#denying myself of my past is denying my present self | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

gretavanmoon · 6 months ago

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The Proposition (S17)

Spinning Now: "Birthday Sex" by Jeremih (2009)

Pairing: Danny x female reader

Word Count: 14.3k

Description: Danny's always been that friend and roommate who you never thought of as anything more, until a birthday proposition presents itself in a way that neither of you can deny.

Warnings: Drinking, Cursing, Heavy Flirting, Praise, Dirty Talk, Touching, Wax Play

Smut: Kissing, Oral M!Receiving, Oral F!Receiving, Fingering, Unprotected Sex (use protection!!)

+ This little diddly of an idea has been swimming around in my head for months now, and I've been so excited to get it going. And thanks to the reader who suggested it be a roomies trope ;) Hope ya like xoxo

Girl you know i i i...

HER POV

White or red?

There is no special occasion, simply just the bi-weekly dinner gathering of your friend group that has turned into an every-Thursday-night habit. Not that an occasion constitutes your wine choice, but still yet, the thought quickly crosses your mind. You are all meeting at your and Danny’s house tonight, along with the conjoined group of friends that has been steadily keeping each other fed for the past two and a half years, now.

You’d been living with Danny for as long as you could remember, taking claim of his spare room sometime after everyone collectively moved out of your parents’ homes. The arrangement worked perfectly, the two of you already knowing how the other ticked after being friends for many years. Your jobs kept both of you busy, giving the other enough room that you didn’t feel like you were invading space in the small house.

You pull your phone from your pocket as you peruse the wine selections, texting the group chat to check on tonight’s menu.

You: What are we making tonight again? I already forgot

Jake: Salmon and quinoa and some other stuff

Jake: God your memory sucks

You: Emma, come get your man he’s being mean to me again

Emma: Quit picking on her babe

You: Ok so I should get white wine, right? Pairs with fish?

Sam: Just get three fuckin bottles of wine, who cares

You: Ok I’m not coming if you guys are gonna continue to harass me

Sam: Too bad it’s your house and you have to be there anyway

You: I’ll lock myself in my room I don’t care

Danny: No Y/N, if they’re gonna be assholes they don’t have to come over. They can stay home and we can order pizza :)

Jake: Shut the fuck up Sam, I’m making the damned salmon and quinoa

Josh: What the fuck is quinoa

You shove your phone back in your pocket as you roll your eyes, the buzzing still consistent as you imagine they are still arguing with one another.

It's funny how much Danny has been defending you lately. He’s still his normal self, your very good friend who sometimes lets his sweet side get the better of him, but in the past couple of months, something has switched. The more the brothers pick on you, the more he stands up for you. It used to be the opposite, with him joining in on your playful dog-piling any chance he could get. But ever since a couple of months ago… ever since his last birthday…

Almost three years ago now, you and Danny had found yourselves wrapped up in each other’s arms in his bed after a drunken night that started out like any other, dinner, socializing, cards, and way too much to drink. It was his birthday party, and after everyone else had cleared out, you stayed up to clean up the multitude of plastic cups and empty bottles that were scattered around the house. You were both fairly drunk, and you knew if you got the majority of the party cleaned up that night, you wouldn’t have to bother with it all while being inevitably hungover the next morning.

“I’ll get out of your hair soon, Danny. I’m about to call an Uber to go stay with Emma.” You’d said as you dried the last of the dishes. He was sprawled out over on the loveseat, his shirt halfway unbuttoned and his mess of curls pulled up on top of his head. You’d always found him attractive, but you’d always been positive he was way out of your league. He’d never even given you a passing glance in that way. Except, that night, he looked exceptionally delicious… and your hazy, drunken mind undoubtedly had started to drift.

“What? Whyyyyy…? Don’t get an Uber, it’s too late,” he’d slurred as you walked over to sit on the ottoman his feet were rested on.

“Becauseeee… it’s your birthday and I don’t want to interrupt your time with whatever guest you might have coming over.” You remember the words felt heavy in your mouth, like it was strange that you had never talked about Danny’s personal life out loud before. Or yours, for that matter. Even after all the years of being friends and roommates, the two of you had always taken things as they’d come… watching as strangers made their way in and out of your bedrooms without a second question.

“Guest?” His face contorted. “I ‘ont have a guest coming over, Y/N…”

You’d let your mouth gape open and your hand clutch your chest in a display of over-dramatics. “Really? No one to give you a happy ending on your birthday?! You must be falling off the wagon, Wagner.”

What you do remember, though, was how hard he laughed at your half-assed attempt at a shitty joke.

“I swear! Just me, tonight.” It was at that very second that you remember becoming enamored with the way he licked his lips, how he clicked his tongue just a little, and how his eyes had fluttered closed under his lashes. He’d reached his hand out for you to grab, so you did.

“You gonna let me be lonely on my birthday, Y/N?” His warm fingers slowly worked their way to interlace with yours. This flirtatious tone wasn’t something you’d ever seen from him before, but for some reason, you found yourself tumbling for it. The deep rasp in his voice signaled something else, something so unexpected from him that you almost laughed it off as him kidding with you.

Your eyes had glanced around the room in confusion, and when you didn’t answer, you felt his foot kick into your leg, bringing your eyes back to look at him. His eyebrow was cocked in the air, as if he was waiting for an answer.

“You’re drunk, Danny… you don’t…” you’d anxiously answered, nodding your head side to side in disbelief.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t want me to… stay…” for some reason, he was making you nervous, and you were having trouble answering him. There was no way he wanted you to stay, of all people. No way in hell.

He’d laughed, sitting up on the couch and leaning over to take you in his arms in a giant bear hug. His face was buried into your shoulder, pulling you close in the warmest embrace you’d had in a while. It was strange feeling him this closely, and you shivered a little at his touch. You’d hugged him back, and then felt his lips drift close to your ear.

“I actually do… want you to stay here with me. In my room, in my bed, until tomorrow morning…” his voice crackled in your ear, the faint scent of spicy tequila still on his breath. It’d sent chills all over your body, and you had to admit, it was a strangely welcome feeling. Danny had never been this close to you, like this, ever before. His words had shocked your system, though, temporarily deeming you unable to respond.

So when he finally pulled back from the hug and confidently met your eyes again, you let yourself go with it. You were still fairly intoxicated, but this drop dead gorgeous friend of yours who had hardly ever given you the time of day was now throwing himself into your lap. Why turn him down? It was his birthday, after all.

“I never knew you were into me, Danny,” you’d cooed, watching as his fingers drifted across the back of your hand.

He sat back and dropped his head against the cushion again, cracking his fingers above his head. “I‘ve always been into you, Y/N. You’re gorgeous and fun, make me laugh… always been so good to me.”

You’d never admitted it, but of course you had pictured yourself with him a time or two. How could you not? Talented, handsome, kind and genuine…always looking for fun and always including you in his outlandish plans. But this…him laying it out on the line like this? It had your body beginning to physically yearn for him, completely out of nowhere.

“Stop playing, no you haven’t…” you’d argued, still in disbelief.

He held his hands up in surrender, cocking a sideways smile. “I swear. I just… never had the guts to say anything…”

You contemplated it all for a second, giving him a questioning look that begged for his reassurance.

“Why not, ya know? Not like we’re strangers…” you’d muttered through a sharp inhale.

You stood from the ottoman and slowly began stepping one foot in front of the other toward him, standing just between his legs. Your heart rate spiked as you answered him, your face flushing with the reality of what you were about to do. “Just a birthday hookup, huh? Just this one time?”

You let your hand brush against his thigh, your fingers lightly tickling until they reached his hip. It felt as though your hands were disconnected from your body, making their own decision to reach out and touch him as he sat reclined in front of you. Gently, his hands pulled around your waist, his thumbs digging into the flesh, strong and inviting.

“Just this one time…and that’s it.”

That night, the two of you stayed up until the winter sun was striking through the windows onto Danny’s white down comforter, and only then did the two of you finally drift off to a short but sweet slumber, until the alarm on his phone woke you both in a panic.

You’d fallen asleep upside-down on the bed, both of your heads at the foot of his king-size. His arm was draped across the small of your back, and his hair was still a messy bundle of curls at the back of his head.

“Fuck,” he’d muttered, rubbing his eyes. “What time is it?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know, it’s your alarm…”

Suddenly, now, in the light of day and the brightness of the room, the both of you became very conscious of your unclothed selves. You’d felt your cheeks blush at the sight of him, skin still dewy with the after-effects of sweat and sex. You didn’t miss his passing glance of you, too, still halfway wrapped up in his sheets as he maneuvered to the top of the bed to check the time.

“‘S only seven. Shit, I’ve got a headache…” he said, running a hand over his face.

“Me too,” you mumbled as he laid back down beside you. You pulled the covers up a bit more over your body, feeling extremely exposed in the bright sunlight. He propped himself up on his elbows, giving you a sweet and questioning look. “So, what are we supposed to do now?” you’d asked. “Cuddle?”

His laugh bounced off the walls, the glitter in his eye sending a wave of nerves through your body.

“We cuddled plenty last night, Y/N. We didn’t end up falling asleep until like, six,” he said, his voice groggy with sleep, or lack thereof.

“Fuck,” you breathed. “I’m sorry for keeping you up all night, I know you have things to do all day–” he cut you off with a kiss, his neck craning down to meet your lips with the sweetest surprise touch.

After a few fleeting seconds he pulled away, meeting your eyes as he spoke again. “Don’t you dare apologize to me, Y/N. I asked you to stay in here. Asked you to keep me company on my birthday.” His hand reached up to pull the hair away from your cheek, bringing instant flashbacks of his hands on your face and shoulders last night as he pinned you down, fucking you into his mattress. “I was just completely unaware that both of us would last for that many hours…” he laughed, rolling away to cover his face.

“God, Danny, don’t embarrass me!” you laughed along with him.

“What is there to be embarrassed about?! Shit, I think we were great together,” he went on, holding his hand out for you to low-five.

You pursed your lips together, letting your hand clap onto his. “We were, weren’t we? Never would have thought.”

“Shit, I thought about it all the time…” he admitted.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” you played, smacking him across the chest.

“I don’t know, you’re just a girl in my friend group, ya know? My roommate that helps me with rent…didn’t want to freak you out or something and make you hate me,” he explained.

You propped up on your elbow, shaking your head at him. “So we could have been doing this all along?”

“Oh, so you enjoyed yourself, then?” he countered, rolling you to lie on your back as he pulled himself over you again.

As you gazed up at him above you, small curly strands falling around his face and onto yours, you felt your face get hot, the same need you felt in your stomach for him last night coming back full force. A need you never thought you would have for him. A need that came back to you over and over again the night before, and left you both too exhausted to even bother to see the morning.

“Danny, we fucked like five times, of course I enjoyed myself,” you tried to keep the confidence heavy in your voice.

His nose scrunched up as he giggled, light and airy into the room. He laced his fingers with yours, lifting your hands together into the air and pulling them back down between you again. This time, you took the initiative and kissed him again, straining to keep things from moving as quickly as they had moved once you finally climbed into his lap on the couch last night.

When you finally separated, both of you refraining from letting it go any further, he disconnected your hands and clenched his jaw. “What do we do now?”

You didn’t want a relationship. And neither did he. That much was very known amongst your friend group, the both of you way too busy with your own lives to devote your time to another. You stood strong in that decision, and you knew for a fact that he would, too. So your mind began wandering, thinking of ways to end this entanglement you’d found yourselves in.

“What if we just… did this sometimes?” you proposed.

His brow furrowed. “I’m listening…”

“Our birthdays. Yours in December, and mine in June… it’s perfect. If the both of us are single on our birthday each year, we make a plan to not leave the other lonely…” The idea seemed preposterous, but at the same time, it didn't. A sure-fire way to make each of your birthdays interesting each year, and after the night you’d shared last night, you’re positive he wouldn’t turn the idea down.

His eyes dashed around the room as he considered it, taking a deep breath as he sat up in the bed. You caught a glance of his naked lower half, and your eyes rolled back on their own accord as you pictured his hips pounding into yours last night in the darkness of his bedroom. You sat up too, challenging his gaze.

He held his hand out again, this time for you to shake.

“Deal.”

—-

After deciding on the three bottles of wine, two white and a red, your mind begins wandering off by itself, causing you to hardly pay attention to the fact that you are singing the words to the song playing in your headphones out loud. You bite your lips, glancing around to see if anyone had seen you, or worse, heard your horribly flat singing voice. Luckily the aisle is clear, so you make a mad dash for the checkout line, ready to get out and head back home for dinner.

The drive is short, and when you finally arrive in the driveway, you find that you’re the last one to get there.

“Hello, hello,” you sing as you let yourself inside, kicking off your flip flops at the door. You set the bag of wine bottles on his island where Jake and Sam are busy preparing the meal.

“Thank god, the booze is here!” you hear Josh sing through the house as he makes his way over to stand beside you, opening the drawer of the island to search for Danny’s wine opener. You set all three bottles in line on the countertop in a nice straight line. “Shiraz, Y/N? That’s surely a bold choice…” Josh says, rolling his eyes.

“The label looked pretty, I don’t know!” you counter, shoving your shoulder into his. “It already smells really good, guys…” you say as you leave Josh to the wine, leaning over Jake’s shoulder as he stirs a pot at the stove. Suddenly Danny is leaning over his other side, sticking his finger in whatever sauce Jake is stirring.

“Aht, aht!” Jake swats his hand away just as Danny sticks his finger into the saucepan. “It’s not perfect yet…”

“Tastes good as hell to me,” Danny says, locking eyes with you as he pops his lips over his finger. You feel your insides churn.

“So Y/N, your birthday is next week, you guys planning your weird little bi-yearly birthday hookup still?” Josh nonchalantly asks as he yanks the cork from the bottle of red. Fortunately, it only took nearly two years for your friends to catch on to your and Danny’s little birthday agreement, when Jake inadvertently tried to surprise Danny with filling up his bathroom with balloons, only to find you bent over the bathroom sink.

“Christ, Josh, you have to put it like that?” Danny intervened. “Geez…”

“What?! That’s what it is, right?” Josh says as he pulls glasses down from the cabinet. You feel your face blush, even though it’s an open topic, at this point.

Danny pulls himself up to sit on the corner of his countertop. “No, we simply enjoy the other’s company on our birthdays because both of us suck at the dating playing field and always decide to indulge in one another’s availability, right Y/N?”

“That’s correct,” you confidently agree as you listen to the others groan.

Josh throws his head back and laughs loudly.

“What?” Danny yelps.

“You don’t think it’s funny that neither of you have ever had a significant other on your birthdays for the past what, three years now?” Josh says, eliciting silent looks of agreement from his brothers.

“Mmm, no, I don’t think it’s funny. We both suck at dating, you heard him. This is just…our way of making sure we aren’t alone twice a year.” The attempt at explaining yourselves is transparent, at this point. You know you’re lying to yourselves. It's obvious. Each and every time you pull yourself from Danny’s bed, or he from yours, you feel your bones begging you to stay. You like him, you’ll admit it, but only to yourself.

Twice a year isn’t enough, it was never enough. And you know for a fact that it will never be enough. On his birthday last year, you could have sworn you heard him say something close to the ‘L’ word as he came for the third time that night, his voice low and whining as you clenched around him, bringing him to his completely fucked-out state of mind. Each hookup had gotten hotter, heavier, and more serious. Each time was better than the last, and this last one was so intense, that you ended up staying in his room a second night, completely breaking your own rules.

As you slipped out of his bedroom that second morning, his honey brown eyes were begging you to stay, his lips touching his fingertips and blowing it your way as you quietly shut his bedroom door behind you.

That morning broke you. That morning your heart told you what it wanted.

That morning was the last time you denied it to yourself– you were absolutely head over heels for him. The yearning you’d felt had begun overtaking your whole self. And it wasn’t just yearning, it was something else. Something more powerful, something you couldn’t grasp the notion of, because you’d never felt it before. It’s now become something that makes your days drag by with the thought of him, not only sexually but personally, too. You feel wrapped up in his life, intertwined with his decisions, and some days you barely even have the time to give each other more than a goodmorning and goodnight. Sure, you still meet up every week with your group for dinner, but the subtle touches and the intense glances that are being shared almost on the daily now have become too much. You want to tell him. You need to tell him.

“Hm. Okay, so… what’s the plan this year?” Josh asks, obviously wanting to pry into your business, just like always.

“Josh, it’s none of your fucking business. Can you leave them alone for a second?” Sam says as he empties the box of rice into the insta-pot.

“No, it’s fine. I have big plans…” Danny bites his cheeks in as he denies himself a cheeky smile, swinging his bare feet as he sits on the counter. His eyes are boring into yours, and you swear just a simple word from him would have you on your knees for him, anymore.

“Big plans, huh?” you try to avoid his stare.

“Mmmmhm…” he says, grinning to himself. “Might have you running away and never coming back, though.”

You nearly choke on the sip of wine swirling in your mouth. Throughout the years, you will admit, your hookups had gotten more and more mischievous as time went on, both of you pushing each other’s boundaries just a little more each time. Nothing had ever gotten too crazy, but after his birthday last year, it was an unwritten understanding that not much was off the table, at all.

Sam plugs his ears with his fingers. “La la la I don’t wanna hear details!”

Jake pulls his wooden spoon from the sauce, turning to face all of you. “I do, I wanna hear it. Keep going. What’s the plan?”

“I’m not fuckin’ tellin’ you guys, it’ll ruin the surprise,” Danny argues as Josh hands him a glass of wine.

“Okay well you can tell me after her birthday then, right?” Jake pushes.

Emma steps in front of him, taking the now dripping spoon from his hand and running her tongue up the side to catch it from going into the floor. “Yeah Danny, maybe you should give him the rundown, maybe it’ll get his wheels turning,” she challenges, bouncing her eyebrows to Jake as she places the spoon back into the sauce. You laugh at her, feeling no embarrassment in the least.

“Get my wheels turning?! What is that supposed to mean?!” Jake yells, grabbing her waist from behind and spinning her around the kitchen.

You lock eyes with Danny again as he gives you a suspicious look of excitement, like he’s trying his hardest to keep his idea locked inside.

—---

After a rambunctious and wine-drunk dinner, everyone begins to file out of the house, stumbling away to either walk down the street to their respective homes, or catching a ride out with other friends to the nearest bar. You’re left behind again, like always, helping Danny with dishes and pouring out the remaining bits of wine left behind in the glasses.

“So, next week. The big 2-5. You still down for hanging out?” he asks as he dries the last dish, as if you would ever say no.

“Actually, I think I’m going to spend this year alone, ya know? Keep it low key, order some take-out and curl up on the couch,” you say with a cheeky tone.

His jaw hangs slack as he nearly drops the towel in his hand. “Really?”

You scoff. “No, Danny. Are you serious? We shook on it, and I don’t break my promises,” you laugh. You slowly walk toward him, the line between friend and more than a friend getting blurrier as time goes on. You want to put your hands on his bare chest, press yourself against his warm body, crane your neck up to meet for a sweet kiss, but you don’t. Because you can’t. Because he isn’t yours.

So instead you just simply stand before him, leaning a hand onto the countertop.

He lets out an audible sigh of relief. “Shew, good. I was about to be pissed at you, Y/N,” he breathes as he playfully shoves your shoulder. “Standing me up on your birthday…”

You smile as you realize your feet are carrying you closer to him on their own. You try to stop them, try to tell them no, but you can’t. Now you’re standing in front of him, your chests almost touching as you let your finger trail up his arm to his neck. “I’d never stand you up, Danny. Not in a million years,” you murmur.

You feel his body stiffen as you let your singular fingertip connect with his skin, your touch a featherlight drift. You glance down at his hand balanced on the cold marble countertop, his fingers tightening and loosening under the weight of his own want to touch you back. You hear him breathe in, fast and choppy as you begin to manipulate the line between friends and more, truly unable to keep it black and white no matter how much you try. Finally you let your eyes look into his, dark and brooding and looking a lot like they do after a few rounds of self-indulgence with you.

“Good,” he growls, “because I have a hell of a night planned for us.”

Us.

“Is that right?” you question, still trailing your fingertip across his arm and neck. You can see the chill bumps forming on his skin now, and you can tell he is physically restraining himself from succumbing to his mental constraints. You have to admit, you’re finding it very satisfying, watching his mind tell his body no. The muscles in his arms flex and tighten as you step closer, slowly tiptoeing to bring your faces close, your lips barely ghosting his.

“That’s very right,” he whispers, opening his mouth slightly as if he’s going to kiss you, but instead pulling back a little. The proximity is enough to make you feel soaked already, your entire body buzzing with fire for him.

“When do you want me ready?” you breathe, letting your lips graze across his, your finger now hooked behind his bicep. His hands are still gripping as he balances between the island and the countertop as he leans down to you, restraining himself still yet.

He’s inhaling and blowing air quickly through his nose, and you know for a fact that he’s holding himself back with everything in him. His jaw clenches hard as his eyes stay trained on your lips. “Want you right now, if I’m being honest…” His words make the butterflies in your stomach explode their wings.

You can taste the wine still heavy on his breath. “But it’s not my birthday, Danny…” you retort.

He takes a deep breath. “I’m getting to a point where I don’t care.”

You swallow it down. Maybe your thoughts are mutual… Your heart is absolutely racing, like it would do when you found out your elementary school crush liked you back. You don’t even know what to say, at this point, you want him so badly…your vision blurring with the mental snaps of the two of you wrapped up in one another again.

“You should care, we have an agreement,” you admit through your teeth, as badly as it hurts to say it. “We set our rules.”

He scoffs hard. “I don’t remember signing my name on any dotted line, Y/N,” he spurts back, making you feel that drop in your stomach again. He wants to break the rules, too.

You bite your lips in, deciding to cut your losses. You step back from him, disconnecting your finger from behind his arm, and stepping away. The flushed look on his pink cheeks is enough to make you want to run back into his arms, and the look on his face makes it seem as though he just lost the one thing in his life he never planned on having, anyway.

“I asked you a question, Danny. When do you want me ready?” you say strongly.

He closes his eyes and recenters, swallowing down his thoughts. “Uh, uhm. F-Friday. Around 8.” He finally cleans up his expression and meets you with a smile again. “Be ready to celebrate.”

—--

DANNY POV

Friday rolls around more quickly than you thought it would. The group had decided to rain-check family dinner this week, planning on celebrating Y/N’s birthday the following weekend when everyone would be in town at the same time.

Your palms had been sweaty all day just at the thought of what tonight would hold, and you realize that you hadn’t been this anxious for a night together with Y/N, yet. The nerves are positively eating you alive, but you shove them down, knowing that you shouldn’t be having them in the first place. She doesn’t feel for you the same way you feel for her, and she likely never will.

It’s heartbreaking and wasteful, really, knowing that your sexual chemistry with her is only put to good use twice a fucking year when it should be being shared with her whenever you wanted to show her how much you really care, but. Here you find yourself.

She’s taking up all the extra space in your mind these days. You feel like you’re floating on air each and every time the vision of her face pops into your mind, you feel like you can feel the blood in your veins rising to a hotter temperature than you’ve ever experienced, and you find yourself wanting to give her all the things she’s ever wanted, and more. Your friend, one of your best friends, you’d say, unknowingly spinning herself into your life in a way that you can’t even tell her about.

That last birthday you shared together, your twenty-fifth, wasn’t the same as the rest before it. Sure, fucking her was high on your list of excellent sexual experiences thus far, but that last time, shit. Had your head spinning for days after. Never had a woman gotten you more fucked up than she did after that night. Two nights, really. That was when you knew it was real. When you wanted to ask her to stay, don’t go… be with me here and don’t ever leave… But your pride got the best of you. So you let her walk out, taking every single last bit of hope you had to make her yours with her as she walked out your bedroom door.

Could she not see it? Did she not notice how horribly you want her, all the time? Surely she doesn’t think you’re just being nice when you do little things for her… offer to change the oil in her car, take her lunch to work, send her every single funny meme and video you have ever come across simply because you know they’ll make her laugh…

Apparently not. But you don’t want to push too hard, too soon, either. If it’s meant to happen, it will. Hell, you hadn’t even told Sam about these feelings you’d been having. No one knows. This is a secret you’d kept bottled up for months now.

You come back inside after a quick trip to the grocery store and gently place the items from your arms onto the island, making sure the champagne bottle doesn’t tip over and break. You stick the bottle into the fridge and remove everything else from the plastic bags before rushing into your bedroom to make sure it’s presentable.

While she was at work, you’d spent the majority of the day cleaning up the general guy-ness of your bedroom, putting on a fresh set of sheets and giving the bathroom a good wipe-down. You’d never cared this much, for what she thinks of your surroundings…

…But you want tonight to be special. You want this birthday to be her favorite one, yet. And you’re determined to do so. You’d placed various candles around the surfaces of your bedroom, trying to make it romantic, but not so much that it will make her think you’re trying too hard.

When you decide that your room is as neat as it’s going to get, you go back into the kitchen and tear into the small cardboard box that’s been hiding away on top of your refrigerator for almost a month now. You’d seen an ad for it while scrolling instagram or something, and you knew right then that you had to get it. Your birthdays spent with her were becoming more and more experimental, and the idea for this year had fallen right into your lap.

You rip the packing tape off the box, letting it fall to the wayside as you open the flaps, finding the perfectly wrapped 2 and 5 candles in all their glittering glory. Shiny, crimson red wax with metallic gold trimming, long wicks and a thickness that regular store-bought candles just don’t have. You smirk as you pull them from the packaging and lay them in front of her small cake- chocolate with white buttercream icing. Her favorite. A glance at the clock on the stove lets you know you have an hour until she gets home, so you scurry off to the shower to get a last-minute scrub before you inevitably hear her coming through the door.

—--

Your stomach nearly falls to the floor when you hear the front door unlatch, and you find her a tired and flustered mess after her long shift. You busy yourself on your laptop, trying your best to seem more involved with what you’re doing than watching her unload her things from her arms onto the table.

“Hey birthday girl,” you mutter without looking back at her. “How was your day?”

You feel her lean all her body weight across the back of the couch beside you. “Long,” she huffs, “but not bad.”

You find the confidence to turn your head to her, finding her resting her head into her palm as she eyes you. You have to reel it all back in as you feel her so closely in your presence again.

“Good,” you reply, keeping it short. “Not too tired to skip our date?”

She hums a sweet laugh. “No. Most definitely not.”

“Are we…leaving the house? I’m trying to decide what to wear…” she asks shyly.

You have to remind yourself that she’s your friend, there’s nothing to be scared of, you do this all the time…

“No, actually. We’re staying home,” you reply.

Home. Your home, with her.

“Eight o’clock?” she reiterates.

“Yep, on the dot,” you tease as she stands to make her way to her end of the house.

She sways down the hallway, tossing her jacket over her shoulder as she disappears into the shadows. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”

—---

A few hours later, you’re leaned on the island swirling a lowball glass of tequila, waiting for her to emerge from her bedroom. You’d been standing patiently, fashionably early for your birthday date in the kitchen as you listened to the faint sounds of her music playing as she got ready.

Your nerves are already shot, the tequila doing little to assist in qualming the nervous anxiety swirling through you. So when you finally hear her bedroom door open and her steps coming down the hall, you have to tilt the rest back in hopes that it will hit you a little more quickly.

She’s dressed cute, but comfortable, and you can tell she did her hair that special way that you’d complimented a few weeks ago. She smells like sweet sugary flowers mixed with the woodsy smell of rain, and just her scent as she approached you was already driving you insane.

You meet her in the middle of the kitchen, grabbing her hand to twirl her around into your embrace. “Happy birthday, gorgeous,” you mutter, your face falling into her hair for a second.

Her arms lift around your neck, squeezing just a little as she places the sweetest kiss to your cheek. “Thank you, Danny.” You allow yourself to hold her for just a second, your right hand gripping the wrist of your left at the back of her waist.

“You hungry?” You ask as you pull away from her.

“Yeah, whatcha making?” she replies, taking a seat at the island.

You grab the box of the frozen pizza you’d previously thrown in the oven, displaying it for her.

“Oh my god, my favorite!” she squeals. “I’m so excited.”

You laugh as you fold the box up, cramming it into the trash can. “Knew you would be. It’s not a five-star birthday meal, but. Let’s be honest. I can’t cook for shit, and you love this pizza more than you love a lot of things…”

“No, you’re so right. I’ve actually been craving it for a while,” she giggles.

“Wait, I also gotttttt….” You make your way to the fridge, pulling out the bottle of champagne.

“Shit, pizza and champagne? You know exactly how to make a girl happy, Daniel.” She blushes a little, and you know you’re on the right track for the night.

“You gotta open it, though. It’s bad luck if someone else opens the champagne bottle on your birthday,” you lie, scooting the bottle to her across the countertop.

“You’re crazy. Give it,” she rolls her eyes as she takes the bottle, twisting the key seven times and removing the wire casing. She stands from her chair, gripping the bottle in both hands as she searches for somewhere to aim.

“At the wall! Just not toward a window!” you warn, closing one eye as she begins to push on the cork. Finally it pops off, flying toward the wall as the bubbly pours from the neck of the bottle. “Get it, Y/N, get it!”

She cups her lips over the overflowing bottle, slurping up as much as she can before it flows into the floor. The two of you laugh as you bring two glasses over, letting her pour them up. Just then the timer for the pizza goes off, and the sound of the beeps reminds you that time is ticking, making your nerves rush for the main event.

——-

After stuffing yourselves with pizza and downing the bottle of champagne, the two of you are piled up on the couch sharing a six pack of some crazy peach flavored beer she’d bought last week.

You’re seated on the couch as she reclines across it, her legs in your lap. You’d talked a lot tonight, like more than you maybe ever have before. Sure, you’d been friends for many years now, but majority of the time, you’re surrounded by the other guys always intervening on your conversations, or interrupting your discussions.

But after three hours of deep exchange, you swear you could talk to her until the end of time, and never get tired of it. She looks natural with her bare, sunkissed legs draped across your lap, and your hand that’s mindlessly drifting over her thigh and knee looks like it belongs there.

Her drunken laughter bounces off the walls and right into your chest, making your entire self beam with happiness and adoration for her. The way she takes up space in the home you share gives you an inexplicable feeling. Roommates doesn’t even begin to describe what you want to title your living situation with her.

Your faces are blotched red and tears are falling from your eyes as the two of you come down from a laughing fit, and a sweet recovery silence falls over the both of you. Her eyes are bloodshot from the alcohol, and her face is flushed from the belly laughs.

“You’re really pretty, Danny,” she flits, making you whip your head her way.

“What?” you ask, embarrassed.

“You’re pretty. Well, you’re handsome, of course, but. You’re also pretty,” she explains, her words making you feel shy.

“Oh, thank you, Y/N. Don’t think anyone’s ever told me that before…” you respond. Your hand grips into her thigh a little bit as your head falls back onto the couch cushion. You meet her eyes, the both of you staring at each other while everything else in the room disappears. You hold the gaze for a long while, each passing second making your breathing pick up. Fuck, she makes you nervous.

Finally, she stands, pushing her hair back behind her ear as she reaches for you to take her hand. “Take me to bed, Danny…” she whispers.

Okay.

You slowly stand, keeping her hand in yours as she pulls you into the center of the room. Like magnets, your bodies are pulled into one another, your hands finding both of hers as you turn to walk her backwards down the hall to your room. You move in slow motion as the two of you glide across the wooden floors, taking your sweet, special time.

You take her chin between your fingers, and push her hair back again before leaning down to press your lips to hers. It’s gentle and sweet and slow, her lips parting only just a little bit as you guide her down the long hallway. You allow yourself the indulgence of her lips, the feeling of her tongue gently swiping across yours, the flavor of everything that she is. It’s all perfect, she’s perfect.

Her hands finally find your face and hair, entangling themselves like they always do, pulling you further into her. For this only being the sixth time you’ve done this, it feels like the most natural thing in the world to you. It doesn’t make any sense that you waste your time thinking about it, instead of giving her the loving that she deserves.

But you plan on showing her tonight. You may not be able to tell her, but damned if you can’t try your best to show her.

“Wait, I almost forgot,” you pause as you approach your bedroom door. “I’ll be right back. Stay here,” you command, squeezing her shoulders. “No peeking,” you whisper as you watch her eyelids close.

You’d already strategically placed her cake on the table in your room, with two forks and no plates. But the last finishing touch is the sporadically placed candles. You grab your lighter from your nightstand and light them one by one, watching as the flickering flames cast a warm glow across your walls. Perfect. Lastly, you place the 2 and 5 candles in the center of the cake, but wait to light them.

You slip back out into the hall, finding her still standing with her eyes closed. You grab her hands and pull her to walk toward you. “Keep them closed.”

Her smile lights up your entire world. “What are we doing, Danny? I’m scared…”

“Don’t be scared, babe. S’just me…”

You pull her inside, instructing her to sit down on the bed as you grab the cake and lighter. You balance it in one hand and flick the lighter with the other, lighting the wicks of both the number candles.

“Open your eyes.”

Her eyes flick open, finding the room completely illuminated with orange glow. “Ah, Danny…” she gasps, glancing around the room, and finally to the cake in your hands in front of her.

“Hm hm hmm hm hmmm hmm…” you hum the Happy Birthday song, your voice a bit shaky and jittery with nerves. “Don’t forget to make a wish,” you say, watching as her eyes flick to yours, then back to the cake in your hands. She closes her eyes for a few seconds before opening them again, and blowing out the flames of her 25.

“You wanna know what I wished for?” she asks.

You shake your head. “No. But I hope it comes true.”

You set the cake down on your nightstand and you sit back down beside her on your bed. You bring her in close again, letting your forehead balance on hers before you make contact. You swear to it, you could get lost in kissing her more easily than you could get lost in a foreign country. You’d kissed her a hundred times before, but lately…now…

Things move slowly, things move sweetly…normally the two of you waste no time in ripping one another’s clothes off, biting and scratching and devouring each other like you’re starved, but tonight feels like it deserves more attention than that. It deserves to be appreciated.

Your hands drift to the bottom hem of her cream-colored eyelet lace dress, your hand drifting up her thigh. You pull the dress as you go, revealing her thong hugging her hip. Your hand slips below the waistband, and you run your fingers along it and down the front pantyline, the backs of your knuckles skimming across her heat. She whines a little at the contact, and you feel your vision growing blurry.

You continue kissing her while slowly letting your hands explore her in a way you’ve never let them before, taking special care to pay attention to your every move. The kiss becomes more longing when you let a digit slip into her folds, feeling her wetness coating your finger for the first time in six months. Her hands grip onto your shoulders, pulling your upper body into her. You push her back to lay on the bed, never once disconnecting your mouths.

Her left knee is bent into the air while the other one lies flat, so you push it to the side a little as your hand still hides in her panties. Her hand is yanking at the back of your hair as your featherlight touch drifts up and down, finally landing on her sweet spot. She cries quietly into your mouth when you land on it just right, using your middle finger to swirl her wetness across it.

She sits up a little, reaching to your back to pull your cotton t-shirt over your head. You disconnect for just a second to help her, and toss it to the floor. “Mmm there you are,” she mumbles, her hands rushing across the skin of your chest and arms while you go back to work.

You feel her legs spread, giving you the ok to move further. You let your two middle fingers dip inside of her to the hilt, her muscles already tight and twisting around you. “Fuck baby, you’re tight…” you pull away long enough to say. With your words she tightens around you on purpose, clenching herself as you begin pumping your hand in and out of her. You start to wonder if you’re the only one she’s slept with since December. Not that it’s any of your business, but, lately you’d decided that your feelings for her had gathered so heavily in your chest that that six month gap would be worth it, if it meant she could be all yours.

You watch her face in awe, suddenly feeling no ounce of shyness in the least in watching her come undone around your hand. Her bottom lip bites into her mouth as her eyelids flutter open and shut, and the sounds that escape from her lips make you realize how beyond ready for her you are.

You continue pumping your fingers in and out of her, feeling her drip down onto the bed sheets below you. “You wanna let go like this for me, baby?” you ask, having trouble keeping your breaths even.

“No. Yes, but no…” she concedes. “Wanna… want you…”

You smirk. “Go ahead, Y/N, we’ve got all night. You know how we are...” You take the opportunity to twist your fingers inside of her, turning your arm so that your palm is now pressed against her heat instead of perpendicular with it. You lean down and lick a stripe up the side of her neck as you leave your fingers buried deep, stopping the pumping altogether and instead wiggling the tips of your fingers against the spot deep inside her.

“Fuck Danny,” she breathes. “Keep it there keep it there…” Her eyes squeeze shut as you watch her chase her high, her hand squeezing at your pec and gripping onto it with everything she has.

It’s impressive really, how much you’d learned her body after just being with her a handful of times over the course of three years, learning her ins and outs and what drives her crazy for you, and stowing them away at the back of your mind until the next birthday.

You make quick and heady work of brushing your fingers across that spot, pressing your palm against her clit and adding just the right amount of circular pressure in both places. Her legs fall open even further and her head tilts back, all of her muscles tightening as she cries out, giving you her first orgasm of the night. And you had barely even removed any clothing yet.

When she’s done, you gather up her wetness and pull it onto her stomach under her dress, letting your middle finger massage it onto her skin. “Fuck…” she breathes out, wiping the hair from her face. “That didn’t take me long,” she laughs.

“No, it didn’t,” you agree, sitting up on the bed. “Must be excited to see me.”

She sits up and stands from the bed, pulling her flowy cream dress up over her hips and hiking one knee after the other across either side of you. You lean back away from her straddle, resting your arms back on the bed as you get a good look at her, already glowy. She reaches up and clasps her hands behind your neck. “Very excited to see you,” she admits shyly.

“Hm, really? You see me every day,” you poke, trying to feel out her level.

“Yeah but we can’t do this on random Tuesday afternoons, or in front of our friends, now, can we?” she presses, letting her hips fall onto your lap. You reach one finger to her chest and trail it up to under her chin, pulling her into you. Your heart begins pounding as you fall into a ravenous kiss again, this time bringing more heat than you even began to touch on a few minutes ago. Your hands fall to her waist, pulling her down onto you as she moves her knees to sit closer, pressing your chests together. Your hands travel across her thighs and to her waist, then finally around to grip her ass.

Though your tongue is burying itself deeply into her mouth, you’re metaphorically biting it. You want to tell her that yes, you do want to move things in another direction with her, you do want to hold her hand in front of your friends, you do want them to know how crazy you actually are for her. So in an act of boldness, you try.

“Maybe not in this regard, but they probably wouldn’t mind a little PDA…”

She giggles as she wraps her hands in your hair. “PDA? Like flirting with each other? In front of them?”

“Yeah, just like that. They already know we sleep together sometimes, they have to know we, ya know… are allowed to let it flow into days that aren’t our birthdays…” you swallow the words down, feeling so anxious that she may take them the wrong way, or hate them altogether.

“You think they’d make fun of us?” she asks, her mouth kissing behind your ear.

“Oh yeah, they would. But, I’d be there to slap the fuck out of them if they embarrass you,” you respond, squeezing your hands into her hips.

Her tongue is tickling the sensitive skin around your ear as she lays tiny pecks near your hairline. “I think I’d be okay with a little flirting… sometimes it almost happens naturally, anyway,” she says, making your heart rate soar again.

“Really?”

She nods, coming up to face you now, her cheeks tinted the palest pink. “Mmhm, sometimes I have to stop myself from touching you in front of them. You know, just innocently.”

You swallow hard, knowing the exact feeling all too well. When you’re surrounded by your friends making dinner or whatever it may be, you’ve found yourself having to stop your hand from grazing across her lower back as you walk by, from leaning down to kiss her cheek, anything, all the time. She’s right, it does feel natural to want to do that.

“I do, too, actually,” you admit. “You… It feels normal to me. Just a reflex.” You buck your hips up into her as you speak, your body begging you for some contact.

The whimper that leaves her chest ignites that deep carnal instinct inside you, wanting, needing to connect yourself with her again. You gather the soft fabric of her dress in your hands, signaling to her that you want to pull it off. She lifts her arms above her head, allowing you easy access to tear it all the way off of her. As her hair cascades back down over her shoulders you realize that her dress didn’t require a bra. So, you’re left staring at her left only in her thong, her breasts sitting more perfectly than you remember them. “You’re so gorgeous, Y/N, I swear…” you grit, raking over her body with your eyes.

She hops off of your lap, motioning with one finger for you to stand. When you follow her order, she falls to her knees, working her fingers to unbutton your jeans. “Fuck, wait,” you say. Her eyes glance up at you through her eyelashes. “Pull your hair back.”

She does as you say, pulling her hair into a ponytail at her neck while you undo your jeans with one swift movement. She gets done with her hair quickly, swatting your hand away and pulling your zipper down. “Take them all the way off, Danny,” she demands, and the backs of your knees hit the mattress as you lean over, kicking them and your underwear off one leg at a time. You kick them to the side as she walks on her knees closer to you, taking your already over-hard dick in her right hand, licking her lips just a little before she swirls her tongue around the tip. Everything had just happened really fast, her urgency making your blood pump. Her tongue flattened out against you, and she pressed you all the way to the back of her throat, almost making your knees buckle under you.

She grabs your hand, pulling it toward the back of her head. You take the signal and wrap your hand around her hair just as her lips meet your base, and you hold her there, feeling the saliva already beginning to pool in her mouth. “God damnit, baby, fuck you’re so good at this. Don’t even need my help…” You loosen your grip and allow her to drag her lips across your shaft, adding hard suction as she slowly ascends off.

“Want your help, though. Do it…” she motions, so you do. You use her ponytail to guide her up and down you, forcefully pushing and pulling on her head just like she likes it. The first time you did this, you were a bit thrown off, as you’ve always just let whoever was pleasing you do whatever they felt. But she likes it when you tell her when and where you want her to be.

The candles are physically heating up the air in the room, providing a heat that feels like a heavy blanket on your skin. Your mind flashes with remembering the special candles, and you feel a spark of excited electricity shoot through your body. The baby hairs around her face are beginning to stick to her forehead as her eyes glance up to look at you, doelike and pleading.

She hums onto your dick as you squeeze her cheeks together, taking a hard hold on her jawline as your opposite hand guides her motions. Your head falls back as you feel the knot tightening in your stomach, but you can’t let go just yet. Her tongue swirls around your tip and the sounds that her mouth is making sound downright ruthless, spurring on your albeit degraded current situation.

She moans onto you as her lips pull on and off, all by the force of your hand. You pull her hair particularly roughly, watching as the string of saliva connects her mouth to you, still. You take the second to sit down on the bed, physically unable to stand for another second without losing all will to hold yourself up. She moves in closer and digs her nails into the soft skin between your legs, sending a shake through your body. “Mother fucker baby, keep going with that…” you say, biting your bottom lip as you watch her. She scratches at your skin a few more times before you finally decide you can’t take it anymore, pulling and pushing on her head at a quicker pace.

“Mhmm…” she moans as she nods her head ‘yes’, and you feel the deep rumble in your stomach, telling you that you’re not far. She kisses her lips down tightly on you this time, flicking her tongue in all the right places as you feel her throat tightening around you.

“So fuckin’ deep baby, shit…” you say as your hips jut forward a few times, your dick hitting the back of her throat. Suddenly you feel your world falling apart as you let go into her, the dim orange light of the room turning into flashes of black and white as you send your streams down her throat. You wrap her hair around your hand as you hold her just where you want her, pulling her closely into you as you hiss through your release.

When you finally take a breath and your vision unblurs, you watch as she wipes her chin with the back of her hand, standing to her feet again and joining you on the bed, a completely smug and satisfied look on her face.

“The fuck are you grinning about, huh?” you ask, pulling her in toward you again.

“Nothin’, I just really love being the one to make you make noises like that,” she says, biting back another smile.

“Well, you’ve got me figured out, seriously,” you compliment her, and it was the absolute truth.

She shrugs you off. “Eh, I’m out of practice, really.”

Oh?

“No way, you’re like… well seasoned,” you kid.

“You dick!” she yells, stifling a laugh. “I haven’t even done that in six months.” You can tell she regretted saying it as soon as she did, suddenly avoiding your eyes and pulling one of your pillows up to cover her chest.

“...You’re kidding,” you breathe, truly in disbelief.

She shakes her head. “Lame, huh?”

“N-no, not lame. I–You haven’t, since…?” you stammer.

“Nope. Since your birthday. Go ahead, laugh at me all you want,” she says, motioning with her hand.

Her words hit you right in the gut. She hadn’t been with anyone since you…

“I’m not gonna laugh at you, Y/N. I… I actually haven’t been with anyone else, either.”

Her eyes meet yours in disbelief. “Really?”

You nod. “Not this time around.”

She sits for just a second, hugging the pillow to her. “Why not?”

You shrug, the nerves bubbling in your stomach. “I dunno, no one’s really…struck my interest. Not enough to bring back home, anyway.”

She pulls one shoulder up toward her ear. “Yeah, mine neither. I’ve…tried, ya know, but.” She swallows. “My birthday is my favorite holiday for a reason.”

You can’t stop the joy that rises in your chest, your extremities tingling and your heart beating in your ears as she basically admits she doesn’t enjoy anyone but you. She hasn’t made it work with anyone else in six months.

“Six months is a long time to wait, Y/N,” you mutter quietly.

She pulls the pillow down, moving closer to you on the bed. “Not when what you’re waiting for is all you can ever think about.”

Fuck… it feels like your head is going to float right off of your shoulders out of a pure high at her admission. Your chest gets warm and your mouth goes dry, and you swear if you were looking in the mirror, there would be stars in your eyes.

She feels the same.

After a few seconds of disbelief, you find the nerve to answer her, a hardly audible whisper as you bring your face close to hers. “I think I’d wait for you for fifty years, if you wanted me to…”

Her hand cups your jawline as she grits her teeth, pulling you into her again. Your mouth wants to devour her all over again, but instead you take note of the tender moment, laying a sweet kiss to her lips that has a promise behind it.

Her eyebrows furrow together when you pull away, a look you’re familiar with but also one that told you she’s confused. She opens her mouth to speak, probably to ask you if what you’d just said is true. But nothing comes out. She just stares at you in disbelief.

Your hand finds her hip as you yank her body in with a little force, almost nose to nose now.

“Yeah, you heard me right. I’d wait for you, I will wait for you, if that’s what you want me to do…” you say, feeling so anxious for the outcome of this conversation you could almost be sick. It’s either going to end really really well, or so badly that you’d end up alone in bed tonight. But the risk outweighs the outcome, and you are ready and prepared to take it, whatever it might be.

She swallows hard as you watch her eyes become glazed. Her hands are balancing around your neck and across your shoulders, and you can feel the heat rising in her palms as her digits nervously fidget. It feels like a hundred years pass in the time you wait for her to respond, and you contemplate taking it all back. Making up an excuse, saying just kidding, we’re just friends… But the panic stops as soon as she finds her words.

She shakes her head. “Wait for me… you’d, you wanna actually…?”

“Be with you more than just twice a year? Yeah, Y/N, I really would. You– you kinda have held a really special place for a long, long time now.” You swallow again, letting the words you’ve kept pent up for so long finally flow, but still feeling a little embarrassed by the admission. “I just never said anything, ya know, because of our arrangement. It worked so well for us but. I… I don’t know. It feels like more to me, lately.”

She nods hard again, a tiny smile crossing her lips as her eyes stay trained on yours. But she stays quiet.

“Can you say something, Y/N?” you ask through a huffed laugh.

“It is more, Danny. It’s been more to me for a long time, too. You take up more space in my mind than I’d like to admit,” she says, now avoiding eye contact.

Wow… finally. Finally, there it is.

“Why do we both deny it?” you whisper.

She shrugs, massaging the back of your neck. “I don’t know. But I don’t really want to anymore.”

You wrap your arm around her torso, pulling her weight from underneath her as you lay her flat on her back.

“Then we don’t,” you say as you tower over her, the candle light flickering in her eyes and off of her skin. Her body is beautiful, there’s no denying that, but what has always gotten you is how she carries herself…how her body language is always reflective of exactly what she’s feeling in the moment. And right now, as her midsection arches up into you begging you to touch her again, you have no other thoughts than to appease her.

Your mouth travels down her chest and across her belly, leaving long, lingering kisses across her body. As you get closer and closer to her heat, you move to kneel on the floor just as she had for you earlier, slipping your hands underneath her to pull her to the edge. Even in all your wild, drunken sexual adventures with her, for some reason, you’d never concentrated on this. You’d never gone down on her. It wasn’t that you didn’t want to, as it was one of your favorite activities, but the immediate pull to one another on these nights always ended up with getting straight to the good part. Neither of you really ever left time for the embellishments.

She perks up onto her elbows as she gazes at your face between her legs. “Danny…”

“Let me show you what I mean, baby,” you more ask than say, running your tongue down the inside of her thigh. Her body stiffens as she still gives you that look of hesitation. Your tongue drifts over her opening as you tease her, barely ghosting overtop of everywhere but her sweet spot. She shudders again. “Unless you don’t want me to…”

“No! No I want you to. Please. You’ve just…” she finally relaxes her head back down.

“I know I haven’t. And that’s on me. But I wanna show you that I’ve been thinking about this, doing just this since the last time I had you…” you explain, finally delving your tongue deeply into her. Her reaction is immediate, her back arching up again as her hands find your hair. The sounds she makes make you strain to keep it together, and the taste of her finally on your tongue is enough to make you want to stop altogether, and get to the good part, but you savor this instead, realizing you’ve wanted her like this for so long.

You squeeze your lips over her, inching your tongue languidly inside of her and moving it back up to circle her clit. When you finally find it, she squeals, exhaling as her hands rip into your scalp. You glance to the head of the bed, pulling down a pillow and positioning it underneath her back to get a better angle. Your hands snake under her again, squeezing her ass as you pull her in.

“Fuck Danny, why did you hold back on this for so long?” she asks through a pant, her legs opening and closing over your ears. “Shit…” You realize that you don’t really have an answer.

She’s writhing and fighting herself, and you can tell she’s nearing the peak, until she backs off again, likely wanting to make this last. She hums and purrs as you work over her clit, using your tongue and lips to kiss every single drenched inch of her. You feel like you can’t get enough, until you remember. Her birthday gift.

You slow things down, pulling away a bit until you see the disgruntled look on her face at the disconnect. “No, don’t stop… don’t go..” she begs. Her expression is desperate, and you want nothing more than to feel her lose herself at the mercy of your mouth. So you dive back in, this time with a purpose.

“‘M not goin’ anywhere, baby,” you manage through kneads of your tongue against her. You bring your arm up between the two of you, using your elbow and hand to press her legs apart while your free hand’s two middle digits enter her again. Your tongue never lets up, circling and swirling furiously as her muscles tense. You take that as your cue to work harder, feeling her clenching around your hand already. You pump in and out of her again, making sure your tongue is pointed exactly where she needs it.

“Fuck, Danny baby… yes…” she breathes, and the pet name sends a shockwave straight to your dick, hearing her utter your name followed by a word so personal. You cup your lips over her clit, using a quick and harsh suction motion as you flick your tongue across it.

When she finally lets go, her cries and slurs of curses echo through your room, the most beautiful sound you’re sure you’ve ever heard. Her hands stay tangled in your locks, forcing your face into her as close as you can get. You savor it all, the sight, the sound, the taste… you wonder why you ever denied yourselves this piece of the puzzle after all this time, but then again, maybe saving something this intimate for right now is exactly what was supposed to happen.

Her body jolts and shakes as she lets the pleasure wrack through her, and you devour every last bit. You crawl up her once she opens her eyes again, her hand freeing from your hair and back down to your face, pulling across your cheeks and mouth as she wipes her wetness from you. Her voice is strained as she finally speaks. “Fuck that was…”

“Fucking delicious,” you finish, pressing your lips to hers again, making her nod into you.

“Yeah, fucking delicious,” she agrees, wrapping her legs around you and using the leverage to pull you onto her. If you weren’t rock hard before, you surely are now after witnessing her falling apart for you like that. You can tell she’s already ready to get things going again, but you stop her, pulling away like you had done before. You stand from the bed, watching that same look of disappointment come across her features.

“Don’t look at me like that, just wanna give you your birthday gift,” you say, walking around the bed to your nightstand. You grab the cake and place it carefully into your lap, grabbing the lighter again as she comes and sits beside you.

“I already blew out my candles, Danny,” she says, balancing her chin on your shoulder.

“You did, but I didn’t tell you that these are special candles. Not meant to be blown out,” you explain, flicking the lighter to life and igniting them both.

“Not meant to be blown out? Why–”

“Because they’re really an oil,” you say, putting the lighter down and grabbing the plastic tray under the cake again, holding it up between you. “These are candles specially made for us to let melt and drip onto each other. Not like regular wax, these don’t burn as hot. Once they start to melt a little, they turn into a body oil.”

“Like a massage oil?” she asks, and you nod.

“Mmhm, see, you can already smell the lavender and bergamot. They had birthday cake scented, but. I thought that might be overkill,” you smirk. Her eyes drift down to the candles with intrigue, and she bites her bottom lip in. “We don’t have to, if you don’t want to. But, I’ve heard good things…”

She picks up one of the candles from the cake, carefully licking the icing off the bottom. She holds her opposite hand out palm down, and lets the melty wax oil drip down onto the back of her hand, a few droplets of dark red liquid dripping down between her fingers.

“Doesn’t burn at all,” she says, reaching to grab the cake from you to set on the table again. She then takes your hand, letting the wax drip down onto your hand, too.

The sensation is more of an extremely warm electrical pulse than the burn you’d expect, and it quickly dulls as the oil cools. It doesn’t harden like normal wax, instead it just turns into a thick oil. You take your other finger and rub it across your skin, feeling the softness of the lotion-like liquid sink into your skin. “Wow, no, it feels good,” you agree.

“Lay back,” you suggest, and she does, handing the candle off to you.

You question the situation, not knowing exactly where to drip the oil to make her feel the best. You assume maybe her chest and stomach, maybe even down her legs, if she feels up to it. You hold the candle directly above her sternum, raising your eyebrows in final question before you let it drip.

“Yeah, go ahead,” she says, her hand landing on your knee.

The red liquid finally falls through the air, a singular drop that lands and splatters across her chest. Her mouth opens just a little, but then her surprise quickly turns into a devious smirk. “Feel good?” you ask.

“Aha, yeah, actually. It burns pretty bad for a split second but it goes away…shit, do more,” she pleads.

You go along with her request, drizzling tiny drops between her breasts and down her stomach, nearly completely coating her in the oily liquid.

“You sure you like it?” you ask as you watch her face repeatedly turn from a surprised grimace into a devilish look of satisfaction. Thankfully, that second look, you’re more than familiar with.

“Yessss…” she hisses as another drop falls onto her skin. “I feel so…” her mouth lies open as you continue letting the oil drip and pool, the floral scent filling your nostrils.

“So what?” you ask.

Her eyes bore into yours as she bites her lips between her teeth, her hand still gripping hard into your leg muscle. “I like the pain. It’s like… I don’t know how to explain it…” she breathes. “Like a sensation I don’t want to ever end.”

You take your free hand and gently massage it in, taking time to work over her nipples and stomach. “God, that feels so good…” she whispers, her hand now digging into the muscle of your thigh. You place the candle back on the cake, turning to pay special attention to rubbing your hands over her muscles.

The heady scent of the oils mixed with the residual alcohol still flowing through your system brings a whole new dizziness to the atmosphere, and you feel as though the whole situation is only becoming heavier. You reach over to your phone sitting on the night stand, and flip your music to some psychedelic playlist. The distorted guitar and scratchy bass sounds bring you both to a new plane, and you take the moment to recognize the woman you have your hands on, and how she feels underneath them.

Her eyes flutter open and closed as your hands drift, massaging the soft oils across the mountains and valleys of her body. “You want me to do you?” she asks, eyes flicking back to the candle.

You shake your head. “No, shh. It’s your birthday, just relax.”

She smiles a little as she gets comfortable again, moving her body a little closer to yours on the bed. Your hands travel up her shoulders and neck, slowly kneading the tense muscles. Then you move on to her hips and waist, squeezing at the thickness of her. You feel yourself getting turned on all over again just by touching her this way. You watch as her hands drift across the tops of her legs, gripping at her own thighs. The visual is almost too much, watching as her fingertips pull at her skin. You reach to grab the still-lit candle, adjusting your body to sit beside her legs.

“‘M gonna try your legs, that okay?” you ask.

“Yeah, go ahead…” she mumbles, her eyes still rolling around behind her eyelids. You move between her legs and let the wax drip onto her inner thighs, not really caring if any lands on your comforter. “Ffff…” she hisses, biting onto her bottom lip. Her face contorts from pain to pleasure as the oil cools, and you replace the candle, making your way back to massaging her.

Your hands nearly cover the entirety of her upper thighs, your fingertips digging into the skin just as hers had done a second ago. You push the oil all around, paying special attention to start at her knees, and slowly work your way up. You have half a mind to lick into her again, seeing it now from this view, but you stop yourself. Your thumbs rub into the creases where her legs meet her heat, and she practically moans out at your touch.

“You’re being such a fuckin’ tease, Daniel,” she says, her hands cupping her breasts.

“Mmm, I don’t think you understand how hard it is to stop myself right now…” you huff.

She bites her lips again and shakes her head side to side, obviously feeling the same emotions as you. This doesn’t feel like it normally does, and you feel more anxiety than ever to satisfy her. You watch as she reaches her hands for you, signaling for you to get things going.

“Don’t stop yourself then,” she stutters, her voice almost shuddering. Her hand grips into your hair again and pulls you up, your hands crawling up either side of her as her nails claw and pull at your back.

Suddenly your mind finds itself again as you remember to grab protection. You balance your forehead on her sternum, both of you already panting and sweaty as you pull yourself away to reach for your bedside drawer.

“No, just—it’s fine,” she says, grabbing onto your arm.

You meet her with a puzzled look, not quite understanding that she’s changing her mind on a whim. This is one part of your agreement that you both have always stuck to.

“What? I’m—“

“Just…it’s fine. Don’t get it,” she says, giving you a look that could kill. “It’s been six months…right…”

You think it over, rolling the thought over and over in your mind. “You sure?”

She nods, “Yeah, yeah I’m sure. I’m…we’re good. I promise.”

You feel your heart growing in your chest, feeling a new wave of anxiousness and…something else bubbling up. It’s almost blinding you to even think about what’s about to take place, this already feels so different than before.

The slick of the oil across your chests make your bodies slide against one another as you line yourself up, both hands on either side of her head. Her hands gently drift across your hips, a devilish smirk sneaking across her lips.

“Gonna feel you for real for the first time…” she says gently, looking more excited than you’d seen her in ages.

“Yeah, no pressure,” you answer, pressing yourself through her folds. The sensation alone is making you quake, feeling her against you without a barrier.

“What, you nervous or something?” She asks, digging her nails into your scalp.

You clench your jaw, feeling the tip enter her just a little bit. “Kinda.”

“Daniel…shut up. No you’re not.”

“I swear,” you reply, pressing in just a little more. “Different now, like this.” You feel your heart beating from your ribcage.

Her hands grip behind you, pulling you in towards her, but you hold back. “S’okay, just me… please…” Her legs lift and her ankles cross at your lower back.

You push forward, telling yourself it’s okay to fill her all the way to the hilt. It’s now or never, and you’ve waited so long for this, wanted her for real for so long. You make sure to watch her face as you bottom out, taking in every single detail that you can.

HER POV

It’s almost dreamlike…

The dim and comforting glow of the room, the sweet scented oil that’s relaxed your muscles, the dying feeling of excitement from the gift Danny had gotten you…

But mostly, the feeling of his body towering over you and buried as deeply as he can get, finally without the use of protection.

You’d been wanting Danny for real for longer than you’d like to admit, now, and now that it’s finally happening, it’s almost as if you couldn’t have dreamt it up any better. Of course he feels nervous…you do too. Something in the air has shifted, and it’s not just because you both had finally admitted to wanting more than your predisposed agreement.

“Fuck, Danny…” you can’t help but yelp in a pitiful high-pitched squeal. Feels just like you always thought, but somehow better.

Much, much better.

He begins to pick up a pace after you lock your ankles against him harder, forcing his hips to find a rhythm. “You good?” he asks, almost shyly.

“Yeah, better than good, shit…”

His left hand grips your jaw with a little force before he brings his lips to yours in a heated mess. His thrusts are working in perfect time, hitting you in just the right spot to tighten the knot deep inside you already.

“You feel so perfect baby…god, never thought I’d have you like this…” his lips are hot against your skin as he speaks, his teeth nipping at your sensitive spots every few seconds.

“Leave a mark, baby… gimmie a reminder…” you breathe into his ear, making the light nips on your chest switch into slightly painful lovebites that you’re positive you’ll be able to see turn into bright red marks tomorrow. He growls into your skin as his teeth sink in just enough to make you squirm beneath him.

Though the room is flickering with a tangerine glow, the multicolored vibrance of the light flashing behind your eyes brings a whole new depth to what you’re experiencing, an overwhelming feeling of unwarranted pleasure that is undoubtedly ripping you apart at the seams. He’s all you’ve ever wanted, better than anything you’ve ever felt, and he’s been living under the same roof as your best friend for way too long.

You can tell he’s getting closer by the tumbling of his thrusts, but you swear you never want it to end. The euphoria taking over your mind is making you dizzy.

Suddenly he slows down a little bit, rolling himself to the bed but keeping himself inside as he plucks you to straddle his lap. Your hands find his pecs as you begin swirling your hips, feeling him at a completely different angle, now. His curls are laid out behind him on the white blankets, and his chest is gleaming from the oils.

You begin bouncing on him, his hands gripping into the thick muscle of your thighs as you grind on him. His head leans back, his jaw moving between hanging open and clenching tightly. “Y/N, shit…I’m not gonna be…”

You can feel the twist in your stomach, the deep tightening letting you know that you are close, too. You lean down and press a slow and needing kiss to his lips, showing him all the emotion that’s currently coursing through your body in the act. “Me too baby, just do it. Want to feel you…” you stammer through the ravaging feeling of your impending orgasm. You squeeze him hard, sending you both over the edge, tumbling down together in a flustered mess of echoed praises for one another.

He stays buried inside you for just a few seconds as you both come down, neither of you wanting to be the first to speak when you finally catch your breath. After a minute of silence, you let yourself come out of the cloudy bliss, sliding yourself up and off of him.

As soon as your body hits the bed beside him, he’s craning over you again, gathering you up into his arms into the most loving embrace you’d felt from him yet.

“Every six months isn’t gonna work for me anymore, Y/N…” he admits, fully submitting himself with an honest look in his eye. “I just…”

“Me neither, Danny. It’s not enough. Won’t ever be enough,” you admit, taking his face in your hands. And it was true, after experiencing him tonight in the way that you did, there was no way you’d ever be able to wait for him again. There’s too much emotion involved that you’ve both been hiding for too long. Too much still yet to explore.

“Stay, please? And not just for tonight,” he whispers, his thumb gliding across your cheek.

You nod. You know there’s nothing on this earth you want more than to wake up every day next to him…the friend who has always been just a little bit more.

“Okay,” you concede, sliding your body into his.

“Okay? Yeah?” He asks with an excited lilt.

“Yes. I’m not going anywhere,” you respond. “Couldn’t leave you if I wanted to...”

The low chuckle that rumbles through his chest and onto your cheek pressed against it feels so longingly familiar that you wonder why you ever thought it wouldn’t work out to begin with. “What took you so long?” he asks, wrapping and squeezing you hard.

“Could ask you the same…” you laugh into his chest.

You fall asleep with him that night a different woman than the one you were when you walked into his room, and not just because you’re a year older, now. You’d finally gotten everything you’d ever wanted.

Danny nuzzles his face into the crook of your neck, sleep already lacing his voice. A soft feeling of comfort washes over you as you realize how safe and protected you feel in his arms, and how you aren’t too shy to admit that this feels more right than you could have ever anticipated.

Now you won’t have to wait six months to share your love with him again. You’ll be able to share it with him tomorrow, over coffee in the kitchen.

He presses a sweet kiss to your temple as you let the heaviness of sleep overtake you, already falling into a dazed place of complete contentment.

“Happy birthday, baby.”

Taglist:

@wetkleenex-gvf @britney-gvf @gretas-sweat @josh-iamyour-mama @highway-tuna @bestfriendsallstrungout @jjwasneverhere @gretavanbrie @writingcold @thewritingbeforesunrise @myleftsock @edgingthedarkness @its-interesting-van-kleep @jjsooobsessed @ageofcj @starcatcher-jake @capnjaket @cozyjakey @jakekiszkapunchmeintheface @stardustjake @dancingcarbon @builtbybrokenbells @gretavangroupie

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split-spectrum · 8 months ago

Text

Concessions

Pairings: Obi Wan/FemReader

Warnings/Tags: (more to come) sexually explicit content, explicit language, edging, orgasm denial (like a lot of it - that's the whole fic)

Chapter Length: 3K

Description: Obi Wan chooses to undertake a trial that prevents him from sex for one year, and asks you to serve as his witness. As his close friend, you don't mind helping him.

The rules of the trial are very clear. You make it your personal mission to find the exceptions.

☆☆☆

"They call it the Nikkama."

"A full cycle?"

He pauses, taking in your incredulous tone. "Yes. A full Coruscant cycle."

"And you're asking me to... what, participate?"

He shakes his head. "Of course not. This is simply a... personal matter for me."

You raise a brow even higher than it already was, not saying anything in response. He seems to be on the edge of an explanation, but never quite getting there. Your silence invites him to continue.

"By the end of a standard year, it is my goal to come away with a new understanding of the Force, and of myself."

"That's very... respectable," you manage. "So, if you need someone as the keeper of this... trial, why not ask a master? Why me?"

His eyes search your face. He's trying to determine if you're toying with him. The truth is, you have an idea of why he wouldn't approach Yoda about this, but you want to hear him say it.

"I had... rather thought it would be obvious."

So you had guessed correctly. But he won't admit it.

You smirk; an acquiescence. You won't make him dance around the details any longer. You are friends, after all. Friends who happen to know one another more intimately than most friends do - the real reason he's come to you with this request.

"Alright. Tell me the rules."

No sex. That's the essence of it. 'Seeking bliss through denial', as the ancient Jedi texts stated it. To complete the trial, one must deny themselves the pleasures of the flesh for the time it takes the Jedi temple to finish one full cycle.

The rules are quite simple: The Jedi must make the trial known to one witness - the keeper. The Jedi can not bring themselves to completion through sex or by any other means. There are allowances, of course. Orgasms beyond the Jedi's control are permitted. This way, one cannot fail the trial while sleeping. Finally, the Jedi must not speak of the trial with anyone aside from the keeper. Like many other trials, it was a battle meant to be fought internally.

If he failed, Obi Wan had explained to you that he could not simply begin again. One was not allowed to attempt the Nikkama for ten more cycles. It was not meant to be taken lightly. Much like everything Obi Wan has ever done, but especially like the things he's been doing lately.

Since becoming master of the Chosen One, it seems like all he's done is push himself, as if trying to prove he's worthy of the position. Having known him since padawanhood, his capability has always been clear to you. But with his new responsibilities, he seems to be seeking new and creative ways to strain himself. You know nothing you say will be enough to slow him down, so most of the time, you can only offer your begrudging support.

Three months in to this latest self-imposed trial, you can already tell the strain is starting to wear on him.

"Anakin, I've told you before," his voice carries over the crowd of padawans on the landing platform as you walk past. "The way we present ourselves is a choice."

"Yes, master," mumbles the boy in front of him, his eyes clearly more focused on the ship he's about to board than his master's words.

"...and today you've chosen to present yourself to professor Huyang with a wrinkled robe because you did not hang it properly as I asked, did you?"

"Sorry, master." Anakin's words are contrite, but the way he shrugs Obi Wan's arm off his shoulder says this will not be the last conversation they have about it.

Obi Wan looks around, clearly asking the Force for patience. He squeezes a blink just a little longer than normal, gathering himself, and when he opens his eyes, he catches you watching the display. You press your upper lip down into a poorly-hidden grin and keep walking, using the mug of caf you'd retrieved from the refectory in the temple's main hall to hide your smile.

Once Anakin is sent on his way with the other padawans, Obi Wan strides down the hall to match your pace.

"I saw that," he grouses. He's putting on a half-joking tone, but you can tell there's a current of real irritation running beneath. "You won't find it quite so entertaining when you have a padawan of your own."

You let your grin loose. "That's the beauty of volunteering for the most distant and dangerous missions. They can't keep me at the temple long enough to assign me one."

It's an exaggeration you're putting on for him, but it's partially true - you do tend to volunteer for the most exciting assignments you can find. That's where you and Obi Wan differ the most. Part of you craves adventure in a way that's almost unbecoming of a Jedi. Obi Wan starkly contrasts your eagerness, content with whatever duties he's given. He always has the serene air of a proper Jedi knight about him. And you truly enjoy pushing his buttons until his calm demeanor breaks.

"You look like you could use one of these," you tell him, changing the subject by pointing to the mug in your hand.

He looks down at your hand, then glances dejectedly out of one of the windows as you pass it. "Oh, I could use something much stronger than that. If only I had the time. I promised Master Sinube I would help him question some suspects for an investigation this afternoon."

You click your tongue against your teeth. "Poor thing."

"Yes, no rest for the wicked, it seems."

"More like 'no rest for the stubborn'."

He gives you a look.

"No rest for the decidedly overbooked," you go on, pushing those lovely buttons of his.

He sighs, shaking his head in annoyed bemusement and not rising to your bait.

You turn to face him before your path peels away, dropping your antagonizing grin. "If you're too busy this afternoon, what about this evening? We could meet up in my quarters for 'something stronger' if you'd like. I have a bottle of Alderaanian red that's been gathering dust."

"Hm. Dusty wine; how very tempting," he sniffs, crossing his arms at you.

You roll your eyes, but he doesn't give you a chance to retort.

"It's a kind offer, but-"

"But, Anakin is gone for the week and you'd rather be alone in your quarters, falling asleep early?"

"Well, yes, in fact, I would."

You shrug. "Do as you please, then. My charitable offer stands, if you decide you'd rather enjoy yourself than become a hermit at the ripe age of twenty-seven."

You turn down an adjacent hallway, leaving his mood behind you without another thought.

Later that night - very much later, in fact - you had almost forgotten about your offer when a knock at the door to your private quarters reminds you.

"Obi Wan."

You won't spoil the surprise by gloating, though you sorely want to. You just smile instead, glad to see him despite his dour expression.

His lifts his eyes tiredly. "Might I request that you hold off on any clever commentary until I have my promised drink?"

Your grin broadens as you step to the side, inviting him in. "You might request it, but my cleverness won't be silenced."

Passing you, he manages to flick up an eyebrow despite his otherwise muted demeanor. "Oh, dear. If I had known you'd started without me, I'd have-"

"You'd have come sooner?" you finish for him, sweeping up the bottle on your counter and topping off your glass.

He drapes himself over your couch, sinking into the cushions as he spreads an arm over the side.

"I may not have come at all. I would have gone to my quarters and gotten some well-deserved-" You hand him a filled glass. "Thank you. Some well-deserved rest."

He finishes his statement with a long sip, then swirls the glass and closes his eyes, pinching his brow with his other hand.

You just roll your eyes, nudging his boots to the side and sinking into the couch next to him. "Master Sinube really putting you through your paces, then?"

He sighs through his nose. "Master Sinube is a wonderful teacher in the art of... patience."

Your lip quirks upward. His patience has never been tested before by the kindly old Cosian. And it's rather odd for Obi Wan to admit it. You consider pointing it out, but seeing him so worn out by the experience dampens your desire to wind him up. You turn on the holovid screen instead.

"After a few more glasses of this, trust me, you'll feel better."

When you awaken, you feel something soft and warm beneath your face. It's the cloth of Obi Wan's tunic.

Your head is buzzing faintly as you press your nose into the fabric, breathing him in. You only marginally care that what you're doing is inappropriate. It's been a long time since you've been this close, and you can blame the drinks if you really must.

You swallow, blinking slowly as you register that the room is filled with the sound of some holodrama you've never watched before. The music is swelling, and you reach over Obi Wan's chest to press the volume button on the remote. His head turns, following your movement though he's still half-asleep.

You feel his breathing pattern change below your cheek, and you look up at him. His long eyelashes part slowly. His body shifts so that he's facing you, though he removes the arm that had fallen to your shoulder. He puts a hand on the back of the couch.

And he looks at you.

The moment where he should have moved away - where one of you should have - comes and goes.

You lift your face, staring at his lips. You know you're caught in his gaze. He's watching you, not saying a word.

The idea of leaning up to press your lips onto his is so far removed from your mind that it's basically an impossibility. You aren't padawans stealing moments in the temple anymore. Your heart doesn't pound with the fear that you'll give into your baser instincts. You're fully aware of what you're enjoying - the look in his eyes; the space between your mouths. Holding your faces so close that it's almost another kind of kiss.

Then you shift your hips, just slightly, and you feel it. You feel the way his clothes pull tight at his center. Your leg brushes the taught line of fabric just below his stomach, running up his thigh.

Considering his circumstances, it's a normal reaction. You tell yourself this as you feel a blush spreading over your face and down your neck. It's a physical response to repressing his body's urges. You try not to take it personally. You won't mention it.

You blink, lowering your gaze from his and starting to extricate yourself from his side. He swallows, pulling away from you.

"I'm sorry-" His voice is throaty and a bit slurred. "I-"

The inner side of your hip brushes against him as you turn to get up, and a soft, almost dejected moan pours out of him. He snaps his mouth shut. You freeze, looking up at him.

That noise will not be so easy to avoid taking personally.

Suddenly he's sitting up. "Terribly sorry, I- I don't know what came- came over- "

You force a smile, though your heart is racing, and you pat his shoulder. "Don't worry about it. Only nine more months to go, right?"

A slight look of relief passes over his wide eyes. "Yes," he agrees, clearly grateful you've decided to blame the trial and not him. "Yes. Quite right. My apologies."

When Obi Wan finishes his many further apologies and excuses himself, leaving you alone in your quarters, you are grateful for one thing: As you lie back in your bed, imagining the way his hips had twitched at the slightest brush, you thank the stars that the Nikkama doesn't go both ways.

You'd had your fun.

That's what you keep reminding yourself. When you have to keep your eyes from lingering a little too long during a shared smile. When your heart kicks up a little faster anytime you see that he's returned safely from some far-off world. When you kiss someone else and it doesn't feel the same.

The Jedi are not forbidden from physical pleasures. There's no reason not indulge in sex, so long as attachment isn't involved. But when you'd both realized as padawans that kissing and touching was swiftly turning into longing and wondering, you'd agreed it was for the best not to continue.

That conversation was so long ago, and the boy who'd made that promise was so far removed from the man who was currently pinning you down on the training room floor.

"Yield," he pants, teeth glistening in the fading sunlight. His breath is hot, and you're swallowing it with gasps of your own.

You flex your thighs, using the Force to lift both of you off of the ground. "Not until you've beaten me."

Huffing an exasperated laugh, he looks over your head in disbelief. Then he tightens his grip on the hand that holds your lightsaber and feels where your thumb is located. He stills. You're holding the empty hilt against his side, and your thumb is just below the pressure sensor. You grin, open-mouthed, sweaty, and undefeated.

"In a non-lethal match, I have indeed beaten you."

You're just about to reply when he crushes your wrist in his palm, wrenching it upward and holding both of your arms harmlessly above your head. You yelp in surprise and no small amount of pain as he presses the weight of his body onto you, holding himself up by pinning you down.

"But just for good measure - there," he says, digging his knees onto either side of your hips to hold you still. "Now yield."

You struggle against him, but it's like trying to break out of a durasteel cage. Then you catch sight of a dewy patch of golden skin and make a move that neither of you are expecting.

Your teeth sink into his neck before you can catch the impulse, and the muscles there vibrate when he gasps in shock. He releases your hands, but catches them again quickly. His face is suddenly flushed when he pulls away.

"There can be some honor in defeat, you know," he scowls down at you.

You smirk, pleased at getting a rise out of him. "A Jedi doesn't accept defeat with any reasonable chance at victory."

You lift your hips again, this time sending a concentrated pulse through the Force to try and wriggle out from under him. He holds you steady and you rock to one side, attempting to flip him off and reverse your positions, but to no avail. You take a few deep breaths, then try rolling your hips one last time.

"Stop that."

His tone snaps you out of your concentration. You look up to see him glaring down at you, looking unsteady for the first time in your match. You hesitate, then decide to take the opportunity he's giving and make the same move again. You grind your body against him and watch as his eyes widen. He releases your wrists and rolls off of you, standing up.

"I yield."

His turns his back on you, stalking over to where you've left your water canteens, and takes a long drink.

You lie there a moment in stunned silence, then shake it off and stand up, following him. "Are you... okay? What was that?"

"It's nothing," he snips back immediately.

Then you see his shoulders soften and he turns to face you. "Forgive me. I'm not... feeling very well."

He gives you a forced smile, then reaches to pick up his robe from the floor. "Perhaps we could continue this later?"

You shrug, at a loss. "Sure."

"Very well," he answers, heading for the doorway. "Thank you."

You frown, his sudden formality making you uneasy. "Obi Wan... did I do something wrong?"

"No," he says, shaking his head. "I just need to get some rest."

You take a beat before pressing him again. "I'm sorry about the bite."

He sighs. "There's no need to apologize. The fault is mine. Perhaps... it would just be best if we hold off any sparring sessions for the time being."

"Oh?" you ask quietly. "For how long?"

"Just... just for now."

You furrow your brow. Then it clicks. "Until the end of the Nikkama?"

He looks caught-out, sending his gaze past you.

Of course. It's been six months, now. He hasn't mentioned it, but you might have known by his mood.

Now you're the one struggling to make eye contact. You pick up your own canteen, drinking, then wiping your mouth.

"Is it that bad?" you finally ask.

He lets out a soft laugh. "Well, it's not meant to be easy."

There's a long, unbroken silence as you wonder how to approach this. Or whether to approach it, at all.

"Do you... want to talk about it?"

He shakes his head. "It's simply a matter of discipline. There isn't much to talk about."

"Well," you tell him slowly, carefully. "I've read the texts. And I want you to know that if you need... help, getting through to the end, I'm here for you."

His face drops. "What does that mean?"

You take a step closer, your heart pounding as you try to put the words together. "The trial has rules against you seeking pleasure. But, everyone has needs. And if you aren't seeking it... if it- it just happens..."

He looks down at the space between your bodies, and it's like you can see every thought running through his head. He doesn't answer for a very long time.

"Anything that were to happen," he says in a low tone, nearly a whisper. "Would need to be without my request."

Your breath is shortening with every word he says. "You asked me to help you with this," you reply. "And we are friends, are we not?"

He nods. "Of course."

"Then if you need it, let me help you."

Your hand tingles as you reach out to touch his side. He gently takes your hand and lowers it, almost grazing between his legs, and holds you there just a moment too long.

Your fingers lift from his hand to unclasp his belt, but he pulls you back.

"No," he says, swallowing and letting out a few slightly labored breaths. "No, I wouldn't- No."

You wait for an explanation, but he doesn't finish his thought.

"Well, as long as you know the offer stands," you tell him, straightening up. "If you change your mind..."

"I won't," he cuts you off. "There is no- no need."

Smiling for his benefit, you nod. "Of course. My mistake."

You can feel his gaze follow you as you bend over to pick up your own robe and brush past him out the door.

In any other situation, Obi Wan would hold his own in a debate. He's quite well known for having opinions that aren't easily swayed.

In this matter, against your better judgment, you find yourself wondering if you might be the exception.

A/N: I'm planning for this to be a short multi-chapter, maybe 3-5. Completely self-induglent. I want this man to be edged within an inch of his life. I want him whimpering, your honor.

On a side note, forgive me for this interruption in posting Water and Rock! It's been challenging because I've needed to basically write the full ending before I can be sure the plot/pacing is right for this chapter. It will be up soon, promise! In the meantime I've been using this side fic as a bit of a creative outlet lol.

As always, if you'd like to be tagged for this fic, feel free to comment or message me. :)

#obi wan x reader #star wars #obi wan kenobi #star wars fanfiction #fanfic #obiwan #obi wan × you #obi wan kenobi x reader

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yukidragon · 10 months ago

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Sunny Day Jack - Songs to Listen to While Descending into Madness

Hey, remember when I found Ian's perfect theme song for Sunshine in Hell? Well, I found one that fits Joseph's descent into madness and embracing the personality of Jack. Maybe I should make a playlist specifically for Sunshine in Hell sometime...

Not only does it have this manic energy that switches to disturbing and somber, a lot of the lyrics really give me the vibe of the suffering Joseph went through as he tore away at his very identity to become someone and something else.

When did I become afraid of the dark? Are my eyeballs just yet to adjust to seeing the light? The room I'm in is still the same, the shadows have not rearranged it No, the only thing that's changed is how I see at night I fumble for the switch and strap on infrareds and wish For sunshine when the morning's somewhere else But I can't change what time it is or dilate my irises Only what I look at, and I'm looking at myself I am not the sunshine, I am not the moon at night Well, who else could I be when I can hardly see? I am not the sunshine, I am not the moon at night I'm no one if I'm nowhere in between When did I become afraid of the dark? Was it when I left the cave and swore I'd never go back? If we can't see each other, then there's no more use for hiding I've decided I'll abide it; why deny the color black? I'm not a flower, not a solar-powered calculator Damn my eyes for seeing what's not there I'll trade in vision for a practiced intuition 'Til my fears come to fruition, I'm not scared I am not the sunshine, I am not the moon at night Well, who else could I be when I can hardly see? I am not the sunshine, I am not the moon at night I'm no one if I'm nowhere in between The future must know where you've been The past predicts the state you're in The present did and will not last Is, isn't, was, have, hasn't, has All that I ask is, keep those empty frames If nobody's in them, then no one is to blame For your self-portraits, sign another name Well, who should I be then, if I'll never be the same? I will be my sunshine, I will be my moon at night Who else could I be, when I can't fucking see? I will be my sunshine, I will be my moon at night I'm nowhere now, here's no one now to be And if dreams can come true, what does that say about nightmares? I'll stay awake tonight

It really gives me vibes of the animatic Sauce made where Jack antagonizes Joseph, particularly that high energy of Jack strutting around, being cheerfully scary and threatening. It also reminds me this classic picture of a cheerful Jack and a traumatized dead(?) Joseph.

It even has a sketch updated version you can check out here!

Credit as always goes to the awesome Sauce for their awesome art, characters, and stories. They and the rest of the crew of SnaccPop Studios are a wealth of endless inspiration. Consider joining their patreon, won't you? Just remember - don't repost anything privately posted there!

There's so many lyrics that make me think of Jack's broken mind and the effects of hell had on him. I have to really break it down to show all the different feelings/images that it conjures up, since there is so much here virtually every line.

"When did I become afraid of the dark?" When you were trapped in hell, Joseph. His loneliness was bad while he was alive, but his death made it so, so, so much worse. He's terrified of being alone and forgotten. He can't stand the cold numbness only broken up by pain. It's a night he can never sleep through or wake up from.

"The room I'm in is still the same, the shadows have not rearranged it. No, the only thing that's changed is how I see at night." It didn't get better. Nothing changed in that hell. It just repeated his death and the delusions of his decaying mind. The only thing that changed was himself into someone else, someone who could better handle the madness.

"I fumble for the switch and strap on infrareds and wish, For sunshine when the morning's somewhere else." Joseph struggles desperately somehow, someway to find some sort of light, some hope in hell. Unfortunately, his sunshine Mary is somewhere else, reborn as Alice. All he can do is wish for a miracle.

His sunshine was always like a miracle to him. She found him twice. He prays she'll find him again.

"But I can't change what time it is or dilate my irises, Only what I look at, and I'm looking at myself." Joseph can't change his circumstances. He can't feel anything but cold and pain, no matter how much he struggles. He's helpless.

The only thing Joseph can do is relive his death and look inward into an ever growing abyss that stares back at him. That abyss, that hell is changing him because he can't do anything but stare inward.

Joseph only has himself in this hell, and the longer he stares at himself, the more he hates what he sees.

"I am not the sunshine, I am not the moon at night." Joseph isn't as good as his sunshine was, in his opinion. He's not even as good as a fraction of her, like the sunlight is reflected on the moon. He doesn't even have a glimmer of her light either.

"I'm no one if I'm nowhere in between." In a way, he is nowhere, trapped between life and death. Joseph/Jack was erased. He became no one.

"When did I become afraid of the dark? Was it when I left the cave and swore I'd never go back?" Jack swore never to go back into the tape, never to be Joseph ever again. He's terrified of being alone, and he refuses to ever be alone and forgotten ever again.

"I've decided I'll abide it; why deny the color black?" Joseph gives into his darker impulses, his madness, his yandere side. He'll do anything to be free of this hell, to have his sunshine back.

Even if that means staining his soul irreparably with sin by torturing and killing others to do it.

He'll be damned to hell either way. He knows that from experience.

"Damn my eyes for seeing what's not there." When someone is put through sensory deprivation, they hallucinate, make up alternate personas, and the like. Jack himself was confused at first when the tape was played, asking if MC/Alice really was real, that he wasn't just dreaming.

How many times did Jack imagine someone was really there to save him, only to be disappointed by a cruel reality that he was still trapped in hell?

"I'll trade in vision for a practiced intuition. 'Til my fears come to fruition, I'm not scared." These lines sum up the whole Jack persona. He'll bury himself in that cheerful façade in order to deny his own fears that he'll be trapped in hell forever. He'll lose himself in a dream of his own making since he can never sleep again.

The only way to avoid being scared of an eternity in hell is denial, denial, denial.

"Well, who else could I be when I can hardly see?" He's Jack. He can't see himself as Joseph anymore. His mind can't handle it. He's blinded himself to his real identity by burying memories of anything else.

"The future must know where you've been." This feels like the video tape. The few traces left of what happened in the incident of 1984.

"The past predicts the state you're in." All the mistakes Joseph made and the few things that made him happy with himself are the reasons why he became Jack.

"The present did and will not last." Time is cruel, constantly marching forward and erasing the past. Jack lost everything so many times. He lost his identity, his dreams, his sunshine, and his life. Everything was lost so easily... how can he not dread losing it all again?

"All that I ask is, keep those empty frames." If nothing else, Jack is desperate to be remembered. Even if the person in the picture isn't himself anymore, he's desperate for at least some trace of him is remembered, even if it's this caricature of the character he played.

"If nobody's in them, then no one is to blame." A reference to LambsWork Productions covering up the part they played in Jack's death or the scandal the 1984 incident created. They can't have their reputation ruined if no one remembers the SunnyTime Crew Show after all.

"For your self-portraits, sign another name." This makes me think of all the autographs Joseph had to sign as "Sunny Day Jack." The character had his face, his voice... but it was a different name. He couldn't break character, because the character was what people loved. It's another reason why he's Jack now instead of Joseph.

"Well, who should I be then, if I'll never be the same?" Joseph Cullman is missing. [Redacted] Haberdae is dead and erased. He can't go back to being either. Who should he be? What name or persona should he use that will give him peace?

"Who else could I be, when I can't fucking see?" What is left for him but to be Sunny Day Jack? He has nothing else but that persona in this hell.

"I'm nowhere now, here's no one now to be." This line sums up Jack's state in the tape. He's nowhere, and he doesn't know how to be himself anymore. He is nothing... so he'll be the character he played.

He doesn't know how to be Joseph anymore because he can no longer see the good qualities he had as Joseph. Everything good was attributed to Jack in his mind, even his sunshine's love.

"I will be my sunshine, I will be my moon at night." He will be Sunny Day Jack. He will be his own hope, his sunshine. Losing himself to this alternate persona was the only thing he had to cling to in that cold and lonely hell. He clung to it like a piece of driftwood until the splinters dug into his hands and made him bleed madness.

"And if dreams can come true, what does that say about nightmares?" Now this shift makes me think of after Jack is freed and the lingering trauma from being in the tape. It's fitting because it comes after a drastic shift in the song to something somber, slowly building into something almost... hopeful?

His dream of being saved came true... but the nightmare of that hell still haunts him.

What if he goes back?

Jack could, just as easily, be sent away if Alice doesn't want him there. He needs to make sure that never happens.

Can Jack really dare to cling to this hope that he's been given, that this actually is reality?

Was he really saved, or is this just another delusion?

So even though Jack finally can sleep, he's finally safe... his fears still haunt him. He can't truly rest until he's sure, absolutely sure, that he won't lose his sunshine ever again. It's the hope he's desperate to hold onto.

"I'll stay awake tonight." The hell of the tape robbed Jack of his ability to sleep, both in the past and in the present. His trauma and mental scars run deep.

No doubt there were many nights where Jack just laid in bed and watched Alice sleep. He focused on her warmth, her steady breathing. Her heartbeat, her soft skin, her smell...

Alice is real. This sunshine is real. Jack knows that. He knows that deep down in his soul, but...

What if?

Just one minute longer. One second more to reassure himself.

This beautiful person Jack holds close in his arms is his salvation. Alice chose to save him. She promised to never forget him. She promised him forever.

Jack feared that the tape would be his forever.

So even though he's tired, Jack just needs a little bit more, just that extra moment more to drink in Alice with all of his senses so that he can truly believe that she delivered him from damnation.

Joseph is dead. The good parts of him, the light and hope he found in himself as that redacted identity are gone from even his memory. Jack is the only one there now.

Alice is the only sunshine Jack can see now, and he'll do whatever it takes to make sure he never loses that light, his hope, his love ever again.

Of course, during these moments of insecurity, Alice would stir, just a little, and cling to Jack tighter. Sometimes she even murmurs his name softly. She can feel that he needs her love through their connected souls.

The thoughts and feelings flow both ways. Sometimes Alice can pick up what Jack is thinking too, especially when his soul cries out to be seen, heard, felt, and loved.

Even though Jack didn't say a word, Alice heard his thoughts, his deepest need, and answered in a sleepy mumble, "Don't worry... I've got you. 'm not going anywhere..."

The soft words, slurred by a haze of sleep, sent a jolt through Jack, and all the love and gratitude he felt for her washed over him. Even in her dreams she would reach out to him, reassure him that she won't let him go. Even when in moments when his fear made their connection feel so tenuous, so fragile, all it took was a soft squeeze of her delicate hand always holding so gently onto his to quiet his fears.

Alice won't remember what she said in the morning, or anything else she mutters in a half-asleep haze, but she'll always remember Jack. She'll remember this man, no matter what name he uses, no matter what the fractured picture of his sanity looks like now. Their love is forever.

Even if Jack can't find the light in the man he used to be, even if the light of the good parts of Joseph are dead, buried, and forgotten in his mind... Jack can always believe in Alice, his sunshine. As long as he has her, he doesn't have to fear the dark or that he'll be banished back to hell.

Jack has the light of hope. It's in his sunshine Alice, and in the persona he wears. Most of all, it's in their love that lived on even after death.

Fortunately, over time, Alice will help him see that the light was always there even when he went any other name. With her help, he'll be able to finally find true peace and rest his weary soul in the gentle sunshine of their love. He'll finally be able to heal and truly shine in spite of the darkness.

Yeah, I know the song ends on a more somber note, but I'm all about happy endings and fluffy vanilla goodness. I couldn't help but add on a bit of a sweet reprise of sorts, even if not in so many lyrics. Sunshine in Hell is all about these wounded soulmates helping each other heal after all.

@channydraws @earthgirlaesthetic @sai-of-the-7-stars @cheriihoney @illary-kore @okamiliqueur @kurokrisps

#Sunny Day Jack #Something's Wrong With Sunny Day Jack #SunnyDayJack #sdj #swwsdj #Headcanon Ramblings #Sauce-y Art

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elysisticism · 5 months ago

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Dear Queer Kids: It Doesn’t Get Better

The news cycle from the past few months could break your heart, over and over and over again. It consistently spits out stories of our community’s most painful incidents of directed hate, in violent and gory detail. And there’s a new one every time you turn around.

Lately, the theme has been transphobic fear mongering and increased restriction on an even more vulnerable subset: trans youth. The vitriol has always been there, it just wasn’t always so blatantly acted upon, especially so close to home. The hate speech has moved from whispers behind closed doors to shouts in the street, to the mouths of our politicians, to the ink spilled out on our legislation. The consequences are dire: suicide, assault, murder.

This pride month, as I reflect on the past year, I remember the tragic assault and subsequent death of Nex Benedict, a 15-year-old non-binary student just trying to use the school bathroom. I am reminded of my days as a queer and trans kid. It has been over a decade since I was stuck attending public school, but I vividly remember the uncertainty, the fear, and the hopelessness. When my carefully built scaffolding of adult queer life is stripped away, these are the emotions that remain.

At that time, there was a popular campaign, mostly by out gay celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres (we didn’t have a lot of visible trans adults back then) featuring them assuring queer kids, from their mansions, sports cars, or Hollywood sets, that it gets better. I remember the sentiment ringing quite hollow. When you are so immensely vulnerable and in pain in the very present moment, it doesn’t help hearing that it will get better in some far-off imaginary future. We didn’t know if we’d survive until then.

Now, reflecting on the last ten years from a vantage point above the chaos of teenage life, it would still ring hollow. You need to know that it doesn’t get better – it gets different.

As a non-binary teenager, one of my biggest hurdles wasn’t hate, it was invisibility. It may be because of my privilege as a less feminine, middle-class white kid, or my propensity to people-please, stay quiet, and focus on academics, but I was rarely a victim of deliberate and directed transphobia or discrimination. This doesn’t mean that those teenage years were easy for me. Invisibility comes with its own set of hardships: constant misgendering, gaslighted excuses for why it was ‘too difficult to understand,’ and a reputation as the ‘weird kid’ ate at me each day, nibble by nibble. Illegibility shielded me from targeted violence, but it also shielded my true self from the world. From underneath the covers, I could peak out at a world that was barely beginning to accept cisgender gay couples, and pretend to be asleep (deny my truth and project myself as girl) when the wrong type of attention was drawn, dreaming of a time when it would get better, and I would be recognized for who I am.

Slowly, the transgender community has gained societal awareness through campaigns, media attention, and the hard work of queer activists. However, not all attention is good attention. With an increase in general dialogue surrounding the transgender community has come an increase in hateful dialogue, misinformation, bigoted rhetoric, and violent actions. To be clear, the hate is not new: gender non-conformity has been seen as unacceptable for generations of Western society. However, the hate has evolved and gained traction amongst those who can use it for their own gain.

In the present moment, hate against such a miniscule but exposed minority of the general population is a rallying point, a dog-whistle, and a distraction. Fueled by disinformation, purposeful misunderstandings, and exaggerated or blatantly false claims, transgender people have become a common enemy. To the loudest of our critics, we never were individual humans with unique actions, aspirations, and lives we are attempting to live free of violence. Instead, we symbolize an attack on the status quo and everyone who belongs to it or benefits from it. Truly, I do not believe that most people have an ingrained motive to hate our community; what they hate is the feelings of vulnerability that emerge within themselves as a reaction to societal changes beyond their control. Spurred on by certain faith leaders, politicians, and influencers, they have turned this fear into anger and have directed it those more marginalized than themselves.

The consequences of this movement are now beginning to come to fruition. Transgender youth looking to participate in sports, get an education, or merely go to the bathroom face a barrage of restrictions, discrimination, and violence. The most vulnerable members of our community who do not experience outright beatings will absorb the environment of hate that has seeped into our institutions and transform it into self-loathing. At best, self-loathing shuts tight and locks the closet door, preventing queer kids from ever experiencing and sharing their true selves. At worst, self-loathing turns to careless risk-taking, self-harm, and suicide. Simply put, transphobia on the societal level leads to trans death again and again and again.

Perhaps this age-old song of hate will decrescendo, but it will always be audible in the background of our lives. The privileged fearful will find a new victim-enemy, re-concentrate on another vulnerable group, and begin to ignore us once again. Then, just as we did after the second world war, after the government purge, and after the HIV/AIDS crisis we will quietly emerge from the shadows, take stock of our circumstances, mourn our dead, and continue to live. We will learn their new rhetoric, we will educate a new generation, and we will advocate for the most vulnerable amongst us. We will survive again and again and again.

It doesn’t get better - it gets different. Yet we adapt to this difference every time and every time we continue to survive.

But if it doesn’t get better, if the hate continues to circulate, evolving and reforming each time, why must we endure? Why should our community, and our youth, continue to subject themselves to the same violence experienced by our queer ancestors?

Queer youth of today, you must know that there is more to life than perpetual hate. The storm may rage around us, but there will be moments where you find yourself in the eye. When you finally put on that item of clothing and the mirror reflects back the true essence of who you are; when you find the group of friends and chosen family that stick with you, no matter what; when you look your partner in the eye and spark that feeling of belonging, feeling of home.

These islands of queer joy sustain us, nurture us, and remind us of why we fight again and again and again.

You don’t need to listen to those privileged celebrities in their mansions, sports cars, and Hollywood sets telling you it gets better in some distant future. You also don’t need to listen to the hate-mongering faith-leaders, politicians, and influencers. What you need, and what I know is out there for you, is a community of allies, peers, and queer elders that will assure you that you are welcome, just the way you are.

This is how we continue in the face of hate, violence, and death. We gather – in secret, in public, online, in person, covertly, in colourful displays, at protests, at memorials, out loud, and in whispers. We find each other and we hold fast to one another, we support each other, we care for each other, and we ensure our own survival.

I must tell you that it doesn’t get better. The hate never goes away. But you will grow into a community of resilience, a community of hope, and a community fueled by moments of your very own queer joy.

#Pride #queer #lgbtqia #trans #rainbow

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wutheringmights · 5 months ago

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Commentary for latest CTB chapter???👀👀👀👀

Thank you! You guys are as prompt as ever. Unfortunately, I needed a few days to get my thoughts together (and honestly would have taken even longer if I wasn't going out of town this weekend).

I kinda struggled a bit to have Important Thoughts about this chapter (I have been so tired all week), but I did my best.

(Triggering content from the chapter are discussed below).

I’ve mentioned many times already that I suffered from a massive bout of writer’s block during this chapter; and it’s a bit hard to pinpoint what exactly caused it.

On one hand, I think the last chapter was just so much that I may have burnt myself out on an emotional level. Usually, a week or two off is all I need to fix it, but I also had a lot of personal responsibilities that took up all of my bandwidth.

And, frankly, there’s a part of me that is a little freaked out that I’ve been working on this story for so long, and that I might not be able to finish it within my self-imposed deadline (if I have to see CTB’s 4th birthday, I am gonna lose it). That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy writing CTB or that I feel pressured to keep going; I just felt exhausted and overwhelmed by how much of my life I’ve sunk into a story that not only refuses to end in a timely manner, but that I can’t share with anyone I know in real life.

My burnout required a few months' rest to get over, but that’s not to say I didn’t try to work on this chapter that entire time.

So I actually started this chapter back in April, right after I published STP. I wrote this opening scene of Link ruminating over the past and got stuck trying to transition to him being found. I got so stuck that I ended up bouncing over to the present-day section, where I got stuck in a new and novel way (which I’ll talk about more later).

That means that everything else in the past I wrote the day before posting. On one hand, I was raring to go and I felt really good getting all those words onto paper. It did a lot for my ego. On the other, I really wish I took more time to revise a lot of this. I think the pacing overall is really strong, but there’s a few ideas I threw out into the story that I really wish I lingered on.

For example, I mention that Link’s physical abuse was a relatively short stretch of time compared to how significant it is. Him being violent towards the engineer feels like it went on forever and forever, but it only lasted about 4 months. I like this detail so much because it helps to illustrate how even short-term abuse has lifelong effects on people. If I lingered on this chapter a bit more, I would have found more ways to ruminate on it.

I almost had Ayane discover Link in his house. I ended up changing it to Jakucho since, as much as Ayane likes Link, she would not care enough to go check up on him.

For the longest time, I imagined Link’s room at the Miyashita estate to be the same as the one he was held prisoner in post-Kakariko Well. But I ended up stating in that chapter that the room was located in a part of the house he had never seen before. So Link’s room was changed from a formal guest room to a study.

In universe, this is so that he’s encouraged to read books and is easily within Jakucho’s reach.

I personally got a hearty chuckle out of Link being denied chopsticks by default; he’s probably very good at using them in the present, but during this time he’s probably really shit at it. Real white boy behavior.

If I gave myself more time to work on this section, I would have played around with the idea of him being haunted by an imaginary engineer, just as he had been haunted by an imaginary version of his old self on the way to the Kakariko Well. I don’t know if I would have committed to it, though. On one hand, it would have been a cool way to illustrate his inner thoughts. On the other, it implies a mental break I don’t think he’s experiencing.

On a similar note, I worry that this chapter wasn’t that effective because it was way less (for a lack of better words) dramatic than the past few “Link Has A Breakdown” chapters have been?

Let me explain. So nearly every time Link has been under emotional duress before this, I’ve played with the prose to show how his reality is being warped. Take chapter 24 for example. Link gets stuck on the engineer leaving him, so the passage of time in that chapter becomes unclear-- both in him not realizing how quickly time is passing and him constantly going back to the day he realized the engineer was gone for good. The prose is written in a way that conveys that reality has broken. It’s very melodramatic.

But for this chapter, reality is firm. Link’s mind has cleared enough to see what happened in the past clearly. The prose can’t dramatically screw with perception because that’s not what’s happening. The passage of time and the depiction of reality has to be crystal clear.

So despite making these long, semi-experimental passages one of my signature moves, I couldn’t use it here without actively detracting from the story. On one hand, a more grounded chapter effectively shows how this breakdown is different. On the other, it’s a little basic.

I have a bit of a problem where past!Ayane is a bit too similar in personality to Linkle. Ayane in the present day is supposed to be a cool teenager who is probably a bit of a mean girl at school-- the kind that will grow out of it the moment she leaves for college. But I wanted to show her entering this stage of life in the past, so she’s less bratty and more troublemaking.

Speaking of which, any reference to Ayane “going through a phase” is supposed to refer to her becoming a moody teenager. I didn’t realize until literally yesterday that it might come off as her family being transphobic. They’re supportive of her being a girl; they just get fed up with how much of a kid she is.

The point of the chapter that made me start tearing up in the coffee shop is when Ayane got mad at Link for destroying the journal. I’ve been that kid who understands cognitively that a parent in your life is not well but still struggled with what that meant on an emotional level. Her family definitely explained to her that Link isn’t well and etc, but that can be kinda abstract for kids to really understand. So when the mental illness causes him to react badly, it seems to her that he is hurting her because he does not care about her.

And there are a whole slew of issues you can explore with that idea alone, like how culpable is Link for his actions when he is unwell but still the adult? I’ve already started exploring bits of it with the child’s relationship with Link and the engineer. But exploring this idea from a different perspective (the child and his fucked up emotional issues vs Ayane’s normal preteen perspective) is always interesting.

Link impulsively trying to kill himself was not in my original plan for the chapter, but after everything... yeah, he would try. This might have something to do with an episode of You’re Wrong About I was listening to work last week where they talked about the percentage of suicides that are impulsive decisions versus premeditated.

(Of course, today I listened to the episode on copycat suicides and now I am very nervous about this chapter being used as an instruction manuel)

I was going to have his attempt be to freeze to death outside, but then I thought of the obi belt, and I really could not resist alluding back to the hanging scene in chapter 13

It ended up being a good transition into a scene I’ve wanted to do for a while now: Ayane’s mom asking him to continue acting like Ayane’s older brother.

I originally wanted that moment back when their friendship was just starting out, but decided to toss it to his depression arc to act as a moment of encouragement for him. What I didn’t expect was to stumble into this scene being both a way to talk him out of suicide, as well as him realizing he’s a shitty brother. I’m a terrible brother is a monumental realization for him, and I stumbled into it by accident.

I was tempted to remove Ayane’s mother from this scene and put Jakucho here instead. But Jakucho would never ask Link to play an older brother role. Plus, I like the idea that a random, near-stranger accidentally talked him down without realizing what they were doing.

And of course, having Ayane’s mother talk helps to develop the Miyashita family dynamic and give a better idea as to why Shigeo is estranged.

Ayane’s mother also has a very tiny appearance earlier in the story-- chapter 9, when we meet Jakucho for the first time. Granted, I think I only referred to her as Impa’s sister.

I also stumbled accidentally into the moment with the koi fish and using them as a symbol for perseverance. I really like that scene. I almost named the chapter “The Koi Pond” in its honor.

I also admit that until fairly recently, I also didn’t know fish could live in frozen water.

I went back and forth about whether I wanted to make a big moment at the beginning of the chapter about Link going non-verbal, or if I should let it build up slowly; I ended up going with the latter.

I didn’t want to make his non-verbalness the center of his issues when it’s just a consequence of his depression. He’s not depressed and non-verbal. He’s non-verbal because he’s depressed. So waiting until the second half of this section to address it homely drove home that this is only a symptom of a larger issue.

This chapter also gave me the opportunity to address my sign language headcanon; it’s standard taught in school, but not in a way where everyone is actually good at it. It’s like learning Spanish in elementary school; you grow up remembering a few phrases and words, but never actually become bilingual.

I like the way the bell motif is used in this chapter. In the past, Proxi’s bells are a sign that things are going to get better. In the present, the Castle Town bells signal that things are about to get a whole lot worse.

But, yes! After all this time, Proxi is finally here. Hopefully the long wait for her introduction/return will be worth while.

For the present day:

Remember how I said my writer’s block struck for this part of the chapter as well? I solved it in the dumbest way possible.

One of my big issues was that I didn’t know how to string everything that I needed to get done into a cohesive chapter (because if the chapter isn’t good, then I would have wasted so much of my time on a story that isn’t good, and etc.). My solution was to write a flat draft with only the stuff needed to move the plot forward (talking to Ganondorf, getting on the boat, etc), and then do revisions where I added character moments.

Except, I did character moments by the character. So I would spent a week adding scenes about Spirit, then another about Time, and so on. I said in this post that I turned a 5k draft into a 12k draft. Yikes.

Because I wrote the chapter like this, I think the pacing is not great. The dinner scene and the post-Midlink gossiping was originally one scene, which I split into two to accommodate other character stuff. But I also think this is one of the most well-balanced chapters in terms of how many characters got a moment to shine.

I’m really enjoying how much you all enjoy Ganondorf. I think nearly every comment on the chapter so far has mentioned him. I almost regret keeping him in the Zora’s Domain right now, but have no fear. He will be back.

I am endlessly amused by this moment when Warriors realizes he has to talk to Spirit again, and he thinks “Spirit. / Fucking Spirit.” Is he cursing him out, or is he remembering... you know...

I mentioned a long time ago that one of the issues I had to fix when starting this chapter was finding something for the rest of the Chain to do in this final act. I figured out what their deal is, and a lot of tiny moments in this chapter is the set-up for that.

In a similar vein, I feel like I lost the thread on Time for a hot while there. I really had to mull over what his problem is, how he was going to respond, and how I can show Time responding near Warriors so that the reader can know. I’ve never had this much difficulty writing him-- or characters in general-- before. Hence, my on-going battle against writer’s block.

Another amusing moment that only I think it funny: Spirit lifting Warriors up by the scruff of his neck to haul into the alley way, like he’s an old cat. Honestly, I should write more jokes based around Spirit being strong enough to lift Warriors now.

Now that I think about it, I have a scene in my head where Warriors bitches so much while traveling that Spirit just throws him over his shoulder and carries him like a sack of rice. Is it out of character for both of them? Yeah, but we can imagine it happens in the AU where they are friends.

I have been wanting to provide some form of a resolution for Midna and Twilight for so long, but there hasn’t been a good moment to make them talk-- or at least, a moment where they can talk while Warriors is nearby to listen.

I really enjoy striking a comparison between how Midna and Twilight hashed everything out versus the bullshit Warriors got up to last chapter, especially because Midna and Twilight’s solution was to just give up. It’s not going to work out ever, so they might as well enjoy themselves now.

I love MidLink so much, but part of that love is in how it 100% would not work out between them. As Midna says, they would hate each other in a year. But they keep trying anyway because they love each other right now and that’s what matters.

Speaking of which, Midna’s “we’ll hate each other in a year” line is a reference to the Greta Gerwig Little Women movie. I love that movie so much, enough that I can forgive Timothy Chamalet for being in it. He has a scene where his proposal is met with basically the same sentiment from Saoirse Ronan’s character.

Tiny little headcanon: Skyloft’s theater style is very similar to ancient Greek theater, with heavy use of masks and choruses. That’s why he mimics holding a mask when performing Twilight’s line for Lana.

His line was originally something Twilight actually said, but then I went in a revised the MidLink scene and got rid of it. I kept Sky’s mocking of it because I thought it was more realistic.

I won’t say much about what the boys talked about post-confession scene, except to point out that they were kept up by the noise, they might have an idea of the timing of when everything went down during the Hot Mess

I’m glad everyone found my joke about always going to Wild’s era funny lol

Chateau Milk (aka: alcoholic milk beverages) is a tiny little world building detail I have been dying to do for ages. I wanted to use any scene of milk-drinking to shove in a joke about Hyrule being intensely lactose intolerant (he’s immune to all bad food except dairy), but I couldn’t squeeze it it.

The ribbon kinda got a disproportionate role considering how briefly I referenced Spirit losing it last chapter.

The reason Warriors was sharing a room with Four was so that I could finally do a follow-up on the Four Swords stuff I started forever ago, but it has once more been punted off to another chapter. Maybe one day...

By the time I got to this second conversation with Time, I was feeling much better about how I was writing him. Between this and his earlier appearance, this is definitely the stronger moment.

I also deeply amused by Ganondorf and Lincoln have to pretend to be very bitchy with each other in order to not seem like they were married. I wanted to write a scene where Ganondorf argues that Lincoln needs to show him the proper request so that Lincoln would have an excuse to kiss his hand, but I ended up not having the energy or will power to go back in and add it.

Spirit is so not used to anyone having a genuine interest in his senses that Sky’s question totally caught him off guard. Thank god Sky is the type of person who would ask because I got a good moment to clarify more of the limits of Spirit’s senses-- mainly, that a lot of the info he gets is so contextual that most of it is nonsense to him

To clarify, Spirit’s senses freak out people outside of his era. In New Hyrule, where the idea is a bit more common place, it’s considered rude to ask just as its rude to tell people what you sense. Lokomo customs, and all that.

I didn’t plan on having Spirit cut his hair, but I was deep in the throes of writer’s block and felt like I needed to write about Spirit doing something a little insane to respike my interest. Cutting off your hair because the guy you hated saved your ribbon fitted the bill nicely.

(Nonetheless-- RIP Spirit’s long hair. You were much beloved)

Spirit and Lana’s relationship has always been very underbaked on my part. I didn’t do a lot with them at the beginning of the story, and I haven’t done much with it now (or even much with Lana in general). Here is a vague attempt to salvage my mistakes. If I could ever revise the whole of CTB (I will never), this would be one of the things I would improve

Oh God... the Nephus stuff...

Like, I knew this was going to happen. What I worry about is whether it feels cheap to just have a character go back on their word like that. It’s realistic, if only because Warriors’s deal was really shitty. But on the other, it’s not very satisfying for the reader. You want the characters to have complex reasons for everything. I’m not sure that this qualifies.

And this applies to all of the war stuff this chapter. Did Nephus lie about not wanting the Triforce? Whatever the answer is now, it’s not going to be satisfying.

I know I said previously that Lincoln had no suspicions as to what happened during the Hot Mess. Well, I lied. Guy had it figured out fairly early on and only needed the opportunity to ask.

I just hope this scene with him and Spirit shows how Lincoln can be Warriors’s dad. Warriors is his mother’s son, but some of his insanity is from his father.

Also we’ll pretend Lincoln has had that arm tattoo this entire time. The tattoo is not plot relevant, but it’s important to me.

Legend’s “it’s always the fucking Triforce” speech is my favorite Legend line in a chapter.

On a subconscious level, I was basing Castle Town on Boston. Why? I have no good reason. Just felt right.

I really wish I managed to get us to Castle Town any time before this part of the story, if only to explore all the various neighborhood ideas I have. I managed to squeeze in the Gerudo neighborhood, but I have more thoughts on neighborhoods for the Zora, Goron, Rito, and even regular-old humans.

I’m going to tell you right now that the girl in the graveyard is not plot relevant. I had a whole thing about the grave being a memorial for all the heroes across the eras and her praying to the memorial for a new hero that I just never got around to explaining

“Shines with humility” is another line that deeply amused me. Like, buddy. That is not how humility works.

The Master Sword rejecting Warriors is supposed to feel very fitting and very unfair, all at once. I wanted people to understand why he’s lost the right to use her while still being frustrated that he was still being punished. I wanted this to be another opportunity for complex feelings. I don’t think the scene hit the right way, but that’s alright.

There was a point of time where I was plotting this half of the story when I realized I could use the Triforce scar idea that I had previously abandoned. I like the idea and the scene a lot, but I wonder if it feels forced? Like the whole story bent over backwards to make my silly idea possible. Let me know if this feels like a natural conclusion, or if I messed up somehow.

That being said, this whole scene where Warriors and Spirit were cutting the Triforce into his hand was a lot of fun to write. Nothing breaks writer’s block like writing an insane character dynamic.

I feel like I should talk more about themes and what this means for them, but you have eyes. You probably get the point by now. Instead, I will inform you that I did try to read that section to my writing friends, who all agreed that they did not have enough context to understand what the fuck was going on. And, yeah. That’s fair.

I really wish I waxed more poetry about Warriors reentering the public eye. I did not have enough willpower to revise the hell out of that scene. However, I love the ending bit with Warriors asking Hyrule to make sure he gets the scar.

One last thing-- I really should have done a revision because an important plot element may have gotten lost in it. I won’t say what, but hopefully it won’t cause problems down the road.

And that’s the chapter! I feel like I didn’t have a lot to talk about this chapter, despite taking a near-week to write up all my thoughts. Next one should hopefully come sooner, but note that I still have a few more weekend trips and real life responsibilities to handle. My life is not settling down again until the beginning of October.

I really want to emphasize that my bitching about my writer’s block and the source of it is not something I really need sympathy for, and it’s really not something encouragement is going to fix on it’s own. I appreciate the thought, but a lot of my issues right now just require some self-reflection on my part. I don’t want anyone feeling forced to drop a nice word or feel worried I’ll drop the story without it; I’ll still dedicated to finishing CTB. I just need some time (and to stop hanging out with my extended family).

In other news, my friend offered to bind CTB into a book for me. Well, books. She knew the word count going in, but I have heard many complaints about how long CTB is. Apparently, it’s 6 volumes so far. Some volumes only have two chapters. When I told her I updated last Sunday, I saw the light leave her eyes. I love her dearly, and I will find a way to pay her back for this.

#i skipped over a lot of things so feel free to ask additional questions #your bonus fun fact is that there almost was an Icarius appearance this chapter until I realized it fucked up the pacing #me rambling #lu ctb #ask #linked universe #ctb commentary #ctb spoilers

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innocuousibis · 8 months ago

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Blue Eye Samurai is trans, right?

I just finished season one and have some thoughts. I'm a fan of the author is dead and personal interpretations of media being valid, but if the coming arcs turn this into a queerbait situation I will be sad.

I read Mizu as a gay trans man who does not have the language or examples of transness present in his society to come to an understanding of who and what he is. Even for me as a trans person now it was really hard to come to full a understanding of myself and my desires with so few examples to identify with. I went for years living in an in-between state, verbally and internally denying my identity, and making failed attempts to assimilate into cis roles before I figured out what is really going on. I can't even image how much harder this would be for people living in the past.

Mizu's tendancy to want to confide his real sex to people he is close with feels to me exactly like what I have to go through when I am deciding to come out to people as trans. I live as a man now, and now people that I meet perceive and refer to me that way. But being trans is still a big part of my experience, and something that I often feel a desire to confide, while I also worry that it will change how I am perceived and treated. Mizu doesn't want to be treated as a woman, but he also doesn't want to deceive those he cares for. And he also wants to be with men and desirable to men, which creates another place of tension against his identity.

We see Mizu attempting to assimilate into the role of wife, and it is clear how uncomfortable in that role he is. The more his husband Mikio allows him to be himself and express his masculinity the more Mizu falls in love with him. He wants to be treated as a man and an equal in society, to be one of the guys and to spar on with Mikio on an even field. But when he finally fully shows Mikio his true self, the formidable swordsman he is, Mikio is repulsed and rejects him.

I think the most powerfully trans moment in the show was when Mizu was at the brothel and reacted to the sight of two men kissing. As a gay trans man he instinctively identifies with the two men.

It's possible that the next season will attempt to scrub Mizu's character of queerness and chalk all of his behavior up to pragmatism. We have this season, and it is trans as hell, but it would suck if the next season were to change Mizu to fit him into a cis narrative.

Perhaps Edo period Japan did not have any language to conceptualize what it might mean to be a trans person, but this is a modern piece of media, subject to modern analysis and interpretation. Considering how much blatant trans coding is built into Mizu's character, it bothers me that the creators refer to Mizu as 'she' while the character is almost never referred to that way in the show, and have nothing to say about the trans interpretation other than "oh that's cool, yeah you can call her 'they'."

#blue eye samurai #mizu is trans #i'm trans #this shit is trans

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neechees · 11 months ago

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what do you think of blood quantums for tribal enrollment? I’ve heard many different opinions about it and wanted to ask your opinion. On one hand it undoubtedly filters out the pretendians, on the other it seems to keep many indigenous ppl from connecting with their communities when they are legitimately indigenous. It was also put in place by the govt so that doesn’t help it’s merit either

BQ for tribal enrollment does not filter out the pretendians, it's not ironclad. And even if it did, it's also disenfranchising people who are also ACTUALLY Native.

We (& i mean the royal "we" here) talked about this on my blog that there's a type of "pretendian" that technically does have some kind of (usually distant) Native heritage down the line, but that they use this to their advantage. If you've lived your whole life as a different ethnicity and only very recently learned of some Native lineage (esp if one is white), that Native heritage somewhere does not suddenly make you Native.

Like if I found out I had a greatx8 Chinese grandmother I would not suddenly start calling myself "Asian". Obviously that situation would be a little different since Chinese Canadians & FNMI have different histories of racialization within Canada & experiences among the diaspora, but it would still be weird for me to do something like sign up for a scholarship specifically meant for Chinese Canadians or started selling "Chinese inspired" art while marketing myself as Asian-Canadian. I would have Asian heritage yes, but I did not live my life as an Asian Canadian, and suddenly wanting something (what one could perceive as "benefits") from that experience without even trying to do ANY work in actual exploration, community building, self education & reflection, or reconnecting of that heritage would be weird & wrong.

The type of pretendians that I mentioned do the above: they might have some Native heritage, but there's a lot of people (and I mostly see White people do this), that aren't actually interested in reconnecting or building community & allyship with Native people, but want the perceived "benefits" of being Native, be it imagined (like how some people think that ndns don't pay taxes, which is a myth), financial (like applying for Native scholarships or selling "Native" products like sage), or social (like wanting to be perceived a certain way, or trying to market themselves as a Native "activist", or building a social media platform) or Fetishistic (being obsessed with the idea of Native lineage, hippies, appropriation) or literally anything else. So no, BQ laws for Native enrollment doesn't necessarily filter out pretendians effectively, because this type of "pretendian" also exists, and will and have used that heritage to get tribal enrollment for the above reasons.

And as I mentioned, it also disenfranchises other ACTUAL Natives, both those who technically have very little or no Native BQ but were adopted in & have always identified as Native their whole lives, or those who are mixed race and have what would be considered a "high" Blood Quantum as well, and even those who are "full blooded" but do not have tribal enrollment & are denied it for any number of reasons. Black Natives for example, are regularly denied tribal enrollment regardless of BQ for no reason other than that they are Black, so BQ for enrollment doesn't even necessarily work for people who are ACTUALLY NATIVE either.

BQ for tribal enrollment has a racist history in the past AND ongoing issues in the present. In other words, the system of BQ is bullshit, and was made up by White colonizers who literally did not know or care about Native ideas on Native identity, and their goal in creating BQ was also working along with genocide. BQ in enrollment was not made to protect us.

#anonymous

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schizosupport · 5 months ago

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I don't really have a diagnosis for a lot of this stuff but I think my experience might be relevant so I'd like to share. Especially since I've never had words for my experiences around sense of self so I'm hoping this might resonate

It's like there is a me, clearly there has to be because I observe the world and interact with it and stuff but like. There is no internal consistency to the me that I am. Like I have different ways of being and moving through the world and they are all me and they are all a performance and all of it is performance and none of it is. Like I interact with the world and other people differently but also internally I feel completely different. But I'm always me. But there's not any sort of true, real me, just a collection of facades and modes of existing and attempts at being a person.

Also like time and memory are weird for me. Like my past didn't happen and also it's currently happening. I'm right here right now and also in my grandmother's garden how it was when I was little and also dissociating. And then someone will ask me what I'm experiencing and I won't know how to tell them that memory is a closed loop and I am trapped to forever repeat memory and states of self and ways of being.

And then on top of that theres the trauma of being a mentally ill person who's never truly allowed to know themselves. There is no fact of my existence, no matter how deeply I hold onto it or know it to be true, that is safe from a therapist or doctor or other authority figure coming in and telling me I'm wrong. Like for example having therapists deny a physical health diagnosis I've had my entire life, which meant that while I was around that therapist I was not allowed to acknowledge something I consider a basic fact about who I am. And with my history I usually don't remember I can just think what they're saying is wrong, I contort myself into being whatever it is they told me I should be so that I can hold onto as much of my freedom as I can

And so gender exploration for me has been fraught. Fundamentally I fall back on do I want this/not want this when it comes to making decisions. But I'm constantly worried if the me that comes after the me I am now is going to be okay with these things. And on top of that I'm scared to be open about myself in case it gets challenged, because the moment it gets challenged I have to rethink and attempt to reunderstand my entire life and every experience that I've ever had. Which is not an easy thing to do, to finally think I've come to an understanding of myself only to have to throw it all away and start over from scratch because someone decided I was wrong. Or even just the fact that how I feel about presentation and the gender people interpret me as change based on how I am at any given moment.

But also having taken some steps into transitioning, I am really happy about it. It makes me feel good and that's honestly what I care about at the end of the day. My loved ones are thankfully supportive, which also helps a ton. If nothing else it makes me feel like my body belongs to me, which is something that's very important to me

I relate to a lot of this. I'm also taking baby steps into transition myself, and it's hard to "stand by myself" when I can't even begin to answer what that even means. But it also feels good to do it, even though "myself" is this big unknown that I'm still trying and failing to discover.

I sometimes feel like I only ever know who I am in a social context, because the "me" then is a result of who I think the other person needs and wants me to be. For me this means that the notion of "they bring out the best in me" is very literal. I try to surround myself with people who shape me into a person that I like to be. And I tell myself that ultimately the question is "who do I want to be", not "who am I?". So I don't know if the quirky daughter that my dad knows is any less "real" than the messy queer dude that my fiance loves, but I know that I am more happy when I'm the messy queer dude. And ofc there's way more to any persona than just gender. But yeah.

And for me, getting to know people who make me into a version of myself that sparks joy, is my way of "finding myself". Maybe it's who I am, but it's easier for me to think of it as who I like to be.

Also yeah, time and memory is odd, and I try to be careful not to think too hard about it :p

Thank you for sharing your experiences 💜

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imnotasuperhero · 2 years ago

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Look into my eyes (search your soul)

Wanda Maximoff x Reader

Summary: Your love for Wanda could make you go the distance and more, just to see her happy.

A/N: AAAHHHHHHH!!!!! That’s all I’ve got to say, my dudes! I started writing this and I knew almost right away that all I wanted to say wouldn’t fit in just one part bc it’d be way too fucking long, so I decided to cut it here and let the resolution for the last part. I also didn’t want to wait till the weeked bc I promised myself I’d post the finale on Sunday. So, here you have part 8 full of.. wtv you want to call these messy self introspections that flew out my fingers. Enjoy!

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX

Swallowing the lump in your throat, you sat up in the darkness of your temporary room trying to dissipate the fog settled in your mind; grunting and whining in the process as your ministrations on your head only seemed to condense it.

No matter how much lavender you sprayed in your bed before sleep, the more you tried to empty your mind, the more Wanda mocked at your futile attempts, provoking the rebellious tears that accumulated in your eyes, pricking relentlessly at them.

Angrily wiping them away, you gave up and silently made your way outside Wanda’s guest’s room and padded your way to the kitchen, determined to try different methods to reach your goal.

Once your hands warmed up with the steamy mug of chamomile tea, you turned on the tv trying to find one of those junky tv shows. Hopefully, your brain would be fried enough to prevent you from thinking further.

And it would have worked if it wasn’t for the fact that after a few minutes of you trying to decipher the current turmoil involving some oversprayed bodies dissolved away at the couch sinking beside you. And you didn’t need to look at them to know who it was. Her perfume was enough for your nostrils to inhale her aroma and hold it for as long as you could as if trying to mark your soul with it.

“Hope I didn’t wake you? Is the TV too loud?” You grabbed the remote but her soft hand took it out of your grip, feeling the burning sensation running up your arm.

“You didn’t wake me,” the redhead placed it on the coffee table and returned to her previous position with the silence taking over you both as the only sound was the nonsense coming from the TV. But before the pregnant silence could stretch for much longer, Wanda ripped up the heavy veil looming over you.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” You saw through your periphery how her highlighted face turned from the tv to look at you and you would be lying if your body didn’t freeze for a millisecond.

“Would you let it pass if I said no?” You finally turned to your side, gasping at the mesmerizing way in which her factions shone with the light from the tv. Her soft green eyes settled over you in that comforting way only she could provide.

“We’ve known each other for twenty years, Y/N. I know better than to push you,” Wanda clicked her tongue as she opened her arms in a silent invitation.

And you cursed yourself as your body acted on autopilot and quickly snuggled against her warmth, ignoring the orders your brain sent.

The stress you’ve accumulated through the past few days melted away at feeling her so close to you. The raising and falling of her chest against your back sent you back to the past. Times of just you two leaning against each other in the privacy of your room quietly talking about everything and nothing all at once, at times ignoring the movie playing in the background. The way she’d insist on you sitting between her legs so she could hold you from behind just so she could torture you and, who were you to deny her?

The feeling of her trained fingers feeling way too real as Wanda softly braided your hair have you closing your eyes and humming something so intimate-

“You know,” Wanda’s voice brought you back to the present and you froze at feeling your hair in her hands. “I always loved your longer hair,” she admitted almost over a whisper and you knew by the way her words came out, there was a pause.

“But sometimes one has to work with what they have at hand,” you could feel the smile in her words at the time she expertly crossed tresses of hair over one another, leaving you in a trance state you simply couldn’t escape.

And being fully aware your efforts would be futile, you just stood put, allowing her work in your hair lull you to sleep, cursing yourself in the process for being so weak at her enchantment.

And you knew you were fooling yourself. This meant nothing else but some tricks for you to be able to sleep at ease. Yet, you couldn’t help the yearning grasping at the corners of your heart, fighting to conquer its surface.

Finishing her work, Wanda placed your braided hair on the right side of your neck before you felt her arms encircling your torso, bringing you flush against her front and you had to choke down the gasp wanting to leave your lips at the intrusion at your personal space.

“Sometimes I wish things were different,” Wanda spoke against your head, her right cheek placed atop your head with her gaze towards the TV.

“Sometimes it’s in our own hands to make the change,” you mussed quietly. Shyly, even.

You swore the kiss on your head was a product of your imagination. Just a cruel fantasy out from the world you had created and only shone in the confines of your mind. It had to.

“What’s your agenda for tomorrow?” Wanda saved you from swimming away into angry waves.

“I just have a meeting at 10am. After that, I can manage my work schedule.” You answered lazily. “You need me to take care of the twins?”

“No.” You felt her shake her head. “I was thinking we could go to the park if it didn’t rain,” Wanda suggested and you couldn’t help the smile taking over you.

“I would like that,” you muffled a yawn.

“Perfect,"

You felt your body tensing at the warm breath against the already hot skin of your cheek, anticipating the excruciatingly slow touch against it.

"Glad to be of help," Wanda's lips lingered on your skin for a few moments too long before retreating herself from the hold she had you on, standing up. "If you still have trouble sleeping, my bed is big enough for the both of us," she added casually, walking away and up the stairs, leaving you alone to deal with the angry butterflies clashing in your stomach.

The heavy weight on your stomach and the way it trembled made you afraid to move even the littlests bit. The thought of whatever the object was collapsing over you had you petrified as you tried to understand the distant noises. But no matter how hard you tried, it was like gibberish to you.

It wasn’t till a small giggle rescued you from your nightmare that you were finally able to open your eyes just to see Tommy sitting on your stomach laughing while Pietro held him in place, imitating the gallop of a horse.

After a few seconds trying to adapt to your surroundings, you smiled toothily at the baby in front of you. “Good morning, munchkin,” you carefully sat up as your hands replaced Pietro’s. You blew raspberry kisses on his cheek, filling the air with his giggles.

“What time is it?” You looked up at Pietro only to curse at his answer.

“Shit, shit, shit!” You hurriedly handed Tommy to him, jumping off the couch and rummaging through the house, cursing yourself for oversleeping.

“Sorry,” you called after you as you avoided colliding against Wanda and Billy.

After you quickly brushed your teeth and threw in what you considered a nice outfit for a meeting, you stepped down the stairs and hurried to one of the cupboards to take one of the granola bars to munch on your way.

“Please be careful,” Wanda mumbled as she worked on the twins’ bottles.

“I always am,” you clickled your tongue before you kissed Billy’s head and then did the same to Wanda’s, leaving her dumbfounded as you walked towards the front door, repeating the action with Tommy’s head. “See you guys later,” you called after your shoulder ignoring Pietro’s complaints about something you didn’t understand, closing the door behind you and hurrying to your car.

Checking the watch on your wrist, you sighed at the time. Hopefully, you’ll get there in time to cause a good impression.

Despite your senses telling you to decline the offer, you knew it was too good of a project for you to turn down. Even more so with the never-ending budget your house needed.

To say the client was satisfied was an understatement if the praises and positive nods were an indication of it. You just hoped his boss would pick you out of the other 3 contestants.

Turning on the stereo of your car, you couldn’t help the thumping against the leathered steering wheel at the tempo the current song possessed. This day couldn’t get any better. The prospect of a picnic with Wanda and the twins had you smiling from ear to ear and your heart beating rhythmically at the day ahead of you. But then you remembered the events of last night and all the happiness flooding your insides started to turn into anxiety as you remembered Wanda’s words. The way her lips would move around those sinful words had your legs twitching at the taunting smile hanging from her lips.

The honk from behind you had you mumbling an apology to the void as you stepped on the pedal.

Breaking outside Wanda’s favorite bakery, you entered the shop smiling at the girl at the counter.

“Morning, Y/N.” The blonde greeted you.

“Good morning, Alex,” you took one of the brownies off the serving plate, smirking at the look the girl sent your way. “Add it to the total,” you winked, making her roll her eyes.

“Same as always?”

“Add a dozen of those yummy Sokovian buns,” you nodded.

Alex quickly worked on your order as you chatted some, enjoying the mix of pastries and freshly brewed coffee.

Handing her the money, you bided her goodbye and started your way back home, trying to calm your erratic heart as it only seemed to step out of your chest the closer you got to Wanda’s.

But all the elation that flooded inside you like waves just moments ago turned into a sea storm as the anxiety took over you at Wanda’s words.

“But- You told me we’d go to the park last night. When you joined me on the couch?” You questioned confused. You could never forget something like that. Or anything that had to do with Wanda, for that matter.

“Y/N,” Wanda’s gaze sent goosebumps down your back at the way she was looking at you. Like if you had grown a second head. “I didn’t? You slept early because you were exhausted from the moving, remember?”

“I-” The fuck was happening. “Must have dreamed it. I’m sorry,” you silently placed the box on the coffee table before making your way upstairs, ignoring Wanda’s words. How could you be so idiotic to think Wanda would ever want to spend alone time with you when you saw each other twenty-four-seven?

Wanda could only tilt her head to the side as she saw you climbing the stairs two steps at a time, all the while trying to remember if she actually invited you to the park. She surely wouldn’t forget something so important.

First, the soft way in which you bid her goodbye in the morning, and now, the pleasant-smelling box you’ve gotten for her to supposedly bring to the park.

Not that she’d oppose. Hell, she’d be happy to just have you all for herself even if just for a few hours in your usual spot under your tree after so long. But the way in which your face fell gripped at her heart, making it sink to the floor.

No matter how hard she tried, all her attempts to solve the puzzle you were, seemed futile the more you closed off.

The day morphed into night in a dreading way. You barely spoke to her except when it was related to the twins or the house and Wanda’s patience was reaching its limit. But then again, little could she do to get you to talk. Time had shown her it was better to let you voice your problems at your own pace. So for the next two days, she fought the will inside her to trap you both in your room, focusing instead on her own work, tending to the twins when needed.

But the mixed signals you were giving her started to play a number in her head and Wanda found herself walking on eggshells in her own house.

And just when she thought you’d storm off, escaping from her presence as if she were the plague, you then would place a steamy mug of tea on her desk, smiling at her as you silently retreated from her office.

And no, she would never kick you out. But she wouldn’t deny that she wouldn’t love to kick your ass just to get you to open up, allowing her to understand whatever was upsetting you so she could either change it or fix it.

“She’s driving me crazy,” Wanda sighed as she rocked a sleepy Tommy, looking up at Natasha who did the same with Billy. Both babies ready for their afternoon nap.

But before the redhead could speak, Wanda kept talking. “At times she’d avoid me at all cost, and then she’d bring me tea or food when I’m working in the office. And the way she acts with the twins? It pains me to know that she only does so when she thinks I’m not seeing her. Like… why would she hid from me? She knows I wouldn’t trust my children to anyone but her. And call me delusional if you may, but is like she doesn’t want me to acknowledge the potential she has to become their mom and-” Wanda stopped suddenly. The rocking movements paused too at the realization.

“Oh, shit.”

“Shit indeed,” Natasha repeated with her characteristic smirk, biting the inside of her cheek to prevent laughing at her friend.

“What do I do?” Wanda whined, sitting on the couch as she felt her legs trembling.

“What any mature person would do,” Natasha offered, rolling her eyes at the dumbfounded expression on the redhead. “Talk to her!”

“And say what? Hi, wanna be my children’s mom?” Wanda spoke mockingly.

“Not that,” Natasha choked a laugh. “Just tell her how you feel and most importantly how her actions affect you.”

“What if I’m reading wrong and she doesn’t want anything to do with me?” Wanda could feel her anxiety tearing at her heart. The erratic beats and the capacity to feel the blood running in her ears had her hands shaking and she thanked the Gods out there for having her son in her arms, providing her some sort of grounding.

“If you think she doesn’t love you back, then you need to get checked,” Natasha shrugged.

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Appendix 1: Feeling Powers Growing—An Interview with Silvia Federici

January 18, 2016

Silvia Federici: My politics resonate with your idea of “joyful militancy.” I’m a strong believer that either your politics is liberating and that gives you joy, or there’s something wrong with them.

I’ve gone through phases of “sad politics “ myself and I’ve learned to identify the mistakes that generate it. It has many sources. But one factor is the tendency to exaggerate the importance of what we can do by ourselves, so that we always feel guilty for not accomplishing enough.

When I was thinking about this conversation, I was reminded of Nietzsche’s metamorphoses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his image of the camel. The camel is the prototype of the militant who burdens herself with huge amounts of work, because she thinks that the destiny of the world depends on her overwork. Inevitably she’s always saddened because the goal is always receding and she does not have the time to be fully present to her life and recognize the transformative possibilities inherent to her work.

Nick and carla: You said that you feel like there are so many sources to sad militancy{3} and can you speak to some more of those?

Federici: Sad militancy comes from setting goals that you cannot achieve, so that the outcome is always out of reach, always projected into the future and you feel continuously defeated. “Sad politics “ is also defining your struggle in purely oppositional terms, which puts you in a state of permanent tension and failure. A joyful politics is a politics that is constructive and prefigurative. I’m encouraged by the fact that more people today see that you cannot continuously postpone the achievement of your goals to an always receding future.

Joyful politics is politics that change your life for the better already in the present. This is not to deny that political engagement often involves suffering. In fact our political involvement often is born of suffering. But the joy is knowing and deciding that we can do something about it, it is recognizing that we share our pain with other people, is feeling the solidarity of those around us. Militants in Argentina speak of “politicizing our sadness.”

This is why I don’t believe in the concept of “self-sacrifice,” where self-sacrifice means that we do things that go against our needs, our desires, our potentials, and for the sake of political work we have to repress ourselves. This has been a common practice in political movements in the past. But it is one that produces constantly dissatisfied individuals. Again, what we do may lead to suffering, but this may be preferable to the kind of self-destruction we would have faced had we remained inactive.

The inability to make politics a rewarding experience is part of the reason why, I think, the radical Left has been unsuccessful in attracting large numbers of people. Here too we are beginning to learn however. I see that many young militants today are recognizing the importance of building community, of organizing activities that are pleasurable, that build trust and affective relations, like eating together for instance. It is not an accident that Indigenous peoples’ movements in Latin America give so much importance to the organization of events like the fiestas.

Nick and carla: We wanted to ask you specifically about the feminist movement and what are some of the ways that feminists and other movements have struggled with sad militancy in the past. We’re thinking of Jo Freeman’s essay on “trashing” from the ‘70s, where she talks about real tendencies to destroy relationships within the feminist movement.[180] In one of the interviews that you’ve done, you mention “truculent forms of behavior that were typical of the movement in the ‘60s” and that you see new forms of kindness and care emerging that maybe were absent back then. So we wanted to ask you about how things have changed from your perspective, and whether you see a connection between trashing and what is now called call-out culture in contemporary movements.

Federici: When I wrote about truculent behavior, I was thinking of relations in the male Left and male-dominated organizations, where you found a lot of protagonism and peacock-like competition, as well as a manipulation of women, sexual and otherwise. These were among the factors that motivated the rise of the women’s liberation movement. Not only women’s demands were pushed off the agenda, but everyday relations were often degrading for them.

A good description of women’s lives in male-dominated organizations is Marge Piercy’s “The Grand Coolie Dam,”[181] where she powerfully describes the many forms of subordination women suffered in male-dominated groups. In comparison, the organizational forms the women’s movement adopted were a major improvement. Possibly feminists moved too far in the opposite direction. I am thinking of Jo Freeman’s critique of the “tyranny of structurelessness.”[182] But she’s excessively critical of the feminist movement. I don’t agree that feminists were especially prone to trashing each other. The attack on leadership, for instance, though it often worked against people’s capacity to express themselves, also opened the way to more egalitarian relations—like ensuring that everyone would have a change to speak in a meeting. The resistence against women getting credit for authoring articles or speaking too much in public was a legacy of the experiences we had made in male-dominated organizations. In time, it is a fear that most women left behind, as they felt more confident in their own powers.

Some of the bitterness that you find in Jo Freeman comes perhaps from the fact that, when we joined the women’s movement, many of us believed that we had reached a sort of paradise. As I wrote in “Putting Feminism On Its Feet,” when I began to work with other women I truly felt that I had found my home, my tribe.[183] We thought that we had reached a place where everything would be harmonious; where there would be love, care, reciprocity, equality, cooperation—sisterhood as we called it. So we dis-activated our critical thinking and left our defenses down. Unfortunately, we didn’t reach paradise, and the disappointment was especially severe because we assumed that in the women’s movement we would find happiness, or at least we would not encounter the kind of jealousies, power plays, and power relations we had experienced with men.

Spinoza speaks of Joy as coming from Reason and Understanding. But we forgot that all of us bear on our bodies and minds the marks of life in a capitalist society. We forgot that we came to the feminist movement with many scars and fears. We would feel devalued and easily take offense if we thought we were not properly valued. It was a jealousy that came from poverty, from fear of not being given our due. This also led some women to be possessive about what they had done, what they had written or said.

These are all the classical problems and distortions that life in a capitalist society creates. Over time you learn to identify them, but at first, many of us were devastated by them. For me coping with this realization has been an important learning process. But I have also seen women leaving the movement because they were so deeply hurt by it.

On the other hand, the feminist movement, because it stressed the importance of sharing experiences and engaging in a collective examination of our everyday lives and problems, gave us important tools to deal with this situation. Through “consciousness-raising” and the refusal to separate politics from our everyday reproduction it created forms of organization that built trust and showed that our strength was rooted in our mutual solidarity.

I found a vision in the women’s movement that allowed me to overcome some bitter experiences and over time insulated me from disappointment. I see politics now as a process of transformation; a process by which we learn to better ourselves, shed our possessiveness and discard the petty squabbles that so much poison our lives.

I think that this has been a collective experience that has left a mark on other organizations as well. It seems to me that, over the last two or three decades, the women’s movement has been the most important influence on the organizational forms of most radical movements. You don’t find today, on a general level, the kind of behavior that was common among men thirty or forty years ago, not at least among the new generations, although there is still a good amount of machismo around. But you also have men who genuinely want to be feminist, and define themselves as anti-patriarchal, or organize against male supremacy—all unthinkable stands—with few exceptions—in the ‘60s.

carla: I have all these questions! There seems to be some kind of paradox in this: that joy is about feelings and relationships, but not just an individual feeling. And while we want to speak to the power of joy, it can’t be turned into a commandment, and in fact it gets lost when it becomes something imposed on people. But it also can’t be about just feeling happy or feeling good, or being okay with the way things are. It feels like a little bit of a paradox and I haven’t figured out how to think that through. A lot of my activism over the years has been around youth liberation and working with children having more of a say, and getting that form of oppression into the discussion and into activist spaces, and my work was very centered around that in a public way. I don’t want to replicate individualism in liberation; I want it to always be connected to the larger systems and social struggles. But it also needs to be about thriving right now, because they’re kids! And when things were working well it seemed that there was a lot of room for freedom and growth but it was held and felt collectively, without a bunch of rules or norms. There was happiness, sure, but also difficulty and a willingness to work through it. So it feels like a constant paradox to work through joy …

Federici: I like the distinction between happiness and joy. Like you, I like joy because it is an active passion. It’s not a static state of being. And it’s not satisfaction with things as they are. It’s part of feeling powers and capacities growing within yourself and in the people around you. It’s a feeling, a passion, that comes from a process of transformation and growth. It does not mean that you’re satisfied with your situation. It means, again using Spinoza, that you’re active in accordance to what your understanding tells you to do and what is required by the situation. So you feel that you have the power to change and feel yourself changing through what you’re doing, together with other people. It’s not a form of acquiescence to what exists.

Nick and carla: We’ve found your concept of the accumulation of divisions really compelling, and the ways you’re centering how capitalism is always using white supremacy, patriarchy, colonization, and other oppressive hierarchies to create divisions and enable exploitation. Your historicization of those divisions is powerful, because you show how the state and capitalism have deepened and entrenched patriarchy and racism as a strategy to stop resistance and enable more intense exploitation. And for us, in this book we really want to center the importance of rebuilding trust and connection and solidarity across those divisions, while leaving space for difference and autonomy. One of the things that we like about your work is that you don’t jump to a simple unity—that overcoming these divisions doesn’t look like a simple unity. And so we wanted to ask you to talk about that a little more. Is there a distinction between divisions, which are hierarchical and exploitative, and differences, which might be something else? And can you talk about the positive horizon you see for resisting the accumulation of divisions while warding off a kind of homogenizing unity?

Federici: Yes, the distinction between differences and divisions is important. When I speak of “divisions” I speak of differences that carry hierarchies, inequalities, and have a divisive power. So, we need to be very clear when we speak of “differences.” Not all should be celebrated.

The lesson we learned in the ‘60s from the women’s movement and the Black Power movement is that the most effective way to respond to unequal relations is for those who have less social power to organize autonomously. This does not exclude the possibility of coming together for particular struggles. But in a society divided along racial and gender lines, unity is a goal to be achieved, not something that can be assumed to already exist. Organizational autonomy, or at least the construction of autonomous spaces within mixed organizations—as it often happens in Latin America—is a necessary condition to subvert these divisions. The women’s movement could not have developed the understanding of the situation of women that it developed if women had remained in male-dominated organizations. It was crucial for women to move away from these organizations to even begin to think about their problems and share their thoughts with each other.

You cannot think of a problem, give voice to it, share it with others, if you fear that you will be dismissed, ridiculed, or told that it is not important. Moreover, how could women have spoken of sexuality and their relations with men in front of them? And how could Black militants speak openly of their experience of racism in front of white people?

Autonomy within movements that are working toward unity but are traversed by power relations is fundamental. A crucial reality would have remained hidden if the feminist movement had not organized autonomously and this is also true of the Black Power movement. Important areas and forms of exploitation would have continued to be unnoticed; would not have been analyzed and denounced and would have continued to be reproduced.

Nick and carla: You often point to Latin America and other places where the social fabric is much stronger in general, and movements are a lot more capable of reproducing themselves and meeting their own needs, relying less on the state and capital. The maintenance of communal and cooperative forms of life seems to be central to the capacity for sustained struggle and resistance. Can you elaborate on all this?

Federici: I went to Nigeria in the ‘80s and one of the big surprises for me was to discover that large amounts of land were still managed communally. That doesn’t mean that in communal land regimes relationships are necessarily egalitarian. Generally men have more power than women; but until recently they could not sell the land. Clearly these communal regimes have gone through many changes, especially because of colonial domination. But the fact that communal ownership has been widespread in Africa until at least the nineteenth century and, in some regions, continues even today, has had a deep impact on relationships and people, which is why I believe so much violence has been and is necessary to privatize the land and the continent’s immense natural resources.

It’s the same thing in Latin America. In Mexico, in the 1930s, during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, some land was returned to indigenous communities that had been expropriated by colonial invasion. Today the Mexican government is trying to re-privatize everything, but until recently at least thirty percent of the country’s land was still held communally.

Again, this is not a guarantee of egalitarian relations. Women in these communities are coming forward, criticizing the patriarchal relations often prevailing within them. A good example are the Zapatista women. As you can read in Hilary Klein’s book Compañeras, many of the transformations that have taken place in Zapatista communities, like the application of the Revolutionary Law On Women, have been the product of the struggle that women have made against patriarchalism. But communal land regimes guarantee the reproduction of the communities that live on the land.

Today many of these communities are facing dispossession because of land privatization, deforestation, the loss of water to irrigate their milpas. But when they are forced out and come to the cities, they still act as a collectivity. They take over land though collective action, they build encampments, and take decision collectively. As a result, in many cities of Latin America, new communities have formed that from their beginning were built collectively. It appears that the narcos now try to infiltrate some of these communities. But when people take over the land and cooperate to build their houses, to build the streets, to fight with the government to connect the electricity and get water pipes, there is a good chance that that they will be able to respond to this threat, and you can see that there’s a new social reality emerging in these communities.

As Raúl Zibechi often points out, something new is emerging in these communities because they have had to invent new forms of life, without any pre-existing model, and politicize the everyday process of their reproduction.[184] When you work together, building houses, building streets, building structures that provide some immediate form of healthcare—just to give some examples—you are making life-choices, as all of them come with a high cost. You must fight the state, fight the police, the local authorities. So you have to develop tight relations with each other and always measure the value of all things.

Nick and carla: Following up on that, part of what we are curious about is how we can learn from places where, in general, the degree of politicization is higher and the social fabric is much stronger. What kind of lessons can North American–based organizers draw from this for organizing in our own communities? How can people in the global North learn from all of the vibrant struggles and forms of life in Latin America while being attentive to differences in context at the same time?

Federici: This is a discussion that is taking place in New York. People in the social movements who are inspired by the struggles in Latin America are now thinking in terms of territorial politics, the territory being a place where you have some form of collective control and even self-government. Clearly, the situation in the US is profoundly different. But thinking in terms of territory enables us to see that the neighborhoods in which we live are not neutral spaces, they are not just conglomerates of houses and people. They are very politically structured. In New York, for instance, since the ‘70s, there’s been a process of “spatial de-concentration,” whereby every neighborhood has been studied by local and federal authorities to figure out how to better control the movement of people and guarantee that the wrong people do not go to certain neighborhoods. Subway lines, bus lines, playgrounds have been restructured, to make sure that poor people cannot easily go to places of wealth.

So looking at our neighborhoods as “territories” in this case means recognizing those factors of tension, of crisis, those power relations that traverse them that divide people but can also bring them together. The social centers that have opened in recent years in New York are attempting to do that, trying to engage in practices that create “territory,” that is, create forms of aggregation. Building more collective forms of reproduction is a key aspect of this process. It is indispensable if we want to create “communities of resistance,” spaces where people are connected and can engage in some collective decision-making.

Nick and carla: Maybe one thing to follow up on this. In that question you talked about the forgotten impacts of really subtle things like architecture, planning, and in Caliban and the Witch you talk about the forgotten impacts of the witch hunts, and how those impacts are still with us today. Are there underappreciated movements of joy and transformation where we haven’t fully appreciated the impacts?

Federici: There are so many movements. The Suffragette movement, for example, is always portrayed as a bourgeois movement, but I’m discovering that it had a working-class dimension as well. But rather than thinking of particular movements, what most matters is discovering and recreating the collective memory of past struggles. In the US there is a systematic attempt to destroy this memory and now this is extending across the world, with the destruction of the main historical centers of the Middle East—a form of dispossession that has major consequences and yet is rarely discussed. Reviving the memory of the struggles of the past makes us feel part of something larger than our individual lives and in this way it gives a new meaning to what we are doing and gives us courage, because it makes us less afraid of what can happen to us individually.

Nick and carla: Another thing that we wanted to talk to you about is the style and tone of intellectual engagement. Your style is so generous, and you have a really militant critique of capitalism, but you’re always pointing to examples in a range of different movements and you seem to reserve really pointed attacks for large destructive institutions like the World Bank. It seems to us that this differs from a lot of radical critique today, which can be very focused on exposing complicities or limitations, talking about the ways that movements are lacking, that they haven’t yet reached this or that, as well as targeting individuals. So we wanted to ask: Is this style something that you’ve cultivated and that you’re intentional about, and maybe more generally, can you talk about the potential of theory in intellectual work today, and what joyful theory might look like? What makes theory enabling and transformative, and what gets in the way of that?

Federici: It’s partially a consequence of growing old. You understand things that when you’re younger you didn’t see. One thing that I’ve learned is to be more humble and to hold my judgment of people until I know them beyond what I can make out from what they say, realizing that people often say foolish things that they do not really believe or have not seriously thought about.

It also comes from recognizing that we can change, which means that we should stress our potential rather than our limits. One of the most amazing experiences in the women’s movement was to see how much we could grow, learning to speak in public, write poetry, make beautiful posters. All this has given me a strong distaste for the impulse to squash everything at the first sign that something is not right.

I’ve made it a principle not to indulge in speech that is destructive. Striving to speak clearly, not to make people feel like fools because they don’t understand what I say, is a good part of it. That’s also something I’ve taken from the women’s movement. So many times we had felt humiliated, being in situations where we didn’t understand what men had said, and didn’t have the courage to ask what they meant. I don’t want to make other people ever feel this way.

Nick and carla: You’re really good at that! One of the things we were talking about this morning is the question of identity and a lot of the critiques of sad militancy that we have read really make identity into the problem quite a bit more than we would want to. We’re trying to think through how to speak to the power of identity and experience while also pointing to power of transformation and working across difference, and how the two of those aren’t antithetical in the way they’re sometimes set up, that they’re crucial for each other.

Federici: I think the critique of identity has taken on dimensions that are not always justified. What people often criticize as identity is actually the position that a person has had in the capitalist organization of work. For example, is being a housewife an identity? Yes, it’s an identity, but it is also a particular place in the capitalist organization of work, like being a miner, it’s also a particular form of exploitation. Identity is often used in a way that hides that exploitation. That’s when it becomes problematic.

Moreover, behind identity there’s also a history of struggle and resistance to exploitation. Identity can be a signpost for a whole history of struggle. When I say I am a feminist, for instance, I consciously connect myself to history of struggle that women have made. Identities can be mutable as well. “Woman,” for example, is not a fixed identity. The concept of woman has undergone a tremendous change over the last fifty years.

The problem has been the wedding of “identity” with the politics of rights, as when we speak of women’s rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, as if each group were entitled to a packet of entitlements, but in isolation from each other, so that we lose sight of the commonalities and the possibility of a common struggle.

Nick and carla: That’s really helpful. Our last question is about hope. Spinoza himself is pretty wary of hope, but he sees it as quite future-oriented: to hope is also to fear, because you’re attached to a future object or outcome. More generally hope is often equated with a naïve optimism: it can become fixated on a certain outcome. But in one of your interviews,[185] you talked about it as something that’s a lot more open-ended. It’s more the sense that we can do something. Do you think that hope is necessarily attached to a vision of the future?

Federici: Hope is positive if it is an active passion; but only if it does not replace the work necessary to make our action successful.

Silvia Federici is an Italian activist and author of many works, including Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective and organizer with the Wages for Housework Campaign in the ‘70s. She was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.

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