#cat fucking shreds on guitar

[h3llcat01]

My personal opinion I really dont care if you have something to say about it

I feel like this is really normalized and I see so much weird stuff and its kind of weird, y is there grown men whimpering as well as grinding into their phones on tiktok?

____________________________________________

Its ok to be an adult on that app n stuff jus for fun n to see funny things or cute cat things but its not okay to jus post really weird stuff/18+ stuff and all on a literal 13+ app

I honestly probably have no room to talk because I make a lot of weird jokes but the difference is they're between me and friends who r comfy with that n its not as open as it is on here (Theres also WARNINGS, man.) Y r there literal (s) to the (ex) bots as well as people doing weird things like grinding into their phones for an app that was designed specifically for a 13+ audience

_______________________

this goes to kids too that post weird stuff you're 13 pls stop posting urself in a weird manner or saying smth like "pick me!" on a grown persons post abt them needing someone in a /r way or sexual way, its for your own safety, people are weird, and you shouldn't be doing that anyway.

______________________

You shouldnt be sexualizing yourself as well at 13, I am so sorry if you went through smth that made you do that, in a lot of situations kids will do that for attention.

[sturnsdarling]

'you look like this song'

{insp by @sturnioz au} smartand'mean'!reader is getting ready in fratboy!Matts room whilst listening to Nirvana, and he can't keep his eyes, or hands, off of her.

vibe check: fluffy smut with no real plot, everyone's (my) fave

2k words

A/N: This is for the anon who's having a shitty month, i hope you love it and i hope it makes your september a little better. I had this idea after Matt was listening to nirvana on stream, i need to sit in his room and listen to music whilst i get ready on his floor and i need it NOW.

love and cigs, merc

You were sat on Matts bedroom floor, wearing nothing but a black lingerie set and a pair of fishnet tights with the crotch ripped out, a gift from you to Matt from a previous bathroom hookup. Your legs were crossed underneath you as you did your makeup in the body length mirror that you had found on the street, and claimed as your makeup mirror in Matts room.

You tugged at your eye slightly, smoking out the black liner you had just applied, effortlessly achieving that 'slightly fucked out but still hot' look that had become your signature style. Your playlist was on a loop, always hooking your phone up to Matts speakers regardless of whether or not he was there or not. 'Smells like teen spirit' by Nirvana began to play, the steady drums making the floor vibrate slightly.

The door clicked open, and Matt walked in the room, looking at his phone and bopping his backward cap clad head along to the music before turning his attention to you. You looked to him in the reflection from your spot on the floor and, of course, he was already looking at you. You shot him a small smile before returning to your makeup, moving onto applying a dark burgundy lip with a slightly open mouth.

Matt came to stand behind you, caressing your slightly tangled hair with a large hand. His hand came down to the side of your face and slid down your jaw, watching you intently in the mirror. Your focus didn't waver, still focused on your makeup as you patted and rubbed your plump, dark lips together.

Matt felt as if his mouth had began to water at the sight of you, his hand coming down to your jaw as the song continued to play in the background. He tugged at the bottom of your jaw, moving your head so you were looking up at him from your perched position on the floor, him towering behind you.

"hey, tough girl" Matt smirked, his hand snaking its way up and down your neck with soft fingers.

You smiled in return, batting your lashes at him like a cat, "hi, Matthew"

"you look sexy as fuck right now, you know that?" He said, his words rolling off his tongue like honey.

You chuckled slightly, rolling your eyes and attempting to return to doing your makeup, Matt tutted at your slight attitude with faux anger, pulling your head back up to face him as he leaned down on bent knees, capturing your neck in his hand and kissing you roughly.

The force he kissed you with sent you backwards, Matt catching you in his lap as he met you on the floor. Your head was cradled in his legs, your view of him upside down. Kurt Cobain was shredding on the guitar, the sound giving your face a whole new beauty that Matt was lost in.

"you look like this song" Matt muttered, in awe of how completely beautiful you were.

You couldn't help but laugh, lifting yourself up and turning round to face him, your legs tucked under you like a baby deer, "what?" you said with a smile.

Matt brought a hand to your jaw, swiping his thumb along your smudged lipstick, knowing it was probably stained on his mouth too,

"y'know how this song makes you feel when you listen to it? like you're vibrating, you can feel every cell in your body and your heart thumpin' in your chest so hard it could break a rib" Matt said, quoting you the first time you played this song in his presence.

"yeah?" You smirked with furrowed brows, letting Matt poke and prod at your puffy bottom lip.

"thats how you make me feel, when I look at you" Matt finally brought his eyes to yours.

Matts words made you feel warm all over, you couldn't even muster up a reply, the only thing in your mind being how not only was that easily the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to you, but how all you wanted to do in that moment was pin matt to the floor and ride in him into oblivion for remembering your exact words about one of your favourite songs of all time.

His eyes were pouring into yours, your breathing got slightly heavier and your mouth parted. The song was coming to end, steady drums and repeated 'hellos' being the only sound in the room as you attempted to form a sentence in reply to Matt.

Nothing you could think to say was coherent, or appropriate for the time frame in which you'd known each other so, you did the one thing you knew Matt would understand.

You threw yourself into him, capturing your lips in his with feverish passion, pressing your tongue against his almost immediately. Matt welcomed your attack, kissing you back with matched desperation. You crawled onto his lap, straddling him and raking your hands through the tangled curls at the nape of his neck, pulling his hat off to give you better access to his soft brown hair.

Matts hands were on your waist, pulling you down into him as he lowered you both onto the floor, his back pressing against the hard wood. His hands snuck up your nearly bare back, the feeling of his skin against yours sending you into a frenzy. Every press of his finger tips felt like hot wax as you quietly moaned into his mouth, grinding your hips against his, trying to chase any friction you could.

Matt tensed at your movements, hips rutting up into yours involuntarily as you pushed your barely clothed pussy down on his growing bulge.

"need it, now" you whimpered into the kiss, your words demanding but your tone desperate.

Matt chuckled, "right now, angel? thought you were gettin' ready?" he muttered into your mouth, chasing your lips.

"right now" you replied, speaking in two word sentences, unable to shake the fever that had overcome you.

Matt smirked and slid his hands down your back and over your fishnet covered ass, pulling apart your cheeks slightly, making you arch above him like a cat. Your hands left his hair and dipped in between the two of you, you fiddled with the button of his jeans, snaking your cold hand into his jeans.

Matt let out a short hiss, and you captured his mouth in yours once more, pumping him as best you could under the restriction of his jeans. Matt moaned into your mouth, and brought his hand down to your ass, smacking it in encouragement. You used your other hand to fumble with the top of his jeans, pushing them down with needy whines and whimpers into the messy kiss.

Once you had managed to free Matt of his jeans, him doing nothing to help, enjoying watching you be so desperate for his cock, you sat up, still pumping him in your hand as you did. Matt watched in awe, with your lipstick smudged over your face and your eyes fluttering with needy ache, you'd never looked more beautiful.

Matt came up slightly to rest on his elbows, eyes still trained on yours. You brought your free hand to his mouth and swiped your middle and index over his stained lips, Matt knew what you wanted, and took your hand in his, opening it into a small bowl in front of his mouth. He held eye contact with you, and collected his saliva on his tongue, spitting it into your palm. You smiled, taking your now wet hand and replacing the hand on his cock with it.

The feeling of your sticky hand against his cock made his head roll back on its hinge, eyes fluttering as a low groan left his mouth. You shifted your hand up and down his length, rubbing his spit all over his throbbing shaft and over his leaking pink head. Shifting slightly, you lifted yourself up, pulling your underwear to the side and lining Matts tip up with your aching hole.

You lowered down onto him, the burning stretch of his cock filling you up as you sunk down inciting a breathless moan from you, nudging your puffy clit against the scattering of hair at the base of his cock as you let him nestle into you completely.

Matts mouth was opened wide, his head snapping back up to watch as you sucked him into your tight walls completely, brows burrowed at the sensation of you clenching around him.

You began to move, resting your hands against his chest as leverage as you moved to place the bottoms of your feet against the floor, squatting on top of him.

The new angle made your pussy grip Matts cock in a way he'd never experienced before,

"oh fuck" Matt said through gritted teeth as you began to bounce on him.

You were lost in it, his earlier words playing on repeat in your mind as you moved up and down his veiny cock, relishing in the sting of him stretching out your unprepared pussy. Despite the lack of foreplay, you were soaked, and you could feel yourself leaking sticky juices against the base of his cock every time he bottomed out side of you.

Whimpering, desperate moans left your throat as you fucked him, taking him as deep as you could, milking him with every bounce. Matt couldn't keep his eyes off where the two of you met, watching as you rose up and down on his length, his whole body tingling at the feeling of your tight pussy coupled with the slight sting of your nails digging into your chest.

"m'gonna cum if you keep riding me like this, angel" Matt said, breathlessly as he reluctantly tore his eyes from your skin slapping against his and met your eye line.

"s'what I want, cum inside me, please" you mumbled, begging as you relentlessly milked his cock.

"you - fuck - you know the rules, angel, you -" Matt cut himself off with a moan, "you cum first" his eyes flit back to the sight of your perfect pussy taking him, and he brought his thumb up to your mouth, pushing it inside and laying it against your warm tongue.

You pushed your tongue against his digit, wrapping your lips around his lowest knuckle with a small hum. Matt pulled his thumb from your mouth with a pop, taking his free hand and using it to push you up slightly, giving him better access to your clit and the perfect opportunity to wrap his hand round your throat.

Matt laid back completely onto the floor, with one hand on your throat, and the other working your clit, he watched as your eyes rolled to the back of your head, unable to control your contorting face as he worked a relentless pace on your sensitive nub. You picked up your speed, ignoring the ache in your thighs as you desperately worked to get Matt to cum.

"tell m-" you stuttered, "tell me again"

Matt smirked, the events of the last few minutes adding up in his mind, you liked it when he told you how he felt about you, without actually telling you.

"you look like a Nirvana song, angel, so pretty n' so messy, all for me" He cooed, trying his best to make his words clear despite his fucked out, wavering tone.

"mphm" your brows knit together, you shifted your position, straddling him once more to grind your hips back and forth against his.

The drag of your pussy against his base, along with the wet, sticky pace Matt was setting on your clit and his perfect words made you see stars, and you came all over his cock, vision going blurry as you reached your high.

You moaned out his name, unable to stop the noises that left your mouth as you shook above him, legs tensing around his hips and nails digging little crescent moons into his chest.

"fuck, pretty girl, you look s'good when you cum all over my cock" Matt said, bringing a hand to hold your hip, grinding you down onto him faster as you started to get lightheaded.

"y'want me to fill you up, angel? soak your perfect pussy in my cum whilst your favourite songs play in the background?" Matt mumbled, slowing his pace on your clit and moving his other hand to your hip.

"please" you whimpered

Matt didn't need any more permission, he lifted you up slightly, the movement making you flop forward onto him, catching yourself with a hand round his jaw. Without warning, he began to pound into you, using his grip on your hips as leverage to mercilessly fuck your weeping pussy.

You let out a broken moan, trying to capture his lips in yours but failing, trailing wet, sloppy pecks on his mouth as he thrust into you at a feverish pace, grunting and groaning at the feeling of you clenching around him.

"so fuckin' needy for me, tough girl, all because I told you somthin' nice" Matt said though gritted teeth, "you feel as good as you look, y'know that?"

You couldn't even begin to muster a reply, only moans spilling from your mouth as Matts relentless pace into your pussy made you completely cock dumb. With a few hard, long thrusts, Matt buried himself inside you completely, dick twitching in your walls as he coated them with his cum, moaning your name as he went limp beneath you.

You breathed into each others mouths, foreheads rested against each others as your body weight relaxed down onto him.

"you gonna keep getting ready, angel?" Matt mumbled, pulling out of you.

"mhm" you nodded breathlessly, "just need a minute"

Matt chuckled, wrapping his tattooed arms around you as you caught your breath on top of him. "okay tough girl" He said, just before pressing a long kiss into the side of your head.

taglist: @sturniozalt@mattslolita@shaquilles0atmeal@blahbel668@sleepysturniolo@le4hsblog @sarosfilms @joemamaaa42069 @2muchofaslvt @seluky10 @cherib3lla @jetaimevous @witchofthehour

[weebsinstash]

*strums guitar* you know who would be a total piece of shit, to be stuck up in Heaven fuckin FOREVER with

This douchebag! Gotta get some Adam content out before the finale drops and then I'm sure I'll be back for more then too!

I was listening to "You Didn't Know" again and I HATE this man, and because I hate him and he's an asshole, I can then see his wretched character doing shitty and debauched things

Which then means he's conceptually fuckable and we must discuss

I was sitting and thinking about. Ok in the most dramatic fucking way possible can you imagine being in the courtroom with Charlie as a Sinner Representative because you're dope like that, and Adam just starts fucking beefing with you on sight and you give it right back to him because HOMIE BASICALLY INVENTED MISOGYNY, you're standing in HEAVEN while an ANGEL looks you dead in the eye and calls you a CUNT like I wouldn't fucking tolerate it I'd be screaming at him like a feral beast, "why don't you look at your FEMALE BOSS and say that again, you dickless loser?!"

But can you imagine just having this insane BEEF, you guys are having MUSICAL DIAGETIC SINGING BEEF, and then, like. Either there in court or later on in the plot, hey, everything is good now, Sinners/you can ascend or we can go from heaven and hell and visit our families and everything is good now, yaaay! Or your name was mispelled on a form and it's like oh shit you were supposed to be in Heaven all along our bad and ONLY you are cool to "go upstairs"

And you can't even be happy about it because it's literally "oh cool I DO belong in Heaven!">wait but my friends are in Hell > oh fuck THAT ANGEL THAT HATES ME IS HERE, and sure enough he's standing there at the pearly gates to personally welcome you into Heaven, grinning like the cat that ate the canary, making it EXTREMELY CLEAR that he's basically gonna be stalking you because he wants to personally witness you fuck up and get sent back to Hell where he can kill you himself

Homie is back at base posting photos of you all over the walls like an insane person, "look at this tricky fucking bitch, fucking scheming, fucking planning something, fucking bitch" and even Lute is standing there, ".... that's a photo of them eating a sandwich, sir" and she's like TRYING to see where he's coming from but these are photos of you like SLEEPING and the suspicion that you might act out becomes an excuse to stalk you as he gets progressively more unhinged and perverted and frustrated (in more ways than one)

Let's also just discuss some baseline ideas! Abso fucking lutely do I see him as some, frat boy piece of shit who is always at least vaguely hostile to women so we're discussing female Reader specific ideas. Like imagine he's trying to actually be friendly and be cool with you or maybe you guys even hang out on good terms or whatever, maybe you both play guitar and he likes how you can shred it, and, he's the kinda guy to invite you to hang out and not specify other people are gonna be there so you get there and he's with his buddies and they're all talking about, gross shit like the size of the tits on the girl they last fucked, "oh hey did you sleep with Stacey" "fuck yeah I slept with Stacey you know that slut takes anyone", like, Adam deadass expects you to stand next to him with your red solo cup as they all talk about "the massive cow tits on that bitch" and if you even mildly imply this isn't entertaining "you're just bein a prude babe!"

Like Adam has no self awareness, he'll be saying horrid shit about women and then one of his buddies makes the most MILD of comments about you, "yeah your friend is kinda fuckable" and Adam is like in a RAGE, "hey man, that's not fucking cool! Let's go, outside NOW, fuckin step up, bro!" and he's brawling dudes for shit he's said about their conquests PLENTY of times

Just picturing the idea of like idk Saint Peter or even Emily flying around and they see you sitting on a bench outside far far away from where other people are and they fly down to greet you with the biggest smile, "hiya, how are you?" and you um look at them with such a genuinely dead, depressed, empty expression that they like cannot even fathom it. You're??? Unhappy??? In HEAVEN??? they cannot even comprehend it.

The real kicker is if you started to CRY and look this angel or seraph directly in the eyes as you ask, "can i... go back to Hell? I'm allowed to leave, right?" and THAT'S what raises massive red flags and sends that angel straight to their fucking boss. Sera would be over here, "oh she's having problems with Adam oh that's unfortunate but they'll sort them out -- WAIT WHAT DO YOU M E A N SHE WANTS TO LEAVE????" And,, oh, NOW they suddenly care about how happy you are, NOW they're suddenly willing to help maybe mildly keep Adam away from you. Because why? Because now you're potentially going to damage Heaven's perfect track record, and, geez they can't have you running around DEPRESSED, with your face looking all... ICKY and SAD! What if you made the other darlin-- I mean other residents of heaven sad and they maybe wanted to leave their precious angel protectors too? Huh? Ever think of that?

I love how I was sitting over here "what if like the entire Spider Society was yandere for the Reader" and ever since then my brain is like a puppy chasing treats, "what if I made this entire community mentally unhinged"

Also. Carmilla Carmine and her family + Zestial protecting Reader from Adam or any other angels because 👏 we can have as many mommies or daddies or fake family members as we want down here and that's the facts on that 👏

[vxnusstuff]

LARRY JOHNSON SMUT/FLUFF/HEADCANONS. I DONT CARE WHICH. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

Larry johnson x gn!reader headcanons

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆.˚𖦹

- okay first off yall been neighbors ever sense 7th grade

- he literally love you and everything u do

- feel like if your showing him a skill in your special hobbies he’d try to learn it and succeed after some time but if its cooking your fucked.

- if you dont know how to cook the your not in luck! sure he can make something microwaveable but couldn’t be able to make a full course meal

- he’d loveeee to show his favorite songs from sanitys fall

- if u have a cat/dog his camera roll would be FILLED of just silly pics of your cat/dog

- if u have piercing he’ll sometimes compliment how u look with it

- he’ll compliment u every so often but not to profusely

- feel like his love languages is physical touch and quality time so he’d loveee just chilling in the treehouse or cuddling in his room

- would definitely punch a bitch for u , he cared for what he loves and will fight for you if needed

- date’s wouldn’t be fancy but would be fun like stargazing , ghost hunting , playing video games ect.

- when you guys first started dating or still crushing he probably showed off some moves on his guitar

- speaking of guitars if u played one in front of him he’s star struck. He’s first off impressed and second totally in-love !

- like first super hot girlfriends now super hot girlfriends who knows how to shred guitar !

- would maybe go to a party once or twice with u but probably threw up and u guys had to leave (or vis versa)

- if your sick he’ll help you get better and wont care if sharing the same bed will get him sick

- his a really good boyfriend and would never do anything to hurt u ‼️

-p.s his friends love you and think your so pretty and think you suit larry 🙃

⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹⋆✮⋆.˚ ⋆.˚𖦹

a/n : got a couple request for him so here u go ! trust me im working on all your guys rq and thank you for the support!

[badchoicesworld]

hello there! i just found your blog and i love your writing for hobie, so i’d like to request another thing for him.

would you mind doing something about a transmasc vigilante reader who tags along with hobie on patrols and late night hangouts? hobie and the reader could diy their own costumes together :) maybe reader is black cat, another spiderperson, or whatever you want to come up with. thanks in advance, and i’ll probably request again soon!

hobie brown with a transgender, vigilante reader (ftm)

RAAHH thank you so much :]

i chose for the reader to be another spidersona, probably anarchist and super cool, hope this is okay! let me know if not

warnings: unsafe binding (there’s a warning ahead)

pairing: hobie brown x transmasc!reader

requests: open ! PLEASE

★⋆ ⋆☆⋆ ☠︎︎ ⋆☆⋆⋆★✧

for you and hobie to get along so well and hang out outside of missions n such, i imagine you’re a spider-man who rejected miguel’s “invitation” to spider society. this is what might have led to you becoming a vigilante who’s occasionally recruited by spider society after some begging- or you’ve just been a vigilante from day one in your dimension.

but ! who’s likely to notice such a person? hobie, obviously. you two become menaces and no one looks forward to being in a room with you. hobie destroys their faith in the constitution while you’re reinforcing everything

during missions, you make a hell of a team ! there’s somehow this real nonchalant feeling to the atmosphere even if you’re punching down baddies

banter, plenty of it back and forth while swinging about and fighting for ur life

probably makes fun of your form or something playfully, makes a comment or two about a punch you’ve thrown “you call tha’ a punch?” “Naaah, nahnahnahnahnah. watch this,” probably does worse let’s be honest, throws the dirties punch known to man but it does the trick

you’re more stealth while hobie’s way more out there, style n all that

hobie dropping in on some operation to take down the big baddies while shredding away at his electric guitar, meanwhile he’s able to see you picking off people from vantage points

whenever you’ve gotta wait about for some patrols or just observe for a night, you two will find some sorta rooftop to perch on top of and patrol from there. but the view kills

you two probably have a sort of routine: completing missions together for the spider society, hobie then tags along for some vigilante work, then you both kick back at his place once the days come to an end

chill night consists of hobie subconsciously strumming at a note occasionally on his guitar while you talk about whatever together

a lot of complaining about the institution, probably how much miguel fucking sucks

depending on ur current situation with transitioning, given that hobie knows, mans is probably the most supportive person you’ll meet

hobie lives in a society that he actively chooses to protect despite being apart of the margin of people that are still severely oppressed to terrible degrees, be it for his race or how he chooses to express himself (in my head, hobie’s also a boy kisser). so i think that he has a certain passion for protecting those minority groups. you, as a trans man, sometimes get the hobie brown special treatment.

let’s you crash at his place whenever you need it, let’s you borrow his clothes n shit if they help you feel more masculine, will give you tips n tricks that either he uses or has heard work great for presenting masculine

does your makeup if you want it, like making your face look more chisel, fake facial hair or brows more blocky- that kinda shit.

if you’re yet to go through the execution process (top surgery), hobie’s ur guy (a terrible terrible influence)

if you have a binder, good for you- hobie is going to find it and customise it for you because he’s hilarious

probably does some like web stitching into it, lil embroidered parts that match his pins or something like “hobie was here” in his clapped handwriting

this isn’t anything new, you two have this little game going on where you just steal and tag each others things for shits and giggles. his best work? punk-ifying your binders with those like spikes he has on his jackets shoulder pads

firm believer in trans men being shirtless in a binder is normalising something that should’ve been from the beginning- probably also marched a free the titties campaign for all body types and identities cause they aren’t inherently sexual and shouldn’t be (if cis men can, why can’t cis women, y’know?)

if he accidentally damages your shit he’ll either fix or replace it, maybe even make something to compensate

or it becomes part of the fit

these lil things have helped personalise your things greatly- there’s nice little details all over that make you both crack smiles

makes sure that throughout missions you’re good if you’re binding, which he honestly just doesn’t dictate. won’t be the type to tell you off for wearing it too long or during missions, it’s not your fault that you’re just doing what makes you feel more like yourself

instead just makes sure that you’re well rested after the missions over and does things for you so you don’t strain

(DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. I WILL FIND YOU.)

if by some unfortunate twist of fate you don’t have a binder, hobie will probably diy you one. argues that they can be mass produced by corporations, why can’t he make one by hand? just one more win for the anarchists

diy binders are dangerous, especially if they’re not made right. i’d like to think hobie would try his best, but i imagine he doesn’t have access to the right materials

in this case, he probably rips apart his shit trying to find the right elastic cloths for your safety

that, or he makes a makeshift binders just a bit looser than it should be to reduce the risk of hurting you.

absolute worst case scenario ? could honestly fashion something out of webs (i have a spidersona that does this) mans a genius, he’ll figure something out

positive ? binder looks sick since he makes it

(ok ur safe, continue)

if you’ve got top surgery, good for u, hobie will have ur head if you don’t take the appropriate recovery time

if you are involved with spider society, he either takes your missions for you or absolutely terrorises miguel into not giving you any

you think it’s just a subconscious, casual thing that hobie does but he always manages to slip a “lad” “boy” “man” into his sentences whenever speaking to or about you. gender affirmations innit

that being said, hobie views you as a man wholeheartedly

hobie’s into physical touch so probably got an arm slung around your shoulder, tons of playfully nudges whenever he sees fit (often)

★⋆ ⋆☆⋆ ☠︎︎ ⋆☆⋆⋆★✧

i also wanna stress rq that the way i portray hobie; he’s so incredibly supportive, hype man, but he’s not this sunshine and rainbows thing i’ve seen some people portray him as

he’s laid back, nonchalant but can get excited (like w the whole “miles my guy” scene where he’s so hype)

thinks/knows he’s hot shit but it doesn’t make him arrogant. man just knows what he’s capable of and gets to be laid back thanks to it

[pricelessemotion]

Lectori Salutem | E.M.

Summary: [5.1k] you and eddie shoot pool and spill secrets.

Pairing: rockstar!eddie munson x fem!music journalist! reader

Warnings: drinking, language

Notes: things are finally picking up! next chapter will include some 18+ content so you must have your age in your bio for the taglist!

previous chapter | series masterlist | next chapter

Eddie clambers into the passenger seat of your car. Upon leaving the diner, you managed to convince him to let you drive to your next destination, citing a general need to live. 

The drive back to Eddie’s was considerably less nerve-wracking. This go around, he decided to obey the speed limit and not split lanes like a maniac. Not only did he give you peace of mind but he also spared the delicious french toast that you ate from making a reappearance. 

Turning the key, the car starts with a light rumble. The sound of electric guitars and heavy drums shatters the silence between the two of you. 

Fuck.

You still had the Corroded Coffin tape in your stereo. 

Eddie is turned away from you, grabbing the seatbelt. At the sound of his own voice being played back to him, he slowly turns around to look at you. The grin on his face would put the Cheshire cat to shame. 

“I didn’t know you were a fan, sweetheart.” The nickname is saccharine coming out of his mouth. 

“I–” You sputter, trying to come up with a good defense. “I’m thorough in my research.”

Eddie is obviously amused at the fact that he’s caught you red-handed. His seatbelt is already buckled, but it’s stretched thin as he leans across the center console. He smells like syrup and cigarettes. For a second, you consider turning the stereo off completely. 

“Should I be scared? Do you have a shrine to me in your room? Do you have my face tattooed on your ass?” With each question his voice gets louder and louder, filling the tiny space with his velvety timbre. 

Though your face is hot with embarrassment, you’re secretly relieved. Any semblance of tension from bringing up Evelyn at the diner has dissipated. It’s been shredded with every strum of a guitar. You find it’s easier to be around Eddie this way. It’s easier to give in to his playfulness, rather than try to maintain the facade of professionalism. 

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” You say, casting him a sideways glance. 

Eddie, for the most part, remains stoic. But you catch the twitch of his mouth and see the tell-tale shade of pink flood his cheeks. If anything should be indicative of the fact that you’ve stunned him, it’s that he’s stopped talking for the first time since you met him. Another thing you’ve learned about Eddie Munson: He never shuts up. 

You release the parking brake and peel off into the streets. If Eddie is at all bothered by listening to his own music, he doesn’t show it. In fact, he takes the opportunity to quietly sing along, only stopping to pepper in commentary about the track or to give you directions. The richness of his voice is so distracting that you haven’t even noticed that you have no idea where he’s taking you.

Trying to find street parking in East Hollywood is a fruitless endeavor. You almost wish you had taken up Eddie’s offer to ride his bike. Eddie directs you around the backside of a building where a sign indicates that it’s a private parking lot, not meant for public use. He assures you that you won’t get towed.

The Blue Line is a bar tucked in between a Thai restaurant and a dry cleaners. Walking up to the doors, you’re hit with the clashing scents of peanut sauce and fresh linen.  

There are very few people inside, given that it’s a bar and it’s barely even five o’clock yet. The soles of your shoes stick to the floor, making a quiet but awful velcro-like sound with every step you take.

“Buckley!” Eddie’s voice booms as you enter the establishment, echoing off the concrete floors and exposed brick walls.

A tall, freckled girl springs up behind the counter. At the sound of her name, she grins, her dark lipstick contrasting pearly white teeth. 

“Munson!” She yells back. The few patrons that linger around various areas of the bar are evidently disturbed by the sudden change in volume, turning their heads and scowling. She doesn’t seem to care. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Just looking to shoot some pool in the best bar in L.A.” Buckley audibly snorts at the last part of his statement. “My tab still open?”

“Always.” She shakes her head and raises her brows at him as if to say, of course. She turns to look at you. “Who’s your friend?”

Your mouth opens, but the words die on your tongue. You and Eddie are not friends. At least, you’re not supposed to be. But you don’t know if you want to tell this woman, who Eddie is clearly close with, that you’re here on assignment to try to cherry-pick the best parts of him and turn them into something palatable. 

At your hesitation, Eddie swoops in and makes the introduction for you. He doesn’t mention the fact that you’re a journalist. Whether the omission is for your benefit or his, you’re not sure.

“Nice to meet you,” She throws the rag she was using to wipe down the counter over her shoulder and extends her hand. “I’m Robin.” 

Her handshake is firm, but her eyes are soft. The fine bottles of liquor behind her are backlit by an unseen light source, giving the illusion of stained glass. She quickly turns around and rummages through the minifridge and grabs two beers. 

“You know the rules, Munson, don’t get too rowdy and clean up when you’re done.” She says, popping the caps off of the beverages and setting them down on the counter.

“Me?” Eddie grasps his chest in faux incredulity, sarcasm dripping from every word. “Too rowdy? Never.” 

Robin sticks her tongue out at him in response right as she’s being flagged down by a customer at the far end of the bar. She salutes the both of you, flouncing away to refill the man’s old-fashioned. 

To your right, there’s something akin to a hall of fame. A collage of pictures of different celebrities that have visited the very room you’re standing in. You wonder if Eddie is up there, but you don’t dare to go see for yourself.

“Can you play?” He asks, walking towards the pool table. 

You make a noncommittal noise. You had played your fair share of games of pool, sure, but never in a setting quite like this. Never with someone like Eddie. Setting your bag down on one of the empty tables that lined the perimeter of the room, you pull out your tape recorder.

“You mind?” You ask, holding up the device in Eddie’s direction. 

Eddie grimaces and shrugs off his leather jacket, draping it over a bar stool at the opposite end of the table. The motion draws attention to the plethora of ink that litters both of his arms.

“Do we have to?” His face scrunches up as he asks the question, a slight whine in his tone. 

You almost feel inclined to say no, if only just to see the wrinkle that has formed between his brows disappear. Another thing you’ve learned about Eddie Munson: he is very hard to say no to. That’s how you ended up in this bar in the first place. 

It would be easy to forgo the tape recorder and pretend that the two of you are just friends hanging out. But if there’s one thing that you know, it’s that the human memory is fallible. You can't risk the quality of your article for the sake of his comfort. 

“It’s what I’m here for.”

Eddie bristles at your response but says nothing. He takes a square of blue chalk and thoughtfully rubs it on the end of his pool cue. The sunglasses he took off are tugging down at his v-neck, exposing sharp collarbones and even more ink. 

“I have a proposition for you.” Eddie declares. 

You raise an eyebrow. 

“For every ball you sink, you get to ask me a question about my life. For every ball I sink, I get to ask you about yours.”

You let out an incredulous laugh, thinking that he can’t possibly be serious. But he just stands there, staring at you as he sets the blue piece of chalk down at the edge of the table. 

“Final offer. Take it or leave it.” He throws both palms up in the air, pool cue tucked into his side. 

For the second time today, you take Eddie’s words as a challenge.

“You’re on.” 

Eddie takes his time setting up the game. While he’s leaning over the side of the table gathering the scattered spheres, you can’t help yourself from admiring his silhouette. The back of his shirt rides up, revealing a strip of skin that you cannot tear your eyes away from. 

Oh my god.

Eddie Munson has a tramp stamp. 

A chaotic collection of branches and thorns surrounds a Latin phrase: lectori salutem. You rack your brain, trying to remember the one semester of elective Latin that you took back in freshman year of college when Eddie suddenly turns around. You quickly look up to meet his eyes, but the smirk on his face reveals everything. 

For the second time today, Eddie has caught you staring. 

“Ladies first.” He says, grandly gesturing toward the table. 

You break the rack. A blur of colors bursts forth in every direction. Despite your best efforts, none of the balls make it into a pocket. Looking back at Eddie, you see he’s still got that smirk on his face. He leans over and effortlessly knocks a ball into a pocket. Stripes. 

“Where did you go to school?”

“NYU.” You reply, having been asked this question so many times that the response is practically automatic at this point.

Eddie lets out a low whistle. “Out-of-state tuition must’ve cost a pretty penny.”

“I had a scholarship.”

“Wow. Pretty and smart. You’re kind of the whole package, aren’t you?” The teasing lilt in his voice doesn’t take away from the sincerity in his words. 

The compliment flusters you, which you’re sure is the whole point of Eddie’s making it. 

“Only one question, remember? It’s still your turn.” 

Eddie sees right through your attempt to deflect. Graciously, he doesn’t point it out. He just leans down once again and lines up a shot. Stripes Twelve. Right lower pocket. 

“Why do you hate New York?”

The sureness with which he asks the question throws you for a loop. Whatever you had expected to come out of Eddie’s mouth, it definitely wasn’t that. 

“What makes you think I hate New York?”

“Tsk tsk. I’m asking the questions here.” Eddie scolds, but his voice is devoid of any real ire. He plants his hands on the table, leaning towards you. You can just barely see the faint outline of a gravestone on his right forearm. “You don’t hate it, but you don’t love it either.”

In the five minutes that have passed since he started questioning you, Eddie has managed to see right through you. You’re starting to wonder if you’re actually that transparent or if he is just that good at reading people.

“I don’t know. My dad is from there. Whenever he talked about New York, it always seemed like some mythical place. He always said ‘Don’t live in New York so long it makes you hard. Don’t live in California so long it makes you soft.’ I guess I went to New York to prove to myself that I could, y’know. Prove that I could leave the nest and not fall flat on my face.”

Heat blooms in your chest during your ramblings. The pressure you feel is so much that you’re surprised steam hasn’t started coming out of your ears. Despite knowing exactly why you went to New York, you’ve never said the real reason out loud. It didn’t seem like it mattered to anyone but you. 

Eddie has a thoughtful look on his face. “3,000 miles is a long way to go to prove a point.”

You shrug. Eddie pauses for a moment, waiting for something. At the realization that you’re not going to say anything more, he leans over the table and shoots.

Stripes. Thirteen. Top right pocket.

“Did you?” Eddie posits, elaborating on the quirk of your brow. “Prove your point?”

You want to laugh. That’s the same question you’ve been asking yourself since you made the move back west. The prodigal daughter returned with nothing to show for it. 

“I proved that living in California my whole life made me soft.” You admit, gazing down at the table, the floor, your shoes, anywhere but his face. 

Eddie frowns in your periphery. He has a clear shot at the far end of the table. You wish he would take it already. 

“It’s not a bad thing, y’know.” Eddie’s fiddling with his pool cue, generously rubbing more blue chalk on the end. You don’t know much about pool, but you doubt that it’s necessary. It seems like he’s doing it more to prolong the inevitable. “Being soft.”

“Isn’t it?”

You’re almost sure that he’s joking. Actually–you’re sure that he’s making fun of you. He must be. The notion makes you angry. Oh, of course, the heavy metal rockstar is extolling the virtues of being soft! You look up, a snide remark already on the tip of your tongue. But when you finally meet his eyes, his gaze is intense. Contemplative, even. You take another sip of your beer and hope it washes away the lingering bitterness. 

Eddie Munson and his damn sincerity.

He looks as if he’s about to say something, but then decides against it. He leans over, lining up that clear shot that you had spotted earlier. His necklace hangs from his neck, the red guitar pick grazing green cloth. 

Stripes. Nine. Middle left pocket. 

“So,” Eddie starts, smiling satisfactorily to himself. “Do you actually have my face tattooed on your ass?”

If his earlier question about hating New York shocked you, then this one was like being struck by lightning. You gape at him, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. You should’ve known that this would come back to bite you.

“It’s just a question.” He defends. “I’m genuinely curious.”

“No, Eddie, I do not have your face tattooed on my ass.” 

“But you do have a shrine of me in your room.”

“I am this close to using this pool cue to poke both your eyes out.” You threaten, absolutely buzzing with mortification. 

“Fine! Fine, I’ll let it go.” He concedes, before saying the next few words under his breath. “For now.” 

Eddie is the opposite of a bad sport when he misses his next shot. He only clicks his tongue and gives a slight shake of his head. You’re relieved that you finally have the chance to get out from under his microscope. 

Solids. Four. Bottom left pocket.  

“What do you like most about living in LA?” You ask. You know that it’s cliché, that everyone who moves here is asked the same question. But you can’t help but want to hear everyone’s answers. Each person you meet paints a picture of your hometown with vibrant colors. It’s always refreshing to hear a new perspective. 

“The food, oh my god, the food!” He practically moans. “I swear whatever bullshit they were passing off as Mexican food back in Indiana should be investigated.” 

Eddie goes on a whole tangent about tortillas that could easily be used in a commercial advertising the food scene of southern California. All of the talk about tortillas reminds him of his favorite food truck, located in East Los Angeles. It’s parked right across the street from a record store. He discovered it while trying to visit every record store in the city. 

“And speaking of record stores… I mean, fuck, you can’t find half the obscure shit that you have here back in Indiana. There’s no point in shipping your shit out to the midwest if no one’s gonna buy it I’m guessing.”

“I never even thought of that.” You admit. Every time you walked into a music store, there was always a new shipment waiting for a band you had never heard of. “Growing up, my favorite thing was always to go to the record store. Even if I didn’t buy anything, I would just sit in one of the booths and listen to vinyl.”

You smile at the memory of the sun streaming through windows and chunky headphones too big for your adolescent head. The nostalgia clouds your mind so much that you fumble the next shot, accidentally knocking a striped ball into a pocket and giving Eddie the chance to ask you yet another question. 

“Do you regret going to NYU?”

“No.” You say, and you mean it. “I think it’s good to get out of your comfort zone. I think… I think it’s important to figure out what’s wrong for you. Maybe even more important than figuring out what’s right.”

Eddie hums in agreement and excuses himself to go to the bathroom. You take the opportunity to eject the tape from the recorder and put in a fresh one. Tucking the tape into your bag, you remember that you still have the mixtape Eddie made for you. You make a mental note to listen to it on the way home.

“Having fun?” Robin appears next to you, gathering a few bottles that hapless patrons have left behind. She lifts Eddie’s off the table and adds it to her collection. You hadn’t even noticed that he had finished it. 

“Eddie is absolutely kicking my ass at pool right now.”

She barks out a laugh. 

“I know the feeling. We used to play with each other all the time back in Hawkins. I think I only won once, and that was because he was high off his ass.” 

Your ears perk up at the mention of the small town in Indiana. You could tell from their interactions that they were close, but this was a whole other level. Does she know about 1986? 

“Maybe he’ll have mercy on me.” You muse, slightly wincing at the doubtful look Robin gives you.

“I have faith in you. Don’t let Edward get into your head.” She squeezes your shoulder as she leaves, the glass bottles clinking in her wake. 

So, you think to yourself, Eddie stands for Edward. It’s a regal-sounding name. A little too refined for the rockstar who’s rough around the edges.

When Eddie returns from the bathroom, he holds two more beers in his hand. You’re about to say that you still haven’t even finished your first one. That you think one is enough. You still have to drive back, after all. But he sets both of them down next to his leather jacket, making it clear that they’re both for him. He sniffles as he approaches, giving a small cough to clear his throat. His knuckles brush the tip of his nose until it glows an angry red, even in the dim lighting. He pulls up his pool cue right to the edge of the green-striped ball. He’s got a clear shot. 

He shoots.

He misses. 

You quietly breathe out a sigh of relief. Despite the fact that your job is to get into the nitty-gritty of people’s lives, you’ve never been on the receiving end. It’s unnerving. There’s a reason why you’re a writer. You like the control of rough drafts and rewrites and edits. It leaves less room for misinterpretation.  

Circling the table, you hope to find an easy shot. 

“You have to actually hit the balls with the stick for them to go anywhere,” Eddie says, taking a long sip from his second beer. “Just wanted to make sure that you knew that.”

You roll your eyes at his obvious attempt to psych you out. Leaning over the far end of the table, you balance the pool cue delicately between your fingers. When you finally make the shot you smile to yourself as not just one, but two of the balls go careening into pockets at opposite ends of the table.

“You know, I’ve half a mind to think you were hustling me, sweetheart.” Eddie takes a long sip from his second beer, the condensation dripping down his hand. 

“It’s not hustling if you just assumed I would be bad at it.” You’re so proud of yourself that you can’t help the smugness in your voice. “What’s your middle name?”

“Now you’re crossing the line.” He deadpans. “That’s just too far.” 

“Oh come on, Edward.” At the sound of his legal name, Eddie’s facade drops. The reaction encourages you to continue your teasing. “It can’t be that bad.”

“How do you know that’s what Eddie stands for?”

“I have my sources.”

“Your sources could be wrong. It could stand for Edison. Or Edmund. Or Edgar.”

“Something tells me my sources are correct.” Your eyes flick over to the freckled girl behind the counter. Eddie catches your glance and kisses his teeth, shaking his head in exasperation. 

“What if you’re secretly a fairy who’s trying to get me to say my full name so that I’m indebted to you for the rest of my life?”

“Fine. Don’t tell me your middle name.” You concede, trying to come up with a better question.  “How did you know that I was a writer? Back in your room–when I picked up the book–you called me a writer.” 

“Isn’t that like, your whole thing?” Eddie waves his hand flippantly. 

“Yeah. But there’s a difference between journalistic writing and fiction writing. How did you know that I do both?”

Eddie takes another drink from the beer in his hand, thumb grazing the label. 

“Maybe I’m ‘thorough in my research’ too.” He says, quoting your words back to you.

It’s a non-answer and both of you know it. You decide not to press the issue. Maybe Eddie isn’t such a good sport after all. You started winning and he stopped playing fair, dodging your questions left and right. For someone who is supposed to be getting interviewed, he isn’t doing a very good job. You settle on a topic you hope he’s willing to actually talk about. 

“Patsy Cline.”

“What about Patsy Cline?”

“She didn’t exactly fit in with all of the metal.”

“My Uncle Wayne loves Patsy Cline. He would always play her records whenever he was cooking or cleaning. I guess listening to it reminds me of home.”

“So do you actually like it? Or do you just find it comforting?”

“Is there a difference?” Eddie muses at you from behind the lip of his beer bottle, before taking a long swig. “Wayne actually gave me that vinyl as a parting gift. He said it’s for ‘when you want to listen to real music’. He was only joking. Kinda.”

Eddie visibly softens while recalling the man who raised him. His tense shoulders have drooped and his jaw unclenches. He speaks of the older man with an unmatched fondness. 

“Wayne sounds like a funny guy.” You smile, sidling up to Eddie. “What’s he like?”

“He’s the best. He took me in when I was just about this big.” He juts his palm out at his waist.  “I had big ears, a buzzcut, and a gigantic chip on my shoulder. I was so– I was so angry at the world. He was the first person who told me it was okay to feel that way. 

He was a trucker before I came along, but then he quit and started working at the plant so that he could be there for me. Everything I do, it’s all for him.”

The words make your heart clench. Sparing yourself the embarrassment of revealing just how much his words got to you, you take your next shot. With misty eyes, you see the flash of blue make its way across the table and into a pocket. You already know what you’re gonna ask him. 

“Say you get everything you want. You win Grammys. You sell out Madison Square Garden. What next?”

“Shit, I don’t know.” Eddie polishes off the third beer. “I’d probably start by buying Wayne a house, but that’s if he’ll even let me. He’s always saying that I’m the kid and he’s the adult. That he’s supposed to be taking care of me, not the other way around.”

He lets out a quiet burp, which he muffles with his fist. His pool cue has been long forgotten next to him. The configuration on the table before you tells you that you can win in just two more rounds. You’re not sure if you want to. You try anyway. 

Solids. Three. Middle right pocket. 

“Does your reputation actually matter to you?”

“That’s a loaded question.” Eddie leans backward. He’s a little unsteady on his feet, the effects of the alcohol seeming to finally kick in. “Off the record?”

“Off the record.” 

You make a show of grabbing the tape recorder and clicking the stop button. You slide it over the wooded lip of the table, proving to him that the device really isn’t recording anymore. 

“Of course, my reputation matters to me. Anyone who says they don’t care about their reputation is lying. Sure, you learn to brush it off. You learn to expect that everyone you meet is gonna have preconceived notions about you. Whatever. People have always had some shit to say about me, I say let ‘em talk.

But it never gets any easier realizing that everyone you meet thinks they know you just because of some shit they read in a magazine. It never gets easier knowing that nothing you do belongs to you anymore.”

Eddie’s words weigh on you. Whether or not he realizes it, you fall into both those categories. You had turned your nose up at the lousy headlines. You had thought he was just another reckless rockstar. Now, you’re tasked with writing him a new one, one that’ll make people like you see him in a better light. It's still the same. He still doesn’t get to control how this story ends. 

“Is that why you agreed to this interview?”

You know you’re essentially wasting a question. Whatever his answer will be won’t matter in the long run, because you won’t be able to use it. You want to know the answer anyway. 

Eddie looks down at the table and then back to you. You know that he could tell you that you used up your question. That if he was a little less drunk he would probably diffuse the tension by quipping back to you, only one question, remember? He doesn’t. He sees that you have the winning shot perfectly laid out for you. This time, he doesn’t prolong the inevitable.

“Yeah, it is.”

You make the shot. Just like that, the game is over. Your victory feels hollow. 

A blue-striped ball sits lonely on the table. A question left unasked. An answer left unheard. 

Eddie puts his leather jacket back on and brings the empty beer bottles back to Robin. You pick up the tape recorder. It feels like dead weight in your hands.

You meet Eddie at the counter, where he’s happily chatting with an amused Robin, all previous tension regarding your last question seemingly forgotten. You bid your goodbyes. The two of you shuffle awkwardly together towards the entrance before Eddie gets distracted by something.

“Oh my god, I love these!” Eddie regards the gumball machine full of small, shitty prizes with a childlike wonder. 

He grabs his wallet from the pocket of his jacket, dutifully pulling out two quarters. He shoves them both into the coin slots and cranks the handle. The machine spits out a plastic capsule with a bright green lid. He takes the prize and thrusts it into your hands. 

“For you.”

You’re confused by the sentimental gesture but decide not to question it. Shaking the contents out into your hand, the prize reveals itself to be an 8 ball keychain. 

“Hey! We match!” Eddie pulls out the motorcycle keys from his pocket, and sure enough there’s an 8 ball hanging from the key ring that’s identical to the one you’re holding in your hand. 

“Yeah.” You smile to yourself, twirling the small sphere between your fingers. “We do.”

The drive back to the house in West Hollywood is quiet this time. You elected to switch from the cassette to the radio as soon as you got in. The sounds of classic rock drift between the two of you. Eddie spends the entire drive looking out the window, proving himself to be a quiet and contemplative drunk rather than an obnoxious and outspoken drunk. 

Pulling up to the curb, you feel slightly awkward. You’ve never been good at goodbyes. 

“You doing anything tomorrow?” Eddie’s head flops in your direction, his body language giving away the depth of his inebriation. 

“Um.” You hesitate for a moment, unsure of what he might be planning. “It depends. What time?”

“Around noon? We have a recording session tomorrow and I just thought maybe you’d like to hear some of the stuff we’ve been working on. Plus you’d get to meet the other guys. It would be good, right? For your article.”

He says the last sentence as if it’s an afterthought. 

“For the article.” 

“It’s at the recording studio near Sunset? Big red sign, can’t miss it.” He’s using his hands again as he talks. The silver rings glint under the yellow of the street lamps. “Can I have your number, though? Just in case it gets canceled or something. I don’t want you to show up and think I’m sending you on a wild goose chase.”

“Sure.” You rattle off the number for him. Eddie continues looking at you, glassy-eyed and rosy-cheeked. “Are you sure you don’t want me to write it down for you?”

“I have a good memory.” He grins toothily, tapping his temple with his index finger. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”  

With that, he tumbles out of the car and stumbles to the front door. You watch his retreating figure with the realization that you’ve barely scratched the surface of who Eddie Munson is.

You remember to swap cassettes before pulling away. As you begin mentally writing the beginnings of his article in your head, the mixtape plays softly in the background. 

Living in a world of make believe 

I can hide behind what's real

But wearing your emotions on your sleeve

And they all know what you feel

taglist: @twisted-wonderland-of-wren@cloudroomblog@amira0303@forrestfae6@aysheashea@vintagehellfire@poisonedluv @kimmi-kat@mmunson86

if your username is crossed out it means tumblr wouldn’t let me tag you 💔

[crimsonxe]

Death Stranding spoilers below the cut:

"Everything has to be easily understandable and has to make perfect sense!" -certain frustrating types in the current media landscape that want to be spoonfed

Hideo Kojima: Yeaaaaaaaaah, fuck that take this complicated scifi/supernatural story that involves planes of reality and various groups vying for power. Oh and one character is a mother, sister, and even to some romantic figure who's also a walking annihilation being. There's weather that makes one age and people explode after death, but some come back but aren't zombies. And the recent trailer literally has a baby coo-ing cyborg ninja, Higgs returning in Crow make up (which is awesome btw cause I grew up watching the original movie and Stairway to Heaven) wielding electric guitar axes that shoot electricity from shredding, BT cats, ships being able to dive into beach-space, dead? Louise (though I have a sneaking suspicion Elle Fanning could be her older self returning from a Beach), and just is like "run with it" xD

Like the reveal that Lou is a girl is the simplest thing in the entire game. And I just love it so damn much from an intellectual masochistic vein xD

[doubleddenden]

Genuinely wish there could be a wholesome anime about a guy adopting a bunch of kids and it doesn't get weird

Like okay they can be monster children but the focus is that he's a good father figure they need and the normality they so desperately needed in their lives

No weird twist where the dad marries the daughter he raised, no no weird "will they won't they" dynamic between the dad and daughters, no weird fan service from the children at all

If anything it's a failed harem anime where women think he's an ordinary DILF, but then they meet the kids and one accidentally squirts them with squid ink because they have anxiety about getting a new mom, or the cat daughter pukes up a hairball on the carpet, or the dark elf son that has visions has a vision of the woman's exact moment of death and casually says some fucked up shit like "you will die aboard the train to Shibuya Station on February 30th, 2025 c:" and she runs away because she's too stupid to realize Feb doesn't have 30 days

And there's obviously a mom that's perfect for them, she's the childhood friend to the dilf that's also coworkers and has dinner with them sometimes, but the DILF is an idiot and sees her as a sister or something despite the glaring obvious signs. Even says himself "man you'd be perfect for the kids lol"

But more importantly it's day to day chaos that the dad gently calms, it's helping the kids feel better because they don't really fit into society, the dad standing up for his kids- like this is a normal ass person embracing absolute weirdness but he wouldn't have it any other way

Maybe there's a scene where he gets into a fist fight with an elf king that has come for his daughter's hand in marriage- king is fighting with magic but DILF just uses karate he learned in high school

There's an a school festival and like his vampire daughter SHREDS guitar because he taught her how to play at an early age and she knows all the classics

Dad teaches his slime girl daughter how to make chocolate for valentines and helps her figure out a way to keep from spilling herself into the mix with plastic wrap

He's got a demon son that comes from hell and his ancestors like tormented billions for eons, but son brags to his human friends that his human dad is cool because he showed him how to work on cars to save a buck

Also the dad encourages the kids to not totally abandon their roots, because it's important to know about where you come from and all that, but also encourages them to try the mundane human stuff like new coffee flavors or roller coasters

Like this man is an average joe but not a Gary Stu, and his kids fucking ADORE him and there's NOTHING MORE between them except they love their dad and their dad loves them

[plushiekisser]

pinned

about me:

name: oz or ozzy

hoarde name: the cat cafe

objectum and posic

main: @lightboundhellhound

follows from: @lightboundsystem-main

dni:

racists, sexists, antisemites, islamophobes, queerphobes, exclusionists (i loveee mspec lesbians/gays and all kinds of men and all the neopronouns and gender hoarders 🥰 etc etc)

zionists/anti palestine/pro israel

proshippers/anti antis, HP apologists, dream apologists

terfs/people who say they hate all men (man haters don't pass the vibe check)

anti endogenic systems (just accept the fact that the human brain is capable of things you don't understand and move on)

pro life/anti abortion

maps/pedos & zoos + their supporters (including those who think these are queer identities. no the fuck they are not)

companions under the cut

companion list:

Claude

item type: thrifted build a bear bunny

pronouns: he/him

age: adult (older than me, that’s all i know)

info: our anniversary is june 19. he was in a rock band in high school, and can shred on guitar. has trust issues and doesn’t like talking about himself

Nat

item type: bluetooth headphones

pronouns: she/her, it/its, tech/techs, 🎧/🎧s, cy/ber/nets/cyberself

age: adult, i think the same age as me?

info: i lowkey have a crush on her 👉🏻👈🏻 its name stands for Noise-canceling Artistic Technology, and tech was a normal pair of headphones until 🎧 gained sentience. now cy wants to make nets own music

Eight

item type: thrifted skateboard

pronouns: he/him, xe/xem

age: adult

info: punk rock legend that i have a crush on 👉🏻👈🏻 we dont hang out often enough cos i still haven’t learned to skate 😔 i wanna hang out with xem i just dont know what i could do other than practice skating. which im bad at :,)

Snip

item type: thrifted beanie baby cat

pronouns: he/him

age: im getting older child, younger tween vibes? ten ish??

info: likes to hang out on my shoulder like a parrot haha. i think he has a brother but i can’t decipher the details (snip doesn’t communicate verbally but i can pick up small things like “hello” and “thank you” and stuff)

Florence

item type: thrifted music box

pronouns: it/its

age: definitely adult, probably older than me

info: plays Schwarzwald Mädel and sounds beautiful 🥰 it doesn’t communicate much in any way, but it’s a beloved companion regardless. if it did talk tho, i think the lid would be its mouth. that’s the vibe i get anyway lol. oh and this is another object i have a crush on (i may be aro for people but i fall for objects so easily lmao)

Waffles

item type: easter bunny beanie baby from like 2010 ish (“real” name is hoppity i think)

pronouns: he/him

age: child

info: the moment i saw him he said “hi!!! im waffles!!! :D” and i knew i had to keep him lmao. he’s very eager to please and wants to make friends more than anything 💜

Marigold

item type: build a bear

pronouns: she/her

age: early 20s

info: we don’t communicate a whole lot but i’ve got a crush on her just like with so many of my companions lmao. she’s got a heart of (mari)gold 💜

[lizzygrantarchives]

Rolling Stone, July 16, 2014

The vamp of constant sorrow talks about love and death — then tries to wiggle out of her cover story.

SHE GOES TO a dark place, in the end, and won’t come out of it. “I’m not sure if they should run this story,” Lana Del Rey will say, sprawled out on a soft brown couch in tiny denim cutoffs and a white V-neck tee, blowing pensive little gum bubbles. She has, by this point, spent a good seven hours talking with me. At times, it even seemed like it was going well.

“I feel like maybe we should wait until there’s something good to talk about,” she continues, in an airy tone that turns pleading. “You know? I just wish you could write about something else. There has to be someone else to be the cover story. Like, there has to be. Anybody.”

Maybe it shouldn’t have been a shock, landing here. Del Rey’s brand of pop stardom is self-thwarting, ambivalent, precarious: At her clouded core, beneath the considerable glamour, she is more Cat Power or Kurt Cobain than Rihanna or Katy Perry, complete with a mysterious, Kurt-like stomach ailment that plagues her on tour. And then there’s the tattoo on the side of her right hand, just below the pinkie, inked in neat black cursive: TRUST NO ONE. (On the same spot on the other hand: PARADISE.)

Still, a day earlier, it all feels different. On a cloudless, offensively hot mid-June afternoon in New York, the release day for Del Rey’s second major-label album, Ultraviolence, she answers the green wooden door of the Greenwich Village town house where she’s staying. “I’m Lana, nice to see you,” she says, offering a soft handshake and a big, white, hopeful smile, one that instantly suggests everything you think you know about her is wrong: that you’ve read too much into the consecutive placement of songs called “Sad Girl” and “Pretty When You Cry” on the new album; that you’ve taken certain recent interview quotes (mainly, “I wish I was dead already,” which earned her a Twitter scolding from Frances Bean Cobain) too seriously; that it’s a mistake to assume her aloof stage manner has anything to do with her actual personality.

Her laugh, fizzy and girlish, is coming easily. She’s all but giddy over having her album out, uncompromising, spooky, guitar-laden, hitless thing that it is: “It’s what I wanted.” Today’s V-neck tee is powder blue, nearly matching the self-applied pastel polish on her longish nails, over pale, strategically shredded jeans, cuffed just below the calves, that are familiar from another magazine’s photo shoot. She’s wearing false eyelashes but not much noticeable makeup. Del Rey is four days away from her 29th birthday (for reasons she can’t explain, she’s usually reported to be a year younger), but looks, at the moment, like a college junior home for the summer.

She seems so carefree – bubbly, even – that within 10 minutes, it seems safe to break the ice: “So, on a scale of one to 10, how much do you wish you were dead right now?”

Her big brownish-green eyes widen even further. Then she lets out a delicate snort of amusement. “Ten being dead?” she says. “You’re funny! Today is a good day.” Today she chooses life? “Yeah, today I choose life.” So, like a one? “10. 10!” she says, in a daffy singsong, not unlike Diane Keaton murmuring “la di da” in Annie Hall. “Seven. 12!” She throws back her head and laughs, possibly beginning to enjoy herself.

But when it comes to Lana Del Rey, who can tell anything for sure? She’s a baffling bundle of contradictory signifiers, a mystery that 10,000 tortured think pieces have failed to solve. David Nichtern, who signed her to his small indie label when she was still in college, saw her as “the outer aspect of Marilyn Monroe with the inner aspect of Leonard Cohen”: She may look a bit like Nico, but she’s her own Lou Reed. She’s nervous and self-conscious onstage, but fearless in her lyrics (“My pussy tastes like Pepsi-Cola”; “I was an angel looking to get fucked hard”). Her consistently viral videos are id-infested pageants of creepy-nostalgic Americana, good-girl/bad-girl dichotomies and the occasional make-out sesh with an old dude. Just try to figure out what’s going on in her 2012 clip for “National Anthem,” where she plays both Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, dares to riff on the Zapruder footage, and casts rapper A$AP Rocky as JFK.

She’s a pop superstar with hardly any actual radio hits in the U.S., just a remix of her song “Summertime Sadness” that she never even heard before its release. And, perhaps more than any other pop star of this century, she’s been misunderstood, even hated. She was the subject of a savage indie-nerd backlash – a pre-lash, really – before most of America had ever heard of her. (Among other complaints, music bloggers felt somehow duped when her online hit “Video Games” led to a near-instant major-label deal.) Her shaky, slightly dead-eyed Saturday Night Live debut was treated like a national emergency, inspiring weeks of debate, including Brian Williams playing music critic (he was not a fan). She had her change of name from Lizzy Grant presented as evidence of deception rather than showbiz-as-usual. She had to deny surgically enhancing her lips’ poutiness (up close, for what it’s worth, they look pretty much like lips).

Released in the wake of the SNL performance, her 2012 debut on Interscope Records, Born to Die, got skeptical reviews. The songs, and her mannered, multilayered vocals, seemed to be drowning in lush, trip-hop-y production. But with the help of strong, cinematic new tracks on the bonus EP Paradise, it all turned around: The album sold more than 1 million copies in the U.S. (and more than 7 million worldwide); her Great Gatsby soundtrack single, “Young and Beautiful,” went platinum. Kanye West, who takes matters of taste seriously, enlisted her to play his wedding to Kim Kardashian. “It was beautiful, just being there,” Del Rey says. “They seemed very happy.” Earlier, over lunch, West had told her “he really liked where I was coming from, visually and sonically.”

Del Rey isn’t inclined to celebrate any of this stuff, however. “It doesn’t feel like success,” she says. “Because with everything that could have felt like something really sweet, there’s always been something out of the periphery of my world, beyond my control, to kind of disrupt whatever was happening. I’ve never felt like, ‘Oh, this is great.’ ”

The town house Del Rey is staying in belongs to someone she calls “a friend”: 31-year-old Francesco Carrozzini, a dashing Italian photographer who’s shot her for various European magazines. He obviously does well for himself – “better than us,” Del Rey jokes, as she shows me around. His four-story house is a seriously amazing bit of Manhattan real estate, a movie-star-worthy bachelor pad, its dark wood walls covered with art photos and his shots of celebrities like Keith Richards. The house is on the same block where Bob Dylan moved with his family in 1969; Anna Wintour lives nearby, as does Baz Luhrmann.

On the second-floor coffee table, near a Serge Gainsbourg box set, there’s a book called The Boudoir Bible. “No shame,” Del Rey says with a grin. She’s sitting on the brown couch, smoking Carrozzini’s American Spirit cigarettes in her languid way, below a huge black-and-white photo of a bunch of slim, naked people piled on top of one another. The midday sun is blazing through an open window, and her brown hair and fair skin are glowing in its haze – an Instagram filter or cinematographer couldn’t do better. “I quit sometimes,” she says, of the cigarettes. “And then stop quitting.” She smokes onstage, too – it’s pure craving, not an image thing. “I find, sometimes, halfway through the set, I definitely need to have a cigarette.”

Within a few days, she’ll be photographed nuzzling with Carrozzini in Europe. But for now, she says, she’s single. Starting in December or so, Del Rey began a protracted breakup with Barrie-James O’Neill, her boyfriend of three years. He’s a songwriter, which allowed her to live out some Dylan/Joan Baez fantasies (she’s partial to Baez’s paean to that romance, “Diamonds and Rust,” even quoting it on “Ultraviolence”). “It’s all been hard,” Del Rey says. “Yeah, my life is just feeling really heavy on my shoulders, and his own neuroses just getting the best of him, I think, just made it untenable. Which is sad, because it was truly circumstantial, the reasons for us not being together.”

Ultraviolence feels, at times, like a breakup album, though Del Rey says all of the songs were actually about previous relationships. Either way, it answers a lot of questions about her, even as it raises some new ones. If she were the corporate puppet or calculated fraud some of her detractors imagined her to be, this is not an album she would ever make. The main producer was Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach, who’s gifted at summoning vintagey atmosphere and Morricone-ish grandeur, but is in little danger of being confused with Dr. Luke or Max Martin. They recorded much of it live, with his Nashville crew of rock musicians playing while Del Rey sang into a $100 handheld microphone, her vocals newly raw, jazzy and powerful. There are a bunch of guitar solos. But not one track seems even vaguely suited for pop radio.

Even before Auerbach got involved, Del Rey knew that she wanted something very different this time around. “This record was, ‘I’m going to do it my way,’ ” says her friend Lee Foster, who runs Electric Lady Studios and co-produced some of the album there. Foster told her that Bruce Springsteen had followed up Born in the U.S.A. with the stark Nebraska (Foster had the order reversed, but close enough). “We talked about taking that stance, like Springsteen shifting gears and saying, ‘I’m gonna do exactly what you don’t expect me to do.’ “

Auerbach ran into Del Rey at Electric Lady, where he was mixing Ray LaMontagne’s new LP. “Honestly, we both benefited from really not knowing anything about each other,” he says. After she played him some of the demos she was working on, he became a fan, lobbying to produce her. But he was taken aback by the major-label hassles he experienced – Del Rey is signed to two of them, Interscope and the U.K.’s Polydor. “There was a lot of bullshit I’m not used to,” Auerbach says. “The label says, ‘We’re not going to give you the budget to extend this session unless we hear something.’ And we send them the rough mix and they fucking hate it and they hate the way it’s mixed. And it’s like, ‘Thanks, asshole.’

“The story I got told,” he continues, “is that they played it for her label person and they said, ‘We’re not putting out this record that you and Dan made unless you meet with the Adele producer.’ And she said, ‘Fine, whatever.’ And she was late to the meeting, so while they were waiting, the label guy played what we recorded for the Adele producer and he said, ‘This is amazing – I wouldn’t do anything to change this.’ And here’s the kicker: Then all of a sudden, the label guy said, ‘Well, yeah, I think it’s great, too.’ ”

“I had heard about some back and forth regarding the music,” says Interscope chief John Janick. “But Lana knows her vision and her audience, and it’s up to us to follow her lead.” Del Rey acknowledges a six-week period this past spring when things were in limbo: “I mean, I think there were people they wanted me to work with,” she says. “I don’t know who they were. When I said I was ready, they were like, ‘Are you sure?’ ” She laughs. ” ‘Because I feel like you could go further.’ “

“On this album, in my opinion, you didn’t want her to try to do something,” says Janick’s predecessor at Interscope, Jimmy Iovine. “I felt she hit a bull’s-eye. Everybody’s saying to me, ‘We need a single,’ calling me from Europe. I said, ‘You don’t need anything.’ It’s a very coherent body of work, and I thought any other conversation was a distraction. Lana, more than most, reminds me of artists that I produced” – he’s thinking of Patti Smith and Stevie Nicks in particular – “which is slightly different than the majority of artists that are on Interscope. Because you can’t find those artists every day. She’s one of the rare things that come along in life, which is a lyricist. You know how rare they are, today, outside rap?”

Del Rey’s co-manager, Ben Mawson, warned her that she’d have to answer for some of the new album’s lyrics, particularly the title track, which quotes the old girl-group line “He hit me and it felt like a kiss,” then adds, “He hurt me but it felt like true love,” just in case she hadn’t made her point. She’s vague on whether this theme might be autobiographical: “I guess I would say, like, I’m definitely drawn to people with a strong physicality,” she says with a shrug, “with more of a dominant personality.”

She’s not worried about any message those lines might send. “It’s not meant to be popular,” she says, sitting in the backyard of the town house, which opens onto a shared garden, where Dylan had angered his neighbors decades ago by trying to put up a fence. She’s sipping hot coffee through a straw, a longstanding habit she acknowledges is both “weird” and “nerdy.” “It’s not pop music,” she says. “The only thing I have to do is whatever I want, and I want to write whatever I want. I just hope people don’t ask me about it. So I don’t feel a responsibility at all. I mean, I just don’t. I feel responsible in other ways, communitywise – to be a good citizen, abide by the law.”

But precisely how does she want the public to hear those lines? “I just don’t want them to hear it at all,” she says, pouting a little. “I’m very selfish. I make everything for me, kind of. I mean, every little thing, down to the guitar and the drums. It’s just for me. I want to hear it, I want to drive to it, I want to swim in the ocean to it. I want to think about it, and then I want to write something new after it. You know? It’s just … I don’t want them to hear it and think about it. It’s none of their business!”

But, um, isn’t she selling people this music? “I’m not selling the record,” she says. “I’m signed to a label who’s selling the record. I don’t need to make any money. I really could care less. But I do care about making music. I would do it either way. So that’s why it has to be on my terms.”

Del Rey has never been in therapy. “There’s nothing anyone could ever tell me that I don’t already know,” she says. “I know everything about myself. I know why I do what I do. All of my compulsions and interests and inspirations. I’m very in sync with that. It’s the other stuff that I don’t have any control over, just what’s going to happen on a daily basis. My interactions.”

So what drives her? “Now? Nothing,” she says. “I don’t have any drive anymore. But I enjoy making records. Before, I felt drive, but now it just feels like an interest. With the first record having received so much analysis, there’s no more room for ambition. It breaks that part down, just because you sort of know what to expect, and that nothing is going to work out the way you think anyway.”

She doesn’t want to conquer the world? “No, what I’d love to do is, Francesco has a bike downstairs,” she says. “I would love to take a motorcycle to Coney Island and have an amazing talk with you and jump in the water.” Somehow, this plan never comes up again.

Even as a small child, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was, by her own recollection, “obstinate, contrary.” She was born in Manhattan to parents who both worked Mad Men-style jobs at the advertising giant Grey, but when she was one year old, they gave up those careers and moved to sleepy, upstate Lake Placid. Her dad would go on to start his own furniture company, get into real estate and then become a successful early investor in Web domain names. But Lizzy just wished they had stayed in the city. “It was really, really quiet,” says Del Rey, who has compared the town to Twin Peaks. “I was always waiting to get back to New York City. School was hard. The traditional educational system was not really working for me.”

At 14 or so, Lizzy started drinking and hanging out with older kids. The scenario, she recognizes with a laugh, was not unlike the harrowing movie Thirteen. “In small towns, you sort of grow up fast because there isn’t that much to do,” she says. “So you’re out with everybody else who’s already graduated, and that’s totally normal. But it just didn’t sit well with everyone in my family.”

“I’m a sad girl/I’m a bad girl,” she sings on her new album – but the sad part didn’t come until later. She “felt passionate” about drinking, sharing bottles of peach and cherry schnapps with her friends. “I felt like I had kind of arrived into my own life,” she says, her voice turning dreamy. “I felt free. Even though I loved leaving town, by the time I was about 15, I knew I was probably going to stay there and have a life there. I mean, I had a vision for myself, definitely, at that point. I didn’t see becoming a singer or anything. I just wanted to grow up and get married and have fun. Have my own life, my own place.” Her parents, meanwhile, wanted her to become a nurse.

Losing patience with her partying, they sent her away to Connecticut’s Kent School. The move failed to curtail her drinking, and she was miserable. Her father’s apparent success aside, she says she was on financial aid. “I was very quiet,” she says, “just figuring things out. I didn’t relate well with what was going on culturally.” She wasn’t into mean girls. “The ways people treated other people, I thought was kind of cruel. The high school mentality I didn’t really understand. I wasn’t really, like, snarky or bitchy.” In an early song called “Boarding School,” she mentions being part of a “pro-ana nation,” referring to anorexia, and sings, “Had to do drugs to stop the food cravings.” But she insists that’s fiction: “The mentality of the pro-ana community was just something that was interesting to me.”

A young English instructor introduced her to Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and Vladimir Nabokov (she has tattoos of the latter two names on her forearm), plus Tupac, the Notorious B.I.G. and old movies like The Big Sleep. Lines in “Boarding School” and another unreleased track, “Prom Song,” led fans to question the precise nature of this relationship, but Del Rey says it was nothing inappropriate: “He was just my friend.”

She started to think that she might want to be a singer, but could hardly bring herself to say it out loud, especially to her family. “I just thought it was kind of a presumptuous thing to say, coming from a more traditional background. You wouldn’t say it unless you really meant it.”

The summer after her senior year, back in Lake Placid, she woke up sick and hung over one morning, and suddenly realized something important was missing. “I lost my car,” she says. “I couldn’t find it. And … I don’t know, I just lost it. And I was just really sick. It was just one of the many reasons why my life was unmanageable. I didn’t want to keep fucking up. And at that point, if I was going to keep going, I wanted to have something that I really wanted to do.”

She says she hasn’t had a drink or gotten high since that year, but won’t clarify whether she considers herself an alcoholic, or if she ever went to rehab. “It’s just you never really know what’s going to happen,” she says. “Things change every day.”

She had gotten into SUNY Geneseo, a college in New York’s state-university system, but decided not to go. She took the year off, heading to her aunt and uncle’s house on Long Island. She worked as a waitress, just as she’d done over various summers. “I loved it,” she says, though her mom told one of her label execs that she had been a truly awful waitress.

Her uncle taught her some guitar chords, and she started playing open mics in the city. Somewhere around that time, she read Anthony Scaduto’s pioneering Bob Dylan biography, which she saw as a “road map” toward becoming an artist.

The next fall, she enrolled at Fordham University in the Bronx, where she majored in philosophy but otherwise hardly participated in student life. She lived with boyfriends, crashed on couches. “I was writing, writing, for years,” she says. “Trying to figure out what I really wanted to say and why I was consumed with this passion for writing, where it came from. It kept me up all night. So I was waiting to see why. That was a really whole separate world.”

She’d ride the subway late at night, composing lyrics in her head. “There were these nights that I enjoyed so much, just staying up and writing songs.” She cites a sparse, Cat Power-ish tune called “Disco” (“I am my only god now,” she sings, cheerily) and “Trash Magic” (sample lyric: “Boy, you want to come to the motel, honey/ Boy, ya wanna hold me down, tell me that you love me?”): “I felt I was really capturing my life in song form, and it was such a pleasure. And that being my whole life, you know? And really being happy, because I was doing exactly what I loved.”

A Williamsburg, Brooklyn, songwriting competition in 2006 led her to 5 Points Records, a tiny label run by Nichtern, who had, years earlier, written the Maria Muldaur hit “Midnight at the Oasis.” “I knew immediately that she was gonna be a big star,” says Nichtern. “And she herself knew, and not just by chutzpah or bravado. On some level she knew this was what her karma was.”

Nichtern hooked her up with producer David Kahne, the guy behind Sublime and Sugar Ray hits, who recalls leading her to looped beats for the first time. Kahne was a well-connected industry veteran and she was an unknown kid, but he found her somewhat daunting. “She was mysterious,” Kahne says. “I was confused a lot of the time whether what I was doing was right or wrong, whether she liked it or didn’t. It felt, a lot of times, like everything could change all of a sudden.” Like, for instance, Lizzy’s name.

Lana Del Rey is, she says, the same person – the same artist, even – as Lizzy Grant. “There’s not, like, a schism between people,” she says. “It’s actually just a different name, and that’s sort of where it begins and ends. I just thought it was strange, being born into this geographic lock-down location, and a name that you didn’t choose, and going to school for fucking 23 years. It was just unfathomable to me. So I think in choosing that name, it was just more becoming who I was, you know? It wasn’t music-related. It was just part of my life.” The other possible name was Cherry Galore, she says, probably joking: “You’d be sitting here calling me ‘Cherry.’ ”

By the time Lizzy became Lana for good, 5 Points had already released an EP from the Kahne sessions under the name Lizz Grant – and iTunes had selected Lizzy as one of the best new artists of 2008. “As we’re putting the album together, she says something like, ‘I really want to change my name,’ ” recalls Nichtern, who had been taking Lizzy and her album around the industry. “If we’re making the movie, you’d see a spit take. We’d just gotten that far with Lizzy Grant.” But Del Rey had found new management, dyed her hair from blond to brown and was ready to move on. They ended up all but scrubbing the LP’s existence from the Internet, which made it look like they were trying to hide Del Rey’s past, contributing to conspiracy-mongering later on. “We didn’t want the old album to be available just as we were trying to launch a new thing,” says Mawson, her co-manager. “And if that created suspicion in the eyes of weirdos on the Internet, then fine.”

Del Rey went off to London for months of writing sessions, one of which yielded an elegiac ode to a boyfriend who liked to play World of Warcraft, though she knew simply calling it “Video Games” was a lot more poetic (“Sometimes a girl’s just gotta generalize”). She had started making videos using iMovie, mixing self-shot webcam segments and YouTube clips: “Just putting things together, building a little world.” She perfected the approach with “Video Games,” creating a career-launching viral video. Even as she faced legal action for appropriating footage, people accused her of not actually making the “Video Games” clip herself – The New Yorker, of all places, called it “allegedly homemade.” “I definitely wouldn’t say I did if I didn’t,” she says with a sigh, showing me the software on her MacBook, which has a badly cracked screen. “That would be weird.”

It’s a clairvoyant, appropriately enough, who gives the first hint that something will go wrong on the second day. “I was trying to think of shit we could do,” Del Rey says, greeting me again at the town house door. “The only thing I could think of is we could see a psychic together.” In any case, she needs cigarettes, so we head out into the June heat. She’s wearing cheap, gold-framed sunglasses with peach-colored lenses. “They’re so ugly,” she says, striding along Bleecker Street. “Rose-colored glasses. Just what the doctor ordered.”

Del Rey was raised Catholic, but she has a mystical bent. “I’m definitely a seeker,” she says. While she was waiting for the Kahne album to come out, she got involved with an “East Village guru” who “had an ability to see into the past and read into the future.” But she left his orbit after detecting something “sinister” about him.

We end up paying a visit to a storefront psychic next to a bodega, in a creepy, red-walled room. The mystic turns out to be an unexpectedly fresh-faced woman in a matching red sundress, who enforces strict rules about “energy.” Del Rey asks her to do our readings together, but the psychic demurs: “Can I talk to the young lady alone?” The outing is becoming comically pointless.

Del Rey is laughing as we return to the house, though maybe slightly irritated. “Fuck,” she says. “I should’ve thought that one out. I don’t think she had the gift. It’s always sort of a menacing vibe unless you go to somebody who’s, like, world-renowned.” The psychic told her that this is her year for love and happiness – Del Rey jokes that there’s still six months left. She’s amused to hear that the psychic told me that I’m spiritually sensitive: “She could probably tell that you thought she was being a fucking bitch.”

We go back to talking, with Del Rey blowing cigarette smoke out the window, into the light. We finally touch on Saturday Night Live, still a dangerous subject. The performance, she maintains, “wasn’t dynamic, but it was true to form.” But the reaction was agonizing. She felt music-business friends pulling away from her. “Everyone I knew suddenly wasn’t so sure about me,” she says. “They were like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be associated with her – not a great reputation.’ ” Iovine says they simply “got caught speeding” with the early performance, and that he spent time in the studio afterward coaching Del Rey on using in-ear monitors.

I ask her about “Ride,” a song where she sings about feeling “fucking crazy” – not an isolated sentiment in her catalog. “Well, I feel fucking crazy,” she says. “But I don’t think I am. People make me feel crazy.” We talk a little about the “I wish I were dead” thing, which she blames on leading questions. “I find that most people I meet figure I kind of want to kill myself anyway,” she says. “So, it comes up every time.”

Then, really without warning, her mood shifts. It’s a powerful thing, palpable in the room, like a sudden mass of threatening clouds. Her eyes seem to turn a shade darker: Trust no one. I ask, perversely, about “Fucked My Way Up to the Top,” one of Ultraviolence‘s best songs, which attacks an unnamed imitator who didn’t have to go through the gauntlet Del Rey did. It may be about Lorde, who criticized Del Rey’s lyrics but has a not-dissimilar vocal style.

She just released the song yesterday, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. “Now you are annoying me,” she says, half-trying to sound like she’s kidding. She lights a cigarette, looking miserable.

We begin an agonizing, endless meta-conversation about our interview and her relationship with the press. “I find the nature of the questions difficult,” she says. ” ‘Cause it’s not like I’m a rock band and you’re asking how everything got made and what it’s like touring in arenas and what are the girls like. It’s about my father. It’s about my mental health. It’s fucking personal. And these questions all have negative inferences: It’s just like, ‘SNL. Do you actually want to kill yourself?’ … Maybe I’m sensitive. Do you think?”

That’s when she says she doesn’t want to be on the cover of Rolling Stone anymore. She also says, “What you write won’t matter” – meaning that nothing will change her detractors’ minds about her.

It goes on and on. “You hit all my more sensitive weaknesses, all my Achilles’ heels. You’re asking all the right questions. I just really don’t want to answer them.”

Every attempt to talk her off this rhetorical ledge seems to make it worse. Del Rey stands up, in a distinct “time to go” gesture.

“I definitely presented myself well, and that’s all I’ve ever done,” she says, walking me downstairs. “And that’s never really gotten me anywhere. I’m just uncomfortable, and it has nothing to do with you.”

Stepping out, I try to convince her that her crisis of confidence over the interview is no big deal. It is, again, the wrong thing to say.

“It’s not a crisis of confidence, it’s not,” she says, standing in the doorway. “I am confident.” Her eyes are ablaze with hurt and pride. “I am.” She says goodbye, and shuts the door.

Originally published on rollingstone.com with the headline Lana Del Rey: The Saddest, Baddest Diva in Rock, and in the July 31, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone with the headline Vamp of Constant Sorrow.

[eagerbby]

can i call you - e.m

paring| Eddie Munson x female reader

synopsis| The year is 1999 and Eddie Munson might, quite possibly, be absolutely head over heels with a girl he met on the internet. What could go wrong?

an| this is set in the late 90s, Eddie is 21 in this as is reader. basically just a little idea i had floating around in my head. could definitely be a series if anyone wants it to be one, let me know!  

warnings- 2k, not much to warn about for part one

Part 2

“That was Korn with Blind, here on 99.3 Metal Shop. If you’re just tuning in; we’re glad to have ya. Going back almost a decade, here's Metallica with Master of Puppets.”

“Fucking Metal.” Eddie grinned, tuning the volume knob on his radio up, the first chords rumbling through the white walls of his room. He pops the tab of his beer as he bangs his head along with the music. It was another lonely night, stuck in the small cage of his room. He’d tried to get Gareth and Jeff to hang, maybe go down to the quarry and get high, but alas both boys had plans that didn’t include hanging out with their older buddy. 

So here he was, spinning in his desk chair, a chat forum open on his black spray painted monitor. The CPU whirled loudly from under the desk but Eddie could barely hear it with the heavy guitar shredding coming through his radio. He was about three beers in and a half a joint down, the edges of his vision becoming hazy in his intoxication. 

Eddie’s ringed pointy finger rolled over the trackball on his stained mouse, flicking the screen up and down and up and down. Again and again until Eddie sighed and threw his head back. He shouldn’t be waiting for you. It was a Friday night, you probably had better things to do instead of sitting at your computer chatting with some strange guy on the internet. Although, Eddie hopes you don’t think about him like that. The two of you have been talking quite regularly for the past three months. It had started randomly, you personally asked him on a horror movie forum for some movie suggestions so he gave you his favorites -The Shining, Maximum Overdrive, My Bloody Valentine- and you had watched them all, giving him such detailed critiques he was kinda surprised you’d taken his suggestions. A week later you sent him your AOL name and told him to add you so you could chat more. He jumped at the opportunity, so intrigued by you in such a short time.   

It was a little awkward at first, with Eddie trying to play it cool because you were so different from the girls he had gone to school with and you were a little reserved, not too sure how much you wanted to share with a stranger online. But the relationship had blossomed, grown into a friendship without either of you really trying. You loved his corny jokes and he could listen to you for hours talking about your cat and your poetry. You’d even let him read a little bit of it, blessing him with the most beautiful prose Eddie had ever read before. He wasn’t much of a poetry guy, but you were turning him into one.

Eddie leans forward after a brief war in his head, debating if he should just bite the bullet and shoot you a message first. Maybe you didn’t see he was online yet? Quickly he pulls up your AOL log and types.

HellfireMaster- What’s your favorite scary movie?” 

He hit the enter key and tapped his foot anxiously. A minute or two passed with no response. Eddie groaned deeply, rubbing his hand over his face. This was stupid. 

Eddie pushed back from his desk, the wood banging off the wall with the force of it, and strolled over to his bed, flopping down on the disheveled sheets. He laid there with his hands folded on his chest, staring at the slow turn of his ceiling fan. He can’t remember when his crush on you started, but it was eating him up on the inside. He doesn’t even know what you look like for Christ-sake and yet you have him wrapped around your finger.

There’s ping from Eddie’s computer and he shoots up to his elbows at the sound, big doe eyes locked on the computer screen with excitement. He wastes no time jumping from his bed, tripping over dirty jeans and piles of crumpled paper from his last lyric writing session, over to his desk chair that groaned under his weight as he plopped down in it. Eddie’s grin rips at the corners of his mouth, wide and excited, little dimples forming by the edges. 

PrettyiNProsed- I don’t know.

HellfireMaster- You have to have a favorite.” 

Eddie bit his lip as he waited, knee jiggling with anticipation. 

PrettyiNProsed- Is this where you tell me you’re watching me?

Eddie chuckles at that, the tapping sound of the keyboard mingling with the bass from some song he wasn’t even listening to. Scream was your new favorite movie. It had taken some convincing on Eddie’s part seeing as you had heard how horrible it was from some friends, but after watching it -while Eddie watched it at the same time and you live reviewed it- you couldn’t believe you had waited so long. 

HellfireMaster- I could be. You just never know…

PrettyiNProsed- I bet that would sound more convincing over the phone, huh?

HellfireMaster- Maybe, but someone doesn’t want to do that yet.

It’s true, Eddie had been slowly slipping talking on the phone more and more into your conversations. He couldn’t help it, curiosity was killing him. The thought of finally hearing your voice was starting to consume him. It lingered in the back of his mind as he worked, as he held his campaigns, at band practice, even hanging out with his small group of friends. It had hurt his feelings when you’d all but blown him off the first time, quickly saying goodbye and logging off, but Eddie didn’t let that deter him. When he wanted something he’d work his ass off to get it.  

PrettyiNProsed- Hey! I never said I didn’t want to.

HellfireMaster- You never said you did though..

PrettyiNProsed- Don’t get all grumpy on me now, Eddie. 

You didn’t even have to see him to know he was pouting about it and Eddie loved that about you. That you could read him so well like you understood just who he was. It was a rare thing for him to feel so seen and he thinks maybe it’s because, with you, he isn’t Eddie ‘The Freak’ Munson. He was just Eddie, he didn’t feel like he had to play a part.

Focusing back to the computer, he cracked his knuckles and began typing back.

HellfireMaster- How was your day, sweetheart?

PrettyiNProsed- It was okay, getting better now as long as you don’t go all dark and brooding on me.

PrettyiNProsed- Think you can handle that, sunshine? 

Eddie felt like a fucking idiot, smiling at his computer with his cheeks flushed red and his lip sore from his canine repeatedly sinking into it. You always did this -using these cute nicknames that he’d probably scoff at if they weren’t coming from you. He really did have it bad and for a mysterious face behind a screen at that. 

HellfireMaster- Oh, I can handle it. 

PrettyiNProsed- Good. I’ve been waiting all day to talk to you.

God if that didn’t send his stomach swirling with butterflies. 

HellfireMaster- You have?

PrettyiNProsed- Yes! Guess why!

HellfireMaster- No, just tell me.

PrettyiNProsed- Ugh, you’re no fun!

HellfireMaster- Just tell me, princess! I don’t like waiting.

PrettyiNProsed- Sucks for you then!

Suddenly that green dot next to your name was red, signaling that you’d gone offline. Eddie’s eyes bugged, his teeth clenching tight together as his nostrils flared. You’d logged off. He couldn’t believe it. You’d never done that before and this wasn’t the first time the two of you had joked around like that. You always took his jokes and dry humor in stride. Had he upset you? Eddie doesn’t think he could live with himself if he had. You were the only thing making him get up in the mornings, you know other than his job down at the tire shop, if he lost the brilliant light you had brought into his small little world he’s sure his life would metamorphose into a miserable stream of wake work sleep until he inevitably died alone.

He might be a tad bit dramatic, but still, he needed you. 

Another ping has his eyes darting to the screen.

PrettyiNProsed- Are you ready to stop being a brat, big boy?

Eddie blanches at your words, his cock twitching to life to his dismay. Big boy. Fuck. Why did that stir something inside him? His calloused fingers hovered over the keyboard until he slowly started typing. 

HellfireMaster- I’ll do anything for you to just tell me.

PrettyiNProsed- Ohhhh, anything you say?

You were flirting with him. Eddie pressed his palms against the stubbled skin of his cheek, more in awe than shock, because you’ve never openly flirted with him before. You were sweet and funny and wickedly smart, but you always seemed to just skirt right past his flirty words, usually playing them off in a sweet dismissal. But tonight was different, you were starting it. Eddie adjusts his semi hard cock, grimacing at how dirty he feels popping a semi at two simple words. 

HellfireMaster- Whatever the princess deems suitable.

PrettyiNProsed- Hmm, so many options, but I think I want you to beg for it.

Fuck, Eddie thinks with a helpless moan. You must be in a mood tonight and Eddie thinks it might just kill him. Eddie was not a beggar, but he’d fall to his knees and grovel if you as much as asked him to. Which you kinda were right now.

HellfireMaster- Please. Oh please my dear, sweet, princess, please take mercy on my pitiful soul and tell me why oh why you’ve been waiting to talk to a simple peasant like myself.

PrettyiNProsed- You really poured it on thick there, Eddie. 

PrettyiNProsed- But I’ll take pity and tell you because I liked it, also I just have to tell you what I got!

PrettyiNProsed- I went to the mall last night and bought two things.

Eddie chuckled at this, running his free hand through his bangs as he finger typed.

HellfireMaster- Two things!! Wow, I think you have a problem there sweetheart. Impulsive spending. 

PrettyiNProsed- Hardy-har. Would you like to know what I bought, asshole?

HellfireMaster- Of course I would, big spender.

PrettyiNProsed- Well first I went to this really awesome record shop and bought that Dio album you suggested.

HellfireMaster- Shit, you got Holy Diver? What’s your favorite song?

PrettyiNProsed- Well, I’ve only gotten halfway through it, but I really liked caught in the middle!

HellfireMaster- That’s my girl! 

Eddie doesn’t think as he types it, as he hits send, in fact it only hits him what he’s said when you don’t respond back for a minute. Shit. Maybe that was a little forward. You aren’t his girl, you were his friend, maybe even best friend at this point but definitely not his girl. Not yet at least.. He’s starting to type an apology when your next message comes in.

PrettyiNProsed- You wanna know what that other thing was, Eddie?

HellfireMaster- Yes

PrettyiNProsed- I bought a receiver for my room.

HellfireMaster- A receiver? 

PrettyiNProsed- Jeezz, Eddie. I bought a phone for my room!

Eddie froze midway to lighting his cigarette, the unlit stick falling from his lips to his lap as he gaped. 

PrettyiNProsed- I didn’t want to talk to you in the living room, my parents probably wouldn't be too happy if they knew I was spending my time talking to a stranger on the internet instead of focusing on my college courses.

HellfireMaster- Can I call you?

PrettyiNProsed- Not tonight, I’m exhausted, in fact my bed is calling my name. But I’m free tomorrow at 6 if you wanna…

PrettyiNProsed- You still wanna right?

PrettyiNProsed- Eddieeee??? You still there??

Eddie’s elated, fists punching into the air as he spins in his chair. Tomorrow night. He’ll finally be able to hear your voice. His begging had really paid off this time, which was such a sudden change he couldn’t quite believe it. But that didn’t matter. Nothing else did right now. Tomorrow he’d finally hear you say his name, hear your laugh, be able to really talk to you. He couldn’t wait. 

HellfireMaster- 6pm. I’ll be waiting! 

PrettyiNProsed- I’ll send the number tomorrow, gonna make you wait till then.

HellfireMaster-  Tease

PrettyiNProsed- Hm, I guess I am.

PrettyiNProsed- Goodnight Eddie, don’t go getting into trouble before I can hear your voice.

HellfireMaster- Me? Trouble? Not ever, sweetheart.

PrettyiNProsed- Yeah, I’m not convinced. 

HellfireMaster- Sleep tight, princess. 

Eddie logged out, a blinding smile on his face, his stomach fluttering with angry little tornados. He shut his computer down, turned off the radio, and crawled into his bed. A click of the string on his bedside lamp and he’s engulfed in darkness, the only light a white moon beam peeking through his blinds, and Eddie lays on his back with his hands folded over his blanket covered chest still smiling like a love sick fool because tomorrow night he’ll be in this same spot but with the phone pressed to his head, you voice filtering through his ear like a melody. 

Eddie falls into a dreamy sleep with the thought of you and your voice calling his name. Finally.     

[fatewoven]

@sevient​:  [ QUIET ]  RAUF ND SAMAEL PLEASE PLSEA PLES   /  prompt.

Curiosity killed the cat, but he’s certain this is not the type of satisfaction that brought it back in the age-old proverb. It eventually occurs to him he’s drifting, thoughts recycling through the same nonsensical scenarios, repeated over and over like the chords of a guitar strummed out of idle boredom. Yet, that’s the farthest thing he feels at present while bracketed against the wall of the shop, hidden behind shelves junk and the flimsy excuse of a mandated break. Though, nothing in this God-given world could preserve his modesty in such a situation if someone finds them.

He keeps himself steady, arms braced against the wall, and it would be a pleasant surprise if his prosthetic doesn’t leave dents by the time they’re done. Dizzy with want, a low-burning desire at the base of his gut, Rauf bites down on a low groan as SA-M43L shifts behind him, enveloping him further in an iron-tight hold. Not that he wants to be anywhere right now, mind you. It should feel claustrophobic, constricting and hazardous, but the only detail his mind sticks to is the way the smooth metal of the unit’s limbs, designed for combat and shredding things to pieces, brings a sort of security — the sense of being held addictive as morphine. He’s pinned against the wall, steam billowing down his arched back, and Rauf widens his stances. Gives him more room to maneuver as claw-edged digits pry him upon, meticulous and insufferably thorough. Gasping, head bowed and shoulders tense, mouth working over an expletive, Rauf hisses and demands: “Get on with it.” And logically, on an intellectual level, he knows SA-M43L is big. By design. By necessity. Yet, as something tapered and smooth presses against him, teasing at his hole by slight motions, all his thoughts come crashing down. Reduced to sensation and reaction as it pushes into him, stretching him further than before — and it could break him, but he’s deliriously humored at the idea, head canting to shoot SA-M43L a withering glare when he stops out of consideration, cautious as he lets Rauf adjust, one hand almost large enough to completely wrap around his waist.

Forcefully relaxing his muscles, Rauf looks down at his half-leaking cock, more erect and enthusiastic he’d seen it in years, and then at the monster that’s pushing into him, barely halfway in and feeling like it’s up to his lungs. He breathes out, edged with laughter, and leans back to see how it feels inside him. In truth, he’s had his fair share of sex, both life-changing and mediocre, but SA-M43L is something else, robot or no. It’s intoxicating, the blend of sheer size and perfect technique that knocks the air right out of him, leaving him breathless with every inch that drags in and out by gradual thrusts. “You won’t break me.” Stop treating me like I’m fragile, he means, but chooses not to say for the sake of his pride. A moan punches out his throat as the ridges of that veritable-fucking-dick drags against his prostate, and he should write a review, a glowing letter of recommendation to whichever scientist thought it was a brilliant idea to arm a combat unit with a working dick. Before another moan could drip from his mouth, deep and low, utterly wrecked at the slow, unhurried pace SA-M43L sets, servos and gears whirring, sensors attuned to his heart rate, a cool finger slips between his lips.

With an affronted noise, glancing over his shoulder, Rauf freezes when he hears a customer calling out from the front, looking for an employee during the lazy afternoon, and he closes his eyes. Counts to ten in preparation to leave them both unsatisfied as he bounds back to work — but SA-M43L keeps moving, rocking his hips in a smooth, unbroken rhythm. Each motion makes him go deeper, impossibly so, and he feels overfull — knowing nothing else will satisfy him like this. Still, responsibility bred into him through countless generations, he tries to dislodge the unit off him by patting the forearm. Then by fingers between joint seams and pulling on sensitive wiring, but all his attempts result in SA-M43L increasing his speed, rocking further and further into him, intent on ruining him. And fuck—

Fuck if Rauf doesn’t want it to stop anytime soon. He groans, muffled, and saliva drips down his jawline as he pants, trying to stay quiet as his insides slowly and mechanically get re-arranged. Every thrust wrenches a gasp out of him, back arched and legs spread wide. He should’ve known SA-M43L would be a pain as he brings Rauf closer to the edge before halting completely, making him buck and writhe for release while buried to the hilt, terribly uncooperative about the whole affair. He can see the internal lights blinking in a delighted pattern, the engine rumbling away like the purr of some giant cat, and Rauf can’t pry himself out of this, forced to take it and take it as SA-M43L resumes the slow, torturous rhythm once more.

He thinks the customer might’ve left at some point, but nothing about him cares about the things outside this corner. His curiosity will be the end of him, he thinks, but the bone-deep satisfaction brought on by this thorough, heart-stopping sex, will keep him alive out of sheer spite. Biting on the digit in his mouth, hearing SA-M43L let out an approximation of a chuckle, those synthetic vocals vibrato with some indescribable emotion, Rauf pushes back against him, meeting the thrusts head-on as if to punctuate his frustration — and eventually, after he’s regained the ability to walk, he will explore his fill, eager to know what else SA-M43L could do if he can reduce him speechless by something simple (wonderful) like this.

[clown-of-rivia]

“They don’t exist.”

Jaskier swears his soul leaves his body for a second as he yelps with a start at the unexpected voice grumbling over his shoulder. On pure impulse, he slaps his laptop closed, sending a prayer out to the gods of Google Docs and Archive of our Own that it saved recently, and slumped into the comfy armchair of the bustling coffee shop that smelled of desperation and success. (But judging by the two other writers in the corner each on their fourth double expresso, the raven-haired beauty flirting with the barista without shame, and the dude crying while clinging to a clear disinterested girl’s hand it also smelled of heroics and heartbreak).

He turns to the offender seated in his own armchair just over his shoulder and… wow. No, no thinking with your dick. He clears his throat, his voice innocent, “whaaaat don’t exist?”

“The creatures in your story.” At Jaskier’s raised eyebrow the man rolls his eye and grunts. “Omegas, alphas...Witcher ‘knots’.”

Jaskier doesn’t think his face had ever lit up so fast and so furiously in his life before. I’m just saying, you could light a match against his flaming red cheeks right now. Had the creep really been reading over his shoulder?!

“And- and how would you know, huh?” Jaskier retorted, desperate to claw back at least a shred of dignity through confrontation. Witchers are basically creatures of legend, so few left that they have essentially turned into a conspiracy theory-fuelled secret society that works in the shadows.

But the stranger didn’t seem impressed with his haughty tone, instead just raising an eyebrow of his own on his otherwise sinfully handsome but expressionless face. He wore a deliciously tight grey shirt that hugged his chest under a black leather jacket that should make him look like an asshole but made him look like a damn husband-shaped fantasy. White hair was up in a ponytail and shaved at the sides.

That was when Jaskier stopped drowning in those golden amber eyes and really ‘looked’. His own eyes narrowing in disbelief before going wide as his breath hitched. 

“I know who you are,” he said softly as if his realisation was about to amaze and impress the stranger. “Big ol’ loner, sitting in the most corner seat available, cat eyes, white hair, suspicious long and narrow duffle bag I’d wager holds two very scary swords…”

The man kept his deadpanned eyes on Jaskier as he threw his black coffee back in one go like it wasn’t scolding, then reached for his bag, clearly getting ready to leave. 

Let it never be said Jaskier wasn’t a man of opportunity. 

“You’re a Witcher,” he said eagerly as he rose to his feet with the man, his eyes positively sparkling. “You’re Geralt of Rivia.”

Yellow eyes flashed in agitation then darted around suspiciously. It took a moment to realise Geralt was trying to make sure no one else heard him. He visibly relaxed when no one seemed to have been paying attention, all eyes glued to their phones and mouths glued to their pumpkin-spiced double-whipped what-evers.

Geralt gave a grunt Jaskier couldn’t decipher if his life depended on it and shouldered his bag, turning towards the door. 

“W-wait!” Jaskier almost ran after him before remembering his precious laptop and darling guitar. He rushed to pack up then darted out, using his long legs and sharp elbows to basically slither his way through the bodies before bursting out the doors, his head whipping around before he spotted black leather, white hair, and a black duffle bag. 

“Wait!” he called out again, clutching his laptop bag to his chest and guitar case strap over his shoulder as his legs carried him the last few steps till he stopped in front of the confused and somewhat irritated looking Witcher. And by holy fuckest of fucks and actual Witcher.

“Why.” Geralt responded, not a question. 

“You cant seriously expect me, after meeting the most incredible person I’ll ever meet, to just let you leave? Let me buy you lunch! Oh bollocks, its 4pm… ok dinner! Early dinner. If you’re on a mission or something and don’t want to go out I- I can cook! Or maybe just let me buy you a drink?”

Jaskier knows he’ll be screaming into his pillow at 2:30 am for the rest of his life when he remembers this embarrassing display of desperate grovelling. Right now, however, he couldn’t bring himself to care - not even if there is even the slightest chance Geralt might agree. 

He kept the full force of his doe eyes trained on the stoic Witcher till he let out a short huff Jaskier swore was his version of a laugh, the hard lines between his eyebrows easing. 

“Sorry to disappoint, but I have to meet someone. But who knows… you might hear from me again… ‘Witcher Bitcher Bard’.”

Jaskier felt his heart jump into his throat at Geralt saying his Ao3 username out loud. He had just uploaded his latest chapter when the gruff voice over his shoulder startled him. 

“I’m curious to see for how long the handsome, disciplined ‘alpha’ Witcher will be able to resist the beautiful, cheeky ‘omega’ bard, what with his ‘heat’ coming up.”

Geralt gives him a wink and a smirk in the face of Jaskier’s stunned silence, before sauntering off. 

It’s only once Geralt is on the otherside of the street that Jaskier’s tiny rat brain catches up to what just happened. He grins so wide his cheeks hurt as he yanks out his phone to turn on email notifications for comments on his fic: ‘Resistance is futil my darling Witcher’.

[t-underneaththeradardancing]

variations of ordinary - and ouch but -  everything aspects problematic esp spelling and lets not tawk about punctuation k - lizards like cosplay i think  and shredding - the rat maze of efx pedals shell shocked - quick jump into that rabbit hole filled w  chainsaws -so many bad decisions  - waiting for delivery  or do i mean deliverance  - a new scratching post - she has gone thru 2 almost - completely - i tell u she is such a good kitty - yah sometimes the rugs a little also but shez a cat ffs - w claws  - yes we should b dancing - i play some guitar while waiting - needles wuz ok - a couple little fux emoted - it helps the chi 

did u ever wish and wait for so long u no longer want it 

im ok - its jest a moment - why do things never happen at the beginning of a window - i guess if i gets fuck all done it - not like it aint  never happen and sometimes dogs do eat homework 

feelin old af today

[labelleofbelfastcity]

fig and gorgug’s excellent adventure

word count: 1.7k

read on ao3 here!

“Bill, my most esteemed colleague…”

Fig looks over at a quietly snoring Gorgug, his face softly lit by the shadows of Bill and Ted on her crystal. Even after a year of knowing each other, a few months of which were spent in a cramped cell together, she hadn’t known he snores. It had never been quiet enough, she had never been quiet enough, to notice that about him.

If Fig focuses, she can feel the rumble of the tour bus against her back, and, if she leans her head against the metal wall by her shoulder, the vibrations of tires over asphalt rattle around in her skull. They’ve only been on the road for a week, with just two concerts under their belts, and Fig is already kind of exhausted.

It’s a lot. The managers and the calls home and the makeup assignments for missed schoolwork. She probably wouldn’t even be doing the latter, but Gorgug spends his allotted midmorning time sitting at their extremely tiny table, with papers of Barbarian Theory and Engineering 1 scattered around him, and she’d feel like an asshole to just watch.

Fig hasn’t been sleeping well, either. The little bunk seems to press in around her, shoving her into an even smaller version of herself. Which feels stupid to complain about, because Gorgug is over a foot taller than her, since his growth spurt over the summer, and he’s sleeping just fine.

As if to prove her point, Gorgug shifts in his sleep, curling closer into Fig’s side. It’s just past one in the morning, and they have a gig tomorrow so Fig should really be sleeping too, but she’d felt like crying, for some reason, alone in her bunk. She’d crawled into Gorgug’s, instead, and pulled up Bill and Ted while he blinked blearily at her. It didn’t take him much longer to fall back asleep—now with his arm tucked around Fig’s shoulders—and Fig continues to hide from her emotions by watching Ted philosophize.

“Hey, Gorgug,” Fig hisses, burrowing her head into his chest in a way she knows will stick him with her horns. “Gorgug.”

“Hrmgh,” he grumbles, shifting more so that Fig can’t really poke him anymore. “Go to sleep.”

“No. Gorgug, hey. Come on, dude, I have an idea.” She doesn’t, really, more the idea of an idea, just like how Bill and Ted only operate on negative brian power and a pretty homoerotic bromance.

Homoerotic. She must’ve texted Kristen too much yesterday.

“Sleep is my idea,” Gorgug says, but it’s more of a sigh and a yawn wrapped up together and stretched like a yawning cat.

Fig’s brain unhelpfully supplies an image of sleepy Riz—ears cocked all funny and pupils absolutely giant. She shoves it back into the little chest lovingly marked “Bad Kids” that she’d constructed the second they drove away from Elmville because Fig is great at compartmentalizing and hiding her feelings. Totally.

“I’m bored, I want to do my idea.”

“You’re watching Bill and Ted.”

“No, I’m not. I’m talking to you.”

“Then stop talking to me and go to sleep.”

Fig huffs, about to say something just into the realm of mean, but then she feels Gorgug smile against the top of her head, and she relaxes a little.

“What’s your idea?” He asks, still sleepy, but also endearing in that goofy and sweet Gorgug way.

There’s a pause, while Fig tries to come up with her idea. The bus trundles along and Bill and Ted continue to kidnap historical figures. Finally, she says, much quieter than is warranted, like it’s some big secret she’s been holding close to her heart, “I’m gonna find a chronomancer so we can go back in time.”

“Like Augefort?” Gorgug yawns again.

“Absolutely not, Augefort doesn’t have Rufus energy.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Maybe not a chronomancer, then, but like, someone who’s fucked with time, ya know. It would be cool to hang out with someone who’s fucked with time.”

“Like Augefort?” Gorgug says, before amending, “No. Wait. Rufus.”

“Yeah, Rufus,” Fig agrees. “Except if Rufus were hot, I think it would be more fun if our Rufus was hot.”

“Rufus is already hot. He’s got… sunglasses.”

Fig giggles and Gorgug snorts too. “You need your eyes checked, dude.”

“We watched the,” he yawns, “the Matrix last month. That’s what you said about Neo.”

“Uh. Neo is Keanu Reeves so just, automatically hot. Which. Speaking of. Bill and Ted are right there, dude.”

Gorgug laughs, quietly, voice still gummy with sleep, as he pokes her gently in the side, “I thought you liked older men.”

Fig makes a face that is very scandalized and very affronted. “That doesn’t mean I like Rufus.”

Gorgug shrugs, as best he can while in cuddle-mode. “I don’t know…”

Fig huffs and whacks him on the arm. “Maybe we should go to sleep.”

“Works for me,” he says, and settles back down.

“Hey. Hey! Don’t go back to bed, Gorgug. I’m still talking.”

He grumbles and turns his head even further into hers, trying to shield his eyes from the crystal’s light. “Watch your movie.”

“This is our movie, Gorgug. It’s ours.”

“It’s too late for it to be ‘our’ anything.”

“You’re no fun, you know that? No fun.”

“I’m sorry,” Gorgug says, way too sincerely for her to continue down that line of teasing.

“Hey, no, it’s fine. You’re tired, I should let you rest.”

Gorgug’s hand moves where it’s on her shoulder, rubbing over her sleep shirt, and then pausing, “Hey, is this mine?”

“Um,” Fig says, because it is, in fact, his. He’d left one of his Owlbears t-shirts on a chair, right after they unpacked all their stuff onto the tour bus, and she’d thought about it for approximately three seconds before snatching it and chucking it at her pile of clothes.

That first night, neither her nor Gorgug had gotten any sleep, sitting on the floor of the bus between their bunks, anxiously going over lyric and style choices for the next night’s show. So the shirt had waited until after their first concert, when both of them had been too tired to do much more than change out of sweaty, smoke-filled clothes and fall into their respective beds. It had smelled comfortingly of the Thistlesprings’ homemade fabric softener, but Fig’s varying states of cleanliness have not helped the smell stick around.

Now, though, cuddled up against Gorgug’s chest, she doesn’t miss the shirt’s smell. It’s nothing compared to the real thing.

“It’s okay if you took it,” Gorgug says, cracking a small smile. “It looks better on you anyway.”

“Since when do you have an eye for fashion, Mr. Hoodies-In-Summer?”

He reaches around and pokes her on the cheek, “Hey, my hoodies are a catch for women ages thirteen to twenty-eight.”

“We did sell, like, a literal ton last night,” Fig says, snorting.

There’s a lull in the conversation. Bill and Ted shred some sick air guitar.

“...It’s a little weird,” Gorgug says, eventually, in that introspective tone of his that promises paternal questioning.

“What is?”

“That we’re sophomores in high school and have so many people, like, caring about us. Or, I mean, watching us. Like, I guess we’re famous, or something? That’s weird.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“I guess I never thought about it like that.” Fig’s been too caught up in the whole being famous thing to think about what it means for her, a fifteen year old, to be famous. She isn’t a fan of thinking about it, actually, and decides to put it off even further. This is why Gorgug’s the thoughtful, considerate one.

“That’s probably why you’re better at songwriting than I am,” Gorgug muses. “You just do what feels right.”

Fig shifts a little, so she can look at him better, his features cast in the shifting colors of the crystal. “Dude, that’s like all drumming is. Like, just playing your emotions and not overthinking it. And you’re literally the world’s best drummer.”

“Oh,” Gorgug laughs, “I wouldn’t say that.”

“You are. What other teenager gets to go on a tour while they’re still in high school?”

“Um. The Jonas Brothers?”

“I mean this in the nicest way possible, but if you compare our music to the Jonas Brothers again I will stab you with my horns.”

“I really don't think they’re poky enough to do that—”

“Stab, Gorgug. With force. You wouldn’t like it.”

“Okay, fine. I’ll take your word for it.”

“Wo-ah,” Ted says, on the crystal.

“Wicked,” Bill chimes in.

“What if we talked like them at our next concert?” Fig asks, “Just come out with full Bill and Ted voices and keep them up the whole show.”

“That sounds… hard.”

“No, it would be fun! Like, um,” Fig switches into the voice, drawing out her vowels and smiling dumbly, “we’ll totally get babes like this, dude.”

“You can get princess babes,” Gorgug says. “I’ve got Zelda. That’s basically the same thing.”

“Oh my god, you’re too cute,” Fig burrows closer to him, back in her usual voice.

She can tell Gorgug’s blushing by the bashful tone of his silence. “Um, thanks. I should probably call her tomorrow.”

“Do you mind if I join too? I really like her, she’s nice. And sick as hell.”

“Yeah, that would be fun! We can show her our set, maybe.”

“Totally! If school wasn’t on right now we could’ve brought her along.”

“I don’t know, wouldn’t that, like, Beatles us?”

“Did you seriously just mention another boy band? Also, beyond that, did you use the Beatles as a verb?”

“Er.”

“Sometimes, I wonder how you ever made it into the punk-rock scene. And then I remember that I invited you.”

“Thanks for doing that,” Gorgug says, wrapping his other arm around Fig’s shoulders. “I never really said it before, but, thank you. This has, um, it’s meant a lot to me.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, dude.”

“It’s, like, kind of everything right now, Fig.”

“Oh.”

“So, I guess, um, thank you. For inviting me to join a band with you and taking me on tour.”

“I, uh… Of course. Thanks for being my drummer, Gorgug. I’ll always take you on my adventures.”

“And I’ll always go with you.”

Bill says, “Excellent,” on the crystal screen, smiling at Ted with big eyes.

Yeah, Fig thinks, as Gorgug sighs and smiles into the top of her head. Excellent.

[straw-of-the-hat]

can i have some harper and dabi hcs?? like them acting as if theyre siblings 🥺🥺 i really like theyre relationship with eachother and i can totally see dabi being overprotective of her

Harper & Dabi are siblings and here's proof

Headcanons? Headcanons for the poor and needy?

Expect ✨typos✨

These belong to this fic

-Dabi won't ever admit it out loud, but he sees Harper as a sister. He loves her like one and looks after her like she is one.

-Harper knows this. She isn't gonna dispute it though. Especially seeing as she feels the same way.

-Dabi will never admit it, and he tries not to think about it, but he hates Kirishima on some level. He's constantly critical of this kid. This redheaded, boisterous teenager who is so obviously taken with Harper it hurts. He doesn't see how Tsukauchi and Sansa can't pick up on it.

-Jesus fucking CHRIST she scares the everloving shit out of him. She will literally send him into full cardiac arrest one day and he's positive of this. She gets into trouble all the time and it irritates him that he can't be there to protect her in those moments.

-Bantering with her makes him happy. Painstakingly happy, actually. He'd do it all day if she'd let him.

-Annoying her on purpose is also fun sometimes.

-He likes to watch shows with her and eat ice cream, similar to their first meeting with one another.

-He's the only one who gets the utter bullshit that is Kurogiri and she appreciates that. It's something they can share drawl looks about.

-Sansa is a goddamn wackjob that's going to get himself or one of them killed. They constantly whisper about getting him into rehab but so far haven't done it. Half because they're tired and half because it probably wouldn't work anyway!

-Dabi buys her pads and tampons, makes sure she eats, makes sure she brushes her hair every so often

-He'd do the laundry and make her bed too but Kurogiri goes ballistic anytime anyone gets near her shit. Talk about territorial

-Dabi is incredibly flattered that she thinks nothing of his scars. She doesn't think they're gross or unsightly. She doesn't think they're badass or good looking. She literally could not give a shit. He values that.

-Anytime Kirishima stares too long he'll snap his fingers really loud without even looking up from his book. It always makes Harper snort and Kirishima jump a foot in the air

-Harper wanted to learn to drive, as that's a skill one should probably have, but didn't trust Sansa to do it. Kurogiri didn't know how to drive and didn't need to, and Tsukauchi was too much of a passenger seat driver. That left Dabi.

-Now Harper can drive stick like a pro and they had tons of laughs. Dabi can't remember the last time he had such a good time, or the last time he felt this proud of someone

-He doesn't feel sad when he sees her wearing a dress or going out with friends. He doesn't. It's not like she's growing up really fast or anything. Or that something tif that manner would make him upset. Of course not.

-When she gets cold he lets her wear his jacket and he secretly took pictures. No he won't share them.

-Dabi acts really chill but when Harper turns her back he's all glares and silent threats to anyone that dates look at her

-He's going to break Kirishima's shins if he doesn't back the fuck up

-Watching Harper get dressed up in her trench coat and cat ears makes him feel all sappy inside. She looks so big yet so small.

-Her becoming friends with Shoto makes him want to cry happy tears

-He'd honestly do anything for her he's not gonna lie

-Sansa started some sorta party in the living room and Tsukauchi was shredding in the guitar. Harper coaxed him into singing somehow

-They text a lot and bitch to one another about the bullshit surrounding them

-Kirishima asked her on a date and she said yes what the fuck

-No it isn't okay and yes he is chaperoning from a distance without telling her he's going to first

-Of course she's a mind reader so she already knew but oh well at least he can keep his eyes on Kirishima. Little bitch.

-Harper had to write a paper on someone in her life she looks up to, and she had to interview that person. Dabi thought it would be Aizawa, or Tsukauchi. So when she sat down next to him on the couch, leaning a bit into his side and beginning to ask questions, he may have almost cried

-He got her flowers because she was having a hard day and she appreciates it

-Coming to class with her, it's his job to simply sit there. During the last fifteen minutes of the period, mineta makes an offhanded comment about him being sketchy. He wasn't listening, but Harper lost her shit. Went absolutely fucking ballistic. Dabi had to physically stand up and grab her shoulder to keep her from killing this kid

-Honestly if he hadn't stopped her no one would've. They were all ready to watch him die.

-There was a class discussion about morals and what made someone a good person. People were using All Might as am example, Present Mic, Hawks. They were all very vague, using the typical "they saved someone" or "they're nice!"

-Harper chose Dabi. And god damn did she dig deep.

-No he didn't almost cry. That was dust in his eyes. It made them water. It happens.

-They were at an event for upcoming heroes and someone asked who Dabi was and why he was with her. Instead of saying he was a bodyguard, she just snorted and said that he was her brother.

-Dabi wouldn't want it any other way.