#chapter 42: popped up & smoked up

[xxnghtclls]

Permission

Chapter 41

(Chapter 40; Chapter 42)

True Form Sukuna x Reader

Rating: Explicit

Warning: Graphic Depiction Of Violence

Please see Chapter 1 for tags!

Stains

“You left me waiting for you, despite knowing what happened.” you exhale the smoke against the wall in front of you. “I’m still angry at you.”

“I know.” he looks at you and you know it’s soft, maybe even apologetic, even though you’re only seeing his gaze from the corner of your eyes. “And you’re so pretty like that.” he coos.

“Is that so?” you look into your lap and swallow, knowing if he continues like that you can’t stay angry at him for much longer. Knowing he’s going to punish her, makes you tame as a lamb for him.

Asshole.

“Mhmh.” he hums. “The way you clench your jaw, the way your brows are pressed together. So angry. So cute.”

Fighting hard not to blush instantly at his words, you smack your lips and squint your eyes at him.

“You should’ve seen me slapping that bitch then. I bet it would’ve made you hard.”

He stares at you for a second, his lip twitches in confirmation, before he lowers his head down to you. Red eyes glowing at you before he whispers.

“That’s what happened when I heard what you said to that brat.” he coos, while he gently strokes your jaw.

Heart squeeze.

Your face paints itself in a deep red.

“I wish I would’ve been there, seeing you snap like that. Would’ve loved to shove my cock into that angry, bratty mouth of yours, to push and fuck, until you’re choking. Until I see that fucked out face of yours again. It makes my cocks throb just thinking about it.”

“It does?”

“It does.”

His finger wanders up to brush against your cheek, as you drown in his eyes and words, hating that he can’t make you hate him.

Asshole.

Continue.

“I’m still angry.” you breathe.

“Liar.” he coos, before he leans in, licking your bottom lip. Slowly. Needy.

He sighs, before his left bottom hand gently takes his kiseru back, your fingers brushing against each others in the process.

“She made me bleed.” you mumble. “I want you to make her bleed, too.”

He chuckles.

“So demanding.” he grins, before he wraps his hand around your cheeks, squeezing them. “I’m gonna punish her as I see fit, Princess.” he continues, before taking another puff.

You keep staring and Sukuna huffs at the sight of your lips popping forward, the smoke escaping his mouth in the process, before he lets go of your cheeks.

God.

How you love watching him like that. Being a silly monster with attractive wrinkles in his eyes.

“Are you going to punish your Princess for laying her hands on one of your favourite subordinates?” you whisper into his hooded eyes, while his lips curl back into a smirk. A hungry one.

“If she wants me to.” he coos back, while he tilts his head and furrows his brow.

Your lips part, as you watch him and you nod, almost unnoticeable. He leans impossibly closer.

“Good.” he flares his eyes at you. “Still angry?”

“Always.” you lie a second time.

A purr escapes his throat, before he chuckles. Your King grabs your left wrist with his bottom right hand and pulls you towards him, onto his lap.

And you let him.

With your right hand you pull up the fabric of your kimono, to straddle him. Sitting down on his cross legged thighs, he grabs your ass and pulls you flush against him. You gasp, as you feel his bulge beneath your cunt. So incredibly hard and huge, as his dicks press against the straining fabric of his pants beneath his kimono.

You almost feel his pulse.

Throb.

Sukuna’s previous actions and words already made you feel wet between your thighs, but now feeling how needy he is for you, makes you clench against the fabric of his robe.

His precious robe.

“Your kimono is going to be a mess, my King.” you breathe, while he leans back, propping himself up on the elbows of his upper pair of arms. “Because I can feel you being hard for me. They’re making me so wet for you.”

“Soaking.” he corrects you, his voice a breath, while you feel him shifting his legs behind you.

“Soaking.” you repeat even quieter, before he gently bucks his hips up, his bulge pressing harder against you. You fall forward, your small hands meet his chest for support.

“Ah!” you whimper at the friction and you know you already left a stain. The white fabric feels so soft against your bare folds, just like his bare skin.

His hooded red eyes watch you intently, as he bucks his hip another time, only to give you a little bit of friction. His chest keeps rising and falling beneath your hands and you see him opening his mouth slightly.

He‘s enjoying this.

You breathe heavily, while sitting on top of him and after a moment, you notice his motions became still. Desperate eyes find red aroused ones, pupils blown, before Sukuna nudges his head in your direction.

Oh.

His bottom pair of hands find your knees and his fingers brush against them over and over again, so gentle, before you start moving.

Ride me, the moment on his throne replays in your head, as you start to slowly rub yourself against him.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

Sukuna keeps watching you, his facial features twitching in arousal and his breath becoming audible, just like yours. You start to moan silently.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

It’s quiet in your room, only your aroused breaths and the friction on the fabric is heard. You feel your cheeks burning, as you keep looking into Sukuna’s lust ridden face.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

Your movement causes a small wrinkle to form in the fabric under your oozing cunt. It pokes into your hole again and again. With every motion you make.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

Thighs start to tremble, as the feeling in your cunt increases. The little wrinkle keeps moving, his dicks start twitching.

“Oh god.” you whisper, as you let your eyes fall shut to drown in the pleasure, as the knot in your abdomen keeps tightening and tightening.

Sukuna groans at this needy sight of yours and you notice his fingers now digging harshly into your knees and the flesh of your thighs. Feeling his legs shifting, you open your eyes slightly, still looking down and see how he impatiently fiddles with his remaining fingers. You look back up to his face, his facial expression so sinister and tense.

He’s about to snap. He can barely control himself.

“My Ki-“

“Keep going.” he growls aggressively, while bucking his hips up into you another time, making you squeak loudly.

“Agh!” you whine, as you continue to work yourself on his fabric.

You feel good, but you’d feel better with his cocks pounding you into unconsciousness. They twitch under your cunt and you keep rubbing yourself, while your hands find his face and you lean forward.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

���Let’s just fuck.” you whimper quietly. “P-Please, my Love.”

He’s tensing up, you feel it so intensely, but he just sneers at you.

“I said keep going.” he growls, before the hands on your knees suddenly find your ass, before he starts rubbing you harsher against him.

You moan loudly, his actions being so unexpected and rough.

Back and forth.Back and forth.Back and forth.

“Fffuck.” you moan. “Please, my King, I need you inside me.” you whine into his face, while your hands find their way back to his chest, fingers crawling inside of his kimono and pushing the fabric apart, ready to undress him. His cocks twitch heavily beneath your cunt and it’s almost enough to send you over the edge. Sukuna doesn’t respond to your plea, just grunts and growls at the friction and the sight of you. That tiny wrinkle tickles and probes against your hole.

You’re close.

Back and forth.Back and forth.Back and forth.

“Is this my punishment?” you whine so close to your orgasm, while he keeps moving you, so desperate to make you cum against him.

“No. It‘s mine.” he growls, moving faster. “For making you wait for me.”

“Wha-? AAAhh!” you cum hard against his white kimono, creaming all over it with your essence, your hole desperately trying to grab and clench around his dicks beneath. He groans in sync with you, watching you come undone on top of him.

You pant heavily, almost unable to hold yourself up against his chest. The orgasm was forceful, but not as satisfying as it would’ve been with his dicks inside you.

You’re still hungry.

Sukuna, being breathless himself, gently pushes you off his lap, only to reveal a creamy stain on the white fabric. Just like you expected. A hand on his palm forms, to lick up the mess.

You let yourself fall and roll onto your futon right next to you, before you elevate your head and watch him.

“What were you saying?” you ask breathlessly, while Sukuna stands up. His words were so unexpected, but so hot to you.

“Your punishment comes later.” he mumbles, while he throws you an angry glance and walks out of your chambers without further explanation.

Your door slides shut.

What?

Confusion paints your face, before a giggle builds up in your throat and you can’t help to let it out.

“What a bastard.” you laugh to yourself, while thinking of his angry face as he walked out. “Ahahahah, so angry and so horny.”

You look down and see your exposed legs and cunt, before throwing your head back in another wave of laughter.

“His punishment. Ksksksksks.” cheeks already start to hurt, before you turn around on your stomach. “What a cute bastard.”

You calm down and think about the punishment you’re going to receive. At your call. You think and think and slowly, a specific thought comes into your mind and you smile to yourself.

Where did he go? With that stain on his kimono?

You snort at your thoughts, before you remember, that you’re still bloody all over your face. Getting up, you go to the bowl of water and undress yourself. Taking the cloth, you start cleaning yourself, your face, your tits, beneath your armpits, between your thighs. After you’re clean, you put on a new kimono and decide to search for Akiko, to apologise one more time for your behaviour.

Walking into the halls and past the garden, you see that it’s already evening.

Maybe she’s gonna get his dinner soon.

Looking around in this section of the shrine, you can’t find her. You turn and walk to the door that’s leading to the throne room. Opening the door quietly, you can hear voices mumbling, before you poke your head in.

Sukuna is sitting on the top of the mountain of skulls upon his throne, Uraume is standing right next to him and they seem to discuss something, but you can’t make out what it is. The faint echo of the halls making it impossible to understand it. Your King immediately stops talking as soon as he notices you. A familiar squeeze on your heart gently knocks the breath out of you, before he nudges his head to you, motioning you to keep out.

“My apologies.” you say, bowing your head and closing the door in front of you again.

You sigh.

What kind of business?, you ask yourself again, while walking into the other part of the shrine.

He just keeps sitting on his throne with a pussy stain on his robe. Just like that. He must be horny.

Once again, you snort at your own thoughts, while heading to the kitchen. Chewing on your lip, you hope to find Akiko soon, since you’re not allowed in this section of the shrine at this time of day.

You keep walking and suddenly, a familiar squeaking rolls over the stone floor. Nervously, you keep looking until Akiko turns around the corner with his dinner, exactly as you hoped.

“My Lady!” she whispers, relieved to see you.

“Akiko!” you smile at her quietly. “Are you okay? What happened in the kitchen?”

She stops to tell you about it, but you motion her to keep going in order to get out of these halls.

“I’m okay, she wasn’t in the kitchen. The maid commented that she’s been in her room all day.” Akiko explains.

“Huh.” you hum in surprise.

“I got his dinner and quickly went out. The atmosphere seemed a bit tense.” she continues and you eye her with worry.

“Be careful, yes?” you say seriously.

“I will, my Lady.” she responds and bows her head slightly.

Both of you turn the corner to the hall leading to his chambers, as suddenly the doors to the throne room open. Sukuna walks out along with Uraume behind him. Your eyes meet, before you vanish behind the corner. The speed of his footsteps increase slightly, until he appears walking next to Akiko, looking down to her.

“Mhm. Dinner.” he coos, looming over her and flashing his teeth in a grin, unable for her to see since she lowered her face.

You glare at him, while his upper pair of eyes seek your face, his bottom pair of eyes stay pinned at Akiko. He starts chuckling at your sinister face, while the three of you keep walking to his chambers.

Not a further word is spoken.

The sound of his door sliding shut.

The cart in the middle of the room like it should be. Akiko left. Only a human and a curse left in this room.

You stand at the opened garden door, watching the sunset, while you hear clatter of the plates and how Sukuna starts to eat.

Dinner.

“Are you growing impatient?” you ask. “To eat her I mean.”

Crack.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to hear the answer to, Princess.” he munches.

Your heartbeat skips. His answer makes you grow nervous.

“Unfortunately, I told you that it’s gonna happen whenever you like me to.” he continues, calm. “So, do as you please. She’s yours.”

You huff.

He was just messing with me.

Sukuna’s munching sounds grow louder in your head, as if you’re standing right next to his stomach mouth. Indulging, feasting, devouring.

“Why don’t you just eat that bitch?” you mumble quietly to yourself, not even intending for him to hear it.

The sun sets, the sky turns dark, the nature of the night starts to sing.

Sukuna swallows.

“I told you.” he grumbles.

“Did you? Not really.” you respond, still having your back turned to him.

A pause, until his feet start walking up to you, until you suddenly feel his hand grab the back of your neck and his lips against your ear.

“Don’t question me.” he whispers, his tone threatening. You turn around to him and muster his face for a second.

“I do as I please.” you whisper back. Confidently.

His lip twitches, before you feel the incredible need to press your lips against his.

And you do.

He groans against the kiss, if it’s out of anger or arousal, you don’t know, but you press yourself harder against him. The kiss is hungry, he bites your lip and you lick his tongue, tasting the remaining blood of his meal. The taste ignites something in you. His hand shifts, chocking your throat now and you grow weak. His other hands grab your body too, your waist, your ass, the side of your ribcage. You feel the blood flow to your brain decrease, makes you dizzy in your head and willing to be overpowered by him. Hungry hisses and groans are exchanged between your open mouths until you break the kiss.

“You said you’re going to punish me if I want you to.” you stare hungry into his eyes. Sukuna impatiently catches your bottom lip between his teeth, before he nods. His expression turns so needy, his brows furrowed, his pupils blown.

He needs to fuck. And I want, too.

But not here.

“Please walk with me first, my King.” you mouth against his cheek, before stepping away from him. His grip on you loosens up, letting you know he admitted to your plea. With a final look into his eyes, you turn around and walk to the door.

Your hand slides the door open and you pause, turning your head slightly to your King.

“My punishment isn’t due in your chambers.” you say, before you start to walk into the halls.

Into the darkness, so quiet.

Sukuna follows you, only a few steps after you and still you feel this incredible menacing energy looming over you.

He needs you as much as you need him.

Needs to fuck you, as much as you want to be fucked.

And you know exactly where you want it.

Because you’re ready for war.

You walk and walk, with a slow pace, step by step. At the end of the halls, you turn right and open the door. Sukuna keeps following you wordlessly. Your fingers find the knot of your obi, untying it and throwing it on the floor.

A dark, but quiet purr escapes his chest and you keep walking. Another step and you start to undress your robe, leaving every piece of your kimono on the floor, until you’re naked. Your exposed skin, engulfed in darkness, only to be shined upon the moonlight through the spaces of the wall.

Almost there.

As you reach the desired door, you turn around and you see how Sukuna’s tall figure increases his speed and walks towards you. Fast.

Step. Step. Step.

He approaches you, hoists you up and slams you against the wall. His mouth smashes against yours, purring and devouring you in the darkness of these halls.

So impatient.

You throw your arms around his neck and let yourself drown in his actions. He presses himself so hard against you, it almost hurts. Kissing you so deep and intensely. So needy and hungry. Lips and tongues and teeth meeting each other to eat and feast without consuming. His cannibalistic saliva suddenly tastes so good to you, so special and sweet.

Oh god how much it turns you on.

Your hands are rushing to his kimono, parting the fabric on his chest. Fingers slipping under his robe, feeling his muscles underneath, the way he breathes so fast and the way his heart beats in excitement. Your hands slide up to his neck and get a hold of his face, before you break the kiss.

“Thank you for those motherfucking kois.” you breathe in a raspy voice, before he slams his lips back onto yours. His bottom pair of hands that are holding you up, squeeze your ass and press you harder against him. Your cunt drools onto the fabric of his kimono again, until you feel his stomach tongue slipping out through the gap of the fabric.

“Ah!” a muffled cry into his mouth makes him groan back against yours, as his tongue penetrates your cunt.

“Go on, let me know how well I’m treating you, Princess.” he breathes against your opened, moaning mouth. “Before I’m gonna pound these little holes so hard you won’t be able to speak.”

You gasp at his words and the feeling between your thighs. Even now you’re almost speechless, as he keeps tongue fucking your soaking hole.

“You treat me so well …hah… Almost like…” you pant, moaning and whining in between, feeling his tongue swirling around in you. “As…As if I’m your Queen, my King.” you dig your nails into his neck.

A satisfied groan escapes his throat, before he starts kissing and licking at your neck. So hastily and impatient, as if he’s got no time to lose anymore. You squeeze your arms around his neck in pleasure, before you whimper in his ear.

“Take me inside, my Love.” you bite the shell of his ear. “Take me hard.”

“Oh yeah?” he bites down your collarbone, before he leans back and grabs your jaw. “As you wish, Princess.” he hisses, before he opens the door to the kitchen and walks inside with your legs still wrapped around him. Sukuna kisses you, his motions turning more and more aggressive, before he harshly slams you on the wooden counter in the middle, causing it to move and scrape slightly across the floor, shoving off all the cutlery, utensils and plates that were sitting on the surface. They hit the ground, so loud, bursting and clashing, while Sukuna’s lips never leave yours. You hear apples roll around, before the sound of Sukuna flicking his fingers hits your ear. A spark ignites the one candle that’s still been sitting on the eating table in the corner. It’s not bright, but enough for you to see that huge curse in front of you, orange colours flickering against his figure, while his eyes stare so hungry at you. Sukuna is about to make you his once again.

In their kitchen.

And it’s exactly what you want.

He keeps kissing you roughly, before he pulls at your feet, making you fall off the counter again. With a harsh movement, he turns you around and bends you over it, while you hear how his other hand hastily pushes down the pants beneath his kimono to finally free his throbbing dicks.

Slap!

His other right hand stings at your rear and you whine, before you feel him grab your hips and pulls your ass further up to meet his dicks. Another hand of his grabs the back of your neck, pressing your face against the surface you’re lying on. Your mind can’t follow what’s happening, almost clouded from him manhandling you like that and you love it. The pleasure overrides your brain.

Spit!

Sukuna’s saliva meets your clenching asshole and he groans at the sight. You feel it dripping down to your soaking pussy and you’re ready, so ready for him. He guides the tip of one of his dicks and rubs it against your tight asshole, coating it with his spit, before he starts to push. Asshole only.

And you whine, it’s been a while since you took his dick in your ass, but you trust him not to hurt you. His ragged breathing turns you on more and more, as he keeps pushing and pushing. You almost feel his hands trembling on the parts he has his grip on you. Suddenly, another hand joins. You feel a tongue lick against your slowly stretching hole, licking and wetting it more and more and you moan. It feels better and better with every second, the stretch and pressure of his dick inside you, the tongue easing the pain his girth brings with.

“You’re so good to me, my King, my Love.” you moan, desperately searching for something to hold on to.

“Ahhh…” Sukuna groans deeply at your words, his voice jittering and you know he’s still holding back.

He keeps pushing and pushing and soon, you feel him fully inserted in you, twitching in you.

“Sing into my ears.” he growls “…if you can.”

And suddenly he starts pounding your hole so hard, that a scream escapes your throat, before it knocks the wind out of your lungs.

Spit!

He smacks his lips and another load of spit meets his moving cock, coating it more and more. You’re gasping, want to moan, but nothing comes out, as he takes you so good and hard, just like you wanted. Nails scratch across the wooden surface, leaving marks, before your hands desperately try to grab around the edge in front of you, to get a grip on reality, to stay in the here and now, but he doesn’t let you.

“Not going anywhere, Princess.” Sukuna growls, as he notices your attempt and grabs your wrists with his left upper hand and crosses them behind your back. You can’t move, hands pinned behind your back, your face being pressed against the counter, your feet dangling in the air from the way he’s holding your hips. Suddenly, your mind comes back, as you start to feel his balls slapping harshly against your clit with every thrust.

SlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlap

Pleasure doubles and shoots through your body like lightning, making you come back to life, making you start to scream and shake of pleasure and arousal.

“That’s right, y/n. Keep singing.” he growls, while he keeps pounding and his balls keep slapping, echoing in the whole room. Your cunt clenches, so needy, so desperately. It drives you fucking insane.

SlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlap

“Fuuuu-ah-ah-ah-ckkkk!” you cry, as the motion makes you start to drool on the counter beneath your face. He chuckles at the sight.

“Nasty bitch.” he growls. “Been thinking about you all day. This fucking stain on my kimono being the constant reminder of how much you want me.” he leans down to your ear. “Being the constant reminder of how much I want you.”

“Oh god.” you moan loudly.

“Of how much I need to feel and fuck you…” he keeps cooing, while emphasising every word with a thrust. “…need to devour you.”

A moan gets stuck in your throat, as you hear his words and your heart skips a beat. You press your eyes shut, your brows furrowed in pleasure, while your mouth is wide open, as he keeps ramming himself into your ass like an animal. You feel you’re about to cum any second and not at all during this sweet torture that he keeps putting you in.

And suddenly he stops.

You rip your eyes open, inhale loudly as if you’ve been underwater for too long. Going slow now, stroking soothing circles on the skin of your hips with his fingers.

So cruel.

So sensual.

He presses your ass against him, and you feel the length of his upper dick poking against your tailbone. A loud, raspy exhale escapes his throat, as he starts to roll and circle and sway his hips, reaching into you so deep, making you feel like he’s moving your insides. His bottom dick inside you twitches and you gasp. A high pitched whine shoots through your chest every now and then, as he keeps moving and moving. Lustful growls and snarls echo in your ears, making you grow wetter and wetter by the second, making you feel as if the juice of your cunt is going to drip down to the floor soon. And you hope it does.

You tremble in his hold, his ragged breathing letting you know he’s close.

“You want me so bad?” you whine. “Just tell me that you’re mine.”

With all the sanity you have left in you, you start circling your ass around his cock. Sukuna moans at your actions and lets go of your neck and wrists and hips, to get a better look at what you do to him.

Circle. Circle.

“Fffuck… look at you.” he whispers.

“I know you could. I know you are.” you continue teasing him. After a moment, he groans loudly.

“Not yet, my Princess.” he hisses.

Circle. Circle.

“Are you close?” you moan.

“So close.” he admits with a jittering voice.

With his answer, you stop your motions and carefully roll onto your back, keeping his cock inside your ass. Sukuna hisses and you clench, as you see his lust ridden face and his tattooed chest beneath the parted fabric of his kimono. The left side of his robe almost falling off his shoulders.

It looks so messy. So untidy.

So sexy.

You spread your legs and wrap them around him, pulling him a step closer to you. Propping yourself up on your elbows, you reach for his upper dick with your left hand and stroke it a few times, before you lead it to your unattended cunt. Instinctively he slides through your slick a few times, coating his dick with your essence. You gasp, before you look at him seductively.

“Make sure they’ll hear it.” you mutter and his red eyes flare up, as a sadistic grin spreads on his face.

“So this is what this is about.” he hisses, while he finally inserts his upper dick into you. “Gonna use me to get revenge for that fucking brat.”

His grin.

He looks so proud.

You can’t hide the smirk that crawls into your face, before Sukuna grabs your hips again and starts fucking you in a steady pace. The friction in your needy cunt distorts the look on your face back into pleasure. Your mouth is opened wide, your brows furrowed in lust, while you keep staring at him. His lip twitches at your sight and your bouncing tits and your eyes wander down his torso, how it moves beneath the fabric of his kimono. You could cum at the sight of him alone.

“So fucking hot.” you mumble, as you look back into his eyes and his grip on your hips grows tighter. “Fucking me so good, so so good.”

“Argh” he growls, while his eyes pierce into yours, his expression starts to mimic your pleasured one.

You lay down on your back, tilt your head at him and lick your upper lip slowly and seductively.

“Divine.”

His lip twitches, before he growls loudly at the sight of you. Sukuna increases his pace, before grabbing your tits and squeezes them with his upper pair of hands.

“Look at you. My sweet Princess. So fucking devious.” a groan that turns into a chuckle. It makes you grin back at him, although you have to concentrate so intensely not to melt from his motions.

Slap!

A harsh thrusts makes you moan out loud, makes the counter move again, makes you almost lose composure. Sukuna starts to pinch your nipples.

“Doing such filthy things ’cause she wants to be my little Queen so so bad.” his raspy voice, you could cum any second. Sukuna moves his left hand from your nipples up to your faces and pushes his thumb into your mouth. You suck and lick mindlessly, like the needy whore you are for him.

And he enjoys it so, so much.

You moan around his thumb, making him moan out loud, while he keeps thrusting and thrusting.

Devious.

You bite into his finger. A loud groan followed by a chuckle shoots through his throat.

“That’s my girl. Fuck.” he growls so deeply, before he leans over you, grabbing your hands with his and pins them down besides your head.

SlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlap

With animalistic noises he starts fucking you so violently, while he intertwines his fingers with yours. The counter keeps moving with every thrust and you scream and cry. Tears forming in your eyes, as his dicks keep pounding and punching your insides so good and deep, that your eyes are about to roll back. His kimono hangs down onto your naked body, the soft fabric tickling your skin. Your voice so loud for them to hear, for everyone to hear, letting everyone know how good he treats you.

His, his Princess, his Queen.

And he does it, too. Doesn’t hold back the noises that keep building up in his chest. Keeps moaning and growling and snarling, just for you. Your pussy so wet and your ass so tight for him, it makes your heart squeeze. Makes your heart squeeze to let you know how much he needed you and perhaps how much he loves you.

And right now, you believe he does. So much.

Because it’s just you and him.

You and him.

“Spread those legs wider for me so I can give you what you fucking want.” he growls aggressively against your face, his hands on your hips moving up, to grab the back of your knees and pushes your legs further apart.

So deep.

SlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlap

And finally you snap.

“Fuuuuck!” you cry and cum around him, as he keeps fucking and fucking. Sukuna doesn’t stop, pants so heavily at your orgasming sight, as he folds you in half, pinning your knees down to meet the surface of the counter.

SlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlapSlap

He moans and moans and pants and breathes. His mouth open wide, his eyes so angry, about to roll back.

“Shower me in it.” you moan in your bliss and it’s making him snap as well.

“You filthy slut! Take it!” he groans so loud and deep, as he let’s go of your body and slips out of your holes. Sukuna pumps himself aggressively, propping his right knee on the counter and shoots his warm cum on your body. You prop yourself back up on your elbows, raise your chin, close your eyes and open your mouth, to catch whatever drops of your Kings seed may land in your face. He moans so loud while doing it, just like you wanted, while the sticky fluid lands not only on your stomach, tits and face, but also on the counter.

Just like I wanted.

Such a mess.

Sukuna calms down, as he squeezes the last drops out of his dicks. He slides his knee off the counter and looks at you with hooded, relaxed eyes, before he tugs his dicks back into his pants and his kimono back into place.

You look at him, breathless, cum staining your face and body. Sliding your index finger across your stomach, coating it in his seed, before you suck it off your finger. Sukuna tilts his head watching you intensely, before he huffs at the sight of you.

You grin, swallowing, before you slide your whole hand across your body and face and smear the cum onto the surface you’re laying on. He keeps watching you, a devious smirk spreads on his lips.

So proud.

“Slut.” he smirks quietly and the way he says it makes your heart flutter.

“What a punishment. I’m curious, if the others enjoyed it as much as I did.” you coo, tilting your head.

Sukuna huffs at your words, shakes his head and turns around. Your eyes follow him, only to see that the door wasn’t closed shut the whole time, making your lip twitch in excitement.

Sliding down the counter, you walk after him. Quietly.

Leaving the mess in the kitchen untouched.

You pick up the pieces of your kimono, while you silently make your way back into his chambers. Sukuna is walking a few steps ahead of you and you can’t help to admire this tall man over and over again. The way he walks, the way the moonlight compliments the pink shade of his hair and figure. So peaceful. The things he’s done just minutes ago being unimaginable right now.

He arrives at his door, slides it open and without looking at you, he walks in.

And the door stays open.

For you.

[silverwings22]

Caught in the Crosshairs: Chapter 42: Shatter Me- Lindsey Sterling

Series warnings: Smut, mind control, canon typical violence, childhood trauma, language, chronic illness

Chapter warnings: The horrors of war, injury, disability, violence, discussion of death

Previous Chapter:

Next Chapter:

"They're tracking us." Hunter's voice was low as the Imperial ships swept low, searching for them as darkness fell. The three renegades were hiding in the rubble, resting between sweeps and a flurry of rushed sprints.

"They'll be monitoring comm channels." Miria nodded, leaning against Wrecker’s knees. "We can't risk them overhearing us."

Hunter nodded, touching his comm. "Tech. Plan Double Zero."

"We copy." Was the only reply. 

"I'm not familiar with that plan, dear." Miria wracked her brain for the countless plans she and the Batch had numbered and outlined. Had she forgotten something? Was she losing her mind along with her strength? 

"Radio silence. It's a code phrase, not a plan." Hunter assured her when he heard her breath sharpen. "Something we came up with as cadets."

Wrecker snorted. "I remember that one. Cross said the two zeros looked like boobs, and that was the only thing that could shut him up."

She wanted to laugh and scream at the same time. Oh, that was just like her Crosshair… She pressed a hand to her chest plate. "I see."

Wrecker put a hand on her head. "I miss him too."

She nodded. "I know."

"Sweeps gone. Next dash." Hunter nodded. "I think the ship's over the next ridge."

Miria pulled a set of binocs off Wrecker’s hip as they darted across an open space and darted up the ridge. "Afraid not. But there are Imperials."

"They're setting up a perimeter." Wrecker grumbled. 

"How many explosives do you have?" Hunter cocked his head. 

Wrecker shook his head sadly. "Only a couple smoke bombs."

Miria nudged his hip and passed him the binocs. "What about those?"

A low, rumbling laugh started deep in Wrecker’s chest. "Separatist tanks? Hell yeah!"

Miria smiled faintly. "Quickly, then. Before they start closing the perimeter in."

The three of them quickly started skidding down the ridge side. 

Wrecker and Hunter quickly climbed into the tanks, trying to get at least one running while Miria kept watch on the Imperials. "They're coming around. Hurry." She whispered. 

"This one's dead." Hunter groaned. "No good." 

The Jedi hissed as a bolt of plasma narrowly missed her head. "Wrecker!"

"This one's dead too. But give me that battery pack!"

Hunter nodded. "I'll cover you."

Miria ducked under his arm as he opened fire on the approaching Imperials. The battery Wrecker needed was half stuck in a broken tank chassis, and even with her braces she couldn't get a grip on it. "Hurry!" Wrecker yelled.

Miria swore under her breath again and pulled the knife from her thigh, using it as a pry bar to finally pop it free and throw it to her demolition expert. Then she backed up with Hunter to shoot. 

"I do hate fighting clones." She muttered unhappily. 

"Me too."

Finally, just as she was certain they were going to be overrun, Wrecker got the tank's anti-aircraft gun working and started absolutely destroying everything he saw. 

"Bet you ten credits he kisses that gun when we're back on the ship." Hunter snickered.

"I don't gamble." Miria tried not to laugh. Wrecker would absolutely kiss the gun, like he'd kissed the large proton torpedo on Bracca. "Especially not when I know I'll lose."

They stepped back and let Wrecker have his fun, following his newly cleared path to the ship. 

"This old bird never looked so good." Wrecker grinned. 

"Let's just hurry and get the others." Hunter grumbled. "Tech, transmit your coordinates."

"Sending them now."

Miria sat back with a groan into her chair, wrapping an arm around her middle. 

"You okay, Miri?" Wrecker frowned. 

"I will be." Her response was automatic, uninflected, and concerning. "Just as soon as I see the others safely on board."

Hunter and Wrecker exchanged looks before taking off for the coordinates. 

Tech was limping. Miria's heart went straight to her throat when she spotted her genius leaning heavily on Echo, Omega trailing behind with a sad look on her face. "Tech?!"

"Fractured leg, General. That is all." He said almost sheepishly. "I will be fine."

"Wrecker, help him to the med bay." She swallowed tensely as the other half of the team made it aboard. When her eyes drifted out to the woodline, she spotted a gray-haired man watching them. "Omega, love. Who is that?"

"He helped us. He's one of the survivors." Omega explained, wrapping her arms around the Jedi. "We offered him help too, but he said no. He's trying to stay, and rebuild their way of life. Art, culture… and he gave me this." She held up a kaleidoscope. "He said something that makes you happy is worth more than jewels… we didn't get anything from the war chest, so I guess this is still something good?"

Miria nodded, giving the man a wave to show she was no threat before following Omega inside. "He's right, you know. Credits can't buy happiness."

Omega smiled faintly, glancing at Echo on the bridge. "Yeah…"

Miria sighed. "You should talk to him, dear. There… may be more to the story than what we overheard."

Omega nodded and headed over to Echo, and as Miria headed for her bunk she overheard the corporal saying what Omega needed to hear most of all. "Rescuing you from Kamino was the right decision, Omega. I'd do it all again, given the chance… you're not the reason things are tough right now. You're probably the only reason we're not working for the Empire."

Satisfied there was no lasting damage between siblings, Miria retired to her bunk and hung up her armor, lifting her shirt to inspect her ribs. They were an ugly shade of black and blue, but it seemed nothing was displaced. Her frequent coughing was just going to hurt like a charging mudhorn for a while. 

"You okay?" Hunter walked in from tending Tech in the med bay. 

"Just tired." She dropped her shirt.

"You always say that."

"I'm always tired." 

Hunter sighed and sat in his bunk, across from hers. "You know we have to talk about this."

"An unpleasant inevitability." Miria shifted onto her knees, sliding all the way back to the durasteel wall. Hunter watched her with a look of resignation… she still slept like she was waiting for Crosshair to get in bed next to her. He'd always insisted on sleeping on the outside, as if protecting her from whatever came in the bunkroom door. For Miria, his presence was like a secure door shutting the rest of the galaxy out of their little bubble. Facing him, holding onto each other, they forgot the storms of war and mortality. Nothing mattered, when Crosshair was there, but love.

But that door wasn't closing again, leaving her painfully exposed to whatever judgment Hunter had. 

"Tell me the truth, Miri. What are you planning?"

She closed her eyes. "Nothing at the moment. At least nothing of action… I've only made a few contingencies for after I'm gone."

"Going? Where the hell are you going?!" He didn't mean to sound as harsh as he did, but the idea of her running off alone terrified him. She was their friend, their sister just as much as Omega. 

"To a grave." She met his force with a soft voice. "You know what's happening. I know you do, you can smell blood across the ship. We always knew it would end this way."

"Not like this, Miri. You're a fighter, you can hold out till we find a cure."

"There isn't a cure, Hunter." She whispered. "This is it. This is what it's going to look like… the medical device Tech made isn't helping anymore. I can't use my hands without the braces.” 

“And you still want to fight.” He sighed. 

He felt it when her jaw tightened, an unfamiliar hitch in her breath that sounded a lot more like anger than the edge of tears. “What I want won’t ever be mine.” Her voice started so low, soft but building like a storm gathering strength. “I wanted to build us a home on Naboo. I wanted to keep our team together after the war. I wanted to live!” Her voice cracked, splintered in her throat. It didn’t sound like Miria. She was soft spoken and gentle; she didn’t sound like she was about to collapse in the way that stars did, and take everything around out in the aftermath. Other than one night in 79’s, when she’d been far from sober, he’d never seen her lose control 

Bang.

Hunter’s eyes darted up. Miria’s metal-braced fist had slammed into the small shaving mirror magnetized to the wall next to her. Her eyes were narrowed sharply, body frozen into the position she’d stopped when the punch landed. That wasn’t Miria’s face. That wasn’t Miria’s patience and kindness that Hunter knew so well… that expression was hot rage with nowhere to go but outward. Those were the eyes of someone who’d been scared for so long that they couldn’t tell the difference between fight and flight anymore.

For a split second, before her blood welled up and started running crookedly down the shards of mirror and her wrist, Hunter didn’t see Miria at all. He saw Crosshair. 

Miria’s eyes slowly widened, the woman snapping out of her outburst as quickly as it had come over her. The broken glass made an unpleasant crunching sound when her hand dropped away and she dropped back from her knees to her ass on the mattress. 

“Miri…” Hunter started to reach out, focused on the smell of blood. He had to check her knuckles over, remove any embedded glass, and clean her up. Then he could pick up the broken glass, and everything would be fine… it was a checkless of needed actions, something he could put his hands on and make everything better for her-

When he touched her shoulder, she flinched like he’d burned her and buried face in her hands. Blood smeared down her cheek. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me…”

“It’s okay. Let me see your hand-”

“Don’t touch me.” She kept pulling away as he tried to help, retreating til her back was against the durasteel wall and she’d tucked her head under her arms. “I… I’m so sorry, Hunter. I didn’t mean to. I swear I didn’t mean to.” 

“It’s just a mirror, Miri.” Hunter said gently. “We can get it fixed or replaced.”

Miria slowly shook her head. “It’s not just a mirror, Hunter… something’s wrong with me… I’ve managed to fight the dark side off since I was six years old, even if my body was failing… but now it feels like it’s in my mind.” She closed her eyes. “I’m so scared, Hunter…”

Hunter kept creeping forward, inch by inch, until he was sitting on the foot of her bed right in front of her. “Me too.” He admitted. “But we’ll get through this together, okay? Let me check your hand. Please.”

The woman slowly let him pick up her wrist and bring it over to rest on his knee, averting her eyes while he inspected and bacta-sprayed the ugly gash that split deep between her first and second knuckle. Then he pulled off her brace to bandage the limp hand below, and cleaned the crimson off the durasteel before putting it back on her. “Thank you.” She whispered, head down on her knees.

“Look here. There’s blood on your face.” He leaned over with a bacta wipe and cleaned up her stained cheek. “That’s better. It’s gonna be okay. We can fix it.”

Miria just hugged her knees tighter. “I hope you’re right…” 

[dj-causticchasm]

DJ Screw - Chapter 42: Popped Up & Smoked Up 

Disk 1

1.  I Got 5 On It (Freestyle) - Kay-K, Screw, Hawk & Lil' Keke  2. G Ride - E.S.G  3. N 2 Deep - Compton's Most Wanted & Scarface  4. Outlaws - 2Pac  5. Nigga Sings Tha Blues - Spice 1  6. Unsolved Mysteries - South Circle, 8-Ball, & MJG  7. Let Em Know - E-40  8. I Like To Funk - Kocaine 

Disk 2

1. Busta Free - Rappin Ron & Ant Diddley 2. Ain't No Sunshine - C-Bo 3. Good Times - Twinz 4. Top Down - Too Short 5. Skit 6. Who Got The Camera - Ice Cube 7. What Would You Do - Dogg Pound 8. Ain't No Nigga - UGK 9. Let It Rain - Above The Law 10. West Up (Instrumental)

[nought-shall-go-ill]

⭐️ Would love to hear some director's commentary for The Other Half of the Sky!

And I would love to give some director’s commentary for The Other Half of the Sky, @kay-elle-cee! I am so sorry it has taken so long. I typed out a whole answer to this the other day, only for the app to delete it 😰.

This is also my first time doing a director’s commentary, so if there is some kind of etiquette I’m getting wrong, further apologies! With that all said and one, here are 6 facts about TOHOTs in honour of Chapter 6, which will come out… eventually.

Fact 1: The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad TOHOTS - This story originally started out very differently. I came up with the original plot about a year ago. Lily was still estranged from friends and close to Snape, but she became connected with the Order in a very different way. She was made Potions teacher at Hogwarts and very gradually got close to Transfiguration teacher James who was a single father to Harry after his Muggle wife was murdered. The plot was far more centred around their love story but the other main plot points were there, so I shan’t mention more about that because spoilers! However, I didn’t even start to write that original TOHOTS down. Something just wasn’t right about it. So I tucked it away until I found the missing piece…

Fact 2: I got love for you if you were around in the 80s, the 80s - The 80s culture drives a lot of my love for this fic. And I am wholeheartedly not ashamed of that. It was entirely what it needed to spark some fire into it again. Now, I absolutely do not think a fic needs to be culturally accurate to be interesting. As far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m having a good time, I don’t care how accurate it is with the language or culture. However, I am also a history and linguistics nerd, and I love reading and hearing about this era! And it has been a dream of mine for awhile to write something that really delves into it. With my own bizarre background and educational history, I’m strangely well suited to writing about the variety of people groups introduced in TOHOTS too. I love getting lost in the world of this era and feeling like I’m really there. I can only hope the readers do too. So, sorry Potions teacher Lily, I abandoned you for a Depeche Mode-listening, Mackem Mum-having, Silk Cut-smoking Lily instead and haven’t looked back. (This has also been a great chance for me to connect again with British culture too. Though a born-and-bred Brit, I don’t spend a lot of time interacting with my home country anymore and though I have… mixed feelings about it, it is still nice to connect with it from time to time.)

Fact 3: Lily & Dorcas’ Infinite Playlist - There just might be a scene coming up in Heaven— I mean Elyseum, Caradoc’s club, sometime soon. Maybe. Maybe. And just maybe I’ve made a playlist of songs that will be playing in the club at the time. Maybe. And that playlist just might include maybe such songs as (randomly selected): Olivia Newton-John & The Electric Light Orchestra’s Xanadu; Bucks Fizz’ Making Your Mind Up; The Go-Gos’ We Got the Beat; and Kate Bush’s Babooshka. *Slight spoilers for next chapter* but there is also going to be an adjacent bar attached to the club that plays more alt music, so expect lots of post-punk and new wave, as well as pop!

Fact 4: Honey I Blew Up The Fic - As some people might know this fic originally started off as a The Light Come Shining length one shot. It then became a 12 chapter multi chapter fic. Now, it is currently set to be around 42 chapters long. That’s quite the growth! But honestly, I prefer it this way. This has allowed me to explore far more of Lily’s story away from James, and I personally think it is a stronger story for that. Sure, it would probably need a professional edit if it were a published piece, but we’re here to learn and have fun ne.

Fact 5: Blech - In the name of being honest, I have one thing I dislike about this fic. Most of it I love, but that first paragraph… I just don’t know what I was thinking! I think I was trying to be like the sort of writer I’m not. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit to that, but it felt like something suitable for a director’s commentary. Not everything has to be perfect for you to love it. (Might go back and edit it one day though…)

Fact 6: The Good, the Bad and the Muggle-y - Though it won’t be a huge part of the plot, I also plan to explore Muggleborn reactions to 1980s current affairs in this fic. This might not be popular with everyone, I’m aware. Fanfic is escapism. But a lot of hardships occurred in the 1980s and though TOHOTS Lily is certainly flawed, I just can’t see her ignoring them entirely, at least not forever. In many ways, I want this to contrast canon in that way. Though Harry becomes more and more concerned with the Wizarding World (as he has every right to be), Lily is older and has a different fight to live through. I cannot see a movement that is so concerned with saving Muggle lives not becoming entangled with it… at least slightly. So, do expect more of that Muggle culture to come in and make a bit of a mess as it does.

And that’s it! I hope that is along the right sort of lines for a director’s commentary! I also plan to put out a little snippet later on too, so watch out for it.

[dancer-me]

I posted 842 times in 2021

87 posts created (10%)

755 posts reblogged (90%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 8.7 posts.

I added 1,162 tags in 2021

#0 - 270 posts

#eddie diaz - 194 posts

#evan buckley - 192 posts

#buddie - 121 posts

#911 spoilers - 120 posts

#911 season 5 - 71 posts

#buddie fic - 56 posts

#911 fanfiction - 49 posts

#911fic - 47 posts

#danswers - 42 posts

Longest Tag: 135 characters

#all of them paying rapt attention as i blow their mind with how to make a shared spreadsheet and utilize 'if' statements for efficiency

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

I mean no shade to Taylor Kelly or TK Strand but this is what happens in my brain every time someone abbreviates Taylor Kelly to "TK" in a post and I just think you all should know what's going on.

27 notes • Posted 2021-11-10 19:23:56 GMT

#4

Giving up Ground

cover art by @ronordmann

Part 2: Giving up Ground (read on AO3)

Rating: Mature Category: M/M Relationships: Tarlos, pre-relationship Buddie Chapters: 10/10 Total words: 76,092

Part 2 of Chaotic Energy 911 / 911 lonestar cross-over series.

Eddie was dating Ana. Had been, for almost the last two months. He had told Buck three weeks ago, straight up, that he was planning on romancing Ana at a cabin in the woods for a weekend. Just the two of them. As consenting adults. But after The Elevator Incident, Buck had honestly thought that the feelings between him and Eddie had shifted. He hadn’t thought Eddie would still go. Now, Buck is left to wonder whether it was all just wishful thinking. But his time to agonize over the ‘what ifs’ is cut short when a massive storm front blows in and causes a deadly multi-vehicle collision on a bridge over troubled water. Buck finds he’s glad Eddie isn’t around to see this. Meanwhile, TK is back in Texas. Carlos wants to live with him, he has a close friend in Buck, and life is good. That is, until some bad weather causes road rage in Austin, and TK finds that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

To read Part 1: Express to Nowhere (AO3)

34 notes • Posted 2021-10-03 20:13:19 GMT

#3

For the writing the next 5 sentences thing: "if we survive this, I will kill you"

“If we survive this, I will kill you.”

Buck finished clearing the broken glass from the window before chancing a glance over at Eddie who – fair – was pretty pissed, seeing as they were trapped on the seventh floor of a bayside office building because Buck had thought he heard someone and, spoiler alert: he’d been wrong.

The smoke was suffocating, but the window offered a welcome reprieve to Buck’s lungs as he looked his fill at Eddie’s frowning but still too handsome, soot covered face while the flames crept closer.

Buck reached out his hand and curled his fingers tightly around Eddie’s wrist, pulling him in close with a cheeky, “counterargument – if we survive this, I’ll kiss you,” while he pressed his forehead to Eddie’s, feeling Eddie’s nod and hearing the muttered, “we better live, asshole,” before he was tucked more securely in Eddie’s arms and tumbling out the window and into the bay below.

Buck had barely broken water with a deep gulp of fresh air before Eddie was on top of him; one hand tightly curled in his hair and the other pressed up against his back, but the only thing he could focus on was the hot, wet slide of Eddie’s lips against his.

“I’m never doing that again,” Eddie gasped when he finally pulled away, only to lick his way back into Buck’s mouth in reply after he grinned and asked, “what? Jump out a window or kiss me?”

Send me an ask with the first sentence of a fanfic and I'll write the next 5

40 notes • Posted 2021-08-17 20:45:47 GMT

#2

9-1-1 / Lone Star Fanfic Masterpost

Hi hi! Here's a list of my 9-1-1 / Lone Star fanfics to date on AO3 😊

Buddie

Quarter Life Crisis - Rated G | 1,841 words | Complete

“Quarter life crisis? Really, Buck?”

Truthfully, Buck hadn't meant to offer his two cents to the bickering family, the words had just popped out. But yeah, Buck could remember his quarter life crisis. Only at the time, he'd been pretty sure it was going to be his only life crisis, because the universe had seemed pretty hell bent on ending Evan Buckley.

Alternate universe coda to 4x10 "Parenthood" where Ana Flores is most definitely not in the picture.

(4.10 fix-it, fluff, pre-relationship Buddie, some cute pining)

-

Pull Me Under - Rated T | 3,413 words | Complete

Buck makes the choice to get back under a fire truck to save Eddie.

Eddie hopes that he's enough to save Buck from himself.

(4.14 character introspection, angst and feels, angst with a happy ending, first kiss)

-

Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You - Rated M | 11,871 words | Complete

In which a popcorn flick movie producer is rescued by the 118 and immediately sees the future of his next hit summer movie. He takes a special interest in Firefighters Diaz and Buckley.

(fluff, humour, outsider POV on Buddie, getting together, first kiss, borderline crack but I regret nothing)

Buddie & Tarlos

Chaotic Energy Series

Buck didn't know who 'Buck' was anymore, both in and out of the uniform. Well, other than reckless. Hard to love. A bad friend.

Buck finds an unexpected kindred spirit in TK Strand, which would be great if the universe wasn’t working in overdrive to get rid of them both on an individual basis that is only exacerbated when the two of them are together.

This is the journey of the chaos that is Buck and TK as Buck works to rediscover who he is and maybe, just maybe, find his own happily ever after with the love of his life along the way.

Part 1: Express to Nowhere - Rated T | 22,479 words | Complete

In which Buck and TK form a lasting friendship after they get trapped in an elevator together at a first responder's convention in California. The 118 and 126 work together to rescue them.

(established Tarlos, pre-relationship Buddie, H/C, angst and humour, TK and Buck bromance, not actually unrequited love but Eddie is dumb).

Part 2: Giving up Ground - Rated M | 32,000+ words | WIP

In which Buck and TK face separate weather related collision calls. Tarlos takes the next step in their relationship, but Buck can't help but feel like he's somehow given up ground in his friendship with Eddie.

(established Tarlos, pre-relationship Buddie, angst, hurt TK and Buck, mutual pining, Eddie is less dumb but still up there, H/C and H no C).

51 notes • Posted 2021-07-15 21:49:44 GMT

#1

Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You

Inspired by @ktinaj and this post of hers!

In which a popcorn flick movie producer is rescued by the 118 and immediately sees the future of his next hit summer movie. He takes a special interest in Firefighters Diaz and Buckley.

Rated: M | M/M Buddie | 11,870 words | one-shot

The speakers in the SUV were blaring 80’s hard rock, volume turned up to max, loud enough to be heard over the buffeting of the wind through the open windows as the SUV sped down the Pacific Coast Highway.

Some would say that Tucker Davies was an unlucky man.

Most, really, would agree that having his vehicle careened off the side of the road by a sudden rockslide and balanced precariously on the edge of the steep cliff was nightmare material.

But not Tucker Davies.

No, not him.

Tucker opened his eyes and he saw a bright future. He saw red carpets, Hollywood lights – possibly even a Golden Globe. He saw a blockbuster.

He saw two of the most beautiful men he’d ever seen, in navy blue LAFD uniforms, repelling down the cliffside to reach him in his vehicle. They had the build. They had the jaw lines. They had the fierce confidence in their eyes. They had the chemistry. Tucker had worked in the film industry for almost two decades, and he knew a money shot when he saw one.

These two firefighters of the Las Angeles Fire Department? They were money.

Tucker had questions.

What were these men doing in public service when they checked all the boxes for a promising film career? True, he had no idea what their voices sounded like, or if they could actually act, but this was 2021 – popcorn action movies didn’t need good actors. They needed buff, beautiful men with chemistry and a compelling plot line.

He could work with this.

Continue reading on AO3

60 notes • Posted 2021-07-10 03:18:31 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[actualbird]

🥺🥺 omg ive been thinking abt ur longdistance michael in the phillipines bmc fic for Years...... please if u have an ending/more content/any thoughts do share!! i havent been into bmc for a long time but that fic just pops into my head all the time its the quintessential bffs to lovers (god i HOPE) experience

michaelmeal Today at 8: 04 PM i think we’re lost

michaelmeal Today at 8:46 PM oh man

michaelmeal Today at 8:55 PM gps is FUCKED says we’re INSIDE the mountains and that roads are FAKE

michaelmeal Today at 9:06 PM oh hey that was kinda a haiku

michaelmeal Today at 9:40 PM mom just went full spooky and talked about how we’re being tricked by a kapre which is basically a big dude that lives in a tree and smokes and messes w/ people if he feels like it what kinda goals except he likes making travellers get lost and we’re the travellers he’s messing with which is not goals it is i just broke my brain trying to think of the opposite of goal dark goal

michaelmeal Today at 10:12 PM 11:11 MAKE A WISH I HOPE WE DONT DIE FUCK goddamn slowest internet speed in asia

michaelmeal Today at 10:30 PM the view is great tho image.jpg

michaelmeal Today at 10:51 PM not only did my wish come true via the gps finally bucking up and telling us we exist again but we just passed by this shop thing and sjfdhfkjdsf wait it’s best if youre online im a patient boy i can wait maybe

michaelmeal Today at 11:18 PM hey uh lord i dont talk to you anymore but please make my dad stop using big probably fake color words while we play i spy amen and rock on SARCOLINE??????

michaelmeal Today at 11:32 PM i see the ocean!!!!!!!

michaelmeal Today at 11:40 PM we fuckin did it image.jpg

juruhmuh Today at 4:33 AM Glad you didn’t get lost forever! And shit those pictures look lovely.

michaelmeal Today at 4:38 AM why in the FUCK are u awake rn

juruhmuh Today at 4:39 AM Hello would’ve been nice :/

michaelmeal Today at 4:39 AM do i look like a normie to u kidding kidding hello jeremy good morning jeremy you are the light of my life jeremy why in the fuck are you awake rn jeremy

juruhmuh Today at 4:40 AM Sdgdhfsdhfshd I took a nap. That just ended up as regular sleep.   So now I’m awake because I’ve lost control of my life.

michaelmeal Today at 4:40 AM hey waking up early is a good marker of people who do have control over their life also eating a fruit at breakfast or something and yoga

juruhmuh Today at 4:42 AM You sound like an article a mother of six wrote.

michaelmeal Today at 4:42 AM i am a mother of six the gang is my children

juruhmuh Today at 4:42 AM SGFJSDHFJH. There’s seven of us tho?

michaelmeal Today at 4:43 AM i didnt include you doofus thatd be weird on like a billion different levels

juruhmuh Today at 4:43 AM For some reason you have a point. How’s the beach?

michaelmeal Today at 4:44 AM AWESOME like the waves arent huge or anything but u can still surf and it’s fuuuuuuun dude it wouldve been really fun if you came like you’d get hella sunburn and become a peely tomato but itd still be fun

juruhmuh Today at 4:44 AM It’s not fun when you’re the one with the sunburn, Michael!!!

michaelmeal Today at 4:45 AM PEELY TOMATO

juruhmuh Today at 4:45 AM Unfriended.

michaelmeal Today at 4:47 AM :’( image.jpg

juruhmuh Today at 4:51 AM Well, you’re definitely shirtless.

michaelmeal Today at 4:52 AM oh thank god just when i was worried you couldnt see

juruhmuh Today at 4:52 AM Put. A shirt on.

---

thats  what else i managed to write of always toward!!! as for the ending of the fic, because this was a chatfic, i sadly didnt outline the plot very extensively. but here is what i have written down for chapters 2 and 3 anyway

i hope this helps, anon!

[technoskittles]

Catradora fic rec list

I mentioned making one of these awhile ago and I’m finally sitting down and compiling some of my all-time favorite fics. I’ve read a lot (like, a LOT), but I feel like a few of those really deserve an extra shout out.

I’ll separate them between multi-chap and one shots, but other than that they won’t be in any particular order. I’ll also try my best to tag the authors here on tumblr if I can find them, but if not, just lemme know if you see your fic and I can edit this later.

I’ll also be including ratings/word count/trigger warnings/etc

(I’ll mostly be including common tw’s so please make sure you also read the tags for anything that may affect you personally! Also, if I miss any, please keep in mind that it’s been awhile since I’ve read some of these so I may not remember all of them!)

Key:

[E] - Explicit 

[M] - Mature

[T] - Teen & Up Audiences

[G] - General Audiences

And for the multi-chap fics:

(O) - Ongoing

(F) - Finished

(?) - Not finished and they haven’t updated in awhile so the author probably died

So let’s get started! (Get ready for a long post obviously)

Multi-chap fics:

1. upper west side by ceruleanstorm (F) [T] ~190,000 words

TW: past child abuse, alcohol abuse

@princessofgayskull

I feel like this is definitely one of the top must-reads for all Catradora fanfics. I know I’ve seen this on a couple different lists but I’m including it on mine as well because it really is just that good.

The chapters are lengthy (but in a good way!) and the story really takes its time to flesh itself out. The character development of the characters as individuals is beautifully done and wonderfully realistic. The pacing of the development of Catra and Adora’s relationship is also sweetly slow, a steady slowburn that invokes that deep-rooted yearning feeling mirrored by the characters themselves.

It’s a really clever premise that takes place in the modern world but implements the canon universe in the form of the book that Adora’s writing that ties back to her and Catra’s shared childhood. The way that aspects of the show were revamped into this fic are so creative and I just....ugh. LOVE.

This fic also has a oneshot compilation that takes place after the events of the final chapter which is currently ongoing and I HIGHLY suggest checking that out as well once you’ve finished this. 

The sister fic for those interested: she’s god (and I found her) (O) [T] ~40,000 words

2. The Devil Is In (The Details) by SeasInkarnadine (O) [M] ~58,000 words

TW: Graphic Depictions of Violence, child abuse, emotional abuse, use of recreational drugs, Major Character Death

@seasinkarnadine

This is a really great fic where Adora is an undercover cop who sidles her way into one of the largest gang syndicates to bust whoever killed Hordak, a big gang leader and drug trafficker, whose death was originally ruled as an accidental overdose. Her and Catra (one of the gang members) both know foul play was involved and work together to figure out the truth.

The dynamics between these two is so casual and hilarious but still has those gut-wrenching moments that really ground you and realize that their relationship is dysfunctional on a few levels. The exploration of Adora’s conflicting feelings towards Catra hurt in such a good way as she realizes that she does genuinely care for Catra, but also is aware that what she’s doing will eventually screw her over and land her in jail. It’s the best kind of underlying angst and I highly recommend it.

Another really great selling point that I particularly love is that Adora is deaf in this AU and the author really shows this in such a realistic and natural way that shows she really knows what she’s talking about. It makes the dynamic between the two even more interesting considering that Catra also knows sign language which give the two a lot of moments of mutual understanding that doesn’t extend to the other characters. It’s something that the two of them have that’s sort of just for them to be on that level of understanding and it’s so great.

Also, Morgan is just a great writer in general and I highly suggest checking out more of her stuff (her art too!). She’s one of the writers I’ve looked up to since my beginning days in the fandom and it’s still amazing seeing all the great stuff she puts out.

3. Skinny Love by Maychup (O) [M] ~100,000 words

TW: past child abuse

@maychup

Another staple of big fics in the catradora fandom but for good reason. This fic is a wonderful exploration of events taking place after S1 illustrating Catra & Adora’s relationship in a different path that the rest of the show takes. It focuses heavily on their past experiences with each other and how that affects their current situation being on opposite sides of the war. 

This fic is older, published just after S1, so canon divergence is an important aspect of its build. But the way the story is written is so beautiful and grounded that it’s still interesting even now knowing what really happens in the show. 

Their dynamic is kind of back-and-forth, with Catra figuring out what Adora means to her and vice versa and where the two of them want to go from that point. It has so many sweet moments and steamy ones as well (btw, there’s a lot of smut) and the exploration into each of the character’s pysches is so compelling and intriguing.

4. Faded With Feelings by yesimgay (F) [T] ~24,000 words

TW: recreational drug use

This was such a cute, short multi-chap fic. It’s a bit older but I think it’s still one of my top faves. 

A modern au, Catra & Adora are roommates post-college and trying to make their way in the adulting world. Catra has ADHD and smokes weed to help with that. One day Adora accidentally eats a couple of her edibles and cute shenanigans ensue. And that’s just the first two chapters.

The rest of the fic goes on to the girls figuring out their feelings for each other, especially Adora who, in this case, isn’t really sure of her sexuality. All-in-all, a really cute fic that’s a nice break from all the angst that typically saturates the fandom.

5. Chasing the Spotlight by holymountain (?) [T] ~20,000 words

This is an AU where Adora is hired to be Catra’s, a pop singer, bodyguard. There’s so many cute moments in this, though admittedly it’s been about 6 months since it’s last updated so be sure to keep that in mind.

6. we’ve been making shades of purple out of red and blue by darklady21 (?) [t] ~24,000 words

An “and they were ROOMMATES” au. In this one though, Catra and Adora don’t actually know each other and really only get to know each other over time. It’s cute and has a lot of interesting interactions between the two, but it hasn’t updated in about 7 months.

7. Tuning Out by FaiaHae (?) [T] ~2500 words

I actually really loved the whole concept of this fic but it hasn’t updated in like, an entire year so...only read if you’re okay with the fact that it probably won’t ever be finished haha

8. burnt sugar by jeserai (O) [G] ~11,000 words

@jeserai

Oh god YES this fic. The classic “fake dating” au except Catra is a rich kid inheriting a business who essentially hires Adora, a broke college student, to go on a date with her to this big business function. There’s not a lot to say about it other than that without giving too much away, but the fic is about halfway done at this point so it’s a pretty short read as of now.

Just be warned, it’s currently on a MASSIVE cliffhanger so if you wanna wait until it updates I totally understand lol

9. still waters by summerson (O) [M] ~28,000 words

TW: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, self harm

A “The Last of Us” AU. Personally, I’m not super familiar with TLOU because I could never get into the game myself, but this fic is so well done and the writing style is so interesting and well-executed that I still love this fic to bits. But obviously, for those of you who are aware of TLOU, you already know that this fic is going to contain quite the fair share of angst so be ready.

10. Whispering Dreams by dragonesdepapel (F) [T] ~7500 words

It’s been awhile since I’ve read this one so I don’t remember everything, but I do remember really enjoying the writing style and the construction of this fic. It’s a short read, but it’s totally worth it

11. please could you be tender by erce3 (F) [G] ~40,000 words

@figbian

please please PLEASE go read this fic. I’m actually begging y’all to go read this one I loved it so much it’s still one of my top 10 faves out there.

This fic is set in a modern setting where Adora & Catra were childhood friends and are in college and god it’s just SO. GOOD. The writing style and composition of the flashbacks with the present events is so beautifully done and organized and I really cannot hype this fic up enough GO READ IT

12. buried a hatchet (it’s coming up lavendar) by erce3 (O) [G] ~12,000 words

on the note of that last rec, I highly rec their other work which is currently in progress. It takes place after S3 but it’s an exploration on if Catra and Adora got trapped in the portal instead of Angella and FUCK this person is genuinely amazing go read their stuff

13. Senior Year by SimplyAbsolute (O) [E] ~98,000 words

@simplyabsolute

This is a really cute fic about Adora and Catra in their final year of college and I guess for me personally it really just hits hard because I’m also in my final year of college lol. But really, it’s a great fic and I suggest checking it out. It’s actually only got one more chapter left too so it’s almost done!

14. Assassinating Adora by Wicked42 (F) [T] ~13,000 words

@wicked-42

TW: Graphic Depictions of Violence

Jeez this fic was a real rollercoaster of emotions. I loved every bit of it. 

Basically, some people try to assassinate Adora and Catra stops one of them, but both girls are still inflicted by the poison and....it just gets crazier from there. Don’t wanna spoil it too much but this is a must-read for sure.

And this one may seem like cheating but I’m gonna plug one of my own multi-chap fics here

15. Pure Feeling (O) [T] ~30,000 words

TW: brief mention of sexual assault in Ch 5

This is a modern AU set after all the kids have been out of college for a few years. 

Adora and Catra were childhood friends but ended up drifting apart and falling out during their college years. Fast forward about 6 years and they run into each other again, except now Adora has a daughter and is struggling to balance her life as a single mother. Overtime the two girls work on rebuilding their friendship and somewhere along the way might even realize that they’re feelings for each other never really went away. But of course, like all things in life, this isn’t an easy process and they run into more than a few complications - internal and external.

One Shots:

(there’s so many of these I’ve loved so I’m really going to try and narrow it down to about 10. If yours didn’t make it, no offense! I just have WAY too many to include and this post is already so long haha)

1. The Interlude That Never Ends by FMLClexa [M] ~2500 words

TW: Major Character Death, brief mention of sexual assault

Okay I’m gonna be honest: If you ignore all the other fics on this list, READ THIS ONE. This is absolutely my #1 favorite without a doubt. It’s a soulmate/reincarnation au and it’s so wonderfully executed that I honestly cannot even begin to tell y’all how much I love this one. It’s old and one of the first fics I ever read, but it’s so timeless and excellent and I promise you won’t regret reading it. I know I’ve read this about a million times over.

It’s been a whole year and this has held my #1 fave position the entire time. READ. IT.

2. after party by summerson [M] ~2000 words

TW: recreational drug use

God this fic was so great I read it last night and I’m still in awe in how well it was written and the emotions it managed to invoke in me. My favorite scene is the part where Catra tells Adora “I love you” because it’s so raw and desperate and I vibed with it so hard. It’s really difficult trying to tell someone how much you love them with just a few simple words because they really just don’t convey how much you love them and it’s so frustrating and GAH this fic was fucking great please read it.

3. jigsaw by jeserai [G] ~2500 words

@jeserai

This fic is so great and I felt so warm inside reading it. Definitely read if you want sweet, slow friends to lovers burn.

4. Vicious by SeasInkarnadine [M] ~3500 words

TW: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Rape/Non-Con

I really highly recommend this one if you can get past the trigger warnings. It was so well written and very suspenseful with the juxtaposition of the timeline between current events and snippets of what had happened just hours before. But the ending is really sweet and the way that Catra cares for Adora after the whole thing squeezed my heart to pieces.

This is one I’ve read a few times over because of how much I love it. Def in my top 3.

5. Basement by spookyscaryskeletons [G] ~2800 words

This was such a great rendition of “Adora and Catra are forced to talk” and the emotions were raw and bleeding and I love the character portrayals. 

6. Coming Apart by Whorls [E] ~13,000 words (or ~6,000 words each chap)

@crazy-pages

Okay this fic technically has two chapters but I’m including it here in the oneshots because the chapters are identical in the sense of story but the only difference is that in chapter one Catra is a cis woman and in chapter two she’s a trans woman pre-op. Other than that the chapters are identical so it’s mostly based off which experience you would rather have while reading.

This fic was. So. Fucking. Good. Sen did such a fantastic job with both aspects of this story and I love it to bits and pieces. The smut in the beginning is delicious as can be, but then towards the latter half it absolutely sucker punches you with feelings but in a good way. I really, really fucking love this fic and I think it needs more attention than it initially got so I’m imploring you all to please go read this fic. It’s fantastic.

7. Seconds That I Cannot Replace by Mogatrat [M] ~7800 words

TW: child abuse, underage(?)

This is a really heartbreaking fic set before canon. It’s about all the times that Catra and Adora started a romantic relationship only for Shadow Weaver to come in and ruin everything by constantly erasing and resetting Adora’s memory. I still think about this fic from time to time. Give it a go.

8. Come morning light by dragonesdepapel [T] ~1800 words

TW: Major Character Death

Another one that’s technically two chapters but it’s the same events, just covers the perspective of each girl. Adora’s dying and asks Catra to stay with her.

Basically this fic ripped my heart out and I still think about it sometimes.

9. someone you like by caela [T] ~5100 words

oh fuck me yes this fic. A modern au where Catra sorta stalks Adora on instagram and accidentally likes an old picture. Fluffiness galore.

10. When You Came Calling by ActuallyMe [E] ~5200 words

TW: Major Character Death

A 1940′s Mob AU where Catra is a private eye and Adora married high-ranking mob boss Hordak...who’s just been murdered.

Really great one shot. Personally I would’ve loved to see more come of this but it’s great on its own.

And once again, this is cheating but here’s a couple oneshots of my own that I wanna plug real quick

11. hang tight (all you) [T] ~9200 words

Modern AU fic set when Catra and Adora are in high school. Adora struggles to come to terms with her sexuality in an discouraging environment as well as the fact that she’s had a crush on her best friend since middle school. Personally I think this was one of my best works and a lot of other people seem to have liked it too so yeah!

12. as my World d[ivides] [E] ~2500 words

TW: Rape/Non-Con, Underage

One of my darker fics, but still one I’m pretty proud of. Without giving too much away, Adora suffers from a trauma and engages in unhealthy coping mechanisms and Catra enables her because no one’s taught them any different.

[halothenthehorns]

All in the Family

Chapter 42: Talon's and Tea Leaves

"I thought you could only see Dementors if you saw someone die?"

"They're not thesterals you dumbass!"

James groaned as he struggled to open his eyes this time. For a moment he thought he hadn't accomplished it at all, before he realized they were in a very dimly lit room, but at least it was quite warm. Sitting up slowly with still shaking hands, he found himself in a very pleasant cushion, a roaring fireplace behind a teacher's desk only a few feet away.

Sirius and Regulus were already up and aware, bickering with each other, and the others were getting more unsteadily to their feet and glancing all about them to make sure there was truly nothing more about to pop out at them. Where they were exactly though was a bit of a mystery.

One quick glance out the nearest window showed him to be looking north, and as high up as they were and in a circular room no less, he was positive they must be in a tower. It was odd though, as the North Tower wasn't used in his time, so he really hadn't a clue what the tea set up all around was for, nor the plentiful cushions instead of seats like a class would normally have. In front of him was a steaming blue teacup just waiting to be drunk.

There were two books in front of him, one he vaguely recognized as Harry collecting while he was in Diagon Alley, and the dark purple book leading them around this madness. He'd never cared about Divination a single moment in his life before now, but he continued putting the obvious together rather than dwelling on anything else. "I think we're in Harry's new Divination class."

"Figure that out all on your own did you?" Frank rolled his eyes as he looked through the teachers desk curiously. James was beginning to think he'd actually like this guy if he weren't such a prick, he had a natural curiosity about him that clearly, without anyone around to enforce them, he was all to willing to indulge. As of now, he wasn't taking the accusations thrown at Sirius any more lightly from some Ravenclaw who didn't know a damned thing about his best-friend.

"Well get to reading, would you Prongs," Remus prompted, sitting on a poof so forceful beside him, he felt compelled to see if anything had come out.

"Eager to get to your classes?" Wormtail chuckled as he came over and helped himself to some tea.

"Urgh, I still can't imagine it. Moony, at the front of the class!" Sirius snickered as he sat down on his other side and began nudging James' foot. James kicked him in the shins before he began.

James still didn't continue right away. He really wanted a chance to talk to his friends, really have a conversation about this future and all that seemed to have happened to them. This was extremely private though, and not just because of Moony or even Padfoot. He just wanted some time with his friends again, back in their dorm. He'd always loved being the center of attention; nicking students textbooks to juggle them, telling raucous jokes, chasing the Snitch about, but always at the end he'd crept off to his dorms and have a late night conversation just the four of them before bed.

Judging by their expressions, the others felt the same, but there was nothing to be done for it except power on. "Talons and Tea Leaves."

"Well, we got the second part," Peter smacked his lips in appreciation as he'd finished his glass in record time.

"I swear you've scalded all your taste-buds off," Sirius rolled his eyes.

"It's good," he defended, reaching for a clean cup to pour more. "Much better than bags."

"Must be bitter, I've not seen any sugar," Remus looked genuinely hurt for this misfortune, it was likely all that was stopping him from making his own cup.

"The one time I don't have any honey on me," Sirius smirked.

"Bloody hell, they won't shut up about the damned chapter title." Evans grouched from the opposite side of the room. "We're never getting out of this blistering hot room."

James watched her for an even longer time than usual, but for once couldn't think of anything to say to her. He'd always been endeared by her, the ferocity in her every step, how intense she was over every subject, especially him. He fancied himself the hero who was going to rescue her from Snivellus the useless idiot. She'd spurned him, but never enough the thought had ever crossed his mind she wouldn't see what he was doing eventually. Now though, if she really thought so little of Sirius? Surely she didn't mean it, thinking him a murderer? The flare wasn't truly gone, but he looked away lest something he would actually regret passed his lips towards her.

Malfoy was a pleasant distraction, the git.

"Somehow I doubt that boy's as funny as he thinks he is," Lily scowled in Potter's direction, then her brow furrowed when he glanced up at her and looked away remarkably quickly. "Not that this is a new development for boys." She finished pointedly. He made no reaction, and her feelings quickly rose to true bafflement. She twisted a strand of her hair around her fingers in curiosity for a moment, before she decided she didn't care and turned away.

None of them were paying Hermione's little conundrum any real interest. So the girl was taking some extra classes and worked them into her schedule, however she and McGonagall had pulled it off likely wasn't interesting in the least.

Regulus muttered to himself when Hagrid announced boasting about his coming class. He'd tried striking up a conversation with Sirius, to try and talk to him and see if he couldn't find out what had spooked him around that Dementor. He'd never imagined a look like that could appear on his face, and he truly just wanted to help. Instead he'd been insulted and the prat had walked away to be with his friends once again after his ignorant comment, now he was left by a trapdoor in the floor as the kids in the book struggled to find the tower they'd been dumped into.

"Well she's going to be a character!" Alice burst out laughing for the description of this Trelawney professor.

"She already sounds like a fraud to me," Frank muttered without interest as he finished shuffling through her papers with nothing interesting to note. He plopped down in her high-backed chair and surveyed his surroundings, admittedly enjoying the atmosphere provided.

"Why's that?" Lily asked in surprise, as she continued looking through Unfogging the Future by Cassandra Vablatsky. None of it was really any more fantastical to her than turning a rabbit into a pair of slippers.

"Well it's all a load of tripe, obviously," Frank looked surprised at her. "None of this stuff is real," he waved vaguely around the room, where a crystal case of glass-balls could be seen, there were some medallions of unrecognizable symbols on a few patches of carpet, and the ceiling above had smoke imprints that may have more significance than Lily had guessed.

"Why's that?" She repeated even more curiously.

"Yes, do enlighten us Longbottom," Sirius sneered from his poof. It was hardly an intimidating posture, crossing his arms while sunk into a giant purple cushion, but he still somehow thought he managed it. "Continue telling us what is and isn't true from your wild experience."

Frank scowled a bit without looking over, continuing to address her as if there had been no interruption, almost. "Me mum's always been very clear about this load of tosh. You can't predict the future, even magic has limitations and that's one of them. Certainly no such thing as Seer's, prophecies, and signs from the beyond."

"We use unicorn horns as potion ingredients," Lily still sounded more polity argumentative for Frank's position on this than anything. "How is that more outlandish than applying astrology in practice?"

"What's that?" Frank blinked in confusion.

"Oh, I know this one!" Potter's hand suddenly shot up as if he really were in some class again, the eager look back upon his face speaking around her now present again. "Muggle's use it to define things about their birth based on the stars! Evan's is an Aquarius, that symbol that looks like a mouth."* He looked quite proud of himself until she turned incredulous eyes on him. He looked unabashed for several more moments before he actually realized she was just staring at him with that expression again, the one she'd had on her face since the train. He quickly turned back away, unwilling to diagnosis what this new feeling she was directing towards him was so long as she was still holding to not acknowledging Sirius' innocence.

"I see you've actually been paying attention in your Muggle Studies class," Pettigrew finally broke the silence when Potter hadn't continued right away, just kept staring at the book again like he was waiting for something. "Professor Burbage would probably give you ten points if she were here for that."

"I thought we were supposed to be doing that assignment over our own astrological symbol?" Sirius accused.

"She suggested it," he shrugged without remorse, before finally continuing on.

The class continued in mostly uninterested silence. Frank and Lily did not pick up on their conversation again, and James kept reading absentmindedly through Trelawney's chatter as he tried, for once, not to think of her. He finally got a reprieve when all four of them burst out laughing at Harry receiving a Grim in his cup.

"Oh that's brilliant," Sirius chortled hardest of all, now eagerly grabbing for his own cup and pouring himself a glass. "Think I'll get a stag?"

"I doubt the point of the exercise was to get your favorite animal," Alice rolled her eyes at them, but was ignored as they continued with this game.

"Nope!" Peter popped the p for emphasis as he looked gleefully into his cup. "I got a bloody rose! Maybe I'll find true love," he snorted, setting his cup down with an eye roll.

"According to this," Remus was flipping curiously through pages while still sipping his own, "it means deep emotion, friendship, infidelity, and betrayal."

His friends continued another round of snickering, while Remus repeated the process on his own cup he'd just finished. "Ooh, I got a lightning bolt. Wonder if I'll be the next Boy Who Lived."

"Merlin I hope not, it would be awkward as hell to be related to you," Sirius smirked.

Remus ignored him and pointed at what he'd found, "apparently it means 'you will be betrayed by one who calls you a friend.' Merlin, are all of these just depressing?"

"I got something that looks like a set of wings, or maybe a bird?" Sirius was squinting and tipping his head from side to side to try and get some kind of visual.

"That could either mean peaceful, or an enemy." Moony snorted.

"I'm genuinely disappointed it wasn't a Grim," James snickered, refusing to admit the plummeting feeling in his gut as he eyed his own cup and swore he saw the same. He hung around with a 'grim,' once a month and wasn't going to let a cup spook him now. Before his friends could ask about his, he kept going on with Harry's time.

The situation was made even funnier when they reached McGonagall's class and his own son ignored the lesson on animagus'. It took everything in him not to laugh at that.

"McGonagall's a breath of fresh air to those kids," Frank snorted, hoping to instigate Lily into talking again, but she was swirling the dregs of her own tea around and just looked forlorn now. He stood up from the desk and circled around so she couldn't miss his apologetic smile in the shadows. "Sorry, if err, I offended you. Over the whole-"

"Oh, no," she quickly said, placing the chipped blue cup back down and giving him her whole attention. "Just, distracted," she casually flipped the book shut as if it had suddenly bored her.

"Right, yeah," he awkwardly rubbed at his neck and left her to it, more disappointed than he thought he'd be Potter had quickly burnt through the next lesson over something in Transfiguration. The change of topic would have been nice.

Lily smiled distractedly again until he turned away, trying to convince herself surely it was a coincidence she'd seen a snake...

Regulus was growing a little jealous of the meal the trio of kids were enjoying, even if they were still bickering over it, so was happy enough when the subject was changed. He was still avoiding his own teacup, he didn't want to tempt fate like Aunt Misapinoa was always going on about. If anyone was a real Seer, it was that woman, and he couldn't understand why Sirius was laughing all this off. Still, he knew his brother had a liking for magical creatures, and this one should be easy enough to engage him in. "I've a friend who's taking Care of Magical Creatures, and he hasn't mentioned anything about Hippogriffs."

"Not all teachers follow the same plan," it was Lupin who looked up and explained polity enough, his tone surprisingly gentle and calm for never having directly spoken to him before. "This is a bit advance, we didn't do these until our fourth year, but Hagrid may be showing off a bit."

"You didn't take Care of Magical Creatures?" Sirius didn't look up, but instead snorted crudely into his cup. "Let me guess then, Arithmancy and Study of Ancient Ruins."

"The two you didn't look twice at, too difficult for you," he snapped, quickly growing tired of his resistant brothers constantly fluctuating ability to look at him. The idiot truly seemed incapable of making up his mind if he wanted to talk to him or not! It seemed impossible he could come to any decision ever, let alone one so monumental as murdering people!

His mental tirade came up short in surprise at the thought, and he sucked on the inside of his cheek for a moment trying to analyze further if he had anything else to back this thought up as Potter continued.

Hagrid was doing quite well. The lesson was truly enjoyable, until Malfoy got involved. The git.

"I wish that hippogriff had ripped his whole bloody arm off, the insolent brat!" Sirius snarled in frustration.

"You know, it may be Padfoot, that comments like that make them think you're capable of such violence," Peter offered helpfully, even pointing his thumb to the three unimpressed faces.

Sirius grumbled for a moment before turning purposefully his seat. "I'm not going to defend myself from a bunch of idiots who don't know how to take a joke!" Then he turned back and looked quite pleased with himself for it.

James let out a little huff of breath that none of them could decide if it was suppressed laughter or annoyance at his best mate egging them on. They certainly all grasped what the following expression was as he read out Harry's reminder of Sirius Black supposedly being out there stopping his son from going to see a friend! He muttered tersely under his breath until his heart melted in sympathy for Hagrid. Then he wanted to dump his head in the water-trough again for suggesting any child of his shouldn't be wandering around school. He instead warned the chapter was near completion, and they all did whatever they could to brace themselves for the next skip.

*The symbol is actually supposed to be water, or waves or something, but that's what I thought it was at first until I read it.

[wu-sisyphus-gang]

Motion Sickness Chapter 42

pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq

I tapped the ash of my pipe in an alley. The glass made a soft tong sound as I tapped it against the brick. Then I stepped out with a boot and quashed the still-burning greens.

I already felt like a pro with it.

My head clear of distractions like bugs or the sound of Mother's voice I could finally get to work. The slight spinning the greens caused was not unlike alcohol but it was minor. I felt like I could focus through it. I even felt like I could drive, or ride as the case may be.

Gods it was good to be off that stuffy train. There were 'no smoking' signs everywhere and fire alarms in every bathroom. I'd maybe checked a couple.

"Well Neo, let's buy some horses."

She held up one finger.

"One? One horse? For the both of us?"

She nodded.

"So what? You'll just ride bitch on mine?"

She frowned at my phrasing but still nodded again.

"Huh. And feminism marches on."

She kicked me in the shin. I deserved it too so I managed a muted, "ow. Alright. Alright. Fair cop."

I rubbed at one of my piercings, fondling the earlobe around the metallic diamond stud.

"You know I could probably teach you how to ride. It's easy enough for someone like me to figure out so you could probably do it."

She shook her head. Probably thinking something like 'why would I do that when I have you to ride me around?' To which I'd say, 'yeah, fair enough.'

I found a merchant and paid him. It came out to a few thousand Lien but it was no skin off my back. Just one aura-driven horse and we were good to go.

I saddled up. Putting my bag of loose possessions over the horse's back (spare clothes, toiletries, the bare necessities) along with Neo's own duffle. Then I mounted. The horse grunted slightly under the suddenly added weight of all my weapons and armor and me. I was something like two-hundred and thirty pounds by myself. Probably a little more.

I reached down to Neo. She looked away as I easily swung her onto the horse's back. The horse hardly stirred under the addition, she was smaller than Ruby or Weiss. Neo popped her pink parasol to shield us both from the Anima sun.

She rode side-saddle. And managed to look ever so lady-like on the horse's back but I knew the truth. I turned my head back to face forward. This thing was no lady. She was as much a beast as the horse we rode on.

Like that we were off, hooves beating a steady rhythmic clip-clop down a beaten trail. It had the marks of being a real road for cars with four wheels.

"You don't do tactile stuff do you? Just auditory and visual illusions right?"

I felt her nod her head against my back.

"And you haven't been hazing me, have you?" It would be convenient if all my hallucinations were caused by Neo messing with me. Convenient. Not likely or comforting or anything like that.

She shook her head.

"Then I think I'm a little fucked up."

She snorted a little, still managing to be lady-like still. It reminded me a little of Weiss.

"I didn't use to be like this. Mother got to me. Salem, that is. She haunts me like an evil spectre from the end of time. I'm not sure if you believe me about her but she's bad news. Has all kinds of magic besides being old as hell and probably basically unkillable."

She snorted again. I felt her wipe her pink and brown hair back. It brushed against my sleeveless arm. It tingled against my free skin there.

"That's what I'm saying. She's fucking bullshit. I didn't really believe it myself until I ran into her, or her shadow at least. It was almost enough to unmake me, that alone. She made me kill two of my friends. Made me. Like I was a puppet."

She just listened that time. She put an arm around me to hold on as we rode out of Shumi and on to Wutai. It was the first real touch another person had given me since everything went down.

Since I'd killed Ren and Nora.

Since I'd tried to kill myself.

It was oddly reassuring even if it was light and meaningless. Gentle against my arm. Just enough to hold on from where she sat in our double saddle.

I was choking something back as she did and got settled in a little more. I could feel her aura. The cruel cold was a mellow comfort to my own heat. Like I was burning up and hadn't noticed it. Like I had a fever and didn't know.

"That's why I have to go and find Merlot. Salem could make me kill you too, I'm not sure what will make me snap next. That would be bad, for both of us."

She tensed up a little at that. I wasn't sure she took it as a threat but it kinda was. Salem's reach was long and I wasn't sure what we'd find at the laboratory.

"Not right now. Captain of my own ship at the moment. Just… be careful around me. Be ready once we get to the lab. The report was all about modified Grimm. Not like me, maybe, depending on what the fuck I am. Salem mentioned that I do indeed have sisters. How could I forget that? Oh my gods she has my fucking sisters."

I stewed in that. Listening to the rhythmic beat of the horse.

"Depending on how false my memories are. Most of them are fake. Inconsistent when I really look at them. I have to save them, though. And myself of course. I won't get anywhere as her puppet. All the more reason to get to the lab and find Merlot."

pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq

I set up the tent and tied the horse to a tree. Setting out the horse the graze. That was what was great about horses. It was a grass fed engine. They could go anywhere there was grass with excellent mobility. That was why they were a staple of mankind.

I didn't ask Neo for anything as I set up the camp. Which was fine. She sat on a fence looking at the road forlornly. Like she'd made a deal she wished she could go back on.

My legs were cramped from riding and I was sure hers were stiff, too.

"Let's fight." I said, standing up straight from the tent. I took a hit off my pipe at the same time and exhaled.

She gave me an odd look.

"What? Cinder is stronger than both of us. You think you'll reach her level by not sparring? By not practicing?"

She hopped off the fence and stalked towards me. She rubbed her chest as she looked at me.

"I'll take it easier on you than before but we really can't afford to get out of practice. We'll be out here for a week or so. That's two, back and forth to really get to know each other. Plus if we'll be working together it will help if we know the others' style."

She pulled her dolon on me and pranced closer with that otherworldly grace people who'd had their aura unlocked for a long time possessed.

"What's your weapon's name, by the way?"

She made a shushing gesture, a finger to her pink lips. A confident grin on her face.

"Uh, okay then."

She shook her head and pointed at her weapon.

"Oh the weapon's name is Shush."

She shook her head.

"Quiet? Silence?"

She pulled out her scroll and typed like she did when I was having trouble guessing. She didn't seem to use any real sign language and sometimes it was nearly impossible to determine what she meant. It was 'Hush' typed on the screen on a note word processor.

"So close! Well then it certainly suits you, Hush."

She rolled her eyes, exasperated that she'd had to pull her scroll.

I tapped out the ash from my pipe on a tree and squashed it. I put the pipe away in a bouch on my belt beside the relic. I wasn't sure how the damn thing worked and I hadn't really messed with it. I was willing to bet if I took the top off the lamp it would do something but I wasn't sure what it would do or even what for.

Sure something related to knowledge but that wasn't exactly a narrow topic. All of knowledge that is.

I still felt like my head was clear enough to fight despite the greens. I drew the longsword from my back. I held it with both hands on the long handle.

I rested my left beneath the right and breathed in. I activated my semblance with a little sigh. I felt good. I felt right.

Neo approached me and poked at the rising wisps of light.

"My semblance? It's called Limit Breaker. It makes me stronger and faster and there's a charge I can spend on an attack or movement."

She counted down with her fingers at a steady pace.

"How long does it last?"

Neo nodded.

"I'm not really sure. It used to only be fifteen seconds or so. Fifteen seconds to spend it or use the mobility and strength buffs. Now I can hold onto the charge for longer. Minutes, maybe." Fifteen seconds was short as fuck but minutes were long as Hell in a real fight.

It used to be a lot of pressure but now I had time to think and to trap my opponents with the superior speed and resilience.

"You ready?" I asked.

She shook her head, hiding a smile and I realized she was waiting for my semblance to evaporate away.

"Hey," I protested. "If you wanted to go without it you could have just said something."

She frowned at me. I threw the Limit away in the form of a blade-beam against a tree. It blended away against the bark, throwing out chips of wood and with a groan the tree fell.

"Fine. Alright? You ready?"

She grinned and vanished.

I stood still and listened. I watched carefully but couldn't see any indication of her movement. She reappeared on top of me. Bringing the sword-stick down on me, trying to breach my collar bone in what I was figuring was a favorite move of hers.

I had to raise Crocea Mors upwards to deflect the blow to the side. I tried to riposte but by the time I brought the weapon around and down in a counter attack she disappeared.

She reappeared behind me and kicked my right leg in the back of the knee. Now I don't care how strong you are and firm your balance is. You get kicked like that, you're dropping to at least one knee.

I did. I swept the sword around my body to ward her off and get back to my feet. As I tried to rise she came at me from the left and I struggled to bring the blade around in time to block the smaller, more lithe cane sword. I leaned on my blade like a knight as I rose to my feet.

I swiped at her and nicked her and sent her tumbling. She growled at me. She cartwheeled back to her feet and vanished.

She stabbed me in the chest, tearing out chunks of my aura as she did. I reached out with my left hand and grabbed her. Her eyes widened in surprise before I bounced her off the ground and tried to reach her by dancing my blade down in a large forward swipe.

I caught her and comboed her forward in four more strikes.

Once she was out of tumble she vanished and kicked me in the chest with both heels. I reeled backwards. She stabbed me from the right. Then reappeared on the left, further away from my sword.

I was sort of intentionally handicapping myself without the shield. I traded mobility for defense and I stepped back with her and tried to block, both hands on my long red hilt.

I caught her across the stomach with a touche and pushed her back with a tiny grimace from her. It activated my charge and I flew towards her. I jumped and brought the sword vertically around my body to deliver a punishing falling upwards swinging aerieal that launched her up in the air at a perfect middle height.

She broke the combo by teleporting in front of me. She jabbed at me with the umbrella and expanded it right in my face, pushing my sword to the side as a matter of course. She then flickered towards my throat with the thin blade. It caught me and I tried to grab her but my grab was slow and she twisted back away with a side flip.

I flew at her, holding my semblance, still. She dodged in place, leaning to the side. She jabbed at my face with her blade and it caught my aura and left a shallow cut on my cheek.

I grunted and in a flash spent my semblance I climbed her up in a massive upwards swing. The Limit Break attack made her aura flash and flicker in a tide of bright pink.

She rolled away from me. She slammed one arm in the dirt and vanished again. She reappeared with her legs around my head and used the momentum to try and slam me into a tree.

I jumped then backflipped off the tree instead of being rammed into it.

She still managed to bring me to the ground and tried to put me in an arm bar at the same time she stabbed down with her cane-sword. I dropped my blade and with pure main strength peeled her off of my arm and tossed her.

She landed neatly on her feet. Her eyes switched colors as she blinked at me.

She reappeared before me and stomped on my foot. I leaned forward unconsciously and she hooked me with her umbrella and used my momentum to throw me to the ground. I frontflipped in place to counter and whipped my sword around and knocked her off her feet.

She attacked me with an illusion. Making me see a flash of white before she went low and stabbed at me. I blindly swung downwards and she slid on her knees beneath the cut and stabbed up at my thigh. She pierced my aura and when I swung at her she vanished and shattered like a glass pane.

Our weapons clashed as I chased after her and she backed up. Three times they met with solid clanging noises as we did. Her blade was fast and it whipped through the air as I chased her.

I kicked out and our legs met. She rolled over it and kneed me in the face. I tried to grab her but she vanished.

I took a guess at where she would reappear and Cross-Slashed her. It was less serious without the broadsword. Even still, I tried to be light about it but she bounced off the ground and lay still.

"How you holding up?"

She frowned and tried to vanish but collapsed.

"Don't push yourself too hard, now. It's just training. To get better."

She glowered at me.

"Why don't we call it there. No reason to over extend until one of us is without aura. How does dinner sound, besides?"

My heart was racing and I could feel the high from my greens up top, really in my head.

She gave me a suspicious look.

"Don't worry. I'll cook."

She giggled a little. I walked over and pulled her to her feet. I rested my sword against my shoulder before I sheathed it.  

"Hey I can cook."

She snorted as though to say 'sure you can.'

"I can. You just watch. I'll whip something up. I mean it won't be five stars but it'll be edible." Eggs and rice? Eggs and rice.

I pulled out my pipe. "You want some?"

She sat and shook her head. She was giving me a hard to read, soft smile.

"Suit yourself. I'll get us a fire going and everything will be fine. It'll even be delicious, you'll see."

I wasn't Ren but I could put something together. Ren… nope bad thought. Didn't like that. I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to eat a breakfast burrito ever again.

He'd forgive you, Jaune. He would.

I reminded myself.

It was Salem. It was all her.

In the end, we sat back and ate in companionable silence.

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-WG

[princess-havok]

Love Fast Los Angeles Read-Through: Preface

This book has 42 chapters + a preface, so I've decided to make each post 6 chapters and then do the preface separately. I want to start with just the preface because it is eight pages long but so much happens, it's like getting whiplash every five seconds. Let's do it.

First of all, it's a prologue, Davey, not a preface, a preface is more of an introduction while this is like, things that happen before the real story starts, or really just an explanation for why Star isn't around and why Alvin goes to LA.

Anyway, we open with Alvin doing a photoshoot on the beach and if I could summarize the first page of this book in a single image it would be this:

We've got narration like "Whatevs. It's cool. I've already got a memory stick full of sick shit" and nobody talks like that!

I'm not 100% clear at this point how much time has passed between Pop Kids and this book (iirc it might be more specific later but I don't remember right now) but Alvin and Star, the grown-ass woman who straight up groomed him when he was 15 and nobody cared, are still together and living in San Francisco in an old Victorian, aka my dream life. But then, in the second paragraph of this entire book, he comes home to find her cheating on him, he hits the guy with his motorcycle helmet knocking out a tooth (which he takes???) and she kicks him out.

There's some nice references in this bit, like that Star is a masseuse and the room in the house where she works is known as the Zen Room (ayyyyy!), and as he's packing his clothes to leave he sprays them with her Rose 31 perfume. This book, having come out in 2017, makes sense to have been written during the writing of the Dreamcar record and I appreciate that little nod.

So Al leaves, and we're still only 4 pages into this book and we've changed location again, going to the "Tranny Shack" where he also works shooting the drag shows. And I am truly, wildly uncomfortable with this paragraph:

"A Nubian goddess enters her spotlight. Draped in the pelts of plush animals, Lucky Day caresses her luminous microphone. The audience hushes. She begins to sing "Circle of Life" and I lose it. Spotting me weeping behind my lens, the queen of the jungle steps from the stage through the crowd and in her soothing Song of The South voice, says, "This is your favorite number. Why ya cryin' sugar?" (11)

Look I'm willing to give Davey the benefit of the doubt and suggest that Lucky Day may be based on an actual drag queen he knows and this is all harmless, but is it weird! The use of "Nubian," while a valid name of an indigenous group in Africa, is also used by weird fetishists who think black women are ~exotic. Having your black drag queen character sing a song from the Lion King dressed in fake fur? And probably worst of all, the deeply stereotypical speech pattern and comparing her voice to Song of the South. Couldn't just say she had a southern accent, you had to go with probably the most obscure Disney movie, which is obscure because it's so racist even Disney won't re-release it. Song of the South has a weird cult following of racists who praise it and claim to love it as pushback against what they feel is Disney being too woke by like... having a single black princess or acknowledging that maybe a gay person might have existed in the periphery of one of their main characters. That's not Davey's fault of course, but the association is there and also it is really super weird to use that movie as a comparison! Hardly anyone has seen it! I'm uncomfy.

So anyway, Al ends up staying with Lucky Day for literal weeks. We're five pages in and there's a time jump. In the space of a paragraph on page 12 (the preface started on page 8) Al moves in, becomes depressed enough that he sleeps all day, doesn't shower and loses his job, and starts chain-smoking until Lucky can't take it anymore, Febrezes him while he's asleep, makes him shower and eat breakfast.

She makes him grits for breakfast and I don't think Davey knows what grits are, except that people from the South like them because he describes them being cooked in an iron pan which I'm like 90% sure is not how you make grits? Idk I'm not southern and also I find grits disgusting. But you don't make them in a frying pan!

In the space of another paragraph starting on page 13, Al gets a tattoo, starts working out, feels better about himself and gets a new job, so... a second time jump in two pages and we're not even 10 pages into the book. The pacing here is insane.

Lucky flies down to SoCal to hook up with an online fling and then comes back, having been assaulted. It turns out her online fling is a famous pop star, Jamie Shannon (let's take bets who he's based on!), and Al vows to wreck him. So he's off to LA, and this absolutely batshit insane preface comes to an end.

As I was writing this recap my cat came and closed the book on me and then stood on it so I think that's a good place to stop this first entry. I expect the pace to chill the fuck out when we get into the actual story so maybe I won't be writing so much about eight pages. EIGHT.

Aren't we glad we're all on this journey together.

[stoplookingatmeblog]

twenty-one

1.

It was around that time that all my friends went to work in different chapters of what you can call ‘the filming industry’. P-G shot beer adverts which used some kinds of robotics to get the right shot, flip the bottle right, and then slept with this girl who offered him a paid internship in managing pretty much everything on sets of a bunch of movies, ads and whatnot. My own mother, finally getting out of the convenient but unemancipated housewife life, got a job in supervising the shoot - making sure the costumes were right, the scenography, all that stuff. It was pretty much, you could call it, the time of Life On Set Then - everywhere you went, ads, movies, Netflix series, all of it wrapped up in fake police ‘do not cross’ kind of tape, horses and knights from our beer-bottles riding the streets, and the catering busses with food that was (mother told me) ‘absolute horeshit’. Whatever. The time was of living in a reality created for money, by money, with money, because of money, giant heaps of money, distributed unequally (of course) to all my student friends who didn’t even need the money except for that feel of ‘life on their own’.

I didn’t have a job. Before not working, I worked a couple of cafes, restaurants and the like. That was the vibe. I hated it. Each time I began working in one of these places, I ended up sleeping with someone (first time a guy, and then a girl or woman that was honestly too old for me) and that I hoped marked the end of relationship with gastronomy for me. So I didn’t work, deciding not to decide what to do next, not putting myself on the road to one kind of future or another. I didn’t want life to go anywhere directed. I thought about writing but then I thought about the seriousness and stiffness of writing, whether or not it’s a purely natural act, all that, and decided on trying to squeeze the last drops of childhood (it was adolescence, but adolescence is really a final sigh of childhood) and live what was left of the kid-life to the fullest.

I was twenty-one years old. 

A group of friends convinced me to go with them surfing (on my parents’ money), to Victoria, a place which location doesn’t really matter, except that I thought, and still do, that the spot is an actual a piece of heaven on earth. A nearly imaginary point on the increasingly smaller map of this melting planet. My age, too, was melting away like icecream - not having a job and surfing in Victoria, like a teenage pimple, some place that popped up and presented itself in its complete and vulgar form and purpose that you initially didn’t believe and then wept after at that airport because you could never come back. It was an actual speck of heaven on the map. 

Even though everyone was younger than us - four of us, me, P-G, J, and Stone (the last one, a tired intellectual I could never get tired of, except you could see he was really both bored and exhausted by being born and living as himself. And his nickname surprisingly not derived from the astronomical amounts of weed he smoked but his actual god-given surname (which he thought of changing, because of his father) - even though everyone who came to Victoria was younger than us by something like three or four years, we surprisingly didn’t have trouble at least getting along, and at most sleeping with girls there. It was even more grand in that way, even if absolutely not true, when you saw yourself in their eyes as someone older and somehow experienced, who somehow kept going on, and somehow knew what was going on. The same lie made most of us, (excluding me, as I mentioned) get a job around that time. In movies and advertisements, with no creative input or control, but like actors that nobody knew about, playing their own invented parts backstage.

I was twenty-one years old and completely aware of both how small and how big that was. I knew about the kinds of things I probably should be doing and that’s why I sometimes did them, for a minute putting my feet into that creek too, but most of the time staying at the bank and just watching. I knew what being twenty-one meant, so I decided to sit back and watch it.

My friends all surfed a lot, which would normally bother me because I did it only for the first week of our month-long stay, but quickly dropped it and decided to stay at the beach and read, and drink and look at some really beautiful girls who passed me by, and for once enjoy that stranger-life. By the second week, after seeing in a restaurant a shirt with a ‘SeXsurfing ‘00’ inscription on it (‘00 being the year we were born, which made us inspect our parents’ lifelines to check for the possibility that at that time some of them were in Victoria), and in the twenty-one-year-old drunk epiphanius inspiration, all four of us decided that we would lead the ‘SeXsurfing ‘21’ lifestyle, not thinking about the ‘42 and the ‘63 and all that shit. 

I wasn’t the most successful one when it came to girls, but I can say that the stories I had with them were the most absurd and worthy of telling. Even though it was J who (and he too asked himself why in the world that was) was able to talk with someone new every evening, somehow perhaps betraying my unwanted by nonetheless existing monogamous attachment, I slept with only one girl over the course of the last week, picking her up (or perhaps her picking me up) through a conversation about our shared borderline-sociopathic or rebellious outlook on reality. That was very twenty-one. 

Our first meeting (like every meeting since) was going to one of the three tourist shops on the beach and stealing something. And that too was very twenty-one. We were rich enough (our parents were) and far away from home enough to do all that. And we were both young and beautiful enough to want a mugshot we could keep from an arrest by a Victoria Police County Jail or whatever it might have been called. We were never caught but we did steal something every day, and then get drunk in the evening, and then fuck in the night. While my friends had these singular, although beautiful, encounters I would drunkenly burst into the closed restaurant with my temporary girl-friend, steal absolutely vile icecream from the fridge, and then play chess with her on the hotel rooftop at four AM. 

The four of us were twenty-one years old and born in the year 2000 which in the same way made sense - our lives were easy to calculate, clearly-definededly started, and even if they had to end with no thing coming back or being repeated, the twenty-one points we scored didn’t mean anything except the joyride and experiment, and meaningless game that it was. We were taking our shot at living, taking our shot at playing, and even when we didn’t win, it still didn’t mean anything. We lived on our parents’ money, or on advertisement money, or cafe-sleep-with-someone-there-and-then-leave-because-you-don’t-need-money money, all of it a mystification, but that those twenty-one years led to nothing we suddenly did not care. 

Well, and then being woken up by the police, although surprisingly not because of the icecream dream but for the crime of sleeping in a hammock on the dunes which (I learned) was territory of both the military and part of some natural park.

What made me go home with something in the end were the conversations we had at that time, and in particular the conversations with Stone. Like me, Stone had a feeling of injustice done to him by his family, not having a real father and hanging down on the tired gray hair of our housewife mothers and all, and it made us connect on a level we didn’t with either P-G or J, who were most often busy surfing or thinking about the jobs they had or would one day have, and the girls they met that weren’t my girls so I didn’t care that much.

Stone kept affirming that both of us (although him in particular) were in possession of superior intelligence, which I instinctively tried to discourage him from saying (because I didn’t like sucking my own dick like that), but nonetheless accepted as at least potentially or partially true. In my case, it was not intelligence that me connect with Stone but some kind of a shared understanding of what was going on, that we were twenty-one and what that meant, like a filthy two-pigeon flock of pigeons flying above the waves, knowing the fact of the creature swimming underneath the surface. I thought, and still do, it had to do largely with coming from an unhappy or non-existent family, which really makes you understand that all you do, with even the most meaningful and beautiful things, is just this game that you play but holds no particular meaning beyond it. That and that love, no matter how beautiful or true, can slip away from you like shit. 

‘It is completely lonely’, he said one night as we chugged down the bottles of beer drunk rich kids left behind running away from the police - bottles half-empty to me and I think half-full for him, but I still haven’t quite figured that one out, ‘Because you never really see things the way the rest of them do, and each conversation almost the same, you begin to think the only way to be is to be alone’

I agreed. I usually did, being aware that he was slightly more intelligent than me.

‘Back when I was in the Institute, they told me I would have problems with getting out of relationships with people what other people get from other people because what I want is to be understood and that is problematic when you think you want it but also think it’s impossible to ever understand anything’

I too thought you could never understand anything, but had a sense he perhaps only said it to keep me on the same page. Stone chugged down another half-full beer and kept talking. I stayed silent, in part because I would probably say the same things he did.

‘When I was seventeen and worked in a factory, I gained a sort of awareness of how my life would look like’

‘What kind of a factory?’, I asked

‘A cake factory, I would work in the hot section and pull out cakes out of the oven and then fill some of them with cherry, and some of them with apple-cinnamon. And then, because I was seventeen and my work was fundamentally illegal you could say, they’d let me work in the cold section in the night, and I applied sugar coating on these doughnuts, you know’

‘Yeah’

‘And then wrap them up in plastic covering, you know’

‘Yeah, yeah’

‘when the coating was dry, and send them to another section of the factory. And so over and over.’

‘So, what does your life look like because of that, do you think?’

‘I don’t know…’, he took a puff from one of the cigarette butts we found that night in the ashtray, ‘... I guess working in the factory was a kind of almost psychedelic experience that really made me aware what my attitude towards suicide is. You’re young, and you step into that thing, and you do those things because you want to, you don’t need to. Well, you might need to but the need is still your choice, it isn’t honed into your life like… Like I recognised at some point that each cake I filled with the stuffing or coated was an expression of the same kind of thing I did when I smoked weed (a lot), or drunk (a lot) or had sex. That, ultimately, I would never be able to not think about it.’ 

‘I mean, I think the position we are in - if I understand you correctly - of being relatively well-off - I mean our parents - would make you unable to really plunge into anything that you’re doing, right? Because you ultimately don’t have to do anything, like, really, like here, you always sort of treat it as a game’

‘Not even a game’, he said, and the sun was already slowly creeping up the mountain in front of the shop where we were sitting, ‘But just not a challenge. Because of our intellect, both yours and mine, the only challenge you really face is whether to continue being or not, and the rest is just, you know, stuffing these cakes. But that decision, you know The Myth of The Sisyphus?’

I did.

‘Yeah, so that decision you have to and always will have to make fundamentally alone. And so either go and work - work in any kind of way and do those things and hand them over to others to complete them and you don’t really ask questions (but we can’t do that, neither you nor I) or you step out of the factory and face the living sun, like you’re definitely going to feel after we leave this place, and decide whether you’re more happy alone or with others, or whether you want to keep on handing things to others or not, and all that.’

‘I mean this is the reason I think people shouldn’t have children - I’ve written a piece about it, you should definitely read it - because it’s kind of like juggling with a hot potato and handing it to someone else, so that they have to confront these questions, instead of you, but what you really do is give up.’

At that point I don’t think I understood his cake factory metaphor or didn’t want to believe that I did in the fear that it wasn’t very profound.

‘So what do you think you’d like to actually do?, if you could pick anything at all?’

‘I don’t know’, again inhaling another cigarette butt and handing one to me. And the sun almost rolled its own boulderous weight to the top of the mountain. ‘I think I would like to have a family, especially since meeting May (he was the only one of out SeXsurfing quartet with a girlfriend), I started thinking that maybe I can, and I’m recognising this, give someone something that my father never gave me, hoping to do it right this time’

‘Yeah, I mean that’s literally the ending of my book - have I told you already I’ve written a book? - that the main character thinks he can do it right this time and he of course fucks it up, but I don’t know if I still think that. You know, life is sometimes surprising.’

‘Exactly’, he exalted the smoke, and the sun, previously rolling up the mountain to sunrise, seemed to have fallen back again to the bottom of the mountain, and began its journey anew. 

‘I mean, when I was seventeen I worked in a factory…’

‘What kind of a factory?’

‘A psychedelic cake factory’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I worked in this factory and I worked in the hot section and my job was to take the cakes out of the oven and then pump them full of acid, or pot, or sex, or anything you could get your hands on. I guess it was illegal, but then again I was seventeen so my work was all fundamentally illegal.’

‘Where did the cakes later go?’

‘Later? Well in the factory I sent them to another section that I never really saw, but later later to homes, parties, rich people who really wanted to try the kind of stuff their kids were taking, I guess’, he chuckled, ‘It’s interesting, I wonder if my father ever tried one. Maybe in some alternative universe or something. Maybe he ate it and became like me, and dropped everything and went to work in a factory and in that reality they stuffed the cakes with shit like cherry and coated them with sugar, you know, maybe that was the right reality, and later he dropped that job, and went outside of the factory, and made the choice and threw himself under a bus or something.’

‘The right reality. 

Maybe.’

2. 

Lou from the restaurant (the SeXsufring tshirt we found was in that restaurant) was the kind of man you’d always want to be. We travelled to him for dinner hitchhiking from the beach, in twos, usually P-G and J, and then me and Stone, around seven, or all together if we could sit in the trunk of the car when we travelled in one of the rich-kid rented cabrios, and you would feel the day (same day, every day) a winding road under our feet (like gods, treading on forever) cutting through the mountains and the sunset rolling his boulder somewhere and when you finished eating you’d lie down on the warm good night asphalt with a can and listen to music on one of our phones and wait for someone to take you back to the beach. 

But gods that we were, Lou from the restaurant was the kind of man you’d always want to be. It was always a show, too. He would come by people’s tables (our table in particular, because he knew and we knew), this enormous older man dressed in a white sweaty shirt with eyes that looked blind but saw everything, and told us stories about all that he knew, which was pretty much the town, and the town hall, and the restaurant, and everything. And the girls also came there to eat, and everyone too. And everyone knew Lou from the restaurant.

I always ordered things I could not afford because P-G and J were always happy to lend me money, so I ate octopuses and steaks, and everything was everything you’d ever want to eat. There were half-blind, strangely-speckled cats that roamed under the tables, not even expecting guests’ dinner cat-food enjoying the company, like we did, and there were kid cats and mother cats and they would fight on the backdrop of the white-painted summer trees, and some girls would say the cats’ were really poor and imply their lives were wretched and miserable to which I would reply with something like natural selection and they would say that’s a horrible thing to say and then all of us would bite into the steaks that Lou brought us. 

After P-G  asked him to tell us his version of the legends we heard of from the girls, about his old restaurant, and how someone ruined it and how the paradise moved from Victoria to this new town (I don’t know the name, but it was simply Lou’s town), and it seemed like god himself was telling us the story, dusting it off, driving away the spiders and the snakes, an old book or a chapter in a book that everyone on the beach talked about but it seemed nobody actually heard. Except the four of us.

‘Well so you know I’m really electrician’, he began, ‘but at one moment I tell my wife - let’s build restaurant. So I go to the town hall, here’, and he pointed to a building not ten meters away, ‘and the auction close at 12, I go in at 11:56 and the price is 12000 and I go in and say 60000. So I get the restaurant and everyone crazy and angry at me but I have it.’, I cut out the portion of the steak and chewed on it orgasmically. Everything Lou cooked was good as hell. ‘So I build restaurant…’

‘But not here, right, on the beach?’, P-G, who heard most versions of the story interrupted

‘Yes, the beach. So I build restaurant and first year I make so much money I put it in…’, his broken eyes and mad half-blind english were both looking for the word, ‘like bags, plastic bags, trash bags, and it is so much I count it then in winter, because I have no time in summer. So it is good, so much money, going great. And then in year two thousand and… two thousand just, maybe, I go away for holiday and they call me “your restaurant is destroyed”, I say “no you’re kidding me”, and they say “no, no, they burn restaurant down, come back”. So I come back, and true, the restaurant is destroyed, and you cannot build it again because the law that was there changed so you cannot build now.’, as he was telling the story, Lou’s eyes stayed monotonously bland, bright and staring somewhere beyond. A true restaurateur, he never stopped looking at what was going on at the other tables so at that point he stood up, saying ‘I finish the story in moment’, and went to take care of something in the kitchen.

Then when he finally came back, he said:

‘So where was I now tell me.’

‘Your restaurant was burned down when you were out of the country’, I reminded him

‘Yes. So I move here and build new restaurant, and it is small but people come like before and they even fight for to eat, and they ask “you finished already, let us eat”, and my restaurant again now is doing well, very well, and people come, and still I don’t have space, but people come’

‘And is it going better or worse than in the previous location?’, P-G asked

‘No, there there was more money but here is good. Very good.’, he waved his grubby big hand at all the tables packed with people, girls, others like us. And he laughed with his tongue flying up and down in his mouth in a way some people find repulsive, but to us it was Lou from the restaurant, and Lou from the restaurant could honestly laugh in whichever goddamn way he pleased. 

‘Ok, I’m sorry but I have to go again, the people’, he pointed to the kitchen, ‘don’t know what they do’

Our twenty-one year old quartet replied ‘of course, of course’, in unison and for a while we sat there chewing our steaks, and fish and octopus, and another steak, silently, only saying a couple of words of admiration for Lou from the restaurant, the man you’d always want to be.

‘There are snakes and scorpions here’, P-G told me one time we went to the more rocky part of the dunes near where our tent was pitched. ‘So we have to be super careful, especially during the day. In the night they sleep in their wretched little caves or among the rocks, they won’t bother us in our sleep.’ 

But they will bother us when we’re awake, or when we think we are, but are someplace else, like Lou from the restaurant who went for holidays. You stop paying attention to what is slithering or crawling in the sand and one time as you are looking for a nice and fresh cigarette butt lost in the sand, BAM, and you are dead, like that (Lou’s grubby old hand falling down on the wooden table with a thud).

We were twenty-one years young and on holidays from either a job in advertising or not yet having a job in advertising, and there were girls and waves, and sand, and scorpions, and it was all a joyride so we didn’t really think about that. Well, to be honest, not much could go wrong - another day, like groundhog day, would be more or less the same, always better and better and better. And the shrinking, melting map - warmer and warmer and warmer. 

The worst that could happen, we knew, was the police coming in and chasing us away from the dunes (because it was both military grounds and a national park at the same time). But that wasn’t that bad, after all, it was police in paradise, and we felt so much love for them as we did for the scorpios and the snakes and it was just impossible for them to not love us back.

Well, hen one day it happened. It was after I woke up with her, for the first time in two weeks sleeping in an actual bed, but more importantly for the first time in perhaps a year sleeping with a warm body next to my heart, next to me, in my hands, falling asleep with my lip still in her teeth. I woke up in the morning and having the bare level of awareness of my state, that I must stink and will not be fun to be around in the morning (although the fresh air made hangovers impossible - what can I say, it was paradise), I decided to go back to the our camp on the dunes and sleep off the night in a hammock I usually inhabited. 

There were usually some locals (working in restaurants and the shops I stole flip-flops from) who like devils crawled out in the night and tried to party with the twenty-one year old us, drinking our booze and smoking our smokes, so when the white-poloed guy woke me up like bad sunrise saying ‘Police, wake up, police’, in sly english and a broken smile, my instinctive reaction was to reply with a classic ‘Shut the fuck up, you’re not police’, but after seeing one of them who definitely was police, with a uniform and gun and all, I complied with their request for my ID and let them write me a pink slip of paper demanding a fine so astronomic that none of them could not possibly believe I’d actually pay it. A younger policeman (also not uniformed) asked me what happened to my neck and, explaining a bruise that could only look like a love bite (and indeed it was), I replied that I was bitten by a wild animal (and indeed I was). He said that with that bruise-like love bite and a half-unbuttoned shirt I looked like a ‘star, rock star, you know’, and we both laughed, and I decided none of it was that bad after all. He looked like a ‘star, rock star, you know’, as well, slightly unfashionable but at the same time completely incredible in bluish sunglasses, a pink polo shirt and slightly silver but naturally black hair. In Victoria, the snake, too, was quite handsome, and what he ruined, at the end of the day, was only an hour of my sleep.

I met Lou from the restaurant - he saw some creature, and its wretched work, destroying his restaurant, but his bright, half-blind, all-seeing eyes burned with nothing but love. And mine, slowly but surely, started to shimmer with it too. The days, or the same day, grew brighter and brighter, and the nights drunker and drunker and the driving drunk on the beach got faster and faster, and more and more people fitting into one car, with no winding-road end in sight.

3. 

There was no hangover in Victoria, but going anywhere in the morning was especially difficult, as if the gravitational force doubled, or thriced, or quadrupled.

Stone, who had an admirable ability to make contact with any kind of an alien species of a person (that I really envied), found himself one night in a conversation with a russian maths student (the Russian started university well before the usual age, he was like 17), and when the next day we asked what the two talked about Stone only said ‘I think we are a week away from merging the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. But give me another bottle and it will be one day.’

The Russian, Stone told us, was one of the ‘exceptionally intelligent’ ones (which Stone, had the habit of identifying and cataloguing into his set of people ‘worth talking to’). The Russian was younger than us - perhaps sixteen or seventeen, as I mentioned which really gave everything he said an additional benefit of seemingly prodigy-like, but also made Stone wonder whether he was a kind of a father-figure to the exceptionally intelligent maths student, that considering leading Stone to the two days later declaration that it was undoable, stemming from Stone’s own desire to redeem his father’s abusive absence et cetera et cetera. 

The Russian was so socially inept, that even I was doing quite well (it was not superior intelligence, that barred me from connecting with others, as Stone asserted). A prodigy, the Russian spoke not just maths and Einstein, but quite good english, french (from my limited knowledge I could confirm also quite good), spanish and bulgarian (which I had absolutely no idea about but he sounded possessed and speaking in tongues when he presented his abilities to us). He could play giftedly most instruments you could think of, but playing, he said, never really excited him. He was one of those kids who know and can do so much they would really rather not do it at all.

Because of our groups’ incidental and unexpected but intense interactions with girls, the Russian treated us with an unjustified reverence, but it was not any kind of envy, with a mind like that you don’t really envy anything except being able to rest from what’s in your head and for once have a good night’s sleep. There is a scene in the movie Beautiful Mind where the main character, a schizophrenic, lays out to a girl he likes, very systematically, astrophysically like, why she should sleep with him. I bet that’s what the Russian would do too in the future.

There is another scene in a movie - Interstellar where a group of astronauts looking for humanity’s potential new home (the map contracting, the world getting small since the year ‘00, now twenty-one, then ‘42 then ‘63, warmer and warmer and warmer), the group of astronauts lands on a planet, of constant, unending sea, sees in the distance what they think is the great mountains of a new found land. After a couple of minutes of advancing towards the mountains, Matthew Mcconaughey says in hollywood style ‘these are not mountains. These are waves’ and the four astronauts have to flee the slowly approaching catastrophic demise of the wave, which, due to a fucked-up gravity on the planet, rose to that catastrophic height. 

At six AM, after one of the exceptionally drunk nights, with the sun already in full swing, and the alcoholic gravity fucked-up in their heads, Stone and J went to catch a wave bigger than at any time of the day. 

While I was sleeping off the night in the hammock, with God knows what dreams, or maybe even no dreams at all, and P-G tossing and turning in the tent, and Stone and J surfing the morning wave, the Russian sat solemnly and alone on the sunrise beach and looked up at the starless sky, wiped clean by one gigantic white star which at that point (he knew, we didn’t know) was so big and close to the contracting map that it sucked out some of the time and some of the space from the air, making the tide rise more than at any time of the day. He knew why that was and we didn’t know but we were looking at the same thing, the earth getting warmer and warmer and warmer, and the wave growing higher and higher and 

And we would sometimes go away from Victoria, to a nearby town where the waves were always bigger and we marvelled at how they whip-cracked, splash-fell and rocked against the concrete-lined shore and drowned the air underneath with all their might, worked it into white foam. He knew and we didn’t, and while we lay down with girls looking into the stars and talking about constellations (only to then laugh about how drunk and absurd it is to think three stars can possibly represent the shape of a great bear or big dipper or any kind of stupid shit like that), The Russian tried to crack the code written in the stars. Looking for a new home for us. The four of us walked the shore and wondered about the origin of colorful pebbles spat out by the lapping magnificent waves, and he could probably tell us everything about each of them, trace lines from each falling star to each stone we cast mindlessly into the sea.

He could explain the shifting realities when the morning came, and why, at seventeen, you have to do certain things and not the others, and now, too, why we did all those things, why we worked in psychedelic factories and sung our hearts out to the bass of the speaker. Why we ran after girls beach-length and back, why we hitchhiked to Lou’s restaurant, why we came to Victoria in the first place, why we had jobs in advertising, why we were twenty-one, but Stone was right about one thing - the Russian was ‘fundamentally alone’

There is another scene in Interstellar, the next one after the giant wave, where Matthew Mcconaughey comes back to the spaceship waiting in the orbit of a water-mountain-these-are-not-mountains planet, discovers that time, tied with an invisible string to the fucked-up gravity) passes differently on the surface of the planet, in its orbit, and in general completely differently back on the contracting earth’s map where he left his children. How old were at the time he left in that movie - I can’t remember, let’s say twenty-one. Having spent only half an hour on the surface, he now plays the received messages from back home and sees his children’s lifetimes growing older and older and older and finally sees them surpassing them in age. He breaks down in tears and I suppose you could say he, too, was ‘fundamentally alone’

The Russian, Stone told us, was taught privately by a tutor who’s line of mathematical origin could be traced all the way to Gauss or someone. He could speak Einstein, french and spanish, and although his tongue got tied in human conversations, one day, as we drank beer on a small patch of grass in front of the local hotel, he proclaimed there was something very important we wanted to tell us. Concluding that the Russian was most definitely possessed by something (you could tell when he spoke bulgarian), we all decided listening would do no harm but at worst would be so incredible that we would not believe it. 

‘You guys are now young and strong and you surf and all, but seriously, you have to do sports’, he began, ‘I don’t mean just any sport but something that really puts weight on your muscles. Like rowing or pumping on the bench, you have to train and now prepare for the rest of your life. And cardio, too, it will save you from heart disease and such.’ - and you can imagine mine, our surprise and feeling of absurdity that a being like that was uttering sentences such as these at that moment. 

And that was it, the only normal set of words he ever uttered in front of us, which in his mouth was not normal at all - this man, trained by Gauss himself, had one recommendation to us and it was to do sports because it will help us to stay healthy in the future. 

In space, the state of weightlessness makes the unused muscles grow weak, and the astronauts have to use the special gym machines installed on their spaceship so that their bodies don’t entropy, and heart is a muscle, too, I think, and I wondered, briefly, after what the Russian told us, if it too can die with no gravity. And it seems that time is a muscle too. It contracts and then it unfolds, it squeezes and releases and lets you breathe and suffocates, and ultimately things seem neither good nor bad but just what they ended up being. Time can definitely die away and fall from you like a dead leaf. Or it can end up a pretty stone under the feet of a giant wave. You don’t feel how it squeezes and unfolds, how it lays you down in a warm bed in the arms of someone you didn’t ever know but who reminds you of everything. 

Matthew Mcconaughey - seeing messages from the future, past, present, now, never, always, and breaking down into tears, his heart breaking from weightlessness.

I was twenty one and I knew what it meant. 

And in a year I would be twenty two, and in another year twenty three, and in three years twenty four. And the astrology girls, going with us skinny dipping in the midnight water, they will disappear somewhere under the waves and start slowly fading away from our lives like an unused muscle.

J loved quoting this one scene from Matthew Mcconaughey's first movie: 

‘You know what I love most about college girls? I get older - they stay the sameeeee age’

And each time he said it, he laughed with the greatest, purest laughter you could find on this now planet.

4. 

‘And I got caught one time’

‘For what?’

‘Well, maybe two, but only one time involved the police. Second time. And that was me trying to steal an album, well, it was called Steal This Album’ - I was lying, although I did also steal that album, but having trouble with the police was for an attempted theft of headphones though that didn’t sound as sexy. And for some reason which made me feel real good I was flirting with the most beautiful girl under the good sun by us recounting our thefts both real or invented.

We both quickly settled that we had some borderline immoral thread running through our veins but drew the line at actually killing someone. We were rich and young enough to say those things and be all sexy about it. We knew we didn’t have to steal but arranged we should do it together and some point (‘ok, why not tomorrow?’) and it was beer first, and then flip flops the next and then another day a pink swimming mattress from the backseat of some rich and young and abandoned rented cabrio. And we took it swimming, drunkenly in the night. Rich and young, and full of stars.

We stepped into the calm sea, small waves, shallow, and took off our clothes, most of them, and took our pink stolen mattress against the waves, her covering small breasts with only her hands, our sociopathic personalities meeting somewhere under ridiculous notions of astrology. We kissed, and that was that. 

The mattress lay once again abandoned (has someone left the rented cabrio just as we left the shore?) where our friends would say it was ridiculous to steal it. We only stopped kissing when she said we have to look for the damn pink abandoned thing (apparently it was rented by one of her friends) after which we dived deep into the shallow sea.

I remembered all those things other than sex best. The kiss in the sea. The conversation about stealing shit, the hand covering breasts. And after sex, the interruptions of it by my taking sips from a big bottle of booze, and playing chess on the rooftop of the place we stole from. 

‘And I got caught one time’

‘For what?’ 

‘Stealing mattresses, and flip flops, and beer, but it was good, the time I did treated me well’

‘How long were you in for?’

‘Hmm I don’t know, around eight decades’

‘Woah, how old were you when you got caught?’

‘Like, twenty-one’

‘Shit, but you say it was good?’

‘Yeah. It was good life’

[antihero-writings]

The Empty Throne (Ch1)

Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist (Brotherhood & Manga)

Fic Summary: It's been a long time since that word died on Ed's lips...but relationships may be the only thing that can come back from the dead. || Exploring Ed and Hohenheim's relationship using the songs "Stumbling in Your Footsteps", "The Alchemist", and "Youth" as prompts.

Character focus: Edward Elric

Notes: This chapter explores Ed's view of his father more early on in the series, using the song “Stumbling in Your Footsteps” by Get Scared as a prompt.

Also, this chapter expands upon Chapter 42/Episode 20 "Father Before the Grave," and includes some lines only from the manga. (I actually highly recommend reading it, because Ed and Hohenheim talk more in it than they do in the anime). 

As always, I would absolutely love to write more about this fandom, so feel free to give me FMAB prompts!! You can drop them in my ask box!!

Chapter 1: Living Ghosts

The study door was ajar. Little Ed ran past it without a thought…but as he passed, something in the corner of his eye flickered, and he stopped.

Something. A fleeting shadow, like hope. And his heart staggered.

He backtracked to the door, something in his chest bubbling, a word fluttering to his lips:

“Dad?”

But it dissipated like smoke; there was nothing but an empty chair, and a few flies buzzing in the empty air. Disappointment tugged at his blushing face, before anger took hold, twisted in his chest, and he marched off.

That was stupid of him. How could he possibly think that man was back? It had been weeks now.

“Ed?” His mother popped her head around the corner. “Did you say something?”

“No, nothing. I just…thought I saw something,” he mumbled as he marched up to her.

This wasn’t the first time he’d seen this ghost.

Each time the front door creaked open; each time he saw a shadow across the lawn; each time something woke him in the night, or early in the morning, that word would rise in his chest and ripple onto his lips, and all too often he couldn’t help letting it escape.

And each time Winry came in the door, or a stray dog walked by the porch light, or he found it was just Al coming back from the bathroom… the word would flicker and die.

The hope that planted that word there slowly unwound, a ball of yarn at the center of his chest getting smaller and smaller; a plant withering and dying.

The house was full of ghosts such as these.

Over time that thing in his chest that jumped and hammed at each passing noise, and plummeted into his stomach when there was nothing there, became tamer, less excitable. But it didn’t just die… it changed.

In the fall it became something…instead of bright and warm, bubbling inside him, it was sharp, and burning; a painful heaviness sitting in the center of his chest.

After all, Icarus felt the warmth of the sun before he sank into the cold waters of despair.

And that word, so eager to flutter to his lips, he trapped in a jar.

******

Trisha felt a tug on her dress as she walked through the garden. She turned to see her son’s golden eyes shimmering up at her.

“Oh, hello Ed!” She turned to him, holding the basket at her side. “What’s going on?”

“Are you picking tomatoes?” he asked like his mind was on other things.

“Yes, I was going to make soup for us! You always loved this soup! Right?”

He scratched his head, frowning, then muttered softly;

“When’s dad coming back?”

The abruptness of this question seemed to hit Trisha.

This wasn’t the first time he’d asked this, nor the second, nor the third. Still, each time it hurt her a little more. She understood his reasons…but she knew Ed didn’t. And she’d promised Hohenheim she wouldn’t tell them…not that they could really understand at this age anyways.

She’d wait for him. But she hoped he’d come back soon, for their sons’ sakes.

Her lips curved into a smile all the same—somehow—as she knelt down in front of him.

“Oh honey.” She set the basket down, and put her hands together. “He’ll be back before you know it!”

She smiled, yes…but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“It’s been months now.” Ed muttered.

“I know.” She petted his head. “I know its hard. You just gotta be patient Ed. I promise if you just keep waiting a little longer—”

“Yeah but…how long?”

“I don’t know honey.” The sadness tugged at her words; the sadness she was desperately trying to keep at bay. “But I know he’ll come back.”

He paused, looking at the ground, his expression twisting, like he didn’t want to speak the words festering behind his lips.

“What is it?” She asked gently.

“Why did he leave?” His voice was soft. “Were…Were we… not good enough for him?”

“Oh honey.” She put her hand on his cheek. “Have you been carrying that around this whole time? Of course not.” She pulled him into a hug. “You’re perfect. And your dad knew that. You were the world to him. He just...had something he needed to do.”

“What went wrong?” he mumbled into her shirt. “Was it something I said?”

“No, of course not!” She held him tighter. “Nothing went wrong at all!”

He wanted to believe that. He wanted to hold these words like precious jewels.

Once, he could have. Once these words had given Ed hope, made him look forward to tomorrow, be willing to wait. But she’d said them enough by now they were nothing but that; empty, flowery words.

If they were truly the world to that man, why would he leave his world behind? He’d had it all.

They were meant to be a kingdom, a fortress against any obstacle. But the king had got up and left his throne.

Adults always throw around such words when they don’t want to tell kids a painful truth, thinking they’re ignorant. Ed thought that was crueler than simply speaking said truth. Because the more they repeated those things…the more the truth behind them bled through the cracks in their smiles.

The truth that Ed could see behind her smile, the truth that made him begin to cry into her shirt today was that he knew he was never coming back.

******

Ed’s footsteps were rough against the floorboards as he walked into Pinako’s house.

Usually he would give her a pleasant hello, but his irritation was rather boundless at the moment;

“Hey I’m here. Sorry it took so long. Also a stray mutt decided to follow me home.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

Hohenheim froze, peering at him over his glasses.

“Edward! You had your brother and I worried sick!” She smacked him with a dish towel. “Next time call us!”

“Sorry.” He scratched the back of his head. “I got dragged off on an…unexpected detour.”

She pursed her lips. “Some top secret military mission no doubt.”

Before he could respond, her eyes landed on Hohenheim and her expression fell. She glanced between them, and her voice was gentler as she spoke;

“I see you found your father.”

“The bastard decided to materialize is more like it.” Ed put his hands on his hips

“I wanted to warn you he was here…But you didn’t exactly give me a chance.”

“You need warning before seeing me?” Hohenheim looked strangely sad at this.

“Yeah,” Ed threw over his shoulder, “a big blinking sign would have been nice.”

“Well.” Ed didn’t wait for a response before he changed the subject. “I have sand in…places, so I’m going to go take a shower, if that’s alright with you freaks.”

They didn’t have a chance to reply before he rounded the corner.

The floorboards creaked as he marched down the hall, and into the bathroom, shutting the door a little louder than necessary.

He groaned, kicking the empty trash can—(it went flying across the room, since he used his automail leg)—before pausing and leaning his head back against the door.

Closing his eyes, he let out a long sigh. Had he been holding his breath ever since he saw that man?

He hadn’t been lying about the sand…but more than anything he just needed some space to breathe.

The news about Maria Ross, what the Ishvalans said in the Xerxes ruins, the Rockbells…and now Hohenheim showed up? After ten years he picked now? Not when they were in Liore, or Central, or even when Al was there too, nooooo. It just had to be in the three seconds he alone was here.

Three seconds…A day.

…Ten years.

Was the difference negligible to Hohenheim?

That was the only explanation he could think of for why he might react the way he did today. Were all adults like that? He hoped he wouldn’t be when he grew up. Did they not realize how the years felt to a kid? Maybe ten years wasn’t much to an adult like him.

But to someone still growing up? Ten years may as well be a century. Childhood is the only time the years feel long; just a few hours to play is weeks in some fantasy world. Those moments get shorter as each year goes by, like a speeding train, and suddenly you start to see how many seconds you’ve wasted. Kids don’t have that concept. Ed was just starting to understand it himself.

None of them could ever get those years back. They couldn’t patch the memories up with the other sewn back into the gaps. Those years when they might have played together, ate together, practiced alchemy together…just been together. All that might have been was snuffed out when the door shut.

And today, now he walked back in like he left yesterday.

Who did he think he was?

Ed opened his eyes.

What was he doing again? Towels. Yes. He should probably get those.

After cleaning up the spilled trash, and putting the can back, he walked over to the cupboard above the toilet to pull one down—(…the rest fell on top of him in the process—no it wasn’t because he was short).

When Ed saw Hohenheim at the grave, he’d been sure it was a ghost. It was the right place for one, after all. Even a living one.

Over the years he’d seen far too many ghosts of Hohenheim to believe the man standing there was anything corporeal. He was too angry to allow him to return at the moment he was least needed.

After reorganizing the towels and setting his by the shower, he pulled his hair out of the messy braid he’d made, catching his reflection in the mirror as his hair fell across his shoulders.

“We have the same look.”

Ed scowled at the mirror, balling his hand into a fist.

That’s all he had to say, after ten years?

“We do not have the same look.” He muttered to the mirror.

They may not have the same style…but he couldn’t deny they had the same hair and eyes.

He was almost granted the mercy of forgetting. Made sense, considering how long it’d been since he’d seen his ugly mug.

Proceeding to the shower, he turned on the water, the faint hissing filling the room as steam rose, warming the air.

This wasn’t the first time he wished he had inherited more of his mother’s features. More than once his mom mentioned how he and Al looked like their father. That had made her happy, and once upon a time that was enough. But now that they were alone, he lamented the fact that he had his father’s features instead of hers… he’d much rather people saw her when they looked at him.

He took off his clothes, throwing them onto the floor and stepping into the hot water. The warmth spread through him, like a cure to the bitter cold piercing his chest. Sighing, he closed his eyes and put his hands on the back of his neck, letting it trickle across his face.

So long since he’d seen his ugly mug.

Ten years. It may as well have been a century.

The last time he’d seen him it was through the wide eyes of a child, looking up at this towering figure with his back turned. Those cold, gold eyes, looking down at him. Saying nothing at all as he left them to grow up on their own.

He had grown up since then. He’d done and seen things adults couldn’t bear to look at. And he’d stopped seeing Hohenheim through those eyes; those eyes that gazed up hopefully, sure the adults have all the answers, wondering why he did this, assuring himself that man had some logical explanation that he’d come back one day to give them. And they’d forgive him. Some hope he would come back and fix their future. That he wasn’t a bad man.

Now he knew he wasn’t a saint, nor a good man who had simply gone astray. It was much simpler than that;

He was just a fool.

Ed reached over and grabbed the soap.

That was all. There was no deeper reasoning. No explanation to be had. He was just a fool. Some deadbeat dad who couldn’t even be bothered take care of his sons. He chose to save himself, instead of saving them. Left them to make sense of it all on their own.

So that’s what he was doing; making sense of it all. And the sense he saw was that he was a selfish bastard, nothing more.

Their mother had once said that they were the world to that man.

If that was true, he’d had the world right at his feet…and he’d walked away. He had it all, and he stepped off the planet. He hoped he fell into a black hole.

Was it so hard for him to stay, and take responsibility for his kids, and own up to that fact that they were his own, despite the fact that he was a fool? Even a fool could try his best.

Was the look in their eyes so hard to bear?

Today, he hoped it was. Ed hoped his eyes haunted him as much as Hohenheim’s gaze had himself. He hoped he could still taste them on his tongue those ten years. That he could never truly spit them out.

That wide-eyed, shimmering gaze of yesterday had become a fire of glass no one could put out, or shatter.

He knew that no one was going to take care of him. No one was going to comfort him when he cried anymore. The only one who would look after him was himself—(well, and Al too).

—Yet… the moment he saw him, he was hit with a shrink ray. Those wandering eyes, wondering thoughts—

—Dad? I-Is that you? After all this time?—

—Why did you leave? What are you doing back?—

—(Please stay)—

And that resounding desperate plea from long ago he’d done everything to deny, to block out…

Please come home again.

The house was empty. So, unbearably empty. A hollowness that bored into his chest and made a nest there.

When the thunder rumbled outside, the house shook with it; the wind whispering through the corridors.

That word had long since died on his lips; he’d long since stopped seeing Hohenheim out of the corner of his eye; his heart had long since stopped jumping at each passing noise.

Yet, now, when he walked by the kitchen, sometimes he thought he could still smell Mom’s soup. When he strode through the garden he was sure he saw a flutter of her dress. When he lie down to sleep, sometimes he swore he heard the wind whisper “Goodnight,” and felt a kiss on his forehead.

And though that thing in his heart had hardened, the warden of his lips never pardoned, when he saw a shadow across the lawn or heard a stray noise, the image of a man with golden hair and eyes flared up to his brain.

It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. He was never coming back. He forgot about them, left them to rot away, and for that he didn’t deserve the courtesy of these far-fetched wonderings.

But the house was so empty. And the hollowness burrowed into his chest.

So that night, after hearing his parents’ voices echoing through his dreaming head. Something in Ed broke.

He threw off the covers and stood there in his room, breath heavy on his chest.

The buzzing in his body wouldn’t let him go back to sleep, or lay there doing nothing. Something was vibrating at the frequency of everything he was made of. The resonance animated his legs, carried him through the moaning hallway, down the stairs of that big empty house, and into the yard, where the rain was pouring down.

He ran, his bare feet getting cut on pebbles and sticks.

Was he crying or screaming? All he knew was that humming in his body just kept getting louder.

He tripped on a rock and fell to the ground, his hands smeared in the mud. But he didn’t get up.

That resonance manifested in his throat. And at last he knew he was screaming.

It started with wordless sounds rending the air, like he was some wounded animal caught in a trap, until finally it manifested into words;

“Where did you go, you bastard?!” He roared. “Why did you leave?! Why did you leave us?! Leave mom?! Were we not enough for you?! Huh?! What did you have to lose?!”

His breath cut through his chest in gasps as he sobbed onto the grass, his tears mixing with the rain, the dirt and grime coating his hands and knees.

The thunder rumbled in reply.

This house had once been an illustrious kingdom. They made castles out of couch cushions, cathedrals out of books. They were lead by a perfect king and queen whom they would follow to the ends of the earth.

Until the king packed his things, and left his throne, his riches, his people too. Shut the portcullis, and was never seen again.

Until the queen lie bleeding on the checkerboard floor.

“Mom…please…” His voice was barely a drip of rain now. “Please come back, Mom.”

The kingdom lie in ruins, a crumbling echo of what it once was.

Their kingdom had lost its king, and now its queen too. Two lonely knights wandered the board alone. Who was left to lead?

The word was less than a breath:

“Dad…Dad please…”

Tears streaming down his face he sat up and yelled to the grey, grumbling air, the reverberation in his lungs louder than that thunder, “PLEASE COME HOME AGAIN!”

He fell back down, breathing heavily, shivering, finally realizing just how cold he was.

“I promise to be good.” He murmured. “Let us show you we’re good enough for you.”

The sentences ran out, and finally into the dirt there was only word breathed over and over:

“Dad…Dad…Dad…”

Until, at last, that word was gone from his lips.

He put the soap back and moved on to the shampoo.

The moment he saw Hohenheim before that grave…

He felt so small.

And he hated feeling small.

Hohenheim’s eyes hadn’t changed one bit. He may as well have walked straight back through the door that day.

That look from when he left was a scar across his mind, one that still burned when the nights were long enough, and the days were hard enough. He almost searched his body for the mark.

Even though the anger was sizzling on his tongue, bolstering him up, making him feel superior, he couldn’t help but feel so tiny.

“You were hiding the memory.”

Said so casually, reading him like a book when he’d looked at less than a page. He wanted more than anything for him to be wrong.

—(But when your house is full of ghosts, the only way to keep them from following you…is to burn it down)—

No How have you been, Edward? No I’m sorry I left, Edward. Not even a simple explanation or apology. Were those two little words so hard to say?

Ed felt so sick to his stomach.

He leaned forward, closing his eyes, resting his automail arm on the wall, the water draining through his hair.

He wanted to wash it all away, this day, the scent off his skin…erase the connections. But no matter how hard he scrubbed, the traces wouldn’t come off.

After turning off the water, he reached out from the curtain to grab the towel, ruffling his hair with it, drying off and putting his clothes back on, carrying his jacket over his shoulder.

As he passed by, the mirror taunted him;

You’ll never be free from him.

When he reached the door he hesitated, his fingers flickering before the doorknob. He bit his lip, wondering if he should go out there at all.

He didn’t want to see that man, to talk to him.

It’d been so long.

The look on his face as he left was burned into his mind. When he saw him again, before that grave, for a moment that memory was all he could see. How could that tape, so long stuck in one place, suddenly be moving again? Talking and walking like it wasn’t defective for ten years?

What could he possibly say to him? What should he say to him? What did he want to say to him?

Nothing. Said the wrath that hadn’t been put out by the water.

Everything. Said the little boy in the rain.

He took a deep breath before venturing into the hall, and a long exhale before entering the kitchen.

Pinako was standing at the sink in an apron, stirring something, while Hohenheim sat at the table cleaning his glasses—(ya know, not helping her, like the bastard he was).

Ed threw his jacket on the back of a chair, determinedly not looking at Hohenheim, and walking up to Pinako.

“Can I help you with anything, Granny?”

“Sure. Keep stirring this for me.” She pointed to the pan of the stove, then added, “You should feel right at home.”

Ed looked into the pan to see it was full of bean sprouts.

“WHADDYA TRYING TO SAY, BEAN SPROUT LADY?!”

“I MEANT WHAT I SAID, YA MIDGET!”

The house soon bounced with their indiscernible shouting match.

After they’d exhausted the topic, Ed stirred bitterly, and leaned over, whispering out of the corner of his mouth,

“So do you have any idea what the hell he’s doing back?”

“Beats me.” She muttered. “I’ve got the same information as you, kid; he just decided to show up one day.”

A few sprouts fell on the counter and sizzled as he gave him the stink eye over his shoulder.

“Who does he think he is?” he grumbled, “Showing up without so much as a warning...”

“You’re one to talk.”

“Wja—That’s different!”

“Well…Like it or not he is your father, Ed. Maybe you oughtta trying talking to him.”

“What, you mean like before he decides to jump ship again?”

“I can hear you, you know.” Hohenheim’s level voice broke through.

“Yeah well—good.” Ed grunted and stirred more vigorously, but didn’t continue the topic.

After a moment’s silence, Den clicked over to them and lay at Ed’s feet, whining slightly.

“Hey, buddy.” He switched stirring hands to pet him. “Is something wrong?”

“…Animals have never much liked me.” Hohenheim answered softly.

Ed smirked, scratching Dug behind the ears. “Good boy.”

“Alright, that should be enough, thank you.” Pinako took over. “Sit down, Ed. Supper’s just about ready.”

“Oh.” He backed up, remembering that staying for dinner entailed actually conversing with that man. “Well, on second though I…I’m actually not that hungry.”—(which wasn’t a lie).

Pinako looked at him over her glasses like she knew exactly what he was thinking.

“Sit. Down.” She enunciated.

Ed surveyed the room and sat in the spare chair against the wall, facing away, putting his hand on his chin.

After a moment Pinako grabbed the back of the chair and dragged him into the spot opposite Hohenheim.

“You’re strong for an old lady!”

“You’re weak for a young man.”

“Wh—I’m plenty strong!”

“Maybe if you drank more milk.” She put a glass of it in front of his plate. “You’d be stronger.”

“So we meet again ya bastard.” Ed scowled.

Hohenheim looked like he was about to speak when Pinako clarified, sitting beside him,

“He’s talking to the milk.”

“Ah!” His tone shifted. “It appears you and I have something else in common!”

Ed looked between the two like he was about to start a self destruct sequence.

He grabbed the milk and tried to chug it, but quickly failed and ended up spitting it out.

“Nope.” He coughed, milk dribbling down his chin. “Still can’t do it.”

Ed thought he saw Hohenheim’s mouth quirk up slightly, but it was quickly overshadowed by the realization that he was staring at him. Not in a you’re-talking-so-I-should-look-at-you way, but a ah-yes-a-test-subject kind of way.

“Your eyes stuck, old man?”

Rather than apologizing, or stopping—(like a normal person)—he adjusted his glasses to get a better lock on. “This is the first time I’ve gotten a good look at your automail.”

Ed looked at his own arm, realizing there was an unfortunate side effect to taking his jacket off. He looked back and forth from him to Pinako, as if she’d rescue him.

He’d never felt embarrassed about his automail before—actually, it was pretty badass, if he said so himself. But Hohenheim’s scrutinizing continued to be that shrink ray—why? He didn’t care what he thought…

“Pretty nice, handiwork, huh?” Pinako jabbed him with her elbow.

“Yes, expert craftsmanship.” Hohenheim responded absentmindedly.

“Wouldja quit examining me!”

Hohenheim finally broke his lock, resuming eating. “Pinako said it was your leg too.”

“What, you want a fashion show?” He spoke through his food.

“No, no that’s fine.” He said like it was a genuine offer. He took a bite of food before continuing. “So your leg was taken when you tried to transmute your mother, and your arm when you transmuted your brother’s soul into one of my suits of armor, yes?”

Ed swallowed roughly, turning to Pinako. “Did you tell him everything?!”

“Well…He does have a right to know.”

“Since when?! He doesn’t have a right to anything when walked out on us!”

“How old were you?” Hohenheim plowed on like he couldn’t hear them.

“Eleven.” He answered through gritted teeth.

“That’s rather impressive. You were able to bind a soul at just eleven? There’s not many who could do that at thirty.”

It was the first time someone said that that he didn’t think sounded impressed at all.

“How is your brother doing? I would have liked to have seen him.”

“As well as he can be without a body.” He muttered through his food again. He couldn’t really taste anything.

Hohenheim paused before asking softly;

“���Why did you do it Edward?”

Ed nearly choked, jerking his head up, his eyed widening. Was he really asking him this, now?

“Why do you think?!” He stabbed his food without intention of bringing it to his mouth.

“Didn’t you know the risks?”

“We didn’t care!” His voice rose, and he stood up, his chair groaning against the floor. “It’s not like we had anyone here to—oh I don’t know—give us a reason not to!” He paused, then said in a normal volume. “No offense, Granny.”

Hohenheim said nothing. Even though Ed was standing over him, as his glasses shimmered in the light, he still felt as though he was being looked down upon.

That look, that look from when he left, never leaving his face, that look that made him want to punch him—(he would have, if Pinako wasn’t there)—

“I’m going to bed.” He grunted quietly, turning around.

“But you’ve barely touched your food...” Pinako pointed out gently.

“I’ve lost my appetite!”

Ed just caught the words “He’s rather hotheaded, isn’t he?” before he slammed the bedroom door.

It was then he noticed how almost every part of his body was tense.

He leaned back against the door, this time sinking all the way to the floor, putting his hands on his face, digging his fingers in his hair, the tenseness translating to trembling.

One conversation.

One moment.

Ten years.

Once upon a time he waited weeks for him to come back. Once upon a time, he wanted more than anything to just talk to him—he’d take a mere moment. To talk about something, anything.

Now that he was back, he could barely stand to be in the same room with him.

The buzzing in his body made him want to run out into the fields and scream again, to punch him over and over until he was beaten bloody. But this time he remained in place, a creature frozen in ice, trying to break out, shaking in his crystal prison.

Now their kingdom had become more than just a ruin, or an echo of itself…it was a bone yard.

Ed said he wanted to go to bed, and he did, but apparently that translated to ‘lay awake in bed for hours.’

He didn’t know how many had transpired when Hohenheim came in. Ed didn’t directly see him, but he knew it was him. For one thing, Pinako would never be so creepy. He didn’t even do or say anything, he just came, and left. Pervert.

…And the worst part of this day wasn’t seeing him again, it wasn’t the anger broiling in his gut…

It was that as he sat up in bed, staring at the door…for the first time in close to ten years he could taste the putrefied remains of that word on his lips.

[screensirenfic]

Black Leather - Chapter 42

“Just a little more, and then you’ll be ready.” I advised, still smearing on powder blue eyeshadow onto El’s eyelids until I’m pretty sure she looked like a budget Cindy doll, but it had been what she wanted; and fuck if I was gonna tell the kid what to dress like after the ass saving she’d done this year.

“Can you keep still a minute?! I’m almost done.” I complained, still struggling to blend at the corners, because putting makeup on a thirteen year old was like putting diapers on a puppy; probably pointless, with you having to deal with far more wriggling than necessary.

“Ah— Okay, okay...” She managed between squirms, eventually managing to sit still on the stool I’d moved into the bathroom.

The kid had shown me a picture of some young starlet on the cover of Seventeen with bright pink lips and sparkly blue eyeshadow.

The look on a whole made me want to barf, reminding me far too much of Tina and her cronies in school, but the kid’s eyes lit up at it; so I tried my best.

Once I’d made her eyes suitably blue and “alluring”; as the magazine sold it, I put the eyesore of a shadow down, picking up a shiny pink gloss I’d managed to pick up in Melvald’s, which wasn’t quite as ghastly as the shade on the cover.

“Okay; you can open your eyes...” I said; popping open the lid of the gloss, whilst I checked my handy work was even.

“And open your with your lips like this...” I demonstrated, rolling my lips over my teeth so I could get a smooth canvas.

Eleven followed my instructions, stretching her lips so I could smear the pale pink gloss all over them. It was a little stickier than I’d have liked, but I guess that served me right for shopping in the dollar aisle.

All that was left was a little blush; the same pale pink shade I used thankfully complimentary to her skin tone, and then I was done.

“Voila!” I made us of the sole bit of french I learned in class as I pulled back, admiring the much more flattering copy I’d done of Seventeen’s cover photo on a face I honestly much preferred.

The kid instantly got to her feet, making her way over to the bathroom mirror to admire her reflection.

“Do I look pretty?” She asked, nervously fiddling with a lock of hair that had managed to escape the reach of my hairspray can.

“No... you look beautiful.” I reassured her; smiling as I tucked the stray curl behind her ear.

She beamed; a thing that was almost too bright to look at, filled with genuine warmth and enthusiasm, and in that moment I decided that yes; she was beautiful.

And she was my little sister.

—————————————————-

Dad had insisted on driving us both over to the school, and in hindsight; it was probably wise, considering my only mode of transportation was a motorcycle, and that was hardly conducive with wearing a prom dress.

El had been nervous the whole ride over, fidgeting restlessly in her seat, and I wondered if I’d ever been that high strung.

Then I remembered my own first dance, and how I’d spent the most of it hunched over a toilet bowl; Steve holding back my hair whilst I blew chunks down the porcelain.

When we arrived, she’d been hesitant to get out the car at all; last minute jitters hitting her harder than before.

“I feel sick...” She stated as I began to climb out the car, clutching her stomach in what I guessed was a convincing act for a kid who spent most of her life as a lab rat.

“It’s just nerves; they’ll pass in a minute.” I reassured her; knowing that if she could take on a damn demogorgon, she could go to one stupid school dance.

She shook her head, fingers bunching tightly in the fabric at the front of her dress, before saying;

“I want to go home.”

“Well; what do you mean you want to go home?! You were looking forward to this...” Dad turned in his seat to put in his penny; the irritated tone of his voice far too familiar a thing.

El just continued to shake her head, clutching more desperately at her stomach.

“I wanna go home.” She repeated; glitter rimmed eyes wide and nervous.

I sighed and crouched down beside her, already overly familiar with the number anxiety could do on your good mood, but unwilling to let her miss out on what may very well be the best night of her life so far.

“Tell you what; how about you and I just take a look inside and see what’s what...” I offered, hoping the kid couldn’t already see through my poorly thought up rouse.

“No pressure; just a quick in and out, and if you don’t like it, we can go home and eat pizza and watch looney tunes.” I continued, already knowing her weakness of junk food and kids cartoons.

She thought on it for a second, before nodding.

“Okay. Just a look.” She agreed, and I took her hand to lead her out of the car.

———————————————————-

Getting El into the gymnasium wasn’t the arduous affair I had prepared for; the kid only needing to take a look through the windows in the gym doors to decide she wanted in.

We’d walked in at the far end of the gym; the dance already fat too well into the swing for any of the kids to notice a newcomer, even a total stranger like Eleven.

Already I could tell she felt out of place; her hand reaching out to grab my own in a clammy grip, needing some grounding in what might’ve been the busiest room she’d ever been in.

“Every Breath You Take” was playing loud on the speakers, and from wall to wall, some lucky kids were enjoying some one on one time with their chosen partner. Those that weren’t so lucky stuck to the sidelines, staring on wistfully at the happy couples.

El scanned them all hopefully, clearly searching for someone in particular amongst the sea of bad perms and old wedding—

She’d found who she’d been looking for, and judging by the way her face lit up like a Christmas tree; he must’ve seen her too.

I followed her gaze, until I laid eyes upon a rather dapper looking Mike Wheeler, suited and booted and dressed to the nines as he made his way towards her.

Eleven stared at him; her face the picture of teenage romance as she watched her love struck Romeo stride towards her.

“Well; what are you waiting for? Get over there!!” I urged her on; managing to garner a quick smile, before she dropped my hand and cut through the crowd to meet him halfway.

The two of them met in the middle of the dance floor, and I could already sense the makings of a romantic epic blossoming between them; their faces too full of innocent adoration to be captured even in the pictures.

They talked for a moment, before Mike offered El his hand, and she took it; the pair of them disappearing onto the dance floor to enjoy the rest of their night.

My work here was done.

——————————————————-

The cold evening air outside Hawkins Middle hit me harder than I expected the moment I walked out of the fire escape doors. I pulled my leather jacket tighter around my shoulders, determined to smoke my cigarette quickly, then get the hell out of there; because it was far too fucking cold to spend the night outside in th—

“Aren’t you a little to old to be a middle schooler?” A familiar cheery voice pulled my attention away from attempting to light the smoke braced between my lips.

“I could say the same to you, Harrington...” I retorted, turning towards the lanky brunette leant up against his BMW.

“You here to drop the kid off?” I asked as I made my way over to his car; guessing Steve probably offered to act as Dustin’s chaperone for the night.

“No; I just came because I love booze free punch and glitter curtains…” He joked, moving so I could settle next to him on the car, lighting up my cigarette and taking a drag.

“So you managed to convince your dad to let her go?” Steve asked, nodding towards the school in a clear reference to Eleven.

“Yeah. He was pretty stubborn about it at first, but I managed to talk him round.” I replied, pulling the cigarette away from my lips and offering it to him.

He took it, taking a drag and exhaling smoke, before replying;

“You’re going soft in your old age…”

“Me soft?! You’re the one going around adopting random thirteen year olds.” I retorted, snatching my smoke back from him to take another drag.

“What can I say? I’ve got a weakness for short stacks with bad hair and big mouths.” He smirked, glancing at me with teasing eyes.

I elbowed him hard at that, starting off a chain reaction of quiet chuckles from both of us.

I loved moments like these.

Stupid, pointless moments when we could just sit back and be ourselves.

No Tommy or Ally, or even Nancy; just me and Steve smoking cigarettes by his car and telling bad jokes.

I smiled, leaning back against the car and breathing in the crisp night air; a cool contrast to the warm smoke of my cigarette, just enjoying the muted murmur of The Police seeping out from the gym.

Steve swayed slightly to the music, bumping me every now and then with his hip as he hummed along with the music; happy to just enjoy the silence and the cold with me.

“Hey… Do you— do you wanna dance?” He suddenly asked, spinning to face me and taking a few steps back from the car.

“Steve; we’re in a parking lot.” I pointed out; raising an eyebrow at him skeptically.

“So what. The songs not called Dancing In The Streets for nothing.” He smiled goofily; the bad joke earning him a groan from me.

Still; it didn’t dampen his spirits, him already rhythmically stepping side to side in the worst possible example of a solo slow dance I’d ever seen, but still; it was Steve, and his goofiness always made me laugh.

“Come on; Lo. Don’t make me dance all by myself…” He coaxed me from his makeshift dance floor; his ridiculous dance moves making me chuckle and look to the heavens, because; really?

This was who it was gonna be?

Still; I decided to humour him, dropping my cigarette to the floor and putting it out with my boot, before stepping forward to join him.

His smile lit up at my unexpected compliance; me stepping close to him to loop my arms around his neck in what must’ve been the closest I’d been to an actual slow dance since I was thirteen.

Steve settled his hands on my waist, holding me gently as we swayed side to side to the music; big dumb smiles on our faces, because this was ridiculous.

We were two seventeen year olds dancing outside a middle school dance like it was fucking senior prom.

It was stupid and dorky, and maybe even a bit pathetic,

But it was nice.

And that was enough as I swayed side to side with someone who’d rapidly become my best friend over the past five years; someone who cared about me more than anything.

Someone who lo—

Someone who loved me.

I leaned forward, staring back into Steve’s warm brown eyes as I came to a realisation.

Steve loved me.

He always had; and as he closed the last few centimetres gap between us, soft pouty lips colliding with my own, I couldn’t help but smile.

Steve was an idiot; he was dumb and dorky, had too much money to know what to do with and was far too pretty for his own good.

But he was my idiot.

I lifted my hand, letting it tangle in thick, hairspray coated locks, leaning into the smell of overpriced cologne and savouring the taste of cherry lip balm, and smiled.

Things didn’t change, but some things never had to.

And Hawkins never changed.

[nashvillesingersblog]

Ken Hatton shares his insight about performing with the Bluegrass Student Union, the Louisville Thoroughbreds, his experience as a director, solo performer, and arranger, and his very candid opinions about the evolution of the music industry and the Barbershop Harmony Society.

Top photo: Ken Hatton

Bottom photo: Bluegrass Student Union 1978 International Quartet Champion of the SPEBSQSA (DBA Barbershop Harmony Society) (L to R) Ken Hatton, Allen Hatton, Dan Burgess, Rick Staab

Todd Wilson had a chance to interview Ken Hatton for our email newsletter. Todd is one of our founders and serves the Nashville Singers as Executive Director and Artistic Director.    

You can subscribe to our newsletter by texting the word SINGERS to 42828

DISCLAIMER: Some of our readers may find Ken’s responses to a few of Todd’s questions a bit edgy. Due to the length of this interview, only a small portion was published in the Nashville Singers newsletter. Hatton’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of the Nashville Singers organization.

TW: When did you know you wanted to be a singer?  

KH: It’s impossible to remember not being a singer.  Granddaddy and Dad were both “song-leaders” in the Church of Christ (“Minister of Music” was considered too “uppity”), and Dad joined the Louisville #1 Chapter of SPEBSQSA, Inc. as a tenor with his high school gospel quartet, in 1951.  Mom was a fair pianist and could hold a tune pretty well too.  Brother Allen was born in 1954, and I came along in 1955.  

The Church of Christ held that instrumental accompaniment was a sin when making a “joyful noise,” so all the worshippers sang in 4-part harmony, you know, just like that original quartet, “Matthew-Mark-Luke-and-John.”  It was all we knew as toddlers, so I can’t really recall when I learned to sing harmony.  It just always was.  Dad taught us to use our “musical ear” to find the harmony, using the shape-notes in the hymnal.  His advice was, “When the note moves up, sing higher, and when the note moves down, sing lower, until it sounds good with the melody-note.”  That was how we learned to woodshed; it was a spiritual thing.  

I do remember at the age of five, when I learned my first popular song.  Allen was in the first grade, and I would wait for his school bus every day on the front steps. I really missed my playmate!  Each afternoon, he would teach me all the things he had learned that day in school.  On one of those afternoons, he sang me a song that some of his fellow first graders had heard on the radio.  Within a few minutes, we were singing it in unison, and with some occasional improvised harmony.  “When I was a little bitty baby, my mama would rock me in my cradle, in them ol’ cotton fields back home.”  I’m not sure that’s when I knew I wanted to be a singer, but that’s when I realized that I was one.  

TW: What can you tell us about growing up in the Hatton family?  

KH: We were encouraged to participate in music-programs in school by our parents, and we enjoyed those activities.  Perhaps talent at a given discipline affects one’s motivation (For some reason, I did not really dig long division or algebra).  Allen learned to play the trumpet, and both of us took piano-lessons as youngsters.  Later, our younger sisters displayed similar talents for singing, and the oldest of the three, Jo Anne, played piano.  Dad was one of the original Thoroughbreds, when the chorus was formed out of the old Louisville Chapter, and Mom sang with the Kentuckiana Chapter of Sweet Adelines, Inc. (later, Sweet Adelines International).  Both parents dabbled in quartet-singing from time to time, and their ensembles always sounded musical, but never seemed to stay together long enough to earn rank in competition.

Dad took Allen and me to an occasional chorus show, where we would be seated in the audience and admonished not to move.  Then, we would watch the chorus rehearse for their performance, and would enjoy the show. I can recall getting an unexplainable lump in my throat whenever that chorus of men would sing with reckless abandon. The highlights of those shows were the several chapter-quartets, including the Derbytowners and (later) the Citations, both of whom were really good competing quartets.  We didn’t realize that the goose-bumps and throat-lumps were being caused by the ringing of chords.  The big thrill for us, as kids, was to experience the Club House Four. They were a pretty good singing District Champ quartet, but those guys really worked at entertaining.  Their jokes and routines were not as “edgy” as the Brian Lynches of the world might prefer, but old folks and kids alike just couldn’t stop laughing whenever the “Club House” was on stage.  

The Thoroughbreds’ Musical Director was a guy named Bill Benner, who had moved to Louisville for work, after having directed the Lake Washington Skippers to a second place finish in international competition in 1957.  Over a four year period, he took the brand new Thoroughbred Chorus to 8th, 6th, 2nd and 1st place finishes, winning their first chorus championship in 1962.  Soon after that competition, Bill resigned as director, though he still conducted the Sweet Ads for a while.  It seems he had been so focused on barbershop that he had ignored his wife and his job, and they both sort of fired him.  He needed to get paid for directing the chorus, and the 1962 T-breds didn’t like that very much.  So, our family took him, in, and Dad provided him with a job at his real estate company.

The saddest part was that Bill was being considered for the Society’s Music Services Director position. The Thoroughbreds’ 42 singers had finished second in 1961 to the 160 voice Chorus of the Chesapeake, under the direction of Bob Johnson.  It was revealed later that year that a certain judge was a member of the winning chorus, and he had over-scored the winners and underscored the ‘Breds.  The judge was kicked out of the judging program, and the Thoroughbreds received a secret apology, which was delivered in person by the new Music Services Director – Bob Johnson!  It probably was a good thing, as Bill’s tunnel vision personality might not have been a good match for that position.    

Bill proved not to be much of an agent, but he sure was fun to have around the house!  While he was thinking about what he was going to do with the rest of his life, and eating Mom’s home-cooked meals every night, Bill would teach us tags.  The guy was a savant, carrying all four parts in his head, and could teach the whole song by rote – eight bars at a time, with no “spots (That’s what we called sheet music back then).”  In fact, that’s the way Bill had had taught most of the charts to the Thoroughbreds for four years – by rote.  

So, Allen and I had one of the Society’s premiere musical smart-guys in the bedroom next to ours, and we got quite an education during his year and a half long visit.  It turned out that we were pretty quick studies, which was a good match for a bipolar type, like Bill.  There were five us in the house at that time who could hold our parts, and it was fairly easy to sing one of Bill’s tags after very little teaching time.  The first one we learned was “I Found in My Mother’s Eyes.”  

Bill moved to Chicago, and none of us ever heard from him again.  Jim Miller and Joe Wise had been appointed co-directors, and with the help of coach/arranger Ed Gentry, ushered in a new era of barbershop chorus singing through the Thoroughbreds.  Meanwhile, Mom took Bill’s place as Musical Director of the Kentuckiana Chapter of Sweet Adelines, Inc., later directing Falls of the Ohio Chapter, Derby City Chorus and Song of Atlanta.  She served as a judge in SAI contests, and sang a pretty mean baritone.      

Most choruses had a rule back then that excluded men under the age of 16. The exception was that one could join at 15, if your dad was an active member.  The thinking was that the members looked forward to their night out with the men (not with the women or the children).  They didn’t watch their language, and if they felt like having a beer or a smoke, they didn’t have to worry about being a role-model for just that one night each week. Boy, I miss those days!

Allen and I both joined at 15, and sang in our first Chorus Contest in Atlanta, in 1972, in which the chorus placed third.  We were disappointed, as the Thoroughbreds had won the championship without our help in 1962, 1966 and 1969, and were tied with Pekin, IL for the most international wins. Allen headed off to Morehead State, and back home, Rick Staab, Danny Burgess and I got our feet wet, singing with an “old” Thoroughbred named Paul Morris on tenor.  Paul was 28.  We sang together for about six months.  Rick went away to attend Georgetown University, breaking up the group, and Allen came home to attend University of Louisville.  Then, Rick surprised everybody, and came home to attend U of L as well.  That’s when the final combination of the Bluegrass Student Union was formed, with Allen on tenor.  Now, we had four guys about the same age, with similar skills and education.  

Mom (Mary Jo Hatton) was our first coach, and refused to let us work on craft, focusing instead on singing with the right muscles.  She knew we wouldn’t go back and do that grunt-work after we had earned the “cheap” points.  Mom was concerned about us damaging our young voices, so she demanded that we master vocal production first – a smart move.  

TW: What got you interested in barbershop harmony?

KH: One could say, “See Question #2,” and just stop there, but there is a twist.  As a young teenager during the hippie-years, barbershop was associated with the establishment, and we young people had our own subculture. We were told not to trust anyone over 30, and pop music was progressing in a different direction from Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook.  I perceived barbershop in those days as a fun hobby for older fellows, but the quartets and choruses I had heard didn’t seem like a good fit for the musical trends I was following as a baby-boomer.

Allen and I attended our first International Convention on our parents’ coattails in 1964.  Later, we attended our second one in 1968 (I was twelve), and discovered that barbershoppers had lots of pretty daughters in the “Barberteens” room, but didn’t appear to have very many sons. That turned out to be handy for us. We enjoyed attending those conventions, and sang some tags, but didn’t really pay much attention to the musical goings-on – too many distractions.    

Fortunately, Mom and Dad had a library of recordings of the Society’s Top Ten quartets, as well as recordings of live shows and Long Play (LP) record-albums produced by top quartets like the Renegades, Roaring Twenties, Boston Common, Dealers Choice, Regents, Gentlemen’s Agreement, Sundowners, Sidewinders, etc..  We listened to them all, and enjoyed some more than once.  But far and away, the quartet whose records I fell in love with were produced by the Sun Tones (later the “Suntones”).  My headphones and I spent hundreds of hours poring over their fantastic renditions of popular songs set to barbershop, and that music convinced me that this particular a cappella style could actually be “cool.”  Later, I would wait by the mailbox for each new Suntones-record, as it was released.  I listened until I had accidentally memorized all four parts to all of the several “Sunspots” records that we had.  That was the final piece of the puzzle.  I then joined the chorus, because I simply had to.

TW: You were a member of the Thoroughbreds, considered one of the most successful barbershop choruses in history.  Can you share a few of your own experiences with the T-breds?

KH: Like you guys, I could write a book.  Most of my experiences would be similar to those of other long time barbershoppers, and if I started telling about funny things that happened, we would never be able to list them all.  I will mention one general happening that helped create my personal mission and philosophy.  

Our 120 man chorus showed its best face during competitions, but after winning each trophy, about half of the guys would take a “break” for a couple of years.  We would be left with 60-70 active singers, who did the business of the chorus, week in and week out.  That core of “lifers” sold the tickets and program-ads, built the scenery, commissioned and tweaked the arrangements, rehearsed the show-tunes and performed the package-shows. The rest of the guys came back only to compete.

To our director, Jim Miller, it didn’t matter how small the audience was, or whether it was a prestigious event.  He spent the same energy in preparation and performance, whether we were singing for a banquet of 75 people or a stadium of 10,000.  I can recall many tough shows for small audiences who were not expecting the entertainment to be some barbershop group.  Jim would plan the show carefully, knowing that we would have to work hard and smart, in order to please the “tough” crowd.  Then, he would rehearse us for a couple of hours before the performance, to see which key people were missing, and would change his plan accordingly, moving certain singers to different voice parts to achieve balance, and substituting some second string MCs, soloists and quartet-singers.  

After a complete run-through, the chorus would hit the stage, and Jim would let the audience know with his body language and apparent effort that we wanted to please them. He would work up a sweat, and motivate us to dig in, so as to deliver the most emotional and exciting performance we could muster.  We always exceeded the expectations of those tougher (smaller) audiences, and each performance made the event seem more important to them and to us than it really was.  

BSU followed Jim’s example in that regard, and, with few exceptions, we exceeded the expectations too. For three decades, our quartet did a complete run-through before every performance.  We found that our percentage of remembered lyrics and accurate intervals went up, while our number of seconds of dead time went down.

Music Educators generally teach singers to perform without showing any apparent effort, but that was exactly the opposite of our approach.  We always wanted the audience to sense how hard we were working for them, so we made sure that all of our effort was apparent.  That made our audiences feel special, which is supposed to be “the job,” isn’t it?  Jim’s and our approach was one of the things that set our chorus and quartet apart from most others, who tried to hide their effort during performances, for some unknown “sophisticated” reason.  

One exception?  We sang for a United Nations General Assembly dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in the early 1980s, and we gave ‘em our best stuff, performing with reckless abandon.  We never got more than a white gloved golf-clap from those diplomats. Our host explained that they had all been taught to be very reserved, when in the presence of each other.  But our job was to make them forget their emotional training, so we failed that day. There were no whistles, shouting, hats in the air, money or room-keys on the stage, and no tears or laughter from anybody.  It was miserable.  Later, at the reception, the audience-members were quick with the compliments flattery, but I just wanted to crawl under a rock.

The rest of the 33 years of shows pretty much run together in my mind, because they were the same in this regard:  We gave everything we had in preparation and performance, and fell across the goal line each time, totally spent and exhausted… victorious!  Looking back, our experience was a lot more fulfilling than if we had taken some drugs, skipped across the stage, and tried to hide our efforts from the crowd.  Thanks, Jim!

TW: What were the names of some of the quartets and quartet-singers you sang with before the Bluegrass Student Union?  Compared to those quartets, what was different about the BSU?

KH: BSU was the first organized quartet of which I was a member.  Years later, I sang in several other quartets; Kids at Heart, The Sensations, The Exchange, Four for the Price, Bold Venture and The Daddy-Ohs!  One difference with BSU was trust.  Since I knew that the other parts would always be where they were supposed to be, I was free to think about the message of the song and our emotional connection with the audience, instead of being preoccupied with a few synchronization errors, out of tune chords or horizontal tuning (song going sharp).  The other main difference was the fact that BSU was all business.  When the last man arrived at rehearsal or at the studio, we started singing, and we didn’t quit until the first guy had to leave. On the road, we didn’t sight-see or attend a lot of parties.  We discussed future plans on the plane or in the car, had our carb-dinner together, rehearsed at the hotel, went to the venue early, set up our recordings in the lobby, dressed and made up, did our complete run-through, and gave our performance. Then, we repeated the process before the afterglow.  We often listened to the show tape on the way home, and discussed improvements for the next show.  Every action was designed to maximize the quality of performance.  In some of those other quartets, we spent a little time more enjoying ourselves, and that was fun, too, but in a different way.

TW: What can you tell us about a few of your most memorable BSU performances?  

KH: There was a sameness about our performances over the years that makes them all kind of a blur.  The common denominator was the audience-reaction. We started with a short, fast, high pitched opener, designed to get the audience’s attention away from whatever had preceded us on the show. We followed with self-deprecating humor, to make them like us personally. Then, we sang a swing-tune to charm, and followed with a sincere love-ballad, for the “kill.”  After that, we could sing our novelty songs, to demonstrate virtuosity, and repeat the process ad infinitum.  We were never really a one-song standing ovation kind of quartet. Our approach was a selling process, designed to earn the audience’s respect and love over the course of the performance.  Typically, the long or standing ovation would come at the end, as designed, and only then would we agree to perform an encore. Incidentally, you never saw BSU take cups or bottles of water on the stage. What’s up with that?  Do beta-blockers dry you out?    

Of course, we saw our share of far-away places and prestigious venues, but prestige and exoticness were not what made a performance memorable. Again, it was the audience.  One that stands out was in Viborg, South Dakota.  This community had one hotel, made of unpainted concrete blocks. There was no phone in the room, and a black and white TV was advertised at 50 cents extra per day.  The venue was a high school gymnasium, and our expectations were low.  Nevertheless, we prepared according to our training, and when we hit the stage, we realized there was standing room only in the place; people were hanging from the light fixtures to get a chance to see this show.  We didn’t know that South Dakotans rarely got to see any kind of live entertainment.  People had driven to Viborg from several hundred miles around.  It was such an appreciative crowd, and we were able to deliver a solid performance because we had not taken them for granted.  Carnegie Hall was nice, but this crowd was deafening!

We were invited to sing on the Saturday evening show at the Buckeye Invitational, in Columbus, Ohio, 30 years after our first performance.  It was to be our second appearance at the Buckeye, which was rare, so we were excited about the opportunity, late in our long career.  

We decided to dress and make up in our hotel rooms, and arrived during intermission, knowing that there would be a feature quartet before our spot as the headliner, which was traditionally the final act.  The stage manager excitedly welcomed us into a dressing room, expressing surprise that we were so late, and advising that we were scheduled to open the second half of the show.  I apologized, and asked, “Who is headlining?”  “Max Q,” he replied (who at that time was a silver medalist).  

Barbershop-etiquette calls for the International Champion to headline the show, which should have been us. It was (and is) a slap in the face for any champion to play second fiddle to a second place quartet.  Of course, it was possible that the show producers were neophyte barbershoppers who didn’t know any better.  However, there is no way that Max Q would not have known that tradition.  They should have declined immediately, when asked to headline, but evidently, they had decided it was appropriate for them to be the stars of the show, for some reason that was more important than good manners.  

We decided that the only thing to do was to remain quiet about their offense, and to simply do our “talking” with our performance, as we had been trained to do.  We spent a few minutes in the dressing room, rearranged our song-order and palaver for maximum effect, and went through the curtain with big ol’ grins, about half pissed off.  We opened with “Back in Business,” and the crowd went wild.  We just banged every song, and there was nothing left for Max Q, but a pile of juice.  In the lobby after the show, our recording table was mobbed, and theirs had four lonely guys in tuxedos holding pens, with a couple of crickets chirping, and no autographs to sign.  Second again!

As we were packing up, Jeff Oxley ambled over, and said sheepishly, “I guess you guys probably should have headlined this show.”  Ya think? Yeah, that one was memorable.  We never told anybody about it, until this writing.  

In the 80s, we did some research by surveying the various chapters.  There were over 800, and about 600 of them held an annual show, with a guest quartet.  If you took out the holiday weekends, on a given Saturday night, there were 15 annual chapter-shows going on in the country.  All of the show-chairmen wanted a champion, a past-champion or a top ten quartet as their headliner.  As one of the most popular show-quartets, we had our choice, so we conducted a survey, and began to be selective about which bids we would accept.  Our goal was to maximize fun and profit.  We started to perform only where the chapter had a larger crowd (good for recording sales) and a reputation of hospitality where other guest quartets were concerned (good for the fun).

We pitched in with the Citations, the Harrington Brothers and eventually the Suntones, to organize three special weekends.  We approached chapters about sponsoring special shows that would feature BSU and each one of those other quartets, with only quartet-singing – no choruses.  The idea went viral, and the three weekends were spectacular - so much fun!  The last one was in 1991, with the Suntones.  We performed on a Friday night, two shows on Saturday and one on Sunday afternoon in the southern Michigan and northern Ohio areas.  What a kick to ride around for the weekend with our idols, and get to know them personally!  We included a set as an octet, since we knew all of their tunes, and we traded two of our guys for two of their guys at the afterglows.  It was a dream come true, and BONUS – we all became good friends.

TW: What BSU CD recording project generated the biggest sense of pride, and what about that project was different?  

KH: We were proud of all of our recordings, because we took great care in the production of each one. From a young age, we knew that our quartet was finite, and hoped that people would listen to our recordings, long after we were gone.  That thought was on our minds with the planning and execution of each project. Bobby Ernspiker was our recording engineer, and he was also the son of a Thoroughbred.  

On the first two albums, “After Class” and “The Older the Better,” we had a largely technical approach, caring more about the accuracy of the notes, the ringing of the chords and the intelligibility of the lyrics than about the art.  We were making pretty good bucks on the road, so we decided to give Bob unlimited control over the duration of sessions.  Bob was our fifth set of ears, and was instrumental in capturing the best performances we could muster. Unlike other quartets, we spent six months to a year in weekly recording sessions, to do our best work.  It was our perception that those albums were not perfect, but they were better than most others.  We made money, although our sales were not yet commensurate with the expense and effort we had invested.  

Having met Walter Latzko, we decided to do our first theme album, which would be the first one created by any barbershop quartet.  We chose Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man” as the theme, and set to work on Walter’s fantastic arrangements.  We spent more time listening to Bobby’s guidance in the studio about emotional performance. It took a year to take the tunes from the paper to the stage, and another year to record them.  This time, we spared no expense on the studio time, the costuming, choreography, graphic art and photography, in an attempt to create the best show-package and recording in the history of the Society. The result was an artistic success, but again, the sales were no better than those of any ol’ past champion.

In spite of the apparent unwillingness of the buying public to notice any difference, we were pleased with the product, and decided to look for another theme.  We eventually settled on the songs of the 40s, and the idea for our “Jukebox Saturday Night” album was born.  Latzko and Waesche, our two faves, collaborated on the charts, and we applied the same attention to detail (and spent the same moneys), to create the best product possible.  We accelerated our attention to capturing the right mood for each song.  When that recording hit the streets, the sales went through the roof.  It was puzzling; perhaps the barbershoppers were tired of the Music Man theme, but excited about hearing tunes adapted to barbershop that they had not heard before. For whatever reason, this particular theme appealed to them, and Jukebox catapulted us to a new level of acclaim that left the other past champs behind.  The perception was that we were progressing, improving and pushing the edge of the envelope musically, just as our great examples, the Suntones and the Buffalo Bills, had done twenty and thirty years before.  

We continued that approach with a collection of tunes written by George Gershwin, whose chords and progressions had earned his songs taboo-status in previous Society competitions. But we liked them, and so did Walter (Latzko) and Ed (Waesche).  The result was our album, “Here to Stay,” the first one we did not release as an LP record, but only as a CD and a cassette.  The songs were more sophisticated, the arrangements were arguably better, and the performances were emotional.  The singing demonstrated greater savvy, while our technical execution was just a hair less precise than that of the previous two recordings.  The perception was that this was a lateral move, kind of an extension of Jukebox, and the sales were just as strong as those of the previous album.

In 1998, we introduced “LEGACY,” a 25 year collection of audio recordings in a 3-CD box set, including all five studio-albums, several previously unreleased tracks and a recording of a live show, complete with declamatory stuff between songs.  In 2006, we created our final recording product, called “COMMENCEMENT,” a 2-disc set (1 CD and 1 DVD).  The audio disc includes a few tracks that we were messing around with when we decided to retire for good.  The video disc includes the best performance of each song that we could find on video tapes we had collected over the years.  

Fans of “Here to Stay” and “Jukebox” have since gone back and checked out “Music Man,” and found it to have been under appreciated by past generations. We understand that our video of the Music Man show-package has been used by teachers at Harmony University for decades, to demonstrate showmanship, the way to put a show together, avoidance of dead time and the use of costumes, props, lighting, effective pauses and voice-over-music, to enhance a quartet’s performance.  That pleases us very much.  All of our tracks are available perpetually and digitally through iTunes, CDbaby.com and Pandora.  We have discontinued production of all hard copy CDs, etc.    

We are certainly proud of all of the products, since those five (original) releases each represented our best work at a certain stage in our development.  By design, many of the songs in the second half our career had a timeless appeal that continues to pay dividends.  Thanks to some good taste in song selection, great arrangers, hard work, outside-the-box engineering and professional artwork, our collections of recordings are still being purchased and listened to today.  We anticipate that people will enjoy our music a century or two after we start keeping each other company at the ol’ marble orchard.

TW: The Nashville Singers had a chance to sing your arrangement of “Manly Men” a few years ago, and the audience loved it!  When did you complete your first vocal arrangement?  Do you remember the name of the song?

KH: Glad you liked that one, but sorry, I really don’t remember the first one. When BSU started, I was not adequately educated to sight-read. That skill was developed slowly, and by necessity, over the years.  BSU was a hybrid quartet – that is to say, we were products of the woodshedding generations of the 40s, 50s and 60s, but were also affected by the work of genius-arrangers of the 70s and 80s.  As a result, we did not trust some aspects of the written arrangement, and always reserved the right to woodshed our own changes. Sometimes, they were necessary, to facilitate breath-points and “covers” of pickups.  Other times, they were swipes that we heard and felt, as we learned the chart. Helping to create the tune was a big part of the fun that we simply refused to give up.  

Most arrangers think it is presumptuous of others to change anything about their work.  That attitude is hypocritical and presumptuous in itself, since an arrangement, by definition, is composed of changes from the songwriter’s original work, who is the real (and legal) artist in question, anyway.  As we experienced different arrangers, we figured out which ones had a problem with our changes, and we quietly declined any and all opportunities to sing their charts. Ed Waesche was the first to exhibit an appreciation for what he called our “musical sensibilities,” and endorsed our changes, unless we committed a form-error, which he would help us to correct. Later, Walter Latzko encouraged those same sensibilities, so we had two of the smartest geniuses in our corner, which was more than anybody else had.  Those who wanted to dictate every aspect of the way we sang a song could go find their own quartet.  This one was ours!

The woodshedding accelerated my learning process, and over the years, I learned to spell some of the chords, identify intervals, tell a major key from a relative minor key, make up simple key-changes, etc.  Before long, I could sight-read all four parts, and would know them cold before we had our first rehearsal on a given song.  

It wasn’t until 2002 that I bought my first Finale software.  Friend Walter, had suffered a stroke several years prior, but was still writing arrangements daily, using his left hand to operate the mouse of a computer. The Finale system would enable me to be of assistance to him.

In his salad days, Walter could write an arrangement with his lead pencil and some blank staff-paper while on an airline flight that lasted a couple of hours. He could see the notes on the page in his head, could hear the tune being sung (also in his head), and he could write it down as fast as you or I could write a letter to Mom.  That was his genius, and it explains why only a handful of our Society members were respected arrangers in those days.  In no case did it take Walter longer than a few hours to hand write an arrangement of a single song.  

However, the stroke had robbed him of the use of his strong writing hand and of some of his energy. On the computer, it then took Walter about twelve hours to write an arrangement.  It became a two day job, so he would sometimes tire of the piece before he finished, and would send it to me for ideas from my old “musical sensibilities.”  We collaborated on a lot of charts during the last years of his life, and he taught me a lot about arranging.  

Lacking formal musical education, I am certainly no match for the geniuses who have that special (in their head) kind of talent.  However, with the aid of the Finale program, I found that I was competent to write a chart that included some original ideas.  With the computer, I could listen to my work through speakers, instead of “in my head,” and, with effort, could tweak the chart until it met my own standards as a top quartet singer.  

It was a labor of love, and I was mentored by a guy whom I loved.  I found that, even as my performing ability began to slow down, my strong imagination produced the same endorphin-rush, while writing, that I had enjoyed as a performer.  Over the past 14 years, I have compiled a modest library of 60 or 70 charts. However, I was not the only one who discovered that Finale can take the place of those certain genius-skills. There are now more competent arrangers than there used to be, all competing for the attention of the top ten quartets and choruses.  Of course, there only ten of them, right?  So, my catalogue has been placed with friend Jay Giallombardo and his wife Helen, in the hope that some hot shot quartets might notice them.  Some of those charts are listed on Jay’s web site, but I am not writing much these days.  

Some favorite arrangements that I wrote include a medley of songs from “Paint Your Wagon,” a millennial song popularized by “Five for Fighting” called “100 Years,” and a five part solo (with barbershop chorus background) called “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town.”  My favorite collaboration with Walter is a contest-chart of a song written by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells, called “County Fair” for an obscure Disney film called “So Dear to My Heart.” We finished that one shortly before my old friend passed away.  All of those tunes have matching learning tracks, which should be available from Jay.  You can hear full mixes of several of them on my album, “Walter and Me,” available on iTunes and CDbaby.com.  Thanks for the commercial.

TW:  From 2004 to 2011, you released four recordings as a soloist. What/who inspired you down that path? How would folks purchase some of those products?

KH: In January of 2002, the phone rang, interrupting a BSU rehearsal on a Sunday evening at Thoroughbred Hall.  A tiny voice said, “You don’t know me, but my name is Chilton Price, and I’ve written a song to honor the fallen firefighters from the 911 disaster.  We would like for the Thoroughbreds to sing it.”

Usually, such a phone call resulted in an embarrassing experience, because I would have to tell the person that they had written a bad song.  This time, such was not the case.  Ms. Price faxed me her song, and on Monday, I sent it to Walter, who wrote a chart that same day.  That evening, I passed it out to the chorus, and we learned in the same night.  Two weeks later, we performed it for a thousand attendees of a convention of the National Association of Retired Military Officers and their bejeweled significant others, at the Grand Ballroom of the Galt House Hotel, in downtown Louisville.  The place came apart.  

I visited Ms. Price the following Tuesday evening, to present her with a recording of that performance, and to thank her for thinking of us.  She said,” Ken, I didn’t tell you who I really was, because I wanted you to judge my song by its own merits.  I have several gold records hanging on the wall in my hallway.  I wrote ‘You Belong to Me’ and other hits from the 1950s. They stopped recording my music when Elvis came along, because I refused to change my writing style.  But I have continued to write new songs that sound just like the Great American Songbook tunes for the last 50 years.  No one with talent has ever heard them before.  Would you be willing to listen to some?”  

Chilton played, and I sang. I felt as if I had won the lottery. The first song made me cry, and each one was better than the last one.  This was the start of a beautiful friendship that lasted 400 Tuesday nights over an eight year period, until her death at the age of 96.  We catalogued her music, and wrote verses and extra lyrics together.  We collaborated on new original songs.  And we talked about every aspect of our lives, keeping no secrets.  You guys should know by now that when you make music together, it is one of the most intimate things you can do with another person. When writing together, we had to communicate the same feeling to the listener, so we had to compare our feelings and life-experiences, in order to tell the same story.  It really was one of the thrills of my life, to become friends with an accomplished songwriter, and Chilton, in particular, was a genuine person, with great wisdom and class.  She taught me how to write songs.  

Along the way, Chilton expressed her desire to have other artists sample her work.  We were already familiar with the freshly budding careers of Michael Bublé and Josh Groban, so she was inspired to hire a pianist and record a demo-CD of original songs, with me doing the singing.  We called it “Pure Price.”  The project turned out well, but we were advised that new songs presented by a new singer was a tough sell.  So, we went back to the studio, and recorded a CD with half original songs and half familiar songs, called “The Best Is Yet to Come.”  Then, we were advised that, while piano-vocal was charming, the tunes really deserved more accompaniment.  So, we went back a third time, and recorded yet another CD of half familiar and half original songs, but this time with a full 17 piece big band and a dozen string-players. The original band-charts were written by our favorite pianist, Jay Flippin, who also put together the best musicians in Louisville for the project.  Man, this was a dream come true!  To be the Sinatra-guy, with a studio full of hot players and the actual songwriter, smiling behind the glass.  It really was heaven.  We got to meet with Michael Feinstein for an afternoon, but so far, none of Chilton’s and my unpublished works have been recorded by anyone famous.    

By that time, BSU had slowed down, and in December of 2006, we called it quits for good.  Another singer who was working at the studio had a steady gig, fronting a big band on the Cunard cruise-ship “Queen Elizabeth II,” and needed some relief, so he could spend more time with his family. So, he got me set up to take his place on several trips for 35 days at a time over the next two years (2007-2008). That was a real learning experience. I was surprised to learn that those musicians do not rehearse.  They don’t need the practice, because they can sight-read it the first time, and make it sound like some guy on the radio.  The only question was, could I keep up with them?

We had several thousand passengers on the ship, and several hundred of them came on board strictly for the ballroom dancing in the ship’s famous Queen’s Room, which was designed and furnished in the style of the Titanic, from the original White Star Line. It was a classy joint, full of rich folks from several continents, who were very sensitive to the tempo required for each different kind of dance.  We performed two one hour sets each evening, seven days a week, and we were not to repeat a song during any certain cruise, some of which lasted for more than two weeks. I had the opportunity to perform several hundred different songs, and I had a whole four measures to figure out the key, tempo, meter and rhythm of each one, before coming in on time and in tune.

The international montage of musicians was mostly fresh out of college, using their talents to work their way around the world, before settling down with a job and family. These guys were all pretty jaded, and showed it with their playing.  Everybody was in business for himself, and not enjoying the room, the crowd or even each other.  It became apparent that they had been taught by their university professors to look down their noses at the listeners and at other musicians who could not play as well. We had a trombone player who was a great sight-reader, but who was not an experienced improviser.  They would “throw him the ball,” and then laugh hysterically (in full view of the audience) at his feeble attempts to play a trombone-solo.  

I dressed them down pretty good during the next break.  I let them know that this was unprofessional behavior, and I expected them to get a haircut, be sober, stop showing up with spotted ties and wrinkled clothes, and to act like pros, instead of amateurs.  They could set me off the boat in Tahiti, and I could fly home – no problem, and they could explain the absence of the singer for the rest of the month.  Then, I began to recognize horn players from the stage whenever one would distinguish himself with a solo.  I gave them nicknames, like “Mr. Incredible (Ukrainian)” and “Lady-Killer (Canadian).” Before long, those guys were smiling at each other, calling out the measure-numbers and enjoying playing as an ensemble.  We didn’t feature the trombone player anymore.            

It was a little nerve-wracking at the start, but after three or four days, I was comfortable enough to look up from the music-stand and perform.  After another few days, the music-director in charge of all the acts asked me to handle the speaking between songs.  At the end of our first 17 day cruise, the passenger-evaluations gave us a score of 85 out of 100, which turned out to be the highest score ever awarded to that particular room.  The musicians and the bosses were pretty doggone happy, and the band-director got a raise.  All that resulted from a barbershopper – an amateur with a professional attitude – being thrown in with a bunch of professional musicians with bush-league attitudes.  I found out from the band-cats that singing in tune on that ship made me an anomaly, which helped.  

We made some good noise, and I learned a lot.  The favorite tunes we played turned out to be a samba called Quando Quando Quando, with lyrics by Pat Boone, and a waltz-rendition of “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.”  The young cats had never heard of the latter, but played it well, and told me, “Dude, you sang that tune like you wrote it!”  It was fun!  I was able to stick and jab – to back phrase – whenever I felt like it; much different from singing homophony with a quartet.  No rehearsal was necessary.

After each performance, we had a midnight buffet, and then I would stay up all night in my cabin, writing band-charts.  What was cool about that?  The band would play the chart the next night, and would then give me pointers about my writing.  It was a great experience, but after two years, I had enjoyed a lot of songs, and had learned everything the ship could teach me.  I came home, and fronted for the Don Krekel Orchestra, a big band in Louisville, for a couple years, before retiring from solo-singing.  It was a kick, but in the music biz, “you is either famous, or you is pore!”  My last gig was a party for some rich folks at the Galt House on New Year’s Eve of 2015. I looked marvelous, but filled the room with mediocrity.  Time to move on.

By that time, I had collaborated with Walter on some great charts, and I had written some myself that I liked, so I produced an a cappella recording, singing all four parts.  I called it “Walter and Me, and it appears with my three solo recordings on iTunes and CDbaby.com, under the artist-name Kenny Ray Hatton.

TW: Can you talk about some of the choruses you have had a chance to lead over the years? What advice could you give to aspiring choral-directors?

KH: It was always a dream to someday be front-line director of the Thoroughbreds.  At the same time, I had watched as the guys who followed John Wooden at UCLA and Adolph Rupp at University of Kentucky do well, but fail to come close to the records of the great ones.  I did not relish the thought of following Jim Miller with the ‘Breds.

Brother Allen got his shot when Jim resigned in 1985, as co-director with Ken Buckner.  Then, when Bunk left town to work for the Society in Kenosha, Allen was the man!  He did well, and if you listen to the recordings, the chorus did some of its best singing ever, under his direction.  But certain other choruses were getting better exponentially, and even though the T-Breds tied for first in 1990, the proverbial “coin-toss” went to Dr. Greg Lyne and his Masters of Harmony.  Egos, trends and politics divided our chapter after that. Choruses have a way of assigning all the credit for a chorus’s success and all the blame for its failures to the director, neither of which is true.  But directors and chorus-members know that going in, so I suppose it’s fair.

When Allen resigned in December of 1992, I was not active in the chorus, but the BOD sent guys to talk to me.  I had recently started my own business, and was not prepared to discuss the matter until August of 1993.  They had appointed a guy as “interim director,” while they conducted a “search.”  The Board asked me to keep quiet about their approach, so they could make that guy think he was getting the job permanently, while they waited six months for me.  I refused to make that promise, but I did not go out of my way to let him know. I regret that.  

That’s the thing about chorus-directing that I detested – the politics.  The official BOD of our beloved Thoroughbreds deceived that poor fellow, an action which was, in their minds, “in the best interests of the chapter.” I never understood how lying to a guy could ever be in the best interest of any chapter.  But that’s what you get, when you put humans in charge.

A seasoned judge once wrote, “You get good marks, and win a scholarship. You finish pre-law, and get into a great law-school, where you graduate with honors, and land a job as a clerk for a Federal judge.  You get on with a prestigious firm, and after several years, they make you a partner.  Then, you run for circuit-judge, and win the election.  Your first trial is almost over, and who makes the decision?  Two retired guys, three housewives, a file clerk, a bricklayer, a schoolteacher and ditch-digger!”  That’s kind of the way a barbershop chorus works.  The Board of Directors searches to find the most skilled and knowledgeable person they can to be the Music Director.  Then, knowing they are less qualified, they complicate your efforts with frequent attempts to micromanage. Unless you can earn enough implied authority with the troops, it is a built-in recipe for failure.      

Regardless, I showed up to accept the directorate in August, and we went to the Cardinal District prelims a few weeks later.  We won handily, with a group of about 70 men, and began to prepare for our annual Christmas Show, as well as the 1994 International Chorus Contest in Pittsburgh, with 92 guys on stage.  

International competition was a different story.  Our ranks had been decimated during the prior year by the formation of the Louisville Times Chorus by David Harrington and Mark Hale, along with a couple of dozen of our better singers. The new group had a tough audition for admission, and didn’t invite any of our “average” singers to participate.  Wonder where that idea came from?

That loss of so many good singers gave us a tougher row to hoe, but we started in earnest on the fundamentals.  We tackled a new Ed Waesche medley of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Billy-A-Dick” and Jule Styne’s Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” along with a new chart of “Till We Meet Again.”  We had Sally Whitledge, of International SAI Champion “4th Edition” fame as our choreographer, and her husband, Bob, of the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” was our bass section leader and one of our associate directors.

We worked hard, but the resulting performance was scored in the mid-80s; not up to the chorus’s reputation, nor to my standards.  I was privately embarrassed by the singing, even before the scoresheets revealed a 6th place finish.  Another year and two new contest songs later, our 1995 contest performance in Miami was equally embarrassing (to me), and the rank was identical (a gift, in my opinion). In the meantime, we had done a lot of exciting B-level singing on shows, and held on to most of our local following.

When Ken Buckner announced that he was moving back to Louisville, I was sure that he could lead the chorus to greater heights than I.  As it turned out, the performance we gave in the 1995 fall contest was the best singing the chorus had ever given under my direction.  I had my letter of resignation in my pocket, and handed it to the Chapter President immediately after we came off stage, and before the call-off.  I was finally proud of a contest-performance, even before I learned that we had won, and we had beaten the second place chorus, the Louisville Times, by 20 points. I handed the baton to Bunk, and wished him well.

Three years later, in February of 1998, the chorus was struggling even harder, and I was approached by the president and one of the associate directors to again serve as front line director.  When I showed up at the Board meeting to respond, both of those guys denied in my presence that they had approached me.  Once again, they didn’t want to hurt the feelings of the guy who was in charge at the time.  More politics – more lying.  

I then announced to the Board that this idea must have come to me in a dream during the night.  I would be out in the parking lot long enough to have a smoke – about four minutes, and then my offer would be withdrawn. They came out and got me to serve as director three minutes later, but explained that they had to complete their “search,” so it would be a couple of months before I would start my term. That wasted time led to a slim defeat in the fall contest at the hands of our rivals, the Louisville Times – more embarrassment.  We weren’t even the best barbershop chorus in town!  Still, we received a “wild card” bid to participate in the International Chorus Contest, where they finished eighth, and we finished fifth.  

This time, I quickly got Brother Allen on Board, appointing him as co-director for the duration.  The group improved exponentially in preparation for the 1999 chorus contest in Anaheim.  We commissioned a new Waesche arrangement of the Irving Berlin tune, “Pack up Your Sins, and Go to the Devil,” and dusted off Ed’s old chart of “Over the Rainbow.”  The Anaheim contest saw the Thoroughbreds return to the medals, although it was a bronze, awarded for a 5TH place finish.  In the old days, it would have been disappointing, but our guys jumped for joy, as they had failed to even qualify for the dance the previous year (for the first time ever).

We seemed to have a tiger by the tail, but that’s when the wheels started to come off.  Allen and I agreed to implement individual performance-accountability, and divided the chorus into two groups – one performing group and the other remedial.  This was our way of competing against the “hand-picked” choruses – by focusing our teaching efforts on smaller groups and individuals where they were needed most. We had not predicted that the remedial group would be embarrassed to the extent that they would vote as a political block.  The following year, we competed with fewer singers, and dropped out of the top ten choruses, and in 2001, in Nashville, finished 14th. That was it!  Allen and I were pretty much out on our ear.  

We left the chapter with about 30 guys, and formed the New Horizon Chorus, leaving the ‘Breds in even worse shape.  We had allowed ourselves to be affected by the individual performance accountability standards which were running rampant around the Society, but our Thoroughbreds were not willing to accept them.  In retrospect, we would have been smarter to have continued the path of John Henry against the steam drill.  We still would not have won the championship, but we would have gone down swinging! Instead, we joined the plethora of chapters who had divided themselves in the interest of the elitist-singer. We had become what we had previously scorned.  We ended up with three “also-ran” choruses, in lieu of the mighty International Champion Thoroughbreds.  

In 2013, I moved to Alabama for work, and also accepted the job of Music Director of Voices of the South, in Birmingham, Alabama.  We started with sores of 68%, and (several times) raised those scores to the middle 70s. We finished second in our first spring chorus contest, and three years later. We tied for second, one point out of first, in my final contest performance as a director.  We sang some good shows during our three years, and the guys were kind enough to sing some of my arrangements, along with some written by my late pals, Walter and Ed, as well as two original songs written by my dear departed friend, Chilton Price and me.  I retired in 2016, because some physical ailments made it difficult to perform the athletic tasks associated with conducting.  Also, I had not been able to figure out how to grow the chorus. We started with 22 active, and we ended with 22 active.  I thought perhaps a younger guy could do better.            

What did I learn that I can share with aspiring chorus directors?  I was not smart enough to figure that  out.  All hail Jim Miller!  He used to say, “I hate when you guys whine, ‘I don’t know what to do, Jimmy.’  Maybe I’ll smack you in the balls, and then you’ll sure know what to do.  You’ll say, ouch!”  I wrote an e-book about Jim’s life called, “If Not for Jim,” available on Amazon and iBooks, which was released in 2012, a few months after his passing, at the age of 87. Read the book, and maybe you can get some advice from Jim. My advice is, if you don’t know what to do, stick to quartet-singing, or you might get smacked in the balls.    

TW: You’ve had a chance to work with so many amazing coaches over the years.  What is some of the best advice you have been given by a coach?

KH: Well… not so many.  In the 70s, Jim was too busy directing and singing in the Citations to coach us as a quartet.  Ed Gentry was already coaching the Citations, the Thoroughbreds and the Cardinals quartet.  My mother was our first coach, as previously mentioned.  Her lessons had to do with breath support and using the right muscles, which held us back at first, but raised the level at which we would perform later.  We failed to qualify for International in our first two attempts, in 1974 and 1975. However, we had won the Cardinal District Championship, in the fall of 1974, a year after our formation.  Back then, there just weren’t many good singing young quartets.  Most good ensembles were in their thirties, forties and fifties.  The hot-shots of our youth had been the Sundowners and the Grandmas Boys, who were six to ten years older than we.  

The Johnny Appleseed District had scouted us at our convention, and invited us to an all-expense paid trip to the JAD spring convention, in 1975.  There, we sang for the quartet contest audience, while the scores were being tallied. Let’s just say, we were having a good day.  We sang almost everything we knew, and there were money and panties thrown on the stage.  We got to our dressing rooms, and already had our jackets off, when the MC came to get us, and said, “They won’t stop clapping until you guys come back out here. They don’t care who won the quartet contest.”  

So, we went back out, and sang the only other song we knew; the Suntones’ “Lollipops and Roses,” being sure to apologize in advance for the fact that it wasn’t suitable for the contest stage.  In the judges’ pit that night was a man named Don Clause.  When we left Dayton on Sunday, he was our new coach. Don was one of the writers of the category description of the new “Sound” category, and was getting ready to be C&J Chairman, which we didn’t care about.  He was also the coach of the 1973 and 1974 International Champions, the Dealers Choice and the Regents.  We recognized him from his picture on the back of the DC’s first album, which we did care about.  

Within a year, Don had introduced us to several original Ed Waesche contest-arrangements, had us as his guests on Long Island for a weekend coaching session, had interpreted all four of our new contest songs (which we recorded), and had challenged us to master our craft, using the Society’s “green book,” a craft-manual patterned after the one Ed Gentry had written for the Thoroughbreds.

We didn’t always sing every phrase the way Don had instructed, but he never noticed that. What Don did for us was to convince us that we could master our craft, and provide a tie-breaker to keep us from arguing about how to sing each phrase.  We did all of our homework within six months, having applied our new craft to the four Waesche charts, including “Midnight Rose,” and “I’ve Found My Sweetheart, Sally.”  In the spring of 1976, at the ages of 20 and 21, BSU won the Cardinal prelims, and in San Francisco, in our first International Quartet Contest, we were awarded a 4th place medal.  That was the biggest thrill in my quartet career, to this day.  It was so unexpected by so many people, including us!

Don’s impact was the greatest, but not the only one from great coaches.  He put each of us in touch with our weaknesses.  Mine was pushing down low, instead of trusting my fellow singers to help create my note.  Ricky’s was forgetting the dynamic plan.  Danny’s challenge was to be firmer with his diction.  Allen’s was to keep his falsetto tenor balanced (softer).

Our visual presentation coach was the great Ron Riegler, from the Roaring Twenties, who came in fifth to our fourth, at the San Francisco Convention. Ron taught us to move to the outside when singing louder, and move to the inside when singing softer.  He taught us to do a preparatory move in the opposite direction from which we intended to move, like Jackie Gleason before he would say, “And away we go!” Sadly, Ron became gravely ill in early 1977, and passed away after the 1977 convention.  We recruited my high school drama teacher, Gene Stickler, to choreograph four new tunes for the 1977 and 1978 contests.  You would have sworn that Gene was Ron’s brother; they were so much alike!  

The third coach was a more modest fellow, also from Cincinnati, Ed Weber. Ed was a stage presence judge, who specialized in facial expression, focal point and the fundamentals of stage presence.  He taught us that it mattered where we looked in the audience during each phrase, and that our facial expression should be planned to mirror the emotion suggested by the changing message of the song.  Ed taught us never to raise our hands above the waist, unless there was a planned reason for them to be up there.  And don’t ever close your eyes.  They are the windows to the emotions.  

Our makeup guy was Joe Bruno, who taught us which stage makeup to buy, and how to apply it modestly, so that we looked normal and handsome on stage, rather than like a bunch of clowns.  The makeup was a part of our ritual of preparation, which helped us to feel an aura of invincibility before we took the stage.  The longhairs coming out of the universities to save us all from ourselves have since convinced our lazier members that such efforts are unnecessary. Consequently, their faces wash out in the stage lights, and we can see their expressions only by watching the big screen – when there is a big screen, that is.  We miss you, Joe.    

Our costume-designers included Louise Cecil, a professional, who made the brightly colored thrift-store knickerbockers that we wore during our three contest years for $143.75 – for all four them!  Another was clothier and barbershopper Mike Mazucca, who designed our unique kelly green tuxedos and our rose colored (pink) tuxedos for the other two contest sets. Our last costume-designer was Dan’s wife, Cyndy Burgess, who had a degree in Home Economics from the University of Kentucky.  She designed and built our Music Man costumes – the ones that appeared in the photograph, with the plumed hats and reversible jackets.  We wore them on stage for many years.  

TW: What are your thoughts on the evolution of the music-industry and songwriting over the course of your lifetime?  Are you happy with this evolution?

KH: Well first, let me say that Irving Scrooge Berlin was a greedy SOB. Besides refusing to allow barbershop arrangements of his songs because our genre was not “legitimate,” thanks to that stuck up, crusty old curmudgeon, who never learned to read a note of music, and played piano only by ear in the key of F sharp, and thanks to his lawyers, the term of a song-copyright was extended from 50 years after the copyright started to 90 years after the death of the longest surviving collaborator.  I don’t like that very much.

I am glad to see the money-people, whose only talent is to recognize and take advantage of the potential of others, finally being left out of the mix, thanks to technology.  With the advent of cell-phones, video and social media, any artist can reach the public directly with his or her songs, voice and instrument, from the safety and obscurity of his bathroom or basement. He or she no longer needs cow-tow to the David Fosters and Phil Specters of the world, in order to be “discovered.” If his or her talent is special, it will now be noticed by the real judges.  In the words of the late George Gershwin, “It is not the few knowing ones whose opinions make any work of art great; it is the judgment of the great mass that finally decides.”

Of course, I detest licensing agencies BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, and abhor publishers Hal Leonard and Alfred Publishing for what they have done to the undiscovered songwriter and hobby-singer/player of music, and I am embarrassed and angry that our Society is playing ball with them.  By the way, BHS is both a licensing agency and a publisher.  The former group of pariahs caters only to the writers of songs featured in blockbuster movies, the top 100 grossing concerts annually and of protected works that get radio, TV and internet airplay.  The latter group is squeezing the rest of us out of mere participation by the high cost of permission to arrange, perform, record and promote, and our Society is helping them do it by agreeing to their terms.  

Our better option is to join together to boycott all protected works, and resort to Public Domain songs and original songs copyrighted by our own members, and to make sure not to allow any of those publishers or licensing agencies (or our Society) to participate in even partial ownership of our protected works. This happened once before, you know, when ASCAP got too big for its britches in the late 1940s, and took all of its catalogue off the radio airwaves. That’s what gave birth to the country music industry and caused BMI to be formed.  Perhaps such a boycott now, would birth another industry called a cappella. There are thousands of public domain songs that are very fine vehicles, and we are perfectly capable of writing our own songs that fit the style.  

Meanwhile, if you want to adapt any protected work to the barbershop style represented by one of these licensing agencies or publishers, just so your quartet or chorus can sing it in a show or a contest for which you might earn no moneys in exchange, please be prepared to pay several hundred dollars to the copyright owner, just in exchange for permission.  Of course, another way is to woodshed your own arrangement of a protected work, which constitutes “fair use,” under the law, as long as it is not written down. We used to all know how to do that!

TW: What personal accomplishment are you most proud of outside the world of barbershop harmony?  

KH: Many people like to say they are proud of their families.  I cannot take the credit for the successes of my children, and I will not take the blame for their failures.  We lead the horses to the water, but it is up to them to make the choice to drink.  I feel good about having done my job.  They did not ask to be brought into the world.  Their mother and I made that decision, and all three arrived kicking and screaming mad about it.  We owed them good food, clothing, shelter, education and love.  We paid our debt and provided additional things like cars and money after they were grown.  Since then, it has been up to them.  To their credit, they are all paying taxes, and none are drug-addicts or criminals. I am glad for their varying degrees of success, even while meeting different levels of hardship, because I love and want only good things for them.  But to be “proud” would claim responsibility for their success, which I cannot do.  There are people close to me who have had adult children who made wrong choices that resulted in incarceration and even death.  Those children enjoyed the same benefits that mine did.  If I claim credit for my own children’s success, I would be blaming other parents for the failures of their kids, which would be over-the-top inappropriate.  That’s why I cringe when I see parents bragging about “pride” in their adult children’s successes, and it’s why you won’t see claims of pride in my kids’ accomplishments on my Facebook page.  

That being clarified, I suppose I am proud of the fact that I work hard every day, and that I am not a burden on my family or on society.  I am proud of the kind of work I do, and that makes it necessary for this answer to overlap the answers to your good question numbers 15 and 16.

TW: Barbershoppers probably know you best as the energetic performer and lead singer of the Bluegrass Student Union, the 1978 quartet champs of the SPEBSQSA, now known as the Barbershop Harmony Society.  What are a few things that folks may NOT know about you?

KH: I can juggle.  I discovered as a teenager that I could isolate overtones with my voice, and play tunes with the overtones while holding the same note, simply by changing my mouth opening and tongue position.  I speak fluent Spanish.  I have not been able to walk farther than a block and a half without resting for ten minutes since 2003.  That will likely never change.  I didn’t like Irving Berlin when he was alive, and now that he is dead, I still do.  Oh yeah, we covered that.    

I have worked as a loading dock equipment and industrial doors application-expert on and off since 1986. When I entered the industry, I was sent to a school held by our main factory, which was called KELLEY, inventor and manufacturer of the hinged lip dock leveler, a bridge between the loading dock and the trailer bed.  The fellows who taught that school were the same ones who had been around since the invention of the device, in 1953.  They had been the first generation of sales persons, who introduced the product to American industry, and they imparted to me their noble mission.  Their product had revolutionized the safety and comfort of the loading dock worker, and, along with a later invention by a competitor (the trailer restraint), had saved the lives and limbs of countless people around the world, none of whom realized that they would have died or been maimed without it.  

Most businesses provide goods and services that help people in some way. We don’t all get to be astronauts or Supreme Court Justices. Most of us make our contributions to humankind in smaller, less famous ways.  On our tombstones, it won’t say, “He laid a lot of brick,” or “She counseled a lot of crazy people.”  On mine, it won’t say, “He sold a lot of levelers, restraints and overhead doors, and made sure they were properly installed.”  But that is exactly the thing of which I am most proud.  Funny how one can attain something akin to immortality by doing a little singing, but the day in and day out saving of lives by most of us who do it goes unnoticed.  

When I was a kid, I didn’t imagine growing up to be a dock leveler salesman. The job sort of found me, instead of the other way around.  But I developed a keen interest in the product and in applying and installing it correctly.  I found that once I embraced the noble motivation, my clients could sense that sincerity.  When I get the job, lives are saved, the work area is more comfortable, the customer’s management enjoys the savings that comes with increased productivity, and my commissions take care of themselves.  It’s a great business, because my degree of personal fulfillment just happens to be commensurate with the financial rewards.  What a great country!  I have to believe that unless you are a criminal, or you work in the liquor- or tobacco-industry, your job probably offers similar fulfillment.  We are all here to serve each other, and most jobs allow you to do that.  I can only hope that it brings you similar rewards.  

TW: What’s the next item on your bucket list?

KH: That’s a tough question, because I have had such a great life!  I had two marriages that lasted a total of 36 years, and 29 of them were pretty darned good.  I loved me some women.  I am now divorced and single, and life is really stress-free these days.  My three kids are healthy and standing on their own six feet.  I have a special relationship with my son, Mike.  I always treated him as an equal; not as a child.  As a result, he is now my friend, in addition to being my son, which pleases me very much.  I enjoy my work, and will never retire, as long as I can walk and think.  I have lived many of my dreams, helping the Thoroughbreds to earn four gold medals and some other colors too, winning quartet contests with my three “brothers,” Allen, Danny and Rick, and then going on to join the Suntones-Buffalo Bills-Boston Common-club.  I got to direct the Thoroughbreds in competition on several occasions, although it didn’t turn out as well as I had envisioned. I traveled around the world a few times, and got to visit 47 states, most of them multiple times.  I directed a chorus across mainland China for four 2-week trips, and coached my way across New Zealand and Australia.  I learned how to arrange music, with no formal education, and I sang professionally in jazz clubs with a great accompanist.  I became friends and wrote songs with a real award-winning Great American Songbook writer.  I met idols, heroes, presidents and other famous people along the way, who all turned out to be regular guys, just like me.  My quartet recorded some of the best-selling barbershop-recordings of all time.  I recorded a big band album with 33 top musicians that sounds like it belongs on the Sirius Sinatra channel.  I wrote a biography about the life of my mentor, Jim Miller.  I made a barbershop recording dedicated to my other mentor, Walter Latzko.  I made three recordings that honored yet another mentor, Ms. Chilton Price.  I wrote original songs and arrangements, and heard them sung by others.  On occasion, I even got to perform on the ‘lectric television.  Hoo-wee!  

I promise you that I have done everything that I wanted to do, and more.  I have a few regrets, but owe no amends.  There is no bucket-list, but I discovered something else that I enjoy, just this past year.  You see, I moved to Alabama five years ago, for my work, and I have no “old friends” here. New friends are nice, but there is nothing like the friends with whom you share some history.  I see Allen, Rick and Dan once a year, at a reunion at Allen’s lake house.  I hate to think that I might see those guys only a handful (or two) more times before one of us takes a header.

I have other friends around the country, with whom I stay in touch.  Still, there are others who I care about deeply, but don’t get to see anymore.  Last June, I visited Marjorie Latzko at her home in Lewes Delaware, where she lives, with her daughter, Melanie and her husband and two boys.  Marjorie is one of the tenors of the Chordettes, of Mr. Sandman fame, besides being Walter’s devoted wife for over 50 years and one of my dearest friends.  After a great three day visit, I took the ferry across Delaware Bay, to Cape May, New Jersey, and drove to Brigantine, where I met with old friend Carol Plum. We took her parents, Ellen and Neal, out to dinner, and enjoyed reminiscing about his quartet, Sound Revival, back in the 70s and 80s.  

The next morning, I met pal Jack Pinto, of Old School quartet, for breakfast, and we traveled to New York City, where we had dinner with genius arranger, judge and quartet-man Steve Delehanty and his wife, Connie, along with medalist lead singer Scott Brannon, of the Cincinnati Kids.  I enjoyed spending time with these many good friends, and made a new friend, Keith Harris, the barbershopper and professional opera-singer.  It took some effort and expense on my part, but this was more fun and fulfilling than going around the world.  I did that already, and got paid for it – twice!  It couldn’t be as much fun the third time, especially if I’m paying.  But this trip was a gas, because I got to see those lovely people one more time.  

So, I don’t have a bucket-list of things I want to do and experience.  I just want to see my old friends one more time.  So, I have already planned my trip for 2018.  In February, I will see Todd and Jennifer Wilson, in Nashville, and then hop on a plane to see Holly and Brian Beck in Colorado Springs.  With any luck, Bobby Gray and Terri will be available for dinner, and maybe I can sneak in a luncheon with George Davidson, Terry Heltne and Kurt Hutchison in Denver, before visiting old quartet-buddy, Vince Winans and his wife in Salt Lake City. After a couple of days, I will head for Palm Springs, California, to visit former Thoroughbred Jonathan Friedman and his wife, Annabelle, where they will introduce me to their new baby girl, who is to be born next month.  Then, it’s on to Oakland, where I will spend a few days watching some of my grandkids play soccer and volleyball.  

I might try to visit old pal Greg Lyne, while I am there.  He always tries to tell me that the Thoroughbreds should have won that contest in 1990.  I like that about him.

[xfilesnews]

‘The X-Files: Cold Cases’ Recap and Review

By Keva Andersen. For a fandom that’s always looking for more adventures of Mulder and Scully, Joe Harris and Audible delivered with “The X-Files: Cold Cases” on July 18. The audiobook is based on the Season 10 comics from IDW Publishing written by Harris and executive produced by Chris Carter that were released starting in 2013. The stories take place after I Want to Believe but before the television Season 10 that aired in 2016. You don’t need to be familiar with the comics to get enjoyment out of the audiobook, as the stories are more fleshed out than they were on the page. I had read the issues when they first came out so I could picture some of the scenes very easily, and while that was entertaining, I know I would have been fine without it. There are six chapters in total, with a brief introductory chapter, and then five different story arcs. Like the TV series, there is some mythology and some “monster of the week” throughout the chapters but there is a definite through-line idea throughout the whole experience.

So does what does this comic-book-turned-radio-play experience have in store? Does The X-Files work well in audio format? Find out more after the jump.

We’ll begin our recap with Chapter 2, as the story starts there, after an introduction in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 follows the “Believers” arc in issues 1 through 5 of the Season 10 comics. This first story is very much a mytharc story and a nice reintroduction of our heroes. We find Mulder and Scully living together as a married couple with the last name Blake. They’ve been hidden by the witness protection program. Scully is working as a doctor and Mulder appears to be writing his memoirs. Walter Skinner, now deputy director, finally, gets in touch with the pair after a security breach at the FBI shows someone or something is looking for information on agents who had been assigned to the X-Files. 

After their meeting, Scully is attacked at her clinic while Mulder saves Skinner from an attack by the same group.  

As the story weaves on, some familiar faces return. We get brief flashes of Agents Doggett and Reyes, now separated but still affected by their ties to the X-Files. We dig up the Lone Gunmen, literally, in a bunker under Arlington National Cemetery and find that they’ve been working to help the government in exchange for witness protection. Old Smokey is back too, but unlike in the TV series, this version of the Cigarette Smoking Man appears to be some type of clone that doesn’t always function very well. Some elements of the old mythology like missing time and magnetite make a good jumping off point for the introduction of a new alien force known as the Acolytes. And despite everything Scully did to try and keep him safe, William is still very much of interest to these Acolytes. The action of the story takes us to the wilderness of Wyoming and ends with a showdown between Scully, Mulder, and this new faction.

At the end, Scully meets with the FBI’s OPR to try and explain what happened in Wyoming and asks to be reactivated. We hear from the CSM again and get more of an idea of what he’s really become and how the Syndicate may be using him now. We end with a sweet moment between Mulder and Scully at home.

“Cold Cases” gets off to a very strong start with this chapter, if you’re a fan of the mytharc. I love that we’re “seeing” so many familiar faces and getting back to some of the weirder alien elements. I think having the CSM be some sort of clone makes a lot more sense than the way we saw him onscreen in the TV series’ Season 10. It can get frustrating to have Mulder and Scully separated for so much of the action but hearing how they fight to get back to each other warms the heart. It’s not The X-Files if we don’t get a few good SCULLLAAAYYYYYYYYY’s!

Though we see Scully taken again, she manages to fight for herself just fine. She gets to kick a lot of ass in this and I’ve missed that side of her. I also think Mulder’s weird sense of humor is captured well. The biggest thing I took issue with, however, was the re-working of William’s parentage. The “I forgot she had a baby” and the constant “my son” made me want to put my foot through a wall. I think it’s fine to play with canon but we do know that William is their son, not just hers. Overall, I think the thing I liked most about this chapter is that we see how it’s possible to have tension while keeping Mulder and Scully in a committed relationship. They’ve grown as characters and them being together doesn’t overwhelm the story. No breakup or stupid dates with Tad needed.

Chapter 3 takes us back into Monster of the Week territory and follows Issues 6 and 7 titled “Hosts.” The title alone should tell you exactly which monster from the past pops up in this one.

We start in Mulder’s old stomping grounds of Martha’s Vineyard where a young woman is attacked while swimming. Mulder and Scully share a cute moment in the basement office before meeting their new assistant director, Anna Morales. Morales assigns them the case, which looks suspiciously similar to one they dealt with years before, good ol’ flukeman. Morales sends Scully to re-examine Fluky while Mulder heads to the Vineyard to investigate. There he meets a sheriff who happens to be from Ukraine, and who has more insight into this monster than he initially lets on. Mulder gets to do most of the field work in this one, but as usual lands himself in a world of hurt that Scully has to fix for him. Before he gets hurt Mulder discovers that Fluky wasn’t exactly the only one of his kind.

I think “Hosts” is a fun jump back into the world of monsters. Flukeman is a good choice, in that Scully joked that would be the one thing she would change if given the chance. I also enjoyed the backstory of the creature, though I felt at times it dragged on a little too long. The Mulder and Scully banter is pretty great as well, though I could have done without the “Mulder scoping out the beach babes” bit. Getting back in the autopsy bay with Scully was a blast, and while, again, it was kind of a bummer to have our heroes separated, they kept things moving nicely with all the phone conversations so it wasn’t too bad. The line “we now have flukemen crawling out of every inlet of the sewage chamber” will keep you up at night.

Chapter 4 follows Issue 8 and is titled “Being for the Benefit of Mr. X” so I bet you can guess which ghost shows up in this episode. We start off with more basement banter and a snoozing Mulder who claims he was meditating instead. Their sparring is interrupted by mysterious beeping messages on Mulder’s phone. The last one is a garbled voice that sends him to his old apartment at Hegal Place. This sends Mulder chasing the ghost of his old informant after the things they find at #42 seem to be more than just coincidence. The original Mr. X is still very much dead and his clone has a physiology we’ve seen before. We get some great insight into X’s backstory and how he almost went public with what he knew back in 1987 but Deep Throat had talked him out of it. The look at how far the Syndicate would go to test their work is truly disturbing.

I enjoyed the historical aspect of this episode, especially the part about how X ended up pointed towards Mulder. We know a little bit about what Mulder was up to before he and Scully were partners, so, for me, any additional insight is welcome. The school shooting with the test subjects can be pretty hard to listen to, and I found myself thinking it would have worked just as well to choose some other horror to demonstrate how far the Syndicate would go with their goals. In an episode that’s pretty dark overall, I think that made Frohike’s eavesdropping on Mulder and Scully’s phone call that much funnier. It makes you wonder what else he’s heard over the years….. I will say, I definitely missed Steven Williams as X and Jerry Hardin as Deep Throat.

Chapter 5 is the shortest of the book, and probably also my least favorite. The story is based off Issue 10 and is titled “More Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.” In an effort to learn more about the man he is supposed to be, the clone of CGB Spender is sorting through an archive. We follow the CSM through the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Homestead Air Force Base in 1962, Fort Bragg in 1970, Rhode Island in 1965, the State Department in 1972, and back to the present day. We learn more about his interactions with Bill Mulder, Teena Mulder, and young Fox. The memory with Cassandra Spender is heartbreaking and shows how broken that relationship was from the start. The ending explains more about what this CSM really is, and how little power he has compared to the original. He’s but a tool of Prime Elder. He may look like the Cancer Man of old but this time he’s a pawn in the game.

I’ll admit I’m not much of a fan of the TV episode “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” so I wasn’t too excited about this one as it started. But for fans of the CSM, I think it’s a must-listen. William B. Davis does an excellent job, Spender’s words are just as slimy and loaded as they are on screen. I did appreciate getting more of the backstory of Spender, and I love that he’s back in a way that seems more plausible than “Nah, we just burned part of him even though you watched his flesh burn away from his skull in 2002.” I also like that despite the fact that this is a CSM heavy episode, Mulder and Scully are still part of the action by introducing us to the story and bouncing ideas around.

Chapter 6 is the longest of the episodes and brings us back into heavy mytharc territory. Titled “Pilgrims,” this follows Issues 11 through 15. We begin, like any good X-Files episode, with Mulder’s underwear. Ok, maybe we shouldn’t start every episode that way but it’s pretty funny. Mulder and Scully have been called to Saudi Arabia to investigate an incident at an oil drill site. At first, the agents seem curious as to why they’ve been called in for such an incident, but as we all know, if there’s oil involved, it’s probably an X-File. Assistant Director Morales is back, and she accompanies the agents to the oil field to investigate. Of course, they don’t turn up much there, but Mulder is up to his old evidence-stealing tricks. He takes a card containing video of the incident he believes to have been edited. The agents go their separate ways, with Mulder headed to make contact with the Gunmen and Scully meeting with a woman who was injured in the incident at the oil field. After they split is when things start to get truly interesting. Another ghost from XF past appears, and who should it be? When I consult the notes I was taking while listening, all it says is ALEX FREAKING KRYCEK!!!! But as with our other returned-from-the-dead nemeses, Krycek isn’t exactly as he seems either. As the story unfolds, it would seem Krycek hasn’t been who we thought he was for a very very long time. Though just when you think he’s back, those pesky aliens come calling again.

With the black oil on the loose, Mulder and Scully head to the desert in search of UFOs. You’d think Mulder would have learned his lesson by now, but no. This time, it’s Scully’s turn to get abducted. Thankfully, the aliens were kind enough to drop both her and Krycek outside the Lone Gunmen’s bunker. We also get a return to Skinner’s apartment, who seems thrilled to have a chance to torment Krycek all over again. 

Mulder is still in Saudi Arabia trying to make his way back to Scully but ends up an unlucky host to the black oil. This time the being made of black oil has a name, Sheltem.

Sheltem-as-Mulder makes his way home to Scully, who at first believes this to be Mulder but soon realizes her mistake. Sheltem is familiar in that he’s of the black oil but different in that he’s part of a race called the forsaken ones. After more disappearances and reappearances by both aliens and Syndicate, the story comes to a close in a familiar place, Skyland Mountain. 

The tension builds to the very end, with new alien factions warring with those we’ve seen before, the Faceless Rebels. The chapter ends with some answers, but also plenty of questions, and another look at what CSM has become.

As far as mytharc goes, I thought this chapter was really well done. The blending of the old with newer ideas works well to keep things moving. I did question at first Mulder’s possession by Sheltem. If memory serves me correctly, he should be immune to the black oil after his exposure in Russia. But it seems that Sheltem is “different” enough that I could stretch to let that go. I was also glad there was one element they changed slightly from the comics. The comics insinuated that Scully had sex with Sheltem-as-Mulder, thinking he was Mulder, and that he hurt her, which I found really unnecessary. The X-Files has a history of problematic consent scenes, like “Small Potatoes” and “Post-Modern Prometheus” and I think they made the right choice in not including that scene in the audiobook beyond just a kiss.

Having Krycek return was fantastic, but Nick Lea was sorely missed. I loved how they traced Krycek’s abduction all the way back to the 1013 silo from Season 3’s “Apocrypha.” It would seem then that none of his actions from poisoning Skinner with the nanobots, to selling Mulder out with the UFO in “Requiem,” to his actions in “Existence” were all the work of this clone from the Syndicate, and not Krycek himself.

It also wouldn’t be an X-Files episode without someone making some kind of joke about Mulder’s porn habits. I’m sure David Duchovny was thrilled that that joke made its way from TV to audio. I also got a kick out of Scully’s “I should pull the fire alarm more often.” I liked that she got to take charge of the investigation at points, and how she knew the faceless rebels were coming at the end. A nice throwback to “The Red and the Black.”

A few final thoughts now that we’ve wrapped up the series. I liked the stories, but at times I found them a little hard to follow. Though, I also found myself getting so engrossed in the story I couldn’t listen while driving because I would get too distracted! And while I’m sure voice acting in a booth by yourself without your co-stars isn’t easy, I did find Mulder and Scully to be a little stiff at times. I think the quality of some of the dialogue they were given probably added to that. But they did have some great moments of banter between the two of them and let’s be real, I’d listen to Mulder and Scully read the phone book at this point. Mulder’s sarcasm and deadpan humor comes through really well, and I appreciated that Scully got the chance to be snarky and funny as well. Also, because it’s audio, there’s even more exposition than we’d get on the TV series which sometimes feels silly.

Of all the stars who returned to their characters, I think Mitch Pileggi knocked it out of the park. His Skinner felt spot on to me, just as gruff and no-nonsense as we’ve come to expect. His interactions with Krycek were some of my favorite things. It was a joy to have Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund, and Bruce Harwood back as the Lone Gunmen, as well as William B. Davis, and they also felt pretty in character as well. I do think it’s a shame that for whatever reason they weren’t able to get Robert Patrick, Annabeth Gish, and Nick Lea to reprise their roles as Doggett, Reyes, and Krycek. Having other actors playing those voices we knew so well was really distracting, to the point I sometimes forgot who was supposed to be talking.

Overall, I really enjoyed the series and I think it’s well worth a listen for any fan of the show. Small criticisms or no, it’s a fun ride and makes a great accompaniment to any road trip or other places you might take an audio book. If “Cold Cases” left you hungry from more, you’re in luck. Audible has announced a second book in the series. “The X-Files: Stolen Lives” will be available on October 3, 2017. You can pre-order it here.  So, we’ve got that to look forward to as we wait for Season 11 to air in 2018.