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

[frost0wl]

sooo incredibly unwell about these lines in this fic I found again from my screenshots

[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

[monstersandmaw]

Male shadow/room monster (Lamorak) x female reader (nsfw)

Edit which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me.

The first-prize winner of my giveaway from a little while back, @honeysugacube, requested a tentacled shadow/room monster for the 3k story, so here it is!

Content: Reader is both touch- and affection-starved, feeling distant and detached from her family who provide her with things and objects instead of the warmth of affection, equating them with love... In a version of her own fairytale, the reader gets the friend and affection she longs for. Wordcount: 3825

___

Leaving the campus and the stresses of your course behind you, you stepped onto the bus and drew out your phone to text your mother. ‘Just leaving - I’ll be home in half an hour or so.’ With that done, you slipped your earphones into your ears and turned up your music. Moments of your day replayed in a random shuffle through your mind, but always you felt always on the outside of things.  

Your classmates had arrived at the lecture that morning and immediately hugged their friends, slapped each other on the back, and blurted questions and anecdotes from their weekends, while you doodled quietly on the edge of your notebook, waiting for the professor to show up. It wasn’t that you had no one, but they had different classes, and when you did share lunch together, there was nothing between you like the depth of friendship you saw with that group in particular. You didn’t really see them outside of a university context, and you’d never been all that good at making friends.  

The bus jolted and you blinked, realising that you’d drifted off into your reverie, and now the bus was pulling away from your stop. It wasn’t that far to the next one, so you pushed the stop button and slouched to the front of the bus, bag slung over one shoulder.  

Closing the front door behind you twenty minutes later than you’d intended, with sore shoulders from lugging your book bag all that extra way, you sighed. The hall light was off, casting odd shadows across the walls and floor, and as you kicked your shoes off and one bounced off the skirting board, you thought the shadows shifted just a little bit, drawing back, almost as if they’d tried to shrink away from the blow of your shoe. 

You frowned, but paid it no more attention than that, and headed for the kitchen. Your father stood at the kitchen counter, chopping vegetables while your older brother lounged nearby, nose buried in his phone. It had been a little quieter around here since your older sister had got a job about three hours’ drive from the city, and you were still getting used to that absence, like an instrument missing in a group while the others play on regardless. You were the only one who really seemed to notice the difference.  

“How was class today?” your father asked without looking up.  

“It was fine,” you said as you poured yourself a drink. He didn't comment that you were later than usual, and perhaps he hadn’t noticed. You’d learned not to bother trying to elaborate on the intricate details of your day to your family. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about you, so much as they just… didn’t engage. You’d spent a good five minutes with your mother telling her about the first day’s lectures last year, and once you’d finished, she’d said, “I’m glad it went ok. Would you like rice or pasta with supper?” That pretty much summed up your relationship with your family; they were good providers, but there was no warmth.  

As your father finished with the vegetables, he asked, “Are you planning on going out with any friends for your birthday next week?”

You shrugged. “Maybe.” If you’d been honest, you’d half forgotten that it was your birthday anyway. You hadn’t made any plans, worried that anyone you asked would either accept only to be polite or would find somewhere better to be and leave you feeling worse than before about not doing anything.  

“You’re still up for going to that Italian place round the corner though, right?” your brother butted in from the other side of the room.  

“Sure?” you shrugged. He and your parents loved Italian, so that would probably make for an easy evening all around.  

“Great,” he grinned and turned back to his phone.  

A week later, you woke in the pre-dawn of your birthday and felt absolutely certain that there was someone in the room with you. With a gasp, you sat bolt upright and stared at the door, but nothing was out of place, and there was clearly no one else there. With your heart pounding, you sighed, feeling the ghost of a touch on your face from some lingering dream that you only half remembered. Fingers had been stroking gently down your cheek, and combing through your hair, a soft voice whispering that they were proud of you.  

Sighing deeply, you flopped back into the pillows with a groan. The more you thought about it though, the sharper the details became. The fingers had not been fingers, but soft, smooth tentacles of dark grey smoke, and there had been milk-white eyes blinking in the darkness; four of them.  

“What a way to start my birthday, huh?” you mused aloud. With another sigh, you rolled over and pulled the covers up around your ears.  

Hours later at breakfast, your parents gave you your presents - a modest list of things that would have been useful to almost anyone your age at college, and, with a small degree of fanfare, they offered you the latest iPhone, telling you how much you deserved it for working so hard and making them proud. No one gave you a hug though. It was hard not to feel ungrateful as you cradled your new phone in your hands, and the guilt that accompanied the sentiment troubled you. They loved you, of course they did, and they showed it by providing you with everything you could want. Except what you actually needed in the truest sense of the word…

Conversation at dinner that night was mostly centred on your father’s work, but there was a bit of discussion about the progress that your brother’s favourite team had made through the league tables, and your mother even asked you about the assignment you’d been struggling with a little bit the last week. “I got an A,” you smiled and her face lightened instantly.  

“Well done. I knew you’d do us proud.”

Your hand twitched on the fork, as if you’d been expecting her to reach over and squeeze it, but she didn’t. She topped up your glass and chinked hers jauntily against the rim instead, the cold glass chiming oddly in the busy restaurant.

Back at home your brother nudged you in the ribs and tilted his head curiously. “You ok? You were kind of quiet tonight…”

“I’m fine,” you said. “Just a bit tired.”

“Ok, look, I was going to give this to you earlier, but I thought I’d wait til tonight. I know you used to read all those creepy fairytales under the covers as a kid and play with all the dolls mum and dad gave you…” and with that, he handed you a badly-wrapped parcel, the selotape lifting off at one end where it had refused to stick to the brown paper. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m kind of shitty at wrapping.”

“It’s alright,” you smiled. “Thank you.”

Awkwardly, he flashed a smile at you and walked away, leaving you standing in the hallway with the present he’d pulled out of his jacket pocket where it'd been hanging on a peg on the wall. From the weight of it and the shape of the package, you were certain it was a hardback book. As you swept your fingers over the cover, the light above you flickered off suddenly and you glared up at it. In the absence of light, the shadows seemed denser somehow, and you shivered, the hairs on the back of your neck prickling slightly. A heartbeat later, and it came back on. With another shiver, you left the hall and headed upstairs.  

Alone in your room, you unwrapped your brother’s present.  

Old, slightly cracked leather bound the book, and it had metallic corner pieces to protect the edges. It was only about as long as your hand from palm to fingertip, and there was nothing on the cover at all. Opening it carefully, your nose picked up hints of a scent like distant woodsmoke, herbs, and something akin to petrichor. Inside was written a phrase in Latin and, with the help of your new phone, you discovered that it meant, ‘In the heart there lives a shadow’.  “Odd title,” you murmured aloud.  

The story itself, thank goodness, was written in English, in an archaic typeface that might have looked at home with a first edition of Dickens or something.  

‘In a house on the hill above town lived a young girl,’ it began in typical fairytale style, and despite the cliche, you found yourself falling further and further into the story. It spoke of the daughter of a witch who had grown up feeling isolated, her mother always working. The parallel hit you hard almost immediately and you wondered if your brother had finally noticed how your family behaved towards each other. Dismissing it as a fluke, you turned your attention back to the book.  

To make up for the lack of time the spent together, the witch bought her daughter gifts, and among one of those gifts was a small chest, meant for jewellery or trinkets. When the girl opened the chest, however, she found a pool of inky liquid that stirred and rippled when she dipped her finger into it, the fluid never leaving any trace on her skin. She left the jewellery case open on a table in her bedroom, and that night when the sun went down, when there was only candlelight in her room, a small black cat crept up to her.  

You smiled as you read the next bit, having spent the whole of your childhood longing for a pet that you could share some kind of connection with; a cat to curl up in the creases of your duvet, a dog to play with… frankly anything would have done, even a goldfish to swim around in circles in a tank, but your parents had said no. The dream of one just appearing one day had been a near-constant one for you. The little girl in the story discovered that her cat was not a normal cat and was in fact a creature formed from the strange darkness in the chest.  

As she grew, the creature changed shape, eventually taking on the form of a young man. “You’re happy tonight,” he said as the two of them lay on a grassy hillside, gazing up at the stars.  

She reached her hand across and touched his strange, smoky skin. Beneath the twisting mist that surrounded him like an aura, his body was smooth and hard, cool like leather, and as he linked his fingers with hers, she said, “I have you - I have a friend. I’m no longer alone.”

Tears rolled down your face as you finished the story, leaving the little book open in your lap. Never had you felt more alone than in the wake of finishing that strange fairytale. “I wish…” you sniffed, smearing the back of your wrist under your nose. “I wish I wasn’t so alone all the time…” you hissed bitterly, before you began to laugh softly to yourself. Your whole body ached, right down to your bones, and your chest twisted, leaving you feeling wrung-out and empty.  

Heck, you’d probably even have taken a shadow monster yourself for a friend in that moment, and no sooner had you thought it than something moved across the room, startling you out of your tears. Blinking to clear your vision, you watched a shadow growing slowly in the middle of the empty floor, like a spreading puddle. A moment later, you thought your ears must be deceiving you as you heard a soft, rasping voice whisper, “Please don’t cry… I can’t bear to hear you cry.”  

“What?” you breathed, sitting up and staring wide-eyed at the rippling darkness in the centre of the room. Fear clenched your heart so tightly you wanted to scream, but you weren’t sure you had enough voice.  

“Please… don’t be afraid… I swear I will never hurt you,” the entity murmured, and the surface of the small pool surged and rippled before quietening down.  

“What are you?” you hissed, heart thudding. “How is this happening?”  

“Don’t you remember me?” came the response.  

You stared blankly at the shadow. “Remember you?”  

A gentle smile crept into the voice of the creature you couldn’t quite see, and you heard the voice say, “When we were both very small, we used to play together. I’ve grown up here alongside you.”

“Oh my god,” you whispered as a flood of memories you didn’t know you still had rushed across your mind. “My imaginary friend… I… called you Lamorak…”

“Indeed you did. After one of the knights of Arthur, I believe,” he said, sounding amused at that.  

You paused and then swallowed nervously. “So… if you’re real, then what are you?”

“I… I’m honestly not sure. I believe that I am formed of the shadows in this place, and that I was partly conjured by you when you were young to fulfil the needs of a young child who was often overlooked.”

“But… how is that possible?”

The darkness rippled again and the voice answered, “Magic, most likely. The force of a wish can be pretty powerful, especially in someone very young.”

“Tell me you’re the only one like you that lives here,” you demanded, a twang of anxiety shooting through you at the thought of innumerable shadow beings hiding in every crevice of the house.

“To my knowledge, yes,” he replied.  

“I… I think I remember you in a different shape…” you said after staring for another few seconds at the mass of ebbing shadows on the floor, breathing like an ocean on a sandy shore. It was true, though you hadn’t thought about Lamorak for years. Your mother had dismissed your talk of the shadow boy for childish fantasy, and you’d started to see and think of him less and less after that. Forgotten, he had apparently banished himself back to the shadows of the house but had never left. Something about that made your heart hurt all over again.  

He chuckled and said, “I take many shapes now.”

“Do you have a favourite?” you asked shyly, realising that you were no longer afraid.  

After a little pause, he asked, “Would you like me to show you?”

“Yes,” you said, breathless with excitement for the first time in a long time.  

The shape began to shift and move, rising up and filling the space in the centre of the room to a height of six and half feet or so; it was difficult to be sure because the shadows that surrounded him like an aura were constantly moving. There was a part of his ill-defined silhouette that was clearly his head, and from it, four milky, silvery eyes blinked at you, all slightly out of sync. From his broad shoulders down, he got stranger and even less humanoid; his arms looked more like tentacles, writhing slightly, and as you continued to stare at him from your bed, you realised that there were more of them behind him, and the two which were most prominent were just the largest of them. His legs too were not humanoid, but were a seething mass of tentacles, some thick, others almost wispy, ending in tiny coils of mist like candle smoke.  

“Wow…”

“You’re not the only one who’s changed a bit,” he chuckled and you warmed to his dry sense of humour instantly.  

“Yeah, but you were supposed to be my imaginary friend… Emphasis on ‘imaginary’…! Come here,” you smiled and he obliged, if somewhat tentatively.  

“Not so imaginary after all,” Lamorak breathed as he neared you, shadows frothing and roiling around his lower tentacles like waves around sea-kelp. “I’ve missed you,” he admitted as he drew to a halt in front of you.

You got slowly to your feet and stood beside your bed, dwarfed by his presence, but instead of being intimidated by him, your stomach twisted and you began to cry again.  

“Hey,” he murmured, leaning down and bringing a soft-looking tentacle to your face. He drew the very tip of it across your cheek, and you watched the shape of his eyes change from almost completely round, like giant pearls, to pinched tight at the outer corners, as if worried. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“I… I feel awful that I forgot you… I… I didn’t know how much I missed you too…” you sobbed, and in a heartbeat you felt his arms wrap around your body. Darkness enveloped you and you let it consume you utterly.  

The peaceful thum-thum of his heartbeat was all you could hear for a moment, before a different noise rose around you. Gentle whispers, like spring leaves tickled by a soft breeze, filled your ears and mind, and when you lurched back, suddenly recalling having heard them before in moments alone in your room, he cocked his head to one side and shrank back. “Did I hug you too tightly?” he asked, half joking, half worried.  

You shook your head. “You’ve always been here, haven’t you?”

He shrugged slightly, all the tentacles on his right side heaving and shifting. “I’ve mostly been dormant in the basement,” he admitted. “But I have come to see you sometimes. When you’re lonely, you call to me. I don’t think you know you’re doing it though.”

“The whispers…?” you asked.  

“I think it’s these,” he said, first looking at one tentacle and then bringing more up to touch your cheek again, and you shuddered violently as sparks of inexpressible joy flashed across your whole body. “You like that?”

“Mmm,” you said, another tear escaping your eye. “I… I don’t understand…”

“Understand what?”

“Why that feels so good…?” you admitted. “It’s… I… Is there something wrong with me?”

In an instant, he had picked you up in his arms and sat you down on your bed. “No,” he reassured you, even as he drew back slightly to give you a little room to breathe. “No, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just… alone.”

“Why did you show yourself to me tonight?” you asked, hoping to distract yourself from the way your hands were trembling and your skin felt suddenly too tight all over.  

Lamorak gestured at the bed beside you and said, “May I sit?”

“Sure.”

He leaned in close and nudged his side against your shoulder; it was the gesture a familiar friend might make and it brought a lightness to your chest. He was still tall and you also liked the way you had to look up at him. “You’re hurting but you’ve stopped noticing. You felt it all over again tonight when you read that story, and… well… I felt it too.”

The aching in your chest redoubled and you leaned into his welcoming darkness. “It’s like my wish came true,” you breathed.  

“May I hold you?” he asked in a voice as gentle as velvet.  

When you nodded and whimpered, “Please,” he drew you easily into his lap, as if you were still a child, and allowed his dark tentacles to hold you while you curled up against him.  

“Lamorak,” you smiled as exhaustion washed over you and you let him stroke your cheek and your hair until you drifted off to sleep.  

He came to you night after night following that first reunion on your birthday. Six months later and your grades had gone up, you’d become marginally more confident and sociable at university, and you’d been invited to three people’s birthday events.  

Returning after the latest one, you shot down the corridor and into your bedroom. Going still as you reached the middle of the room, you looked around. “Lamorak?” you whispered and the darkness beside the wardrobe coalesced into his familiar, tentacled form as he stepped out to greet you. “I had so much fun tonight!” you grinned, elated and buzzing. “Thank you for encouraging me to go!”

“I can feel it,” he chuckled, approaching and lifting your chin. “You look happy.”

Easily you stepped into his arms, but something felt different that night. The bond between you and this shadow creature suddenly drew taut as a bowstring and your heart began to pound as you sensed the slight change. “Lamorak,” you gasped as his tentacles touched your neck and throat with searing affection, yet more winding around your waist and thighs. “Oh my god… that’s… that…”

“You want me to stop?” he purred in your ear.  

“No!” you gasped, and a tentacle slithered up your spine, beneath your clothes.  

Shaking, you tipped back into his hold and let him carry you to the bed. “I want you,” he said. “I want to show you how much I love you…”

“Please…” you hissed, throwing your head back as his shadows skimmed under your bra and brushed over your nipple. “Please…!”

Slowly, with the reverence of a pilgrim at a shrine, he undressed you, taking care to keep caressing you all the while with his many other tentacles. His four, pearlescent eyes blinked rapidly, though none of them at the same time, and as he worked you closer and closer, delving inside you and circling your clit enough to make you gasp and moan and cry out against his dark body, you caught a glimpse of his mouth for the very first time. A long, horizontal slit in the blackness of his face opened up, revealing a maw of pointed teeth, and a black tongue, long and languid.  

He dragged it over your thighs and stomach, over your hips, and finally down to enjoy the taste of you. Again and again his tongue savoured you and sent waves of pleasure throughout your whole body until you almost forgot how to breathe and your skin felt aflame.  

“Perfect,” he moaned against your body and you felt the echo of it in your mind. The constant whispering of the shadows around his tentacles rose to a cacophony as you bucked and heaved, heat coiling inside you.  

“I’m…” you cried out just before you came.  

Lamorak held you while you clenched and heaved, stroking you tenderly all the while, caressing you and kissing you until you finally fell back into the sheets beneath you. Your body was wrung out and tingling all over, and every time he moved even a little bit, you twitched again. He gave you kisses and told you in hoarse whispers how beautiful you were.  

“Don’t leave me,” you whimpered as he adjusted his tentacled embrace around you, and he washed slowly back over your body in a tide of darkness.  

“Shh,” he crooned. “I’m here. I’m always here for you. As long as you need me, I’m here. And I’m always yours.”

With those words echoing in your mind, you drifted quietly to sleep, naked in the safety of his arms.

—

I really hope you folks enjoyed this one! Don’t forget to let me know if you did enjoy it by leaving a like and/or reblogging it!

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[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

[just-anka]

I realised I haven’t really regularly posted here since like... I don’t even know, September? It’s been a while, anyway. A lot happened, and I now feel like actually writing a post for the first time in a while, so here goes haha. The first bullet point is entirely work waffle so feel free to skip. Apologies in advance for the fact that this post will probably reach novel length by the time I’m done. 

• I took a week off in late September before Ben started his new job so we could go to the mountains for a bit, and it was a much-needed little break from work. And pretty much right after I got back, work got completely mental - nothing bad as such, just one thing after the other, loads of deadlines, so many important things. First I was finishing up data for a paper (first authorship was being debated which is partially why I threw myself into the job so much, but it looks like it’ll be the PhD student before me’s now, which is how it should be tbh, it’s much more hers than it is mine), then the date for my first committee meeting was set and I suddenly had only two weeks to prepare (did not think it was going to be that short notice, whoops, had a very stressful two weeks but all went well - for us, this meeting means presenting our research plan and preliminary data to a committee of four professors so they can give you input, it’s not suuuper formal but still pretty stressful), then I had to write the report for that (I love writing so that one was okay), then there was suddenly a lot to do for a really important cooperation with a company (big money responsibility which stressed me the fuck out), and then, just as I thought I was pretty much done for the year, I realised I needed my lab book up to date for my end of year meeting with my PI (which wouldn’t be such a big deal, except I didn’t have a lab book at the time. Never got around to starting one. So nine months of lab book were written within another very stressful week). Whew. Even writing this out makes me feel like that was a lot haha. 

• After the end of year discussion, I really was done for the year - I officially worked until the 23rd but there was not that much actual work happening, and with the pressure off after months, I properly crashed for a few days. Ben left for England on the weekend after to see his family for christmas etc, and I spent most of that weekend sleeping and doing very little. It was needed. Then my mum came to visit me for the holidays and we had four really lovely days together, also involving a lot of chilling (the only actual thing we did was that magical winter hike that I posted some pictures of the other day). 

• And now I’m skiing! I was planning to go to England as well for NYE to see Ben’s family, but with the corona situation escalating again lately I decided it was too risky for just a few days. So I made a last-minute plan to go skiing by myself instead, because all that involves is a 2 hour train journey. I’m actually staying in a hotel too, which I’ve never done by myself before, I’m usually a dorm in a hostel type of person, but well. Covid has changed a lot of things :D trying to stay safe and away from people, which is of course not entirely possible in a ski resort, but it’s going okay. The skiing itself is great, it’s really nice having some time to go at my own pace and a few days in a row. Today was day 4 and I’ve really found my groove again (more on that later). There’s not much snow though so not many off-pisteing opportunities :/ I’m staying until Monday and then it’s back to work on Wednesday. 

• Speaking of skiing, we’ve got season passes this year, my first season and Ben’s second. We’ve just been doing on the weekends so far - since the 21st of November I just realised while looking back in my calendar! That’s one hell of an early season start haha. We did just one day three weekends and then one full weekend right before Ben left. The first few days were bloody hard. For context, I learned to ski before I learned to walk and loved it as a child, then stopped for a few years because I felt like I wasn’t progressing anymore and was getting bored with it, basically. Then last January I went to France with Ben and his skiing friends and got introduced to freeriding and the idea of ski touring, and now I’m back to loving it haha. I’d ideally like to not have to resort ski anymore at one point (meaning touring) because I know it’s terrible from an environmental standpoint but... idk. It’s currently my only option, and I love it a lot, so I guess it feels okay? Anyway, since I learned to ski so early, it’s the one sport that I’ve always been pretty good at and like, never get scared, at least not on piste. Until this year. The first three individual days were just all kind of horrible, the conditions weren’t ideal with very hard surface and tons of ice and pretty busy slopes, and only steep terrain open as well (Engelberg, our “home” resort - we have a season pass that encompasses a bunch of resorts so we’re not limited to one - is literally dead flat beginner’s slopes, which weren’t open in the beginning, or red runs that should be black and black lol). Pairing loads of ice with my old skis which barely have an edge anymore was... not ideal. I was so scared constantly and it made me like I lost all my ability etc etc. But yeah, turns out I just needed a few days and some easier conditions to get back into it, and now ice and steep stuff and everything is fine again. Who would’ve thought. (a sensible person, probably). 

• But then, the full weekend we skied in December was awesome! Saturday already felt much better and then it snowed a bunch over night and Sunday we spent all day powder skiing, basically. I learned SO much and just had an absolute ball! Definitely one of the best days skiing I’ve had, and one of the best days recently in general. 

• Plus that whole weekend was just lovely, car camping in a campsite full of huge campervans was pretty fun :D I love the looks we get when people see the car and clearly wonder where we sleep. And we’ve got our setup perfected for winter now so both the nights were toasty. Friday night we had dinner in “bed” watching a movie, and Saturday night we sat in the little kitchen (the campsite has it open for everyone, but everyone else there has a camper, so it doesn’t seem to be used much) drinking tea and playing cards and ahh. Camping in the mountains. My ideal life eh? (though the weekend before this wonderful one, we got snowed in because it dumped over a metre over night completely unexpectedly and that was stressful as hell, but I think that’s a story for another day, if ever, I’m kind of trying to forget that day :’D) 

• Yesterday I also finally took the plunge and ordered new skis. Been debating for ages which ones to get but I’ve finally decided and I’m now very excited! 

• Ok this post so far reads as “work and skiing” which is pretty much what November and December were and probably what January is going to be too haha. Ben and I want to ski another week together end of January as well, and there’s some big exciting work things coming up as well. 

• Even though I have to admit, now that I’m on a break, I’ve spent a lot of time dreading work and questioning my career choices and all of that lark... sigh. I love my job most of the time, but I kind of hate having a job? If that makes sense? Sometimes (okay a lot of the time) I just wish I had more time for other things that I care about. But I also now I’m lucky to have that job, especially this year, and lucky to have a job I don’t hate, and get to do a lot of fun stuff on the side, even if it often means little sleep and downtime. 

• Speaking of things I care about, I was on a proper roll with writing for a few days before and after Christmas. It’s ebbed off again a bit, but it was still pretty cool, and my totally-useless-all-cheese-project is now 33,000+ words long and like, half-way there story wise. Had a lot of fun with that. 

• Lastly, Ben is still in England, and he’s coming back next Sunday, and I can’t wait! I miss him so much when we’re not together it’s actually silly. Although it’s less stressful this time than the last few times because... we live together, his work just offered him an unlimited contract from January, and I’m stuck here for another 2-3 years, so it looks like we’ll actually get to be in the same place for now. Which is all I wished for last year, and I’m so damn grateful - that stability really is the best thing 2020 has brought for me. And, as he said, even though we were apart for the start of the new year, it will hopefully bring more time together than any previous year ♡

• Okay I think this is long enough now, if you actually made it until here you’re a hero and I will try and post a bit more regularly again now to avoid this size of mind dump :’D I hope you all got into the new year alright, it feels very strange to me that it’s 2021 because I actually slept through midnight on new year’s for the first time since I was tiny haha but I’m sure a lot of people feel the same way! 

[oookaline]

Miss You - Lyric Analysis

by me because im bored.

yet again because whats more fun than going over lyrics for the 2736843th time? Absolutely nothing! and if you thought of something, you're lying to youself

So, miss you was a song released in the 8th of December 2017.

Some backstory before.

ObViOusLy, the whole babygate thing, add a lil cherry on top with the Elk split up (23rd march 2015 - 2 weeks prior) and them getting back toguether in 2017 (17 Feb). All of this aswell as Danielle and Brenda in the middle of it.

K with all the smol context under us we can already look around and see that just by the title 'Miss You' people had speculated it was for Eleanor, and since Louis said :

I wrote this song about a time in my life when I was going out partying every night. In hindsight throughout that time I was pretty numb and just going through the motions. Deep down it was always in the back of my mind that what I really missed was the girl that I loved

which obviously links the song to two occurences:

Babygate: 'was going out partying every night' (since we know for a fact he literally went partying every week)

The split up from Elk

but the thing is right- lmao Danielle just danielled away. No mention whatsoever.

This, all of this, and JUsT that quote that Louis gave us already destroyed like- half the narrative of 'Really good friends w an oops baby' and (obviously) just tarnishes yet again the 'engagement' route they were going to take. BUT IT ALSO leaves Danielle behind as if she didn't even exist!!

Which by the way things look, she might not've anygays.

The music video was made in LA

which again (If I could I would literally kiss louis brain) links it to Babygate.

Now the lyrics

verse 1:

"Is it my imagination?

Is it something that I’m taking?

All the smiles that I’m faking

“Everything is great

Everything is fucking great”"

Obviously we can literally hear the sarcasm on the last two lines. 'All the fake smiles' reffering to all the pap pics he did while the lead up to the Holy Conception. Aswell that him reffering to the scene as 'imagination' or 'something that he's taking' could emphasize that its so bad, so unreal that he thinks its a joke and that he's either too drunk or thinking it.

Going out every weekend

Staring at the stars on the ceiling

Hollywood friends, gotta see them

Such a good time

I believe it this time

Again, him reffering to him being papped every week on a club with the first line, the 'stars on the' ceiling reffering to the lights in night clubs, 'Holywood Friends' reffering to Annas, and specially reffering to Snoop Dog and his launch party, which was when this picture happened:

pre chorus:

Tuesday night

Glazed over eyes

Just one more pint or five

Does it even matter anyway?

One of the fucking smartest lines in my opinion, him reffering to tuesday. Which is him reffering to the day the first article of him being out partying came out:

The next are him reffering to what always happened; drinking and feeling shit. 'does it even matter anyways' is his subcontious trying to tell him to give in and just do what they wanted him to do, saying that it doesn't even matter because either way the end will be shit (and bla bla bla, but again, its his subcontious. not him.)

chorus:

We’re dancing on tables

And I’m off my face

With all of my people

And it couldn’t get better they say

the first two lines are ofc reffering to the feeling of being drunk, 'dancing on tables' and 'of your face' are ohrases people use to refer to drunken states. The 'people' Louis is reffering to is his escorts; people paayed to carry out what is supposed to happen that night (bodyguards, pr managers, paps, in cases the girls aswell he appears papped with), and the line 'couldn't get better they say' has both the connotation of this being the LA dream, of always partying, knocking chicks up, drinking to your hearts desire- aswell as having the connotation of 'his people' telling him it will not get better, so don't try to oppose it. (which links back to the previous verse 'does it even matter anyway')

We’re singing 'til last call

And it’s all out of tune

Should be laughing, but there’s something wrong

And it hits me when the lights go on

Shit, maybe I miss you

'singing til last call' refers to how late he spent in the clubs and 'out of tune' suggest again the drunk state. 'Should be laughing but there's something wrong' is again, elluding to that LA dream partying state that should've been what he was feeling, since that's what the media said. The 'lights go on' is reffering to the paps, when they take pictures (and obviously the miss you is talking about eleanor because he'd much rather stunt with her than be here lmao ) And yes, the miss you is reffering to Harry.

There doesn't have to be a reason and obviously it could also be a stunt line in the song- but let me explain what I think: We can see Louis' state by the end of the paps shoots, how he slowly just becomes VERY tired towards the last few ones. And keep in mind he was also touring with 1D WHILE HE PARTIED. Which meant it was Show-Party-Show-Party with things thrown between it aswell. Giving close to little time to spend w Harry.

(Pretty sure that's not at all what happened, its just what I think- it was such a fucking busy thing, I'd not be surprised if they both were stressed and not having enough 1-1 time)

Verse 2:

Just like that and I’m sober

I’m asking myself, “Is it over?”

Maybe I was lying when I told you

“Everything is great

Everything is fucking great”

First line reffering to how in the morning, next day of partying, he was again sober- for the shows- and him asking 'is it over' refers to how he just wanted it to be over with, all the patying and paps.

The two last lines could signify him talking to someone about his life- I'd say that the 'you' here does not mean Harry- but someone else- them asking "How's your life going" and then him going "Great Great, yeah- fookin great ykwim"

something along the lines of that you get me.

And all of these thoughts and the feelings

Chase you down if you don’t need them

I’ve been checking my phone all evening

Such a good time

I believe it this time

the first and second lines here are again, Louis talking about his subcontious; that 'this will turn on us' reffering to him and Harry. About a (probable) fear that this will make a strain in their relationship and stuff.

(a/n: kind of like how a lot of shippers unlarried while babygate was happening because 'louis couldn't cheat' or how a lot of shippers say they broke up during that time because 'Harry couldn't take the stress' and stuff)

Im not saying they broke up not that he cheated. What I'm saying is that there was a fear that this would make them break up- he says 'chase you down' which has the animalification of the wolves chasing down the pray to kill them etc.

Bridge:

Now I’m asking my friends how to say “I’m sorry”

They say “Lad, give it time, there’s no need to worry”

And we can’t even be on the phone now

And I can’t even be with you alone now

the first line links to what I said about Louis' subconcious; this would be that constant need to say 'I am sorry' for something that isn't his fault or something that he can't control, and then the second line goes on to say that he doesn't have to worry because, again, its not his fault and Harry undertands that.

Now the 'We can't even be on the phone now, I can't even be with you alone now' refers to their public appearance, on how other than that Paris interview there are no other interviews with just them two, on how we didn't get a Larry hour on 1Dday... It refers to them literally being unable to say anything to each other because of management.

Oh, how shit changes

We were in love, now we’re strangers

I WANT TO ALIENATE THESE TWO LINES BECAUSE OF HOW FUCKING LOUT IT IS.

this one links ti the last two of the previous, again on their public image (His and Harry's) about how they were once in love (fetus) but now they're strangers (the mortal enemies narrative)

When I feel it coming up, I just throw it all away

Get another two shots 'cause it doesn’t matter anyway

And to top off these last two lines of the bridge is him linking all of this back to the start of the song: 'is it my imagination, is it something that I'm taking' with 'when I feel it coming up, I just throw it all away'; when the thoughts that this is all fake and once he wakes up or stop imagining its all going to be better (aswell as with the connotation of over partying and vomiting) but at the same time him making himself stop those thoughts because he knows this is reality. And then round back again with the repetition of 'doesn't matter anyways' with it feeling like a dead end to him.

[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.

[ladyofpurple]

here it is: the post Literally no one was waiting for. i'd put it under a read more thing but i'm on mobile and can't be assed to get out of bed so fuck it. we air our dirty laundry on main for the world to see like men.

so waaay back in february or something, i started seeing a psychologist again. i'd been seeing a psychologist for a while last year, but she had a private practice and got too expensive over time, so i had to stop. now, however, i finally got a referral to the public mental health offices in my county. which is nice, because norway has this neat thing that means when you go to the doctor, public health care facilities, refill prescriptions for medications you have to take daily, etc, the money you spend on those things gets recorded and after you've spent like $260, you get a free card that gets logged into your medical records and you don't have to pay for any of those things for the rest of the year.

anyway, i mentioned a couple of years back that i finally got put on antidepressants for the first time. they helped a lot, but then i just... stopped taking them. there wasn't a reason, really. i just forgot to take them one week when i was stuck in bed with a headcold, and then it was hard to get back in the habit again. i tried to get back on them off and on for a long time, but i'd inevitably just forget again. until, like, i wanna say november/early december last year? i started taking them again. there were still some slip-ups every now and then, but for the most part i took them almost every day. any gaps were no longer than two, maybe three days at the most, and those gaps were maybe once a month or so on average. averages aren't really useful in this context, but i hope you get the idea.

anyway, i finally convinced my doctor that, no, seriously, i really need to see a psychologist, i've always needed to see psychologists my whole life, seeing psychologists help me, i can't afford a private psychologist so i need a public one, and after a lot of begging and insisting on my end and a lot of hemming and hawing on her end she finally agreed to refer me. except she forgot to actually send the email she'd been typing in front of me, and then she quit, so there was a lot of confusion and time spent sorting things out until i got my first appointment.

i didn't like my psychologist at first. she was way older than i'm usually comfortable with (that's a personal me-problem that i know is irrational, and i'm not gonna go into the why but yes i'm working on it), and very blunt in an exasperated sort of way. she made me angry sometimes. she made me feel like i wasn't trying hard enough. but she helped me get shit done, so i guess she was doing something right.

in june she called in a psychiatrist to help adjust my medications, so i started taking zoloft in addition to the other medication (remeron, aka mirtazapine) that i was already taking. the mirtazapine was helping with my depression, but my anxiety was still pretty bad. the zoloft helped.

by my second appointment with my psychologist, she asked me whether i could have adhd, or if there was a history of it in my family. now, i have a lot of family with adhd (how closely related we are by blood is a bit of a mystery to me, my family tree is more like an overgrown hedge and who knows who fits where), and my grandma used to joke that the women in our family "all have a little bit of that adhd brain in us", but as far as i knew, nobody in my immediate, direct bloodline had such a diagnosis. i had my suspicions about myself, of course — i knew that not every focus or attention related problem necessarily has a specific attention disorder source, but i also knew that what i was experiencing couldn't be "normal," in the sense that if i walked into a room with 100 people in it, 86 of those people wouldn't necessarily look at a list of my symptoms and go "oh same hat." i've had add on my about me for a while now. maybe that was silly of me; i hadn't been diagnosed with it, and what i knew about the specifics of it were picked up piecemeal off the internet. you know, that super-reliable place where everyone is honest and factual all the time?

anyway, this began the process of investigating the merits of such a potential diagnosis. research was begun. questionnaires were taken. my mom was invited to one of my sessions, in which she revealed that, oh yeah, bee tee dubs, she's always suspected i have adhd. did she mention that she has also apparently always suspected ocd and that i'm autistic? no? whoops, well, she has now.

end of june i was referred to the neuropsychologist devision of the public health care place. over the course of a little over 6 weeks i went in for 2 interviews, in which i answered several questionnaires, talked about my life and childhood and traumas and what my mom had told me about her pregnancy and labor, every possible symptom i'd ever had, and was sent home with even *more* questionnaries. in addition to these, i went in for two rounds of "testing," in which i was tested on my memory, pattern recognition, reaction time, impulse control, and probably a dozen other things. i was nervous. it was exhausting. i wanted answers but was terrified of what those answers would be.

end of august, my mom came with me for the big reveal. and guess what? she was right. primary diagnosis: adhd, special emphasis on the attention deficit part. bonus diagnosis: asperger syndrome. surprise! i'm autistic, i guess.

it was hard to come to terms with. which sounds really silly, since i wouldn't have even been taking those tests if i didn't think the outcome was a possibility. and it's not like the diagnoses were surprising either. the adhd part was easier to accept, mostly because i already felt pretty confident i had it. but the asperger diagnosis was harder. having to unlearn all those ingrained ableist stereotypes and social stigmas is hard, especially when you had some you didn't even realize were there. it's very surreal to think a thought and be like "no, wait, i do that. that joke is about me." it's a very surreal and slightly upsetting experience to realize how biased you are as general rule, but especially about a facet of your own identity you weren't aware of. and the feeling of everything and nothing changing all at once. i've always been like this. a doctor telling me i have two cognitive/developmental disabilities isn't an event that magically gave me these disabilities. my brain has always worked like this. the only difference between me now and me a year ago is that i have an official, medical reason for Why now.

that's another thing: coming to terms with the idea of being "developmentally disabled." it's not like i'm suddenly a different person — i have to constantly remind myself that my brain has always been like this. but having a piece of paper confirming that i am legally entitled to special allowances in the workplace or at school because i have not one, but two "disabilities" is absolutely buckwild to me.

it makes me reevaluate my life and my past. how many situations did i make worse because i did not have the capacity or knowledge about how my own brain works to self-reflect? was i high-functioning in the past because life was simpler? was it because i subconsciously had a better handle on what works for me and what doesn't, and somewhere along the way i lost that? or was it simply because i didn't have the option to be anything other than high-functioning? it's confusing.

i also lost my spot at college. i can still reapply next year if i want, but at least now i know why i was failing out lmao

anyway, by my birthday in september we started the process of adjusting my medication again. upping my zoloft, getting me off remeron, and as of 6 weeks ago or so, beginning ritalin.

it was a rocky start, but i'm up to 60mg now. two pills in the morning, one in the afternoon. i have a goddamn alarm for 8am every day, even weekends. my sleeping is still wonky, but at least im genuinely tired by 8pm every night. the psychiatrist still wants me to try melatonin for a month (even though i told her multiple times it has never worked for me, and my problem has never been "i'm not sleepy enough"), so i'm on a whopping 2mg of melatonin for the next 30 days. norwegians are fucking WEIRD about melatonin, don't even get me started.

a slightly unexpected side-effect (on my end) of these medication changes: remeron made me gain weight. like, a lot of weight. and i was constantly hungry all the time, overeating to ridiculous amounts. why did nobody ever tell me that weight gain and metabolism changes are a side-effect of anti-depressants? i was more active this summer than i'd been in, like, three years and i just got fatter. which was incomvenient because i kept outgrowing my clothes. anyway, a side effect of ritalin is a loss of appetite and general weight loss. the combination of regularly taking ritalin and dropping remeron entirely? i eat a fraction of what i used to before, i've almost entirely stopped snacking, and i've lost 15 lbs in less than a month. i've already noticed my face is slightly slimmer now. maybe by christmas i'll be able to fit into my old tshirts again.

anyway, my psychologist quit, so i have a new one now. i've only seen her a few times, but she's veeeery different from my old one. i can't decide if i like her or not.

in the middle of all this, i've been going to the social security office as well to kind of get some of my own money, possibly help me get a job at some point in the future. my caseworker is super nice. if she's over 30 i'd be shocked. i relate to her really well, she's very helpful and understanding, and she's very patient with me and my bullshit. she's the kind of person where if we met at a party or something we could probably hang out.

anyway, she's helped me get out of the house sometimes. she introduced me to this youth club volunteer group thing called the fountain house, designed for young people who've dealt with or are currently dealing with mental illnesses and such. i hung out there yesterday and the day before and did some basic office work. it's nice. and then there's a work placement place that can either give you a job on site in one of their four departments, or help you get a job at an actual business elsewhere with more support and leniency than you might get if they just hired you off the street. i'd start in their second hand store. they clean and restore all donations they recieve, and they're super fucking cheap. i treated myself to my literal lifelong dream of owning a vintage typewriter (!!!!!) yesterday, because it's almost christmas and goddammit, i've been doing so much shit the past couple of months i deserve it. do i have space for it? not really. do i have a plan on what to use it for? no. was it heavy and miserable trekking through the snow and rain yesterday back and forth? was it worth the backache in the morning? fuck yeah it was.

a fucking lot of things are happening all at once. diagnoses, medications, lifestyle changes, work placement, social clubs, dealing with bureaucracies on all sides just so i can feel like a person again, not to mention juggling hobbies like writing and drawing and maintaining my irl friendships. i'm getting as many balls rolling as i can while i have the opportunity and mental/emotional capacity to, but i'm worried i'll burn out again. i'm stabilizing and slowly building my life back up, but jesus christ it would suck if this stupid house of cards collapsed again. but i'm tentatively optimistic. who knows, maybe it's not to late to course-correct my mistakes.

so long story short, that's why i've barely been active on tumblr for months. that's why i haven't been writing, drawing, or reading fic. it's coming along, but it's slow.

i guess the most important thing is that it's coming along at all.

[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