#context: I have spent this whole weekend doing absolutely nothing

[frogsandfries]

I'm feeling a little overwhelmed today. Rant below

I took a break yesterday to just decompress. My sister was acting like I had a break. No lol I spent two days stuffed in a tin can and one day waiting around in a hotel room because I was already a few blocks away from where I needed to be and I didn't know when I'd be needed. It felt like she was suggesting, because going home was the strongest anti-depressant I've ever had, that this trip was fun for me and that I should just get back to the house and hit the ground running, feeling refreshed.

But now it is time to come back to reality and.......

Guys, I just need to vent for a second because I'm feeling really overwhelmed.

I came home and not only had not a single dish been washed, but there were more dishes in the sink. This is her house, she never lets me forget it for a second. She chose to spend her weekend outside, working on the lawn. Which is fine. Apparently I'm deathly allergic to outside. We took the dogs on a walk around a state park yesterday and I nearly died of asthma. The other day when I tried to help her with the lawn, my allergies did not relent. This.... I mean, honestly, this whole entire thing is her thing. But the protest garden is her thing too.

I'm pretty sure she has taken on too much. But she continues to pile it on, and when she can't handle it, it falls to me.

I keep saying it.

I will continue to say it.

This house is a full-time job. Especially with my SAD, which I just learned last summer can be activated by chronically shitty weather.

For example, today, I have to

Feed and water the small animals

Feed her cats, check their water

Check food and water for my own cats

Feed the dogs

Get the dogs outside

Check the chickens

Check my sisters garden seedlings

Take a shower

Do nearly every last dish in the house (there is no way I'm doing this all in one day)

Bring in the waste management bins

D'ya see why I feel overwhelmed?

And then later, she said she wants to get the small animal enclosures cleaned.

The chickens trigger my allergies and asthma.

The small animals trigger my asthma and allergies.

The dogs trigger my asthma and allergies if I have to interact with them for too long.

It's fucking always something.

I cannot live in Wisconsin and now I'm trapped because I can't find a job. This house is huge. Only two humans live in it. This house is a full-time job, even without making a small farm out of the huge garden. My sister keeps taking on more and more projects. But when she can't handle things that need to be handled most days, it falls to the only other person in the house.

Completely out of any other context, I don't mind being the property manager and housekeeping.

At the same time, I'm happiest in a city not enough to have a proper transportation system. I'm absolutely perfectly happy living in an apartment because, let's be extremely real and honest here, the inside of an apartment is really more housework and cleaning of my living space than I actually even want to allot my time and efforts to.

Living in an apartment means, if the plumbing gets fucked up through no effort of my own, is the dishwasher dies, when the siding and roofing needs to be replaced, groundswork--none of that is my responsibility. Which gives me more time and energy to earn money, which is apparently my only and main priority and contribution and worth and value in society.

But the house is in Wisconsin and my asthma is activated nearly every day. I'm allergic to allergy medications. Until I can see an allergist, there is nothing I can do to mitigate my allergies and my asthma will continue to cripple me.

There are too many moving parts for my taste and my sister wants to keep piling on and piling on.

I may still end up doing my something nice that I was going to do for her, but......man.... I'm fucking tired.

And at the end of the summer, when it comes time to harvest everything--the berries and onions and potatoes and beans and just everything that she planted, who do you think is going to end up with the majority of the work? When it's time to preserve everything, who is all of that work going to fall to?

When I agreed to live with her, I knew she had cats.

I didn't know she had (at the time two) rabbits, a hedgehog, and guinea pigs.

She picked up her puppy a few weeks before her trip to see me. She didn't tell me. But by that point, it was already too late to change my mind about moving.

She didn't say anything about chickens or gardening her own produce until we were in Wisconsin.

I didn't move here to be a property manager.

Even if I had kept my remote job, even when I get a new one, she's going to expect me to continue to pick up all of her slack that she can't handle but continues to pile onto herself.

She already knows how I feel about this. I have made absolutely no secret. She knows, even if she doesn't believe, that I really was happy in an apartment in a big city. She knows I was already overwhelmed just by the house and the animals.

I just don't think she......gets it.

Like, yes, I live here for no money. But that does not mean I live here for free. But even though I'm here not working a proper paying job that I can do taxes on, I work.

She knows I have a horrible work history and she knows exactly why my work history is horrible. I don't understand why she wants to get forty hours a week out of me and I don't think she understands how that's going to work when I get a job.

My sister and I are obviously two different people. She doesn't seem to know her limits. That's how she ended up with eight cats, a rabbit, four guinea pigs, two dogs, a hedgehog, and now six chickens that we're hoping will lay eggs, but we'll settle for slaughtering them in fall. Oh, and an absolutely enormous house with a huge lawn.

All I really want to do with my life is make art. I am not interested in housekeeping. I am not interested in cleaning eight litter boxes every week. I'm not even interested in taking the stupid bins down every week. I'm not interested in the cold winters and the wet, wet summers.

I just wanted to live quietly with my two cats and make stupid objets d'art. I didn't even want to live in a place that makes me actually sick every single day. I didn't realize how badly covid had fucked me up, because my New Mexico isn't verdant, which is great because then pollen isn't an issue. Living in New Mexico, I actually wondered why I was still carrying an inhaler when every year, I would throw away a barely used inhaler. Living in Wisconsin, I use the damn thing nearly every day. Sometimes multiple times a day.

I'm so tired.

I'm so ill.

I didn't want this.

But eventually I need to stop bitching and go get my day started so that I can eventually do some stuff that I am actually interested in.

I dunno...... I'm considering stopping doing the extra things, the helpful things.

I dunno, am I being ungrateful? I really do feel like she feels like she can keep piling on and piling on because I can always pick up her slack what else am I doing I don't have a job I'm not making money I'm just sitting on my ass all day without her.

She should know by now, she is not getting more out of me than I have to give, because this isn't a job that I can easily quit and find a new one. In that regard, I really do have to pace myself. And I'm not getting paid, so I am absolutely free to pace myself.

I just wish she would act like she's truly acknowledging that I don't just sit on my ass all day and watch TV and eat bonbons. She says she knows, but she keeps piling on like she's not getting her money's worth out of me. She keeps making up more and more shit for herself to do but she never has the time. Guess who it falls to because I'm not working why the fuck not.

[flanaganfilm]

Good day Mr Flanagan. please what does "the rest is confetti" mean to you and in the context it was used in hill house??

Okay, here we go. Buckle up for a long read.

To answer this, I've got to explain a little bit about what was happening and where I was when I sat down to write episode 10 of The Haunting of Hill House.

Hill House was not a fun shoot. The picture above is from very early in production, when I was still chubby and happy.

It was my first foray into television. I was absolutely terrified that I'd mess it up. So I'd opted to direct all of the episodes myself, figuring that - if nothing else - I'd have no one else to blame if it went south.

It was the most grueling professional experience of my career. The shoot was by no means a smooth one, every day was an uphill battle from a budgetary perspective, and between the three giant production entities involved with the production, I spent a lot of time fighting over the creative and logistical elements of the series.

I began losing weight. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

By the end of the shoot, I had dropped almost 40 lbs.

I was very depressed. Every day was a battle, and for the first time in my career, I wasn't excited to go to work in the morning. We were fighting for basic resources, fighting for the show we wanted, and even fighting amongst ourselves by the end. It was grueling.

We hadn't written all of the scripts when we started production. I believe we had finished through episode 7, but the rest of the scripts had to be finished while we were already shooting.

We'd mapped everything out in the writers room, and I had great support on the other episodes, but I was writing the finale solo. I'd thought I'd be able to juggle it with everything else. I quickly fell behind.

I finally got to the script about halfway through production. I'd work on it between takes at the monitor, and then get home to our tiny rental house in Atlanta, where Kate was waiting with our baby son. (One of the rare bright spots of this shoot came when Kate found out she was pregnant about halfway through production. We even named our daughter Theodora, in honor of her origins.)

I'd typically fall down from exhaustion when I got home, but I had to push through it and work on the script. My weekends were spent shotlisting and prepping for upcoming episodes. We didn't have enough time to stay ahead of prep, so every available day was used for that... I went three months without a single day off at one point.

I'd sit up late staring at the script. I was in a dark, dark place. Overwhelmed, exhausted, and feeling like I lived in an eternal present. Each day bled into the next and it didn't feel like there was an end in sight. That feeling of unreality was heightened because we kept returning to the same sets, same locations, and even the same scenes throughout the 100 shooting-day production. Stepping back into the exact room we had shot in days or weeks or even months ago made the whole thing feel absolutely surreal. Making movies is always an non-linear experience, but this one felt particularly so... it was like the days of our lives were happening to us all out of order.

I remember feeling something like despair creeping into my daily experience on the show. And I remember dwelling on that when I got into the scene work of episode 10.

As I worked through the draft, I recall that despair coloring a lot of what was on the page. My filter was breaking down. There's a monologue at the beginning of the episode where Steven's wife Leigh (played by my dear friend Samantha Sloyan) spews out a torrent of eviscerating insults about Steve's value as a writer. That is just me vomiting onto myself. She was voicing all of my deepest insecurities about myself at the time, and of what I was doing with this series.

She says "Is anything real before you write it, Steve? The things you write about, they're real. Those people are real, their feelings are real, their pain is real - but not to you, is it. Not until you chew it up, digest it, and shit it out onto a piece of paper and even then, it's a pale imitation at best."

This was the mindset I was in for a lot of the shoot. The writing became a reflection of a lot of that turmoil, and I knew who I was referring to in that monologue - I was talking about my family. I was talking about how much of their lives I'd used as building material for this show. I was talking about the fact that I'd lost two loved ones to suicide, and seen what it had done to my mother in particular. And I knew I was using - possibly even exploiting - those people for this series.

There's a lot of despair in this episode. The Red Room, as we conceived it, was a place that would feed upon those emotions. Grief, sadness, loss... those were the real ghosts of our series, and where our characters find themselves at the start of the finale. They're being slowly digested - eaten alive - by those feelings.

So finally, it came time to write Nell's final scene with her siblings. I knew from the outline we'd constructed in the writers room what this was supposed to accomplish - she was supposed to be their salvation. She was supposed to take all of these feelings that we'd been wrestling with and finally provide catharsis... finally say something that would free everyone.

I remember sitting with a blinking cursor for a long time. The Crain siblings had just turned and seen Nellie standing by the door, and suddenly were able to hear her speak. But what should she say? What would I say? What would I want someone to say to me?

What she ultimately says lays bare a lot of what I was thinking about when it comes to grief. It exists outside of linear time, much as I felt I existed at the time. That sense of eternal present, that sense of a nonlinear eternity of moments and memories - it all came out in her speech to her brothers and sisters.

I remember feeling, looking at my insane present and looking back at my past, how strangely overwhelmed I was by memories. That I wasn't experiencing time in a straight line, and hadn't been for a while - for the better part of a year, I'd felt more like I was standing in a whirlwind of moments. "Our moments fall around us like..." Nell said, and I recall sitting back and trying to find the words.

"Rain," for certain, but there was something too uniform about that. The moments of life as I experienced them weren't that orderly, they weren't that small. They didn't fall the same way. Some sailed by, fast and unremarkable, while others lingered in front of me, twisting and stretching. So it was a good word, but not the right word. I left it on the page though.

"Snow" was my next attempt. Better, in that I imagined the snow blowing in the wind, swirling and dancing and feeling more organic. More chaotic. More like life. But for some reason, the word that stuck with me, the word I felt Nell Crain would connect with was...

"Confetti."

And that was because I was thinking not of Victoria Pedretti at this point, but of Violet McGraw.

Violet played Young Nell, and I wondered what she might have said if she experienced time this way. As an adult, Nell was despairing. Nell was overwhelmed. But as a child... there was an innocence to the word. There was a joy to the word.

I imagined moments falling around her, this little girl with the big smile and the wide eyes. Her moments would be colorful. They would be of different shapes and sizes, some falling fast and some falling slow, flipping and turning and dancing in the air, independent of the others. Sparkling, whirling, doing lazy summersaults as they sauntered down to Earth.

I thought of myself, and of the members of my family. I thought of those we'd lost. I realized what I hoped for them, and for us all, in the end... was to look upon that mosaic of experience, that avalanche of days and minutes and moments... and to smile with some of the joy we had as children.

And this, I thought, was something that gave me hope. This gave me a glimpse of some kind of salvation for them. This was also how I hoped my life might seem if I was a ghost - a cascade of color and light and shape and movement, something I could dance in.

So Nell smiled and said... "or confetti."

It stuck with me. The rest of her monologue gets heavy again, and gets to the real point of the show - the point of the whole series, if I'm honest - and that's forgiveness.

I figured the only thing that would let the Crain children out of the Red Room was to be forgiven. I thought of the losses in my own family, and I thought of what I wished for my mother and for my aunts and uncles and cousins and I tried to pour that into her final words.

"I loved you completely, and you loved me the same," she said, "that's all." And this was the point I wanted the most to make. That at the end of our life, if we can say this about each other, the rest doesn't matter. The rest is that rainstorm, or that blizzard, that fell around this one central truth, and maybe built itself in piles around it, to the point we lost sight of it along the way.

And I thought again of that little girl, and almost as an afterthought, wrote "The rest is confetti."

I liked the way it sounded, but I was insecure about the line. I almost took it out, in fact. I remember asking Kate to read the scene and talking about that last line with her. "Is it too cute?" I wondered. She was on the fence. "Depends on how it's acted," she said, and I figured she was right. We could always take it out if it didn't work. The scene could end with "I loved you completely, and you loved me the same. That's all."

Why not shoot it and see what happened.

I turned in the script, we published it quickly so that we could start breaking it down and prepping it. And the next morning I was back on set. I'd deal with episode 10 when it came down the pipe again, sometime in the coming months. We had a lot of shooting to get through before I had to worry about it.

I recall Netflix asking me to cut a lot of that monologue, and I remember them also having questions about the "confetti" line. I pointed out that it didn't cost us any extra to shoot it all, it was only words, and fought to keep the script intact.

Ultimately, they insisted I make a series of cuts on the page. I begrudgingly agreed, but left Nell's speech alone. I made superficial cuts around it, throughout the draft, and even considered changing the font size to fool them into thinking it had gotten shorter (I ultimately was told I wouldn't fool anyone and not to risk starting a war). But Nellie's final goodbye stayed intact.

It must be said - Victoria Pedretti SLAUGHTERED this scene.

By the time we got around to filming it, things had never been worse for the production. There was almost nothing left for a lot of us. Tensions were sky-high, resources had been exhausted completely, and we were all ready to give up.

Filming in the mold-ridden Red Room was depressing, morose, and led to a lot of arguments and unpleasantness. The room itself just felt gross, always, and we were in there for days at a time. The last thing we had to shoot in there was Nellie's goodbye.

Victoria came to set having to push through pages of monologue, and she did so with captivating bravado. I recall being teary-eyed at the monitor watching her work. And when we finally made it to the last line, I watched her deliver it with... a smile. A sincere, innocent, longing, joyful smile. A smile informed by the sadness, grief, and loss of her own situation, of her own life... but a smile that finds forgiveness and grace after all. Pedretti knew how to say the line, and how that word would work.

And as she said it, I knew it would stay in the show.

Over the years, that sentence has become something of a tagline for The Haunting of Hill House. I'm always a bit mystified and touched when I see people approach me with the line on T-shirts, or even tattooed on their bodies.

I started signing it with autographs back in 2020 after enough fans asked me to. Now it's my go-to when I sign anything related to Hill House.

The line, for me, represents a lot of things.

It's about the insane, chaotic, non-linear experience of making that show. It's about trying to find and hold onto joy, even in the grips of despair.

It's about the way the moments of our lives aren't linear, not really, and how we may be unable to understand them as we exist in their flurry. It's about finding hope, innocence and forgiveness in the final reckoning.

And it's about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just... well, it's fleeting. It's colorful. It's overwhelming. It's blinding. It's dancing. And, if we look at it right, it's beautiful. But it's also light. It's tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it's as light as air.

The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.

It's the love that stays.

[wishingicouldfly]

F*cking Running from the bullets

On the 8/22/22 Rolling Stone Article featuring Harry Styles

Prefacing my rant here. I’m a middle-aged cishet mother of one from the US. I have young people in my life who don’t identify as straight, but I am. My opinions are my own, and I do not know everything. In fact, I often know nothing. Just ask my child. Kidding. Anyway, a lot of people are smarter than me and have had life-experiences I will never have, but this is my corner of the internet to rant and rave.

Here’s my Gen-X opinion as a Harry Styles stan and as someone who believes with my whole chest that he is closeted and in a long-term monogamous relationship with Louis Tomlinson.

Buckle up...this gets long, so it's under a cut.

I don’t think most of the general public cares one way or the other about Harry’s sexuality. Not really. There are some very homophobic outliers, but for the most part I think most people in my generation who know music, know that some of our biggest rock idols were gay or bi. And we knew before they came out, based on a host of things including lyrics, coded clothing, innuendos, and common sense. Sound familiar? And it didn’t matter to us because we loved the music.

So most of the GP doesn’t care about H’s sexuality. They like the music. It’s fun. They don’t care enough to look into it. They don’t know about OW or they don’t care about Harry’s personal life to care if they do know about her. Anyone I’ve ever spent more than 30 seconds talking to about H believes he isn’t straight if they don’t know about OW. Most people I’ve talked to about Harry have shrugged about his sexuality. They don’t care who he’s dating.

That said, the Rolling Stone article published this weekend sets up a dangerous source. RS is a respected magazine in the music industry, I’ve used it myself as a source in published works. Rolling Stone is HUGE. There was even a song by Dr. Hook in the 70s called “Cover of the Rolling Stone” because it was and has been a high point in a music career to be showcased on the cover.

Because they are huge and respected, we expect RS to be unbiased. Accurate. Sourced appropriately. Quoted appropriately. To represent artists’ words accurately. Unfortunately in this case, they weren’t. They didn’t. The writer used a lot of personal opinions and leaps of judgment to tilt the article a certain way. Many other publications have taken the RS article and have used it to report on Harry, his view on his own sexuality, and his so-called push back on toxic fandom; other publications who didn’t ask the questions are taking his answers further and further out of context.

How Harry Styles Became the World’s Most Wanted Man – Rolling Stone

I’ll be honest, my first indication we were in the wrong place was when the interviewer casually mentioned that Watermelon Sugar was about c*nnilingus—that made me double take. Because, well, absolutely not. But I guess Harry did say that at one point, so I’ll let it slide, even though in my opinion it wasn’t appropriate for the sort of serious article this purported to be.

There are some good parts of the article—when H talks about My Policeman and says “It’s about love and about wasted time to me” and when he says the director (Michael Grandage) “wanted to show that [gay sex] is tender and loving and sensitive.” Those quotes speak to me about Harry’s true self/real feelings–and support things Michael has said about Harry being prepared for the role in MP. He said Harry knew “every single beat of it at that meeting. I found that incredibly impressive. He knew other people’s lines; he knew all of his lines. He knew why he wanted to talk about it, why one scene worked this way and another worked.”

Harry Styles’ My Policeman Set for TIFF World Premiere | IndieWire

If you read between the lines of the Rolling Stone article, Harry worked very hard NOT to admit to anything untrue about his relationships. You can almost feel the awkwardness of the way he phrases things. He never wants to lie outright, but he can’t tell the truth (if you believe he’s closeted, which I do). He’s trying to keep from outing himself while presenting as someone in a relationship with a woman. He worked hard to be ambiguous about his personal life. And those efforts are thwarted in one fell swoop when the interviewer contests Harry’s own words in the next paragraph.

Understandably the fandom is up in arms. With the bent of the article, on the surface it feels like he’s admitted to a relationship we are sure is PR, and at the same time is queerbaiting/Larry baiting with all the coded messages, cryptic doors/tweets for HsH marketing, and lyrical hints at his relationship with Louis his songs. He’s walking a fine line (excuse the pun) between a PR narrative and the truth he’d rather not reveal. People of all walks of life from check-marked celebrities on Twitter to legitimate news outlets have been debating the point. 

It’s been a firestorm.

On one hand, I think Harry can handle the negative press. He knows about the media more than most. He knows the stories about Michael Jackson, Princess Diana, George Michael, Freddie Mercury. He knows what the press can do and what they can whip up and how devastating the result can be–none of those stories have happy endings. 

It doesn’t make it okay, but I think he knows how to compartmentalize. It’s why he’s not on SM at all anymore. And God knows he’s been here before, and while that never makes bullying and misinformation okay, I believe he has the knowledge of history and a support system in place to balance the media storm/fan outrage with doing the job he loves and fulfilling the commitments he has. He was, in fact, the twice named villain of the year in 2013 and 2014 for (Harry Styles Named 'Villain Of The Year,' One Direction 'Worst Band' At NME Awards | HuffPost Entertainment) for NME. Which, just gross. Can you imagine? He wasn’t even 20 years old. He’s had his share of Twitter hate, and I think he’s off SM for the most part to avoid it.

On the other hand, I think it sets a dangerous precedent for publications like RS to spin a misleading narrative. Not to look at the possibility that he’s asking you to read between the lines is harmful to others in the LGBTQ+ community. He’s telling that he’s on a journey about his sexuality (actually, I’m convinced he’s no longer questioning, but that he knows who he is). I know it’s been happening for decades, centuries probably. But it still angers me that a writer can spin a few words around and make the meaning very different from the intent. Or even outright contradict the words of the subject.

For example, this quote:

Harry in RS: “Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve only publicly been with women,’ and I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone. If someone takes a picture of you with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re choosing to have a public relationship or something.”

That’s very similar to this interview from 60 Minutes Australia in 2013: “I have a lot of friends, some of them are girls, and apparently I’m dating all of them.”

Same message, nine years later, but the author of RS article decides that he’s dating Olivia Wilde BECAUSE he’s been pictured with her. EVEN though he basically just said he wasn’t. Literally, in the very next paragraph the author states the opposite of what he said.

For whatever reason, he’s not comfortable sharing his private life. He stresses that he keeps his private life private and that what the public sees is all work. His relationship with OW is textbook PR fauxmance. It only takes a couple of peeks to see behind that curtain–and he confirms that by saying that every couples walk in front of a camera is work. 

I firmly believe that this will be yesterday’s news by the end of the week. People forget. Someone sees a headline and all they’ll remember is that there was controversy about Harry’s sexuality. And they’ll either care or they won’t. They will either see the movie or they won’t. I don’t think there will be long term damage-he’ll be able to make a choice about what he wants to do–I just hope he doesn’t feel pressured either way. I hope it’s his own decision. 

The damage will be that some will feel betrayed because if he's not closeted, then he IS queer baiting and Larry baiting--it DOES matter to so many who aren't seen, who can't be seen and to so many who support both Harry and Louis.

I don’t know Harry Styles. I think he’s lovely. Talented. Brave in the way he wears clothes. Honest in the way he bares his soul in his lyrics and the way so much of his music can be interpreted by the listener. He seems kind. He tells people at shows to be kind to each other. He often supports gay fans in coming out. He wants people to be themselves, whoever that is–he says it all the time, and it feels genuine. People at his shows are proud of who they are--there's a lot of body positivity, pride for whatever community people identify with--it's lovely.

I don’t have a conclusion for this rant. I’ll leave it open ended and maybe add to it. It must be hard to be someone in the spotlight who wants to perform, but who also wants to keep some parts of their life for themselves. F*cking running from the bullets indeed.

Actually no. Here’s my conclusion. My open message to Harry Styles.

Harry–

I’m not your mom. I am your mom’s age, and I actually think we’d be friends. But I am someone’s mom, and this is what I’d say to her.

First, have you eaten lunch? Had some water? Taken your meds and your vitamins? Ok, then. 

Breathe. You cannot control the bullies. They are mean, and they are wrong. It feels like they are ganging up on you, and they are. But remember this. You are beautiful. You are loved. You are smart and talented. You have friends and family (and fans) who love you and know the truth. This will pass. It’s okay to step back. It’s okay to take a break or a breath. Ask for help or hugs when you need them but tell people when you’d rather they don’t touch you or when you need to be alone. You don’t have to be perfect. Just be yourself. You bring light to so many people. Let the people who love you bring you some light. 

Love, Someone Else’s Mom.

[jaskierswolf]

The Grass is Greener Pt.1/3

Summary: Jaskier's mother is coming to stay and his garden is an absolute mess and his lawn mower has seen better days... luckily for him his ridiculously hot neighbour is there to lend a hand. 

Geraskier

CW: Shitty parents being shitty.

(Prompted by @alwenarin and based on this post by @infinite-mirrors)

________

Jaskier stared forlornly out at his garden. His mother was due to come over on her yearly visit and the next few days of his life were going to be hell. His mother was the sort to blast into his life like a fucking tornado, pull apart everything that he had built for himself and leave him broken, shattered into a thousand shards of glass. He wasn’t even sure why he still let her in, probably some childhood trauma that meant he was desperate to please her, to make her proud, but what did he know? He wasn’t a therapist, much to her displeasure. Anything would have been better in her eyes than a musician and occasional bartender.

He didn’t make much money. His band hadn’t taken off yet and only really had a small but dedicated following online that donated pocket money in exchange for small previews of new tracks or little poems that could be given to lovers or in greetings cards. Most of his rent was paid for in the tips he made at the bar. He was lucky to have the house at all really. He shared it with his housemates: Priscilla, his bandmate and ex, Essi, her younger sister, Valdo Marx, his former schoolmate, professional rival and absolutely twat face who lurked in his attic room and never really came out to talk to them, and last but not least, Regis, a kind scholarly type who had been living in the house before the other rooms had become available and most importantly made excellent homemade gin.

Said housemates had agreed to fuck off for the weekend so he could pretend that the house was his in a last ditched attempt win over his mother.

Of course, none of them had helped to tidy up before leaving and he’d spent the last twenty-four hours deep cleaning the house, and bolting the door to Regis’s bathroom shut. The gin in the bathtub wasn’t ready to bottle yet and he wasn’t exactly going to drain the tub of his elixir. He’d moved the furniture in his friend’s rooms around enough to make it look like they weren’t extra bedrooms, more… rooms that just happened to have beds in case he had company. Priscilla’s room now resembled a music room, Essi’s room had been turned into a makeshift study, Valdo’s he’d left a mess and claimed it was just an attic, and Regis’s room was sort of a library if you squinted hard enough.

That just left the garden.

“Bollocks!” He moaned.

None of them really cared much about the garden, apart from the box down the end which housed Regis’s herb garden for cooking. The rest of the garden a mess. The grass was practically a wild meadow filled with weeds. He quite liked it. He enjoyed looking at the dandelions, daisies and buttercups but his mother would have a fit.

Where was he even going to start?

Lawnmower. They must have one. He stumbled through his back door onto the patio and made his way to the shed that honestly barely lived up to its name. It was falling apart and leaked horrendously, but luckily inside was one rusty looking lawnmower.

“Bingo!” He grinned and pulled the mower out of the shed. It was heavier than it looked but luckily Jaskier was also stronger than he looked. Even so he wasn’t entirely how he was going to start the damn thing.

Perhaps Geralt would know…

Fuck.

Geralt.

Geralt had just adopted a newborn baby. Her name was Ciri. Most of the time Geralt just called her ‘Cub’ which Jaskier found to be incredibly endearing, a fact that had nothing to do with his teensy little crush on the mechanic.

He pulled up Geralt’s number in his phone. He’d been delighted when Geralt had given him his number, yes maybe it was because Jaskier kept turning up at Geralt’s doorstep after shifts at work because he’d forgotten his keys and none of his bastard housemates were answering the door and Geralt just happened to have a spare key, but the main thing is he had Geralt’s number.

After that they’d conversed a few times over text. Mostly if one of them was running to the shops and wanted to know if the other needed anything. Occasionally Geralt would text to ask Jaskier if he could watch Ciri for a short while if Geralt needed to leave the house. Once Geralt had even given him a lift to work because Jaskier’s bike had gotten a flat tire and he didn’t have enough time to walk all the way to the bar. So they weren’t exactly strangers but he wouldn’t really call them friends.

In fact Geralt was still listed as Hot Neighbour in his phone. He meant to change it, it was just that you couldn’t argue with the truth. Geralt was his hot neighbour.

 J —Hey Geralt! Is it ok if I mow my lawn? I don’t want to wake Ciri if she’s asleep. :)

He stared at his phone intently until about an eternity later, Geralt replied.

 G — The child must not be an obstacle.

Jaskier snorted as he read the response. He read it aloud a couple of times trying to mimic Geralt’s rough husky voice and managed to give himself the giggles.

His phone buzzed again.

 G — I can hear you laughing at me.

“Oh shit!” He almost dropped his phone and his cheeks felt like they were on fire. “Sorry Geralt!” He called into the air.

 G— Hmm.

Jaskier scoffed. Who text back “Hmm”? And why did Jaskier still find that so attractive?

But never mind that! He had the green light. Operation Finally Make His Mother Proud, or FMHMP for short, and yes you could absolutely say that if you tried hard enough, was go! He was going to mow the lawn like a proper adult!

He tried for about six years to turn the mower on but without any success. He kicked the lawnmower in frustration and the whole damned thing fell apart.

“Fuck it!” He yelled as he hopped about on his good foot that hadn’t been battered by lawnmower.

He sulked back into the house and flopped down dramatically on the sofa. It was over. His mother was going to hate him and he would die as a disgrace to the Pankratz name and the Lettenhove estate.

He was half way through his pity party when the doorbell rang. He grabbed his phone to check the time. Strange, his mother wasn’t due for another three hours.

“What the fuck?” He mused and padded over to the door. To his surprise Geralt was standing on his doorstep with Ciri tucked safely into a baby sling on his chest and behind him was a shiny lawnmower. “Ah. Geralt!” He grinned.

Geralt turned to the lawnmower and back to him. “Thought you might need some help.”

Jaskier blushed. “Right. Yes. Of course. Come on in!” He stood back to let Geralt through. “Oh, actually do you want to come round the side gate? The lawnmower probably shouldn’t come through the house. I’ve just cleaned up.”

Geralt grunted but followed Jaskier around the side of the house and into the back garden.

“What the fuck, Jaskier?” He grumbled when he saw the state of the lawn. “I thought you said you were mowing the lawn, not trying to find it!”

“Ah, yes, well. That is an excellent point.” Jaskier stammered, pulling at the hem of his shirt nervously. “You see my mother is visiting.”

Geralt raised an eyebrow. “Your mother, how old are you? Twelve?”

Jaskier gaped at his neighbour. “Geralt!” He whined. “I’m twenty-nine! Mother is just a cow.”

“Hmm. Fine. Let’s do this.��� Geralt pulled Ciri gently out of her sling and passed her to Jaskier. “Hold her. I need to grab her stuff. This will take longer than I thought.”

“Oh hang on!” Jaskier called after Geralt but it was too late and Ciri began to cry. “Umm. There there.” He cooed and rocked her gently. “Shall I sing you a lullaby, cub?”

She didn’t answer, babies rarely did, so he decided a lullaby would be fine and began to sing in hushed tones as he rocked her in his arms. Geralt wasn’t long but he seemed surprise to come back to Jaskier rocking his daughter to sleep in his arms.

“Hmm. She likes you.” Geralt noted.

He was carrying Ciri’s car seat and a bag was slung over his shoulder. In his other hand was a large electric contraption with some nasty blades at the end. He dumped the scary looking monster and placed the travel cot on the patio table. Once Ciri was safely asleep they got to work.

Or more accurately, Geralt got to work. Jaskier mostly just watched and made sure Geralt had all the refreshments he needed. He also kept the conversation going by listing all the grievances his mother had with him from her last visit, Geralt hummed and grunted but didn’t offer much in return but it didn’t matter. Jaskier was more than capable of holding an entire conversation by himself.

“And then she starts wittering on about how my sister has a perfect husband and a darling little angel.” Jaskier moaned. “So of course then it’s ‘Julian why don’t you have a wife?’”

“Julian?” Geralt asked.

Jaskier glared at his neighbour. “Don’t ever call me that, I beg of you.”

Geralt shrugged. “I won’t. Just asking.”

“And I tell her, for the hundredth time, to say partner or spouse or lover or you know… not gender specific because she knows! Geralt! She knows. I don’t know how many times I have to tell her.” Jaskier sighed. “Oh, umm I’m bisexual just to give you some context there.”

Geralt nodded. “Right.”

“So of course she starts complaining that I always have to make everything gay, and I’m like… ‘Mother, I am gay!’” Jaskier announced with wide arms.

Geralt looked up at him, pausing halfway down the lawn that was now starting to resemble a lawn. “So why not tell her you’re seeing someone?” He asked. “Solve both problems if you say it’s a guy.”

Jaskier put his hands on his hips and tilted his head. “Yeah.” He scoffed. “Until she asks to meet him.”

Geralt shrugged. “I could do it.”

Jaskier’s heart jumped in his chest. “You what? Geralt!”

“My ex has been bothering me about finding someone.” He grumbled. “Two birds, One stone.”

Jaskier narrowed his eyes at his insanely hot neighbour who was now apparently suggesting they… fake date??

“What exactly are you suggesting here?” Jaskier asked slowly. “You pretend to be my boyfriend for my mother’s visit and we what? Send a few photos to your ex to prove you’re moving on?”

Geralt smirked. “As long as you promise not to fall in love with me.”

Jaskier’s jaw dropped.

Well fuck. _______

Next

[bronanlynch]

(bi)weekly media update

apparently I just. do these every two weeks now huh. sorry to the tuesday again no problem extended universe crew for being unable to keep to a consistent schedule

listening: Curses by The Crane Wives, a band that I just started listening to but I like their sound, nice and fun and folksy, lots of songs with ominous lyrics that are good on fanmixes

honorary mention to the new Lil Nas X song because we are all love the new Lil Nas X song, it’s a bop, it’s been stuck in my head on and off ever since I heard it, and I am not immune to sexily blasphemous music videos

reading: finished Smoke & Ashes, the most recent book in the Kate Kane series that I talked about last week, and I enjoyed it a lot but there sure is a cliffhanger and afaik no set release date for the next one. it’s pretty angsty but does have lots of nice moments of hope, and some discussion about recovering from both depression and alcoholism that I appreciated.

also read more romance novels, and I appreciate that Cat Sebastian, like KJ Charles, knows how to write about rich characters while making it incredibly clear that hoarding wealth is morally indefensible. it’s like the “wow, cool robot” thing where I want to be told that I’m right for disliking capitalism/imperialism/the military industrial complex, but also I do very much want you to show me the cool robot (hot rich prettyboy in nice clothes)

also finally started Harrow the Ninth today, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say about that next time

watching: speaking of “wow, cool robot,” watched a little bit more Turn A Gundam, which sure does have some cool robots. also some gender. the main character crossdresses to like, hide their identity for fun complicated spy reasons and it’s not treated as a joke or anything? it’s just a thing that they do? and no one comments on it beyond when they were like “hey you have to wear a dress to this event because the people from the moon think our mech pilot is a woman and they can’t know it’s actually you because they still think you’re working for them”

absolutely hate that the guy on the right is just wearing a normal boring suit though like. c’mon man

Zan and I have been watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier aka the sambucky show each week and my review so far is. well it’s about what I expected. the first episode was incredibly slow and kinda disappointing (Sam and Bucky never interact! the fact that Bucky might maybe miss Steve is never brought up, not even by his therapist, who tbh gives me incredibly bad vibes! if my best friend and the only person I knew from my past fucked off and left me alone to deal with my trauma in favor of ruining the life of a woman who’d moved on from him, I’d be pissed!) (for the sake of not being angry all the time I pretend Steve died instead of did That).

the second episode was more fun, more happens, there’s some incredibly heavy-handed corporate queerbaiting mixed in with some actually nice emotional moments (this article and this thread by the same person have a pretty good summary of All That). the handling of race, uh, could be better tbh. I appreciate what they’re going for, and to be fair the whole show isn’t out yet so it could get better (since some of the problems are tied to, y’know, the overall political problems, i.e. the fact that the villains are a group of people, led by a Black woman, who hate borders and illegally deliver medication to refugees which is somehow a bad thing, I kind of doubt it). but there is something about the way they’re making a Black man the mouthpiece of American imperialism, and the way that the new (white) Captain America who takes the shield when Sam doesn’t want it has a Black girlfriend and a Black best friend who, so far, have mostly just given him motivational pep talks, that doesn’t really inspire confidence. (this article and thread are a good overview of that aspect of the show)

also, I think it’s very funny when people are like “well you can’t say anything about the show yet, only two episodes are out” like. first of all lads it’s a six episode show, a third of the content is a decent chunk to use to form an analytical opinion, and second of all, if something strikes you as Not Great, you’re allowed to feel that way and say that, you don’t have to wait to see if there might be some twist or context that makes the thing you didn’t care for great and fine, actually,

that being said,

(when we watched the first episode, the immediate next thing we did was watch Winter Soldier and I was pleasantly surprised how well it holds up. not perfect obvi but still a solid movie, and the music does fuck)

also watched this very neat little video essay on Victoriana costuming and like, why so much media is set in the Victorian era, and started the c-drama Word of Honor which I’m sure will either be in a future post or just. something I start blogging about normally

playing: the weekend before last was the Beam Saber season finale, which I’ve already posted about quite a bit because it was fun and I love to play games with my friends. played a very fun game of Things, Eldritch and Terrifying by S. Gates this past weekend. it’s a very fun game, with very easy-to-follow rules and lots of helpful adjectives and scene starters, and also just conceptual it slaps (one person is an eldritch terror, the other person is the human that they’re courting. there’s a variant where you play as a vampire. it slaps). we made it uh, more of a rom-com than a horror story but I had a very good time, we told a very cute love story, and we’re gonna try again to make it more horror-y next time.

also I finally started Brigmore Witches and it’s very good and fun. my one complaint is that I want the Whalers to have names, because I enjoy the bit at the beginning where you can eavesdrop on them and some of them are concerned for you and some of them are fucked up about the Overseers invading their home and some of them want to fucking betray you. also, I didn’t realize that the very beginning when you fight Corvo is a dream sequence so I spent the whole fight being like “wait why does he get a gun and I don’t, where are my powers, wait aren’t I supposed to lose this fight for Plot Reasons why is he dead.” also, fucking love the favor that lets you dress up as an Overseer to get into the prison. I do love a good disguise mission

making: citrus chicken (from a cookbook so no link), plus some citrus-y root vegetables. very good if you like orange.

writing: nothing I can share yet for ~zine reasons. yes I have several fandom event weeks coming up that I want to participate in, no I haven’t written anything for any of them yet

[bibislut]

Hi!!! Can you Ginny x Luna story and it’s how they got together as a couple and there is drama with some of her friends and brothers accepting Ginny but she doesn’t care and stuff and lots of fluff with her and Luna?! Thanks can’t wait to see it I know it’ll be amazing! :)

I absolutely adore Linny, they are arguably the most aesthetic HP ship. Give me all the Linny ahhhh

Please check out these incredible Ginny x Luna fanarts here and here

FIND ME AS BIBISLUT ON AO3

REQUESTS ARE STILL OPEN!!

Word Count: 1456

Warnings: Homophobia and some lovely fluffy feels

Luna had been one of Ginny’s first friends at Hogwarts, and as the two girls matured, they had only grown closer. For years they had considered each other their best friend, spending practically all day, everyday together. If they weren’t together, they wrote letters to each other, eager not to miss a single moment in the other’s life. When they were thirteen, the two had accidentally synchronised their cycles and spent an entire weekend in bed together playing cards and eating chocolate. When they were fourteen, Ginny had broken her leg playing quidditch, and Luna had carried her books for her the entire following week, despite Ginny’s leg having been easily healed by Madame Pomfrey. When they were fifteen, Luna had told Ginny of a muggle practice called stick and poke, and the two had sat on the redhead’s bed a little after midnight under the glow of a lumos spell; giving each other matching heart tattoos on their ankles. When they were sixteen, the two had spent the summer after their OWLs repairing the Lovegood family home, which had been sitting in need the entire year after the battle. When they were seventeen, Luna had gotten her Muggle driving license, and so she and Ginny had spent a whole weekend over the Christmas break driving around Wales, and had to spend a night in the car park of a pub when the snow had gotten too bad; refusing to apparate home. When they were eighteen they celebrated their NEWT results with a family meal at the Burrow, Xenophilius in avid conversation with Arthur whilst Molly dozed with Teddy on the sofa.

The rest of the family had taken to the garden, drinks in hand, laying on blankets as they drunkenly chatted. Ginny excused herself, needing a moment alone from the ruckus. She climbed the stairs, all the way up to the attic; where amongst the boxes and cobwebs, she could look out of the window in the quiet and watch the stars. She pulled her long red hair into a high pony, rubbing at her neck as the joy of the night thrummed in her veins. 

“Stars is watching the stars.” A quiet voice murmured, and Ginny turned to see Luna walking towards her, a carefree smile on her face. The Gryffindor was hard pressed to find something she loved as much as the nickname her best friend had given her after she had realised Ginny’s freckles looked like constellations. 

“Indeed I am, Goldie.” Ginny threw her arm around Luna, watching her as she gazed out of the window, the moonlight on her face. “You’re so pretty.” She murmured. 

“I’m lucky to have found my soulmate so early.” Luna whispered, eyes not leaving the sky. 

“What do you mean?” Ginny’s eyebrows knitted together. 

“Some have to wait years for their soulmates, some never meet them at all.” She shrugged. “I am incredibly lucky to have found mine.” Luna turned her big blue eyes to Ginny.

“You reckon I’m your soulmate?” The words came out more quietly than Ginny expected, her heart racing.

“Why wouldn’t you be?” Luna searched her eyes and Ginny found herself stuck for an answer. She supposed that Luna was as close to a soulmate as she’d ever get - what with their almost perfect understanding of each other. She couldn’t picture ever being so close with anyone else.

“What if you start dating someone? You can’t very well go and tell them I’m your soulmate.”

Luna nodded thoughtfully to herself, looking around. When she finally looked back at Ginny, her words pierced the quiet fiercely, despite her quiet tone. “I suppose I’ll just have to date you, then.”

“Me?” Ginny squeaked, her arm falling from around Luna’s shoulders - but the blonde caught her hand.

“You love me, don’t you? I love you.” Luna said plainly.

“Well, of course-”

“Would you kiss me?”

Ginny’s mouth opened and closed silently, like a gaping fish. Even after all these years, Luna still surprised her. And yet, the more she thought about it, the more she wanted to. Ginny had held her when she cried, had walked hand in hand with her more times than she could count, had fallen asleep on Luna’s chest so many times at school. And now, as the Ravenclaw’s features were lit up by the light of the moon, Ginny looked at her soft pink lips, and couldn’t help but reach out and trace them with her thumb. Luna leaned into the touch, giving the Gryffindor a small smile.

Ginny leaned forwards, kissing her softly, feeling the hairs raise on her arms. This was nothing like kissing Dean, and nothing like kissing Harry. The room seemed to disappear around the two girls, and when Luna placed her hand on Ginny’s face, kissing her back, sparks seemed to fly around them. The redhead had never felt her magic as strongly as she did then, the tingle of it growing stronger by the moment as she pulled her best friend closer, their chests pressing together. Luna let out a little sigh when she did this, and Ginny was sure she would die right then and there, hearing that sound in this context. She pulled back, resting her head against the blonde’s.

“That definitely felt like a soulmate kiss.” Luna whispered, smiling brightly at her. Ginny giggled, amazed at how the night had taken a turn.

“Yeah, it definitely did.” She leant back down, pressing their lips together again.

“Gin, are you in here? The others are-” The attic door swung open, warm candlelight pouring in around the silhouette of Percy. “What in Merlin’s name are you doing?!” He squealed, taking in the sight of the two girls pressed together. They pulled apart, looking at Percy with wide eyes.

“Oh, Percy. Sorry, um, we were just-”

“You’re disgusting! What’s wrong with you?!” He stormed forwards, pushing Ginny away from Luna.

“Disgusting?” Ginny’s voice came out small, suddenly feeling ten years old as her older brother glared at her.

“And here I thought you were just best friends, but this?!” He shrieked, waving his arms around. “This is just unnatural. What are you, a lesbian?”

“I.. I don’t know. But it’s not, we’re not unnatural!” Ginny tried to keep her voice strong, but tears pricked at her eyes as the horrible words of her own family sunk into her skin.

“We’re soulmates, Percy. We love each other. I’m sorry if you can’t understand that.” Luna’s soft, calm voice carried around the space as she stood beside Ginny, lacing their hands together. “ I hope one day you can find-” 

“Oh do be quiet, you loony cow.” He spat, aiming his attention at her.

“I think it’s you who should be quiet, Percy.” George appeared  in the doorway, walking into the room. “I don’t know what is happening with our baby sister, but I do know any decent member of this family would show her the love and respect she deserves.”

“She’s gay! Are you going to come in here and tell me-”

“Yes. Yes, I am. And I’m sure every single person downstairs would agree with me. If Fred were here, he’d hex your bollocks off.” George used his few inches over Percy to lean over him, his voice firm. “She is our sister, it is our duty to try our best to love her, even if she does leave her dirty laundry everywhere.” He winked at Ginny, and she felt some of the tension leave her.

Percy shoved past George, storming down the stairs. Ginny opened her mouth to speak, but George held up a hand, a knowing smirk on his face. “Since this wasn’t a planned coming out, I’ll keep it to myself. But if you’re not downstairs in the next ten minutes, you forfeit your chance to play in the quidditch game.” He turned around, but just before he could disappear through the hallway, Ginny called out.

“Thanks, George.”

“No worries, Gin. At least I know you won’t be getting pregnant any time soon.” He chuckled at her mortified face before leaving with a salute.

“I do love your family.” Luna whispered dreamily, leaning her head on Ginny’s shoulders.

“Did you really whip out the soulmate card to Percy?” The redhead asked, shaking her head with a smile and she turned to face Luna.

“It’s true, though, my lovely stars.”

“Mmm, I suppose.” Ginny murmured, a twinkle in her eye. “My moon.” She added, before she kissed the blonde. She briefly wondered if things would change much between the two of them now, but realised that they already did everything that a normal couple would, except the sexual side. And if that’s what Luna wanted, Ginny would be more than happy to oblige. 

---

Requests open!

[slapshot-to-the-heart]

Flatbush & Atlantic: part v

Here we have part v! Took me a little longer than usual, but I’m really happy with how it turned out - it’s All Star Weekend with our favorite couple, folks! I haven’t been getting as much engagement as usual with the posts, so please feel free to reblog it and pop into my inbox!

part i part ii part iii part iv

part v

January 28

Cass sat on a metal bench at JFK, legs propped up on her carry-on, eyes flitting between the departures screen and her phone. Mat walked through the sliding doors to her left, catching her eye with a quick wave and smile. If he wanted to travel incognito in Long Island, though, the suit bag and “these-are-more-expensive-than-they-look” sunglasses weren’t helping his cause. “You’ve got the tickets?” She asked. After much convincing, Cass finally agreed to let Mat buy the tickets; he said it would be easier to make sure they were seated together, and had told her to think of it as a belated Christmas present if she’d like. 

Mat nodded, gesturing towards the check-in counters. “Shall we?”

Cat grabbed his hand in her own as they walked to the counter. It hadn’t even crossed her mind that they’d be travelling anything but economy — she never had, after all — so she was more than a little surprised when he steered her and their bags towards American’s first-class check-in. He looked down at her. “What? You think I’d let you go to the All-Star Game in anything but the best? Nah, we’re travelling in style, babe.” Cass flushed, handing over her bags to be weighed and taking the boarding pass from the flight attendant with a harried thanks. 

“Qu-est-ce que c’est, chère?” Mat asked, brushing a kiss over the top of her head as they headed up the escalator. French had been her foreign language in high school and college; it had gotten rusty, but Mat and Tito had been more than happy to practice with her, though Beau’s Québécois accent sometimes proved a little difficult to understand. 

“I’m just really excited for this weekend. I know how much it means to you to be on the team and competing in the skills competition again, and I’m lucky to be able to see you do what you love.” 

After a less-than-ideal forty minutes in the security line, Cass handed her license and Mat’s passport over to the TSA agent, who gave them a cursory once-over before marking their boarding passes and letting them through the scanner. 

They boarded the Delta flight some 40 minutes later, after a much-needed pit-stop at the Starbucks. The flight attendants took their coats and showed them to their seats, and before Cass knew it she was seated in a very large, very comfortable chair that had more legroom than she thought humanly possible, a glass of champagne perched on her tray table. “Is this how you live? All the time?” She whispered to Mat, stunned. 

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “The team charters a plane for games and I usually don’t do first class to go back home, but this is a special occasion. It deserves it, you deserve it.” He pressed a kiss to her cheek, pulling out his Airpods. “We’ve got just enough time to get through Pirates of the Carribean before we land. What do you say?” 

Their plane landed a few hours later, the two catching an Uber to the hotel about twenty minutes away. Apparently there had been “a car” coming for them, but Cass balked at the idea, insisting that the Toyota Corolla coming to pick them up was more than enough for her. 

“Hi, checking in for Barzal,” Mat said, smiling at the receptionist. 

“One moment,” she replied, tapping on the computer and turning around to grab two key cards. “You two will be in room 307, third floor. Elevators are that way. Enjoy your stay!” Mat took the cards, handing one to Cass as they turned towards the row of elevators. As excited as she was, Cass was also just the tiniest bit apprehensive about sharing a room with Mat for a whole weekend. She had spent the night once or twice since the Christmas party, and had officially been granted “a drawer” in his dresser, but it was still the longest (relatively) uninterrupted time she’d spend with him. 

There were a few hours before the festivities kicked off with some sort of red carpet-type thing, so Cass pulled out her laptop and got to work while Mat went off to exercise in the hotel gym. None of her professors this semester recorded lectures, so she was relying on good friends and a strong Wifi connection to get the notes from the one class she was missing. Cass wasn’t one to skip out on responsibilities and she did feel bad about not being there, but she had earned a break. 

Mat came back a little while later, and Cass took that as her cue to start getting ready. After he got out of the shower, she took over the bathroom, spreading her makeup, brushes, and precisely-3.4-ounce bottle of hairspray over the counter. This was the first big event she was going to as a WAG, and nerves were flying. Cass was already well aware that she didn’t fit into the typical mold, and hated the fact that she felt like she had to justify herself everywhere she went. And it didn’t help that Mat wasn’t just one of the best young players in the NHL in recent memory, but also a total smokeshow of a man who had hundreds of women falling at his feet. 

But galas, parties, extravagant events were nothing new to her. She had been the president of her sorority at UConn, organizing and attending more than her fair share of her own formals and semiformals or accompanying a friend or boyfriend to theirs. And law school called for dressing up more than occasionally. She was no stranger to impressing people. The dress was light blue to coordinate with Mat’s suit, heavily beaded, and absolutely gorgeous. This was the one part of the trip that she had absolutely refused to let Mat pay for, even though he offered. The league covered the room and he had gotten the flights, and her ego needed to pick up at least a marginal part of the expenses. 

She twisted her hair up into a bun, bobby pins stuck in her mouth as she pulled out a few strands of hair. Setting spray? Check. Lipstick? A deep rose shade that she’d had since her first year of law school, so, check. “You almost ready to go, chou?” She asked, leaning down to her suitcase and grabbing the strappy heels she’d picked out for the night.

“Uh, yeah,” Mat said, buttoning his suit jacket. He usually had pretty good taste even before they started dating, but the navy blue velvet suit he was wearing was really something else. “Wow, you look amazing, Cass.”

She smiled, stepping towards him. “The lipstick’s kiss-proof, you know.”

He raised one eyebrow. “You wanna try that out?”

---

It was a fifteen minute drive to the venue, the car the league had sent packed with players and their partners, or whoever else had managed to wrangle a spot. She thinks there were some cousins involved? Mat got out before her, holding the door open while he leaned down. “The reporters are usually fine, they get that most of you guys aren’t used to this,” he murmured, “but you don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to, I’ll say something if I see it getting out of line.” 

She squeezed his hand in appreciation, taking a breath to steady her nerves before following him onto the red carpet. After posing for a few photos, they moved onto the reporters, Mat getting steered towards someone who Cass was pretty sure was from SportsCenter, but she couldn’t be positive in the crowd of hundreds. Cass briefly introduced herself, stepping slightly to the side as the conversation’s topics veered towards strategy and expectations, how best to manage playing with only three players and how he was feeling about his chances for fastest skater. 

“And you’ve brought your lovely girlfriend Cassidy along, how did you two meet?” Cass heard her name mentioned, quickly snapping out of the daydream she had been lost in. Fluff pieces were nothing new and she knew it would come up, everyone loved getting to know the players outside of a strictly hockey context. 

“Yeah, so I’m in law school, and I got an internship with the counsel’s office for the Islanders,” Cas started, “and I helped Mat with some visa stuff. He kept trying to drop hints that he was into me, but—”

“They weren’t hints. I was being as obvious as possible,” Mat deadpanned. Cass giggled. 

“Well, yeah, in retrospect I was just being incredibly oblivious, but came to one day, and the rest is history.” Mat leaned down, brushing a kiss over her cheek, and Cass could see camera flashes go off in her peripherals. She’d have to track that picture down later.

The interviewer nodded, asking a few follow-ups on her exposure to hockey growing up, her dress, and one more. “So, you hardly live the typical life of a hockey girlfriend. What do you think about that?”

Cass was confused. “Pardon?”

“Law school, being a lawyer. That’s not something that you typically see WAGs pursue, especially considering the salaries NHLers make. It’s not like they have to do much.” Cass was floored. How could someone be so disrespectful, not only to her, but to every other woman in her position? She was struggling to come up with a response. As it would happen, she didn’t need to. 

“Excuse me?” Mat’s response was dripping venom. “Why would you ask something like that?”

The interviewer tried to backtrack, but ended up digging himself into an ever deeper hole. “Well, I just meant that you don’t see it often, which is true—”

“Maybe you don’t, but that shouldn’t matter,” Mat said. “Being a stay-at-home mom or running charity events is awesome if that’s something that they want to do, but it’s not for everyone. And don’t you dare ever suggest that Cass hasn’t worked hard as hell to get to where she is. She’s graduating in five months from an Ivy League law school, and she’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. Don’t ever talk about her that way. Don’t ever talk about any woman that way.” He turned away, his hand on Cass’ upper back. “Don’t ever let anyone undersell you. You’ve worked too damn hard and come too damn far.”

 Jan. 29 (fri)

 Cass smoothed out her dress, taking a last-minute look in the mirror to make sure nothing was stuck in her teeth. “How do I look?” She asked, turning to Mat. 

“You look great, babe. Stop stressing.” She had picked a floral dress and denim jacket for breakfast with Mat’s family, but couldn’t stop wringing her hands in worry. Mat crossed the room in three steps, holding her hands still and looking at her more intensely than she had ever seen. “Remember when I was losing my shit meeting your parents?” Cass gave a tearful nod. “And it all turned out okay and now I text your brother probably more than you do?” 

She laughed. “Noah worships you, and my dad loves you. Thinks you’re ‘good for me,’ whatever he means by that.”

“I think,” Mat said, tapping her temple with one finger, “that sometimes you get a little stuck up here. You’re so smart, and it’s incredible, but you overthink things sometimes, pretty girl.”

She ducked her head. “That’s probably true.” 

“But what I meant to say is that it turned out I had nothing to worry about. And neither do you, my parents will love you and Liana’ll just be excited to have another girl around to complain about me to. It’s going to go great,” he added with finality. 

“You promise?” Cass asked.

Mat kissed her, soft and sweet and slow, the kind of kiss that wasn’t born of passion and lust but of just genuine deep trust and affection. The kind of kiss that brings your feet back to the ground when your head’s stuck off in the clouds. “I promise.”

Cass flashed a small smile, squeezing Mat’s hand in hers and heading towards the door. “Then I guess we’d better get going.” She had been up late the night before, searching on Yelp for the perfect restaurant, despite Mat’s continual claims that they’d “love wherever, they just want food.” Though, she’s not sure what she expected when asking a 20-something man what he wanted to eat. There was a cute place a ten minute drive away, with four-point-seven stars and reviews that said their quiches were the “best thing on this godforsaken planet,” according to IridescentGymRat44. Cass loved quiches. 

It was a quick Uber over, Mat’s mom having texted him that they had already arrived and snagged a table in the back for privacy. It may have been a family event, but it was still All-Star Weekend and Mat was still, well, Mat. It wasn’t likely he could fly under the radar for too long. He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand reassuringly as they turned the corner, and his face split into a wide grin at the sight of his family. Hugging each of them quickly, he stepped back to introduce Cass, one hand lightly resting on the small of her back. “This is Cass, my girlfriend.”

“Yeah, we figured,” Liana said pointedly, causing Cass to poorly cover up a snort of amusement, which in turn just caused everyone to laugh even more at their efforts trying not to laugh so hard. 

As it would turn out, Mat was right. She really had nothing to worry about; his parents embraced her (literally and metaphorically) as soon as she set down and his sister immediately whipped out her phone to show his worst baby pictures. “Hey,” she said, as Mat glared at her, “you deserve to know what you’re getting yourself into.” They were interested in her work and school, and Mat gladly took the liberty of explaining how they met, earning a slap on the back of his head from his mom when he got to the part with the visa slipup. They said their goodbyes sometime around eleven; Cass would have liked to stay longer, but everyone needed to get back to their hotels and ready for the skills competitions in the afternoon. 

“Excited to defend the title?” Cass said, bumping her shoulder against Mat as they walked down the hallway to their room. 

“Yeah, I guess,” Mat said, shrugging slightly. “Obviously it would be great to win, but there’s still McDavid and Eichel and a ton of other guys that have just as good of a chance to run away with this thing.” After his win last year, it was no shock that Mat had been picked for the fastest skater competition again, but the hordes of fans and reporters who were expecting him to go back-to-back weren’t helping his nerves. They reached the door, Mat shoving his hand into his pocket to dig out the key card. 

“Look at me,” Cass said softly, once they had gotten their shoes off and were propped up next to each other in bed. Mat’s head turned, his hand still absentmindedly tangled in her curls. “You’re going to do great. Win or lose. I believe it, your family believes it, the other guys on the team believe it. Now all we need is for you to believe it yourself.”

---

Cass was walking through the tunnels of the BB&T Center, phone pressed to her cheek as she tried to listen to her dad on the other end of the line. A few players and their families were milling about, some getting ready to compete in their skills competitions, others catching up with old friends. “Oh, and you booked the tickets to Hermosillo, yeah?” It was a family tradition for them to spend a few weeks every summer back in Mexico with her grandparents; they had split their time between San Antonio and their hometown ever since retirement. Cass always tried to make it, but the past summer she wasn’t able to wrangle the two weeks off from her job that she’d need for the trip, and it had crushed her. They weren’t getting any younger, and her abuelo had suffered a nasty stroke the year prior that made her all the more anxious to visit. 

“Yep, layover in Mexico City like usual, I’ll send you the ticket when the trip gets closer,” Patrick responded.

“And you’ve got everyone’s passport info?”

She could imagine her dad rolling his eyes. “Yes, Cassidy. Everything’s booked, everything’s fine. Have fun in Florida, tell Mat good luck from us.”

“Okay, I will. Love you, dad.” Cass said, running a hand through her hair. 

A voice that she didn’t quite recognize called her name, and as she turned around she was more than a little surprised to see Auston Matthews waving at her. “It is Cassidy, right?”

She nodded her head. “Cassidy, Cass, I’ll answer to both.”

The confusion on her face must have still been evident, because he followed up. “I follow Barzy on Instagram, he brags about you all the time.”

“Yeah, sounds like him,” she said, tapping her fingers on her thigh. 

“Are you going to introduce me?” His mom asked from beside him. 

“Oh, yeah, ‘course,” Auston said, stumbling over his words. “Mom, this is Cassidy, obviously. Cassidy — Cass?” He questioned, looking over at her. She nodded. “Cass, this is my mom Ema.” She greeted her with a warm hug, and Cass just about melted. Moms really do give the best hugs. 

Ema spoke up. “Do you have family in Hermosillo? I heard you mention it on the phone.”

“Mhm!” Cass’s head almost bounced from how fast she was nodding. “My grandparents split time between there and San Antonio, we try to visit for a few weeks every summer.”

“That’s where I grew up,” she responded, beaming. “It’s wonderful, but the summers get so hot, don’t they?” Cass and Auston both nodded. 

“I think it got up to 110º when I was there once? Maybe 115º? I want to lock myself in a freezer sometimes, I swear.” The whole group collapses into laughs, and spent a few minutes talking before Cass had to tear herself away and find her seats with Mat’s family for the fastest skater competition. Ema had left her with no fewer than three restaurant recommendations, making her swear to try them all. “Best tacos I’ve ever had,” she had said about one. 

Cass greeted Mat’s family with a wave as they settled into their seats, one row up from the ice on the right side. The players had just come out, and it only took a few seconds to make eye contact with Mat. She was wearing his — her — jersey, and had long since abandoned trying to roll up and cuff the sleeves. It wasn’t going to happen, and she kind of liked the feeling of being buried in it. She blew him a kiss as the announcers voices echoed through the stadium, and the heat was on. 

Mat was slated to go last, which was either the best or worst thing depending on how you thought about it. Cass was always someone to sign up for the first slot for speeches and presentations, and hated having late games in tournaments during her lacrosse days. She liked being able to get it over with. Mat was the opposite. He was competitive and stubborn to a fault, needing to size up the competition and get ahead of the game. Needed to know what to expect. There first few she didn’t recognize, a few first-time faces to the All-Star competition, a rookie from Winnipeg who was a favorite for the Calder. Everyone was doing well, really well — all the times but one were under 14 seconds, but nobody had broken Mat’s time yet. 

Eichel got close, McDavid got closer, and then Mat was up to defend his championship. She blew a kiss to him as he stepped up to the line, murmured a prayer, and the whistle blew. Clean straightaways, tight turns, gaining speed on the curves, and in the blink of an eye it was over. Cass knew he had won, the roar of the crowd told her as much, but she didn’t realize his time. She didn’t realize until the announcer reported that with a time of 13.080 seconds, Mathew Barzal had just set the record. His face was stunned for a moment, looking up at the screen and then down at the ice and then back up at the screen again, while being hugged and congratulated from all sides, as if trying to process what had just happened. 

It was the last one of the night, so Cass said her goodbyes to Mat’s family, with a promise to meet up before the game the next day, and hurried down to meet Mat. There wasn’t anything formal scheduled for the rest of the night, so he came out of the locker room in just a pair of athletic shorts and an Islanders t-shirt. Cass ran up, jumping into his arms as he dropped his bag to catch her. “Woah, babe,” he said, steadying his hands on the back of her thighs, “coulda given me a warning there.”

Cass kissed him. “Wouldn’t have been nearly as fun that way, though, huh?”

“You’re right.” Mat shrugged good-naturedly, setting Cass down and grabbing his bag and her hand. 

“How does it feel having beaten the record?” Cass asked. 

Mat ran his free hand through his hair, still shower-damp. “So surreal. I wasn’t even sure I’d win, not with how stacked the lineup was, let alone get anywhere near breaking the record. It’s ridiculous, but it’s amazing.”

“You’re amazing.”

 Jan. 30 (sat)

 Mat was busy doing media and catching up with some of the guys before the game later that day, and Cass had elected to stay in the room. Mat had offered for her to come along, “you might think it’s interesting?” he had noted, but she’d be damned if she let herself fall behind in her last semester, she was just too close. It had already been a bit of a stretch for her to take a day off and come for the whole weekend, so her afternoon was instead filled with some utterly thrilling reading on advanced contract theory and a thick-as-all-hell review book for the New York state bar. She leaned back in her chair, taking the last remaining sip of the mediocre Lipton tea she had snagged from the basket by the room’s coffee maker. She could finish it later.

Cass picked up her phone, pressing play on a voicemail from Fiona that had been left earlier in the afternoon. 

Uh, hey, it’s me. Cass, I don’t know if this is what you want to hear, but I don’t think I’d be a very good friend if I didn’t say it. Uh-oh. Conversations that started like that never ended well. I’m happy about you and Mat, I know you like him a lot, but I’m worried that he’s distracting you. I know you told us you’d be gone, but we missed you at the study group, and I know you skipped your law review meeting today. The rest of the message was more of the same, but one sentence stuck out to her. Think about where your priorities are. Think about where you want them to be. 

Fiona Chan had a one-track mind. And Cass loved her for it — she was one of the most dedicated people she knew and an incredible friend. But she sometimes found it hard to understand when people had priorities that extended beyond the bounds of law school, when their sole focus wasn’t on their Contracts final or clinic or clerkship they were doing for some top-tier appellate judge. 

She flopped back on the bed. Think about where your priorities are. She had been spending a lot of time with Mat lately, but no more than anyone would spend with their significant other — right? And it wasn’t a sin for her to have a life outside of law school. She was still more than competent at her job, got most of the reading done, was prepared when professors would cold-call on her. She still showed up to meetings. 

But even she would admit that her head wasn’t in the game all the time, if she could hazard another High School Musical reference. She’d sneak texts, meet him for lunch instead of going to office hours, and now, take weekends off to be with him. But that wasn’t a bad thing. Or was it? Her grades weren’t really suffering, and nobody else had mentioned anything. Friends notice things, though, Cass thought. And Fiona was one of the most perceptive people she knew. She groaned. Why wasn’t there ever an easy way to figure these things out? She really liked Mat — she might even love him — but Cass couldn’t help but feel like she was gambling on something that wasn’t a sure thing. And her future wasn’t something to play games with. 

[bbk-writes]

Notes: approx 2k words of an extremely fluffy and over the top story where Magnus tries to find a nickname / appropriate term of endearment for Alec.  Magnus never looks through his mail. “It’s all mundane trash,” he says. “Everyone in the building gets it. If someone actually wants to send me something, there are much easier ways of getting it to me than sending it through the American postal system. Even bills get sent directly to my email now!” 

This leaves it up to Alec to rifle through the fliers, sales papers, and community notices that get delivered to the apartment over the course of the week.

“Oh, this sounds nice,” says Alec one morning over breakfast. “There’s a harvest festival happening in Westchester in a couple weeks. You interested?”

“When is it?”

“Second weekend in October,” reads Alec off the notice. “Featuring mazes, a farmer’s market, hay rides, and over a hundred local vendors.”

The more details Alec learns about this, the more charmed he is and even before Magnus nods, Alec can tell by the pleased look on his face that Magnus is in. It’s the kind of thing Magnus clearly loves even though he always feels the need to qualify that enjoyment by contrasting it with the other, grander experiences he’s had. 

As if on cue, Magnus says, “Sounds like a plan, pumpkin. It’s not quite the Tết Trung Thu, but what is?”

The, “Great, I’ll put that on the calendar,” that’s at the tip of Alec’s tongue is abruptly cut off, replaced instead with a confused, “I’m sorry, what?”

“Hmm?”

“What did you just say?”

Magnus looks as though he has no idea what Alec’s talking about. But Magnus is also a master conman, so Alec’s calling bullshit. “I said we should go?”

“Not that,” says Alec. “I meant what’s with the–” Alec makes what he hopes is an explanatory hand gesture, “the pumpkin– thing–”

“Oh!” Magnus brightens. “That’s just something I’m trying out. I quite like it, I think.”

Alec still doesn’t fully understand what’s happening, or why it’s happening, but he knows what his response is. “Magnus, no.”

“But,” says Magnus, looking meaningfully toward Alec’s ass.

“No,” repeats Alec, face getting hot. “Also, inaccurate.”

“I’ll be the judge of what’s accurate or not when it comes to your behind, thank you very much.” Then, somewhat slyly, “Though I will leave you to be the judge, jury, and executioner for mine. And while we’re on the topic. Alexander, if you had to describe my assets using a singular, all encapsulating word–”

Joke’s on Magnus if he thinks he’s going to catch Alec off-guard with this request. Alec, who has spent perhaps an inadvisable amount of time thinking about Magnus’ assets during the time they’ve known one another, already knows what his answer is.

“A ten,” he says immediately, and Magnus looks immensely pleased. Alec’s opinion on this matter can’t be a surprise to Magnus though, and when Alec points it out, Magnus doesn’t pretend otherwise.

“Well, no. But it’s always nice to be told something nice, even if it’s for the forty-fifth time.”

The number can’t be that low, but Alec has more pressing matters at hand. “Okay, we’re getting off topic. Don’t try and make this whole… pumpkin… thing… into something.” The words sound familiar to his ears, and Alec remembers why. “Didn’t we already talk about this before?”

Magnus suddenly seems to find his forgotten breakfast very interesting. “I can’t recall.”

“Hmm,” says Alec. “Well, all right. Try and remember this time please. This sort of – nickname – isn’t really for me.”

And immediately, Magnus’ eyes snaps back to Alec and Alec knows he just said something wrong. Magnus doesn’t look like he heard what Alec had been trying to say at all. He doesn’t look resigned or disappointed or playfully grumpy at Alec.

Instead, the sparkle that’s always present in Magnus’ warm gaze is suddenly brighter, more mischievous.

“Oh?” says Magnus, intrigued. “So the problem is that it’s just not the right name for you?”

Alec realizes his mistake.

-

No amount of Alec insisting that that’s not what he meant will convince Magnus otherwise. “I’m going to find the right one if it’s the last thing I do.”

“You really don’t have to make a promise like that about something like this,” Alec tries to say.

“It’s not a promise, Alexander. It’s a vow.”

Magnus says this as though calling this fool’s quest a vow is supposed to have the whole thing suddenly make sense to Alec. It doesn’t. When Alec, in no uncertain terms, tells him, “Vow or not, there’s no way I’m changing my mind about this,” Magnus had taken it as a personal challenge.

Except not a challenge in the truest definition of the word. Mostly Magnus just starts suggesting things that are so nonsensical or outright terrible that it’s become some kind of game for him, and the way Magnus measures success is by how broadly he manages to make Alec smile.

“A-ha!” says Magnus, when Alec can’t quite hide his reaction to hearing ‘angelcake.’ “That goes on the shortlist, then. We’re making progress, Alexander. You’re partial to names which highlight your temperament and racial makeup.”

“I’m not having this conversation,” Alec says loudly, pressing his lips together so they don’t betray him. He focuses on his task at hand, cutting carrots into little cubes to put into the stew they’ll have for dinner. Don’t break, he tells himself. Stay strong.

“Hummingbird,” tries Magnus next, broaching into another category. “No, swan. Tiger. Lioness. Beautiful, ferocious creatures like yourself.”

He looks at Alec in question and Alec just stares back. Those don’t even warrant a verbal response, which Magnus takes with surprising grace.

“What about stallion?” muses Magnus and Alec almost cuts off his whole hand. Magnus immediately takes notice. “Oh? Do you like that? My sexy, warrior stallion–”

“Magnus. No. Absolutely not.”

“Perhaps I’ll save that for the bedroom,” concedes Magnus. “Just between us. Although I’m sure everyone suspects your achievements, best not to give potential suitors any concrete facts.”

Alec should really be putting a stop to this more firmly but he recognizes that he’s the absolute worst at ruining Magnus’ fun, even when it’s at his own expense. At least Magnus very courteously only plays this game when they’re by themselves, which is quite sweet.

And so Alec says, “I’ll tell you right now that nothing based on food or animals is going to be a winner.”

“Oh?” says Magnus. “Are you saying that I should be trying a different tactic?”

“I’m saying that this is a lost cause and you should be very discouraged. Maybe you can slice some of these zucchinis instead of–” Magnus carelessly waves a hand and the zucchinis disappear and re-appear in a bowl, washed and cut into little half-circles. “Oh, is that how we’re doing this now?.”

For a moment, Magnus is silent. He’s looking at Alec thoughtfully, chin resting at the heel of a palm. Alec can almost see the wheels turning in his head. It makes Alec nervous, but also, bizarrely curious. Magnus’ mind is something else, and even in this context Alec finds it incredibly sexy.

And then Magnus says, “Light of my life.”

“No,” says Alec automatically. It’s his instinctive response, but also– “That’s not even a noun. That’s a – that’s a whole phrase.”

“Apple of my eye,” persists Magnus, ignoring Alec’s completely valid points. “Lily of my pond.”

“My God,” says Alec. “No.”

“Beat of my heart, sun of my sky–”

Alec can’t help it – he throws a dishtowel toward Magnus’ general vicinity to stop his menacing. In response, Magnus makes a show of pulling out a little notebook.

“Suuun-of-my-skyyyy,” he recites as he writes the words down. Alec really should be putting a stop to this, but he ends up just shaking his head instead. “That’s another one for the shortlist.”

-

Magnus takes to this new angle with renewed enthusiasm. Which is saying a lot, since it’s not like any of his enthusiasm had actually diminished at any point since he gave himself the job to find a term of endearment Alec would be comfortable with.

“You should pursue a career in poetry,” says Alec, even as he just refused a series of Magnus’ latest epithets. “Clearly you’ve got a talent.”

“Yes, well – sometimes a man’s heart is just bursting with songs about his love,” says Magnus. “A love so vast that it can’t be kept quiet, a human – or, well, warlock – body too delicate to rein it all in. What am I supposed to do when I have to express such a feeling?”

“Well, when I get that way, I usually just come and kiss you,” answers Alec frankly. “I say, ‘Magnus, I love you.’ Sometimes I try to take your shirt off. Those kinds of things.”

Magnus looks terribly, unexpectedly charmed. “Oh, stop it. You can’t be so sweet when I’m teasing you, Alexander. That takes the fun out of it.”

“Does this mean you’re going to stop with this?”

“Never,” says Magnus solemnly.

-

It’s an accident when Magnus finally stumbles onto something that works.

“Did you see my grimoire, darling?” Magnus asks, digging through his meticulously organized shelf. “Volume four, covering my discoveries from 1862 to 1907?”

Alec hasn’t, but instead of saying so he goes, “...That works.”

“Hmm?”

“You know.” Alec’s face is very hot. He needs to power through this conversation. “That. Your self-appointed mission to call me something that isn’t my actual name. That one. That one is okay.”

Magnus slowly spins around to face him. He looks a combination of confused and disgruntled, and Alec can see him rewinding the last few seconds in his mind.

Alec can also see the exact moment everything slots neatly into place.

“Oh,” says Magnus. His whole expression brightens and he sounds absolutely delighted. He seems to have forgotten about his missing grimoire as he starts toward Alec. “Oh, I’m a fool. How could I have not considered the fact that Alexander Gideon Lightwood is traditional man in all the right ways? Darling. Darling Alexander. Is that right?”

“Well.” Alec’s not going to say that that’s right, but it’s definitely... it’s nice to hear Magnus say that in reference to Alec. Always has been. Alec should’ve taken some initiative, done some self-reflection, and suggested it himself. “It’s nice. Normal. Nothing crazy.”

Magnus nods along to all that. “Yes, you’re right, it’s perfect.”

“Great,” says Alec, releasing a deep, relieved breath. “Now that we’re done with that–”

“And what about… beloved?” Magnus tries it out. The look on his face as he gazes at Alec is far too gentle for what is essentially a joke gone too far.

The way Alec reacts to it is even worse. Suddenly flustered, Alec has to clear his throat before he can say, “Good. That’s also… that’s fine. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” says Magnus, taking Alec’s face in between his hands and pressing a kiss to his mouth. “Sweetheart,” murmurs Magnus, thumb stroking along Alec’s flushed cheeks. Even though he states it, there’s still a question in his voice.

Heart hammering in his chest, Alec nods. It feels like giving too much away, but – but it’s Magnus. What’s there left inside of Alec that he hasn’t already given to him?

“Sweetheart,” repeats Magnus, and kisses Alec again. “Dearest. Darling.”

“All – all good contenders there.”

This is. This is definitely a thing. Alec closes his eyes, blood rushing in his ears.

He definitely has a thing for this.

And then Magnus says, “Alexander,” and the way he does – well. He’s clearly not just trying to get Alec’s attention.

The four syllables are said with the same trace of suggestion as all the others before it. If Alec had known this was in the running–

“I didn’t know this was an option.”

“No? It’s always been my favourite one.”

That spark of mischief is back in Magnus’ gaze, and Alec is ready to have this be the happy ending of this roundabout journey.

“Well, then,” he says. “Looks like you have your winner.”

[wirewitchviolet]

Abuse I’ve just had to sit with forever

Right now I can’t look anywhere without seeing people speaking up about abusive monsters in various positions of power and it’s really triggering a lot of PTSD for me about all the times I’ve been in positions like that where nobody has ever listened or tried to help so... I’m just going to rattle off all the ones that come to my head, anonymously, and I don’t know, if anyone who knows me wants to ask me about any of these and/or try to really do something to help, maybe come talk to me about it through whatever private channel we talk in sometimes.

Family stuff. There’s a lot, and there’s no real way to talk about any of it anonymously because I mean being members of my family it’s already narrowed down way too much.

Someone once put me in the temporary care of a woman who savagely beat me because her own children were making too much noise when they should have been asleep. Bad enough that when I went back to school I was almost ripped out of my home by child protective services on the assumption that’s where it happened. Oh and she also force-fed me rotten food with maggots in it. I ended up pretty sick as a result, lost a whole lot of weight, and ended up with a serious eating disorder that’s plagued me since. I did eventually get out of there but I don’t know that I’ve ever really conveyed the full extend of it.

One of that woman’s children had some sort of torture kink, very nearly killed me, did put me in the hospital from injuries, and might have raped me. Hard to say because I was like... 7? Hard to translate those memories now that I have the context and vocabulary. I tried to explain that to anyone who’d listen at the time but, again, I didn’t have the vocabulary and I don’t think it came across that like... ropes and tools were involved, not just fists. Never got into that with therapists, because the first one I had really loved playing gatekeeper with trans stuff and liked the “maybe you just think you’re a girl because of abuse as a child” line of thinking too much already. I think I heard he eventually landed in prison though, so that’s something?

The first job I ever had. Games website. I was too young to be working but nobody ever thought to ask about it, and my family needed the extra income to avoid homelessness besides. The owner of the site... was really into open sexual roleplay in workplace text chats. I was so young and weirdly sheltered that I didn’t even process that that was even a thing, and 90% of it went straight over my head, plus I was in a weird state at the time with the whole trans thing where oh yeah, if anyone’s doing any roleplaying stuff on the internet, I’ll be in the character of me-but-a-girl but everything is pretend here right? So... there was a whole lot of mounting and thrusting being described and it took a few years to sink in that that was not in fact about him pretending to be a knight with me as a horse or something. And there was also a lot of... failing to pay me for years of backbreaking work, outright stealing from me, and I mean, I was up until like 4 AM every night working while still in high school. So, yeah. that was a lot. Never told anybody about any of this. So far as I know he still runs the site and nobody’s ever confronted him about anything.

Used to try to play various RPGs with some people in this extra niche-y game space. Sort of the first place I was ever read as a woman without offering anyone “corrections.” And... there was just this one guy who whenever he was GMing had some weird creative excuse for my character (usually the only woman in the party) to... be raped and/or impregnated just all of the sudden and totally out of left field. Which everyone was OK with somehow. And when he wasn’t GMing he was all over my character of course. Never really spoke up to anyone. I just left one day.

Ended up... in the inner circle of someone very famous. Mostly famous for being a victim of abuse. Which is why I ignored... every single red flag there is that someone is an abusive person and taking advantage of everyone around them. They controlled every aspect of my life for years. Had me do a whole lot of work for them, place myself in real physical and psychological danger, regularly. Directly asked me to severe ties with most people in my life. Install kill-switch sortware on my laptop for their piece of mind that none of our conversations would ever be seen by anyone, while also making me talk only in privately managed chat services where they logged everything and my screen wiped at regular intervals, and insisting I use an untraceable alias in it. All of this I was constantly assured was for my own safety as much as theirs, somehow, and that I was their most valued friend who they would keep safe, start paying a huge salary to soon, as well as help secure me a safe place to live and get properly started on medical transition stuff that I was unable to do in the increasingly unsafe place I was living at the time. I could keep going with this, but again, I don’t want anyone playing guessing games. Eventually, as serial abusers do, this person got sick of me, cast me out, and said presumably unspeakable things about me to everyone in that social circle, because everyone quite promptly cut all ties to me without a word. I once mentioned some small fraction of this publicly in defense of... multiple people attempting suicide as a result of this person’s abuse, and it was made very, very clear to me that this is not someone I will ever be able to safely speak about in public.

Another person who is very famous, with ties to abuse prevention stuff, added me to a blacklist to kill my career prospects and then kinda put a hit out on me on a neo-nazi website, but I’ve written about that incident. Nothing happened as a result of speaking out aside from the violence I was already being subjected to ramping up and more people cutting ties with me. Oh and those who didn’t are still quite friendly with her.

Several women with ties to... dangerous people randomly got it into their heads several years ago that I posed some sort of threat to someone I am told they “feel very protective towards” and... unleashed a hell on me unlike anything I have ever seen. I have spent the past 6 years now dealing with death threats from far right terrorist organizations who in some cases have very sizeable body counts, and those groups don’t scare me anywhere near as much as these people. Anyone else I have seen them paint a target on completely withdrew from the internet their careers and any sort of public life to try and stay off their radar. I have had multiple people privately confide in me that they had been threatened never to speak to me again before proceeding to make good on that. I have individually thrown myself at the mercy of every single one of them, explained that I have absolutely no ill will towards any of them, and had never even heard of this person they’re “protecting” before they started coming after me. Nothing has worked. They’ve never stopped. I’m legitimately afraid someone connected to them is going to murder me some day, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve confided in all of maybe 3 people about this. One might be dead, one is a total hermit, the third briefly tried supporting me, received threats, and promptly retracted everything, replacing it with a fire and brimstone speech about how I am an evil monster who tricked them. I have regular nightmares about this, and collapse into a shivering heap just seeing any of their names mentioned.

I... spent a good deal of time in social contact with a person I have been told I need to be friends with to advance in a career I would like to pursue. While doing so, he sabotaged a project that was fairly important to me, and I saw some him mistreat someone else in ways I find quite disturbing, but that’s her story to tell and not mine. I don’t feel comfortable around him, and have no real choice but to give up on those dreams. Haven’t really discussed this anywhere. The sort of work I can get would definitely vanish completely if I did.

The sort of work I can get also involves working for a variety of companies with people very high up the ranks who have seriously harmed a number of people I consider to be very good friends, in ways that in some cases include sexual abuse, and I... really would prefer not to ever work for anyone employing such people now that I am aware of this.

Yet another famous person, but one who I feel perfectly comfortable naming, Graham Linehan, used to follow me on social media with a level of enthusiasm that could arguably be better referred to as stalking. Then later he joined some extremist anti-trans hate group and rose to the top pretty quickly. And some years after that, it finally sank in that worshiping a trans woman while also leading a group of people bent on killing us all, so he has been very loudly and very publicly rambling about his hatred for me specifically. I don’t really have to speak up about this one because he’s doing plenty of that on his end, but I do have to note that while this famous person terrorizing me hasn’t really earned me any sort of public defense or sympathy, it has encouraged a whole lot of people to invent an alternate timeline of events where I am directly responsible for him being a bigot, leading to me getting dangerous threats from both horrible bigots and people who claim to hate horrible bigots but have suspiciously poor aim.

Hey speaking of celebrities, one of the stars of Firefly used to regularly send me photos of violently distended testicles. One of the stars of Star Trek once posted something encouraging millions of social media followers to attack me and left it up for a weekend. One of the producers of World of WarCraft once threatened to sue me for libel and went on a big PR tour about it, speaking on podcasts and such, and so many fascists pretending to be journalists have dumped so much crap on me...

And not to long ago in something of a wacky mixup, someone ELSE rather famous, who does diversity consulting no less, confused me for someone else and cut loose with a horrific bit of hate and gossip and throwing me under the bus, and misgendering me, saying random harassers baselessly calling me a pedophile were probably onto something. Privately told a handful of people about that, because I thought she was a friend and that was so heartbreaking, but anyone I told is just pretending not to have seen it.

Someone was once offering me help because I was in a dangerous situation, financially. I explained that things had been extra hard since coming out as trans. Suddenly he goes from helpful and concerned to just... violent. Screaming a me, openly trying to chase me out of the space we were both in. I reported this to the proper people. They tried talking, he left. The whole community mourned the loss and wondered who could have driven him off. Still doesn’t feel like a safe place for me.

I don’t really know why I’m bothering with all of this. Nobody is actually going to help. I’d say nobody is actually going to read this, but I’m sure plenty of people who hate me will to see if I’m talking about them and use it as justification to make things worse. Plus some people I’m not talking about I’m sure. I get plenty of that all the time.

Nothing ever helps and you can’t ever win. If you try to keep the abusers appeased by not outing them, the abuse never stops. If you try to speak up, their fans and friends treat it like declarations of war and pile on. If you just try to be there for other people when they’re being abused, you get singled out as a “troublemaker” and added to hit lists and black lists and... nothing works.

I don’t want a lot out of life. I want to know I have enough food, and have a place to live where I’m not at risk of dying from either temperature extreme, a bathroom, enough room for my book shelves, a bed, a couch, a dinner table, and a yoga mat. Maybe a space where my cats can run around a little enclosed semi-outdoor area for the fresh air and sun. I want to be able to deal with my medical problems. I want to see and talk to friends sometimes. If I’m really greedy, I’d like to have all that for a particular friend too who I’m constantly worrying about dying of poverty. And I’d like to be able to work on games. Maybe play them sometimes. Maybe watch things.

And that’s the really messed up part. Because abusive people and people supporting the structures of abuse always say they just want to focus on getting work done, or having fun, and it’s a lie. What’s most important for them is perpetuating abuse. They could just stop, or get rid of the people doing it, and the rest of us could live our lives and everything would be fine. But no instead we have to drop everything and make sure no woman anywhere feels safe enough to even breath.

[mydarlingtuan]

could I ever make you mine | mark

♤ pairing: mark x reader

♤ genre: fluff, angst (actually, more like sorrow idk)

♤ word count: 1,745

♤ warnings: none

author’s note: based on the song “hey, princess” by allstar weekend, also i dedicate this to @p1ummie because without her encouragement and feedback from all of my questions this wouldn’t be here, and she made me promise to send her my first fic and this is the next best thing. ily.

Apparently, you’re supposed to have friends by the time you’re in high school.

At least this is what your mom always said. You ignored her though, because you were a sophomore and still, no friends. But who cared? The only thing that mattered to you was Mark Tuan. He was the only human aspect of school you looked forward to every day. You spent all of freshman year studying him. He intrigued you, but you were sure that he didn’t even know you existed.

That’s a lie. He knew you existed because he gives you that charming smile every time he catches you looking at him. It didn’t seem to freak him out that you were caught looking at him, staring, more or less, on a regular basis and that fascinated you. You were almost one hundred percent sure that he was only being nice, but you were wrong.

What you didn’t know was that Mark had always had feelings for you. Ever since freshman year, he admired you the same way that you admired him. You were all that mattered to him. You were his absolute favorite part of school. When you weren’t looking, he’d be staring at you, and the times he would catch you staring at him were the times he’d be beginning to stare at you. Mark knew everything about you, and he decided that today was going to be the day he finally spoke to you. A real conversation. He was expecting nothing more than an amiable friend-zoning, but it would be worth it either way.

Of course, Mark was unaware that you were planning on speaking to him for the first time, and it was his heavenly smile that gave you the courage. You looked behind you to see Mark sitting on the other bench across the schoolyard, reading. As you are packing up your books, you feel a light tap on your shoulder. Startled, you abruptly turn around. Standing behind you was Mark, in all his distressed-jeaned glory smiling that beautiful smile that you adored.

“Hi,” he says as he sits next to you. “Y/N right?” “Yes,” you say with a smile back, “and you’re Mark,” “That’s me,” he says. The two of you sit in a silence that’s strangely comfortable. As Mark is looking upon the bustling schoolyard, you take him in, convinced that he has the most breathtaking side profile you have ever seen: perfect jaw line, slightly tanned skin, and soft brown hair you want to run your hands through.

You quickly turn your head forward as he faces you again, and when you look back at him, you see that he has the most beautiful brown eyes. Mark is no doubt unbelievably handsome, but if you don’t say something soon, he might up and leave.

“You have really pretty eyes,” you say. Mark looks surprised when you say this. “Honestly, you’re kind of making me nervous,” you laugh. “Oh,” Mark says, “I thought I was the only one that was nervous. I’ve never talked to such a pretty girl before.” You blush, “You think I’m pretty?” you ask. “Absolutely. Why so surprised?” Mark asks. “No one has ever told me that before. No one even talks to me,” you say. “You don’t seem to care.” Mark says, “Well, no, I don’t, but it would be nice to have someone to talk to now and then,” you say. “Well, now you do,” Mark says with a smile. You smile back and then whipping yourself back into reality, you stand up. Mark follows. “Well, I have to get home,” you say, “Already?” Mark says as if he genuinely enjoyed the conversation you two just had. “Yeah, I know, it was just getting juicy,” you say sarcastically, “but I want to get my homework finished.” Mark seems to hesitate before saying, “What if we do it together? I have homework too.” You are going absolutely insane on the inside because of course, you want to do your homework with Mark, but you try your best to keep a straight face. “We could go to the library,” you say, “Perfect,” Mark says. To your surprise, he zips up your bookbag and puts it on your back for you.

When you come to school the next day all you can do is smile. Mark may not, but you consider the two of you friends. Your new favorite class is Honors Geometry. Mark has always been the class, but since yesterday, he insisted on sitting in the back with you. Your eyes widen as you watch Mark sit in the desk beside yours. “Hi!” you say all too excitedly. “Hey, Y/N,” Mark says, “You don’t mind if I sit here do you?” “No, not at all,” you say. “Why do you sit in the back anyway? All the action is up front,” Mark says. “Exactly,” you say, “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of a loner. A proud one at that,” you pause, “That is, until you came along,” you smile. Mark seems to get anxious at your smile. “I was never a loner, but I never really clicked with any of the I people ever hung out with,” Mark says. “You seem different,” “How?” you ask. “Well for starters, you’re taking Honors Geometry.” You both laugh. “So are you! Don’t forget that!” you say, “Besides, I enjoy it more than I ever did now,” you say as you smile at Mark. “Me too,” he says with a smile back.

At lunch, Mark brings you to the school garden so that you guys can eat in a quieter setting. “So, tell me about yourself,” Mark says, “What do I have to do to unlock the mystery that is ‘Y/N’?” You laugh as you brush your hands together, “I don’t think you want to learn about me. I’m pretty boring,” you say. “You’re far from boring,” Mark says with a distant gaze. It’s almost as if he… likes you.

You blush at his remark and continue on as you look at your feet. ‘Well, I like school,” you say, “Actually, I like the academic part of school. The people part I can live without,” you say. “but, you want to know something, Mark?” Mark raises his eyebrows in curiosity. “There is always one person who I could never hate, and they make going to school the best thing in the world.” “You know, that’s amazing,” Mark says, “Because for me there is also someone who makes every day at this hell hole special. She seems not to know that I have feelings for her, which is strange because I think the average person would be a hell of a lot creeped out if they caught the same person staring at them every day,” Mark smiles to himself, “but I love it. Any day I get to see her beautiful eyes is a great one.”

“You sound like you really fell for her,” you say, jealousy and sadness making its way into your heart, “I just don’t know if she feels the same about me,” Mark says, seemingly peering into your soul. “You know, I’m exhausted!” you say, letting go of all patience you once had. “I-I just wish he knew.” you feel Mark watching you, and you begin to get emotional. “All of this time I’ve spent in the shadows, admiring him from a distance and learning about him, it all seems useless now! And… And I just feel powerless!” Mark looks heartbroken, “Why doesn’t he like me back?” you ask yourself, tears streaming down your face. You still feel Mark looking at you, “Y/N,” he says softly, “It’s you.” “What?” you say, wiping your tears, “I like... you. More than like,” Mark looks as if he’s trying to find his words,

“Ever since I first saw you, I’ve wished you were mine,” You begin to tear up again. “No one here seems to understand how beautiful of a person you are, inside and out,” Mark looks at you again, “I do,” he says sadly. “Mark,” you stand up, “Why do you look so upset?” Mark looks confused, “You’re the one I’ve had feelings for this whole time!” “Really?” he asks, a smile creeping onto his face as he stands up. “All of those you said,” Mark says, “You were talking about me?” “Yes! Yes, Mark!” you smile. You walk closer to Mark and wipe his tears with both of your hands, then cup his face with them. Looking into Mark’s eyes you say, “You’re the one I want.”

You feel Mark’s arms slip around your waist and he pulls you even closer, “I feel like I already know you.” he says. “You do,” you say.

“Can I kiss you?” Mark asks, “I was thinking the same thing,” you say. The kiss is everything you imagined it would be. You almost forget that you’re in the school garden and anyone can see you. Your and Mark’s lips part. “You’re beautiful, Y/N,” Mark says. You blush yet again, “If you keep this up I’m going to spontaneously combust,” you say, “Why so?” Mark asks, playing along, “Because I’m not used to being treated like this,” you say, “Well, I’ll take care of you,” Mark says. “I’ll make sure the whole world knows! With me around you’ll never feel unimportant.” You’re smiling so hard your cheeks hurt. Mark backs away slightly and slides his hands down your arms to hold your hands in his, “Y/N, will you be my girlfriend, so that all of our stares will be with context?” Mark asks, “A billion times yes!” you say beaming.

You launch yourself back into Mark’s arms and wrap yours around his neck to give him a long-awaited embrace. You feel your feet part with the ground and realize Mark has begun to spin you around. Happy giggles escape your lips and Mark’s because of that. He puts you down but doesn’t cease to embrace you, “I’ll never be able to keep my eyes off of you,” you say, “That makes two of us,” Mark says. He kisses your nose and lets go of you to grab his things. “Off to class?” Mark says as he holds his hand out for you, “Off to class,” you say with a smile, interlacing your fingers with his.

Anything you can imagine will never compare to what it is actually like being with Mark Tuan.

It’s your kiss, hey princess.

[idairsauthor]

This Fcking Emergency: Stupid Racist Magic

PLAIDDER: Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of This Fucking Emergency, an intermittent imaginary cable talk show where I sit down with some of the many imaginary characters I have created or befriended over the years and discuss vital issues of the day. Please welcome back to the program everyone’s favorite imaginary diplomat, legislator, and former sheep dealer, Conn mac Emer...

CONN: Why are there so many chairs on set today?

PLAIDDER: Because there were two mass shootings within 24 hours last weekend. 

CONN: I don’t see the...

PLAIDDER: OK. I wrote Redemption for a lot of reasons. One of them was that I was trying to understand and maybe imagine a solution for school shootings. This was in 2005, I would just like to remind our viewers. Aught fucking five. Fourteen years ago I finished this novel and I was already, at that point, permanently appalled by this country’s tolerance for mass shootings in schools. 

CONN: So what happened to Daphie at Decalon High--

PLAIDDER: Yes. That happens in my country. OFTENER and OFTENER. Now you didn’t have a lot to do with that storyline because you were caught up in the other horror of life in the aughts, viz., the War On Terror. But anyway, my point is: because I wrote that novel, when something like this happens...I mean I don’t even call them. Your fellow-characters just...show up.

DAPHIE: Hello?

PLAIDDER: Hi, Daphie. If you want to know what you’re doing here--

DAPHIE: Because of the baby and the mother and the father.

PLAIDDER: Exactly. Only in this case, only the baby survived. Because in my world, evidently, we only have one kind of magic.

CONN: I thought your world didn’t have shri.

PLAIDDER: We definitely don’t. 

CONN: Then what kind of magic do you--

PLAIDDER: Chandra knows.

CHANDRA: Hi.

CONN: Where the hell did you come from all of a--

PLAIDDER: Chandra, can you just say it? That line of yours that’s been in my head since El Paso.

CHANDRA: Found a church on stupid racist doctrine, you get stupid racist magic.

PLAIDDER: Yes. And you know how you get even MORE stupid racist magic? You choose, as the person to lead your nation, a stupid racist mage.

CONN: Nothing about your president seems magical to me.

PLAIDDER: Yes, well, that’s the Ideiren point of view. But what Chandra’s talking about is National. It is in fact the only kind of magic in your universe that originated in the Nation.

CHANDRA: I always thought it was all bullshit. I mean...my family definitely tried to annihilate me with it, and here I still am--

PLAIDDER: All right, let me explain what I mean by ‘magic’ in this context. 

AINE: This should be interesting.

CONN: Shriia! I didn’t know you’d be here.

AINE: Neither did I.

PLAIDDER: Like I said. I don’t even call them; they just come. Anyway. I had an old friend over for dinner the other day who was talking about what we call “the magic of the theater.” Now, when I say that I’m usually being ironic, but he seems to really believe in it and to be honest I’m not totally sure that I don’t. A lot of contemporary performance theory is based at some distance on the idea of theater as a ritual which at some point in the distant past was efficacious.

SONNIA: Effiwhatnow?

PLAIDDER: And welcome to you too, Sonnia. 

AINE: “Efficacious” means that it actually makes something happen. So, take haons linn.

SONNIA: You mean that weird thing you do at five in the morning.

AINE: To you it’s a weird thing I do at five in the morning. To me and to the rest of my people it’s how we help create the world. To you it’s a ritual the same way, I don’t know, brushing your teeth is a ritual. To us, it’s efficacious. It keeps the world together. I can skip it under extraordinary circumstances once in a while and things will be all right, but that’s only because other shriias will be doing haons linn somewhere else. If we all stopped doing haons linn...the sun wouldn’t rise. The whole world would just stay dark, forever.

SONNIA: Really?

AINE: Yes, really.

SONNIA: So what explains the fact the sun rises in the Nation?

AINE: It rises in the Nation because we’re all on the same island.

SONNIA: What about Dubhinis? There’s no shriias in Dubhinis.

TYRNA: Don’t you wish.

PLAIDDER: Hello, Tyrna, thanks for joining us.

AINE: Don’t be hard on her, Tyrna, she was raised to believe--

TYRNA: I know what she was raised to believe in.

SONNIA: So you do haons linn.

TYRNA: I don’t. That’s an Ideiren thing. But we do other things to keep our world together. Despite what you hear from Chandra’s people--

CHANDRA: They’re not my people any more--

TYRNA: --the Nation is not the center of the universe. The Nation only continues to exist because the rest of us are building the world around it. 

SONNIA: That’s nuts. The world is real, whether--

TYRNA: Nobody’s saying it’s not.

PLAIDDER: Well, I kind of am. I mean, your world isn’t actually real. It’s created. It’s created by me, you know, with the support of the people who read it. And that means Tyrna’s absolutely right. I wouldn’t have created this world just to write about the Nation. On the other hand, I couldn’t, or at least I didn’t, create Ideire or Dubhinis or Plenana or any of the other islands without also creating the Nation.

TYRNA: Why the hell not? 

AINE: Tyrna!

PLAIDDER: No, she’s right to ask. Of all the places in your universe, the Nation is the one most like the place where I come from.

CHANDRA: That’s...really depressing.

PLAIDDER: You’re telling me. 

CONN: Weren’t we talking about the magic of the theater?

PLAIDDER: Yes. Yes we were. Anyway, so my friend’s idea of the magic of the theater is this: You have a vision of something you want to make happen. The thing does not come into existence at that moment. You have to work to make it happen. You find other people and you share the vision with them, and you find a place, and you find a lot of other stuff, and eventually the thing that you imagined becomes real--so real that other people can see it. This is an ordinary process that goes on all over the place all the time. But when you think about it, this is actually kind of what magic is. You imagine something, and that makes it real.

SONNIA: I’m not getting any of this.

AINE: I think we’d better move on. I spent months trying to move Sonnia past this stage and it never happened.

PLAIDDER: And then what I said was--and this was before all of THIS happened--there’s a passage in one of the Little House books where Pa explains the railroad the same way. The engineers imagine a railroad, and then everybody goes out west and works 24/7 and digs dirt and pounds steel and eats pancackes and gets paid because of something that’s just an idea, that doesn’t exist at all. It’s a really interesting passage--it’s in By the Shores of Silver Lake, I think. 

CHANDRA: Of course the real magic there is--

PLAIDDER: Imperialism and capitalism, yes. But that’s my point. This having a vision and making it real thing is a lot of fun and I think, mostly, good for people in the theater, as long as the Vision-Haver is, you know, a clueful and compassionate person who cares about the human consequences of their magic. But there’s nothing inherently good about this process of making a vision real. It can be bad. It can be really bad. It can be REALLY. FUCKING. BAD.

DAPHIE: Like...

PLAIDDER: Yes. Exactly.

SONNIA: I don’t know what she’s--

PLAIDDER: Daphie’s whole novel is about me trying to understand one particular kind of very bad magic. I was trying to understand how a thing like the shooting at Decalon High is imagined and then how it is made real. Over and over, oftener and oftener. It seemed to me as if every evil vision, every malicious imagination in my world had collaborated to create this thing. I wrote...I don’t even know how many hundred thousand words went into that novel. Let’s just say the problem and the solution in Redemption are about three times as complicated as they are in any of the earlier novels. And when I look back on it, I can only see one thing about that explanation that I think is really true, that I think is still true now.

CONN: Which is what?

CHANDRA: Stupid racist magic.

PLAIDDER: Bingo.

CHANDRA: “Bingo”?!

PLAIDDER: It’s...oh, never mind. Look, about fifty years ago Jerome Bixby was trying to understand the magic of war and he wrote a script for a show called Star Trek called “Day of the Dove.” And in that episode, there are these energy beings that feed off aggression. So they try to bait all the people on this one ship into fighting each other, so they can feed. The individual Starfleet or Klingon people think they want war but there’s actually some force out there making them want it, making them do things, imagining a war and then making it happen. And it’s remarkable how durable this idea is. I mean you could link it back to Tolstoy and War And Peace, where he tries to understand a thing like the war of 1812 and takes all those thousands of pages to prove that none of the historical explanations for it matter worth a damn. The war happened because Providence wanted to move people from west to east and this was the way Providence found of making that real. Or in season 2 of Stranger Things, they start calling the monster the Mind-Flayer and everything gets tentacly and it is weird, it is REALLY weird for me, how much that damn thing looks like an arani--like the biggest fucking arani ever--

AINE: I hate arani.

PLAIDDER: Yes! I hate them too! They are the nastiest fucking things in the ether apart from the kraikk, and as with the Mind-Flayer and those pumpkin patch death vines and all of these things are metaphors for whatever it is out there that keeps making humans hurt and kill each other when clearly, clearly, that is not what most individual human beings want or what most of them would do if they were free.

TYRNA: Says you.

PLAIDDER: All right. Says me. 

TYRNA: You want to know what I think?

PLAIDDER: Sure.

TYRNA: Put whatever metaphors you want on it. Under the costume it’s always greed. Just people grabbing what they can get and then trying to kill anyone who looks like they might take it from them. Throwing the whole world out of balance. I keep trying to right the balance and it’s like water in a sieve. A hundred women like me couldn’t do it. A thousand couldn’t do it.

CHANDRA: All right, greed, definitely, but like...I mean...the cruelty. The cruelty isn’t just about greed. Sometimes the cruelty actually interferes with the greed. People have a choice between them and they choose cruelty. 

TYRNA: I never said your magic was efficient. It’s been pretty efficacious, all the same.

CHANDRA: But why the cruelty? I mean that’s the question that’s kept a dozen of my therapists up at night. Cruelty beyond monetary gain, cruelty beyond utility. Cruelty as...as, like, a god unto itself.

TYRNA: Cruelty and greed are both lusts and they’re limbs of the same tree grown from the same rotten root.

PLAIDDER: So anyway...what I said was, if theater is magic, then, fascism is magic too. Someone has a vision. He calls out to other people. Other people share that vision. Then they make it real. And it’s hideous. That’s what--I mean, Rhinoceros.

CONN: I beg your pardon?

PLAIDDER: This old French play where everyone turns into rhinoceroses. No reason, they just do it. Because something’s making it happen. It’s not called magic, it’s called absurdism. But it’s the same thing: why the fuck is this hideous transformation taking place? Why can’t anyone stop it? I mean I think the arani and all those metaphors Tyrna is quite rightly impatient with--it’s our way of representing the just--fucking--irrationality of it all. It starts to seem at some point as if nobody really WANTS this, it’s just happening because the thing that’s making it happen is too powerful to stop. Like, an arani doesn’t have an agenda. It just grows. That’s all it does. It has no brain and no intelligence, it’s just an empty bag of guts with filaments hooked into a hundred different heads. It can be manipulated by an intelligent and powerful human...to a point. And after that it just...feeds. This image that we have of this monstrous indefinable thing that makes us do horrible things to each other--I mean--we made it real. We MADE IT REAL. We keep making it. First it’s newspapers then it’s phones then it’s radio then it’s television now it’s the internet. And THAT MAN goes out there and fills up this arani with his--he goes out there and does his--

CHANDRA: Stupid racist magic.

PLAIDDER: People in my country mostly don’t believe that curses are efficacious. But they are. If you’re powerful enough, you can curse people. If you’re the president of the united states, you can call down evil on someone, and the evil will materialize. He says the words--and they’re stupid, stupid words--but they still have power. They suggest images to people who hear them. And then people go and make them real. And then he can say it had nothing to do with him. Because there is no material, no evidentiary, no objective chain of causation. But everyone knows he’s doing it. Everyone knows. Regardless of what they admit. They know that his stupid racist magic is killing people. In El Paso. In Dayton. In Gilroy. He’s imagined a world in which white men are omnipotent and he’s making it real.

AINE: Trying to make it real.

PLAIDDER: Aine, it *is* real, don’t you understand, it’s real in a way that much as I love you you can never be.

CONN: If that gleachinai is doing magic then he’s not the only one. There are other visions in your country. There are better visions. People share them and work at them and some of them come true some of the time. You know that. I don’t understand why you say that this is the only kind of magic your world has. It isn’t.

PLAIDDER: But stupid racist magic just keeps killing people and I don’t understand why it just keeps getting stronger and more powerful and--

TYRNA: BECAUSE IT HAS GUNS.

PLAIDDER: OK, I get that, but--

TYRNA: Do you though? I don’t think you do. There’s nothing magical about any of this. Yeah, words have power, even when idiots use them. Because the idiots HAVE THE GUNS. All of this nonsense keeps happening in your country because nobody has taken the guns away from the idiots.

PLAIDDER: It’s very hard to take a gun away from an idiot.

TYRNA: Honey, what about me or my backstory would ever make you think that I do NOT know that?

PLAIDDER: Nothing.

TYRNA: Damn right. Yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard watching idiots ruin the world. It’s a crime and a shame. It’s unfair. But none of that is a new thing for me, all right? I’ve been fighting stupid racist magic all my life and I will tell you this. You want the balance restored, you have to take some guns away from some idiots. Now when is that going to happen, in your world?

PLAIDDER: Well, Tyrna, it could be said that your whole universe is the result of the fact that it is easier for me to imagine demons and monsters and devils and people shooting fire out of their hands than it is to imagine the government of my actual  country actually taking guns away from idiots.

TYRNA: Wow.

PLAIDDER: Yeah.

DAPHIE: It isn’t always idiots.

PLAIDDER: Daphie...

DAPHIE: Jarad wasn’t an idiot.

PLAIDDER: I know. But some idiot made it easy for Jarad to get a RAF. I mean I never even explained how that happened, because in my own world that’s not an extrarordinary event. Like, of course he could find a RAF when he wanted one, that’s how things just are. I was...when I wrote your book, I was...not interested in that part of it. I was chasing all these other explanations, because that was what we all did, back in the aughts.

CHANDRA: So...I mean...what. You...regret the whole...our whole story?

PLAIDDER: No, no no. I just feel like...well, it took me a long time to accept the fact that actual problems are sometimes less interesting than fictional ones. Like, the fact that a problem is hard to solve doesn’t mean that its solution is fiendishly complicated. Sometimes the solution is really fucking simple. Too simple to entertain people. Too simple for narrative.

CONN: Is this, like, a two-hour special or something? It’s already gone on way longer than normal.

PLAIDDER: I know. I can never resolve these things, I just have to...end them. So I am. Thanks for coming, everyone. I hope it’s a long time before I see you again.

[wigwurq]

WIG REVIEW: FOSSE/VERDON

Are you ready for another prestige limited series from FX? Do you like the legitimate THE-A-TRE? Can you do jazz hands upon request? Well then Fosse/Verdon might be for you. MAYBE.

But what about the wigs? Let’s discuss. As this an eight episode series, I will be updating this post weekly and adjusting whether or not the wigs do or do not wurq. Spoilers, obvs.

So this show is about legendary director/choreographer Bob Fosse and his wife/Broadway legend, Gwen Verdon. If you have never heard of either, I suggest that you stop reading because this show is definitely not for you. Sorry? Produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda and directed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail, this show is made ONLY for theater megageeks and basically no one else. As a former drama club president who definitely got Joel Grey’s autograph after seeing the original Broadway revival cast of Chicago, I thought I fit that bill but after watching this thing, I don’t even know that I qualify. My husband, who spent most of the episode asking questions until finally just deeming the whole thing “boring” was absolutely not the key demographic and yes he went into this knowing who these two people are and has seen several musicals. Similar limited series focusing on very specific pop culture such as Feud: Bette and Joan did a much better job catering to the uninitiated. 

EPISODE ONE: LIFE IS A CABARET

We begin at the end, then go straight to the middle, which is: a choice. We first see Sam Rockwell in old man makeup (sorry - I could find no images of this to share) and then backtrack. Much of this episode is focused on Fosse’s transition from choreographer to film director. This is when Fosse had already lost much of his hair and had a bad combover and Rockwell is given this wig that is giving me Ed Harris circa 1998 feels and like all bad man wigs, looks terrible from the back.

We are then plunged straight into production for the film version of Sweet Charity without any explanation of anything other than the fact that (duh) he’s directing the iconic Big Spender number. But wait - there’s a twist! Turns out Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon did a lot of the directing! DUN DUN DUN. I am all for giving ladies their propers and approaching narratives as if they are Glenn Close’s The Wife character but this does not change the fact that this red Marilyn Monroe wig is not very good. 

This is all very Theatre-y with a capital T and an ending in RE NOT ER. Everything has a Theatre quality to it - but not in that Tony winning Hamilton way, more in that Emmy winning Grease: Live! way (Kail directed both) which is to say that there is no immediacy or intimacy to anything - all the characters feel like they are far away, performing on a stage - and it leaves the viewer feeling empty and, well, bored. TV and stage are just not the same! Oh, and Fosse just found out that movies and stage are not the same because Sweet Charity was a big flop! Look at how sad they are in their gorgeous apartment and terrible, bent wigs with backs that jut out from their necks! THE HORROR!

So then Paul Reiser shows up. He is fine and I’m glad he’s getting work and he’s thankfully not wearing a wig! When a new character shows up in this show, you spend the first five minutes or so trying to figure out who they are supposed to be playing, like an IMDb charades game since no one explains who they are and simply give vague context clues. At first, I thought he was Neil Simon, then he mentioned making a movie with homosexuals and Nazis so I was like: DEFINITELY MEL BROOKS but it turns out it he is Cabaret producer Cy Feuer. You, know - CY FEUER? You don’t?? WELL WE’RE NOT GOING TO EXPLAIN IT TO YOU WE ARE FOSSE/VERDON.

Aaaaanyway, Fosse gets the job of directing Cabaret and goes to Munich and meets Liza Minnelli who in this tv reality looks like this which is not how Liza Minnelli ever looked. AND THIS WIG. AT LEAST GIVE LIZA A GOOD WIG NOT ONE YOU FOUND AT RICKY’S. NEXT.

Then Paul Reiser gives Sam Rockwell a lot of guff about taking too long to direct things and not deciding about costumes and hiring ugly German prostitutes to be extras yet somehow allows him to wear these really ugly shoes. Throughout, Rockwell’s wig is a mess of a tumbleweave, not unlike this show. And then Michelle Williams shows up to save his ass like all capable ladies ever and even goes to buy a gorilla suit in NYC only to arrive back in Munich where Rockwell is boning some German translator who looks way too much like Ann Reinking. There’s also a lot of nonlinear theatrical vignettes into Fosse’s past that play like, well, All That Jazz. Which this is not. 

In the end, we go back to old man Fosse, and it is told to us that he has only EIGHT MORE MINUTES TO LIVE. Kudos to the production team for somehow trying to turn  Bob Fosse’s 1987 death into a thriller. Spoiler: it’s not.

EPISODE TWO: WHO’S GOT THE PAIN?

We (obvs?) begin in Majorca, where 70s-era Fosse and Verdon have gone to patch up their marriage. Also can you think of a more bougie place to go in the 70s to patch up your fancy marriage? There are a lot of scenes on the beach where Sam Rockwell’s 90s Ed Harris wig gets blown around and Michelle Williams cries into a cardigan. And because misery loves company, apparently their best friends, the Neil Simons, are along for the ride. Joan Simon is Gwenny’s best gal pal and her wig is something one might find in a pile of Halloween wigs to play Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.

We then travel back to 1955, or “267 since Gwen Verdon’s first Tony Award.” Yes, this show is still doing this insufferable titling which really is a lot of fun facts that add up to nothing. Regardless, we’re at the point where Verdon and Fosse meet as he “auditions” her for Damn Yankees which he is to choreograph. I have to say that this scene, with both actors dancing and wearing much better wigs than their characters wear in the 70s (still terrible though!) was pretty fun! They can dance! 

They also obvs fall very much in love, though weirdly the scene of them actually having sex for the first time is buried in a montage. You have very odd priorities, Fosse/Verdon! Complicating matters is Gwen’s perpetually bent wig, Fosse’s kind of ok in comparison wig, and oh and the fact that he’s married!

This show not only wants but DEMANDS that you wikipedia everything that is happening, mainly from its distinct lack of good storytelling. Anyway, Fosse’s 2nd wife was Joan McCracken and OMG CAN WE PLEASE HAVE A PRESTIGE TV SHOW ABOUT HER? Wiki tells me that her first husband ended up being Truman Capote’s lover and that Capote based the character of Holly Golightly on her and seriously why are we wasting our time on this Fosse/Verdon mess when we could be learning more about her?!?! Anyway, what the show does tell us is that she has a mysterious illness that makes her sometimes not be able to walk (Wiki explained that she had some heart attacks around this time). Also, she is no fool and fully realizes that Fosse is gonna leave her fabulous ass for Gwenny - just the way he left his first wife for her! Also please look at Sam’s terrible lace front here. Also Joan’s wig is very much Joan Allen in Pleasantville which is to say: the best wig on this show. 

Anyway, the rest of the episode is devoted to working out some musical kinks in Damn Yankees and watching Michelle Williams dance around in a bad wig. Oh, and then finally leave Fosse in Majorca when she realizes he’s about to leave HER fabulous ass for some German translator (I’m sensing a theme here). And the show ends trying to make Joan McCracken’s death into a thriller! Spoiler: Wikipedia tells me she died in 1961! Wikipedia is a much better show than this, also. 

EPISODE THREE: ME AND MY BABY

We begin in some random editing suite where Fosse has gone to begin editing Cabaret and because this show cannot and will not stop trying to be All that Jazz (which I rewatched this weekend and LORDT IS THIS SHOW TRYING TO BE THAT MOVIE - AND ALSO BOTH ARE GARBAGE!) there is an elaborate dance number with random editing assistant (?) ladies. The one good part of this is: Sam Rockwell dancing. Otherwise: garbage fire.

Speaking of garbage fires, the (4 hour!) rough edit of Cabaret that the editors put together for Fosse while he was in Majorca (which he was really pissed about because HOW DARE THEY DO THEIR JOBS) is a friggin mess. Speaking of messes, THE BACK OF THIS WIG. Is Fosse a monk? What is happening here? However, I do appreciate the casting of the dude who played SpongeBob on Broadway as Joel Grey. 

Back at Casa Verdon, where Fosse DOES NOT LIVE ANYMORE, Gwenny is making dinner and trying to get her own career back together when Fosse shows up unannounced with Chinese food and pleas for Gwenny to help him edit the mess that is Cabaret. RUDE! Gwenny and her bent wig have their own dinner dates with her agent, Peter Scolari at the Russian Tea Room to get to THANK YOU VERY MUCH. 

Thus, Gwenny leaves their daughter with Fosse and his epic combover at the editing suite to go to her dinner date and HE CAN’T EVEN HANDLE being with his tween daughter for a few hours (since he definitely has to make time to bone his editing assistant) and ropes Norbert Leo Butz in a very shaggy wig to come hang out with his kid in a hotel room. Gwenny is NOT HAVING IT. 

Even though Butz basically just ate a bunch of sloppy food and made the daughter watch a b horror movie, Gwenny points out that leaving a tweenage daughter with a random dude in a hotel room is INAPPROPRIATE EVEN IF THAT DUDE WROTE MARTY WHICH IS A PERFECT MOVIE. 

This makes her reflect on her own (somehow very Magdalene-Sisters-like) tweenage years (as played by a younger actress whose image could NOT be found on the internet, gurl) when she was raped and impregnated and then slut-shamed by her parents into marrying a much older alcoholic. YIKES. 

So back in the 70s,  despite the fact that she’s in some rando straight play called Children! Children! (yes really) which is being directed by a condescending asshole and taking care of her kid, she somehow finds time to go help her estranged idiot husband edit the movie that she basically co-directed. SERIOUSLY WOMEN HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING. Also all these wigs look like crap. Just when you think Fosse is maybe being redeemable, he decides to bring up the Gwenny’s illegitimate son AT THE VERY WORST MOMENT DUDE YOU ARE THE WORST.

Back with Young Gwenny, we see her giving her infant son to her parents to raise so she can go be a dancer. We then cut to her triumphant turn in Can-Can (some years later but Fosse/Verdon definitely doesn’t specify how many). Gwenny’s show might be a triumph, but her wig is still a mess. Oh, and she’s still haunted by the cries of the baby she gave up BECAUSE WOMEN CAN NEVER FULLY HAVE NICE THINGS.

EPISODE FOUR: GLORY

We begin at Cabaret. Isn’t life one, you guys? Fosse is all poised for this to be the flop that (apparently?) Sweet Charity was but nope: it’s a big huge critical and commercial hit! Do whatever you want, now, Fosse! Oh wait, you already do everything you want anyway? Cool! Fosse and his circa 1997 Ed Harris wig are now unstoppably arrogant! Get ready! So Fosse’s next project is the medieval/psychedelic nonsense musical, Pippin which will definitely give you contact highs. 

JUST LOOK AT HOW HIGH THIS MUSICAL IS. I think when people from the Mid Waste think of Broadway musicals, this is what most of them still think that looks like. Also this is how I fear I’ll die. 

Speaking of! Gwenny’s best galpal, Joan Simon (wife to Neil) is dying of cancer! It’s very sad because she’s really nice and despite her bad Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction wig I appreciate her dedication to half updos with bows that match her outfits. 

Gwenny does not even have time to be sad about this because she needs to take her bent wig over to Pippin rehearsals to pick up her daughter only to find that Fosse has given her FOUR TABS TO DRINK THAT IS LIKE 3 1/2 TOO MANY. She handles it by smiling through her hatred and truly this was a very Miranda Priestly moment and also I like Gwen’s top. ALSO LOOK AT THE BACK OF FOSSE’S WIG NO THANK YOU PLEASE.

Over at Pippin rehearsals, we also meet Ann Reinking (who will become Fosse’s lady love for the next decade or so) but for now she’s keeping things professional and also this is Andie MacDowell’s (wigless, thank god) daughter. Ok!

Fosse is definitely NOT keeping things professional and basically boning the rest of the Pippin ensemble cast, whether they like it or not! There is a very #MeToo moment where Fosse ends up getting a knee to the groin and GOOD.

Not so good? Gwenny’s play Children! Children! (that title - I still can’t). Despite asking Fosse to come over and FIX. IT. he is too busy becoming the poster dude for Time’s Up and Gwenny’s show ends up getting bad reviews and closing immediately. Also her wig is fully turning into a Jean Stapleton in All in the Family lewk. Whilst Gwenny’s professional life is going to crap, Fosse is winning ALL THE AWARDS as shown in a really confusing montage which suggested that the Tony Awards are before the Oscars. INCORRECT.

In the end, Fosse drunkenly tries to go bone Gwenny but she has wisely shacked up with that dude from Obvious Child which literally leads Fosse into a MENTAL INSTITUTION and the entire show to basically just turn into All that Jazz which I will remind everyone is a very derivative and terrible movie! OY.

EPISODE 5: WHERE AM I GOING?

The title of this episode should really be an question for the viewer: where are you going? Where are we all going? Are we still really watching this show? Sadly: yes. UGH I think we’re more than halfway through now? Let’s just finish this thing!

We begin at the mental hospital where Fosse ended the last episode. Gwenny and their kid are visiting him and Fosse is basically catatonic. This does not stop Gwenny from moving FULL STEAM AHEAD ON CHICAGO! Then cut to: Southampton? Huh? Sure! There, Fosse and his best bros, Neil Simon and Paddy Chayefsky are having a beach weekend which leads to the above upsetting 70s mens shorts (which thankfully Norbert Leo Butz did NOT sign on for). I love dudes who refuse to wear shorts in the summer, no matter how hot it is. My husband is one of these dudes. 

The one problem with this beach weekend? Everybody together in their best impression of Renee Zellweger in Cold Mountain: IT’S RAINING! So everyone is stuck inside. And also it’s kind of a Big Chill sort of scenario except the role of Kevin Costner as the dead friend is now: Joan Simon. And also Fosse just got out of a mental institution 3 months ago. And he’s there with his girlfriend and Gwenny is there with her boyfriend. AND ALL THE WIGS ARE TERRIBLE. 

So Fosse’s girlfriend: Ann Reinking! When last we saw her, she was ignoring Fosse at Pippin rehearsals but it’s explained that after his (1 week!) stay in the looney bin, he gave her a ring and now they’re in LURRRVE. Ok? Andie MacDowell’s daughter plays Annie and she doesn’t wear a wig and she’s fine. Fosse’s circa 1997 Ed Harris wig is still very upsetting. As is his tan!

Also upsetting? Gwenny rolls up with this RAT TAIL (it’s hard to see in this pic but it’s the best I could do!) We’re supposed to believe that in the last 3 months she suddenly grew this monstrosity out?!?! MORE ON THE BONE CHILLING TRUTH ABOUT THIS RAT TAIL LATER.

Gwenny also has a really nice boyfriend named Ron. He is played by that guy who played a nice guy in The Office, Obvious Child, and Girls. He doesn’t wear a wig and he is very nice! Fosse’s combover is not! 

Oh also along for the ride is Fosse/Verdon’s daughter Nicole who is definitely too young to be dealing with all these effed up grownups and also is bored and ends up giving herself a cigarette/pickle-induced stomach virus. GET IT TOGETHER, PARENTS.

Most of the episode is about whether Fosse should direct Dustin Hoffman in Lenny or proceed with Gwenny’s vanity project, Chicago, despite the fact that his doctors told him to take a year off work from either! Spoiler to anyone who has never seen All that Jazz or who does not know enough about Fosse to even bother watching this: HE DOES BOTH! WHO IS THIS SHOW EVEN FOR?!?! Also Norbert Leo Butz’s man wig is not as bad as the rest. Great work on not wearing shorts again also! Also Fosse/Verdon bone again in secret even though they are married but have lovers. The 70s! 

 And now to the critical and bone-chilling facts about Gwenny’s rat tail! After a night of drinking and making terrible professional and personal choices, Gwenny sits down to a breakfast of coffee and one single piece of fruit and then....UNCLIPS HER RAT TAIL AND POUFS IT UP! So first off, that clears up the whole “how did her hair grow so long so fast” question. HOWEVER. This now leads to another case of WIG GASLIGHTING. This is when a wig (which is being passed off as real hair) is of equal or lesser quality to a wig that is a known wig within the context of the narrative. In other words - the quality of this rat tail (which we now know to be a wig) is of the same exact quality as the wig Michelle Williams wears to play Gwenny. WIG GASLIGHTING! For other bone-chilling examples of past wig gaslightings please see my reviews of The Danish Girl and Oceans Eight. WIG GASLIGHTING IS TERRIFYING.

EPISODE 6: ALL I CARE ABOUT IS LOVE

And here we are. Throughout this (limited) season, we’ve gotten hints and asides, teases and tosses of All That Jazz but this episode fully just is a remake of the movie All That Jazz. Which I recently rewatched and is terrible. Terrible still? Anyone who would be watching this show would clearly be familiar with this awful film - so why make an episode that is that entire movie with absolutely no new information?!?! Again: WHO IN THE HELL IS THIS SHOW FOR?!?!

Anyway, if you haven’t seen All That Jazz, this episode is about Fosse editing Lenny while also directing/choreographing Chicago AND having some heart issues that end in hospitalization. Gwenny’s wig is bent as ever and Fosse’s circa 1997 Ed Harris lewk is still the same. Truly, there is no new information in this episode at all except that some of it is presented with Fosse AS Lenny Bruce which was an AWFUL IDEA. 

OH! Except this lady playing Chita Rivera who is really good and has the brunette version of Gwenny’s bent wig. 

ALSO! Nicole Fosse is now played by this slightly older actor who looks nothing like her younger version (or the actual Nicole Fosse) and is in a definitely terrible wig (and also forced to wear heavy makeup to visit her dad in the hospital because kids aren’t allowed to visit hospitals? IS THIS REALLY A RULE?)

Anyway, there’s a lot of All That Jazz hospital drama here and a lot of terrible flashblacks to Fosse’s burlesque tween years which attempt to explain his messed up relationship with women in an extremely Don Draper in Mad Men flashback way. There is also messed up hospital sex with Ann Reinking! THIS EPISODE IS AWFUL IN EVERY WAY!

EPISODE 7: NOWADAYS

Fosse recovered! For now! Back at Chicago rehearsals, everyone is wearing extra socks and doing just great. The most important addition to this show this week is that they got some dude to play Jerry Orbach! His man wig was terrible!

He also very did not look like Jerry Orbach! Anyway, this episode was mainly about Gwenny being TOO OLD for all this choreography, y’all. She was huffing and puffing all over fake Jerry Orbach so Fosse had to cut a lot of her dancing but once the show opened guess what? Gwenny got better reviews than the show itself! Take that, dance steps! However, there was a whole part where Gwenny read Fosse for filth and said that he owed his entire career to her and how dare he make the finale a duet between her and Chita! (He made the finale a duet). There were also many flashbacks about Fosse and Gwenny’s fertility issues and I almost believed that Nicole was adopted until Gwenny got legit pregnant while Fosse was too busy dancing to construct cribs. You almost taught me something, Fosse/Verdon!

OMG I CAN’T STOP LOOKING AT THESE PICTURES OF FAKE JERRY ORBACH. Anyway, Fosse/Verdon then legit DID teach me something: apparently a few weeks into the run of Chicago, Gwenny inhaled some confetti during the finale and it effed with her vocal chords but she refused to leave the show, thinking it might close if she did. BUT THEN Fosse got LIZA EFFING MINNELLI to take her place while she got surgery and recovered! This was news to me! HOWEVER, Fosse/Verdon refused to show me any footage of even fake Liza in the show which was a real missed opportunity. 

Anyway, Liza revived the show and Gwenny was kind of pissed about it but on every level: THE SHOW MUST GO ON. Here is Gwenny during the finale which she was forced to share with Chita. And this show didn’t even show us the full finale! I DEMAND TO SEE MICHELLE WILLIAMS DOING THE HOT HONEY RAG WHY DID YOU EVEN MAKE THIS SHOW IF I CAN’T SEE IT. There is literally no reason for this show to exist if it can’t show me Michelle Williams doing a cartwheel in a top hat.  What a world. What a wig. 

IN CONCLUSION: LOOK AGAIN AT THE TERRIBLE MAN WIG ON FAKE JERRY ORBACH. 

EPISODE 8: PROVIDENCE

We begin (or should I say end?) with some grumpy old men talking about what they can and cannot eat (spoiler: they can’t eat anything good!) Both Fosse and BFF Paddy Chayefsky have heart conditions and creative conditions. And I have a condition with this wig on Norbert Leo Butz. NO THANK YOU PLEASE. Anyway, Paddy tells Fosse how to rewrite All That Jazz aka how to rewrite his life and Fosse DOESN’T WANNA HEAR IT. And then Paddy dies and Fosse quite literally dances on his grave but in a really sad and mournful way. Yes, really. 

Meanwhile, Fosse interviews Gwenny in preparation for All That Jazz which honestly is just way to meta at this point, and she kinda tells it like it is. And I kinda know I’m not gonna miss this bent wig! 

Meanwhile, Ann Reinking is forced to audition to play herself in All That Jazz while under the painfully awkward and terrible direction of Fosse in this circa 1996 Ed Harris wig and LORDT I WILL NOT MISS LOOKING AT THE BAD OF THIS THING!

Then over at All that Jazz rehearsals, Gwenny and Nicole are met with bizzarro visions of themselves much like these bizarro visions of themselves in this show and omg everything just got way too meta and NIcole’s wig gives me hives. 

AND THEN. AND FRIGGIN THEN. LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA HAD THE AUDACITY TO PLAY ROY SHEIDER PLAYING BOB FOSSE IN ALL THAT JAZZ. JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT THIS SHOW COULDN’T GET ANY MORE VAINGLORIOUS. MY HEAD AND MY TV JUST EXPLODED. 

Honestly, this is the only way for this terrible show to end - in a blaze of glory and nonsense. Well actually, it ended with Gwenny and Fosse reteaming in old age makeup to direct the revival of Sweet Charity but the internet refused to give me any pictures of that and fine. And then Fosse died on a sidewalk in the arms of Gwenny. And then for some reason the whole show ended with a shot of Nicole Fosse’s Vermont house. 

WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP IT’S BEEN YOU GUYS. But now we can finally be rid of these terrible terrible wigs and this terrible terrible show. 

VERDICT: DOESN’T WURQ

[cosmosogler]

i keep putting off talking about my Many Feelings About Dead Pets and i know it’s not helpful but thinking about it makes me so sad.

i miss snoopy so much. i miss genevieve and i know i’m never going to see her again and i couldn’t be there to make sure things went as smoothly as they could when she was dying. i know she was laying there suffering and she was probably hanging in there so hard because she thought i might come back. because we belonged together. 

that’s something i can never give her, now. that’s something she never got to have. this is just how her life went and it will be how her life and death went, forever. 

i can’t describe how angry i am at my dad. he’s a coward. i can’t stand it. i can’t stand that there’s nothing i can do about it and there’s nothing i can do for eve. she didn’t deserve that. 

there’s nothing that feels pathetic quite like starting to cry while you’re trying to eat food. or crying while you’re doing homework. i keep feeling like i’m going to throw up. i’m so upset. nothing is really making it better. it just keeps coming in tidal waves. 

i know if i talked to people i might feel a little better but i don’t really want to spend energy interacting with people. there’s lots of people i LIKE talking to... but when i say “ok, well we’re feeling bad, so let’s pull up a friend’s chat window and say hi” my brain screams “NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

and then when someone blessedly comes up to ME to say hi my brain screams “NO!!!!!!!!!!!! I DON’T WANT *THAT* PERSON” no matter who it is. 

even close friends! 

i haven’t even said anything about what’s going on with me on facebook... and i’m usually the first to complain publicly about my life. i guess, when usually i want to be around people, lately i just feel like i want to be left alone. even though i still want to be around people. it’s not a good combination.

how am i supposed to “feel” all of this? how do you “process” “an emotion”? my psychiatrist said i should do some kind of, like, memorial for my pets. but even thinking about it makes me start crying a lot. doesn’t matter if i’m cooking, or biking to campus, or even just laying in bed. thinking about writing a letter to snoopy? boom, instant tears. what would i even say? “i love you and i’m sorry”? do i need to write that down?

i feel so embarrassed about earnest expressions of, like, affection. most emotions in general but ESPECIALLY genuinely caring about something and saying something about it makes me feel super guilty if i see it again later. doesn’t matter what it is. if i tell a friend “i love you” i get antsy about it later. i can announce to the world “i love my puppy” and i’ll mean it, but if i try to say something, like, specific about eve? if i try to convey in words the exact extent to which i care? 

god forbid i try to say something POETIC about it. or use some kind of metaphor or arrangement of words that might not mean anything grammatically, but emotionally resonates with me. 

and then talking on twitter or here about how much i’ve been crying doesn’t feel good either. it kind of half feels like a joke. i joke that i cry when i see a dog on tv. how could i not joke about every time i do it regardless of context. i have to make it not matter. if it matters it’s bad... i don’t want people to worry about me... i feel pathetic... i’m just acting pathetic for attention... etc etc. 

i decided against it, but yesterday i was gonna make some kind of comment about the emotions the characters experience in my comic and the ones i’m experiencing right now. like, “good thing i wrote out how they all deal with grief ahead of time!! because i totally nailed it.” or, “haha wow i wrote a whole story about how it’s bad to pretend you’re not feeling your emotions and then i immediately proceed to do everything possible to avoid my emotions!” 

i’m a real winner.

i drew for a while today... i got 2/3 of a page done, which is a good solid pace for one day. i had to stop because i started feeling really restless and irritable about it. like, i wanted to keep going, but i also very much Did Not Want to keep going. it’s like that with the little written bit i’ve been working on, too... i want to write it, i want to tell my story and i want to express myself with some art, but i also just. i don’t want to do anything at all. i just want to throw up and cry a lot. 

but i’ve got things to do... and i don’t like crying or throwing up. they feel bad. and life will keep going on without me if i don’t try to keep up. not that it matters. it’s not like they can double fail me out of the grad program. i haven’t been keeping up with my grading, which is like the one thing that is an actual obligation to people outside of myself. homework is making me miserable.

my psychiatrist recommended i spend more days doing absolutely nothing except things that make me happy, just to try to rest, but... 

nothing is making me very happy. i don’t want to do anything. i have to spend a huge amount of energy just to get my game console turned on. the weather’s been kind of grubby so i haven’t wanted to go for a bike ride, let alone spent energy trying to convince myself to do it. it took me a lot of psyching myself up just to watch some youtube videos i had in my bookmarks. absolutely miserable. 

vanessa got me to go to the medieval fair with her last weekend, but outside of that no one’s really approached me about keeping me busy. i feel kind of abandoned and isolated. even though i don’t even really want to talk to anyone. ian grabbed chipotle with me on friday night. that was nice. but it was also my idea and i had to get myself to club and then sit down for the whole three hours. i also read out chapter 3 of my comic, and THAT took a huge investment of my energy... 

at least people liked it. 

ruby from the discord channel has been leaving a lot of very nice and thoughtful comments on the art that i post there, and on one of the side comics i drew. owl has also been sending me long and very nice messages most days... there are people there. i just... still feel really bad. 

so it comes back around to “i should probably do something to officially ‘grieve’ for my friends” but i guess i don’t feel ready. i don’t know what to say. i don’t know what there is TO say. thinking about it, thinking about starting or even just the concept makes me cry. then i want to avoid it. maybe it’s too soon... but i know it won’t be healthy if it is “too soon” forever. i should probably do something at some point. 

i guess i can trust myself to get around to it whenever i feel ready. i am a person of action. i feel comfortable saying that about myself. so if i’m not doing it, it’s probably because i’m not ready. right...? i do things when i’m ready to do them... even if i don’t really want to. 

i wonder if that’s true or if i use it to justify putting things off. maybe it’s a little of both. maybe it’s another stick i just use to beat myself over the head even though i’m doing a fine job. 

haha. “people like my comic and really relate to blue? better beat myself up because WHAT IF I STOP DOING IT GOOD ENOUGH?” “i get the things on my to-do list done when i can, and can trust myself to get my chores / grieving done when i have the energy for it? WHAT IF I HAD THE ENERGY FOR IT ALL ALONG AND I’M JUST LAZY? LAZY!! SO LAZY!!!” 

“but if you just tried harder...”

it always comes back to that, doesn’t it. if i just...  ţ̻̭͉͐̑̍ͅr͈̫͇͚̦͇̥ͮͧ͊̇i̠͚̹̖͓̣̽͂e̩̲̯̩d̦͎͉̭̺̮ͤ̆̍ͮ͆͗ͅ ͛̆̓̓͂ͩͪ̀ ́͑ͭh̢͔̮̼͎̾̂̓͛̈͆̇ ̛͕̦̖̩̿a̺̹͓̳̮̹͠ ̼͓͕̝̘͎͙ͦ̐ŕ̉ͤ҉̣̬͉̼ͅ ̧̺̮ͦ͂̅ͮd̕ ̣̩̠͔ͯ̉ͣͩ̆̓e̝͛͌ͥ ̺͚̲̺̰̥̈ͫrͪ̓ͩ҉̼̭̟͕ͅ.............

if i tried harder... what? my dog wouldn’t be dead? my cat? i would still be in my phd program? i would have a job? i would be finished with chapter 4, which i wanted to be done with by the end of last year?? 

could i even try harder? i feel like i’m going at 100%. can i try harder? i don’t know how. i don’t know how to do anything different from what i’m doing (other than, like, not doing things, or being an asshole. i can do those things... i can also not do them, and i am currently trying very hard to not do them). 

i know that my trying isn’t good enough. i guess that’s the source of my uncertainty and my guilt. it’s not good enough. how do i make it good enough? will it ever be good enough? maybe not... where does that leave me?

i’ve been thinking about something from group therapy for the last entire week. one person said they were jealous of their peers. i asked what that meant for them. they said it mostly felt like being really frustrated with themself. 

i said... i said something like “oh i feel like that all the time but i don’t call it jealousy.” and... that’s true. 

i’m so afraid of doing something bad or feeling a Bad Emotion that i’ve been trying so hard to reframe all the thoughts and emotions. but... the word fits. i feel jealous of all the successful people. i don’t like admitting that, it doesn’t make me feel very good at all, but it feels true. 

i’m jealous of all the people who get more followers than me more quickly, even though i feel like i’m doing everything that they do. i’m jealous of my classmates who can pass tests even though i’m the one helping them with homework (yeah i know it goes both ways but IT GOES BOTH WAYS, I AM THE ONE HELPING SOMETIMES, I AM THE ONE WHO UNDERSTANDS, SOME OF THE TIME, AND YET THEY ARE IN THE PROGRAM AND I AM NOT). 

i don’t like this about myself. i don’t like these things. i don’t like feeling like this. i know that’s just how it is and i gotta deal with it. but i don’t know how to change how i feel about it. i’m not even jealous of the skill or anything. i know how good i am at physics, at art, at telling stories... i’m jealous of the attention i guess. knowing that about myself is makin me miserable. 

miserable on top of snoopy. on top of eve. on top of how my group therapists broke The Rules. on top of the school obligations. on top of losing the whole reason i moved out here, to get an education... on top of my brother sinking deeper into his abhorrent political and moral identity. on top of my dad being a coward, on top of mom jumping down my throat to get a new cat and get a job and get all these things done and just try harder. on top of hating eating food because it makes me so sick half the time. on top of not getting any sleep, not enough sleep for so long. on top of every one of the hundreds of minor inconveniences and annoying things that pop up every single day. on top of feeling lonely and isolated and unable to keep myself, like, socially stimulated i guess. i’m tired and restless and exhausted and agitated and i never get any rest. 

i feel like, no matter how hard i work to be a good person, no matter how much time i spend plugging up all the holes in the dam with my fingers and “fake it til you make it” and “you are what you practice” i’m still going to just be bad and worthless. i’ll mess up at some point and everyone will realize how much i suck and then they’ll all leave. it only takes one slip up.

i know tumblr’s whole “callout culture” thing gets to me. i don’t even... do any of the major “talking points” that come up with that sort of thing. but i know how easy it is to just make it up or take something i said out of context. i’ve been physically beaten up over it before, taking my words out of context... it’s not just tumblr that stresses me out even though i know tumblr specifically is SUPER not helpful. i know how dangerous it is to be queer-ish and female. participating in a fandom again feels like i’m throwing myself out into a spotlight. or maybe a microscope light. i know attention is bad. but i want attention. but i know it’s bad. but i want people to see what i made. but i know it’s bad...............

i miss my kitty. i loved her so much. i can’t get over that at the end she was trying to comfort me. i miss diogi. i miss brushing her and all those little moments where she seemed truly happy under the anxiety. i miss genevieve. i loved her more than anything. and i could show her that, i know she knew that, but i couldn’t show her forever like i wanted to. i wanted to be with her forever. i know that’s not how it works, but deep down it’s what i wanted...

[asleepinawell]

Shoot + snowboarding (chaos au would be 👌🏼👌🏼👌🏼But no pressure)

I know nothing about snowboarding, so this turned into a team machine winter vacation that includes some snowboarding. Definitely set in chaos au a few weeks after the ending, though context isn’t really needed. This is mostly silly, but hopefully enjoyably so.

“This is aterrible idea.”

“No, letting Johnplan social events is a terrible idea. This is only a slightly riskyidea.”

Shaw sighed. Zoewasn’t wrong, but Shaw was still reserving the right to say ‘Itold you so’ when this all went to hell.

“There’s onlythree bedrooms.” Reese looked slightly uncomfortable.

Root regarded himcuriously from the couch in the lodge that Zoe had rented out fortheir weekend getaway. Was he worried he’d have to sleep on thecouch? Obviously she and Shaw would be sharing a room.

Shaw wandered intothe main room causally toting a shotgun under one arm.

“I took thebiggest room,” she said in a tone that dared someone to challengeher.

“No complaintshere.” John eyed the shotgun. “You expecting trouble?”

“Oh, this? Nah.Security precaution. And don’t think I didn’t see you stuff your bagof guns in the trunk earlier.”

“Always good tohave a plan B,” John muttered.

“Guess I shouldgo get my bags out of the car.” Root stood up slowly, only wincinga tiny bit. The bullet wound in her side was almost completely healednow, but it still ached sometimes, especially in the cold, and thesnow-covered mountain Zoe had brought them to wasn’t the best climatefor it.

“Already broughtthem in.” Shaw lightly pushed her back down onto the couch with onehand. “They’re in our room.”

Even though theylived together, Root still couldn’t avoid the delighted little smilefrom hearing Shaw call it ‘our room’.

Shaw took in herexpression and her eyes narrowed a little. She turned her suspiciousgaze on Reese, as if she thought he’d somehow made Root doubt thesleeping arrangements.

“I hope you’re asound sleeper, Reese, because Root…”

John fled.

“That was mean,”Root said, delighted. She didn’t think John had been implying anything (more likely he’d been concerned about his own sleepingoptions and brooding out loud), but it was still entertaining towatch Shaw mess with him.

“He’ll live.”Shaw placed the shotgun on the polished wood coffee table between thecouch and the huge fireplace and then sat down next to Root. “Longdrive.” There was almost a question in her words.

“Was it? I didn’treally notice.” Her whole side was stiff and achy and she sort ofwanted some painkillers and a nap, but she wasn’t going to admit thatwith Shaw already hovering over her constantly. She wanted her to beable to stop worrying, no matter how endearing it was.

“Yeah, well I’mtired. We’ve got a few hours before Zoe drags us out to whatever thisfancy restaurant is. Gonna go take a nap.” She got up of the couch,but lingered there until Root stirred as well.

Root hid a smile asshe let Shaw give her a hand up. Shaw could be very bad at subtletysometimes, but it was sweet that she was trying.

“And take agoddamn painkiller. No one’s impressed by how tough you aren’t.”

So much forsubtlety.

“Why did I lether talk us into this?” Shaw blew on her hands, trying to get somefeeling back into them after being out in the cold. It was warminside the lodge, but she was frozen solid from shoveling the frontwalk (which had gotten covered in snow while they’d been at dinner).This had clearly been a terrible idea. Her only consolation was thatReese had looked equally frozen.

“Becausesometimes a weekend away is nice, especially now that we don’t haveto watch our backs constantly.” Root stuffed her spare cables backinto her bag. She’d been busy setting up cameras for the Machinewhile Shaw suffered outside.

“Hope you didn’tput any of those in Zoe or Reese’s rooms. You know, just in case.The Machine doesn’t need to see that.”

Root snorted.“She’s seen much worse, I promise you. But no, I didn’t.” Shecame over to where Shaw was sitting on the edge of the bed andreached down to take her hands between her own and rub them.

In the past, Shawwould have scowled, even if it was just for show, but lately she’dstopped bothering to act annoyed by the little gestures like this. Itwasn’t like she could give Root the wrong message when she’d alreadygiven her the right one. And Root’s hands were really warm.

“Regretting ourromantic winter getaway already?” Root asked, releasing her andgoing back to rummage around in her bag.

“Nothing romanticabout Reese snoring in the next room.” There was nothing romanticabout it at all, in her opinion (and Root’s tone had suggested shewasn’t being serious in the slightest about that part). Zoe hadsuggested they all get away from the city for a weekend, and whenShaw had waved the idea off (after all, she and Root had spentseveral months away from the city recently), Zoe had reasoned thatthis trip was an actual vacation rather than a recovery vacation.

And then she’d gonearound Shaw and suggested it to Root and Reese, both of whom had beenall for it, and Shaw had found herself outvoted.

But it had beenhard to be annoyed when Root had been so excited. Even now that theyofficially lived together, there was still a small but constant airof worry around Root, like she expected to wake up one day and findthat everything that mattered to her had been stolen away.

And she definitelydid seem to be enjoying herself, if their overly exciting dinner wasanything to go by. Some waiter at the restaurant had made the veryunfortunate decision to leer at them, and Root had somehow managed to‘accidentally’ light one leg of his pants on fire. The fire hadbeen put out fairly quickly (and the water jug Shaw had smashed overhim had probably done more damage overall), but Root had looked verypleased with herself.

“She says it’sgoing to keep snowing all night.” Root had finished fussing withher bag and was looking out the window at the winter landscape.

“Just great. Zoecan shovel this time. This was her damn idea.” It wasn’t like shecould make Root shovel snow while she was still recovering. Dishesand other small cleaning chores, yes. Shoveling, no. (Though Shaw hadfound that it was more efficient to not let Root attempt toclean. She often just made it worse).

She got up to joinRoot at the window and look out at the woods outside, wrapped in thehush of the falling snow.

“How’s Beardoing?” she asked after a few quiet minutes of watching in silence.

“Sleeping. Leewore him out in the park earlier.”

Having the Machineable to keep an eye on her dog was all the proof Shaw needed of howAI could benefit humanity.

“We should go tobed,” Root suggested at last. “Exciting day tomorrow.”

“Going to be solame.”

“We’ll see.”

“You just saythat because you got out of it on a technicality.” Though beingshot wasn’t really a technicality.

“Maybe you’lleven have fun.”

“I highly doubtit.”

“She looks likeshe’s enjoying herself.”

“I figured shewould, once she got out here.” Root held back a shiver. It wasfreezing out here, especially since she and Zoe were remaining on thesidelines and not running around like the other two.

Though Reese andShaw weren’t exactly running. The big hill next to the lodge hadturned into their own private winter sports arena at Zoe’sinsistence. Shaw had begrudgingly decided that a snowboard might becool enough to not tarnish her reputation as a badass, while Reesehad opted for skis in some misguided attempt to preserve his dignity.

Shaw had spent thefirst few attempts falling over a bunch and slipping around, but sheseemed to have gotten the hang of things now, her uncanny balanceassisting her greatly. Root knew even less about snowboarding thanShaw (who had attempted to learn from a few videos the Machine hadsupplied her with), but she could see the moments when things justclicked for Shaw and she figured out how to control her movements,shifting her weight to control her turn and then leaning into thehill to come to an almost-graceful stop.

Root smiled whenshe saw the little smirk on Shaw’s face; she looked quite pleasedwith herself (and also absolutely adorable all bundled up for thesnow).

Reese on the otherhand stood absolutely ramrod straight and didn’t seem to understandwhat the ski poles were for. His technique appeared to be to pointthe skis downhill and hope for the best. Root thought he might haveshut his eyes at least once.

“He’s trying sohard,” Root said. She wished she’d brought her phone to takepictures, but she did have a wireless camera planted in a tree nearbyso hopefully She was recording all this.

“I think he’sgetting a little better,” Zoe said, charitably.

“I thinkhe’s getting worse.” Root almost laughed when the Machine chimed into agree with her. Reese had been too cool for Her youtube tutorials.

Shaw kept pausingto watch Reese’s suffering with a nasty, satisfied grin. She evenlooked over to the little spot on the side of the hill where Root andZoe had taken up their post to include them in her enjoyment ofReese’s dilemma.

“I think theyboth needed this,” Zoe said. “After all the drama with Samaritanit wasn’t going to be an easy transition back to saving numbers oneby one. Sometimes you need to have uncomplicated fun.”

Root wouldn’t havecalled the look of terror on Reese’s face ‘having fun’, but ingeneral she agreed with Zoe. She was almost disappointed she couldn’tjoin in. Almost. The last thing she needed was for Shaw to talk theMachine into getting her a picture of Root falling on her face. Itwould have haunted her forever.

“What’s she upto?”

Root looked up tosee Shaw cutting a path across the slope that made it seem like shewas going to collide with Reese. At the last second she shifted herweight and avoided him (a mischievous smirk on her face), but Reese had already panicked and veeredwildly away in a desperate attempt to save himself.

“Such a brat,”Root said, fondly.

“He needs to slowdown.” Zoe sounded worried, and now that Root looked she noticedthat Reese was headed right towards them, distracted in his attemptsto get himself under control.

“Oh, shit.” Itwas all she had time to say before Reese fell over and tumbled acrossthe last few feet between them to crash straight into her.

Shaw sat down onthe couch next to the pile of blankets Root was ensconced under. Itwas slightly closer than she normally would have sat on her own, butshe hoped it would do for the apology Root had prevented her fromgiving earlier.

In the directaftermath of the ski incident, Root had stubbornly refused to befussed over, despite the fact she was obviously in pain and visiblyshivering from all the snow that had gotten under her clothes. Shawhad been left with no other choice than to grab her by her collar and dragher, complaining, up the hill to the lodge. Root had continued toprotest needing any special treatment the entire time Shaw ran a hotbath in the large tub. The protests had ended rather abruptly whenShaw had dumped her (still fully dressed except for her shoes andcoat) into the tub, brushed her hands off, and gone to find her somepainkillers.

When she came backinto the bathroom she found that in the five minutes it took for herto dig out the good painkillers from their bags, Root had not onlystripped out of her wet clothes, but somehow found a bottle of bubblebath and added a truly unnecessary amount to the tub. She’d alsoprocured an honest to god rubber duckie (which, upon inspection, shehad painted black with what smelled like a sharpie and put what wereprobably supposed to be blood stains around the beak), who wasapparently named Quack The Planet and who she was pushing through themaze of bubbles with one finger.

To Root’s credit,she managed to hold off on making a ‘fowl play’ joke for anentire minute.

Shaw had gone tosit on the edge of the tub, and attempted to figure out how to framean apology. Afterall, it had been her goofing around that had startedReese’s unfortunate trajectory into Root, and while Root had onlygotten a bruised shin, Shaw could tell that it had made thealmost-healed wound on her side hurt like hell.

Root had listenedattentively to a few seconds of Shaw awkwardly attempting to phrasean apology, before grabbing her and hauling her backwards into thetub. After she’d coughed up a lungful of bubble bath and restrainedherself from choking Root, Shaw had decided that negated her need foran apology.

She still couldn’thelp but hover a bit, even now with Root curled up on the couch withblankets and a mug of hot chocolate.

At the other end ofthe couch, Reese had his leg propped up on the coffee table, ankleswollen and several shades of red and blue (sprained, not broken,Shaw had determined). Shaw ignored all his dramatic groaning andpointed hints that she should be waiting on him since it wasapparently her fault he didn’t know how to ski.

“I should haveknown better than to assume any of you knew how to have a relaxingweekend,” Zoe commented from the armchair she was curled up in.

“I mean, no one’sdied.” Reese made it sound like this was an accomplishmentfor them, which, okay, maybe it was.

“You’re right,”Zoe reflected. “I should probably be grateful for small favors.”She was smiling, though.

Root (who had beenalmost nodding-off for the last few minutes) slowly slumped sidewaysonto Shaw (who quickly relieved her of her mug), already soundasleep.

“Did you drug heragain?” Reese asked, suspicious.

Zoe blinked.“Again?”

Shaw shook herhead. “Not this time.” The codeine probably was a factor, butmostly she suspected Root was just that exhausted.

Root didn’t wake upwhen Shaw carried her back to their bedroom (ignoring Reese and Zoe’ssmirks), and only stirred a little when Shaw put her down in bed. Shewas somewhat awake when Shaw came back from the bathroom, though,because she immediately shuffled over next to Shaw when she climbedunder the covers.

“You doing okay?”Shaw asked as she curled up around Root’s back. Root’s hair stillsmelled like that awful bubble bath.

“If I weren’t,you’d be the first to know.”

Shaw didn’t pressfurther; she didn’t like being fussed over either.

“I knew thiswhole trip was a terrible idea.”

Root laughedsoftly. “I don’t know, Sameen. Skiing mishaps aside, I think it’sgone quite well.”

“Yeah?”

“Mmm.”

“Well, I guessthat’s okay then.”

It meant shewouldn’t get to say ‘I told you so’ to Zoe, but, with Root curledup warm and content against her, it didn’t seem like a big losssomehow.

(if you don’t understand why Root’s rubber duckie is named Quack The Planet, then you probably haven’t seen the 1995 cinema masterpiece Hackers and should remedy this immediately). 

[hardcandyfilmclub]

Recently Gal Gadot tweeted that bullying is unacceptable.

Her hypocrisy is deeply wounding. The shame and blame she instilled into me after I was raped was deeply traumatizing.

Gal is more than a bully; she is a predator who enables predators.

This is my story.

Thirteen years ago, I shared an apartment with Gal Gadot for two months in Milan, Italy. Several young girls lived in the building, all under contract with the same modeling management company.

Shortly after we met, Gal invited me to share space in her room. Gal’s roommate Maya* was going back home to Israel. Maya was 15, and only spoke Hebrew.

Maya was about to leave for the airport. Her bags were packed. The expression on her face was vacant. Tears were in her eyes. It was clear she was in deep pain.

Gal calmly told me that the girl had been raped, and that the experience had put the girl in the hospital.

Gal said the girl was stupid — for going to the wrong club, and for trusting the man who brought her there. I felt sorry for Maya, but I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t speak her language. I didn’t realize that meeting her would foreshadow my future.

Gal had been in Milan for a few weeks. She said she would show me the ropes and who could be trusted. Her confident strength made me feel safe, protected, and loved in a way that I hadn’t felt before. Gal taught me to trust her. I was 18 and she was 19.

Gal told me about men who followed models around to casting calls. They were paid by clubs to convince models like us to join them at these clubs in exchange for expensive food, drinks, publicity photos, and VIP treatment. Gal told me to never trust these men, because they rape.

Gal’s previous roommate had been tricked by one of these men, and the underlying message was clear: trust Gal. I felt safe with Gal. I did not realize then how little I knew about rape, predators, and the culture that supports them.

Gal and I spent most of our free time together. We shared food, clothes, and makeup. We went to the gym. We went shopping and tanning together. We went on photo shoots together. I made her a mix CD. I sang her to sleep. I watched her smoke constantly out of the window. We shared body insecurities, and she shared sex stories. She made sure to appear confident, knowledgeable, and successful — even then. She fed me information about Israel. Whenever she discussed Palestinians, she showed deep hatred.

Gal set us up on dates with men who expected sex in exchange for the lavish meals they fed us, although we never slept with them. She would pick smaller men, and threaten them after dinner. They complained and she chased them off with more threats. She would laugh about it later. She used sex as a weapon.

Several weeks into my stay, she took me to meet her Israeli friends including her best friend Ayala*. Ayala and her boyfriend Yaniv seemed very close. He appeared to dote on her, and they seemed very much in love.

Gal, Ayala, Yaniv and I went out each weekend, sometimes with other friends. The four of us quickly became a core group. We went to clubs to spend time in the spaces reserved for celebrities.

Hidden behind the historic exteriors of Milan’s ancient architecture were sensory-overwhelming nightclubs, decked out like palaces. These places were teeming with swarms of people feeding off of manufactured prestige. I was a sheltered child from a small town, and was utterly unprepared for the dark side of the modeling and nightlife industries.

A short time later, Gal and I spent a weekend at Yaniv and Ayala’s room inside another shared apartment. Gal and I shared a pull out couch while Yaniv and Ayala slept in their bed. The room was close and intimate. We spent the evening laughing, watching movies, smoking, and drinking. Yaniv commented on how I could not hold my alcohol, fully aware I had no experience getting drunk.

A week later, Ayala left for a modeling gig in Greece while Gal was in Ireland for a weekend shoot. Yaniv invited me out to dinner alone. Over dinner, we talked about our significant others, his travel around the world, and his time in the Israeli Defense Forces. I didn’t realize that his intentions were anything other than honorable. After dinner, his friend invited us to a new club.

Yaniv asked if I had ever drank wine, knowing I had not. He bought me several drinks with dinner while telling me that I needed to try different varieties. It’s hard for me to remember what happened after that. I assume he drugged me.

To this day, I have never been inebriated in that particular way, especially after only drinking wine. I was in and out of consciousness, and my body felt limp. I kept falling over. My brain felt like it was shutting down. Yaniv called his roommate Ofir to help carry me home. I couldn’t walk. I was dead weight. I remember odd pieces, like him repeatedly asking me in a sick, almost playfully malicious tone of voice if I thought I was smart.

I remember thinking that we were going home so that I would sleep on the couch, as Gal and I had before. I woke up in Yaniv’s bed, naked. He had removed my clothes when I was unconscious. I remember him climbing on top of me. I could just barely say “no”, and “this isn’t right”. Then I blacked out.

I woke up again while he continued raping me. He was restraining my arms so I couldn’t move. It was violent. There was pain. I will never forget how he looked in that dark room. I will never forget the absolute panic I felt. It was terror. I thought he would kill me next. His rape was full of hate. He did not look at me.

I woke up the next morning, groggy and delirious. I asked Yaniv what happened. I wanted to hear him say it.

“We had sex,” he said, and shrugged. “I thought you knew.”

“I told you no,” I said, quietly.

“You told me no but your body told me yes,” he said. That line still haunts my mind, 13 years later.

I couldn’t get out of his bed, even though I wanted to leave. I was physically sick; not only still intoxicated from the aftereffects of whatever I consumed, but also bruised, shocked, and traumatized. As I lay in his bed, I listened to Yaniv call a friend and brag about having sex with an 18 year old. His conquest; an accomplishment; a notch on his belt.

He told me that no one could know, because Ayala would be too hurt. Soon, he began ignoring me.

I was disoriented and traumatized. I had absolutely no context to process what had happened. I had no sex education, and certainly no understanding of predators or the culture that supports them. I had been taught a woman should be a virgin until marriage.

I thought sex was about love. What I experienced from him was not love. It was hate and disgust. I didn’t have the language to call this rape. Rape was something to fear from strangers while walking alone down the street. Rape was not committed by a friend.

I thought he was my friend.

I was used, discarded, and alone.

Almost alone. At least I had Gal, I thought. She came home two days later. She knew something had happened by looking at me. I wonder if I reminded her of her previously raped roommate.

Gal immediately began interrogating me. I could see no compassion in her eyes. I told Gal something had happened between Yaniv and I.

She took me down to the basement. It was cold, mechanical, and frightening. We were alone. Then her anger exploded.

She stood over me, intimidating and loud, blaming me for what happened. Her eyes were fire. I had already felt small and violated, but she shamed me into feeling obsolete. I felt extremely dirty. Already in shock, I disassociated from my body. I can’t remember most of her words. I remember being in utter terror of her anger.

She was furious for Ayala and “what I had done to her”. Gal pointed her finger in my face like a weapon. She asked me how I could do this, and that I needed to make this up to Ayala. She made me feel ashamed, that the whole event had been my fault, and that I had brought it upon myself by being so naïve.

After that, I feared Gal. I spent nights out as long as I could, hoping to avoid her. When I did see Gal, she would speak of nothing other than her conviction that I needed to speak with or write to Ayala. She would not let up. She was obsessed. There was absolutely no understanding from her. I don’t know how she could not have seen how the rape changed me. I was no longer the same person.

On my last night in Milan, Gal made one final attempt to get me to submit to her demands. She brought me downstairs to a computer. Gal put her hands on me and forced me into the chair. She made me open my email account and write Ayala’s address in the address bar.

Standing behind me and above me, Gal held my shoulders down with a terrible pressure, preventing me from escape. She attempted to dictate what she called my “confession and apology”. I could not do it. I was crying, and my head seemed to break apart. My heart felt like it was bleeding out. My stomach was in awful knots. I began disassociating from my body. I could not speak. I could not write her lies.

She referred to the rape as “your mistake”.

After what felt like several hours, Gal eventually gave up in disgust. It was late at night. She made me promise I would write the letter to Ayala. I never wrote the letter.

I returned home confused, silent, and ashamed. Later Gal returned to Israel for her military training. I ended my modeling career as another young woman assaulted, used, and disposed by the industry and its enablers. I did not think I would ever see Gal again.

When I was getting my degree in Women’s and Gender Studies, Gal showed up on Maxim in a bikini and heels, the cover girl of their issue on the women of the Israeli Defense Forces.

When I saw her face, I had an immense panic attack. I had no idea how much she would upset me. My rape came flashing back. I could feel Gal’s hands pushing on my shoulders. My throat closed up and my heart raced. The nightmares continued to haunt me every night.

After I graduated, I worked as the director of the sexual assault services program back in my hometown. I spent many years helping survivors to validate their experiences and process emotions, yet I still deeply struggled with my own.

Yaniv Nahoum is responsible for drugging and raping me. That was not Gal’s fault. But her confidence and her power in blaming me opened up a part of my brain, and filled me with an all-consuming shame. I can still feel the pressure of her hands pushing down on me.

The trust she built with me was a gateway to my total devastation.

Predators gain trust in order to exploit it for their advantage.

Gal has succeeded in a predatory industry because she is a predator. She is unafraid to destroy others in pursuit of her ambitions. Like any strong predator, she knows how to target, destroy, and consume the weakest and most vulnerable.

Highly skilled predators in our society manage to land roles where they cultivate public trust.

Bill Cosby put on a sweater and built trust as a Huxtable.

Gal Gadot put on a breastplate and became an icon for women.

A predator in a costume is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

When Gal Gadot says that she supports sexual assault survivors, do not believe it. Her actions speak louder than words.

*not her real name