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punk-in-docs · 2 years ago

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“if you want to come you better beg” x prince paul cause i need this filth 😩👀

🥀Qualities of Mercy🥀

Prince Paul x Tsarevna // smut drabble - Bugger me sideways @usedtobecooler only the best for you babes crème de la crème - Prince Prick and some bratty behaviour culminating in angry!hate!fucking coming up. Also short? I don’t think I can write short drabble a about this man. I’m having a lot of feelings ok.

Some babes I know may want to see this @indouloureux @munsonswhore86 @heyndrix @lunatictardis @creme-bruhlee @callmeloverr @roanniom

It’s an odd relief to see the signs of war increase with each gained mile, burnt out patches of land and artillery tracks wedged into the mud. Foul air, fire, and rifle smoke; it means you’re closing in on your goal.

It means you’re that much closer to your husband.

Foul boggy mud, and nipping winds that cut to bone. You’re rumbling your way along treacherous roads, ever closer.

The terrain is dismal. There’s not even any sweetly soft birdsong chirping from the trees. There’s no kind nature. There’s only war and man, and guttural cries of the wounded. A landscape drizzled with slanted misty rain. Stubby felled larch trees and splintered bark.

The soldiers encamped, look like misshapen beasts. Blood crusted black, and the wounded wearing filthy yellowed bandages. Eyes missing, limbs turned to stumps. Squatting and huddling in clumps in the woods. Shivering under canvas with pithy licks of orange campfires staining the air with spicy woodsmoke.

They watch the carriage pass with rapt fascination. But too cold to react.

You weren’t expected.

That fact is writ plain as day all over the face of the dirt smeared soldier who trudged up to the carriage window. The soldier on watch. Who’d been pissing up against as tree when you rolled up.

His eyebrows buoy in surprise as you drop your fur lined hood.

“My Lady-“ He rasped in surprise.

“Tsarevna.” Your second maid, Maricel, leaned forward and snipped. Voice like a barking hound. Just as dogged.

She was eternally bolshy and hard edged. Hated you not being given the proper due politesse as deserving of your rank. She took great offence to those who didn’t understand the severity of your position.

“I’m here to see my husband. Kindly take me to him.”

“I’m not sure he’ll want- he’s occupied with many important matters.“ He fumbles for an excuse.

Maricel’s words come locked in impatience.

“Are you suggesting the Tsarevna of Russia is unimportant?” She tests.

“No- I.”

“He will carve out the time for his wife, you dumb prick.” She points out. Rubbing her shivering hands.

“Now, now.” You scold her.

She merely rolls her eyes. Not frightened by you whatsoever. Just pissy cause she’s cold.

The solider shuffles on his feet. Breaks eye contact. “I’m not sure I have the authority to-“

“Are you going to make me repeat myself.” You warn. Ire threaded into every word.

You stare him down with slicing diamond eyes. Tips sharpened and designed to cut.

A look you’ve thieved and mastered from Catherine’s own brand of venom. Don’t budge an inch.

It’s enough to get him to snap his mouth shut.

“No. Uh. Of course. This way, Tsarevna.”

You clambered out that boxy royal carriage. Door encrusted in a golden crest. Dainty sky blue heel sinking into earth. Hem sodden and dragged with it in no time. Maricel follows you dutifully. Your guard dog.

“Cunt.” Maricel bites out at the solider as she shuffled after you. Trudging into the muck.

“Put your forked tongue away.” You suggest.

She moodily deigns to do as you say.

You fold your gloved hands. Pretty pearl buttons march along your wrists now seeming contemptuous among all this. You rub at them to spark up some warmth in your numb fingers, as you looked around for the cluster of carmine coated generals.

Slipping and staining your skirts with slodgy mud as you followed the dismal soldier who’d take you to him. Your heels slip up, your feet get bogged. The stench of this place is curdling your lungs. Burnt larch trees and smoke and decay.

You press on. Determined.

The men swim their their groggy eyes to you. This place is used to viscera and gummy black blood, and mud crusted ash.

By comparison you look like a chunk of pure silken teal sky, fallen to earth. Precious and spotless. A drop of stunning sapphire wedged into all this dirt and death.

You squelch your way through tents and surgeon tents where men lay gouged and exposed. Rotting alive and shivering under the canvas as they cried out to the chowder thick sky. Rain melting on their eyelashes.

The smoke cleared past you, drifting. And then your overly elegant shape comes moulded out the congealing blood and smog of his hell. Pearl buttons, satin, and floral petal perfume. A wrenching juxtaposition coinciding.

You see your husband. Through the cloth mouth of one of the larger tents. No mistaking those puddle eyes for anyone else. The white scratchy wig. The cut of his powder blue coat and red royal medals slashing blood.

He’s gathered with men around a map table staked out with battle plans. This fare is all simplicity. Battle for blood and the vicinity of conquering men.

This is a land shuttered to the gaze of your sex. Your kind do not come roaming here. Not noble women anyway. The generals of mild importance probably had their favourite whores fetched in, however.

You stand and his eyes travel at last to yours. You smile lightly.

His expression altered into bitterness. Eyes lost their walnut warmth. Jaw clenched. Mood spiked sour.

He told you distinctly not to fucking come.

Yet here you stand.

You meet his burnt umber gaze and the sparky fire flecked there, scalds you.

“Tsarevich.” You greet him. Breath whipped to silver. You’re standing in the misty rain.

Waiting to see what comes spat back.

The generals clustering him, all bow in confusion and politely bob their unkempt wigged heads.

Not Paul.

His jaw clenched. Expression stiff. Posture as rigid as a Siberian Larch.

You’re fucking in for it now.

You batted at the sopping stretch of canvas. Hurling it out the way. Rain crashes down into your sprouting feathered hat and onto your shoulders.

Every squelch of your step into the oozing mud came sharp. Striking as a gut punch.

He’s following, hot on your heels, and you want to turn around and swing a punch into the angelic cherubim face you’d missed all these lonely long eight months.

His anger set off your own. Silky black gunpowder meeting roaring flame.

He’s livid.

You stand in his quarters. His tent is this huge beast of a thing. Clean and comfortable. A room with a table and maps and trunks takes up one. Green and gold tapestries make the walls slightly more habitable. More sophisticated. A cut above the desolate forest and the miseries of the wounded.

An emerald velvet curtain shields off the area where his ornate downy bed must be. He was still a Prince after all. He’ll be among his men. But he’s not sleeping in a frozen bedroll in the muck like an animal.

He storms into this space behind you and slaps the canvas closed. Words snapping out his mouth, that flimsy tent walls and steadily dripping rain will not conceal.

“This is not a place for you. You’re not supposed to be here.”

You don’t twist back to him as you angrily shed your gloves. Ripping them off like it was your own skin.

“Heaven forfend. I travel for two days in an uncomfortable carriage in the fucking driving rain to come see my husband and this is the thanks I get?”

“I told you not to come!” His words stamp out his mouth. He stabs a finger in the air. Aiming it as you.

“A lovely welcome.” You stab back.

He’s toe to toe with you. Muddy boots. Those chocolate eyes are all bitter. Not skated in love. Cold as all this terrible mud you’re bogged into.

“I don’t need you here. I have enough to deal with on my plate as it is fighting these Turks. I don’t need my wife by my side whilst I’m engaged in matters of battle.”

You steel your wilful jaw and bathe in the burnt brown shadow of his scowl.

“I am your wife. I have been left rotting at court. In misery now you’re gone. I decided to come and see you. To be here, by your side. In sickness and in health and even in battle. I don’t consider that as an action that deserves censure.”

“Yes it fucking is. I don’t need you here.” He shouts.

The burn of tears stings at your chest. Rips at your eyes. The man you’ve missed and ached after for months now and this is his choice of words levelled at you. It’s cutting.

“Lovely.” You bite out. “Well then. I won’t waste my time loitering around for you to yell at me.” You grip your gloves and turn back to him.

“Fuck you, Paul. Good day. Go back to your warring, and muddy filth.” You finish acidly. Your throat is full of clotting fire. Your rage. In situ with your wounded pride.

You shove at his coated chest, dull gold buttons. Go to move past him. Wipe your boots on his fine rug floors on the way out.

Your ruined shoes stick on the spot. He’s banded a hand around your wrist. It tugs. Burns skin.

“Let go.” You seethe. Pull your arm. You don’t look at him. Jaw grit.

He does not.

You wrench again. It brings you closer to him. You snarl. He stills your arm.

You do meet his gaze. The glint of fire - raked embers - returns to his eyes.

“No.” He decided.

Oh, now he’s in for it.

Anger spumes out of you like raining cursed hellfire. He should be terrified. You are mighty. Goddess of war backed with wrath. Angrier than Ares. These men should cower under your golden gaze. Desolation writ into you so heavily they should run for the hills.

“Thought you didn’t need me? Why would the mighty Tsarevich need his dumb bitch of a wife at his side? Run out of good whores have you?”

It was too late for niceties.

“Just be quiet.” He snaps.

Stepping very close. Close enough to touch only he doesn’t. His eyes move to your mouth. His hand seeks for your waist. Reels you in.

You don’t want too. But you clam up. You want to rear back and swing your fist to strike him. Preferably with a knife.

“I have never known a woman as disobedient. Nor as wilfully stubborn as you are. It’s infuriating.” He snipes.

His breath warms your mouth. He smells like his woody spice soap and bitter brush of smoke, and sweat. Still Paul. Underneath all things.

“Good.” You snarl with a nod. “I’m glad to have been such an inconvenience.”

“Constant dagger in my side.”

“Fuck you.” You announce passionately.

“I have had enough of your inability to listen to my orders.” He comments.

“Tough shit.” You snark.

“Elegant verbiage.” He insults.

His gaze is swimming into something steel black and lethal. You hate how much you like looking at him like this. It almost makes him look intimidating and handsome.

At this point, you’re half desire, half pure lightning hot rage.

“Get back to me when I don’t want to stick a knife in your thigh. Maybe my vocabulary will improve.” You hiss.

You’re so locked and entwined with this man. Tug his strings and it’s sure enough to jerk some distant part of you, merely by extension.

“Are you wet right now?” He asks. Head tilting His lashes shutter his eyes as he scans you. From the dirt crusted hem, sweeping upwards.

Your mouth is dry as tumbling scorched sands. Clench your teeth to dust. Heart ramming your tonsils.

He spies that twitch in your face. “Am I to take that as a yes, Tsarevna?”

If looks could kill.

“I’m going to fuck you. I know how plaint and weak it makes you when I work that delicious cunt open with my cock.” He steps you back. Hands tugged in your dress. Leading.

“I will fuck every disobedient word and thought out that head. Wife.” He sneers.

He pushes you to one of the wooden columns. Shunts a breath out of you. Hands digging through your skirts. Searching for your pussy.

You rake your nails into the nape of his neck. Hope it stings. Pray it brings blood.

“Be careful what you wish for.” You warn.

He smiles.

He’s fucking you not two minutes later.

Naturally, it didn’t take him long. You succumbed way too easy. Melted like butter, really.

He’s slithered to the gaps in your armour and snuck beneath with all the cunning adroitness of a serpent. You detest it.

He doesn’t give you what you need. Of course not. He doesn’t make this easy. His actions are all dipped in mocking taunt and brat.

He splayed you open, and rubs the fat leaking head of his cock against your trembling pussy. Eight months of nothing your your own fingers and he’s making you sit and beg like a trained lapdog.

Slapping it to your clit and smiling when you lurch. Unwilling to feed the head into you just yet.

It’s fucking agony.

You’re ready to slit his throat by the time he rewards you with sinking to the hilt in one ramming surge of his hips. The anger dissipates - a little.

You soothe the rest of it by leaning up and gnashing your teeth into his neck. Clamp down hard- force him to fuck you harder.

He cursed when sliding into you. Mumbled wisely about how conflict always made you so juicy wet for him. He pulled back and taunted you with your own greediness for his cock. The shine of your arousal coating him all glossy. A pretty sight, that.

“Hear how wet you are my love?” He lurches and slams you. A sharp stroke that wracked every vertebrae of your spine.

The sounds that come keening from you make your eyes flick back into your head. Enough to make him more smug.

“Utterly filthy. Soaking.” He huffs in gasps. “Making wet patches on my bed like a damn harlot.”

“Can’t believe you. Hmm- fucking brat. Yelling at me for coming here.” You manage to gasp. Cheeks blistering hot with this anger spurned arousal. Nails clawed into the carved headboard.

A hiccup snags the back of your throat as he knees closer.

Pushes your legs almost crushed up to your tits. Your stays almost strangling you. You cry loud because of this new angle. Makes him punch a spot inside that almost aches.

“I think this cunt is more pleased to see me than you are.” He smirks. Hands with dirty nails digging into your thighs. Ten half moons socketed into your quivering flesh.

“Fucking hell.” Spews out your mouth. Unguarded. He’s severing every strong steel thread of your resolve.

“I’ll take that as yes.” He says. Hair falls choppy in front of his wild eyes. Tiger eyes. Frightful fierce. Hands clamped to your thighs. He spreads you and sits up to stuff himself deeper. Harder. Faster.

The noises he’s getting out of you are just growing and growing. Rising in pitch and volume. So much so you’re swirling your hips to him to get feedback off that friction. That burgeoning pleasure begins to slice mean into your belly.

“How you moan for me when I give you my cock. Never gets old.” He grins.

“Never too late to punish my disobedient-“ he huffs and fucks hard inbetween his words. “Petulant. Stubborn. Wife.” He insists with a playful leer.

He can tell by the wails how close you are. Enough to taste it now. That eye rolling pressure ready to snap.

His cock stretched you just right. Stabbed into the gaping cup of your womb. You’re so treacherously close to that blissful peak you go rigid trying to chase it down and let the sensation ruin you.

It was mind meltingly good. Close and looming closer. Heat wrapping your limbs and warping your mind to bend to him. Every atom of you trained for this pleasure to come-

He yanks his cock out of you so fast, you want to shriek.

That coal hot glow of orgasm withers and curls to ash. He’s back to slipping his fat head around your cit again. Smearing your cunt in a sticky taste he’ll find and devour later.

“You fucking-“ you glare up at him all blissed and edged. Cunt clenching on nothing but air. He smooths both his thumbs over your pretty and dripping pussy lips. Making you throb.

“If you want to cum, you better beg.” He insists.

“I could kill you.” You seethe. Words dressed in a growl.

He tilts his head. Teasing. “Yes?”

You yelp when his cock slams into you once more. Puff for breath. God fucking dammit.

“How about now?” He checks as he folds you in half, yet again. Cock rooted deep.

The start of a long night, to be sure.

Hours later, darkness wraps you up. Comforting tenebrous blanket. Candles are lit. Dozy gold and matte dark pours into the tent.

He has you food brought in as an apology.

Someone ducks in the tent with a tray of it. He pulls on his boots to go fetch it. Leaves you boneless on his goose feather plumped bed.

There’s a bottle of wine with dinner too. Not the best but you’re not complaining. Dry hard biscuits and a salty wedge of goats cheese was your lot in the carriage ride here.

There’s a thick milky porridge with creamy oats and nutmeg and warming spices. A slab of pink roasted meat glistening with fat and golden globs of plain boiled potatoes barely salted. Sided with some hunk of brown hardy bread smeared in greasy butter.

This food is hot and warm and fills your belly well. He feeds it to you.

It’s how he soothes. But it’s not the only way he wants to offer you comfort.

He gets naked and climbs under the covers. Always bathed you in limitless comforts and luxuries after a rough fuck. The calm sweetness after a raging storm of passion and stinging claws and slamming hate. When the blood has dried to rust, along with the nasty words.

He slips between your legs under the sheets to tongue at your cunt like it’s a juicy honeycomb treat that drips honey.

It’s dripping him.

He eats it out of you. You sigh all dreamy and elongate your neck back to pillows that smell like his shaving soap, to moan his name.

Slipping your nails over the short brown thorns of hair. Rake over his scalp.

You gasp his name and you know the soldiers will have heard the sound sneak out the tent flaps. You don’t care.

His tongue slithers and laps through your puffy sex. Fully nursing your clit with the curl of his tongue. Brushes through the tactile scratch of your curls there. He loves burying his nose in them.

When he’s done he slinks up from under his furs and sheets. Wiping his mouth in the back of his hand. Still a little bit of both of you combined is smeared wetly across one cheek.

It catches in the flickering murky light. Candles are spinning red gold in the dim. Rain is a steady pat on the tent roof.

You look down at him. His gaze is all warmth and tenderness again. A knowing smile slopes the corner of his mouth.

“Did you really travel all this way just so I could fuck you?” He asks all smug.

You smirk. “Got what I wanted, now didn’t I.” You dismiss archly.

But you both know it seats a little deeper than that. There’s definite skin both of you have sunk into this game. It might even be the gummy beating walls of your hearts involved.

“You do know you’re a walking fucking nightmare.” He tells you.

Slotting himself between your hips. Seeking to hold your hands as he rolls into you. Makes your cunt clench.

Your hand slips from stroking his hair, downwards. Vicing your cruel hand around his soft throat. His eyes blaze again.

“Don’t you dare fucking forget it.” You sneer.

He sends you home sore - five days after your arrival.

#punkwrites #prince paul fanfiction #prince paul catherine the great #prince paul imagine #prince paul fanfic #prince paul x you #prince paul smut #prince paul x oc #prince paul x reader #prince paul #i would die for this man #such a brat #he’s such a filthy ho #such a hottie #joseph quinn fanfiction #joseph quinn

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tgmsunmontue · 8 months ago

Text

Together or not at all - Hangster sequel

I wrote a ~2.5k Javy/Nat 5+1 and this is the 2k Hangster sequel (with a potential epilogue to come, who knows?)

This is based on the fact that ~14 months ago my BF of over 20+ years started dating my husband's BF of over 20+ years. Because my husband dared his BF to ask my BF out. Yep. We are all in our mid-40s and that's a thing that happened. They moved in together two weeks ago.

“I dare you to ask him out…”

“Ask who out?” Jake asks, leaning back against the brick work of the house while he watches Javy’s kids run around in the backyard and tries to not miss Laney and Pepper too much.

“Bradley.”

“What? Uh… why do you think that would be a good idea?”

“Well, you actually have a fuck load of stuff in common for a start.”

“Okay. I…” He pauses then and considers it, because Javy’s not wrong. Except for the fact that he may have taken one too many knocks to the head. “Okay. Imagine this. I ask him out. We go out and hit it off. Start a relationship and then two or three years it crashes and burns like all my past relationships and then you and Nat feel awkward as fuck and feel like you can never invite both of us to the same thing ever again…”

His divorce was five years ago, he’s had two short-lived relationships since then, and he’s just sort of figured that maybe the problem is him. Or his career. His career is such a big part of him though that it’s something he can’t divorce himself from, which is a line Catherine had thrown at him and it had cut deep even if he’d later reflected on it and realized the truth of it.

“No. No. I don’t accept that. That’s bullshit Jake. For a start if you think Nat wouldn’t force you both to get over yourselves if you broke up – ”

“If? We haven’t even gone on a fucking date yet.”

“If you seriously don’t think you could have something with him, then I won’t press. But you guys have a lot of shit in common okay? You’re our best friends for a start, and okay, yeah, that could get a little messy if things don’t work out. But that would only be for a while. Only until Nat beat some sense into both of you…”

“And what about the fact I have kids?”

“Bradshaw loves kids. Pretty sure he’s not going to hold that against you. In fact it might even count in your favor.”

“What do you mean?”

“Uh… well… he doesn’t really know you like we do. You guys haven’t exactly crossed paths a lot the last few years, with him being stationed so far away. And it’s not like we talk about you to him, other than mention you in passing. So he might have more, um, distinct memories of you from Top Gun that first time. And some of those other times.”

“Great, so when I was young and dumb and we pretty much had a pissing contest every time we talked to each other? You seriously think this is a good idea?”

“You’re both Navy. You’re both very family orientated. You like being outdoors. You’re both best friends with either me or Nat, and after fifteen years I have to say I consider him a good friend and I seriously think you two could work.”

“So you don’t really dare me, because that’s juvenile shit… you just think it’s a really good idea.”

“Jake, buddy, my dearest and oldest friend and godfather of my children… I’m still daring you because you’re juvenile as fuck and I want you to do this. In fact, I’m not just daring you, I’m double-dog-daring you.”

“Ugh, you suck…” Jake mutters, knocking his head back on the bricks like it will somehow relieve the annoyance he’s feeling.

“Nope. But you might if you follow through on this dare.”

“You’re disgusting. One day your kids are going to ask what you mean and it will serve you right.”

Javy just laughs at him and Jake hates that he knows him so well.

He guesses he’s asking Bradshaw on a date.

… … …

They’ve decided on a local tap house specializing in IPAs and Jake is pretty sure neither of them cares about that, but it’s low pressure and informal enough that they can just pretend this is two friends catching up rather than their best friends insisting they go on a date. He’s still getting flashbacks to some of their previous meetings, and he knows that’s all past, that their most recent interactions have actually been mature and adult, but it still feels a little surreal to be meeting up with him without Javy and Nat also in attendance.

Bradshaw enters the building and he looks weird. It’s been a couple of years since Jake’s seen him in person, their careers taking them to different parts of the world. He’s not wearing a Hawaiian shirt, is missing his moustache and looks good, light blue button-down with sleeves rolled up, showing of tanned forearms and wearing dark jeans. He’s always been attractive, Jake isn’t blind, but right now he’s allowing himself to look and appreciate. It’s a different experience than what he’s used to when faced with all of Bradley Bradshaw.

“Hey Jake.”

“Bradley…” he replies, the name unfamiliar in his mouth. They don’t hug or even shake hands, both letting out little huffs of laughter at the awkwardness and Jake motions to the booth he’d been directed to when he arrived. They sit opposite one another and place drink orders with the hovering waiter.

“Is this as weird for you as it is for me?”

“Yeah. I have to say, I didn’t expect you to ask me out. I promised Nat I’d give you a chance so…” Bradshaw says, and he shrugs, but his smile isn’t mocking, just a little.. shy maybe?

“Well, don’t do me any favors Bradshaw. I’m only here because Javy double-dog dared me,” he says it with a wink, his lips twitching in amusement and hopes Bradshaw takes it with the levity in which he means it. He does, laughing and Jake has to admit he looks good.

“Only you would feel the need to do something because you got dared into doing it.”

“You saying Natasha daring you to do something wouldn’t make you do it?”

“More like the opposite really. She tells me not to do something and I immediately go and do it.”

“God, you must drive her insane.”

“I’ve mellowed as I’ve gotten older.” Jake laughs again, because he’s not sure if it’s mellowing or simply maturing, but he knows what Bradshaw means. “Anyway, we might as well catch-up, not like we don’t have plenty of things we can talk about.”

They talk. They talk and talk and he finds himself enjoying it more than he thought he would. Bradshaw is funny and entertaining, intelligent and not afraid to poke fun of his younger self, admitting that he’s come a long way. He asks about Jake’s daughters, listens to endless stories about them with a smile on his face and asks to see photos. Naturally they talk about Javy and Natasha, their joint godchildren, the sickeningly sweet way they can be together sometimes, but how happy they both are for their closest friend.

Food arrives, is eaten and shared easily when Jake apparently eyes the ribs a little too hard. He makes a passing comment about ribs in Texas and having to get Bradley to try them next time they visit and while a part of his brain spirals away in mortification, he manages to keep his expression neutral, and Bradley doesn’t seem to even do a double take at the vague mention of a future. He is very firmly Bradley now though, not Bradshaw, and he wonders how he might think of Jake. Whether it’s callsign, last-name or first. He definitely seems to use Jake with no hesitation and another little part of his brain wonders how else his name might sound at other times… He startles a little at that train of thought, not really having thought about taking Bradley to bed. It’s not an unappealing thought, but it does feel…

“Does this feel a little weird to you?”

“Yep. Little surreal. Not bad… but,” he shrugs then, but Jake knows exactly what he means.

They both pass on dessert but order coffee, neither of them wanting to stop talking and he feels a little warm when Bradley stretches his legs out, brushes against his own legs and then just rests there while they keep talking. It’s been over four hours and that’s… god, he doesn’t think he’s spent this much time just talking with anyone like this other than Javy or his parents in years. It feels good.

They finish up and settle the bill, walking out; Bradley holds the door open for him and Jake hasn’t been on a date with someone who holds doors open in a while. The last person he dated seriously was his ex-wife and while he’s had a couple of very short-lived relationships since then, none of them had felt this easy. They walk aimlessly, or what he thought was aimlessly until they’re stopping beside a car and it beeps as Bradley unlocks it before turning and looking at Jake, lips quirked in amusement.

“God, let’s get this over and done with, come here…”

Jake’s laughing as Bradley’s hand lands on his waist and tugs him close, they’re both smiling as they begin to kiss, Bradley a couple of inches taller than him giving him an ever so slight height advantage and downward angle and Jake presses into it, lets his own hands settle on Bradley’s hips. They’re not smiling anymore, the spark between them like a pleasurable electric shock and Jake groans into it, not having expected to feel anything more than warm pressure. Bradley’s hands become firmer, his body pressing against Jake’s and it feels feverish, an edge of desperation that doesn’t have an explanation. Their lips are slick, urging each other to press a little firmer and his stomach swoops with anticipation, his cock starting to harden. He’s pretty sure this is meant to be a goodnight kiss, not fucking foreplay and he pulls back ever so slightly, reluctant to step away from the press of Bradley’s body against his. But they should probably talk.

“Fucking hell…” Bradley says, and he doesn’t move away either, the words murmured into the side of Jake’s neck and his body feels tingly with awareness.

“Yeah. Wasn’t quite, uh, expecting that.”

“Uh no, neither was I. Fuck.”

“What’s wrong?” Jake asks, because while he might be feeling a little surprised, he’s not upset at all.

“Are we that blind? Were our best friends able to see… that?”

Jake snorts.

“Well, I think until recently one or both of us have been in relationships so no, I don’t think they’ve been waiting for us to figure our shit out for years or anything. But maybe they thought we might… get along?”

Bradley huffs a laugh and pulls back enough to give him an amused look and oh, it reminds him of all the times before when he’s given Jake a similar look. He’d thought back then that Bradley had been laughing at him, but he thinks he’s had it wrong, it’s been Bradley inviting him to share in a private joke, to laugh along with him. Okay. Maybe Javy has seen something all along.

“So… we doing this then?” Jake asks, because he needs to know. Wants to know.

“I’m… yeah. I’m in.”

“Okay. Good. Me too,” Jake says, and he kisses him again, wants to know if their first kiss was a fluke of some sort but is very happy to be proven wrong. His entire body thrums with arousal and god, it’s been a while, but not long enough to warrant this type of reaction. He wants to take Bradley to bed.

“So,” Bradley says, his lips and teeth leaving little ticklish nibbles along Jake’s jaw. “I guess one of the benefits of doing this now is we both have a better idea of what we’re looking for. Already sorted through our twenties and thirties…”

“Yeah. Know what you’re looking for in a partner, also what you’re not looking for… Oh fuck… Bradley,” Jake mutters as Bradley grinds against him and he can’t believe they’re making out against Bradley’s car like a couple of teenagers.

“Yeah Jake… Didn’t think I’d find it right in front of me, but I’m not disappointed.”

“Oh god, Javy’s never going to let me live this down. He’s going to be fucking insufferable.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make it worth it.”

“Fuck, yes please.”

EPILOGUE

#Top Gun Maverick #hangster #sereshaw #rooster x hangman #together or not at all...

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bluejaysandblackbats · 5 months ago

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Lost Boys

Fandom: DC Comics, Batfam, Superfam

Summary: After Jonathan Lane Kent wipes himself from existence by canceling his own timeline, he finds himself stuck in the afterlife where he meets Jason Todd. He still wonders about the life un-lived on Earth, and how his parents would've felt about him.

Jason Todd, who is making the most of being dead, struggles with the reality of what he's left behind. He has one wish and one wish only: to send his family one final message.

Chapters: 5/?

Characters: Jonathan Lane Kent (Laney), Jason Todd, Catherine Todd, Boston Brand, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, John Constantine, Raven, Talia al Ghul, Ra's al Ghul, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake

Relationships: Platonic JayLaney

Additional Tags: Angst, Platonic Relationships, Magical Jason Todd, Resurrected Jason Todd, Queerplatonic Relationships, Canon Divergent AU, POV Multiple

Chapter Five: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (Laney's POV)

Do people in heaven get sick? I wished more and more with every passing day that there was Google or an encyclopedia of sorts for the afterlife. Jason started getting headaches a few weeks after the dance. He tried to hide it from Catherine and me, but we could see it in his eyes. Jason was fading.

After the dance, we sometimes flew over the ocean at the beach, and we'd do cannonballs into the water from the sky. Somedays, all we'd do was laugh and play like children. Other times, we'd sit in the meadow and tell each other all the things we'd say and do if we could live all over again. I told Jason about how I grew up, and he told me all about the things he swore he'd never speak of out loud. He told me about his birth father, about what happened to him after his parents died. He told me things no one knew.

By the time he'd gotten really sick, we were in the meadow watching the clouds. Jason didn't want us to see it, but he couldn't hide it anymore. All we could do was pretend not to see it. "I see a little dog where you saw your turtle," I whispered as I pointed to the sky.

"Now, how do you see a dog there?" Jason asked as he started giggling. "That's obviously a turtle. Lookit. See the shell?"

"Jason, no, he's like one of those short dogs with the wolf ears," I argued, "See, because those little wisps right there, those are his ears."

"We're pointing to two different—." He stopped speaking and sat up. I turned and looked at him, and he looked paler than usual. "Sorry, what was I—. We're pointing at two different clouds, Lane." He took a deep breath and came back to me.

I touched his cheek with the back of my hand, and he took my hand away. "You okay?" I asked. Jason nodded. "I still think it's a dog."

"A corgi? You see a corgi up there?" Jason asked. I nodded. "I guess I could see it... Think my ma's still out on her date?" Jason stood up and stretched out his arms.

I sat on the ground and looked up at him. "Yeah... Are you okay with her dating Boston?" I questioned. "I mean, he's really not that—."

"I know he's not that bad... I mean, I actually think I might like Boston for Ma. He makes her laugh, and he's good to her. He might be the first guy that was ever good to her," Jason replied as he pulled me to my feet. "If Ma's happy, I'm alright."

"Yeah, and you gotta admit he's kind of cool too... I mean, he gets to travel back and forth—."

"Laney, come on. Even if we could go back, I don't wanna leave my ma," Jason interrupted. I nodded.

"Jason?" I called as I walked on my hands just like he taught me. "Can I say that I love Catherine? Is that weird?"

Jason raised his brow and playfully tripped me up with his foot. "How do you mean it? Because if you mean it like that, we might have problems, Lane," Jason joked.

I stood up and pushed him with my shoulder. "No, not like that! I love her like—. I dunno, like how you love her... I think," I explained.

Jason offered to carry me home on his back. I rode on his back, and he let me rest my chin on top of his head. "Jason, were you this strong when you were alive?" I teased. Jason chuckled.

"Yeah, yeah. I may not be the biggest guy around, but I trained hard. I coulda carried you if I wanted to," Jason replied, "Besides, you're Superman's kid. Of course, you'd be taller than me."

We didn't make it all the way home. He stopped to rest, and he stumbled on the way to sit down. "What's wrong?" I asked. Jason shook his head. "Let me carry you the rest of the way," I offered, and he held up his hand.

"I'm fine, just—. I'll catch up with you," Jason whispered. I wouldn't leave him, so I picked him up and carried him home. By the time we got home, he was fast asleep. I set him down on the couch and waited for Catherine to come back. We never slept, so it was so strange to see him unconscious.

He came out of it for a moment, and he chewed me out for carrying him home, but I didn't care. I knew he didn't mean any harm. He stormed out of the cottage, and I let him have his space. I regret that I didn't follow him.

Catherine and Boston came back around sundown, and by then, I was hysterical. "Catherine, I don't know where he went, but he was sick, and I—."

"What do you mean he was sick?" Boston interrupted me. "He can't get sick anymore." Catherine rushed out of the cottage, and Boston nudged me. "He can't—."

"He is! He's sick, and he's fading in and out. It's like he's a—..." I trailed off, and Boston asked me to take him to the places where I hung out with Jason. He wasn't there, so we circled back around to the cottage. Catherine was inconsolable.

"He's nowhere to be f—." She swallowed hard. "I can't find him," she sobbed, and Boston touched her arm and waited for her to collect herself.

"I'll find him," Boston promised her, and I stopped him before he could go anywhere.

"I gotta go with you. If Jason's anywhere on Earth, I can find him. If he's there, I can find him. Please," I pleaded. Boston looked at Catherine, and she nodded. Boston sighed and nodded.

Boston placed a steady hand on my shoulder, and he told me to remain calm. He was going to take me back to the world of the living as a ghost, and I was going to find my best friend.

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cleolinda · 7 months ago

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Weekend links, April 14, 2024

My posts

Honestly, I spent much of the week coping with storm migraines. You can tell, because I was reblogging a lot from under a cold compress rather than doing anything useful with life.

Reblogs of interest

The Hot Vintage Lady Polls are rough out there, y’all. Round three started closing yesterday (see what’s still open here), and as of this writing, we have lost Bette Davis, Alla Nazimova, Theda Bara, Myrna Loy, Barbra Streisand, Fay Wray, Lucille Ball, Ginger Rogers, and Olivia de Havilland--and it looks like Catherine Deneuve, Clara Bow, Lana Turner, and Mary Pickford are on their way out. Meanwhile, I learned about a ton of actresses I’d never heard of before, only to shriek when Sharmila Tagore, Nadira, and Waheeda Rehman lost this round. (Edwige, I will never forget you.)

Let me remind you (and me sometimes, too): Not everyone has the same taste or childhood attachments or cinema experiences as you. And everybody in this bracket loses. Everybody but one.

(I can tell I’m not cut out for brawling because I’m like, “I will be very sad to see Norma Shearer go, but Hazel Scott seems nice!”)

“Actually, Mr. Musk, I am an attorney. Do you know that?” Here’s the highlights of Mark Bankston, the man who brought down Alex Jones, coping with Elon Musk and Elon Musk’s Lawyer, who is not even licensed in Texas, for 100 pages of deposition.

Hozier Watch 2024: “Too Sweet” has now charted higher in the UK than “Take Me to Church,” and it’s getting real close on the US charts. This is a song that didn’t even make last year’s album. I am endlessly fascinated.

Happy Leland Melvin Day!

Happy Neil Banging Out the Tunes Day!

“Posting endless DNIs because we can’t (or don’t know we can) make spaces just for the people we do want to interact with” actually makes a lot of sense in this centralized social media hellscape.

There is a 20k mg weed gummy and nobody needs that. “Forget meeting the Hat Man this is what turns you into the Hat Man. This is worse than that torture drug that makes you experience 600 billion years in a second. This is the secret to honest to god shifting.”

One of the best uses of the Kate Beaton Poe comic I’ve ever seen

“Americanisms that tell you to check on your American” (they are all correct)

“Tuxedo Mask is the first example of being ‘Kenough’”

Just this once, I will allow this AI rendition of a “traditional Polish family” and their traditional Polish woodchuck.

I am absolutely not saying there is anything wrong with being into tentacles; I’m just saying that Pyramid Head doesn’t even have them and thus is a pretty tame choice to complain about.

Little Guy, a game

A cursèd chair called “Oops!”

Sparrow Tarot: Honestly, this is one of my favorite takes on the Hanged Man.

This dog is a biscuit and she is precious

Video

One of the things that’s so great about this Ilia Malinin free-skate program is, he makes it look so effortless that I would have never figured out on my own, without Tumblr’s commentary, that there’s a couple moves in here that no one in the world can do but him. Like, the very first jump and the announcers start screaming.

A journey from fearing moths to raising them

A dude puts on a dress For the Meme and then discovers that he loves it (and then he styles it as a full outfit and it looks SO GOOD)

Watching this cat ride around on a roomba on a sped-up surveillance camera is self-care.

So is this (although it’s a bit strobe-y)

Bat type: hi doggy

Was the jello for the tuna salad lamb supposed to be lime?

The sacred texts

Holy Shit, Two Cakes

The origin of “Me, an intellectual”

#AllMyLifeIHadToFight

Personal tag of the week

Designer Roberto Cavalli, who passed away this week at age 83. I reblogged several fashion posts--I hadn’t even realized myself that he had designed Beyoncé’s famous yellow dress in Lemonade.

#weekend links #odds and ends #linkspam

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kiwi-the-servamp-addict · 5 months ago

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I recently redrew my subclass ocs! Every. Single. One.

So here's all of em

oh also some of the Svs have outfit changes or little things added on or like bits of redesign

also warning:there's gonna be mentions of death and ways people die so just a fair warning

here's Nyx, Kuro's subclass! They died in the Trojan war as a bystander (why was Kuro in Greece?... I don't know man...) so now they kinda go and do their own thing but they go to bother Kuro every once in a while. They often travel during the day by wearing tons of white (for less sun absorption) and covering all of their skin. They also have a bad habit of talking without thinking.

next is Amira who's Hugh's subclass! She died in a car "accident" shortly after her kid passed away. She's quite motherly towards the people around her and her bag contains anything you could possibly imagine.

Then it's CeeCee! (Fun fact I've drawn her 4 years in a row) she died because she was in a witch trial [she rejected a girl {this was prior to CeeCees transition} and the girl accused her of witchcraft] and she's very attached to JeJe and is all over him half of the time. [Mikuni is jealous... Little does he know JeJe has no interest in women {hc} and CeeCee has a gf]

Then there's Irene who's Freya's subclass! She died in a war because she crossed dressed to get in and died on the battle field [forgot to give her an animal motif...] due to her injuries she has to wear hearing aids and she freaks out about loud noises and paints to cope

Next is Jonathan! He died because he got drunk one night and might've accidentally outed himself... So... He was murdered... He also likes to cook a lot and he owns an immortal puppy (don't ask I can't handle him losing a dog.) named Diablo! He's also a massive hopeless romantic.

Now there's Anita (pink) and Catherine (red) ! They're Ildio's subclasses! Anita died because she was a lady of the night and a client made her uncomfortable w his requests so she refused and he killed her. Now she's kind of hostile to really anyone new around her. She's also a massive chain smoker-

Catherine was arranged to be married to a mentally and physically abusive man who killed the actual love of her life. So on her wedding day she shot herself and now enjoys praying on people for blood so- but she's a lot nicer than Anita.

This is Lilian she's Lily's subclass and honestly looks like a ghost Victorian child. My friend suggested making a character albino but I might have made her too white.... But I thought it was interesting and made her stand out more so I kept it. She died due to starvation and neglect form her parents. Her older sister who was only about a year or two older was doing her best to keep her alive but there was only so much she could do. Now the two live in the mansion and her sister works there and is still alive.

Lastly we have Wisteria who's Tsubaki's subclass! They died by oding shortly after their family was brutally murdered. Now they kinda people watch for fun and flirt with Tsubaki for shits and giggles and is purely here now for the ride.

And ways this concludes my redesigns on my ocs and redesigns on some of the Svs (let's be real it's like almost all of them)

this was actually really fun to do! Maybe I'll get around to drawing the eves... One day...

#servamp #servamp kuro #servamp hugh #servamp jeje #servamp freya #servamp hyde #servamp ildio #servamp lily #servamp tsubaki #ocs #servamp oc #servamp ocs #servamp subclass #subclass oc #subclass ocs #redesigns

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upontherisers · 2 years ago

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if i know you, i know what you do

this is both a week late and a bit experimental, my apologies. this was originally supposed to be a 5 + 1 but i found myself rapidly running out of room, so it's a 4 + 1. i bounced around a few concepts for this and i'm not sure this is entirely clear, but i'm happy i finally had time to complete something that wasn't for academic evaluation.

i'm so happy @mercurygray did blind dates this year and i'm excited to catch up on what everyone wrote!

this is my first true attempt at writing nix and man, he's hard to nail, isn't he? i hope i did him justice. this is a bit long for a blind date (~2k) and i'd like to give a content warning for implied physical violence.

title from "once upon a dream" from disney's sleeping beauty. read below the cut.

“Who are you today?” he asks.

“Second Lieutenant Catherine Brown,” she says. “Friends call me Cathy.”

Lew sniffs. “You don’t look like a Cathy.”

“Good thing you get to forget about it. What do ya got?”

He hands her a newspaper and she briefly flips through it, making quick note of the annotations and dog-eared pages. The crowd swarms around them and no one would question the scene, an American Army officer handing a nurse a paper, but she doesn’t want to risk getting caught standing for too long. She folds the pages away in her satchel and looks around the square, waiting for her contact to show.

Lewis glances past her ear with a squint, an intelligence officer’s way of looking at someone without looking at them. He leans against the wall of the post office and she represses the urge to make him stand up so she could dust his jacket off. Someone cleaned that uniform for nothing.

“Where’s Cathy from?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know—”

“I’m serious,” he says, daring to meet her eye. That’s how she knew he was serious indeed.

Telling him wouldn’t hurt, not a detail so small. It was good practice, she reasoned; it helped reinforce her story. Someone somewhere would know her as Cathy, even for just a moment, and the hairpins digging into her scalp and the itchy collar of her nurse’s gown would be worth it.

“Florida,” she blurts. There’s movement out of the corner of her eye and across the square, she spots a man in a suit emerging from a vehicle. Brown hair, burgundy tie, sunglasses—that’s her guy. He looked around with his hands in his pockets, awkwardly tucked into an alley between the florist and the grocers. The SOE sure knew how to pick them; how an agent manages to stick out in his own country, she’ll never know.

Lew chuckles. “Where in Florida?”

“I have to go,” she says, tucking a flyaway curl behind her ear and readjusting her satchel strap. “You should hear from my C.O. in three days.”

Lewis stares at her, lips parted slightly. He looks concerned and she doesn’t have time for it.

She leans forward and brushes her lips against his cheek in an attempt to sell this passing encounter to any onlookers and tries not to look at his face as she turns away. He murmurs a “be careful” after her and it breaks her heart to pretend not to hear him.

ii.

“And who might you be?” he asks, extending a hand to her. He’s hiding his surprise quite well.

She accepts his grasp with a coy smile. “Hazel Durham.”

Lewis’ eyes narrow in a flicker and he tucks the corner of his bottom lip between his teeth, nostrils flaring. He hates the name. She laughs to herself; they should let her pick more often.

“Lieutenant Nixon, I understand that you’re a Yale man,” says General McAuliffe, blissfully unaware of the silent conversation happening in front of him.

“Uh, yes sir,” Lew says, “class of ‘39.”

“Well, Hazel here attended Bryn Mawr. Your sister school.”

She makes eye contact with Lew again, nodding enthusiastically but unable to stop herself from pursing her lips in a slightly pained smile. She’d been attached to the general all night and the man had the nerve to be wrong about everything; she wouldn’t trust him with a trained dog let alone the 101st Airborne Division.

Later, she finds Lew lazily picking at some grapes on the hors d'oeuvres table. He doesn’t acknowledge her as she forks a few cubes of cheese onto her napkin, but she knows he knows she’s there. Since the moment General McAuliffe had ‘introduced’ them, she’s felt his eyes on her, tracking her around the ballroom, through dances and bored conversations with officials. She thinks Lewis Nixon is the only person in the world that she’s completely detectable to, and she doesn’t know if she hates it.

“That must’ve really hurt,” he starts, rolling a grape into his mouth, “telling people you went to Bryn Mawr.”

She snorts. “I thought he blew my goddamn cover. He doesn’t know that they’re different schools. I could’ve told him I went to Scripps and he’d think it’s in New England.”

“Where’s Hazel from?”

“D.C… I went to Linden Hall and my father is a lawyer for New York City’s biggest shipbuilding union so please, no more questions.”

He shrugs innocently. “I wasn’t gonna—”

“It’s one of his staffers, alright? We just want to make sure there isn’t a leak. The Germans seem to be getting lucky with their intelligence.”

He looks concerned. She wishes he’d stop. “If there’s anything I can do—”

“There isn’t. I shouldn’t even be telling you this,” she snaps and she doesn’t mean to, but she also doesn’t take it back. What is it about him that unravels her so much?

Lew looks hurt but he nods like he understands. He turns to pick up one last grape and parts with a deferential nod. “Nice dress.”

She watches him go.

iii.

He slides into the chair in front of her with a smile. “And who am I speaking with?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Lew laughs. “C’mon. You want me to guess?”

She doesn’t respond. She has things to say to him and she can’t bring herself to do it.

“Joannie? Beverly? Bessie? Cathy again? Gimme something, a hint.”

“Stop it, Lew.” The gravity in her voice gives him pause and she jumps at the lapse. “What do you have for me?”

He produces a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, a flower placed under the bow; her heart shatters at the gesture. She reaches to take it but he pulls back with a frown. Her gaze darts around the cafe. She doesn’t have time for this; the train leaves in two hours and her risk of being followed is minimal at this stage, but the assignment does not afford the chance of risk. She reaches again and his arm retreats further.

“Lewis.” Her tone is warning.

He’s frowning at her with a mix of anger and fear and she wants nothing more than to smooth over the wrinkle on his brow, hold the sides of his face, looking into those big brown eyes and tell him that it’s all going to be alright. Instead, she can only stare. She has nothing for him.

He hands the package over after a minute and she places it in the bag at her feet immediately. After another scan of the cafe, she rises, pulling her coat over her shoulders.

“This is going to be different,” she says. “You don’t have a set contact. If you don’t hear from me by May—”

“The war will be over—”

“If you don’t hear from me by May, write my mother. She’ll know by then.”

“Know what?” He’s trying to test her and she won’t rise to the bait.

She looks at him one last time, trying to take in everything she knows about him. Dark hair, strong jaw, those characteristic Nixon brows, the occasional restlessness of his hands—everything she’s watched him grow into and become since their childhood. His parents’ disgraced son, a high-ranking battalion regimental officer, her best friend.

“Goodbye, Lew. Keep safe.”

His hand closes around her wrist and her eyes flutter shut.

She wants to lean into the warmth of his touch, to rest a moment in a comforting embrace. She wonders if he’ll be the last person to ever truly know her as she was, a girl before the war who wanted to write and act—a girl who believed in the world, in goodness and people and who got bruised by her naivety more than once.

He stands to meet her and she can see his heart on his sleeve. She wishes she could make this easier for him, give him a reason to care less, but he can’t help it, as much as she tells him to stop. He cares about people more than he knows how to handle.

“Be careful.”

She can’t say anything to make him feel better. She can’t bring herself to lie.

“I know.”

She shakes off his grip and departs.

iv.

“And you are? Or am I allowed to ask—”

“Wanda Benton,” she snapped, trying to nip his attitude in the bud, “art historian from Manhattan.”

“A little close to home, don’t you think?”

“Shut the hell up.” She doesn’t like when they met like this, with him half-hungover-half-drunk and her three days without coffee.

She pulls some photos out of the briefcase at her side. She doesn’t have to scan the bar out of caution—it’s an OSS safehouse, they vet everyone who comes through the door—but she does anyway, out of habit and after her last assignment, out of fear. The pages wobble and flex as she spreads them across the wood, the glare on their shiny surfaces causing her to squint under her sunglasses.

“Can you confirm you’ve seen any of these paintings since you entered Germany?” she asks, leaning in to point at the images of most importance.

“Yeah, a few,” he mutters.

She sighs. “Which ones?”

He points a few out and she makes note of their locations with some follow-up questions. As she turns to him, she realizes he’s not looking at the pictures but her, zeroing-in on her right cheek. She glances away.

“What’s that—?”

“Please just answer the questions.”

His hand starts to raise and she tries to lean away.

“Lew…”

It’s too late. He’s nudging off her shades before she can get a hand up and brushing a thumb over her cheekbone, sendsing pain sparking all the way to her spine. She winces and he rips his hand back.

“Jesus Christ.”

She closes her eyes, partially to block the dizzying amount of light flooding her vision and partially so she doesn’t have to look at Lew’s face to see the shock and horror and pity.

She knows what he sees; she’s looked at it everyday since she was extracted from Berlin. The bruising has mostly disappeared into her dark skin, but the pink remnants of scabs and scratches litter her brows and cheeks. Her left eye has a cut that’s certainly going to scar and her nose hasn’t set straight yet.

“What happened?”

What a question. “I can’t say.”

“No.” The firmness of his voice makes her look at him. He looks shattered, like after that jump with the 17th Airborne, and guilt roils in her stomach. He doesn’t have to care this much. “No. Tell me something.”

She averts her gaze to the painting photos. “I ran into some trouble on my last assignment… but I’m okay,” she says.

“Okay my ass.”

“I am,” she insists, placing a hand over his. He gazes at her, mystified, and brushes his thumb over her pinky.

“You’re a good liar.”

She sits beside him on the bench and neither of them speak.

Paris is beautiful in the late summer and it’s bustling. Crowds ebb and flow like the Seine—people laugh and cry and live music floats out of bistros and cafes along cobbled thoroughfares. The birds have come back, signs are lit again at night, and the City of Light is rebuilding. The world is finally living the spring it had been robbed of for so many years and she can feel it, the energy flowing through strangers on the street who embrace without fear. There’s nothing to be scared of anymore.

“Who are you today?” he asks.

She smiles, letting joy split her face as much as it dares. “Rose Robinson.”

Lew’s head whips toward her, surprise evident by his dropped jaw.

“I’m Rose Claudette Robinson. I’m 27 years old. I was born in New York, raised here and in San Francisco. I attended Emma Willard School and Vassar College. I speak four languages. I have two sisters. My favorite color is green. I love baseball. I—”

“I know you,” Lew whispers.

She nods. “You do. We grew up together.”

He smiles so brightly that it’s nearly blinding and wraps an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close enough to kiss her temple.

“Hi, Rosie,” he mumbles into her hair.

“Hi, Lewis.”

#my writing #meet 'em in the skies #lewis nixon

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shions-new-blog-of-stuff · 2 years ago

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"After the Rain"

Follow up to my previous sick fics! Short but sweet, enjoy! Canon x OC, fluff/sick fic for everyone @squashfics @lottathoughts @xcyberhexx @allen-444 @likesugarandcyanide @whateverthefuckyouwantiguess @cilantro24 Warm sunlight filtered through the curtains, making Leon stir, opening his eyes slowly. Lifting his head, his gaze moved to Catherine, sound asleep. Her arm held onto his back tightly, body curled up as close to him as possible.

She didn't wake up at all during the night. Leon pressed his fingers on her neck and forehead. It appeared her fever was gone, and she looked a lot less pale this morning.

Leon glanced up at the clock. 11am. Eyes wandering to the dreamcatcher hanging above Catherine's bed, he wondered if it really did work. No nightmares, no pain. They both slept like a log.

He tried to move, but Catherine whimpered in her sleep, her arm refusing to let him go. He couldn't help but smile and chuckle.

"Cath, I can't make you breakfast if you're keeping me hostage here," he whispered.

He brushed some hair away from her face, gently wriggling out of her grip. Catherine moaned but didn't wake up.

Shuffling out of bed, Leon walked to Catherine's side, fluffing her pillow and pulling the covers up to her shoulder.

"Don't worry, still here." He slowly opened the curtains to look outside. The rain finally stopped, and the sun was shining brightly. He could see an old woman walking her dog and the occasional car passing by.

Leon sauntered back to his guest room, checking his phone. Huh. No messages or missed calls. It's a miracle!

Shrugging and smiling to himself, he made his way downstairs to the kitchen, passing by the large picture of Catherine's grandfather. Square jaw, silver hair, and grey eyes just like Catherine's, his expression looking firm. His suit looked immaculate--plum-colored pinstripe and in his hands, a cane with a silver handle partially carved into the shape of a crow.

"Hope you don't mind me using your cookbooks," Leon said to the picture, nodding and walking into the kitchen.

Soon enough, the kitchen became filled with the warm, savory smells of soup.

#shion's writings #leon kennedy x oc

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mina-van1104 · 9 months ago

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❤️Happy Chinese/Lunar New Year! February 10, 2024! Nevada born & raised, 45 (forty-five) years family living in Nevada. Proud nurse, proud coach! With 🧧“Lai See”, “red envelopes” “Lucky money bag, lucky red bag!” Year of the Dragon 2024! 🐉🐲🧧Chinese New Year-different day every year (January or February).

😁😃Again, “Gung Hay Phat Choy!!” 恭禧發財! 🐉🐲(Best wishes & congratulations, let good fortune & good health come your way!) Good Feng Shui (wind-water) will attract more good luck. Prosperity, wealth, & good health too!🙏🙌More favorable year for Monkeys! Yay! 😁 I was born the end of the year of the Monkey. So some of the youngest monkeys of the zodiac. Dragons, monkeys, rats, & snakes are best friends on the zodiac.❤️

American BORN proud CHINESE/small portions of European descent, Vietnamese, Native American, Ashkenazi Jewish Descent. Celebrating Chinese New Years every year always & forever. Be nice to everyone during the week of Chinese New Years because how you treat others will determine how the whole year will be for you. ❤️

My cousins, uncles, aunts both in America & half my mom’s family still living in China. We always chat with all of them on WeChat, because some governments block FB & Instagram. We all had a good group conversation on WeChat. All 26 of us family members on chat. I miss them.❤️

Also 19 years elite, long distance runner, born year of the Monkey & November Scorpio!🏃🏻‍♀️🐒🦂🙌🧧🐉7+ days celebration! 🎉🍾 Happy birthday today to my cat named Teddy-Persephanie who passed away in July 2022.😭Emotional day too.I still have 2 cats & 2 dogs though.❤️

😍Song played on Instagram is called: “It's Time” by Imagine Dragons.

✞♡# Selfie 📸 # Nurse # Coach #NativeNevadan # ChineseNewYears2024 🎎 # LunarNewYear2024 # athletic # YearOfTheDragon # AmericanBornChinese abc # AsianAmericanMix # StopAsianHate # Biden2024💙 # JesusChrist 🦂 # Buddha # GuanYin # MotherMary # NevadaBornAndRaised # HakkaChineseRaised # ProChoice (though, in politics) # Equality # Justice # Healthcare # Running 🏃🏻‍♀️ # NevadaNative # HomeMeansNevada # Nevada # UNRnevadaAlumnaMay2016 # 3collegeDegrees # 3MedicalLicenses

•2019:OlderSisterCatherineVan&Adam Schwartz’sWedding&TheirWebsiteOn: https://www.theknot.com/us/catherine-van-and-adam-schwartz-aug-2019•ReminiscingMoreThan200PeopleCame.

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xoxoblackat · 1 year ago

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HOPKINS TOMB. - Knock If You Dare💀

Samuel Hopkins was born in Cork, Ireland on December 17th 1822. At the young age of 16, he decided to leave his home for the military and headed towards Ontario, Canada where he found himself in Toronto, Ontario.

Hopkins was stationed in Port Maitland when he met his first wife, Joanne Jones. Samuel had a dream to become rich and decided to chase the Gold Rush in California so he took off on foot to chase those dreams.

After 6 months he finally arrived in California, but luck wasn't on his side when he fell ill and had to return back to Ontario in 1851.

He first wound up living in Dunville, Ontario before settling in Port Colborne, Ontario where he became a well known businessman and gained his fortunes.

Mr. Hopkins' wife, Joanne passed away and he remarried Catharine Thomas. Catherine soon after divorced Samuel and took off with a sizable amount of his fortune.

This man was sought after.

Upon my research, I found out there was another woman in town named Arabella Williams, whom was never married and lived her whole life on a property which is now reserved as the Port Colborne Historical and Marine Museum. This woman took Samuel Hopkins to court for $10,000 for Breach of Promise for not marrying her! 😹 They ended settling outside of court for $1,250.

Hopkins died October 12th, 1899.

He is now known to be seen walking the Oakwood Cemetery with his trusty dog companion. His dog has also been seen at times guarding the tomb itself.

Legend has it that, If you enter the masoleum yard and walk around the tomb 7 times, knocking each time you pass his door you will be cursed.

On the other hand, If you only circle 3 times it is said to bring you good luck.

Three teens apparently each met their demise in parculiar ways soon after going to disturb Hopkins Tomb in the 1980s.

If you plan to visit Samuel Hopkins, it is said that around March 21st (Spring Equinox) is when he is the most visible.

The gate is open... Would you go in??👻

Photography by: ☆Kat Horton

#hauntedcanada #adventurelocal #ontario #HopkinsTomb #witchywoman #paranormal #paranormal investigation

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xtruss · 1 year ago

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Does Your Dog Truly Love You? Science Has the Answer

— By Adam Piore | May 17th, 2023 | Newsweek

Illustrations Brit Spencer; Photographs Clockwise From Top Left Catherine Lender/Getty; Getty; Sensoespot/Getty; Rich Legg/Getty

It's probably impossible to know exactly what your dog is thinking. But a few years ago, Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, decided he wanted to try and find out anyway.

The catalyst was Bern's diminutive pug Newton, a fawn-colored pooch with a friendly disposition and a small black mole on his cheek vaguely reminiscent of a young Robert De Niro. Every night for more than a decade, Newton climbed into bed with Berns and his wife and nestled his meatball-shaped head into the crook of the neuroscientist's armpit, before passing out and snoring loudly. The routine continued even after Newton grew so arthritic that he relied on a tiny-wheeled cart attached to his hind legs to tow himself around and required assistance to get into the bed.

When Newton finally passed away at the ripe old age of 97 (in dog years), Berns was so devastated that he began to ruminate on the nature of their relationship. Yes, he really had loved that little guy intensely. But had Newton, he wondered, felt the same way about him? Berns tried not to dwell on the question. It was sad to contemplate the possibility that for Newton their relationship might have come down to nothing more than a hankering for dog treats or a new chew toy. And how could one ever really know what went on in the head of an animal?

A few months later, while watching news footage of a trained dog participating in the military operation to capture Osama bin Laden, Berns had an epiphany. If a dog could remain calm during a military raid, perhaps he could train his new pet terrier to lie still in an MRI machine long enough to scan her brain and see how she thinks.

Since then, Berns has scanned the brains of more than 100 dogs, published the results in two books and established himself as a pioneer of the rapidly growing field of research called "canine cognition," which is revealing new insights about the often-enigmatic behaviors of our fabulous furry four-legged friends.

Today there are Canine Cognition labs at Yale, Duke, University of Arizona, University of Portsmouth, Barnard College, University of Florida and a wide array of leading scientific institutions around the globe—and the study of dogs in general is one of the fastest growing areas in the broader field of animal behavioral science. A new international consortium called the ManyDogs Project, with researchers in Austria, Poland, Italy, Canada, the U.S., Argentina and a number of other countries, recently completed its first major collaborative study and plans to publish it later this year.

The insights emerging are confirming things many dogs owners have long suspected and are fundamentally changing what scientists thought they knew about dogs. Far from being dumb creatures with good noses, as previously thought, they're actually smart in specific ways that make them ideal human collaborators and companions. Over the millennia, they have evolved to be cooperative animals, endowed with the neural machinery to understand abstract ideas and complex social dynamics. They're able to read and assess human emotions with great accuracy, can understand some language and are even capable of making rudimentary signals.

The new dog science is also addressing the issue most prominently on the minds of Bern and dog owners everywhere: Does my dog really love me?

Dogs Are No Dummies

Humans have been domesticating dogs for at least 32,000 years—more than 10,000 years longer than horses. Today the U.S. alone is home to an estimated 90 million pooches (roughly one for every four Americans), many of whom have owners who treat them like mini people, dressing them in raincoats, sweaters and booties (the global pet clothing market topped $5.2 billion in 2021). They confide their deepest secrets, rearrange vacation schedules to accommodate their idiosyncrasies and shower them with gifts and luxuries such as dog houses and rawhide.

Scientists who study animals have tended to turn their noses up at dog cognition. This attitude was driven in part by the mistaken belief that domestication had dumbed dogs down. In a famous 1985 experiment, University of Michigan researchers found that wolves could unlock a gate mechanism after watching a human do so, but domesticated dogs didn't seem to get it. The implication was that the dogs were stupid.

All that changed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, thanks to a series of groundbreaking experiments by ethnographers Vilmos Csányi and Ádám Miklósi and their collaborators at Budapest's Eötvös Loránd University.

Csányi and his wife were hiking one winter in the Hungarian mountains and stopped to pet a particularly gregarious stray. The dog followed them for five miles through the snow before Csányi picked him up and carried him the rest of the way home. Flip, as they called him, was white and brown and had stumpy legs and resembled an Ewok, a cute furry biped from Star Wars. Flip quickly became an indispensable member of the household and won over all their friends and family. What was it about this "fuzzy male of low stature, surely a mixed breed," Csányi wondered, that made him so magnetic?

Flip seemed to be living proof that the conventional wisdom about dogs—that they were unintelligent—was wrong. The ability of canines to insinuate themselves successfully into the lives of their human owners seemed like an amazing feat of evolutionary magic. "Dogs are smart enough to survive in a human family, which is actually a quite complicated task," recalls Miklósi. "Wolves can't do that. Establishing a specific social relationship with another species is quite challenging."

Csányi and Miklósi decided to examine the process by which humans and dogs forge strong emotional bonds. As ethologists, they were familiar with the extensive scientific literature on "attachment," the process by which parents and children of different species formed lasting emotional bonds.

Human owners and their dogs, they theorized, formed bonds in the same way—growing close through a process that mimicked that of a human parent and child.

Their theory was inspired in part by Flip's behavior at home, which struck Csányi as uncannily familiar. "When my children were 2 or 3 years old, they wanted all of my attention. They wanted to touch me, they wanted me to touch them," he recalls. Flip's behavior was "very similar."

In an early experiment, Miklósi and Csányi placed dogs and their owners in an unfamiliar room with interesting things to explore and took notes. The dogs and their owners exhibited behaviors virtually identical to what developmental psychologists had long observed in well-adjusted human infants and their mothers. The dogs used the owners as a secure base, venturing out and coming back as they explored the new surroundings, all the while staying connected through eye contact and watching carefully for cues. The implication was clear: Dogs had hacked the human system designed to respond to cuteness and bonding.

In recent years, scientists have extended this line of research. When a dog and a human are bonded, each touch and each bit of eye contact causes their bodies to release the powerful hormone oxytocin—the "love chemical" that also promotes bonding between mother and child and is known to lower heart rate and blood pressure. Petting increases levels of the hormone dopamine, sometimes referred to as a feel-good chemical, and endorphins in both dogs and humans.

Other studies have found that dogs have evolved two to three times as many fast-twitch facial muscles as wolves, which gives them greater latitude for expression. A special facial muscle allows them to widen their eyes in ways that way human babies do, eliciting the same high-pitched voices and facial expressions that parents use with infants. Dogs at shelters that are better at making these "puppy-dog" eyes are more successful at finding new homes. Dogs given oxytocin, meanwhile, tend to gaze at their owners more, which causes the owners to look back, setting off a virtuous cycle of more oxytocin and dopamine release and bonding.

The ability of dogs to bond with members of other species is not limited to humans, as any dog owner who also has a cat will tell you. In his 2005 book, If Dogs Could Talk, Csányi describes a dachshund-like canine named Jumpy whose owners frequently cooked rabbit stew, a delicacy Jumpy enjoyed for years. Then, one Easter, they obtained a live rabbit who temporarily became Jumpy's favorite playmate. When they turned that rabbit into stew, not only did Jumpy recognize and refuse to eat his new friend, but he went on a "silent and dejected hunger strike for three days," Csányi wrote. Jumpy has refused to eat rabbit meat ever since.

Social Intelligence

It's not just that dogs are so cute we can't resist them. Research has also confirmed that dogs are hardwired for cooperation and friendship, remarkably attuned to our emotions and limitations and, it seems increasingly clear, capable of learning and remembering complex rituals and information.

For his part, Csányi immediately noticed how quickly Flip seemed to grasp and adapt to the rules of the house. The Csányi home was crammed full of small objects. Although Flip was energetic and "prone to excitement," he never knocked anything over or broke anything. When Csányi commanded Flip to fetch an object from a table—say, a ball or a toy—he invariably grabbed it with "exquisite care." And if, in the process, anything else had been accidently moved, he would "immediately stop and ask for help by looking at me or barking."

This type of behavior led Csányi and Miklósi to question the iconic Michigan experiment comparing the intelligence of domestic dogs and wolves. Perhaps the dogs had been able to open the gate mechanism after watching humans do it. Maybe they just didn't want to break the rules.

Csányi and Miklósi recruited 28 dogs and their owners and set up a complicated contraption that required dogs to pull on the handles of plastic dishes on the other side of a wire fence to obtain meat. Outdoor dogs, who spend most of their time in the yard and thus are presumably more accustomed to acting as independent agents, outscored their indoor cousins about a third of the time, while the most obedient domesticated dogs looked to their owners for permission to reach through the fence. When they got it, however, they matched the performance of their more independent cousins.

To figure out how much the dogs could understand, the experimenters hid food in one of several containers, then brought the dogs into the room and had them guess which container had the food. To help them, researchers offered various cues, alternatively staring at, nodding toward or pointing to the correct container. When researchers use these tests on human infants, they quickly catch on to the hints. Apes and chimpanzees, by contrast, almost never do without extensive training. Dogs, like toddlers, are quick learners. They soon learn to heed the pointing, bowing, nodding, head turning and glancing gestures from humans to find the hidden food.

The pointing experiments provided the first direct evidence that dogs have the brainpower not only to understand abstract ideas, but also to ascribe motivations to members of an entirely different species, according to Evan MacLean, an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist who is the founder and director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center. It also suggested that studying dogs could give us insight into sociability and what allowed humans to be so successful.

"If you think about it, pointing is a fundamentally cooperative kind of behavior," MacLean explains. "If I point out something for you, as a human, when you're trying to figure out what that means, you without thinking about it assume that I have a cooperative motive. I know something about the world that you don't, and the reason I'm doing this is because I want to help you in some way. That is cooperative behavior at its core. Other animals can't do that."

Dogs pay close attention not just to human gestures, but to human facial expressions as well. In recent years, researchers have shown that dogs can distinguish expressions of happiness, anger and disgust. They can tell when a person is sad or cheerful. Their hearts beat faster when they see photos of expressive faces than neutral ones. They avoid angry faces and pay more attention to fearful ones.

All this helps explain why guide dogs are so effective at helping blind people navigate the world and avoid stepping into traffic and how therapy dogs can comfort traumatized children, prisoners serving life sentences for violent crimes, senior citizens fading into dementia and stressed-out college students cramming for exams: because they can read human emotions and respond appropriately.

Good Judges of Character

Evidence is growing that dog smarts are not limited to social and emotional intelligence. It apparently extends to far more complex behavior as well.

Dogs are capable of making rapid, simultaneous judgements of the kindness or potential helpfulness of humans they meet—just as Flip apparently did when he decided to adopt Csányi and his wife on that Hungarian mountaintop. They also seem to be capable of accumulating sophisticated mental files on individual people and using that information to guide behavior.

In humans, the ability to evaluate character is foundational, emerging as early as five months. Zachary Silver, who recently earned his Ph.D. at Yale and will soon open a lab at Occidental College, recently used pairs of actors to test the ability of dogs to make character judgments. One actor would pretend to steal a clipboard or actively harm somebody else, while the other would be friendlier, handing someone a clipboard they are looking for. Both actors would then simultaneously offer the dog a treat. Of 37 dogs tested, two thirds preferred to take food from the friendly actor. Other experiments have found that dogs will eventually stop following cues from human individuals who too often mislead them.

"If we're talking about social intelligence, dogs are very human-like in the way that they reason about the social world," says Silver.

Of course, dog owners have already figured this out. For instance, most people who have shy dogs know that their pets often watch their interactions with strangers closely and are more likely to make a friendly approach to someone after seeing their owner have a positive interaction. Yet they seem to understand the relationship is different—they never seem to want or expect to follow home human friends, no matter how familiar and beloved, if those friends don't reside with their primary caregivers.

With dogs, communication goes both ways. In a revised version of the pointing experiment, owners would leave the room while researchers hid food in plain sight of the dogs. Typically, when an owner returned and was asked to look for the food, the dog tried to signal by running back and forth between the hiding place and the owner or using their eyes to indicate the location.

The eagerness of dogs to help their owners was brought home to Csányi one day when he took a bad fall on an icy staircase. Flip ran to his side, licked him and stayed with him until he could get up. For years afterward, whenever they came to the same icy steps, Flip would return to his owner's side and closely watch him until they had passed the danger zone. During the summer, however, Flip seemed to recognize the danger was absent.

Barking is another effective avenue of expression. In an experiment with Hungarian mudis, a herding dog that resembles German shepherds and border collies, Miklósi recorded the dogs while playing with other dogs, anticipating food, encountering an intruder and several other situations. When he played the recordings to volunteers and asked them to guess the situation, owners and non-owners alike were right about a third of the time—about twice the rate of chance.

"When dogs are vocalizing, they're really expressing different kinds of inner states," Milóski says. "They try to communicate something about their emotions."

Dogs seem to have a big capacity to learn new ways of expressing themselves. Miklósi has shown that with just a little bit of training, dogs can be enticed to mimic a wide range of human actions spontaneously, such as bowing, jumping, lifting a limb, turning in circles—even learning to operate a machine that dispenses balls.

The Limits of 'Genius' Dogs

A sheepadoodle named Bunny has recently attracted eight million followers on TikTok for her apparent mastery of language. (A sheepadoodle is a mix of old English sheepdog and poodle.) Bunny seems to express her needs and wants by pressing buttons on a mat, originally designed to help children with difficulty communicating, linked to specific words, such as "walk." Researchers at U.C. San Diego are currently evaluating the claims and studying the extent to which nonhumans can use these tools to communicate.

It sounds like a silly TikTok thing, but the question of how much dogs can understand—and why some dogs understand more than others—is one of the hottest areas of current research.

It started a decade or so ago with the discovery of a border collie named Chaser that was extraordinarily smart. John Pilley, a behavioral psychologist at Wofford College in South Carolina, trained Chaser to identify and retrieve 1,022 toys by name (he wrote it all up in his 2013 New York Times bestseller Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words). Chaser was also able to discriminate verbs used to describe a desired action—such as "pull" or "fetch." When asked to fetch a specific toy Chaser had never heard of, the dog was also capable of inferring which toy the experimenter wanted if it knew the names of all the other toys present, presumably by a process of elimination.

Chaser kick-started a quest among some researchers to find more examples of "genius dogs" to study. In 2021, Miklósi, set up a website to find smart dogs (he's still seeking candidates) and launched a high-profile "genius dog" contest that was covered by CNN and other media outlets during the pandemic, pitting dogs with big vocabularies against one another. So far, he has identified 40 dogs from around the world. Whereas the average dog may know the names of one or two objects, a genius dog will know four to six names and can quickly learn 80 to 100 with training. It usually takes 10 or 15 minutes to learn the name of one object and the dogs retain them memory for about a month. The "cognitive trick" by which they are learning remains an active area of exploration, and to draw conclusions he first needs to recruit more dogs.

Some experts remain skeptical about many claims people make about their dog's abilities. Amritha Mallikarjun, a postdoc at Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which specializes in training and studying search-and-rescue dogs, bomb sniffers and other service dogs, says that, in general, people tend to overestimate the capacity of dogs to understand speech. Miklósi admits that only an extremely small percentage of dogs are capable of learning 100 words or more.

Dogs may never recite Shakespeare, but they do seem to have an affinity for different languages. Mallikarjun has demonstrated that dogs raised in English-speaking households show far more interest when people speak in Spanish (and vice versa), because, she thinks, it is novel to them. "They can certainly learn the idea that a spoken utterance corresponds with an action or an item, but they cannot speak language" in a technical sense, says Mallikarjun. In most cases, dogs understand the tone, and often can figure out the meaning of words by the context. But most dogs can't actually distinguish between nouns and verbs without cues.

"I can certainly train a dog to step on a button if they want to go outside," she says. "I can also train a dog to ring a bell if they want to go outside, which is what a lot of people have already done. Or you just wait until your dog comes over to you. Because generally we understand our dogs pretty well. Chaser was the only dog thus far that's basically been able to show the idea that there's an action that can go with an object, and they're separate."

Inside the Doggie Brain

As brain imaging technologies continue to advance, they're offering tantalizing clues about what goes on in canine brains. Dogs, research shows, see the world in radically different ways than people do.

Philippa Johnson, an associate professor of diagnostic imagining at Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine, recently produced the first atlas of the canine brain. She's found that the temporal areas of the brain—those involved in long-term episodic memory and emotions—are roughly comparable in dogs to those of humans. This explains how dogs bond so well with humans and understand emotions. However, a dog's frontal cortex—the seat of abstract reasoning, problem solving and imaginative thought—is far smaller than that found in humans. To Johnson, this suggests dogs are "much more present" than humans, blissfully immune to worrying about what will happen beyond the next meal or cuddle.

However, other areas of the brain are far larger in dogs than in humans. These include those involved in visual processing, fine-motor function and smell. Johnson has also done extensive work mapping the "white matter" connections in the canine brain, which sheds light on what areas most often work in tandem.

Perhaps most notably, she has identified a major track in dogs that is not present in humans. It provides a direct connection between the visual cortex and the olfactory lobes, involved in processing smells. She's also found direct connections, not found in any other species, between the nose and the spinal cord. An odor entering a dog's nose will sometimes be processed in the visual areas of the brain, which is why some blind dogs seem to retain some ability to "see." More broadly, this means that the moment-to-moment experience of a dog probably involves an intricate interweaving of sights and odors.

Indeed, if dogs have a superpower, aside from social cognition, it would be their sense of smell. A dog's nose is a million times more sensitive than that of a human. The average person is equipped with five million olfactory receptors—tiny proteins capable of detecting individual odor molecules—clustered in a small area in the back of the nasal cavity. By contrast, the average dog has 300 million olfactory receptors—60 times more than humans—extending from the nostrils all the way to the back of the throat. By some estimates 35 percent of a dog's brain is dedicated to smelling, compared to 5 percent for humans.

That's why dogs have been used for centuries to sniff out outlaws, explosives and drugs, find avalanche victims and rescue individuals trapped under buildings. In recent years, they've even been trained to sniff out cancer and COVID-19. Clara Wilson, an expert on canine olfaction at the Penn Working Dog group, found that dogs can smell human stress. In experiments, a dog presented with a piece of cloth swabbed from the back of a person's neck and breathed on can usually tell whether or not that person had recently been asked to perform a difficult math task.

Dogs, Wilson notes, also use their sense of smell to keep track of time. They can tell the difference between an odor that's 12 hours old or four hours old. That's how they know when it's time to go out for a walk and when their owner is due home from work. Often, on walks, they are sniffing out urine from other dogs, which contains copious amounts of information, such as whether a dog was in heat, stressed out, happy or sick.

One study found that small adult male dogs tended to pee higher relative to their body size than larger adult male dogs to exaggerate their height and competitive ability. In another study, researchers showed dogs pictures of other dogs whose pee they'd sniffed. The dogs who sniffed the pee were surprised if the size of the dog in the picture did not conform to the mental image in their head, Wilson says. There's so much information in pee that Wilson and her colleagues refer to it as the "pee-mail" system. A dog will often pee its reply on the same spot.

There is, of course, a wide variability between one dog's brain and another's. Erin Hecht, head of the Evolutionary Neuroscience Laboratory and the Canine Brains project at Harvard, has been studying how human breeding has affected canine brain development. In research published in 2019, she looked at 62 pure-bred dogs from 33 different breeds and found substantial differences in the sizes of different brain regions and networks, depending on whether they had been bred for hunting, herding, guarding or companionship.

One network included reward regions of the brain that would be involved in social bonding to humans, training and skill learning. These regions would be more pronounced in companion "lapdog" breeds, such as the Maltese and Yorkshire terrier. A second network, associated with active smelling and tasting in pursuit of a goal, was larger in scent hunters, such as beagles and basset hounds. A third set of areas—used for eye movement, vision, spatial navigation and motor areas involved in moving through a physical environment—was larger in dogs bred for sight hunting, such as whippets and Weimaraners.

A fourth network included high-order brain regions that might be involved in social action and interaction, including areas that appear to be activated when dogs are presented with human faces and vocalizations, which was also linked to companion breeds like the Maltese and Yorkshire terrier. A fifth set of regions involved in fear, stress and anxiety, which regulate behavioral and hormonal responses to environmental stressors and threats, was well developed in breeds historically used for fighting, including boxers and bulldogs. And a sixth network, involved in processing smell and vision, was linked to dogs with historical police and military functions like boxers and Doberman pinchers.

"There's way more variation across dog brains than there is across any other species," she says. "And so this is the result of human breeding. We have made them this way, and different breeds of dogs have brains that are sort of prewired to excel in different areas."

"It's a challenge to figure out how dogs think and what the world is like to them, because they have evolved to make us think that they are like us," she adds. "They've evolved to mimic human psychology in some ways. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's actually what's happening in their brains. We have to try to take off our human color glasses to understand what's going on with them, and that's hard for us to do."

Does My Dog Love Me?

All the research findings in the world about how much dogs understand language, read human intent and are keen judges of character did not satisfy Gregory Berns. He still sought an answer to his Big Question about Newton. When his beloved pug looked up at him with those puppy-dog eyes, was it true love?

Since Newton had already crossed the Rainbow Bridge, Berns turned his attention to Newton's successor, a pet terrier named Callie. He trained Callie to lie still in an fMRI scanner. Berns fed her, praised her and left her alone in the huge donut-shaped machine and monitored the reward areas of her brain to see when they lit up the most.

The results were unambiguous: kind words from Berns lit up Callie's reward centers just as much as the dog treats, demonstrating that Callie—and by extension, Newton—loved him just as much, if not more, than a scrumptious piece of food.

"When people want to know 'what is my dog thinking,' I think what they're asking is, 'does my dog love me? I love him,'" Berns says. "The answer is 'absolutely.' It's remarkably similar to how we experience the relationship. They have these social bonds that with us, that they find them intensely rewarding."

Science, in this case, is telling us what we already knew.

#Dogs

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diamondot · 1 month ago

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sure, take your chief of operations on an away mission. he can definitely chief some operations away from the station

look! it's the beautiful woods of California!

look! it's Robin Hood and his libertarian friends!

seriously this dude looks like That One Guy On Twitter Who's Just Asking Questions

honestly kind of a sweet little colony of castaways

hey writers, calling the castaway's ship the Santa Maria is a little on the nose

extremely right wing homesteader vibes

so is the choice really between Leave Forever and Stay But Never Speak to Humans Again? because it seems like Starfleet could just, like, send someone by occasionally

wow they really are culty right wing homesteaders. yikes on bikes

holy shit! it's Catherine Sakai! she didn't go to Z'ha'dum after all! she got stuck here instead

whew, this lady is going to give me hives. don't try to fix your tech even though this girl will die of a preventable disease! my followers will try to leeeaaaave

oh! they put transgressors in a dog crate in the sun, that's cool. nothing culty or frightening going on here

Kira and Dax are on their way guys, don't worry

feels like you guys would be doing everyone here a favor if you dropped a rock on that lady's head. i realize this isn't a very Starfleet solution but

Sisko is as intolerant of bullshit as ever and i love that about him

Sisko: CONVENIENT THAT THIS PLANET FITS YOUR BACK-TO-THE-LAND IDEALS SO WELL

hey! this episode passed the Bechdel test!

gotta lasso that lil doggie- i mean runabout

oh, i guess that sick lady wasn't doing better after all

ooooh, the logs have been erased on the runabout 👀👀

is this Sisko's There Are Four Damn Lights moment

Miles O'Brien can knock you out with a gentle tap to the skull

Miles O'Brien can make a compass out of water in a bowl

Miles O'Brien is going to fix all your problems

anyways looks like someone's been lying about how natural that anti-electronics field is

Miles O'Brien just jumped a guy while wearing only his underwear, what a champion

YIKES SHE KIDNAPPED THESE PEOPLE FOR HER CULT

SHE DIDN'T JUST TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE CRASH, SHE FUCKING ENGINEERED IT

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

CASUALTIES WERE NOT INEVITABLE YOU PILE OF HUMAN GARBAGE

somehow O'Brien and Sisko aren't the least bit surprised to hear Kira

guys you don't have to stay. you really don't have to stay

welp, that was frustrating episode to watch

the baby is making tiny happy squealing noises so it must be

Star Trek night

Paradise: ok but how do you define "technology"

#keep on star trekkin

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loverboybitch · 4 years ago

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the sky is so clear today i can see buildings all the way out on the other side of the lake.//.

#.//.#do u guys see them? its kinda hard to make out with my camera quality #but i can see them just holding out there #i wonder how many miles that is...i wonder what city that is #thats insane #i checked on google maps and its probably st catherine’s ... about 50km away across the water.......#hehe a dog just chased some geese into the middle of the bike path and now everyone is scared to pass them #they just sitting right in the middle of the bike path #canadian geese man they demons

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joheunsaram · 2 years ago

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pretty hallucinations (jjk)

summary: Drunk words are sober thoughts, and now Jungkook knows all of yours — even the ones about him. And you know what they say, once a secret’s out, it’s hard to take it back.

word count- 3.9k

pairing- best friend!Jungkook x Reader

rating- PG 15

genre- f2l, idiots in love, fluff, slight angst, slight crack

warnings- reader is wasted, jungkook is a softie, SO MUCH PINING, mention of bondage and spreader bars lmfao

a.n- a birthday fic to celebrate my favourite bunny! happy birthday jk! this fic came to me after I read a scene in ten trends to seduce your best friend that had me cackling. read that book if you enjoyed this, that ones a real f2l slow burn hehe

special s/o to @daechwitatamic for beta reading, helping with the summary, and leaving the most hilarious comments on my doc haha I will cherish them forever💕

As always feedback appreciated, a reblog and a like goes a far way. Send me an ask! 💌

The room was spinning. A kaleidoscope of colours twirling in the air and you couldn’t help the bitterness rising through you. This used to be your favourite place, a library you had created after years of collecting your favourite words. Systematically organized, it seemed now that a hurricane had passed through.

Well, after ten drinks, you were nothing less than a hurricane. Books with their once perfect spines laid dog-eared and haphazard. You couldn’t find it. Couldn’t find the perfect words for the moment. There was always supposed to be something for every emotion in your collection.

Some may think losing yourself in fictional words was cowardice, but to you it was a reprieve. Reality was boring. In the real world you were just a nerdy overgrown virgin who would never confess your feelings to a man — to the man. In reality, you would always be the girl who talked big about sex and hid behind bravado instead of ever opening yourself up to the vulnerability that came with it. The real you was a phony.

Stumbling with your fingers wrapped around the bottle of whiskey, you meandered to the opposite wall, pulling romance novels off the shelves. They would have answers for your predicament. Wasn’t that the purpose of them? To show how the characters overcame their fears?

The words blurred but you lost yourself. You were Catherine sharing your love but having it misconstrued, leaving you to misery, a death of a life never fully lived. As you read Heathcliff’s grief, daring you to haunt him, he transformed from the Englishman to someone too familiar, his proper attire morphing to the comfortable baggy black shirts and giant stomping boots. His dark eyebrow manifested a silver barbell, his eyes widening into a doe-eyed stare. Ebony tendrils grew from his fingertips, running up his right arm until they formed shapes as intimate as your breaths. Tiger lillies and eclipses and snakes and clocks and words so dear they played as a melody on your lips.

And then Jungkook’s words transformed from the enraged howling of ghosts to silence, his lips parted in shock as his eyes looked at you with pity. The memory was visceral and it forced your hand to tip the bottle against your lips, your tongue coating in the warm bite of liquor. Yet, it permeated through, the single moment of bravery you had been saving your whole life coming back to haunt you.

He had a friendly arm around you, the two of you laughing at the television screen as the characters finally confessed and Jungkook shook his head, chastising them for not coming clean sooner and saving him the trouble. The innocuous words gave you the courage to share a secret ten years in the making.

A simple I like you.

But unlike the characters who were living their happily ever after, Jungkook sputtered, moving away with an awkward laugh, shattering your heart into a million pieces. The distance was a chasm growing wide with his questions and the lifetime of bravery fizzled much quicker than you anticipated.

“I should’ve never opened my stupid mouth,” you lamented, tossing back another searing gulp, books digging into your back as you stared at nothing. Nothing that spurred into a familiar shadow making you cackle at your imagination. It really was better than reality.

Because in your imagination, Jungkook crouched in front of you smelling like fresh laundry that made you hazy. His fingers caressed your face, moving the curls that had spilled from their usual tight bun atop your head to frame your face. But even an imaginary Jungkook wouldn’t give you your happy ending.

Moving your hair away, he smiled, helping you up. His voice was gravelly when he spoke, a novel rasp that you wanted to pluck from the air and store it next to your array of books.

“Your mouth is not stupid,” he chuckled, an arm around your waist as he moved you from the library to the kitchen. You refused to look at this hallucination, instead focusing on the tiles that you had handpicked for the kitchen. Small white ones. They had a pattern in the middle, cobalt outlines of squares interwoven together to form stars of the skies.

He deposited you on the stool next to the breakfast nook and placed a glass in front of you. Condensation trickled down the glass to the island and before your clumsy hands could do any damage, your figment picked the glass and placed it on a coaster. Of course he knew what to do, imaginary men were perfect.

“I’m not imaginary, Trix,” Jungkook answered your inner monologue, amusement lacing his tone. But his mirth did not placate you, there was no way Jungkook would seek you out after he stomped on your heart. Your best friend was not that cruel. Not intentionally at least.

“Trix are for kids! Don’t call me that,” you whined, your words mumbled by the glass that he held to your lips. With the coldest glare you could manage, you stared at him as you finished the drink, refusing to acknowledge how soothing the cool water felt trickling down your throat.

“But they’re your favourite, Trix,” he retorted, bemused before running a hand over your head. You wanted to chastise your heart for skipping a beat at the platonic touch as he mussed your hair but you couldn’t help it. This always happened. You hated that he used that nickname, an inside joke that did nothing other than give you false hope. It was cute when he started. It made you flush to your toes and stutter over your words, but it was unfair how he could easily give you a pet name when your boyfriends had trouble coming up with anything that didn’t make you wince.

“What are you doing here, Jungkook?” Your voice wobbled as did you when he helped you up, moving you towards your bedroom. Tears still streaked down your face, stuffing your sinuses with regret as you leaned against his infuriatingly hard body.

“I’m taking care of you. I always take care of you,” he answered. “Watch your step.”

His answer made you fume. Why couldn’t you feel this way for Jimin? He was supposed to be your type, flirty and loud and unafraid to go after what he wanted. In comparison, Jungkook was just a shy, awkward teenager who showed more emotions when he lost a game of League. Sure, what if the way Jimin called you sugar was a little cringey, it was better than babe or doll!

“Those are all terrible pet names, Trix,” Jungkook commented, his grin audible even when you refused to look at him. All you could do was weakly punch his arm, missing wildly while he steadied you on your never-ending path to your bedroom.

You missed your bed. Your mattress was the most expensive thing you owned. Jungkook had given you a lot of shit for spending a pretty penny on it, but it was like sleeping on a cloud, so soft and plush that you could just sink in and forget about everything.

And you really needed to forget the humiliation of Jungkook’s rejection.

“I didn’t reject you. You were drunk, Trix. You didn’t mean it,” Jungkook answered your thoughts once again. “Also your bed is very comfy so I promise not to annoy you about wasting money again.”

He was laughing at you and you couldn’t help but grunt, turning around and placing a clumsy hand on his chest as you steadied yourself. Your eyes met his and you hated how you melted a little at their sparkle. He always had the prettiest eyes, round with expressive mocha irises that burned your heart. Even his lashes were pretty, long and curved like he was a newborn fawn made to be fawned at. Gathering your drunken thoughts, you came to a single conclusion.

Honesty. Best case scenario, this Jungkook was just imaginary and would disappear soon. Worst case scenario, he was real and since you had already humiliated yourself, you couldn’t dig a deeper hole.

“I did mean it! I love you, you dumb idiot,” you announced, your words surprisingly clear. Yet Jungkook still laughed, rolling his eyes as he settled you into bed, telling you again that you were drunk. But he didn’t understand and he had to understand.

“I’ve been in love with you since I saw you play in that dumb ultimate frisbee match when you were a freshman. When you lost your cool at that concert when a guy tried copping a feel. When you gave me a hug when my mom was in the hospital and everything seemed okay for a little while. I love you, Jeon Jungkook. I’ve always been insanely in love with your stupid, dumb face,” you ranted. Kneeling in front of you, Jungkook’s smile wavered into a concentrated frown, brows bunching together before he was smiling again and shaking his head.

“You love me, but you don’t love love me, Y/N,” he countered, making you groan in exasperation, hand coming to his mouth to silence him. Sometimes you hated him.

“You don’t get it, Jungkook! How do I even–” you sighed loudly, grabbing his shoulders to make him understand. But if your words wouldn’t work, maybe someone else’s would. “It is at moments after I have dreamed of the rare entertainment of your eyes, when (being fool to fancy) I have deemed with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise,” you quoted your favourite poet, eyes stuck on his. “Do you get it now?”

Jungkook stared at you for a moment, awestruck in a way that made you want to lean in and kiss him, but kissing without consent was bad, especially if he was looking for a way to reject you again. You still had at least some of your pride. And then he was laying you back and tucking you in, crushing your heart in his palm till it was dust that pricked your eyes, making them dry and watery all at once.

“We’ll talk about this in the morning, Trix. We shouldn’t when you’re not sober,” said softly, fingers running on your scalp before tracing away your tears. With all the alcohol in your system, your filter was off and all you had was misery.

“Can you at least just stay before you reject me? I need a hug,” you whispered, heartbeat accelerating when he climbed in next to you, engulfing you in his arms. He was so warm. Like your favourite blanket shielding you from the cold in the middle of winter. He needed to know the effect he had on you and even though you were feeling the drowsiness from all that whiskey, you wanted to let him in. He had to understand.

“I know you think I love you platonically. I don’t. I really don’t.”

Jungkook exhaled loudly, moving away so only his forearm acted as a pillow for you. Lying on his side he looked at you, eyes tracing your features as you tried your best to keep yours open.

“You’re drunk. We’ll talk about it in the morning,” he said finally. With mere inches between you, you felt your face heat, your thoughts pouring over your tongue without your consent.

“Jungkook, do you know what a spreader bar is?” you asked, staring at him as his eyes widened. He blinked slowly a few times before landing on his back, looking straight at the ceiling.

“Jesus… yes, Trix. I know what that is.”

“I want you to use it on me,” you continued, loose-lipped and hazy. There was no chance you’d remember this in the morning so why not just go all out and let him in on your fantasies. “Tie me up and bend me over. Fuck me so hard I forget my name. God, I wanna be pinned under you so bad.”

“Stop. Fuck… stop, please,” he whispered, his teeth worrying the inside of his cheek in a way you only saw when he was angry. Was he angry? Is that why even in the dim light of the room you could see his ears slowly turning red?

“Still think I like you platonically?” you asked, tone much more mischievous than you had planned. “Would you choke me? Make me lose my breath as you kiss me or will you be nice and gently hold my jaw when you kiss me? I think about that a lot, you know.”

He groaned, his free arm coming to rest over his eyes. He seemed resigned and somehow that made you grin, especially when he sighed loudly before speaking. “Fucking hell Y/N… please just go to sleep.”

“I wanna feel your tongue between my thighs and—“ Before you could finish, he turned, a hand coming to rest gently over your lips.

“Sleep! You need to go to sleep!” he exclaimed in a panic that made your nerves tingle and your stomach warm.

“Why?” you mumbled against his fingers before he removed them.

“Cause you’re making me hard and I need you to be sober when I tell you I love you too,” he replied in a whine that was equal parts adorable as it was surprising. Did he say he loved you too? What a ridiculous concept! You were positive you were imagining him now.

“Wow, you really are a hallucination,” you giggled. This was a nice dream. You liked how all the edges of light were soft in it, how it seemed as if you were floating in bliss. Dream Jungkook was amazing. He felt so real. You wished you never woke up. Especially when exasperated by your chuckles, his arm wound around you and pulled you close, plastering you to his body.

“Does that feel like a hallucination to you?” he rasped, his exhale hitting on your forehead. His comment diverted your attention to the weight poking against your stomach. You wanted to rub up against him but your body felt heavy, powerless against the haze around you.

“Go to sleep now,” he ordered softly and you couldn’t help how your eyelids fluttered shut at his words. Drowning in his scent of fresh lavender laundry, you felt safe and coddled and finally sleepy.

“You’ll be here when I wake up?” you asked, needing the confirmation that the comfort of his arms wouldn’t disappear, even when you sure he was just a figment of your imagination.

“I’ll be here, Trix. Go to sleep.”

“I love you. I really do, you know,” you assured him, getting a giggle in response.

“I’m starting to believe you do, yes.” You felt his lips land on your forehead, so soft and warm that it felt as if falling into slumber was the easiest thing to do. You wrapped your arms around him, snuggling in closer, enjoying the steady beat of his heart as he whispered once again.

“Good night, Y/N.”

—————

Your head was pounding when you woke up. A drummer having its solo, double bass and all. With a groan you opened your eyes to an unmade bed and curtains wide open to the infuriating morning sun. Needles prickling your throat, you say up only to be interrupted by the smell of bacon, the heavenly grease so inviting that your dry mouth watered instantly.

Why was someone making bacon at your home? Last you checked you lived alone.

Slow as molasses, you got out of bed, your eyes zoning onto the glass of water and a few painkillers sat on your bedside table. Without further ado, you drowned the glass, the relief near instant.

And with the relief came the memories. Whiskey. Wuthering Heights. Jungkook. Confessions. Spreader bars. And Jungkook’s words that were no longer so innocent in the morning light.

“Cause you’re making me hard and I need you to be sober when I tell you I love you too.”

Holy. Fuck. Was that real? Did Jungkook really just confess to you? Did you really feel him when he pulled you close last night?

All semblance of a hangover dissolved in the sudden adrenaline rushing through you, pumping your heart into a frenzy that propelled your legs to carry you to the kitchen. Jungkook stood at the stove, frying bacon as he hummed something under his breath. You stared at him as he worked undisturbed, frying bacon, before snapping his fingers and rushing to the plastic bag at the end of your breakfast nook.

You had decided to watch him quietly but as soon as he pulled out the red box, laughter bubbled through you, effervescent and fizzling. He stared at you, joining you with his own giggles as he walked over waving the box of cereal.

“Trix for my Trix,” he said with a grin that scrunched his nose and made his eyes disappear. So cute that your heart skipped a beat and your filter disappeared.

“So I made you hard?” you asked, immediately slapping a hand over your mouth. Perhaps you were still drunk. Jungkook on the other hand just chuckled, bowing his head and running his hand over the nape of his neck. His dark hair fell into his face, covering the blush you loved so much.

“Yeah. Yeah you did,” he confirmed sheepishly.

The silence between you was a little stunted; awkward and too long for people who were meant to be best friends. Before long, Jungkook was distracted by the task of making breakfast, his attention on the pan as he cooked scrambled eggs and bacon, plating them for the two of you. The silence continued as you ate, but you weren’t one to hold your tongue for too long, wanting to just rip the bandaid off and address the very giant elephant in the room.

“Can you please reject me already? This is too embarrassing,” you bemoaned, trying to drown the prickly heat that climbed up your neck with orange juice. Jungkook’s fork paused on the way to his mouth, his eyes large and alert. He swallowed loudly, placed the fork back on his plate and then cleared his throat.

“I… I’m not gonna reject you,” he said softly, his tone so gentle it made you curl your hands into fists to brace yourself for the opposite. “I just… I still can’t believe you love me too…”

You always read about how time slows when you are having a stroke. But you were also meant to smell burnt toast and right now other than the smell of the delicious breakfast in front of you, there was nothing suspicious. Yet, your heart was racing, your palms were sweating and you could feel your legs quivering even when you were sitting down.

“Too?” you asked in disbelief and he nodded, smiling but infuriatingly quiet. Slamming your fist on the table, much to Jungkook’s amusement, you glared at him. “Please spell it out like I spelled it out for you,” you seethed.

“Yes, Trix. I love you. Ever since you walked into my dorm room two days after we met, pulled the plug on my PC, made me lose my ranked game and demanded I go outside and make new friends,” he teased with an eye roll.

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Yes. If you stayed last night instead of running back here and reenacting Doctor Sleep, we could’ve talked it out,” he grumbled, the smile still ever present. With a shake of his head, he stood up, making his way over to you and pulling you up from your seat. Eyes blinking and hands shaking, you looked up at him, your skin burning where it touched you – one hand on the small of your back and the other at the nape of your neck. His thumb caressed your jaw as his eyes traced over your face.

You felt light headed, your breaths too quick to catch, each nerve ending sparking relentlessly. You bit your lip in an anticipation that only made Jungkook move slower, leaning closer and closer till his nose was brushing against yours lightly. His lips barely touched yours and you were frozen, relishing his breath on your skin, fingers curling into the material of his shirt on his chest.

“Kiss me,” you requested, earning a giggle from your tease of a best friend.

“Okay,” he whispered, finally sealing your lips. It wasn’t the rough kiss of your fantasies, nor gentle innocence of your daydreams. It was searing, tilting your world on its axis. It felt like he was breathing fire into you, yet your whole body was erupting into goosebumps. It felt like colours bursting in the wind.

It was life changing and you wanted more.

Wrapping your arms around his neck, you stood on your toes to deepen the kiss and he easily acquiesced, his arms fitting perfectly around your waist. His lips moved against yours, the tip of his nose grazing ever so lightly against your cheek. When you moaned against him, too overwhelmed to see anything but stars, he picked you up and placed you on the table, easily fitting between your legs. With a hand on your neck, his thumb gently pulled at your chin till his tongue met yours, making you shiver so violently that he broke away with a laugh, his forehead resting on yours as he caught his breath.

“More,” you asked and his lips met yours once again. This was better than anything you could've ever imagined. You didn’t know how long you kissed, but all you knew was that you never wanted to stop. Especially when he nipped your lower lip in a way that sent a current zapping all the way down to your toes. And then his lips slowed until he was pecking at you, once, twice, three times, his hands cradling your jaw.

Dazed, all you could say was, “Are you going to fuck me on this table?” and Jungkook laughed, loud and boisterous, hugging you to his chest. And what a great chest it was.

“But don’t I need to go get a spreader bar and some bondage tape for that?” he asked with a grin, kissing your forehead, once, twice, three times.

“I mean… we could do that next time?”

“If you think after years of being in love with you, I’m going to let you have your first time on the kitchen table, you are sorely mistaken, Trix,” he replied, a finger coming up to boop your nose.

“Virginity is a social construct!” you protested, but Jungkook just shook his head, kissing away your complaints.

“You fell in love with a romantic, so let me romance you,” he whispered, hands tangled with yours, his words sending a warmth through you.

You never thought you would be someone who would enjoy being romanced. But when Jungkook drove you to the park for your first date with a picnic he had packed from his early morning grocery run, he proved you wrong. Sitting on the grass with Jungkook’s arm around you, you thought about all the books in your collection, and how with their endless words they still couldn’t capture the glow of your love fulfilled.

Perhaps reality was better than pretty hallucinations after all.

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outrowingss · 2 years ago

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What’s the real history with Thomas Seymour proposing marriage to Elizabeth after Catherine’s death?

I’m confused seeing people say real life Elizabeth didn’t (or wouldn’t have) accepted Seymour’s proposal like in Becoming Elizabeth because she was deliberately ambiguous with her answers about him wanting to marry her. Is that from her saying she would never marry without permission from the Privy Council? I assumed that was from the Tyrwhitt interviews and she meant ‘obviously I wasn’t planning a marriage with him cause if he’d suggested it I’d have said we had to ask the council’. Because why would she need to give some kind of ambiguous or cautious answer so as to not incriminate herself by admitting knowledge that he wanted to marry, unless she had at the least entertained the idea in some way.

Hello anon - first of all i'm sorry for taking to long to reply, i've been at work and i wanted to try and give a proper answer rather than just giving you a short one.

Theres belief that Thomas Seymour originally had asked Elizabeth to marry him in February 1547 which she rejected him claiming she was still in mourning for her father - however this comes from a 17th Century historian and not a contemporary so therefore we can't verify that this actually happened.

After Catherine Parr's death in 1548, Seymour doesn't immediately dissolve her household and decides that they should now attend Lady Jane Grey, but suspision began to grow he may be looking for a new wife. Kat Ashley, Elizabeth's governess, also encourages Elizabeth to write to Seymour to give her condolences on the death of Catherine, however Elizabeth declined to do so, believing that he didn't need them, she probably also wanted to avoid anymore rumours spreading.

Now unlike in the show, Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour do not see each other again after she leaves Chelsea for Cheshunt. When she comes to London for Christmas 1548, she finds her residence of Durham Palace had been turned into a mint by the Duke of Somerset, Seymour loaned her Seymour Palace and met Elizabeth's cofferer, Thomas Parry (quick note - where is he in BE?). In this meeting, Seymour begins asking Parry about Elizabeth's finances. When Henry VIII died, he left his Mary and Elizabeth a £10,000 dowry if they married. Parry answered his questions as much as he could and then reported to Elizabeth what Seymour was asking. During this conversation, Parry outright asks Elizabeth if she would marry Seymour if the council did not object, and before answering she is said to have looked visibly displeased. Here we get her first ambiguous answer when she says; 'When the time comes to pass i will do as God shall put in my mind.'

On New Years 1548/9 Thomas Parry and Kat Ashley begin to gossip on the subject of Elizabeth and Seymour, here Kat tells Parry why Elizabeth was sent away from Chelsea to the Denny's at Cheshunt. Kat Ashley also began encouraging Elizabeth to consider marrying Seymour and she was pretty persistent on the matter, but Elizabeth again did not give a straight answer, saying that; 'Though he himself would preadventure have me, yet i think the council will not consent to it.'

Soon rumour began to spread of Seymour's plans and he ended up having a confrontation with a member of the Privy Council, John Russell, Earl of Bedford (not Henry Grey as shown in BE), who told Seymour that if he went through with them it could be his 'utter undoing'.

Now we know what happens next, Seymour breaks into Edward VI's chambers, shoots his dog and is arrested and sent to the Tower. Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry are also arrested and sent to the Tower. Elizabeth is questioned by Sir Robert Tyrwhitt about her involvement with Seymour and any possible plans for marriage. In defense of Kat Ashley, although admitting that she had acted irresponsibly, she says that Kat would; 'never have me marry, neither in or out of England, without the consent of the King's Majesty and the Council's'.

During her interrogation, she writes to the Duke of Somerset concerning rumours of her also being imprisoned in the Tower and that she is pregnant with Seymour's child. She refers to these rumours as 'shameful slanders', and asks to come to court so that she may, 'show myself there as i am'. She also asked Somerset to take actions against rumours, which he agreed to do, if she could name those who spread them.

Now the ambiguous answers, her rebuff of Kat's persistance, looking displeased when Parry mentions marrying Seymour and her calling the rumours 'slanders' to me does not seem like she actually wanted to marry Thomas Seymour. Not to mention, there is also evidence that she was made uncomfortable by Seymour's advances, including getting up early to avoid him and writing 'thou touch me not' on a letter.

People do like to say that Elizabeth may have had a crush on Seymour, and blushed at his name being mentioned, she could very well have, but this would not have made her any less of a victim. On the other hand, blushing does not always mean having a crush on someone, it could have been because of discomfort or shame as well.

The ambiguous answers were also something Elizabeth always gave towards the question of marriage, especially after she becomes queen and the council begin pressuring her to marry to secure the succession. It may have been because she did not want to marry at all, which is something she first says to Robert Dudley when she was just eight years old. I don't personally think her ambiguous answers were to avoid her incriminating herself. She was cautious, something the show truly failed to show and did a big injustice to her.

I'm so sorry for the long answer but i wanted to answer as best as i could! If i have made any mistakes/incorrect statements please feel free to correct me!

Sources: Elizabeth The Great, Elizabeth Jenkins (1958) Elizabeth I, Anne Somerset (1991) Elizabeth: Apprenticeship, David Starkey (2000) Elizabeth and Leicester, Sarah Gristwood (2008)

#answers #im also sorry for citing david starkey #but unfortunately his account of the seymour incident is one of the better ones #elizabeth i #tw: csa #becoming elizabeth #thomas seymour #elizabeth tudor

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thmagdalene · 2 years ago

Text

As the man turns to rush back to from wherever he has been cast from, Alice stops him with one measured hand, her grip suddenly all a-force before she rips open the envelope upon noticing James’ hand. With rushed observation, her heart aches — and with an instant need to have her word heard, she tells the man to wait for her — to have a drink and some bread to replenish his nourishment before she scrambles back to her writing table, fetching paper and ink as she takes a hurried hand, her penmanship worse for wear, her eyes strained with the thought of what was going on. Her children, safely tucked back at Wulf Hall, were beyond the primary reach of court and the naysayers who would use the lack of King and a female heir to their advantage. With the edge of her pen scratching against the smooth surface, Alice took little care in the quality of the piece, rather allowing ink blots and smudges to make their mark, as if to express just how she felt without the addition of pretty words.

To mine Heart.

Whenever I left thou at court I always thought, or believed, that the hardest ache was upon my person — that to be alone with a Seymour was quite enough for one long torture. Now, that thou hast finally left me behind, I see that thy venture was never so easy on yourself. Though I walk such familiar halls, there is nay joy for there is a lack of my true happiness. Keep this letter pressed between skin and cloth, for I cannot help but confess how I have missed thee as I miss my own offspring (Arthur and Catherine have gone to Wulf Hall for their protection, without thou I see little hope in a victory against the webs of intrigue sprouting in every shadow)

[the following is smudged, as if a finger has been brushed to disguise the words] If my husband learns of our reunion, I will be forced to his side like a dog on a leash, and I will not have it again. I am yours, James, for now and then the afterlife. I do not ask why thou are away from me, or where thou are over the untameable ocean.

Just return to me with haste, have Poseidon himself drag thy ship to my sweet haven where I await thy embrace in the same manner as when we had first met. I hope all goes well, and that Walsingham, de Vere and Lady Percy do thou justice, though I do not know the Lady very well. I must be quick, your man waits by my door with little patience to return with other such missives, of what I imagine belong in the hand of the princess, who seems to have settled into her brother’s throne like a cat within the glow of a Summer’s heat. Do with this information as thou will, tell Walsingham that I have his wife and daughter in my best interests, that I do all for ourselves. My love for thou comes in waves, thy loss akin to a phantom pain in my side. It is as if I have lost mine hands, mine feet, mine mouth and mine breast. I am yours, James. And will wait for thou as thy burning lighthouse.

Alice Parr

Kissing the paper, she closes it with a plain wax seal, refusing the one of her husband as she rises to pass the letter back. “Make haste, go to your master without pause. We are in need of our Councilmen,” Alice commands, before being left quite alone, without her children and without her lover.

for: @thmagdalene

a letter, marked by an unfortunate residence in an unfortunate place, is delivered under instruction, directly to the lady herself; as to avoid any detection by her odious spouse.

Dearest Alice,

The people here function in lower positions which degrade morality - I safeguard myself from the Florentine's debasement of all sacred. Concerning the identity of the pretender, I have as of yet entertained a suitable answer to be delivered; I neither entertain nor care for this visit, but for that question. The Percy girl is a surprising presence - I own I was not prepared. With all her fire, she is sensible and severe; she tramples Julian under heel. I do not doubt he would be averse to sharing her fire - she shines in her best in this presence. Their amusing and well-acted scenes of antipathy cover my deficiency in interest, and my obvious relief of direction, in your absence.

I long for the delicate life of your complexion - your letter alone shall rouse me; I am listless, servant to sloth and whatever beast love and lust bear as a bastard. The devils which find tenement in me, cry sore and; yet they still refused to be exercised. If so much unholiness can rise from my person, may not an equal influx of a good, sacred essence, one day be brought forth? I, the volatile, pleasure loving little man; I am apologetic, repentant - my contrition is that I have left your side, but the bed I occupy is one I unlawfully claim. I think only of you. Your hair, flying loose in combat or revelry, is still an angel's hair; glorious, under a halo. Place you now before any slug or lady, and one would witness you cut through the masses like a scimitar through flesh. With malicious intent, you may think I pen thee- I do not possess as many faults as I wish. I do not trouble myself with the loss of dignity in my missives; my veins are dark with a tincture, the essence of love. It is not a mere tenderness I feel for you - but of a stronger, more formidable sentiment, who is seated not only in my heart, but in my head. Unblushingly I would carry on a system of deceit and subrafuge to love you; I posses the art of making the most of what I know.

It has been remarked I am quite the specimen - I have no control over my passions. The obstinacy of my sex is to love within confines; I enter into a strong battle with it, of exaction and the expulsion of impulse. What does it matter if I fail in my pursuit of your heart? It would do me good to fail. I shall make a simpleton, an example of myself - pay whatever fine, in knowledge I extended to you every inch of my person. I am by nature a cypher; I deny all the reclusive peace of knowing my true person. Yet it would take the darkest angel of God's kingdom, demanding his pound of flesh, to extract all of me I have given you. There is no higher starting point than the one your love affords me - dear Alice, do I have an ounce of reason in these words? I would do well in a reply less emulous of men greater than I; but I am never prudent, when it in involves you.

Recall my warm affection for you as you reserve judgment on this letter - my faith, in your deep excellence. I must tend to the Florentines; they are bearish and repellent. I do not write to show my talents; I wish only, to express my love.

Forever your most humble servant -

With love,

James Cecil

#cecil.#jamescecils #oop!#bd.event003

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