#do you guys ever draw them without a reference. is that ever even a threshold you reach? do you ever forget?

[sunb0ts]

HEARD IT WAS HIS BIRTHDAY TODAY 💪💪🔥🔥🔥 STILL DUNNO A SINGLE THING ABOUT HIM BEYOND THE DIALOGUE I HEARD WHILE EATING FOOD in the nie hours of the night but BUT! RED GUYS STICK TOGETHER!!!!! 🎉 <333

know very little about Genshin but shout out to our friend that spent 30 minutes showing me Gaming dialogue in the middle of Culver's at 9PM. love that guy love you noisy red characters

[thetorturerwrites]

Puer Deus: Strings

This amazing artwork was gifted to me by @faestae-writes​. Please do not re-use or re-post it without permission from them and/or myself. Don’t be a dickbag.

***

Captured / Hurricane / Sustenance / Liar / Scars / Proof

Summary:  When he wants more

A/N:  OK YOU GUYS -- Look, if you're here this far in, you know this is some dark shit. So, please heed this warning: This is a DARK, heavy kink chapter. SO, some things... 1. The content herein has been dramatized for effect, but this is real shit that happens in the real world. Please feel free to ask me any questions. 2. If you feel the need to explore anything here further, do your research and be risk aware. 3. Strap in. This is some shit. 4. 50 points to your house if you spot the FYA reference. :)

Word Count: 9.3k (I AM NOT SORRY)

Day Seven

It was a flicker of a moment, a subtle jolt of injected power, when the night cycle ended and day officially began.

What day is it?

Today was the first time you wouldn’t stumble to consciousness or fight through a fog.  You were still embroiled in questions, though. Ren told you that you’d been here four days, but how many days ago was that?

You decided it was simply too surreal for you to actually be here, to be in your body, in Ren’s room, on board his ship.  Each time you thought up a level, you felt smaller and more insignificant. Maybe you really had died. Maybe you’d bled out on his floor, and this was your afterlife.

No, not that lucky… 

Your eyes were dry and red from so much crying.  Your body was beyond battered, a landscape of harm and wound, mania and furor. You wore the hue of bruise like a new catsuit, covered by Ren’s painful passion from throat to toes.

The idea that some part of you would hurt, sting, throb, or ache every day you were with Ren had been hard to swallow; but a week into this persecution, you knew it to be fact.

How long until he breaks bones?

Sitting in the center of his great, wide bed, you ran your fingers over the still-bloody sheets and contemplated the last however many hours.  Ren made it clear that he still meant to keep you, and the idea was solidifying more and more in your brain. You pondered whether or not you would be allowed to leave this fucking room as his personal pet.

Having spent a lifetime under open skies, being caged inside four walls for days, weeks, maybe months sent your anxiety into overdrive.  The notion that you would only ever see light cycles and never again sunlight strangled you, chased away all your air. At some point, you knew you would try to flee again just for a damn change of scenery.  

After he’d left, you complied with Ren’s instructions insomuch as you did eat and did not try to escape.  Sleep, on the other hand, was put to the back burner because you were still in his chambers. Even if he didn’t spend all of his time here, these were his things, and they could tell you a great deal.  With the guard outside this time, you simply could not pass up the opportunity to explore.

The room was eloquent in its simplicity and deliberate in its function.  You ran fingers and palms over all of the flat surfaces, seeking out hidden drawers or levers in the walls and along the sides of the bed.  Everything was dark gloss, industrial in its execution and easily maintained.

Of note, there was a threshold of polish right at the door, a long stretch just on the inside where the shine was high. However, that luster faded two or three steps inside.  Ren did not allow people in his room often, even a cleaning crew.

Defeated, you slunk back to the bed.  You’d checked all of the hiding places you would use, but you found nothing.  Ren either didn’t have anything to hide or he was exceptionally good at it.

Sometime in the night cycle, you’d awoken alone in an empty bed, struggling with this swirling sense of loneliness.  Captors didn’t usually sleep with prisoners, but weren’t you more than a prisoner now? With a scowl, you shook the stupid thought from your head.

You were an object to him, easily discarded and forgotten.

You hadn’t slept much after that.  You curled onto your side, facing the vacant side of the bed and overrun with disquiet, anticipation.  You were faced with warring options. Relent and become the devil’s plaything or escape and be hunted. The bitter truth was you wanted both, and this was not the sort of universe to grant such possibilities.

Morning came, food was delivered, and you were still alone.  

Now, you were trying to forget the familiarity you thought you’d seen in Ren’s eyes yesterday, trying to wash it down the damnable drain.  He was no more capable of gentleness than you were of speech. Trying to smother the ache, you turned the shower up as hot as you could handle and drifted into distraction, turning inward in a forlorn bid to comfort yourself.

The darkness that had always been there for you, though, was an empty consolation.  Ren had blown apart every part of you and stomped on the ashes; he’d even taken your blessed darkness, the one place you could hide.  Because when you closed your eyes to sink into that blissful nothingness, you saw him, his bloody face, his burning eyes.

Kylo Ren had infected every part of you, right down to the subconscious.

When you could pity yourself no more, you turned off the shower, scraped the water from your body as best you could, and purposefully avoided your reflection.  The woman in the mirror wanted you to make choices you weren’t sure you could live with.

Exiting the bathroom, you were stopped dead in your tracks by the sight of Ren sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed.  He had a smallish black case to his left and was resting with one arm on a bent knee, his long body relaxed and waiting for you.

You were irked by how beautiful and calm and unhurried he looked.  Must he always look so put together when you only ever felt on the verge of shattering into dirty, unrecognizable pieces of yourself?

Hi...

“You haven’t eaten today.”

He gestured over his shoulder to the tray that still had food on it.  You were flushed from the hot water and stark fucking naked, but you burned redder at the idea that you were going to be punished like a child for not eating. Again. 

Canting your head a bit, you gestured towards the shower.  You’d wanted to wash away the feel of dry, endlessly recycled air, dirt, and shame before you did anything else.  Conquering the day wasn’t on your agenda, but surviving it was.

“Good,” he looked you over speculatively, and your eyebrows shot to your hairline.

He’d shoved food directly into your throat to make sure you were decently-nourished; and now, he didn’t care if you ate?  The speed with which this man changed course made your head swim, and you just stared at him, complete irritation plastered all over your face.  

Fucking pick one, would you please?

The withering look he leveled at you set your blood to boiling.  You’d forgotten that he could hear you now; but by the darkness in his eyes, you knew he’d be sure you didn’t forget again.

“Come here.”

You tensed, arms crossing over your chest as though you could armor yourself against him.  For a second, you couldn’t make yourself move. He wanted you to willingly deliver yourself to his torment.  

A shiver worked its way up your spine, blossoming into sparks at the back of your brain, but you couldn’t tell if it was from fear or pining.  If you refused, he would simply put his angry hands on your body and bend you to his whim. You didn’t know what would happen if you complied without a fight.

Taking in a steadying breath, you closed the distance on tender steps, the soles of your feet still bothered at bearing weight so soon.  Stopping when you were within arms reach, you looked past him to study the kit he’d brought, uncertainty wrinkling your forehead.  

It was a med kit, a field kit.  You’d carried one yourself for years, but your wounds had already been tended.  You were littered with surgical tape and Bacta patches.

What could he possibly need a field kit for?

Are you hurt?

Ren’s rough hand slid up along the curve of your body, settling at your waist and sending fissures of desire playing along the swell of your belly.  Your knees and thighs pressed together, and you shifted under his appraisal. He’d seen you naked before. Multiple times, in fact. But this felt different, affectionate. He had stripped you completely bare, laid out your mind and soul for him to reanimate at will.

Feeling naked in front of this man was about more than just your flesh.

Digging his fingers in, he maneuvered you to sit on the edge of the bed in front of him.  All of the tension you’d washed away in the shower came barreling back. Every muscle was tight, and every synapse was screaming that you needed to get away.

Sat like this, unrestrained before him, you fidgeted, frightened.  Your heart drummed so loud you thought he could certainly hear it. When he was silent and calm like this, you were lost to apprehension, images of lightsabers inside your body where they shouldn’t be flooding your mind. You could likely conjure up more ways for him to murder you than he could.

Just as worrisome, you couldn’t look away.  He captivated you each time he was in the room.  His dark irises gleamed as he held your stare, his full lips curving up on a smirk.  He was daring you to look away first.

He won.

You wilted from the intensity of his gaze, turning your inflamed face away and averting your eyes.  In your stupor, you didn’t realize that he was talking to you. The only thing you could hear was the metronome of your heart, its pace quickening moment by moment.

Displeased that he had to draw back your attention, Ren’s hand was around your calf, fingers pushing in between the muscles and rubbing demandingly. You glared and hissed, twisting your legs together, knees tight.

What!

Slowly, deliberately, he reached up and swept his thumb along your mouth, smoothing away the bothered sneer.  When your lips relaxed, he pushed in and hooked his thumb into your teeth the way you hated, the way you loved.

Your core clenched as he tugged you forward. He brought you nose to nose, so close you could feel his warm breath.  He cleaved apart your desire to fight, soothing you into compliance with weaponized stillness.

“Open,” his voice was melodic, low, and rousing.

Your forehead crinkled in confusion.  Lifting a hand to settle at his wrist, needing the contact to go on, you shook your head ever so slightly because his thumb was already in your mouth.  It already was open.  

You felt his fingers tapping on your knee, then, and you burned red from ears to toes.  Whining, you tugged against his grip in a bid to keep him from seeing the way your thighs rubbed together at the very idea.

“I will not be repeating myself today, puppet.”

Blanching, you stiffened, building up any courage you could muster.  Finally, as though your maidenhead was actually still intact and valuable, you hesitantly parted your knees.

Other than his eyes trailing downward to watch your legs barely obey, Ren didn’t move or speak.  When his fingers dug harshly into your cheeks, cutting the weak skin inside against your teeth, you lurched and struggled.  This only tightened his hold, and you thought he might break your jaw. Clutching his forearm, you fought to settle back onto the bed and opened your knees wider and then wider still.

He didn’t release his rough grip on your face until your thighs were splayed far enough apart that your pussy opened for him, too, and your face ignited with humiliation. You rubbed at your abused jaw and cheek, wondering how long it would take the finger-sized discolorations to develop.

Are you hurt, though?

You surprised even yourself with the repeat question, circling back oddly and still not certain why you should be bothered.  He turned his beautiful, dusky eyes to you, and your breath caught. Was he pleased with your concern? Did it satisfy him to think he’d brainwashed you into caring?

He trapped you there, pinned by his mesmerizing eyes, while his fingers slid up your calf, thigh, hip.  You were nearly lulled into thinking his light touch would extend to your aching cunt, but he gripped your outer labia into such a tight pinch that you felt punched in the stomach.

You yelped and surged forward, folding in as much as you could, hips from screwing side to side trying to lessen the pressure.  He squeezed and tugged upon the tender flesh until it puffed up, swelling under his ministrations.

A satisfied sound bubbled up from his throat, and you slowly brought your focus back to him.

Kylo..please...

In a hot second, he switched and snatched up your left labia, digging his fingers in so deep you could feel the nails.  You shouted out, the wheeze of it tapering off as your breath heaved. Mirroring his grip, you dug your fingers into his arm but didn't try to push him away.

Screwing your eyes shut, you shuddered and tried to roll through the pain.

The whole middle of your body throbbed in time to your heartbeat, and you groaned when the endorphins finally kicked in to flood you with acceptance, the sound of it indecent even to you.  The sting and pulse abated slightly, and your head fell back, lips parting on a relieved sigh.  

“There we go,” he murmured, voice smooth like honey. “Open your eyes.”

You very nearly refused and vaulted from your perch, but it was inevitable.  You wanted to obey nearly as much as you wanted to fight, and it was this internal war he wanted to witness every time.  Willing your breathing to steady, you relaxed your fingers at his sleeve and opened glassy eyes.

The look of him, the utter craving displayed on his godlike features, was arresting, intoxicating.  His eyes shone a shade of twilight you’d never get used to, and his lips trembled, barely keeping his hunger contained. The way he was looking up at you was erotic and evoked a terrible longing.

Kylo!

Your face twisted into a pained frown as he switched back and forth between the two bloated lips.  He clucked in condescension when warm juice tracked down onto his fingers, and you buried your face in your hands.  When he finally stopped crushing you in his vice grip, the gratitude rushed out unchecked.

THANK you…   

Absent his touch, you pressed a hand at your abdomen and forced yourself to breathe deeply.  You were wholly disgusted with your response to such vulgar treatment. Would you blossom under every madness he put upon you? 

Your eyes lit upon his hands and the case he was holding, and you forgot to feel repulsed.

Dread filled your chest, squeezing your lungs back into panic. You had no fucking idea what he was about to do, and you were too terrified to look away. You didn’t think you could curtail his plan, but maybe you could persuade him that you would be good.

If you’ll just let me, I’ll go do it right now...

Ignoring you completely, he produced and threaded a slender surgical needle. Your torso hunched of its own volition, trying in vain to put more distance between you and that curved metal.  You mewled and whined, begging him to look and not do whatever this was, but he brushed your hands away, reaching out to tug and pinch at your labia again, inching nearer to his goal.

Fuck, Kylo..I’ll eat dammit! Please stop...

He looked at you, smug and cruel, and you finally understood that he was swelling your labia on purpose and with clear intent, and it had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you'd eaten.  

You shook your head wildly, leaning forward and pushing at his arm in a different spot every time he would wave you off. Desperate, pleading tears sprang to your eyes, and you clung to him.

No no please no not that please no…

Finished with your begging, Ren anchored you in place with the Force, preventing you from even twitching from the waist down. He hummed at the sight of you, flushed and heaving, thighs spread wide.

You were in the middle of the next pitiful appeal when you felt the needle pierce your most-sensitive skin.  

You were too shocked to move, to shout, to implore him to spare you this torture.  The thin suture line dragged through the perforation, and your eyes slammed so tightly shut you thought they might bleed.

It wasn’t until the second stab of his suture needle that you fully understood what was happening.  You’d thought he simply meant to pierce the bulging, inflamed lips in order to decorate them; but when he tugged the line taut, pulling the swollen folds together, you sputtered and choked on your own spit.  You pawed at his shoulder imploringly, foolishly hoping he would surrender this plan if you appeased him with your touch.

Kylo..please don’t do this...please don’t do this...

He crooned and cupped your face, the supple tone of his voice belying the very atrocity he was committing upon you.  He straightened up to nudge your jaw with his nose, dragging the tip through your tears. Your fingers curled so tight into his sleeve that you popped stitches in the black fabric, but he offered you no more solace than this. 

He wasn’t indifferent to your suffering; he reveled in it, enjoying seeing it up close.

“You need strings, puppet.”

You whimpered helplessly, thinking you’d likely launch yourself into a dying star if he told you to with that almost-adoring voice.

He released your face, and you dissolved into wretched sobs.  There was no escaping his iron will, his demented punishment. Pressing the heels of your shaking hands into your eyes, you openly wept, not bothering to try to be strong for this, for him. Expecting you to endure this easily was too much.

Ren had treated you like property from the moment he saw you.  He’d proven to you that you were little more than an object to be toyed with, and his words from that day in the shower resounded in your ears.  But in this, he was taking away your humanity entirely. Any pretense that you might have been afforded some pleasure for your endurance bled away.

Stitch by stitch, Ren sewed your labia together, rendering you an androgynous receptacle, suitable for nothing more than receiving pain.

When he was finished, your clit was hidden snug behind a fleshy hem, but your vagina was open, accessible.  That was the part he needed, you thought morbidly.  

The Force pressure dissipated, your legs instinctively pressed together, and you curled into yourself. Digging ruddy fingertips into the mattress, you tried to flee, to crawl across the bed and away from him.

You’re a monster...

He captured you around the hips and hauled you onto your feet.  He didn't care that you were awash in pain; it didn't factor into his plans and was, thus, negligible. He gathered you into his arms, and you wished, for the hundredth time, that he had just let you die.

The sutures were neat and tidy, but every movement tugged at them, reminding you of your place in Kylo Ren’s world.  You erupted into a new bout of tears and pushed at his chest, angry and gutted.

“Walk,” he pressed his lips to your temple, murmuring the order into your hair, “or crawl.”

On an offended snort, you jerked your head away from his kiss.  Battling yourself into some semblance of calm, you sniffled and nodded.  He absolutely would make you crawl down the halls of this ship wearing nothing but those fucking sutures, and you’d rather not be so debased as that.

Suffering for Ren was one thing; suffering for an audience was too much.

He had stepped away to shake out clothes for you to wear when the epinephrine crested and dropped you over a black cliff. Thunder roared in your ears, and your eyes rolled into white.  Chased by a wounded gasp, your legs lost all ability to hold you and buckled, but Ren was at your side in an instant, snatching you up before you hit the floor. 

Righting you, he held your weight until your breathing regulated and you pushed back onto your feet. Not wanting to meet his eyes, you nodded against his shoulder, a silent report that you were here with him.  He helped you dress in the gauzy black shirt and pants and tipped your face up.  

You had no idea what he was looking for, and you were too tired to fake whatever it was.

Wrapping his great hand around your upper arm, he steered you from the room and down a dark corridor. He wouldn’t go through all the trouble to maim you if he was going to kill you, and you wondered what fresh hell you were being delivered to now. Your steps were slow, hesitant, but he didn’t rush you.  

Probably enjoying watching you hobbled in a fantastic new way...

He stopped on a chuckle, turned you to face him, and looked down at you with sardonic amusement.  You met his stare, fresh out of any damn to give over whether or not he heard you. You knew you were in no way threatening to this brute, but you leveled him with a searing gaze anyways.

“Supreme Leader Snoke is pleased with my progress.” Ren offered, pulling you flush against his body.  “He thinks I have no further need for you…” He reached out to brush his thumb across your glowering mouth. “...but I find that I want more.”

Overwhelmed and nervous at the admission, your mouth dropped open and you stared, dumbfounded.  While your mind tumbled over what else you could possibly offer him, he brushed past, leaving you to follow.

More?  What else was there?  Hadn’t you already given him everything?  He’d broken through your safety wall. He’d all but bathed in your blood.  He’d sewn your fucking cunt shut so you couldn’t even use it like a human being.

What the fuck else could you possibly want from me…

You were so angry that you stupidly followed him into a blindingly white room.  You slammed to a stop and blinked, forcing the room into focus. In the center, there was a surgical table, a tray of neatly-arranged instruments, and a man, dressed in gray scrubs and donning a clear splash guard at his face.  On the opposite side sat Ren’s black helmet, dented and busted apart.

Hand at your elbow, Ren led you further in and stroked your face with his wide palm, but you couldn’t tear your eyes away from the table.  He nudged the shell of your ear with his nose, and you quivered to feel so near to him, almost like a lover. You clutched at his shirt, molding your body to his and trying to hide from the coming onslaught.

You shook your head, already disbelieving, not wanting to hear what he was going to say next.

“I want to hear you scream,” his voice was hushed, as though this was a romantic secret.

All the blood drained from your face, and your mouth went bone dry. You looked from Ren, who was gazing down at you in a way that seared your insides, to the man waiting to enact his orders.  He stood there silently, waiting for his Commander’s direction, and you wondered if he’d been threatened into this room, too.

Ren turned you into the very middle of this insanity and hunched down to bury his face into the crook of your neck, crowding you back into the table.  Dancing on your toes, you laid petrified and quaking fingertips at his neck, needing to impress upon him how crazy this was.

Kylo...you can hear me...I’ve already given you everything..please don’t do whatever this is...

Paying no attention to your pleas, Ren slid his hands into the roomy waistband of your pants and nudged them down your body, kicking the paltry fabric away before you could get them. He lifted you onto the table and situated you at its very end, legs dangling in an eerily familiar way.

He stepped into the space between your legs, scooting your hips out to meet his.  You felt blistered every time you came into contact with his body, fingers, nose. He tipped your head back to lick at the scars crossing your larynx and rocked his body against yours. He was thick against you, his body hardening at the pitiable display you were putting on, and you whimpered in shameless response.

“Be good, puppet,” he hummed against your ear, enjoying the way your body reacted to his vicious dominance.

He stepped back, tugging out the table's stirrups, and you didn’t know who to be more afraid of. The doctor positioned his tray nearer to your head, stepping in so close you could smell the antiseptic soap.

You pushed at Ren’s hands when he guided your heels into the braces.

Kylo..please...You can’t… I can’t…

It was fluid now, automatic.  Your mouth opened when his fingers drew near, and he yanked you forward by that wicked hook. He slid his thumb slowly against your tongue and looked directly up into your eyes. Your knees knocked together, and you cried out in pain, having forgotten in your terror that your pussy was sewn up tight.

“You will.”

He did something to you when he said those things, and you stopped squirming.  You would never win this war. You would only tire yourself out with the fighting.  Beyond that, some delirious part of you wanted to prove him right, to show him that yes, you could do this.

Clenching your hands into tight fists, you closed your eyes to quell anxious tears.  He finished arranging your legs into the stirrups and scooted your ass down to the end of the table.  

Shame flooded you, barely contained by the bruised membrane that was your skin, because anyone who walked into the room would be treated to a view of your mistreated cunt.

Over you, the two men discussed what was about to happen as though you weren’t even there, and you felt more infinitesimal than ever before.  The doctor agreed that this was, indeed, a minorly invasive surgery, but it was what came next that launched you forward, panic-induced frenzy telling you to get the fuck out now regardless of whether you died in the process.

“There’s no need for a sedative.  She will be fine. Topical if you need it, but nothing stronger.”

You were a rabid animal up against an unstoppable force, but you howled and thrashed anyways.  You clawed at his arms and tried to kick him in the stomach and groin. You screamed and sobbed because even Santcha, who had done nothing but beat, stab, and take from you, had never been so cruel.

Each day you were here, Kylo Ren was disassembling you and rearranging your parts. He was building himself a better puppet, piece by bloody fucking piece.

You cannot do this!  You cannot do this...Kylo..you fucking cannot...

The doctor hunched over, holding his groin and floundering. Ren smirked, punching you into place with his trunk of an arm at your stomach.  Looking down at you, he stroked the inside of your knee with lazy circles, no doubt in a patronizing attempt to settle your fraying nerves. 

“Calm down, puppet.  You’re hurting the good doctor here.”

In your hysteria, you were pushing your feelings, your pain, out into the world around you. If you still hadn’t believed Ren about your Force-sensitivity, you’d just manifested all the proof he would ever need.

Exhausted from your outburst and ashamed for assaulting someone who hadn’t harmed you, you swallowed down air and fixed your stare upon the ceiling.  You counted heartbeats until the muscle didn’t feel like it was about to explode from your chest.

Angrily, you pushed Ren’s hand away.  You needn’t be pitied by the very man who was causing all of this.

With a chuckle, he pulled a rolling stool over to sit like it was just another fucking day of endless meetings.  Lifting your head up to glare at him, your chest seized, breath hitching, because you could see his shoulders, neck, and face between your spread thighs.  

Kylo please...

Maybe it's what he thought you were begging for because the Force slid over you like a weighted blanket, pinning you to the table, and you were never so grateful for being relieved of your autonomy.

The doctor turned your head into place and secured a metal brace on your throat, prohibiting any movement.  He applied a foul-smelling ointment to your skin, and you shattered, horrified to your very marrow.

You no longer had eyes, only faucets spewing forth an endless stream of angry, mournful tears.  You tried closing them to staunch the flow because the doctor said you were moving too much, but you couldn't stop your body now. You weren't in control of it anymore. 

The stress response to this terror was unforgiving, and you thought it might never end.  He was going to have to cut you open from ear to ear because stopping the chatter of your teeth and the rattling of your shoulders and chest was simply not within your power.

Your fingers uncurled, reaching for Ren even though you knew he would never offer you this comfort.

Instead, warmth pooled around your breasts, licking up your sternum, and you drew in a tremulous breath. The Force that held you in place lavished attention upon your torso, cupping, massaging, and squeezing your breasts together. Warm and wet nipped at the hard peaks, and your calves flexed in response. 

“Quiet now.”

Ren's voice was even, demanding.  He had indulged your fear long enough, and it was now time to obey.  You concentrated on the invisible hand tugging your breasts into an aching throb and reminded yourself to wiggle your toes and fingers.  Your lips quivered on every exhale, but you were trying so hard to keep yourself together. 

You knew how to process pain, but this affliction could hardly be classified as pain.

As the doctor set to his task, you felt pressure at your neck but not the sting of the scalpel.  Ren seemed to want that sensation only for himself, and you conjured the image of him painted with your blood, preferring the memory of beautiful torture to this reality of sanitized mistreatment.

The doctor, asking Ren something you didn't catch, stuck his fucking fingers into your throat, and your panic kicked back up. You jerked against the stirrups, and your lips curled into a snarl, readying to shout curses at this man, consequences be damned.

Shushing you, Ren dipped his face between your thighs, and you nearly vaulted off the table when you felt his lips connect with the supple, bruised skin.  His kiss was soft, his lips smooth, and you bristled with ire that he would deny you the sight of him between your legs. 

Alongside the doctor, you cursed him and tightened your hands into angry fists.

He chuckled against you, clearly entertained by your fit.  The sensation at your breasts increased, the rippling heat licking, sucking, and biting at your nipples. The throb bubbled over and spread down your sides, slithering across your stomach.  It was rousing and teasing and distracting, exactly as it was meant to be.

Ren’s mouth traveled from one thigh to the other, and your whole face pinched with the effort to be as silent as possible.  It was clear that any noise you made, any vibration in your throat, would do more damage and prolong this bastardized treatment.

He didn’t want you to damage his property with your foolishness, you realized.

He murmured an agreement to the thought and kissed up the insides of both legs, sucked on his bruises, and nipped at the highest point of your thighs.  Your insides pooled, and he dipped his thumb into the wetness building for him, tugging ever so gently upon the weeping slit.

The doctor reached across your body to the tray that held the destroyed helmet, but you were too wrapped up in Ren’s wicked scheme to notice him plundering the debris for a specific part. The tension in your legs and hips had lessened under his mouth, and your vulnerable thighs had dropped further apart.

Abruptly, the pressure of the Force increased upon your entire body, and you were unnerved all over again because what was coming next surely was worse than what you’d already endured if he needed to hold you down more.

You sniffled through your fear but poured every ounce of brute determination into remaining calm, to keep yourself still and under some measure of composure.  You weren’t sure if he was speaking aloud or in your head, but you heard Ren praising you for how well you were doing, how beautiful and strong you were to endure this for him.

As though you had any choice in the matter.

When his lips connected with your cunt, you thought you would certainly swallow whatever the doctor was lodging into your neck.  You could feel the pressure more insistently now as he crammed or screwed or stitched whatever the fuck it was he was doing.  

Ren kissed and sucked upon your stretched labia; the sounds lewd and consuming. He plucked each stitch with his tongue, and you thought you were going to lose your mind.  You could feel every tight tug followed by the warm flat of his tongue gliding up the length of the vicious seam.

You marveled at how easily this man could conjure new tortures, how simple it was for him to corrupt something so mundane and turn it into exquisite torment.

Master of the Knights of Ren, indeed...

You cursed him again for taking away any hint of pleasure you might eke out from this whole experience.  It was barbarous and merciless to lay his mouth upon you like this and prevent you from actually feeling it, enjoying it.  It was the pinnacle of painful foreplay, and you hated him for it.  

You hated the doctor for being a party to this whole fucking thing. You hated everyone on this ship for bowing to the tantrums of a Child God, and you promised yourself you’d murder Supreme Fucking Leader Snoke himself for creating such a beast.

Ren bit into your thigh harshly at that last thought, directly into the center of the deep bruise, and your toes curled tight.  That mark certainly went down to the bone and would likely scar, little indentations from his teeth puckering more each time he revictimized the area. 

Kylo...

Sweat broke across your brow, and a feverish tremble began as your body tried to deal with the absurd number of sensations warring inside.

The doctor pushed his tray away and told you both that he would need to test the calibration before he could close the window. You blinked up at his masked face in confusion.  Test the calibration of what? How were you meant to do that, exactly?

Ren stood and you jerked at the brush of his body.  You could feel him rustling, but it was driving you mad that you couldn’t see what he was doing.  He hooked his thumbs into the very tops of your thighs and tugged the opening of your vagina just slightly wider. The stitches strained, and you whimpered, unable to contain it any longer.

Your eyes flew wide open because the sound was strange, louder, reverberating.

The swollen head of Ren’s cock nudged at your entrance, and you knew your heart was going to explode from your chest.  He’d been working you, tinkering with those fucking puppet strings, to flood your pussy and make it ready for him; and like a damn fool, you’d given him exactly what you wanted.

You burned with humiliation and ragged desire as he pushed in, breaking the seal and stretching your cunt into something pliable for his sizable dick.  It was endless, the sting and scorch of each inch, and you wanted to beg that he please just let you reach for him. It was all becoming too much, and you were disjointed, disconnected from everything.

Ren pushed and leaned into you until he was fully seated, pulsing at the very center of your body. You could feel every throb, every carnal twitch.  Ren was fucking you from both ends, his dick stuffed far into your pussy and his depraved will stuffed down deep into your neck. The very idea of it sent you into a spiral.

“Fuck, that’s tight,” he groaned, voice gravelly. “Relax, puppet. Open for me.”

Kylo, not like this...

You were truly his object, denied any relief from his harassment or any pleasure at his hand.  Digging his fingers into your hips, he began a slow, thorough stroke, pulling nearly all the way out only to plunge back down to the hilt.

“Out loud, girl.”

Your head ticked, a screaming internal alarm preventing you from shaking it outright, because you couldn’t do it; you could not obey this order.  You couldn’t even remember the sound of your own voice, and you didn’t want to mourn something you couldn’t recall. You also didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

Fuck you...

Ren’s hips thrust harder into you, though, and you yelped. The high-pitched fabricated sound shocked you, and you trailed it with a hiccup, breath catching on the implications of this new reality.

“Lower,” Ren nodded to the doctor, who adjusted the implant in your throat.

You seethed.  He was tailoring the sound of your voice to his fucking preference, and you thought you surely would rip the damned thing out of your neck if you had your hands free. 

Dissatisfied with your reaction to his steady pace, Ren rutted into you stubbornly, fucking you with more force.  Your ire fizzled, the anger dribbling out of your cunt on a steady trickle of hot slick. He stretched you, and you moaned at the fullness of it.  You desperately wanted to arch and rock your hips against him, but you were completely paralyzed, not even given room to wiggle.

“Kylo. Fuck. Please.”

He all but purred at the modulated sound of your voice, the one he’d given you, and rewarded you with a long series of strokes so deep you saw stars.

“Lower,” he ordered, and the doctor moved to his bidding.

“Now, puppet, what’s that mantra of yours?”

Ren’s cunning was staggering.  He was demanding the only thing that had allowed you to survive him.  Your throat burned, tingling around the foreign implant, and you swallowed, trying to moisten the metal. Sniffling, you cleared your throat, focusing on the task you’d been given and not the ruthless invasion of your pussy.

Taking as deep of a breath as you could, you concentrated on making the sound as even as possible.

“In...suffering...there...is...beauty.”

“That’s right,” he praised you and then nodded to the surgeon. “That’s it.”

Having gotten what he wanted, Ren bent over you and nipped at your stomach before tucking himself back into his pants.  In moments, the doctor had your throat stitched up, a Bacta patch applied, and was giving instructions to Ren about no solid food for 24 hours, watch for infection, and apply Bacta as needed.  

He also advised that you should be silent for the next 24 hours due to inflammation but that he understood if something happened to prevent that.

You narrowed your eyes at the ceiling when he said it because of fucking course something was going to prevent that.  Curling your hands into fists again, you renewed your vow to slaughter every soul on this ship.

With the doctor gone, the Force hold you’d been kept under released, and you shot upwards to confront Ren.  This wasn’t fear or flight; this was anger and malice. 

You slammed both fists into his chest and shoved.  Pressing your lips into a hard line, you jammed your knee in between your body and his, intent upon sprinting past him and away from here, from him.

Jerking your legs back apart, he stepped in and wrapped his massive hand around your throat, burning you with his gaze and squeezing you back into muted compliance.  Satisfied you would be still, he wrapped you tight into his chest, fingers still stroking your throat.  

Shock and absolute fury coiled into the pit of your stomach, and you just sat, boiling in your hatred that he could so easily disfigure you and, then, so easily divest you of your rage.

The severity of what he’d done registered, and panicked spikes drove into your heart. You quaked anew, tears spilling, and you dug your fingers into the shirt at the small of his back.

What did you do…

“Out loud,” he pressed, voice endearing as he brushed your tears away.

Licking your lips, you stared at him for a long moment, eyes glossy.  Ren waited patiently as you gathered the fortitude to obey. Even he seemed to understand this was a lot to take in.

“What did you do?” You whispered it, the haunted voice faltering, betraying the depth of your despair.

He hummed hungry delight against your jaw.  Using the leverage he always seemed to have at your neck, Ren turned your head for you to take in the broken bits of his helmet on the tray.  In the vortex of fear and lust and terror, you’d completely forgotten it had been there at all.

“This voice,” he breathed the words out, stroking the bandage, “is mine.”

You gaped at him, eyes swiveling from the tray to his face and back.  It broke over you like lightning. He had taken the modulator from his helmet and had it implanted in your throat.

Ren dropped his head into your neck again and sucked a mark into the skin. You were too frozen to respond, your back rigid but your arms and legs hanging limp and useless.

“This body,” he said into your neck, “is mine.”

Slithering his hands between your bodies, he pushed your thighs apart wide and ran his fingers up the plump seam.  You shuddered, feeling the pulse of your sequestered clit battering against the wall that should not be there.

“This pussy,” he bit at your jaw, “is mine.”

He had succeeded in reducing you to a nameless doll, a puppet tailored exactly to his liking for his entertainment and use.  You were dazed, thunderstruck, and empty. He had put you through absolute hell today, and you weren’t capable of filtering your thoughts, now words, anymore.

You were past the point where you could even care if he punished you for insolence.

“Why did you stay with me?”

The question startled you more than the alien sound of your new voice.  You managed to look at him and concentrated on his alluring freckles. You searched his starry eyes for something to latch onto, something that would tie you here.

You had no childish thoughts of love or support.  But right now, having borne the brunt of so much of his persecution, you needed something.  

One question, though, led to more, and they began to spill from your lips on this new capability.

“Why didn’t you kill me? I was ready, and I would have gladly given you that. Why did you need to do this to me?  You were already in my head, listening.”

Your ire and emotion were rising, the mechanical undertone in your voice lifting in pitch. You blinked, really truly trying to understand the whims of a mad man. 

“What difference is there between me screaming in my head and screaming out loud? Why couldn’t you just leave me the way I was? I was surviving your punishment just fine without this unnatural, bastard tongue!”

You fisted both hands into his shirt and pounded against the chest beneath. Your lips wobbled, and you tipped your head back, furious at the tears that wouldn’t fucking stop.

You had learned to survive without a voice.  The silence you offered the universe became your salvation, your solace.  People expected nothing of you when they knew you couldn't speak, and you’d used it to strengthen yourself, to fortify your will to endure and withstand all manner of ego and abuse.

Frantic, you settled on the most important question, the one that you needed answered.

“Why did you do this to me?”

Ren captured your face in both hands and smothered your tirade with a kiss. His beautiful pink lips slanted over yours, and you melted against his mouth.  He sucked at your lower lip, licked the roof of your mouth, and slid his tongue against yours until you were breathless and squirming.

He curled your limbs around his shoulders and waist and carried you around the side of the table.  Setting you down, he plucked the scalpel from the tray, his hands disappearing between your legs. You whimpered and scooted backwards, but he hooked a hand beneath your knee and pulled you back into place.

“I did this,” he cut one of the sutures, “to focus your attention away from the procedure."

“Is that not…” he nipped at your pulse, “...merciful?”

He made quick work of the remaining sutures, slicing through them and pulling the remnants away. You whined, head lolling, as your freed labia parted, blood beginning to redistribute to the abused skin and shooting pins and needles into your cunt.  He followed the sharp stings with his thumb, rubbing between the swollen folds until you gasped and tipped your pelvis into his touch.

Tugging you against his body, Ren ground his erection between your tender lips.  You moaned low, the sound warbled, wanton, and needy, and he captured it with a deep kiss, swallowing on a growl.

He tore at his own clothes, freed his swollen cock, and pushed inside of you, not bothering to be gentle. Your eyebrows drew together tight at the invasion, the time between the first fucking and this one having been enough for your body to re-acclimate to his absence.  

Sinking your teeth into your lip, you lifted your hips to his assault because the utter completion you felt was too good to resist.

“And I did..fuck…,” he faltered, bottoming out into your tight heat; “...I did this,” he dipped his face down and licked the bandage, the only truly new scar he’d ever given you; “...so that you would remember,” his breath was broken now, his voice ragged with lust; “...that every sound you make belongs to me.”

You held tightly to his back, hugging his sides with your legs, and trying your damnedest to stay here in this moment.  The second adrenaline crash of the day threatened to consume you, but you fought against it because the man who’d teased you for a week had his dick so far inside you that you thought you could taste it. 

You were desperate for this bliss, whining in raw need, and you shuddered when he rocked your body against his in the manner and tempo he liked, large fingers splayed across your ass and moving you to his pleasure. Your tortured cunt clenched and all but sucked his dick in deep.   

You cried out, feeling the lines between you as a person and you as Ren’s personal fucktoy bleed together.  Your whole body contracted, squeezing him hard and coming absolutely alive under his thumb. You clung to his back like he was your own personal savior.

Stretching long fingers around your neck, Ren lifted your face and forced you to look, always wanting to watch you agonize for him.  The now-familiar warm sensation blossomed at your clit, and your eyes fluttered shut on a loud moan. He shook you until your eyes opened again, demanding your stare.

“You’re no victim," he sneered.

He punched himself so far into your cunt that you felt the nudge at your cervix and erupted into an echoing shriek. The Force engulfed your clit, every single one of the thousands of nerves swarmed by the hot vibration and spreading a delicious jolt up through your abdomen.

“You’re a depraved, filthy thing,” he dug his nails into your jaw, “and your body was made for me.”

You couldn’t look away, couldn’t shake your head or disagree.  Accepting that hard truth on your behalf, your pussy flooded him with a new surge of molten slip, and he growled possessively.  He licked at your mouth and squeezed your neck tighter. The pressure arched you into his chest and set your cunt to clutching feverishly.

“See? Not happy unless you’re being hurt.”

Pressing into the veins below your jaw, he stunted the flow of blood to your brain, sending you into floating oblivion.  You convulsed against him, the jerk of your body trying to fight off unconsciousness drawing a hungry moan from your captor.  The suction at your clit intensified, and you begged, lips working on impotent words, breath choppy, and fingers clamoring and raking against his biceps.

You were nothing but a vibrating mess, well-fucked and wholly obliterated by his embrace as he choked and ravaged your body. The stab of his dick was relentless, and you were very nearly gone, your eyes glazing over, eyelids heavy. 

“Cum for me, puppet. Show me how much you like it."

He dipped his mouth to your ear, voice commanding, dripping with derision and desire.  Shifting his fingers, he allowed blood to rush back into your dizzy head, and you gasped hard.  Married with the hot pressure at your clit and the pistoning of his cock, you seized in deference to his order.

Your entire body shrunk into a tight ball against him, knees drawing up high, ankles hugging at his back.  Your fingers and toes curled, your legs and arms shook, and your abdomen and ass clenched hard and tight. 

The orgasm blew through you like a comet, and everything loosened on a series of soul-shattering quakes.

You shouted and wailed, the altered, digital howl sounding almost like it truly belonged to you.  Your cunt spasmed, alternating between trying to push Ren’s invading cock out and trying to draw it further and further in.

You were drowning in euphoria, endorphins, and emotions, and you had no protection, no wall with which to keep everything at bay.  Every single thing Ren had done, was doing, roiled through you and radiated off of your body dangerously, and he was caught in the blast zone.

“Fuck..fuck..FUCK!”

His hands dug caverns into the meat of your ass, fingernails leaving crescent trenches. He bit into the side of your neck, buried himself as far into you as he could, and emptied his cock into the flood you were offering him.

Three more thrusts pushed his seed in deep, and he moaned, low and liquid, into your skin while bucking through his orgasm.  You were barely clinging to consciousness, weak and overwhelmed by the events of the afternoon, the day, the week.

For the third time today, Ren held you, stroking your back until your mind came back to your body.  When you lifted your head, he leaned back, taking in your mottled cheeks, swollen mouth, and glassy eyes.  

“Open.”

He lifted his hand to your mouth and purred when it opened for him naturally.  He hooked his thumb into your teeth, just the way you liked, and you shifted against him, leaking all manner of bodily fluids onto the table.

You hadn't hesitated at all, too sated to bristle that it was beneath you or too eager for whatever demeaning paradise he was willing to offer.  

He held your jaw right there, thumb playing with the inside of your teeth.  He was looking at you as though he was ready to bathe in your blood again, and you weren’t sure that you wouldn’t let him. His eyes were dark and nefarious and hypnotic.

What he did next was so unexpectedly obscene that you choked.  He tilted your head back and spat into your mouth, watching his saliva pool on your tongue.

Your body’s reaction was immediate, suffused with want and something you might later identify as pride. Your fingers tightened into his shirt, and your chest arched up into him. You let loose a low sound that even you didn’t even recognize, and your hips rocked beseechingly against him.

“You belong to me,” he said, watching the bubbles slide down your throat. “This is the last time I'll explain myself to you."

He allowed you to close your mouth, and you stared at him, awed and searching.  Before you could second guess yourself, you curled his trembling fingers around your throat, swallowing beneath the grip.

If this was the closest you would ever get to an intimate gesture, you needed it now more than you needed oxygen.

Satisfied for the moment, Ren squeezed your neck and rubbed his nose against yours. 

Too soon, the moment ended, and Ren grasped your hips and lifted you off of his dick with a low groan.  You watched openly as he tucked himself away and righted his clothing. You flushed, pleased at the idea that he was going to spend the rest of today with your cunt lingering on his dick.

You blinked at the thought, troubled at the ease with which you joined him in such vulgarity.

Your reverie was interrupted by a slender man in all black walking into the room uninvited and unannounced.  Ren’s head shot up on a snarl, and he reached out to wind that unfortunate soul into the Force and lift him off of his feet.  

You tiredly glanced over at Ren’s newest victim, surprised by his bright red hair. Knowing better than to interfere, you simply looked from Ren to this intruder, wondering how long it would be before one of them spoke.

“The...Supreme...Leader...demands...your………………...presence!”

Ren released his hold, and the uniformed man hit the ground with a crash, scrambling back out into the hallway.  Bending down, he scooped up your black pants and handed them to you. 

Ren's gaze hardened considerably, and you were amazed at how dark became void in his eyes. Reaching back to the tray, he grabbed the scalpel, broke off the blade, and lifted it to your mouth.

“If he tries to hurt you or move you,” his voice was dangerously low, and your eyes flitted around his arm to the door, “get away. Find the Knights of Ren.”

The questions played across your face, and your brow knit. Were you in danger?  Why were you in danger? You leaned forward, meaning to ask, but he shook his head, instructing you back to silence.  You sat up straighter, concerned and more alert.

“That voice is for me, only.”

Understanding, you parted your lips and accepted the weapon, moving it with your tongue and tucking it into the roof of your mouth.  Ren's battle face changed for just a second, his beautiful lips turning up into a smirk, knowing full well this wasn’t the first time you’d had to hide a blade.

You accepted that he would push you until you broke for him, over and over, but it satisfied you to no end that he wasn’t prepared to allow anyone else to harm you.  That pleasure was afforded to him alone in the Galaxy.  

“Hux!” He barked it out, and the man, who was still rubbing his tender throat, turned into the room to look.

“You will personally deliver her back to my chambers.”

Ren didn’t waste time asking if the man understood his instructions.  He would be obeyed, or someone would die. In seconds, he had collected the remnants of his helmet and was gone from the room.  

You sagged, feeling like the universe was somehow less bright without the scorch of his presence. Stuffing your aching, wobbly legs into the black linen, you cautiously descended from the surgical table and righted the material over your hips.  

Turning, you faced your new escort, whose name was apparently Hux, and gestured for him to lead on.

[heroprose]

rasping, murmuring;

a/n. 500 followers! we popping bottles!

ship. hitoshi shinsou x reader

summary. magical cat au. or perhaps, the princess and the frog au.

//

it was a friday when a particularly unruly haired stray began to appear on the balcony of your apartment at a regular basis. it hardly ever made sound, but certainly it did startle you the first time you threw open the curtains and saw a cat staring intently up at you, unmoving.

of course, you were stricken. distraught, as to whether to pet the cat, to feed the cat, or to let the cat in. the possibilities were endless. you didn’t dare to do any of these things the first few visits, however, in case the stray was just passing by as swiftly as it came.

but it wasn’t. weirdly enough, it appeared on your balcony and rested quietly nearly every day for an hour or so before leaping away. and it always seemed to stare through the glass and into your apartment, as if fascinated by the interior. you always stared forlornly back from the inside.

a week passes before you find yourself kneeling in front of this stray, finally finding the hubris to reach out. “please,” you say aloud, “please let me pet you.”

the cat says nothing in return. its long, dark fur, you realize, is not blue but actually a shade of purple.

its paws remained tucked underneath its body, so you allow your fingers to cautiously pet its head, your palm traveling down its spine. for a stray, its fur is surprisingly immaculate and silky and immediately you wonder if you’ve been misunderstanding it all along.

“are you someone’s pet?” you muse, more to yourself than to the cat as you reach towards the neck for a collar but all the same, it appears to reply.

the cat lifts its chin up, exposing its chest and— well, lack of collar.

instead of ushering the cat in, you leave the door open. it hurts a little when he continues to leave instead but one day, it crosses the threshold with a meow.

this cat, as you find out for the next few weeks, is not like any other cat you’ve ever met. and you’re not just saying this because it is your roommate now.

from what you can determine (you’re no cat expert but you think you’re adequately qualified for this), it’s biologically male and you hope that for the time being, the cat won’t mind being referred to with male pronouns.

you don’t immediately bring him to the vet for one reason alone and it was that he acted so human, really. you suspected he, at the very least, used to be a house pet because his mannerisms were explicitly clean sometimes, from the way he relished in baths and when he refused to eat neither dry nor wet cat food. 

you’ve resorted to feeding him chicken and the occasional tuna and at each meal he blinks up at you, slow and theatric, as if giving thanks.

but most other times, he is very much a cat, flexing his claws into your clothes and on your skin when you aren’t giving him proper attention.

“agh,” you say, “that hurts.” it doesn’t really but it always makes him retract his claws and you feel like a cat whisperer. how did he always respond so keenly to your verbal remarks? it was all very odd to think about how smart this cat really was.

and you could never settle on an actual name. you’ve settled with addressing him exclusively as baby boy or bastard child, depending on your mood.

lying on the floor one day, you scoop him up and set him on your chest. “baby,” you say, holding his paws. “baby boy. you’re really freakin’ heavy, you know that?”

he settles on your chest, mewling demurely at the soft rise and fall from your breathing. his fur tickles your neck as he dips his head forward, bumping his forehead on your chin.

you laugh, then wheeze when he withdraws and haphazardly uses your rib cage as a launchpad to leap over your head. you roll onto your side promptly, in fear he’ll try that shit again. but all he does is lazily come back to view, dark eyes blown wide as he pads close. he blinks slow at you, just watching.

suddenly not fearing his wrath, you pull forward to kiss his forehead. but at the same moment, he yawns and at the collide, there is suddenly a horrifying roughness on your lips as he licks them, his nose pressing into your philtrum.

you roll away with a gag, and for the very first time, you hear a distinctly disturbed and loud mrowl.

“what the fuck,” you say, rubbing your lips profusely, hoping you didn’t obtain some kinda funky disease. after all, he was a cat roaming the streets just over two months prior. you begin to deeply regret not scheduling a vet appointment like you should have. 

trying your best to refrain from licking your lips, you pull yourself upright and cross legged, still facing away from your cat. “cat,” you say, “i’m gonna hope to whatever higher deity up there that you did not just give me ringworm.”

he stays silent and you presume he’s just as peeved to what has just occurred.

you sigh. “alright, well, i’m going to the bathroom,” you declare.

when you pivot around to get up, you let out an abrupt shout and quite possibly another expletive but you’re not certain which one because your mind is racing and the concern of contracting ringworm vanishes to make space for more pressing matters.

there, backed up against the wall, some guy is looking himself over, a mystified and tense expression pulled on his face. his hair is an unruly purple.

and he’s naked.

but you can’t look away out of respect because what if he attacks? plus, you don’t respect home invaders.

he glances up at the sound of your shout and his eyebrows knit as you launch yourself at the kitchen table, scrabbling for the candleholder.

“no, wait—“ you hear him say and his voice is deep and pressing.

you brandish the metal candleholder at him, hoping desperately this flasher isn’t all that strong even if he is a bit broad. and tall. if only you could find your phone. “do not come near me,” you utter, waving it around wildly.

“please... please put that down,” he rasps as he stands. his hands fly up to his throat as if his own vocal cords stun him.

“sit back down!”

he does just that and all you can do is gawk. a stalker? when the hell did he enter? you don’t dare glance away for too long but your eyes flutter to the balcony, then to your front door. was he watching you from somewhere? while you were playing with your cat?

your cat.

“where is my cat.”

he lets out a breath. “okay, listen— this will sound unbelievable but i—“

“don’t say you’re my cat,” you say testily, your brain still whirring but you refuse— you refuse to believe this. but his eyes are a familiar dark and you can’t forget that voluminous purple fur. you, in opposition, suck in a breath.

“baby boy,” he says without warning and a feeling of horror pulses through you. “or bastard. that’s what you called me, right?” he makes this comment pointedly, with indifference to the nicknames but all the same they fill you with embarrassment. your instinct is to go straight into denial.

“now wait a moment—“

he tilts his head, his gaze almost palpable. “do you remember— and i’m certain you do— when you kept trying to train me to shake hands? that was fun: messing with you, refusing to obey.”

you continue to stare in silence. the candleholder slowly drops to your side.

“still don’t believe me?” he asks with a scoff and that seems to sober you up, the exasperation in his voice like he’s seriously tired that you don’t trust him. this was the oddest home invasion ever.

“okay, listen up magic mike,” you say. “if—“

“my name is hitoshi.”

you didn’t even consider the idea of him having a name. your eyes thin out. “if you are my cat, then— then are you even human? are you some kind of shapeshifter? don’t tell me you’re going to have to steal my identity now.” at this point you’re just rambling because glancing around the room, you don’t see your purple beast of a cat anywhere.

“no,” he says affirmatively to get through your spiraling. “no, i’m not a shapeshifter. i’m human; and i was cursed.”

you gape. “that’s even worse!” you say, and your fingers touch your lips. “did you pass it onto me? man, fuck you—“

“could you please listen before drawing conclusions?” he says. “are you a cat right now? tell me.”

“... no.”

“there’s your answer,” he mutters.

“wow. i’m having a hard time believing you because my cat was nice to me.”

“your cat couldn’t speak.”

“i think i liked it better than way. can you turn back? actually, don’t— i won’t be able to look at you the same way.” you wipe a hand over your face and think. “i need to process all of this.”

he shrugs. “take your time. it won’t change the reality that we’ve been living in the same apartment for the past two months.” 

either he was an incredible actor slash stalker with an incredibly bizarre gimmick or... he was telling the truth. both alternatives made you a bit queasy. there is a long, long silence before either of you move again.

eyeing him warily, you set your makeshift weapon down and walk towards the couch. “we’ve got to get you some clothes. this was okay when you were furry but i can’t have a full time nudist in my home.”

“so you trust me now?” he asks and you reflect.

“there are some discrepancies. like, my cat slept for like twenty hours a day, and you look like you haven’t slept in a week.”

“i’m not tired; this is just my face,” he grouses, but touches the area underneath his eyes. 

you tsk. “well. fine. whatever. we’ve got all the time in the world to sort this out, anyway.”

hitoshi blinks and it’s fast for once, leaving you wondering if you misspoke.

“what?” you say uneasily.

“am i staying here?”

“oh. did you want to leave?”

“no,” he admits, and more stiffly, “i just didn’t think you’d let me stay.”

“you think i’d want you to waltz out without giving me any answers? plus, i spent ages, hitoshi, ages trying to get you into my house in the first place.” you take the blanket that drapes over the couch and pass it to him, your cheek turned away. “it was exhausting how bad i wanted you. that sounds off but you know what i mean.”

he takes it with two hands. “all you had to do was ask. i can’t read your mind.”

your eyes snap back to hitoshi, who wraps the blanket around his waist like a towel and follows you to the kitchen table. “i left the door open. i gave you tuna. for a week. how obvious did i have to be? should i have tried to kiss you, right then and there?”

“maybe,” he says and you only snort. “but i didn’t know that was the cure.” he pauses, and takes a good look at your face. “you cured me,” he emphasizes.

you stop. “you didn’t? and i did? was that even considered a kiss?” all you knew was that your lips could’ve been exfoliated.

hitoshi shakes his head. “i was... i was fully prepared to stay like that, i guess. with you, the person i l—” he stops himself, confusion flooding his visage. “the person who i decided i’d live with.”

“uh huh,” you say. “technically, you still can do that. i mean, i won’t let you mooch off me anymore though.”

“sure,” he murmurs. the strained look on his face comes and goes in a second and you question you even saw it and you can tell he’s mulling over thoughts about distant things and sentiments that you don’t quite understand.

not yet, that is. but those things don’t concern you at the moment— what’s much more pressing is getting that ringworm checked out. and what the hell to do with the cute, black collar that shipped yesterday. and the litter box.

[overobsessivewhumper]

Mr. Hughes new Pet

The same amount of people wanted the next part to be about Gavin and Mutt, as Mr. Hughes and Mutt, so in the end, i just wrote the on that inspired me more in the moment. sorry, it got a little bit long...

Previous part that plays in the future

Content warning: modern slavery, abuse of a minor (Not in a sexual way though), mention of blood

Tag list: @castielamigos-whump-side-blog @burtlederp @im-not-rare-im-rarr

@comfortforthepain @18-toe-beans @haro-whumps @deluxewhump @kungpao-giffy @draganies

43002612’s blindfold got removed roughly, letting him look out of the back of the truck at the two men who had put him in it at the facility. Trying to make as much noise as possible from behind the ball-gag  covering his mouth he tried to shake the men’s hands off of him. He had nothing left to lose. At least  not with these two. He’d already been sold to some sick bastard, and there was nothing he could do about.

43002612 decided he might as well make it as hard as possible for them to transport him.

“Shut the fuck up, stupid brat!” One of the men, the one with the lighter hair of the two, grabbed his bound hands, and threw him to the ground outside the truck.

Despite his tied wrists and ankles, 43002612 tries to get up and run away. Like hell he’s going to belong to some sick person that bought him!

43002612 doesn’t get far, tripping over the cuffs around his ankles. He hits the concrete floor hard enough to get the wind knocked out of him. But that doesn’t stop him. He uses his bound wrists to pull himself further away from his two handlers. A hand grabs his ankle and pulls him back. 43002612 claws at the ground, trying to get hold on the stone. Another pair of hands grabs him and flips him onto his back.

“That’s quite enough out of you! Annoying little shit.” 43002612 glares up at his handlers and attempts to yell back at them, but it comes out muffled. Squirming about, he tries to get his ankle out of the vice-like grip it is in. The man that threw him out of the truck and is holding his ankle groans.

“Fine! You brought this upon yourself!” He begins to drag 43002612 towards the door of the big, expensive looking house by his ankle. 43002612 continues squirming and screaming his throat raw. To no avail. The grip doesn’t even loosen slightly. 43002612 gets dragged up the few steps to the front door of the house, hitting his head on one of the steps. Hard enough for him to stop squirming for a moment. The doorbell gets rung, and the three of them wait for a response. Even 43002612 goes silent. A cold feeling of dread and fear grip him. Now there’s no more getting out of this. He’s officially becoming a Pet with a… a Master. 43002612 fights against the rising nausea, not wanting to get sick whilst having a ball-gag in.

A voice comes though the intercom above the doorbell.  The voice sounds smooth and controlled, but has a sort of gruffness to it. “Who’s this?”

The handler not holding 43002612’s ankle replies.

“We’ve got a delivery for you sir. The Pet with the obedience issues.” A laugh comes through the intercom. A surprisingly warm and kind sounding laugh. Maybe his master wouldn’t be so bad?

43002612 shakes that thought. He didn’t want to be owned by anyone, no matter how nice they may be! Then the door opens.

“Well that’s great!” The man that bought 43002612 was tall and broad and looked about in his early forties, with chestnut hair and a grin on his face. “Why don’t you bring it in?”

43002612 gets roughly dragged over the threshold into the grand and fancy entrance. 43002612 dully notes that the floor is made of rather expensive looking wood boards. His ankle gets dropped and 43002612 pulls himself up into a sitting position. The man, 43002612’s new master, signed something on a tablet the darker haired of the two handlers is holding out, before turning to 43002612.

“Goodness, it’s so small! In theory I knew its size, but I didn’t realize how small it’d be in reality.”

“Well, it’s only like… how old is it?” He turns to the second handler, who checks something on the tablet he is still holding.

“Fourteen.”

“Yeah. So he might still grow a bit… And we are not taking that thing back with us again! You already signed for it.”43002612’s new owner laughs.

“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t not want this precious little Pet cause of something like that!”

43002612 glares, not liking to be called little, precious or a Pet by some guy that bought him.

When the two handlers leave, 43002612 contemplates attempting to escape through the door. Then he remembers that his hands and legs are tied, and that he’d never get out like that. He decides that he’ll have to wait for a more fitting opportunity.

Once the door is locked, the man comes back to 43002612 and crouches down.

“My name is Jaden Hughes. But you will call me Master, or Master Hughes if I’m in a good mood.” He unfastens the ball-gag from 43002612’s face. 43002612 takes the opportunity to spit in his face.

“I’m not going to call you anything like that you sick bastard!” 43002612 was getting ready to start ranting about other things he was no way going to do, but before he could get them out, Mr. Hughes had clasped his hand over his mouth.

“They where right then. You are a feisty little thing, aren’t you?” He chuckle to himself. 43002612 feels a pang of hatred for the man. Glaring, he bites his owners hand, hard enough to leave teeth marks. Mr. Hughes jerks his hand back and gets up. 43002612 almost laughs.

That is until a swift kick aimed at his ribs lands, knocking the wind out of him, and makes him tip over onto his side.

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to bite the hand that feeds you?” He rubs his hand where 43002612 bit him.

Glaring, 43002612 tries to stand up, but Mr. Hughes shoves him over and quickly pins him against the floor. He grabs 43002612’s face roughly, swiftly shoving the ball-gag back into his mouth.

“That’s going back on again.” Standing up, he grabs 43002612 by his hair, not slowing down to accommodate to the smaller man’s slower pace due to his tied legs, leaving 43002612 having to try to keep up by stumbling after him haphazardly. 43002612 goes as fast as he can, but the hand in his hair still yanks him along, a sharp pain accompanying this rough action. 43002612 tries to shove his owner away, but between the hair pulling and his bound hands, this doesn’t work out as well as he imagined.

The hand suddenly lets go, and 43002612 drops to the ground.

“Walk, or I push you down.” Mr. Hughes points to the stairs in front of 43002612. He doesn’t want to do what this psycho wants him to do, especially if what he wants him to go down a stairs that leads somewhere into the dark, but does he really want to risk getting pushed down the stairs?

Not really. So he gets up, glares at the man almost twice his size hovering next to him and carefully starts to hobble down the stairs, not wanting to trip over the cuffs on his ankles. Behind him his owner huffs.

“You’re being awfully slow you know? I don’t like having to wait.” 43002612 turns to glare at him, mumbling what should be “How the hell am I supposed to go faster?!” into his gag.

“Don’t make me push you. A fragile Pet like you wouldn’t do well falling down the stairs.” Still glaring, 43002612 hobbled on, going even slower than before.

43002612 thought he was getting away with it until he got pushed down the last few steps, hitting the floor with a dull thud. But there was nothing dull about the pain that flares up his right side upon contact. 43002612 groans through the ball-gag. Mr. Hughes grins down at him.

“Oops.”

43002612 glares at him, putting as much resentment and disgust into it as he can muster. Before he can do much more then glare, 43002612 is grabbed by the hair again, and yanked backwards into a room.

The room is rather bland, not much more then an empty cellar room except for a few chests towards the left wall upon first glance. But 43002612 understood what this dim lit room was. A room specifically made to cause pain. Disgust and fear gripped 43002612. Mr. Hughes let go of his hair once he was towards the middle of the room. Without paying 43002612 any attention, he locked the heavy door and then moved to the chests, seeming to look for something.

“Now first off, little mutt, there are strict rules in this house.” He doesn’t turn to talk to 43002612. He removes a leather whip from the chest, inspects is, before putting it back. 43002612 feels a small pang of relief. He’s never been whipped before, and didn’t feel like finding out just how it feels all too soon. “As I told you, you will always refer to me as Master. Always. I own you.” His owner pulls a cane from the chest, letting out a please hum before walking back to 43002612. “You will listen to my every word and do what I demand of you. Your purpose in life is to serve me, your master!”

43002612 stands up, glaring at his owner. Like hell he was going to listen to a word he tells him.

“And you will not stand unless I allow you to.” A quick arm movement from Mr. Hughes brings the cane across 43002612’s left cheek. In no way was he using all his strength, but it was more then hard enough to snap 43002612’s head to the side, make him stumble a bit and fall backwards. The pain is sharp and hot, radiating from the initial area of contact out across his cheekbone and jaw. Another stroke of the cane gets aimed at him, 43002612 blocks it from hitting his face with his bound arms. It’s harder then the last one, hard enough to draw blood. 43002612 bites down hard on the ball-gag.

“And you will not bite me. Or spit at me.” Two more equally hard strokes land across his upper arm and shoulder. 43002612 tries to squirm out of the way. His arms get grabbed roughly and pulled out of the way. “Look at me.” 43002612 squeezes his eyes close tighter.

“I said, look at me!” The bigger man’s hand slaps him across the cheek before grabbing his properties face. 43002612 opens his eyes almost automatically.

“That’s more like it, mutt.” His fingers dig into 43002612’s face. “Look at you. So young and stupid. You think you know pain, don’t you? But you don’t.” He presses his thumb into the welt forming on his Pet’s cheek. 43002612 writhes away from the unwanted touch.  “I’ll show you.” He leans in closer. “Not because I’m cruel. No. Because I’m going to make you better.” 43002612 lets out a noise most like a growl.

He gets up and swings the cane at the air a few times.

“You’re a Pet, and highly likely not very intelligent, so I’ll run why you’re being punished past you once again.” He circles 43002612 like a mighty bird of pray would a small, helpless mouse.

“Spitting at your Master is bad.” The cane comes down across 43002612’s naked thigh, twice across each. 43002612 lets out a muffled groan, pulling his legs up to his chest. Despite looking older then most of the handlers 43002612 has had, Mr. Hughes strokes had a far worse bite to them then anything the unwilling Pet had ever experienced. The handlers weren’t supposed to leave marks, this man was obviously planning to leave as many as possible.

“Biting your Master is very bad.” The next strokes come hard and fast across the entirety of 43002612’s back, alternating between lower and upper back. 43002612 doesn’t bother to count them, only tries to wriggle out of the way.

“Talking back to your Master is also very bad.” Mr. Hughes next attack shows no sign of actually going for one specific part of 43002612, striking any part of him that shows exposed and vulnerable skin. 43002612 attempts to move out of the reach of the cane strokes, trying to stand up. But Mr. Hughes makes short work or his futile attempt by kicking him in the chest.

“If you know what’s best for you, you’ll stay down, pathetic thing.” As another storm of sharp, fast blows rain down on 43002612, he can only curl up and try to cover his face the best he can with his cuffed wrists. The constant new sources of pain blossoming across 43002612’s legs, back and arms are like nothing he’s had to experience before. The pain is intense and dominant, replacing any clear thought 43002612 could have mustered. Tears stung in the corner or his eyes, threatening to role down his cheeks. 43002612 didn’t want to give the sick bastard the satisfaction of crying, but it was all just… so much!

Long after the pain had become way too much for the small unwilling Pet, Mr. Hughes stopped. He crouched down next to his Pet, wiping the blood off the cane on the corner of 43002612’s shorts.

43002612 is trembling hard, a couple of silent tears running down his cheeks as he groans and whimpers into his gag. Mr. Hughes gently lets his hand slip into 43002612’s curls, combing through them.

“Shhh… I know Pet. I know it hurts. Shhh…” He wipes the tears off his cheeks with his thumb. 43002612 glares at him, trying to keep the pain from showing on his face. “Oh don’t look at me like that, mutt. You had to be punished. You where being very bad.” 43002612 mumble into the ball-gag how much he hates his new Master, focusing on glaring harder rather then the intense pain occupying almost any part of him that hadn’t been covered. Mr. Hughes sighs.

“I think I know what you need. Some time alone to think about how bad you’ve been.” He on does the cuffs on 43002612’s wrists, moves his arms behind his back and puts them back on there. He drags 43002612 to the far wall, manhandling him into a kneeling position. 43002612 tries to move away, but feels to weak. And when his owner lifts his bound arms up behind him to attach them to a hook in the wall, he can do nothing but vocalise his discomfort by groaning loudly into the gag. The position strains his arms and shoulders.

“Now, don’t squirm about too much, or you’ll dislocate your shoulders.” Mr. Hughes laughs warmly, and strokes 43002612’s cheek. 43002612 tries to move away, but jerks his arms. The strain on his arms becomes worse, and he stops moving instantly, looking anywhere but his new owner.

“Now why don’t you have a long hard think about how the things you did were very, very bad. And if you behave when I come back, I might even untie you an let you have a rest. Maybe even something to drink or eat.” He smiles, ruffles 43002612’s hair almost affectionately, then leaves, switching the light off and locking the heavy iron door behind him.

43002612 shifts a little bit, trying to get more comfortable. With no success. The strain on his arms only seems to get worse. A few more silent tears slip across his cheeks, dropping onto the concrete floor in front of him. He can’t see the bloody welts covering his skin, but he can feel them more then well enough. He can even feel the blood running across his skin from some of them, can feel it pooling at the hem of his shorts.

43002612 stares off into the darkness. He has to get out of here, that much is for sure. 43002612 knows he’ll get out. He’s determined to do so. He won’t succumb to this sick bastards wills. He’ll find a way to slip away, and then he’ll run and he’ll run and he’ll never look back. He’s heard from older Pets at the facility, one’s which chose to become Pets, how hard life was out there. But 43002612 knows he could cope. He would manage. Because he’s determined and never gives up. And having a hard life is a small price to pay for freedom and being able to belong only to yourself.

43002612 squeezes his eyes shut and smiles. He won’t be stuck here long. This is only a temporary pitstop on his road to freedom. It won’t be long. Soon he’ll be free of people owning him, free of all the pain and punishment, free of these cuffs.

Soon, he’ll be free.

[dyscrasia-eucrasia]

<<Prev | Next>>

Part 28 (NSFW)

"Absolutely not," Elaine said, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back in her chair. 

"Why not!?" Demie said. He was standing on the threshold to her room, gripping the door frame so that he could lean his head in without stepping foot inside the room. "Marius has an Instagram, I can have one, too. It's not like I'm gonna go around telling the whole world where to find me." 

"How are you even going to use it?" Elaine asked. 

"I can borrow your computer while you're at work." 

"Absolutely not. Besides, you can't even post to Instagram unless you have a phone." 

"So, maybe it's time I get a phone, then." 

Elaine scoffed. "With what money? And we don't even have wifi, we have fucking satellite internet." 

"You can sell some of my dad's vinyls on eBay. And I'll only use it when we go into towns for shows." 

"No."

Demie let out a frustrated noise. He'd been a bit excited after talking to Angel about Instagram. He figured it was about time for him to learn how to use the internet, if he was going to be showing up in someone else's pictures. Maybe interacting with people through a screen would give him a chance to get more comfortable with people. It seemed to be working with Angel - they could talk for hours over the phone, and he felt safe in Angel's presence. 

"I can't have fucking anything!" He exclaimed, turning and slamming the side of his fist against the wood paneling of the hallways. 

"Don't you fucking punch my walls!" Elaine shouted after him as he stomped across the living room towards his room. 

"Fucking bitch," he grumbled as he stepped into his room and slammed the door behind him. Not that he was necessarily mad at her. She was right, after all - she worked two jobs just to keep the lights on and food in the fridge, and he knew that she spent most of her budget on food for him and the goats. She said she liked TV dinners and instant noodles, but he also knew how happy she got when she could afford to bring home an expensive steak. 

At least she wasn't arguing that he was irresponsible. Since the festival - which he assumed she believed he went to, primarily because he'd lied and said he'd let Angel keep any photos he would've taken - she had eased up a little on the protectiveness. He could tell that she still worried, but she seemed to be coming around to Angel, little by little. 

Though, he wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that the night of the festival, Marius had called and asked to talk to Elaine. She'd gone into her room and closed the door for their conversation, and when she came out she was in a better mood than Demie had seen in months. 

Speaking of phones…

The handset for the landline was in his room from the last time he'd called Angel. He'd called to celebrate that his pregnant goat had given birth, to a sweet grey kid with black socks. The goatling had been the impetus for him finally asking Elaine about getting Instagram - he'd taken some Polaroids, but had no way to share them with Angel. 

He picked up the phone and dialed Angel's number from memory. Angel picked up before the second ring. 

"Hey, what's up?" Angel asked. He was all bubbly and cheerful, and Demie couldn't help but smile a little. 

"Elaine said no to Instagram," Demie said. 

"Aaaaah no, that sucks," Angel replied. "Did she say why?" 

"She can't afford to get me a phone. And we don't have wireless internet." 

"Shit, that sucks," Angel said. "That's too bad, because those guys finally posted the pictures of you." 

"Yeah?" 

"Yeah, they posted the close-ups of your horns. They got a lot of likes, lots of people asking in the comments where they can buy horns like that," Angel said, then laughed. "There's this one pic that has your eyes in it, and it looks so intense and artistic. Maybe I should see if I can convince these guys to take some pictures of me." 

"Well, uh… the tall one seemed to like you a lot," Demie said. He wasn't really sure what he was saying, the words just sort of tumbled out of his mouth. "Maybe he could, like, be your boyfriend." 

He cringed at the words. Not so much at the idea of two guys dating - once again, he told himself that he wasn't homophobic - but more at the idea of Angel dating… well, anyone. Demie didn't have any real relationship experience, but he definitely felt that if Angel started dating someone, he'd see a lot less of him. Considering that Angel was only the second friend he'd ever had, he didn't really want to compete for his attention. 

"Who, Dylan?" Angel said with a laugh. "Oh, honey, no, Dylan is painfully straight." 

Demie felt like he'd been kicked in the sternum. The wind just all went out of his lungs. He wasn't really sure what he was feeling. He felt a little sick, but also oddly relieved, which made him feel even worse. What did he care that there was no chance Angel would date Dylan? Why did he want to be the only person Angel paid attention to? 

"So, what's up with you? How's the baby goat?" 

"Oh, um," Demie struggled to find his voice again. "He's fine. He's kind of needy, everytime I go outside he screams at me until I pick him up and carry him around." 

"Awwwww. Hey, could I come see him sometime? I would die to pick up a baby goat." 

"Um�� yeah. Yeah, sure." 

"Great! I'm doing a Burlesque show at a bar in town on Wednesday, but I could drive out to your place on Thursday afternoon?" 

"Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, I'm always here." Demie's face went hot at the thought of seeing Angel again. He told himself to calm down, that it was normal for friends to visit. 

But he'd never had friends come visit. That this would be Angel's third time driving all the way out to Billy Brook meant that he actually enjoyed spending time with Demie. 

"Great! You can cook for me again, I can't stop thinking about those tomato things you made last time." 

"Y-yeah. Okay." Demie squirmed, suddenly feeling a little uncomfortable as he sat on the bed. 

"Who taught you how to cook, by the way?" 

"M-my grandma." 

"Oh yeah, I could tell. There's just something about grandparents' recipes, like there's all those generations of culture and family and love and stuff… Whenever we visited my grandparents, my grandma would spend all day cooking and--" 

Demie's head was swimming, and he was hardly paying attention to what Angel was saying. He wondered why he was light-headed all of a sudden, when he glanced down at his lap. His dick had slid out of its sheath and was half-hard. 

"Oh, fuck--" He murmured. 

"Hello?" Angel said. "You okay over there?" 

"Yeah-- yeah, I um, I gotta go." 

"Oh. Okay. We're still on for Thursday, right?" 

"Yeah. Yeah, sure. Bye." 

"Byeee--" Angel said, but Demie hung up the phone before Angel could finish the word. 

He flopped down onto his back, breathing heavily. He'd gotten random boners before, but never while talking to a guy. Not like he had a lot of experience talking to guys, outside of his cousins. 

He exhaled through his nose, taking hold of his dick. He closed his eyes and started rubbing himself. It was almost mechanical. He was confused. He was turned on, but couldn't figure out why. This had been happening more and more often. He wondered if this was a part of reaching adulthood for satyrs. After all, myth said his people were extremely sexually active. His parents had both passed away when he was young, without giving him the birds and the bees talk, and Marius had always seemed uncomfortable with talking about sex. So he didn't really have any frame of reference. 

He was in the middle of stroking himself when the door to his room opened. 

"Hey, we need to have a talk about you using the phone all the ti-- JESUS FUCK!" Elaine exclaimed, suddenly drawing back out of the doorway. 

"GODS!" Demie shouted, sitting up and dragging a sheet over his dick. "FUCKING KNOCK!" 

"STOP CALLING YOUR BUTT BUDDY EVERY FUCKING DAY, YOU'RE RACKING UP THE PHONE BILL!" Elaine shouted, her voice getting further away as she was clearly headed back towards her room. 

Demie's breath came out as loud snorts. He had two thoughts in his head: first, that he was still hard despite the interruption; and second, that he had no intention of reducing his calls to Angel, so he probably had to find some way to pay Elaine back for the phone bill.

[revengeisalwaysanoption]

Fic: Io non ci credo, alle giraffe (FINAL CHAPTER)

So, you can find this chapter on AO3 as well (together with the sappiest epilogue you could ever imagine) and I do hope it lives up to your expectations. It mostly did, to mine. I agonized over writing this fic, but I nearly cried now that it’s over.

This wasn't quite what he had in mind, when he had tried to picture the afterlife. The few times he did that, whilst attending the funerals of some old relative, Martino had conjured up a field of barley. An eternal sunset. A light breeze.

Loved ones, lost too early, ready to show him the ropes and teach him how to haunt his friends for the rest of their lives.

"Boohoo! Poor Marti wanted a welcoming committee in a lovely bucolic setting…" said a grating voice in a harsh and judgemental tone.

Where did it come from? Who was speaking? There was nothing around him. No one.

Only darkness.

"Instead of you've got me. This." The stranger continued. "Because we've got to be predictable, don't we? Unimaginative. But do you know what? Screw you, man. I can do better."

Then he heard a loud, snapping sound and had to shield his eyes from a bright blinding light.

"Are you still there?" Marti asked to his unknown companion.

They didn't sound like a particularly pleasant person, but… Anyone, even Marco - Emma's brutish brother - would do...

'Beggars can't be choosers' as his dad used to say.

"Unbelievable!! You're still quoting him. As if that man ever said anything worth repeating…"

Uhh, this guy sure had some serious beef with his father… and could read his thoughts, apparently? No wonder why the stranger was so grumpy, given that he had been bombarded by flashes of Marti kissing Nico for the last… day?

Week? It was hard to keep track of time when they only thing that existed was you, and your immense loneliness.

"No!! That's not my division, you've got somebody else covering that. I'm in charge of rage, disdain, frustration, resent and pettiness. Yeah, yeah. I do most of the work around here." The more Marti listened to him talking, the less sense he made.

Where were they? Who was he? Where was he hiding?

"I'm not hiding. I'm right behind you."

What? How was that possible? He must have been joking, because Marti would have noticed if… Suddenly, he felt a hand on his shoulder. A hand that was too familiar in weight and texture. He turned, finally, to face himself.

He looked battered, exhausted, dishevelled. His eyes were red, and teary. His shoulders hunched, as though he had been carrying the weight of the word for quite some time. Wow. It was a lot to take in. Did he really-

"Let me stop you there. Yes, this is how you sound to other people and how they see you. They are used to it, by the way, so they don't find it as unpleasant as you do. Next? Are you alive? Yes? No? How should I know, when I am literally something you made up?"

So, basically, Martino could only hope that he wasn't stuck here, with the worst of himself, forever.

"The worst, huh? Wait until fear, jealousy and paranoia show up... Not to mention the good old self-preservation instinct, aka what you usually refer to as 'common sense', who's gonna bore y-"

"Okay, okay. I get it. No need to get so defensive." Damn, someone here was a bit too sensitive to criticism!

Okay, alright. Perhaps this guy wasn't the bottom of the barrel, maybe some people even found his fiery disposition and charming, but…. it couldn't be all that his friends - and Nico; his sweet gentle dorky Nico -  saw in Martino.

He had plenty of good, in him… so where was it?

"Ooh! That's the attitude you need to get out of here… Know your worth! Fight for it!" Anger goaded him on, suddenly mellowing out and becoming a lot more amiable.

"Lend an ear to your heart, be true to yourself…" Martino rebuked, not quite as sarcastic as he would have been a couple of days before.

"... and when you do, you'll hold the key to open all doors, yeah. Starting from that one" his grumpy companion said, pointing at the portal that just appeared out of nowhere.

"Don't. Save it. We are nowhere, therefore…" Marti shushed him, rolling his eyes and smiling. It was kind of endearing to realise how predictable he could be. Comforting.

"Stop stalling and go through that damn door. Someone's waiting for you."

Who? Could it be… ? Well there was only one way to find out.

As he stepped over the threshold, everything changed.

He could have sworn that the air was filled with the smell of his mother's freshly baked cinnamon rolls, which she hadn't been making for nearly a decade. The sun shine brightly in a cloudless blue sky, but it didn't burn skin. A pleasant warmth was spreading through him, while Marti relieved the bone crushing hugs, the forehead kisses, the most gentle touch upon his own lips and all those casual loving gestures he had taken for granted for far too long.

He knew where he was. The Emerald Fields, and idyllic place on the outskirts of Eterna. A city 'where all wishes come true', according to legends. His father - merchant for a living, myth-buster for 'the greater good, the improvement of society as a whole' - had proved them to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors… Quite ironic that a man so obsessed with honesty and transparency had the guts to… No. Forget it.

It was unacceptable: he wouldn't any unresolved issues he had with his dad spoil this memory.

Of the last time it truly felt invincible, invaluable. Unique, in all his untapped potential. Carefree.

He didn't mind being alone, here… not that he was. Obviously, he wasn't. Deer and and fawns had materialise beside him, stubbornly nudging Martino towards the lake.

Playfully splashing water with his feet, with a flower crown in his auburn hair, sat the person who had been waiting for him. Not Niccolò, unfortunately. Or Gio.

"I suppose you'll have to settle for me." He said, silently asking Marti to sit next to him with an eloquent look. Welcoming, rather than threatening.

There was an aura of 'now tell me all about your troubles, my friend… share the weight with me and maybe they won't seem half as bad..' surrounding him, which normally Martino would've labelled as patronising - unless it came from Giovanni. Normally.

FlowerBoy tapped the plank on his right, for emphasis, thanking Marti when you finally took a seat on the creek.

"I'm glad you two parted on good terms. He got us through some awful times, you know? You call him 'anger', but he is 'pride'. Which, in itself, is not so bad. Life has hardened him, made him constantly ready for a fight, but… what you see as a flaw, indeed, is one of your biggest strengths. Loyalty. Perseverance. Spite… I can't take the credit for those - especially the latter, which has repeatedly spurred you into action. It comes from loving yourself, sure, but with a slight disdain for others and their shitty opinions."

Woah. Martino hadn't being ready for the lecture on his own negative feelings from… His hippie self?

"You seem nicer, though." Clean-shaven, soft-spoken, well-rested and well-dressed.

A stark contrast from the guy he had met first.

"I generally am. Enough to make people stay, most of the time. Draw them in, however? Avoiding to wax lyrical on how the universe now revolves around them, and keeping a shred of dignity as if I wouldn't gladly have them on every available surface?" Huh? Were they still talking about his family and friends?

"Sorry, I got a bit carried away. The most recent developments with Ni… That's all very new to me. Never had I experienced something so intense. It's exciting and scary. Fascinating and confusing. Anyway, the point is: I'm cheesy. Sappy. Shamelessly so. He gives us an edge, turning mushiness into good-natured banter."

An interesting take, undoubtedly, but… kind of pointless? It did offer a new perspective on parts of himself he hadn't been overly fond of, still… In the grand scheme of things, what was the purpose of these talks? Where was the conflict, and the revelation that came with it?

"Not every tale needs to feature a dragon's slayer, or a fearless knight battling orcs. Lessons can be learnt without suffering."

All he needed to do was listen, basically? Could it be that easy? Wasn't it such a cop out?

"Easy, you say. And yet you haven't been able to achieve such an easy task in all these years. You refuse to. Shut up. You weren't talking? Well, you were thinking. Given them - dreaded common sense, fear and self-pity - too much attention."

Empty your mind. Find the sound that resonates within your soul. Amplify it. That's your spark.

Martino had never progressed past that stage, at the Academy, much to the Mentors' bafflement. He'd supposed they couldn't believe what they were seeing… that an individual with no magic at all co-

"SHUT UP!!"

Right. Right. No more thoughts. Hear the waves sloshing against the creek? The breeze blowing through the grass? The pitter-patter of deer hooves? Great. Cancel them out. Your breath is deafening, now, isn't it? It's all you can hear, and that's not particularly interesting…

"Don't give up, Marti please." Whose voice was it?  His mom's?

"Come on, man. Wake up." Gio's?

"Going from sleep deprived to lethargic? Really? Since when are you the 'go big or go home' kind of guy?" Eva's?

"Are you trying to impress someone, hun? You don't need to. One would think you hung the stars and moon from the way he looks at you…" Filo's?

"Marti, you can't go without seeing Luca's latest master-" Oh, how he had missed Elia's laughter. "masterpiece, yeah, that you've inspired."

"Don't fret. It doesn't matter how long it takes, but come back to me when it's over, okay? I'll be waiting. I'll always be waiting." Nico's. 

Wait. How could that be possible. Shouldn't he… No, no, no. Marti, no. Don't get lost, don't let logical reasoning lure you in. Take care of that later, okay? Okay.

Silence, please… There. You have it. The complete absence of s-

"LET ME OUT!!" A young boy yelled, thumping repeatedly from under the thick ice layer it was now covering the lake.

Was it some kind of ruse, a deceit it was supposed to ignore to reach a higher level of consciousness?

"HELP ME!!!" Thud. Thud. Thud. "PLEASE!!!" Thud. Thud. Thud.

Screw it. Too bad if he wasn't supposed to intervene: he was going to, regardless of the consequences.

Deprived of any tool that could help him with the rescue, it soon became clear that's the only way he could smash the ice was by jumping on it. And once he inevitably plunged into the freezing water, it would be just a matter of minutes before hypothermia kicked in and killed them both.

It didn't matter.

"HOLD ON!!!" Jump. Jump. Jump. "I'M GONNA GET YOU HOME. GONNA GET BOTH OF US HOME!!! "Jump. Jump. Jump. "ALIVE!!!"

Crack. He did it!

Seize the kid and get out. Survive.

"Thanks. I'm sorry I cursed you." The boy said, creating a bubble around them. "I… I didn't mean… It backfired… I…"

"... didn’t want to be alone anymore. You aren’t, you understand? I’m the one who’s sorry. You just wanted to be heard. Acknowledged. Remembered.” Martino couldn't recall the last time I took in the world around him with wonder, grateful to be alive and getting to see a rainbow. The first snow. The low tide. Shooting stars. The dancing curtains. Sunrises and sunsets. Niccolò.

"You really like him, don't you? Me too… He's cool… and he was the first one who saw me. Saw all of us, really… and still chose to stay."

Enough with the chit chat. The promises he'd only made, all that he had never allowed himself to be… No more words were needed to reconcile.

Much better to embrace them. Swim back to the surface. Rise.

********************************** Messy black curls. Full, red, pouty lips. Insanely long lashes. Lithe fingers, adorned with huge rings. More beautiful than Martino ever recalled. “You look like shit.” He mumbled, lazily stroking his hair.  “And you’re heavy. Doze off somewhere else, please.” “Marti?” Oi! He had no business breaking his heart with that note of desperation in his voice. Or with the tears in his eyes. He shouldn’t be allowed to cry. Not on his watch.

“Marti, Marti, Marti…”  He didn’t seem able to say or do anything else, for a while. Only kiss him, and repeat his name like a mantra. Eventually, he calmed down. “Look who’s talking, by the way.” Niccolò retorted, rolling his eyes. “I don’t accept criticism from ‘Mr. Death-Warmed-Over’, sorry.” “And from whom would you accept it, huh? Your husband?” Marti teased, hoping he wasn’t being too cheeky. “Mh. Maybe. I wouldn’t say yes to a proposal that came from a bedside, when he’s still hazy from a long sleep and doesn’t quite know what he’s saying.” Niccolò answered, kissing his knuckles reverently. “I do know…” Martino huffed, taking comfort in the fact that Nico hadn’t utterly turned him down. “... nonetheless, you deserve a better proposal. I get it. And you’ll have it. I’ll ride a giraffe, if that’s what is required for you to say yes, okay?” “Okay. I’ll be waiting for it, then.” He leaned down, resting his forehead against Martino’s. “Choose my wedding dress, in the meantime. Unless you’d want me to wear a suit.” “You could wear a gunny sack and I wouldn’t dream to complain, Ni.” “What if I showed up naked, then?” Niccolò moved to the side, brushing his lips against his ear and neck. “Well, it’s not a sight I’m really so willing to share with everyone out there, but I suppose that if that’s what makes you happy…” “Forget it, then. We should be both happy on that day. We’ll be.” And they were. Living fully - though not always happily  - ever after.

[forasecondtherewedwon]

Def 34

Thanks for the prompt, Anons! (And special thanks, Anon #2. I appreciate that so, so much.)

LateralPairing: Peter Parker x Michelle Jones (Spideychelle)Rating: TWord count: 1105

34. “You might not like me, but you definitely want me.”

Peter made the football team. Of course he did. The onlything Michelle figured the coach hadn’tbeen sure about was which position Peter should be given. Where do you put thekid who can run suicide drills indefinitely, throw a ball with a perfect spiralthe full length of the field, take a hit from a guy twice his size withoutmoving an inch, and weave with more agility than any player the team has everhad? Michelle assumed the coach had worked that question out sometime betweenhis days of drooling over the new recruit’s hustle and his nights ofchampionship dreams, visions of shiny gold trophies dancing in his head. Thewhole nine.

After years of honing her observation skills, Michelle wasfrustrated to find Peter Parker so unpredictable. When people quit marching band,usually it was to devote more time to the robotics lab or the chess club, notso they could shrug off the nerd mantle and become the overnight star of thefootball team. It was unprecedented.

She saw him a lot, almost as much as ever. Not on purpose;Michelle had always taken a certain quiet delight in perching on the bleachersand sketching the team’s top-shelf assholes, so she was often around duringpractices. There was a niche, she felt, in pencil drawings of smack-talkingbigots in homoerotic tussles.

Luckily―not that she had any kind of emotional investment inhis moral status―Peter had never adopted his new bros’ prejudices. But thatdidn’t mean he hadn’t changed. He took up more space. It wasn’t a physicaldifference (he was too smart to go down the junk-shrivelling steroids route ofsome of the seniors, twitchy fingers crossed for a benevolent scout and acollege scholarship), it was his ego. In that he’d apparently decided he hadone. Quiet Peter Parker, marching band Peter Parker, Penis Parker, was newly known (by Michelle, who observed) toaccomplish such spectacular feats as using his prodigy brain forguffaw-provoking comebacks in the cafeteria and―gasp―talking to girls.

Michelle couldn’t confirm the plural, but she felt safeassuming it. For some reason, she wasn’t very keen to catch him flirting orstaring at a classmate’s ass. The only girl she’d witnessed Peter communicatingwith was her. And she didn’t say anything back.

When he approached her, she ignored him. Aggressively. Hisfootball cleats would come clicking up the bleachers during a water break and, becauseof her self-determined imperative to block him out, she’d look nowhere but atthe sketchpad in her lap. Sometimes, it took ages before Peter would stoptormenting her with attempted small talk; her reference material (the playerson the field) grew less fresh in her mind. In those moments, feeling his softbrown eyes on her and unable to meet them, Michelle found that she couldn’teven fill her pages with flowers―a subject she’d always felt confident drawingfrom memory. Her pen or pencil would only trace meandering curlicues. Eventually,he’d go back to practice.

This new Peter didn’t make sense to her, nor did the way herheart surged when he was close by. Until she got a feel for him from adistance, Michelle wasn’t going to be any more inviting. It wasn’t like they’dbeen friends before anyway.

As football season went on, with her wearing a raincoat topractices just in case the sky opened and she needed to shove her sketchpadinside, things became better between them. But that was Michelle’s headtalking. To a more sensitive part of herself, things were much worse.

He put himself in her way―maybe holding a door for her,maybe next in line at the water bottle refilling station when she turnedaround―but he wouldn’t speak to her and she wouldn’t look at him any higherthan his chest. Michelle had a feeling Peter was doing it on purpose. Being sosolidly present that she couldn’t pretend not to see him, and then waiting forher to initiate a conversation. By the end of October, she almost did, but hewalked away as her lips parted.

Michelle was tense. She couldn’t sleep, although her bed wasextra cozy now that she’d yanked her winter comforter out of the closet.

She didn’t realize it was affecting Peter too, their…whatever it was, until she was back on the bleachers, sketching and freezingher ass off thanks to New York’s first cold snap, and heard the coach yell hisname. “Damn good catch, Parker,” “That’s it, that’s it, Peter”―those were shouts Michelle had heard oftenenough, but this one wasn’t praise. Her head snapped up. Peter was slouching tothe sidelines, fingers hooked through the faceguard of his helmet as he let itslap against his thigh. He saw her looking down at him and she knew there was amoment coming that she couldn’t escape.

Peter climbed the steps, eyes lowered, and Michelle made aquick sketch in her mind, noting the sweaty curls of his hair, the tension inhis hands. It was a very windy day―the pages of her book rippling―and she couldhardly breathe.

He reached her, putting on a confident stance.

“You might not like me,” Peter announced, “but youdefinitely want me.”

Her insides compressed in a sensation that felt like fury,but then Michelle considered what he’d said. Peter thought she didn’t like him.Well, duh, of course she didn’t. Except… She met his gaze and let it catch thistime, let it hold. As wide as his eyes were, he hadn’t given any of that spaceto arrogance; staring into them was a completely separate experience fromhearing his voice. There was vulnerability in his face and nothing else.

Peter wasn’t teasing her, though he’d nailed that brand ofjock-type phrase. He desperately, Michelle saw, wanted her to want him. Want him, not the role he’d been learningsince making the football team. She’d been uncharacteristically stupid,observing his failure to fit in with this group in a thousand details and notcomprehending his loneliness.

Squinting one eye shut as the ubiquitous cloud cover slid momentarilyclear of the sun, Michelle cut their locked gaze in half.

“I like you fine, Peter,” she told him, open eye watering.

The next day, she was early to Biology and glanced up to seePeter stalled at the classroom’s threshold, one of the football guys loudly butjokingly hassling him about quitting the team. Their eyes met as Peter turnedaway from his former teammate and headed to his seat. He smiled at her.

For the rest of the period, graphite lilies bloomed in Michelle’sfootnotes.

[sanderssidesfanfiction]

We’ll Carry On - Chapter Thirty Four

We’ll Carry On Tag

General Content Warnings: Sympathetic Deceit Sanders, Substance Abuse, Abandonment, Minor Character Death, Transphobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Dissociation, Bullying, Homophobia

March 15th, 2017

Logan was having problems. Not with his new name, although it was frustrating him that he couldn’t figure out a good middle name that he liked after finding his first name was a snap. No, he was having problems because he realized he still liked guys.

He wasn’t pretending to like them when he thought he was a girl, but now that he knew he was a guy, that attraction was still there and he wasn’t feeling any attraction to any of the girls at his school. He wasn’t sure how his parents felt about transgender people, but he knew they definitely didn’t like gay people.

It was hard, hiding that he was trans and gay. He just hoped one day he’d be around people who didn’t mind either of those things. And, if he was feeling bold, he hoped there was someone out there who would be romantically interested in him despite being trans.

September 23rd, 2019

Logan walked into Jack’s house with a grin. “Thank you for letting me in, Mister President.”

“It’s my pleasure, Mister Vice President,” Jack said with a laugh, closing the door. The two practically ran up to Jack’s room to hang out and get homework out of the way so they could talk about whatever they wanted. “You know my parents don’t mind us talking about more ‘mature’ things around them, right? We don’t have to hide in my room to hang out and talk about things.”

“Neither do mine, now,” Logan said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m comfortable doing it.”

“All right, fair point,” Jack conceded, walking into his room and sitting on the lower bunk of his bed, while Logan took Jack’s desk chair as they both pulled out homework.

They worked through Calculus, and History, and Logan finished his English while Jack struggled with his Physics homework. When Logan finished the required reading of the night and Jack was still struggling, Logan came over and sat next to him on the bed, ignoring the flutter in his stomach as he did so. “Here, let me help,” Logan said. “You said yourself that you need to visualize the circuit if you ever want to finish this fast, so I can sketch out the circuit for you here and you can do it on the others.”

Jack wordlessly passed over his homework and pencil and Logan made a small drawing of the circuit in the margins. “There you go,” Logan said, passing it back.

“Thanks, man,” Jack said with a grin.

“It’s not a problem,” Logan shrugged off.

“No, really, Lo. Thank you,” Jack insisted.

Logan smiled even as his heart hammered in his chest. He scratched the back of his neck. “Anytime, Jack.”

Jack finished his physics homework quickly after that and the two clambered into the top bunk of Jack’s bed. When Logan was staying with Jack, he always took the bottom bunk to sleep in. But when they were just hanging out, they’d both regularly squeeze themselves into the top bunk. It was a tight fit, but neither of them minded.

Some time passed, and Jack and Logan were still lying in Jack’s bed, laughing at nothing in particular. Jack was scrolling Tumblr, and Logan was staring up at Jack’s ceiling. His stomach fluttered uncomfortably when he looked at Jack and he didn’t fully understand why. Jack was his best friend, and even if Logan developed feelings for Jack, he didn’t want to mess up what they had.

When Jack touched Logan’s wrist lightly, it felt like electricity shot through Logan’s veins. He looked over at Jack, and Jack offered him a grin. “You’ve been stuck in your head all afternoon,” he teased lightly. “And I know you’re not stressing about homework because we finished it all.”

Logan shrugged and said, “You know how it is. Tests coming up, peers being...well, however they choose to be that day, and with the new school year...it’s all a lot to take in.” Jack chuckled and Logan felt his ears get hot. “Something funny?” he asked, voice cracking in the middle of the question.

“Sometimes...you can be so oblivious,” Jack said. “Not in a bad way, but just...you see, but do not observe.”

Logan propped himself up on one arm, tilting his body towards Jack’s. “What don’t I observe, Sherlock?”

Jack’s hand reached out to touch Logan’s free wrist, and it lingered on his pulse point. “My romantic advances,” Jack said softly.

“Wait. You...you like...boys?” Logan asked, brain stuttering to a halt.

“Boys, meh. Men? Hell yes,” Jack said, voice growing deep and somewhat sultry.

Logan’s eyes flickered over Jack. His tousled brown hair, the way his muscles were growing from doing lacrosse at school, the cocky grin he wore, the lips he had been dreaming about kissing for months. He moved forward in an instant, lips colliding with Jack’s until not only sparks, but an entire forest fire grew between them. Logan didn’t have much experience kissing anyone, let alone his best friend, but Jack. Jack knew how to kiss.

His movements were sure, mouth moving in time with Logan’s. Jack had one hand at the nape of Logan’s neck and Logan had a hand on Jack’s hip. Logan could feel the beginning of stubble on Jack’s upper lip, and he felt a small thrill go through him. This was real, this was happening. Jack liked him. He couldn’t believe it.

When they pulled apart, Logan was panting a little and Jack laughed. “Did you forget to breathe?!” he asked.

“For the first ten seconds, maybe,” Logan said. “Um. Does this mean we’re boyfriends?”

“Do you...want to be boyfriends?” Jack asked, running his hand down Logan’s side.

“Yes,” Logan breathed. “Yes, I would love to be your boyfriend.”

Jack grinned. “Then we’re boyfriends,” he said calmly. Firmly. No room for argument. “But seriously. How did you not know I was into men? I’m the president of the GSA, Lo! You’re my vice!”

“I assumed that you were...not an ally, but maybe bisexual, with more of an interest in girls,” Logan said with a shrug. “After all, a lot of the girls at school fawn over you, especially when you’re practicing lacrosse. And you seem to enjoy their attention.”

“Sure, I like attention, and yeah, girls are cute sometimes, but I prefer guys, Logan,” Jack said. “Why do you think I joined lacrosse? I get to have hot guys surround me every day for an hour after school!”

Logan barked out a laugh. “Fair enough, I suppose. So are you bi? Or pan?”

Jack considered. “Pansexual, I guess,” he said. “Though saying I’m bi is easier to understand for most people, so I generally use that.”

“Cool,” Logan said. “I’m gay, I think, but nonbinary people are cool, too. Occasionally feminine-aligned nonbinary people might catch my eye, but for the most part it’s guys and more...not feminine enbies.”

Jack shrugged. “You could be bi, too. Or you could just say you’re gay. And of course, the label queer is always open for you to use.”

“I’ll probably use queer, honestly,” Logan said with a shrug. “It’s easier for me and everyone else.”

A comfortable silence fell over them. Jack looked at Logan and kissed his nose. “Do your dads know you’re queer?”

Logan paused. “If they didn’t, they’re gonna find out when I get back home and tell Roman that he was right, apparently.”

“About me being your boyfriend?” Jack asked with a grin.

“He knew I liked you before I knew I liked you,” Logan said. “He’s probably going to ask when the wedding is.”

“Tell him it’s after we graduate college, provided we’re still together then,” Jack said.

Logan glanced at him. “You serious?”

“Yeah, man. If we can date for six years and not want to break up by the end of it I’d love to marry you,” Jack said with a shrug. “I mean, I assume I would. That’s how that sort of thing generally works, from what I’m told.”

“As a concept, though, marrying someone feels kinda...hazy,” Logan said.

“Yeah, exactly,” Jack said. “Right now, I’m just happy to have you as my boyfriend.”

Logan could feel his cheeks start burning like a wildfire, and Jack grinned, kissing him on the lips, briefly. “Should we get something to drink and tell my parents the good news?”

As they got down off the top bunk, insecurity flared up in the back of Logan’s mind. “Are you sure they’ll approve?”

“They already see you as a son, Lo,” Jack reassured. “They might make jokes about you becoming a son-in-law, but that’s the worst they’ll do. They’ll love to hear that I decided to do something about my pining.”

Logan laughed a little and let himself be led downstairs into the kitchen. When they got there, Misses Harkness was already pouring two glasses of lemonade. One look at the both of them and she grinned. “Logan, honey, your hair’s a little mussed up, and you have a little bit of stuff on your lower lip. If you don’t want the world to know you made out with my son a few minutes ago, you might want to fix that.”

Logan turned deep red and fixed his hair the best he could without a mirror and wiped the bottom of his lip with his thumb. Jack groaned. “Mom,” he said. “You’re gonna make him regret agreeing to be my boyfriend!”

“Jack, if I can stand you, with all your flirting at everyone, your dorky references to shows that I’ve never seen, and your passion for theatre without any desire to actually do something about it, such as trying out for the play or becoming the head sound tech, then I’m pretty sure I can stand your mom teasing me a little,” Logan informed him quickly.

“Well, if I can stand you, with all your obliviousness to anything romantic being shoved your way, your Doctor Who jokes which never ever stop, and your overall emotional threshold being similar to that of a small child before you get overwhelmed and can’t regulate your responses, then I’m pretty sure I can stand anything you and your family will try to throw at me,” Jack responded smugly.

Logan’s jaw dropped open. “Are you seriously trying to outdo me right now?”

Jack shrugged with a grin, accepting lemonade from his mom. “Maybe so,” he said.

Logan huffed and took his offered lemonade, taking a sip before he responded. “This is a battle you’ll lose, Jack Matthew Harkness, don’t test me.”

“Oh, you used my full name, I’m quaking in my boots!” Jack exclaimed, making an exaggerated terrified face.

Logan rolled his eyes and sipped at his lemonade. “You’re still being an a-hole, Jack, and I stand by that sentiment.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s one of the reasons why you like me,” Jack said with a grin.

“If you two are going to continue to flirt, please do it outside the kitchen, I actually need to start making dinner soon,” Misses Harkness said, shooing them away.

“Come to think of it, your folks are probably gonna pick you up soon,” Jack said, sounding a little disappointed.

“Well, I can grab my things and we can sit on your porch drinking lemonade until it’s time for me to go,” Logan offered.

Jack pointed at him with a grin. “You see, this is why I like you, Lo. You’re always trying to make the best out of any situation.”

Logan turned pink and scurried upstairs to get his things before coming back down and letting Jack lead them both out to the porch. They sat on the top step and took sips of their lemonade, just enjoying the silence between them. “So, I’m assuming we’re exclusive,” Logan said.

“Yeah, we’re both monogamous, so we’d be exclusive,” Jack agreed. “I don’t want to share you.”

“Nor I, you,” Logan said, sipping at his lemonade. “Although, if you’re worried about being out at school, and you want to continue letting girls flirt with you, I understand—”

“Hey, Lo, no,” Jack said, draping an arm around Logan’s shoulders. “I don’t care what other people think of me. You go to school every day risking someone getting mad at you, just because you take testosterone and use he and him. Compared to you, I don’t have nearly as big a chance of people insulting me. And if they get offended that I’m dating you, well, it’s their problem. I don’t want us to be a secret if it doesn’t have to be. I want people to know that I love you, and if they have a problem they can come to me and I’ll show them what bigots get when they try to insult either of us.”

Logan smiled softly. “A knuckle sandwich?”

“A knuckle sandwich,” Jack confirmed. “And maybe more, depending on how much they insult you.”

“You don’t have to fight on my account, Jack,” Logan said.

“Maybe not, but I want to,” Jack said. “I want people to know that if they mess with you they’re messing with me.”

Logan smiled and kissed Jack softly, which Jack returned with a little laugh into Logan’s mouth. A moment later they were interrupted by a loud cheer and an, “I knew it!” coming from the driveway.

They jumped apart and Logan turned toward the offender with a glare. “Shut up, Roman! We only started dating today!”

“I knew it! I knew you two would start dating eventually!” Roman crowed. “Come on, Ami’s back home making dinner and I’m sure Dad will want to hear all about your new boyfriend!”

Logan sighed and turned to Jack. “Looks like I have to go.”

“I gathered,” Jack said, giving him a quick peck on the lips and taking his lemonade. “Go on, I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”

“See you tomorrow,” Logan said with a smile on his face.

When he got in the car along with Roman, Dad was sitting there, smiling at him. “What?” Logan asked.

“I just figured...it’s about time that you and Jack got together. Everyone knew you two were pining except for the two of you,” Dad said.

Logan leaned back in his chair and groaned. “Can we please talk about something else?”

“Okay,” Dad said. “Do I need to tell you and Roman about safe sex practices?”

“No!” Logan and Roman exclaimed at once.

Dad laughed the whole way home.

[acidwaste]

hey so it seems i’ve forgot to do a l o t of tag memes, and i’m lucky i drafted a big bunch of them! lots of questions overlapped so i did my best to answer in different ways, sorry for the lateness! also @ the people that tagged me here, i wouldn't hesitate to kill for you

@natcaptor / @gayspaced

name: leon or lionel!

nicknames: literally the only nickname I’ve been referred to is “big gay” and like. word!

gender: im pretty sure im a guy, i have been kinda 🤔🤔🤔 abt my gender identity since around november-ish though

star sign: sagittarius!

height: 6’1! i’m told that I’m tall but my uncle is 6’7 so...

time: 3:36pm rn! ive been watching video essays and binging music all afternoon

birthday: december 9th!

favourite bands: animal collective, beach house, camp cope, car seat headrest, death grips, fleet foxes, florence + the machine, gang of youths, glass animals, gorillaz, hop along, iceage, idles, kero kero bonito, mgmt, miike snow, modest mouse, run the jewels, superorganism, the avalanches, the cat empire, the go! team, the mountain goats, the wombats, xiu xiu

favourite solo artists: alex lahey, anderson .paak, ariana grande, billie eilish, bjork, cashmere cat, charli xcx, courtney barnett, cupcakke, d.r.a.m, eric taxxon, frank ocean, gfoty, hatchie, janelle monae, jeff rosenstock, joanna newsom, jorja smith, jpegmafia, kacey musgraves, kali uchis, kendrick lamar, khalid, kimbra, lorde, mac demarco, madeon, mick jenkins, mitski, oneohtrix point never, perfume genius, ravyn lenae, rina sawayama, serpentwithfeet, sophie, st. vincent, sza, vince staples

song stuck in my head: caramelo duro | miguel // kali uchis! its a bop, miguel is one of the few singers that can convincingly make sex jams

last movie i watched: deadpool 2! it was even better than the first, which is a feat in itself ngl

when did i create my blog: december 2016??? i only started using it properly in february last year tho

last thing i googled: “im in my mums car broom broom.” dont @ me

do i have any other blogs: yeah, plenty actually!! i have blogs for aesthetic (@moltenstar), general inspo (@wverns), flight rising (@szarising, kinda inactive?), and overwatch (@blackhardts) tbh the vast majority of my ‘sideblogs’ are just saved urls H

do i get asks: when i say stupid shit like “rung has the ass of a dilf but the dick of a cockroach”

why i chose my url: that one panel where kobd have a vacation at the acid wastes because fuck its finally canon babey!

following: 1,767, which is kinda horrifying!!

followers: 890?? somehow??? thats almost One Whole Thousand and i don't even make content

average hours of sleep: around 6 or 7!! n e v e r more though

lucky number: 43 and 64!!

instruments: i'm too poor to afford music lessons or instruments jsbddsjknfs

what am i wearing: a grey shirt and nothing on my bottom half so my [redacted] is hanging tf out, i should put on some damn clothes

dream job:  oooo uhhh, i’m studying to get an education degree rn because i’d love to teach children (around grade 3-4s preferably because i'm too jittery to handle anyone younger and older kids probs won't listen to me as much as i lack plenty of assertiveness), but!! i’d honestly love to be a musician, one of those underground ones that get lots of critical acclaim

dream trip: one day i wanna gather up some friends and just go on a road trip! idm where we go to, as long as we just have fun and just! adventure!

favourite foods: rare steak, mashed potatoes, eggs, and energy shakes made with like. fruit / cheese / yoghurt / oats / chia seeds ! protein is a large part of my diet

nationality: new zealand, but living in australia

favourite song right now: best part | daniel caesar // h.e.r - gosh i need to re-listen to daniel’s album again, i don’t remember this beautiful song being there and that’s a crime

@damndesi / @novarebel / @luciform-philogynist

APPEARANCE - I am 5'7 or taller - I wear glasses - I have at least one tattoo (but I am getting a tā moko in December, I believe) - I have at least one piercing (planning to get a nose ring, like a bull!) - I have blonde hair - I have brown eyes - I have short hair - My abs are at least somewhat defined (b a r e l y) - I have or had braces

PERSONALITY - I love meeting new people - People tell me I am funny - Helping others with their problems is a big priority of mine - I enjoy physical challenges - I enjoy mental challenges - I am playfully rude to people I know - I started saying something ironically and now I can’t stop saying it - There is something I would change about my personality

ABILITY - I can sing well - I can play an instrument - I can do over 30 pushups without stopping (barely) - I am a fast runner - I can draw well - I have a good memory - I am good at doing math in my head - I can hold my breath underwater for over a minute - I have beaten at least 2 people arm wrestling - I can make at least 3 recipes from scratch - I know how to throw a proper punch

HOBBIES - I enjoy sports - I’m on a sports team at my school or somewhere else - I’m in an orchestra or choir at my school or somewhere else - I have learned a new song in the past week - I exercise at least once a week - I have gone for runs at least once a week in warmer months - I have drawn something in the past month - I enjoy writing - Fandoms are my #1 priority - I do some form of Martial arts

EXPERIENCES - I have had my first kiss - I have had alcohol (tastes like shit) - I have scored a winning point in a sport - I have watched an entire TV series in one sitting - I have been at an overnight event - I have been in a taxi - I have been in the hospital or ER in the past year - I have beaten a video game in one day - I have visited another country - I have been to one of my favorite bands concerts

MY LIFE - I have one person that I consider to be my Best Friend - I live relatively close to my school/work - My parents are still together - I have at least one sibling - I live in the United States - There is snow where I live right now - I have hung out with a friend in the past month - I have a smart phone - I own at least 15 CDs - I share my room with someone

RELATIONSHIPS - I am in a Relationship - I have a crush on a celebrity - I have a crush on someone I know - I’ve been in at least 3 relationships - I have never been in a Relationship - I have admitted my feelings to a crush - I get crushes easily - I have had a crush for over a year - I have been in a relationship for over a year - I have had feelings for a friend

RANDOM - I have break-danced - I know a person named Jamie - I have had a teacher that has a name that is hard to pronounce - I have dyed my hair - I’m listening to a song on repeat right now - I have punched someone in the past week - I know someone who has gone to jail - I have broken a bone (do fractures count?) - I have eaten a waffle today - I know what I want to do in life - I speak at least two languages (not fluently) - I have made a new friend in the past year

@smstransformers

age: 16

birthplace: auckland, nz

current time: 4:19 pm rn!!!

drink you last had: i just skulled half a liter of water whoops

favourite song: jesus etc. | wilco if we're talking abt an all-time favourite

grossest memory: accidentally swallowing a bee when i was seven years old (somehow nothing bad happened?)

horror, yes or no: not unless it’s an incredibly tame horror t b h, my threshold for scariness is very low

in love: i believe so!

jealous of people: lots of times, over really dumb things

love by first sight or should I walk by again: i believe that infatuation can exist at first sight but true love not so much. wish that could happen tho :C

middle name: shane!

siblings: my sister is eight years old, and my brother is seven!

one wish: EZ, make my anxiety disappear, i’d have a much more productive life

song i last sang: jupiter | haiku hands

time i woke up: 7:13, woke up immediately because i usually like to wake at 6:30

underwear colour: blue + purble

vacation destination: auckland / kingston / sydney!

worst habit: not remembering to make my goddamn bed, it looks like garbage

favourite food: mashed potatoes….

zodiac sign: sagittarius !!!

@alyonian

relationship status:

at the moment i’m single! and while being in a relationship sounds brilliant, the last two relationships i was involved in? didn’t work out to say the least, lucky i’m still young

favourite colour:

it’s been emerald green for the longest time but orange seems to be dethroning it at a steady pace

lipstick or chapstick:

i haven’t used chapstick since i was six but i probably should use it again, water is my substitute rn fdghdgh - and i haven’t ever used lipstick in any capacity? so i’d have to go with the former

last song i listened to:

the space traveller’s lullaby | kamasi washington - i’m trying to get through his second album rn (i left off on the second disk yesterday) and while everything he makes is undeniably amazing, it’s? a three hour album? i don’t have the attention span for his spiritual jazz, as great as it is

last movie:

monsters inc is playing on the television right now, i’ll go with that! the animation aged kinda badly but it’s still such a fun movie! sidenote: james p. sullivan? a childhood crush, so this gives me memories

top 3 tv shows/podcasts/comics:

i rarely, if ever, venture into these forms of media but! if i had to answer, i’d say;

unbreakable kimmy schmidt / parks & recreation / luke cage

taz / mbmbam (i havent like. watched a full episode of either but they seem cool,)

tf idw / …………. yeah that’s it, i’ve never read anything else. probably should!

additional favs:

my friends, writing (in theory), listening to video essays, learning music theory + instruments and understanding audio production software

top 3 bands / artists:

HHH okay if i had to limit my choices to just three artists, uh. lorde, the mountain goats, and sophie. i couldnt even fit janelle in i hate th is

----------------------------------

@alyonian

color(s): light colors are always nice and pleasant, though anything peachy and sandy are the best! orange (specially pastel orange) is like. the best thing

last band t-shirt i bought: usually merchandising is very expensive and i dont have the money to accommodate that, but like. i do recall having a wiggles shirt when i was five. i wore it all the time, shjdjgsksd im sure that counts

last band i saw live: i almost went to splendor in the grass last year with family, which wasn't only cool since i’ve never been out of the state since i immigrated - the festival was in queensland, which is around a two hour flight from victoria - but the lineup was pretty fuckin lit too! the xx, haim, peking duk, tash sultana, future islands, vallis alps, a.b original,, i was p excited! unfortunately my uncle fell ill and so they had to give the tickets to extended family :( otherwise, i haven't been to a single concert in my life

last song i listened to: street fighter mas | kamasi washington - up to this song on the album and i really fuckin dig this! also the video is hypnotizing

last movie i watched: monsters inc is about to finish and up next is monsters university! which like…. honestly, this is an extremely unpopular opinion but, i like it just as much as the original? my opinion might be skewed because i’m a monster [hugger], but i like everything abt the movie! except for the finale of the scare games and the last five minutes of the movie, both were just. dreadful.

last three tv shows i watched: if aggretsuko counts that’s the last series i watched of my own volition, which is a miracle in itself considering that’s legit only the second anime i’ve watched to completion (the first being shirokuma cafe, which i probably need to re-watch). otherwise, the last two shows i had beared witness to were thirteen reasons why and queer eye bc my cousin put them on! that first show i could completely do without but queer eye is iconique

last 3 characters i identified with: grimlock (legit. all of them), urdnot grunt (mass effect) and vector the crocodile (sth), i’m not sure what this says about me other than Big

book(s) i’m currently reading: i’m reading ‘maus’ by art spiegelman at the moment, for the third time i believe? i believe my classmates are supposed to be writing an essay on this next term and shit, this novel is heartbreaking, i haven't been this emotional when reading a book than… ever, really. it’s a recommendation of the highest caliber

@victorion

name: leon / lionel, i picked up the second name because i was in a server with an admin that was also a Leon™

nickname: besides ‘Big Gay’ i also have the nickname ‘lemon lion’ which is! nice!!

zodiac sign: archer man

height: Tall™

language(s) spoken: english / some maori + italian

fav fruit: watermelons (only when in season)

fav scent: the smell of a freezer tbh? it just smells Nice i don’t know how to properly explain it

fav season: spring! the breezes are welcoming without being overbearingly freezing

fav color: ornge,,,,

fav animal: SHARKS + CROCS + FERRETS

coffee, tea or hot chocolate: tea! with some milk tho

average hrs of sleep: too little

fav fictional character: One character?????? uhhhhhhh……. like. biggest cc right now is either idw skids or oz from monster prom

no. of blankets you sleep with: depending on my mood but i’d say the average is like, 3??

fav songs: i quickly whipped up some songs i listen to

fav artists: i came to the realization that i like acts that are considered ‘bad’ like maroon 5/drake/lil yachty etc in specific doses… i wouldn't call them good yet, but! i have no beef and thats good

fav books: remember ‘where the wild things are’??? that shit was like. literal childhood, man.. :happytears: i really need to look for a copy again

@thonany-klieme

name: leon / lionel, interchangeable really

gender: male, im probs an nb guy

star sign: sagittarius!

height: 6’1

sexuality: gay??? im not sure, im mostly attracted to other guys but i have had very brief crushes on girls + nb people? sexuality’s confusing so im gonna just latch to the gaybel (gay label) for now

lock screen image: its the album cover of 1992 deluxe by princess nokia, tho it was “T Hanos” a few days ago since i change it often - my home screen is venom but his torso says ‘fuck machine’

ever had a crush on a teacher: no??

where do you see yourself in ten years: ideally i’m teaching kids math n english, realistically i’m probably going down with the political climate

if you could go anywhere, where would you go: new zealand!! or the netherlands

what was your favorite halloween costume: halloween is not big at all where i live, the only time i tried trick or treating was when i was like 7?? i threw a bedsheet on myself and pretended to be a ghost, though since there were no eyeholes + the sheet was blue, it looked more like i was just a moving lump

last kiss: never had one

have you ever been to las vegas: nah and i dont plan to?? how do you handle regular days of 40C wtf

favorite pair of shoes: i have this pair of jandals that ive worn for a fair bit longer than my other pair of shoes, tho i only wear them in summer + very warm nights

favorite book: ngl its. ‘the very hungry caterpillar’ by eric carle. i just, love it alot and i cant explain w h y

[bobbystompy]

64 Quotes I Enjoyed From 2017

Below are my favorite quotes from 2017. Though most occurred throughout the year, some took place before but were encountered during.

(Allison Greene)

The irony and thematic implication of this first quote -- transcribed in January -- is not lost on me.

1) “I wish you all a Happy New Year. Meaning that I wish for your New Years Eve to be happy. It’s hard to wish hundreds of thousands of people to have an entire happy year. That’s a lot. That feels greedy and hopeless and also some of you might not deserve a happy year. Everyone deserves a happy moment or day now and again but a whole happy year I would wish on maybe eight people and four of them are terminally ill children.

Also please remember that the turning over of one year to another is a mental construct that bears no more weight than the things that keep us apart and in competitive categories as human beings. Time is not moving. You’re not losing or gaining ground. You’re not separate from ‘them’ anymore than you’re separate from your own umbrella. It’s now, we’re us and this is here. If you’re in pain, this too shall pass. If you’re in luxury, this too shall pass. Ask an old lady how she’s doing. The internet is not real. Draw a picture on a napkin.” - Louis C.K.

2) “Flowers cost money you could spend on alcohol.” - Tracy Cunningham

3) "Never make fun of people for mispronouncing a word. It means they learned it by reading."

[that one felt profound when I first read it, but there are probably holes you can poke]

4) “Middle America does not have a monopoly on tough times.” - Drew Magary

5) “The whole point of going to a wedding is to complain about it.” - Drew Magary

6) “The world is too noisy and distracted to probably ultimately survive. Everyone needs to shut the fuck up. The answers are in the silence. Monks set themselves on fire to protest and make this point.

Just consider it.” - Garry Shandling

7) “The fact that Chargers fans get to live in San Diego isn’t as much of a solace as you think, either. When you’re unhappy, Southern California can be the loneliest fucking place in the world. Everywhere you look, you are surrounded by people whose lives are seemingly more perfect than your own. And the fantastic weather acts a kind of lingering nag... an irritating reminder that you SHOULD be happy even if you’re not. When you live somewhere miserable, at least you have an excuse for it. People leave you alone, or they help you drink the pain away indoors. You’re not surrounded by a bunch of fucking Jack LaLannes and Navy steakheads making it worse.

[...]

This is how the San Diego Chargers ended, and their fans deserved better. There won’t even be rain to help water the team’s grave.” - Drew Magary

8) There is no meeting without a Gentry story. He tells the story of Doug Collins’s college coach at Illinois State, Will Robinson, putting Collins in front of a mirror and saying, “Now, that’s an ugly motherfucker.” Then Robinson gets a basketball, hands it to Collins, and says, “Now you’re a handsome motherfucker.”

-- “Seven Seconds or Less” by Jack McCallum

9) "This is gonna be bad. So be good." - Patton Oswalt, on the next four years

10) REPORTER: You always hear about guys in the zone. What’s it like to be in that zone and have that moment two games in a row?

DION WAITERS: Oh man, I love that moment. I mean, you can never shy away from that. I just feel—one of my favorite quotes is, uh ... I forgot it already. One of my favorite quotes. But yeah, can’t be afraid of taking them shots.

11) "No person can be explained in one trait." - Jason Benetti

12) That Federer could dig so deep without losing the spirit of grace and generosity he has carried for much of his career--amazingly, it didn't sound insincere when he told the crowd in Melbourne that he would've been happy if Nadal had won--was enough to make Agassi introspective. He fired off a text to a friend, fellow American ex-pro James Blake. Watching Federer, Agassi wrote, "makes me feel like I was much more of a broken person than I even realized."

-- the 2017 Australian Open

13) “Do you, because everyone else is taken.” - Uber driver

14) Federer's physical skills have tended to obscure just how he resilient he has been throughout his career--a point not lost on him. "My mental toughness has always been overshadowed by my virtuosity, my shotmaking, my technique, my grace," says Federer. "That's why when I lose, it seems like, 'Oh, he didn't play so well.' And when I win, it looks so easy." He says it has been that way since he was young. "Just because I don't sweat like crazy and I don't grunt, I don't have this face on when I hit the shot like I'm in pain, doesn't mean I'm not trying hard," he says. "It's just how I play. Sorry."

15) "I’ve always said the only way to change anyone’s opinion is to make him laugh first. It still is." - John Waters

16) “Women like babies. Men like their sons and daughters.” - Kevin Haack

17) “At once, Federer would triumph over his two greatest rivals: Nadal and Hawk-Eye.” - Chris Almeida, on Roger Federer’s 2017 Aussie Open win

18) “Brady did everything in Super Bowl 51 short of fertilizing crops with his own feces to feed his teammates.” - Bill Simmons

19) “It's still hard to believe the Falcons actually lost this game. They're the first team in Super Bowl history to lose with a pick-six in its pocket, one that felt like an unlikely gift given that it came from Brady. Some will throw around the "choker" label, which is inelegant at best and condescendingly incurious at worst. If choking means running after a quarterback on 68 dropbacks until there's hardly any air left in your lungs, the Falcons choked.” - Bill Barnwell

20) “Keep in mind: Plenty of people already think Chance The Rapper is corny. Plenty of people have been thinking it for years. Plenty of people who now love Chance The Rapper had to get over the corniness threshold, to train themselves to love the yawpy ad-libs an the voice-cracks and the general hyperactive teenage energy. When Chance won Best New Artist and howled the word 'God' in his acceptance speech about 32 times, I saw plenty of grumbling — We get it, dude, you believe in God — in my Twitter timeline. Someone even said that the music industry had figured out how to manufacture a marketable version of Christian-rap figurehead Lecrae. And that gets at another common complaint about Chance: that he’s an 'industry plant,' a creature created by the music business, one who uses 'independent' as a buzzword rather than as any kind of unifying philosophy. Those of us who love Chance, that line of thinking goes, have been somehow hoodwinked or manipulated into it. And there have been plenty of other perceived sins over the years: the overalls, the KitKat commercial, the constant references to Nickelodeon cartoons, the persistent smiling. Whether or not you love Chance, there is a strong possibility that he’s annoyed you once or twice.” - Tom Breihan

21) “Traveling is the antidote to ignorance.” - Trevor Noah

22) "But mostly, it's in how Celebration Rock treats every day like the last day of school, raising a glass to the past, living in the moment and going into the future feeling fucking invincible." - Ian Cohen

23) “In fact, it turned out that there was nothing ‘dangerous’ at all in picking on women and refugees. People will pay you good money for that. The dangerous ideas are the ones they don’t pay you for, the ones that don’t get you on HBO. You’re actually dangerous when you do what Yiannopoulos did in the ‘pedophile’ tapes: defend society’s most hated outcasts, and tell the truth about the complexities of gay men’s sexuality. You’re dangerous when you stick up for those on the fringes rather than kicking them. There’s nothing courageous or edgy in bullying the despised and excluded. But it might be dangerous if you dared to empathize with them.” - Nathan J. Robinson

24) [Taj] Gibson was asked if his dunk over Dwyane Wade was his favorite moment as a Bull. "It really wasn't. That was just a dunk. It really wasn't one of my favorite moments of my career, to be honest with you. I had a lot of shining moments in my career. Just being around Thibs, he taught me that people don't look at, some of the games, most of the games, they look at the bright spots. I have a lot of different bright spots in my career. The biggest one in my career would have to be just being on the team when guys were down and having a coach look at me and know that he can count on me. No matter what position, no matter what time in the game. And he would trust some of the most important plays for me to do. Those were the most important moments of my life, just having a guy between Fred and coach Thibs, knowing guys that are ahead of me, making twice as much money as me, and he's still calling my name through crunch time. Those were the best moments of my life."

[have some, Carlos Boozer]

25) “You can't let politics dictate what you read or who you fuck.” - Chuck, “Girls”

26) “Watching Kawhi Leonard play basketball is like when you get the email you’ve been waiting for and it says all of the things you were hoping it was going to say.” - Shea Serrano

27) “This isn't a choice, like my diet. This is a necessity, like my drinking.” - Ben, “Veep”

28) “It's like how love songs never go out of style because no one's ever written one that's closed the book on the subject.” - Brian King, Japandroids

29) Pitchfork: A lot of the lyrics on the album take advantage of this universal, mythic rock'n'roll language, like on "Fire's Highway": "Hearts from hell collide/ On fire's highway tonight/ We dreamed it, now we know."

Brian King (Japandroids): Personally, I really like the concepts of good and evil, heaven and hell-- the extreme boundaries of how people can feel and how fast things can change. I like that that language. I'm not talking about just some night you felt a certain way, I'm talking about the night you felt that way-- that one time. People have always alluded to those extremes as a way of characterizing the most intense feelings since blues and the early days of rock. A blues singer won't be like, "We broke up." He'll say, "Satan stole my baby from me." You just pick it up.

30) “Friends of mine, hitting partners, are Federer fans for real. They own his racket, his sneakers, the hat with his RF logo. When he loses, they're wrecked; when he wins, it's only slightly less painful, because it's one fewer win they get to witness.” - Rosecrans Baldwin

31) “Bad ideas rarely spread when the population is educated about better alternatives.” - Greg Graffin

32) This entire story (9:47 to 10:15)

RIP, Don Rickles (1926-2017)

33) “Being pregnant is cool and weird: Your bones ache, your gums bleed, your ligaments basically just start giving up. (A hormone called ‘relaxin’ is involved.) You plan decades ahead, then worry you’re jinxing it all. You’ve got a decreasingly nebulous imaginary friend there to listen to your hopes and fears at all hours and you occasionally get the hiccups. But the strangest thing about being with child is the way your body becomes not yours, and not even the baby’s, but the world’s. Complete strangers reach out and touch. Internet commenters opine. Photos of yourself splayed postpartum on a gurney, hair matted to the side of your face, one boob swung free, are triumphantly text-messaged to fathers-in-law without your express written consent.

It’s not fair, it’s never fair, but it’s nevertheless the shared experience of so many women during a powerful, vulnerable time.” - Katie Baker

34) "I just watched Deadheads spin around for three hours looking for miracles." - Brad Back

35) “Comparison is the thief of joy.” - Theodore Roosevelt

36) "The Spurs’ run of NBA success is now old enough to vote, and in a couple of years it will be legally old enough to share finely aged red wines with Popovich, although I suspect he’s been slipping it glasses at home for a few years now. One of the cornerstones of that success has been an ability to find talent where nobody else looked." - Rodger Sherman

37) "Cutting at the right time is more important than being fast." - Bill Belichick

38) “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” - “Justified”

39) “An asshole is not a brilliant visionary just because a toilet has a bottomless appetite for what comes out of it.” - Albert Burneko, on the passing of Roger Ailes

40) "He would’ve been a rock star no matter where he’d been born, or when." - Rob Harvilla on Chris Cornell

41) "Instead of getting married again, I'm going to find a woman I don't like and just give her a house." - Rod Stewart

42) “I have never regretted taking a walk. Every time you walk, a bunch of cool shit happens. You burn calories, for one thing. You think of cool ideas. You also get an immediate sense of the layout and vibe of wherever you happen to be. It’s a cheap shortcut to feeling like a local. I walked around downtown Atlanta for two hours once, which was long enough for me to realize, ‘Oh hey, this is the part of town that sucks!’ Then I went and walked around a cooler part.

Also, walking forces me to pocket my phone and actually look around for a bit (in theory…sometimes I check the phone while walking, which is galactically fucking stupid and could get you killed). I can actually feel GOOD about the world when I walk around, because I’m seeing it as it stands now, instead through the horrifying prism of online news and discourse. The sun still shines out there. People are smiling. It’s not bad. You wouldn’t even know we’re all gonna die soon. Not everything has rotted away just yet. You can leave the shifting sand dunes of the day far behind, to borrow a phrase from Professor Fartsniffer up there.

Also, you don’t have to look for a parking spot.

I walked today. I walked past a school and saw a bunch of kids playing touch football and they accidentally launched the ball over the fence and into the road, where they couldn’t get it. So they asked me to grab it for them. I hucked it back over and one kid shouted ‘YOU DA REAL MVP!’ And you know what? For that one little moment, I was, indeed, da real MVP. Step aside, Kevin Durant’s mom. I saved touch football. What did you ever do?

That kind of experience isn’t really possible when you’re sitting in a car. When you drive, you’re basically in a kind of self-imposed purgatory. The goal is to get wherever you’re headed so that you can resume your life again. I have tried to slow down and savor my surroundings while driving but it rarely works out because A) It’s not safe and B) I want to make good time. I have my eyes on the road and my ears on my SWEET TUNEZ, and I’m only slowing down to gawk at an overturned milk truck. ‘Wow, that looks BAD.’

The most important moments in life usually happen when you’re walking. Ever ask someone you’re dying to go out with if they wanna go for a walk, and they say yes? It feels fucking GREAT. That’s gonna be a good walk. Then maybe you two walk down the aisle after you get married, and then walk through the hospital to see your new baby in the nursery, and then walk with that child as takes its first steps. And then maybe someone close to you dies, and you have to walk with their casket to their gravesite. I’ve made some of these walks. I haven’t forgotten any of them.” - Drew Magary

43) "‘A great nation does not hide its history, it faces its flaws and corrects them.’ - George W. Bush

Let us again state clearly for all to hear. The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is a history we should never forget and one that we should never ever again put on a pedestal to be revered." - Mitch Landrieu

44) "Just found out Joyce Manor is playing in Bristol on 7/13. When god closes a door, he opens a moshpit." - Chris Trott, after missing the Captain, We're Sinking Show in Chicago on 7/12 due his England trip

45) “The most prestigious honor in music isn't a Grammy. It's ‘I like this band enough to see them at 10:30 p.m. on a Wednesday.’” - Steven Hyden

46) “I think of you every time I speed up my podcasts.” - Christine Jastrow’s 31st birthday tribute to yours truly

47) "A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce

48) “Personally speaking, a millennial is anyone younger than me who gets on my fucking nerves. I don’t think of like, Dak Prescott as a millennial, because he seems cool. But Chris Brown? Fuck him sideways.” - Drew Magary

49) "It's a scientific fact that a beer tastes better when it travels more than 5 feet in the air" - @PFTCommenter

50) Dustin Brown perfectly summed up what it's like to play on Centre Court. "It would be nice if we're playing every match out there. It's very comfortable. Even when things aren't going your way, it relaxed me a bit to say 'this is where you always wanted to be,'" he said after his Wimbledon second round loss to defending champ Andy Murray.

51) "One thing I’ve always found fascinating about Federer (or, rather, the way we talk about Federer) is that there’s never been any backlash. Normally, when an athlete has been around as long as Federer has, and has been as great as Federer has, and is on the receiving end of so much adulation, some sort of noticeable backlash occurs. Never with Fed.

Relatedly, people root for Federer unabashedly, and did so even during that stretch in the 00's when he was as dominant a force as any sport has seen. Casual fans tend to root for the underdog, but Federer was so sublime that he made people root for Goliath." - Andrew, Deadspin reader

52) “‘Federer manages to scamper across himself’ is one of the more Federer tennis calls I've ever heard.” - Brian Phillips

53) “Everything before the word ‘but’ is horseshit.” - Jon Snow

54) “Be present.” - Megan Filip

55) "The successful person is one who finds an opportunity in every problem. Unsuccessful people find a problem in every opportunity." - Lou Holtz

56) “It ain’t a hit till Nate Dogg spit.” - Mack 10

57) "Nobody goes to work tomorrow. General strike, fuck this country." - some of Blake Schwarzenbach first words at the Jawbreaker reunion

58) “It’s hard getting good news -- you don’t know what to do with it.” - Blake Schwarzenbach, at the first Jawbreaker show in forever

59) “When I was a child, I spoke like a child.” - Davis,“Treme”

60) “In one sense, the story of human history is just people inventing progressively more advanced ways in which to be awful idiots, in groups.” - David Roth

61) "Reality gives nothing back and nor should you." - Kobe Bryant

62) “Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

63) "Brevity is the soul of wit" - William Shakespeare

64) "If I shoot an airball, call the foul." - Dirk Nowitzki

[dixseptdixhuit]

Sunrise (12x23 coda - sort of, but not really)

Note: thank you to @amirosebooks for the handprint idea. Hope it lives up to your expectations!

And of course thank you @procasdeanating for the great beta-ing ♥

Dean sinks down on his knees besides Cas' body, looking up, waiting for someone, something to come and undo what just happened. It can't be. Cas can't be dead. Finally he lowers his gaze on the beloved face. So still, like he's sleeping, and Cas so rarely sleeps. Dean's throat hurts, his chest hurts, he can barely breathe now. He doesn't know how much time passes, all he knows is that this is too much to bear, and the tears that finally escape him won't soothe him. He falls on Cas' chest and heaves through painful sobs, endlessly.

*

“Cut! And stay in position as much as possible, please! Okay, that was good. We have about fifteen minutes before sunrise, so I'd rather the transition goes smoothly.”

Nobody claps, as would probably be the case if they had filmed such an emotional scene during day time. The on-set crew is reduced to the minimum at this hour, and everyone is exhausted. People are talking low and moving around without paying attention to Misha and Jensen still lying on the ground.

Misha opens his eyes and puts a hand on Jensen’s back. He knows he shouldn’t move too much if he wants to find the exact same position again, but Jensen’s sobs aren’t stopping, and he doesn’t like that. Tears are starting to wet his shirt and they aren’t fake. A tired Jensen shooting an emotional scene at 5 am was probably a bad idea, and Misha would have said so if he’d been asked.

“Shhh, babe, it’s okay,” he whispers. He’s not even sure Jensen’s heard him; he continues weeping against Misha’s chest. Misha tries to take him back to the reality of the situation. “Come on, Jens, you’re going to smudge all your makeup on my wardrobe, and I can’t get up to change.”

Misha keeps running his free hand through Jensen’s hair, and slowly the crying calms down, but Jensen stays in the same position, face hidden against Misha’s chest, as if he is ashamed to lift it and look at Misha. They just lie there, and the cold is starting to seep into their bodies from the ground when a PA comes to them, carrying a blanket. She doesn’t speak, just makes eye contact with Misha who nods silently, and she spreads the blanket clumsily over them.

It takes several minutes for Jensen to start to relax. Misha watches the sky gradually lightening, and the crew around them beginning to busy themselves again.

“Okay, people, we need to do this one in one shot, you know that! No mistakes allowed, so get ready!”

The PA comes back to take the blanket away, and Jensen finally stirs as if he is coming out of a deep slumber. He lifts his head and catches Misha’s eyes.

“Sorry,” he murmurs, “I… I’m sorry.”

Misha can’t answer as someone comes up to reapply their makeup. The sky is starting to show a deep pink shade behind the mountains; in a minute, everyone except them draws back behind the camera line, and they hear a clap and a loud “Action!”

 *

The door of the small wooden house opens but Dean doesn’t move from where he’s slumped over Cas’ chest. A scrawny teenager, in a much too big flannel shirt that reaches his skinny knees, comes out of the house. His eyes glow gold and he’s smiling, a weird ecstatic smile. He goes down the few front steps, walking straight to where Cas lies. Behind him, Sam hesitates on the threshold, as if knowing he can’t change the boy’s actions in any way.

The boy stops next to Cas, and Dean finally looks up when he hears him say, in a clear, high-pitched voice: “Castiel.” It’s not a question, not a plea, more like an affirmation, a simple statement.

The sky has taken a bright hue of pink and gold, and exactly as the first ray of sun shines from behind the mountain across the lake, a blinding beam of light springs out from the Nephilim’s eyes to Castiel’s heart, right where the angel blade stabbed him. Cas’ body seizes as the dazzling light spreads through it, and Dean falls back on his ass, his eyes squeezed shut. He’s still numb from the shock of what happened in the last couple of hours and when a searing pain burns his shoulder, he doesn’t react except for a full-body flinch - and then the pain is gone, just like that, and the light too.

When Dean opens his eyes, blue ones are staring back at him. His left shoulder throbs with his heartbeat, but he doesn’t care about it right now, doesn’t even want to glance at it for a second, because Cas is looking at him. With eyes full of life. And he’s breathing, and saying the one thing that Dean wasn’t expecting to hear ever again, “Dean”, in his unmistakable deep baritone.

“Cas… is that you? Really you?”

“Yes. You are hurt. Let me...” and he lifts his hand towards Dean’s shoulder. This time, Dean looks down left, and he gasps. His shirt sleeve is burnt and there, on his shoulder, angry-red and swollen, is the same handprint he wore nearly ten years ago when he rose from his grave. Castiel’s handprint.

“No, don’t,” he says as he stops Cas’ gesture. “I want to keep it. I want to keep you.” He’s dizzy and he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but it doesn’t matter, because all that matters is Cas, not why he’s alive or how. He flings himself at Cas, and clings to him. He doesn’t want to ever let go.

 *

“Cut! Awesome, you did it, guys!”

This time, the whole crew cheers. They all knew that they had to do it in one take, while the sun was rising; there was no room for errors, and it’s done. It worked, and now everyone just wants one thing: going to bed.

“Y’all have twelve hours to rest, and we’ll start again this evening for a few hours only, so please come back well rested!”

Jensen takes several minutes to loosen his grip on Misha’s coat and let him draw back. They stare at each other, dazed and exhausted. Finally, Misha grabs Jensen’s arm and pulls him to his feet.

“Come on, cowboy, let’s get you to bed. I’m sure you can at least walk to the car.”

“Mish… I’m sorry.”

“Shut up,” Misha offers, his tone softer than the words themselves. They’re approaching the car now, not having bothered with anything else, even saying goodnight (or day) to anyone, or removing their makeup.

“Can I… Please come and stay at my place,” and Jensen’s voice isn’t pleading, but strained and thin, and Misha knows he won’t deny him - and himself, if he’s being honest - the comfort. There’s no point in pretending he doesn’t need it too.

“Of course, assbutt.” The reference makes Jensen smile, at least. Misha opens the car door and they both slide on the back seat, squeezing close together, touching from shoulder to thigh. Jensen leans a bit stronger against Misha’s side until Misha, with a sigh, lifts his arm to allow Jensen to snuggle up to him.

While they ride in silence, the sun keeps rising.

(in this ficlet, Jensen needs to be forgiven by Misha for something, but I don’t know what. Feel free to imagine!)

[thejokersenigma]

Joker x Reader Deadly Voice Part 35

Hey guys,

I would just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who is sticking with me on this fan ficiton! I really appreciate the messages I am getting! I love them - they honestly make my whole week!

So here is the next part, quite short compared to what I have been doing recently, but hope you enjoy anyway - i wasn’t really sure where i was going with it as you can probably tell!

Enjoy! :)

P.S. If anyone wants to be tagged whenever I post a new part I am happy to do that, just let me know!

Masterlist

I spent the next day berating myself for that night. I couldn’t get over what I had done or even how I had done it. It was like the incidence with the newspaper and Hannah all over again. But this time I had a weapon, first a knife and then - thanks to the generosity of the Joker - my gun.

I tried to seek comfort in the fact that I hadn’t actually killed him, though this wasn’t particularly reassuring as I knew I would have quite happily. At least now I knew that it wasn’t the Joker that had set up my job with Penguin, and therefore set up everything after. No, life had just happened that way.

This didn’t change my opinion of Jake, but it made me hate the Joker a tiny bit less.

I tried to keep that night’s events out of my mind and move on from it, promising myself something like that would never happen again. I just had to keep my head low and stay away from those that might do me wrong.

Of course I had managed to lose my job through my actions. Darren couldn’t exactly keep on someone that attack his other staff and threatened their life – completely understandable I thought. Besides, I had already talked myself into leaving the club thanks to Rebecca pointing out that the Joker might turn up any night looking for me.

And so I was jobless again.

For the next few days I didn’t really leave my tiny flat, I just sat on my laptop searching and applying for new jobs. It wasn’t that there was a lack of jobs as such, more that I was becoming more and more picky toward them. I needed something that would cover my rent, but I was also now purposefully looking for venues where I didn’t particularly like the staff - thanks to Rebecca’s obvious point – I didn’t want to destroy anyone else’s business by attracting the wrong crowd and I couldn’t predict whether the Joker would ever come looking for me again.

It was a few days after I had confronted Jake when there was a knock on my door. I had been curled up with a hot drink, once more scrolling through the same ads I had scrolled through at least 5 times before, when the door sounded and I jumped at the sudden noise.

I frowned at the door – who on Earth was it? No one knew where I lived and I didn’t really have any friends to tell in the first place. It must just be a charity or something, but they would have to have e buzz them in. My heart dropped, it must be the landlord for some reason – had my rent not gone through? I had only just managed to scrape enough together to pay for this month, I couldn’t afford any more problems - I really needed a new job soon.

Another series of knocks rang out and I placed my mug down on the coffee table, throwing my computer off my lap and unfolding myself from the sofa, making my way to the door.

I pulled it open, already apologising to the landlord for whatever I was being accused of.

I blinked in surprise at the man before me. “Oh, uh - Hi Frost.” I greeted.

“Hello [Y/N].”

I quickly glanced either side of him, searching for anyone else that might be lurking in the corridor, “He’s not with me.” Frost reassured me.

“Oh. good.” I muttered lamely, straightening up and glancing around awkwardly, searching for something to say as we stood silently in the doorway. “Um… Can I help you?”

He watched me for a few beats, as though measuring me up or looking for something before he seemed content and gave a small nod, “Yes.”

Oh lovely, he was being vague. “Uh… Would you like to come in?” I asked, knowing he was clearly after something, but also not willing to save the both of us a load of time and just come out and say it.

“Please.” He answered and I nodded, stepping back and pulling the door open in invitation. Frost stepped over the threshold and looked around at my small, rather dingy flat - no change occurring in his facial expression. I closed the door behind him and followed in further into the flat.

“Who did you think I was?” Frost asked abruptly, not bothering to turn around as he inspected my small lounge area.

“What?” I jumped slightly at the unexpected question, too busy lost in my own thoughts as to why he was here.

“You answered the door as if you knew who was on the other side,” He explained, “and it clearly wasn’t me you expected.”

“Uh- yeah, I – uh – I thought you were my landlord about my rent.”

He glanced at me before continuing to move around my open plan flat, “You’re struggling to pay for this?” He asked, amazed.

“Maybe.” I snipped bitterly, it was alright for some.

He realised he had offended me and straightened up slightly from where he was looking at a relatively empty bookshelf. “Sorry.” He said quickly and I knew he meant it.

I shrugged it off, “Not really your fault. I was the one that threatened a women with a knife – can’t blame them.” I said simply. “Now I spend my days job hunting.” I explained gesturing at my laptop on the sofa.

“No luck then?” Frost asked, sounding like he truly cared - though I doubted it.

“Minimal.” I muttered.

We fell into silence again and I began to feel very self-conscious of his rather thorough inspection of my living room. “So… um…” I mumbled, trying to think of something to break the uncomfortable silence, “How’s your neck?” I asked in an attempt of casual conversation

“Stiff.” He said, “But better.”

I nodded in acknowledgement, “Good.” I muttered, a bit peeved he wasn’t really helping the conversation – after all he was the one that came to talk to me, “So, um, are you back working for him again then?” Referring to the other night when he had clearly been at the meeting.

“Yes.” He said bluntly, not looking at me he moved into the kitchen, “He appears to be back to normal.”

“No grudges over the whole-“ I gestured at my own neck, where Frost’s wound would have been. He glanced over his shoulder at my pause and noticed my miming.

He shook his head as he turned back, “No,” He said, “I know he would not have done it had he been in his right mind.”

“The Joker has a right mind?” I mumbled without thinking.

“You know what I mean.” Frost muttered back, and I sort of did. The Joker did a lot of odd things, but they were always on purpose – I’d never known him to accidentally do something – but I also understood that he wouldn’t normally jump at Frost and attack him like he had.

Frost continued to wander my flat and I was becoming more and more worried he was going to start going through every draw in the place. I was running out of ideas to get Frost to actually talk to me and explain why he was here.

I steeled myself - no more beating around the bush, “Ok, enough chit-chat. Why are you here Frost?” I asked abruptly and he glanced over his shoulder at me in surprise at my sudden bluntness.

“Just seeing how you were doing.” He said simply.

“Really?” I asked, raising a disbelieving eyebrow, “You decided to go through all the pain of figuring out where I now live, finding a way to get into the building without using the buzzer and now are basically inspecting my entire flat,  just to check on how I was doing?” I paused, glancing away and then back to him, “Is this about the other night?” I asked the back of his head as he inspected a picture on my wall.

He finally turned to face me, “That made me want to check on you a bit sooner then I was going to.” He admitted.

“I don’t need you to check up on me!” I insisted loudly, “I’m not a child, I am a fully functioning adult that is quite capable of surviving just fine on my own!” I paused, trying to not get angry at him for his patronising behaviour – he probably meant well. “You know I travelled several hundred miles alone right? That I lived in that little town in the middle of nowhere, for basically a month on my own before you showed up? What makes you think I suddenly require babysitting?”

Frost suddenly round to face me, “Have you been back?” Frost asked, ignoring my question.

“Back? Where?” I furrowing my brow, “To the farm house? No, why would I?” I asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

“We left very abruptly.” He pointed out, “You didn’t pack anything – did you not leave a lot of possessions behind?”

I wondered where he was going with this – why was he so concerned if I didn’t have a few of my things? “I- uh – didn’t really have much.” I confessed, though continuing to eye him up warily, “I – I didn’t have much – I didn’t take much - most of it was new things I had bought.” I shrugged, “So I didn’t really care about leaving it behind.”

“So you have no beloved possessions?” He questioned doubtfully.

Why was he so insistent on this? “Uh, well, I guess there was – I mean there was one thing.” I told him reluctantly, I didn’t particular want to open up to a henchman – even he was basically a friend now.

He raised an eyebrow in question at me, signalling for me to carry on. I squirmed under the look, not wanting to reveal my weird little obsession with a photo. “It’s just a picture.” I blurted out, hoping that would be enough for him,

“A picture?” He repeated, I nodded, “Of what?”

I cringed away at the question, “It’s silly.” I told him, when he didn’t respond I looked back to him and he was still watching me expectantly. I sighed in defeat, “It’s just a picture of my club. You know - the one that was destroyed…” I trailed off lamely. By me.

If Frost found this at all odd he didn’t comment on it – for which I was grateful. Instead, however, I just stood there in silence. I couldn’t bear to look at him at the moment, worried – though he wasn’t saying anything – that his face would show what he really thought.

“So you don’t have this picture?”

“No.” I breathed at the floor, I looked back to meet his eyes again, “I left it behind and now the guy that owns the house has probably got rid of it.” I knew I had forgotten the picture but actually stopping to acknowledge the loss was painful - it was the last piece of my family I really. I could feel a lump of emotion forming in my throat as I thought of the fact it was now probably in a landfill somewhere, lost for good.

I cleared my throat, “Anyway.” I muttered, blinking back the water I could feel building up in my eyes, “Uh, why did you want to know?”

“I’ve got to head off actually, got a job in the area.” Frost said suddenly, turning away from the murky window he was looking out of. I was so taken aback by this sudden declaration that I didn’t notice he had once again ignored my question.

“Uh- ok – sure.” I stammered out, very confused and thinking Frost was behaving very oddly as I followed behind him to my front door. “Uh, Frost.” I called as I held the door open for him to step out. He paused in the doorway, turning back to look at me over his shoulder.

“Do you- could you- uh. What happened to Jake?” I asked, faltering as the two sides of me fought, my innocent naïve self that couldn’t condone what I had done and needed to know how Jake was doing, the side far happier with the suffering, not caring less what he was going through and feeling there was a lot more of suffering I could have caused to balance everything out.

“He’s getting medical attention.” Frost informed me.  “[Y/N].” Frost began, turning around completely now so that he faced me, “Why did you do it?” He asked, almost gently.

I could feel the two sides of me pushing back and forth, one wanting to break down and scream she didn’t know, the other willing to do it again and not needing to explain. “Ask him.” I snapped out eventually and I noticed Frost almost retract from my harsh tone, surprised as my personality seemed to shift to a stronger, more assertive self.

Frost’s reaction didn’t last very long before his calm mask returned, “I will when he wakes up.” Frost replied calmly, almost mechanically.

“He’s unconscious?” I asked in surprise, reverting back to my innocent side, Frost watching me suspiciously and slightly amazed at my sudden mood changes.

Frost nodded, “Doctors were unsure if it was the loss of blood or the blow to the side of the head.”

I crinkled my forehead at this, “What blow to the side of his head?” I asked, puzzled and replaying the night in my head, “He never hit the side of his head, just the back.”

Frost seemed confused just as confused at this, “No, he had a swelling on the back of his head, but also a slight fracture to the left side of his skull.” He explained.

This baffled me. How was that possible? I had definitely not hit the side of his head.  Had he fallen from where he had been slumped? No. That wasn’t a great enough fall to fracture the skull. Was it an old wound they had only just noticed? Or had I seriously done the damage but not remembered it? But I hadn’t drank or taken anything and - if it was true - then how was it that I could perfectly recall everything else about that night, there were no ‘blacked out’ parts of my memory.

Frost watched my face as I ran back through my memories; head bowed and eyes darting back and forth as I held the door open, trying to remember everything from that night.

There was no second head injury.

“I-I don’t remember.” I admitted, still deeply perplexed by this.

Jake Riggen lay unconscious in a sterile bed whilst bright lights illuminated his pale skin and multi-coloured bruises. X-rays hung on the wall, clearly showing the hairline fracture on the left side of his skull, and echoing beeps rang out in the otherwise silent hospital room which signalled his continuous heartbeat.

But Jake didn’t know any of this; all he knew were the last few moments before everything went black that now constantly replayed in his head.

She had turned back from the clown, towering over him as he clung to his arm where his body was tortuously pumped blood out of the deep gash.  She had lifted a gun – where had she got the gun? – and he had closed his eyes against what was going to happen next and the agony in his arm.

The next thing that truly registered with him had been the burning pain in his foot - had she set him on fire?

He hadn’t known - he had just screamed.

He had barely heard anything over the sound of his own pain and his agony had dulled most of his comprehension at the time, but he had vaguely heard her say “He needs to suffer.”

He tried to wrench his eyes open, but when he had she had already gone. Only the criminal clown was left in front of Jake.

Jake should have been afraid of this, but at the time the agony had mitigated any other emotion and numbed all common sense.

There had been a hand on his cheek then, breath on his face. He had snapped his eyes open in surprise at the touch, hoping she had returned to him. Instead his eyes had met bright blue ones and a terrifying grin.

“I heard everything.” Came the voice, quiet, smooth, by his ear, yet it had promised no comfort. “My doll wants you to suffer, “The voice had pondered, “But I’ve never been very patient.” It had admitted before he remembered a cracking from within his own head he was gone.

[letsbejoyfools]

1. You’re on Edwards!

San Fransisco, California, 

Inspector Logan Edwards could’t remember the last time so many cars were parked in front of one of his client’s house - although the term "client" is a concept Logan liked to keep to himself. Certainly the "newbie" (the nickname had stuck even after two years of service) was already teased enough by his fellow police investigators, that he could pass on them mocking him for his odd terminology. But if there was one thing the 27 years-old inspector had quickly learnt throughout his first few years in the criminal investigations department, it was that his job could be ugly. Therefore after a few sleepless nights filled with vivid nightmares of agonizing and dead bodies, Logan quickly developed some sort of protective shield. 

Taking a few steps back from the morbidity of the situation, he then considered himself a lawyer defending an indictment for a client. Except in his case, said indictment was the perpetration of murder and said client no longer belonged to this world. A strange thought process people might think…but it was in those terms that Inspector Edwards was examining the corpse lying on the floor of the kitchen he was currently standing in.

The first thing Logan noticed was the throng of people crowding the room ; something he immediately found suspicious since it was supposedly just a standard accident procedure. That’s what he was told 40 minutes earlier when Lieutenant Clark Taylor required his immediate presence at the victim’s domicile. ‘Gas incident on Funston St. One victim. Get your arse over here.’ Taylor had sent him the text in his infamous ever so polite tone. Now, after running relentlessly around the lovely neighborhood of Presidio Heights where he was due to arrive ‘asap’ - as his boss so gently requested - a stream of discontent was slowly but surely invading Inspector Edwards’ bloodstream like a toxic intravenous injection. 

Because one thing about Logan was that he absolutely despised being confused, especially in a job-related environment. And in that moment, Logan was in a state of upmost disconcertment. The men around him were agitated and seemed to be torn in two opposite directions. ‘Since when does the police need that many men to assess the aftermath of an unfortunate gas incident that caused the death of a hapless guy?’ thought Logan. ‘So what, a guy came home, forgot to turn his gas off and the next thing you know the FBI barges in?’ 

The craving for explanation extricated Logan from his flooding nonsensical thoughts. In a few seconds he spotted Lieutenant Taylor and had barely the time to open his month when Clark started filling him in on the situation. "I know it’s a freakin’ mess. I called you in as soon as we got here and it took these fuckers 10 minutes to realize the dude’s wife was also dead in their bedroom. Hence why we’re fuckin’ crammed on top of each other." 

The house was nothing big, really ; but its astute architectural arrangement gave it a modernistic outline not devoid of practicality. The front door, situated on the far right-hand side of the house, directly led onto a relatively open area. A few steps to the left, was all it took to reach the center of the house embodied by the dining room - if you could call it a dining room that is. Mainly, it was just an elegant solid wood table placed on a refined rug, standing between the cooking area on the left and on the right a wall that enclosed (from furthest to closest) a guest room, a bathroom and the master bedroom Lieutenant Clark was referring to. The kitchen counters were assembled in a U-shape facing the dining table and were surrounding a small center island which provided an ergonomic and satisfactory large working zone. A little further down the ‘dining room’ and behind the kitchen, was a quite spacious living room adorned by two average size cloud-looking sofas facing a large TV. 

Inspector Edwards only nodded as the two men headed towards the bedroom in question, and waited for the main report. "We should be outta here fast though, the case is pretty simple." He took a short pause and explained some more. "Linda Morris, that’s her name. She was found dead in her bed. Same thing, asphyxiation."

The room was submerged in profound darkness thanks to the thick black curtains camouflaging the window. The repulsive scent lingering in the air was immediately captured by Logan’s nostrils, testing the sensitivity of his gag reflex. It was certainly not the first time the inspector had to breath the same air a dead could no longer inhale. As discomforting as it may sound, Logan knew how death smelt. Unceremoniously tossed in a bin of a dark alley ; laying in the serenity of a luxurious hotel room or lost in the vastness of a corn field, Inspector Edwards had seen, smelt, and even felt death in all its forms. 

However in that moment the stench startled him by its unfamiliarity. The odor dangerously tickling his nose was a sordid mix between sickness and oddly…vanilla candles. Logan took a minute to inspect the room, an exhaustive list of little mental notes forming itself from the most relevant observation to the most insignificant detail. 

Because everything had to make sense. 

The bedroom wasn’t messy per se, but displayed enough personal effects for Inspector Edwards to draw a consistent profile of his new ‘client’. This was yet another thing about Logan : he didn’t need much to get the bigger picture. It was a routine, almost part of his inner clock. ‘Observe, retain, deduce.’ A habit so deeply engraved in his procedural memory, it came as spontaneously as sneezing. So the pair of pants and socks meticulously laid on the radiator and the tablet of ibuprofen left on the nightstand had been added on the list just a moment after he first crossed the threshold of the door. 

"The poor girl must have knocked herself out to sleep," Taylor’s head motioned toward the medication, "coulda maybe escaped the gas if it weren't for the pills…" he finished earnestly. Logan only hummed in acknowledgment, as he approached the bed to take a closer look at the victim and her surroundings. She looked almost peaceful, wrapped up under the thickest comforter he had ever laid his emerald eyes on. She was on her side in a fetal position, facing the nightstand where stood an empty mug and the half-used pills. He bent over the mug in order to smell the remainders of its content, but it was only for confirmation. His verdict was already made.

"She didn’t knock herself out, she was sick." He simply stated.

"Sick? Why do you reckon so Edwards?" Asked his boss in a curious tone.

"Remember two days ago, it rained all day and the wind was so hard it knocked some trees over. She must have gotten a cold because her clothes were drenched. That’s why she put them on the radiator instead of the dirty laundry basket," he pointed at the pants. "Plus she lit a vanilla candle, and made herself a cup of hot chocolate. S’what my mum used to do when I was feeling poorly… candles and cocoa," Logan explained simply to the Lieutenant. 

"Impressive Edwards," he said relatively emotionless. "Might have to put you on the next serious case huh?" chuckling to himself, his eyes left his agent’s tall frame and he exited the room without muttering another word. The right corner of Logan’s lips curved ever so lightly before he found his way back to a slightly less packed kitchen, much to his delight. Indeed, the two gas experts hired to examine the gas cooker - presumed origin of the leak - were now gone, leaving only Lieutenant Taylor, the Chief of the Fire Department of San Fransisco and two other detectives hunched over the second lifeless presence the house was hosting.

Instinctively, Logan went over every detail of the kitchenette, scrutinizing the slightest corner in hope to spot any revealing peculiarity. Much like the rest of the house, the cooking area was undeniably clean. No dirty dishes were lazily lingering in the sink and the immaculate marble-like counter was free of any unwanted scattered crumbs. ‘It was a pretty neat family’ was the conclusion Logan drew. The only apparent appliances were an old-fashioned teapot settled on the side of the stove, and a plate holding a half-eaten takeaway pizza, judging by the cardboard box carefully placed on top of the bin. 

One quarter of the missing half laid on the floor a few feet away from the man’s body - buttered-side pathetically facing the fancy ceramic tile. Inspector Edwards didn’t need a degree in rocket science to figure out the location of the last quarter of the culinary puzzle. A quick autopsy would surely confirm the dismal fate of the remaining slice. Logan allowed himself a disconcerted sigh before turning around and partaking in the soon-to-be-over conversation his boss and the high-ranking fireman were having.

Surprisingly so, Lieutenant Taylor quickly brought Logan into the discussion by summarizing the exchange his agent had just missed. "Edwards, Chief Hayes here and his men confirmed our suspicions ; the gas was simply left on after usage until the tank emptied itself". He then faced towards the victim and further explained. "Ian Astroff, 37, owner of a garage all the way back in Richmond District. He was found by the housekeeper. She comes over once a week usually on Tuesday mornings. She called as soon as she found him, completely freaked out. Anyway, the coroner’s diagnosis corroborates the leak theory. Said their time of death coincides and their body’s condition shows every symptoms of asphyxiation. He also said no autopsy required. The poor guy is probably the one responsible for this drama if you are right about her being sick and all that…" 

Logan nodded unconsciously still processing his boss’ verdict with a thoughtful expression plastered on his face, when Chief Hayes announced his departure. "Alright gentlemen, it was a pleasure to meet you despite the nature of this regrettable situation ; although I’m still relieved there is not danger for the neighborhood." He added a genuine "have a nice day" before exiting the house. 

Furrowed brows, Inspector Edwards silently conveyed his perplexity over the Chief’s last words before asking. "Danger for the neighborhood?" Clark answered abstractedly. "The main reason the fire department came here was to make sure there was so dysfunction with the gas system. All the houses ‘round here were constructed by the same company at the same time. If they were in anyway related to this accident, it could be a freakin’ disaster." 

The lines on Logan’s forehead smoothed with understanding, but the wheels in his brain were still turning judging by the intensity of his emerald eyes staring at the body still spread on the floor. When he finally cleared his throat to speak, his eyes didn’t shift an inch from their inanimate target. "We don’t have to worry about it though, it’s clearly not a dysfunction," he stated in an austere tone. Logan must have felt the odd stare the Lieutenant Taylor was directing at him, because he then looked up at his interlocutor. "It wasn’t an accident either. I think Ian Astroff and Linda Morris were murdered." 

Dumbfounded, Clark glared at him more persistently - if that was even possible. His eyes creased and his jaw fell slack in a ‘what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about’ way. Curiosity got the better of him and he confoundedly inquired with arms whirling above his head. "What in hell makes you think that?!" 

If Inspector Edwards was impressed by his boss’ sudden change in demeanor, he sure did a great job at not letting it reflect exteriorly. Instead, he remained collected and simply said to his awaiting superior, "There was no reason for the gas to be on."

There was a heavy pregnant pause before Lieutenant Taylor - who had already recovered form his outburst - decided to put an end to it. "That’s all you have?" he said it more like a statement. "How can you even be sure of what you’re putting forward?" 

His skepticism didn’t take Logan’s confidence down though. With more zest the inspector started sharing his reasoning with a frustrated Clark, each word a step forward in convincing him. "Just think about it for a second. The guy was eating takeaway pizza ; even if he had to heat it up he would have used the microwave. And as we established earlier, Ms. Morris was sick for the past two days."

"Alright, but you forgot the teapot" his boss tried to reason with him, but it seemed Logan had an answer for everything.

"Have you seen any mug around here?" He rhetorically asked, turning his upper body as if looking for the mug in question.

"Again you forgot there is one sitting on her nightstand" countered Clark.

"Again, it was filled with cocoa. She didn’t need boiling water for that. Besides, I lifted the teapot ; it’s empty."

Another silence settled between the two men whose thoughts were currently racing from all sides. Logan was trying to judge his boss’ reaction, while Lieutenant Taylor was processing the new theory. This time Inspector Edwards spoke first, voicing one last attempt to persuade his colleague. "Listen, something just doesn’t sit right. These persons were attentive, I mean look around the house, nothing’s out of place, it’s borderline OCD. Besides, you said Astroff worked at a garage right? He would know better than fiddling with the gas in his own house don’t you think?" 

For a few flashing seconds, the crease in Lieutenant Taylor’s eyes reappeared. Then he released a long sigh, his expression unreadable, keeping Logan on his toes, heart speeding up. "You’re a wanker, you know tha’?" he said dejectedly although the hint of a smirk was definitively threatening the serious expression he was trying to keep. "I guess your serious case might have come sooner than expected huh." Logan’s eyes were already starting to shine brighter. "You’re on Edwards!" the Lieutenant exclaimed before tapping his man’s shoulder and making his way out. Logan was beaming.  

[gemvictorfromtheponyverse]

Love at first Lizard Chapter One

Surprise! Me and @green-love-paternoster totally tricked you guys, because it’s not actually cancelled! There is 3 planned chapters and today we are presenting chapter Number One!!! Yay!

@idemandaspinoff @zaridaxe @dorvanie

————————————————————————

“Everything is goin’ to be alright, Greeny.” Jenny whispered reassuringly, hugging the travel cage for her chameleon lizard closer. She’d owned ‘Greeny’, as she called him, for little under a week, and already she had to take him to the vet.

Glancing up at the building in front of her, she swallowed audibly. It hadn’t been easy to find a vet that even catered to lizards to begin with, and now that she had found one that claimed to have an in-house reptile expert, she felt nervous. It was not that she was nervous about what they’d think of her, or Greeny, but rather the fact that she had never been to a vet’s office before. She had always hated hospitals, and the vet’s office gave her the same creepy feeling in her gut.

Nonetheless, Greeny needed looking after, and there was nowhere else she could go. Taking one last, deep breath, she grabbed the door and opened it, stepping inside.

The waiting room was small, but cozy, with pictures of delighted animals - mostly dogs and cats, but also a few horses and a rabbit - lining the walls, and a childish jungle themed carpet covered the floor. In the corner, a reception desk had been placed, and serving it was a petite dark haired girl that hardly seemed tall enough to see anything over the counter.

Swallowing loudly once more, Jenny gathered her courage and approached her. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

The girl, who had been absentmindedly drawing doodles on a notebook, instantly looked up upon hearing Jenny’s voice.

She looked at Jenny with big, warm brown eyes and a welcoming smile exclaiming, “Oh, hello there! Aren’t you a delightful surprise, business has been slow today, as you can see.” The girl made a sweeping gesture around the empty waiting room with pen still in hand. “My name’s Clara, how may I help you today?”

Feeling a little more confident thanks to the girl’s cheery attitude, Jenny smiled back. “Hello there. I’m Jenny Flint, and I need someone to look at my lizard? He seems to be a bit ill.” She lifted up the travel cage still in her hands for the girl to see, as if to emphasise her statement. “I heard you help lizards.”

Clara’s smile shrunk a bit as she switched her gaze from Jenny to the lizard huddled inside the carrier cage. The poor thing clearly didn’t seem to be doing so well, since he barely moved within the cage. Clara’s no lizard expert, but she hoped whatever that is wrong with the lizard will get fixed soon.

Clara then glanced back toward Jenny with a slightly sympathetic expression, for she saw that Jenny was genuinely worried about the health of her pet lizard. “You heard correctly indeed! Our certified in-house reptile expert is certainly the best in all of London….but I must warn you that she can be a bit of a grumpy old tightwad sometimes,” added Clara with a mischievous lilt in her tone, an attempt to make Jenny feel more at ease. “If there’s anyone who can figure out the problem with your lizard, it’s her!”

Jenny bit her lip, barely holding back a smile. While the way Clara presented the woman was a bit odd, she sounded good enough. Before she could answer her, however, she was interrupted by another person entering the room.

“Clara! Have you got the file on that dog who…oh.” As the man, a tall brown haired guy in a doctor’s coat, spotted Jenny, he stopped immediately. He was standing just short of the threshold to the waiting room, and casually leaned against the wall as he gave Jenny a once over. “Clara, who’s the new customer?” He smiled, a mischievous and quite silly smile, that almost made Jenny wonder if vets were always this casual.

“John, this is Jenny,” explained Clara, returning an equally exuberant smile to the man in the doorway. “She came here today because her lizard is sick.”

Clara giggled as soon as she said that, which Jenny found quite odd, and the man’s grin seemed to grow even larger, as if this was some kind of inside joke just between the two of them.

“Right! A lizard!” John said enthusiastically, giving Clara another suggestive look. “Two beautiful female specimens for our dear loony lizard lady to take a look at. Oh, Vastra is surely going to be satisfied by this!” His grin was almost covering his entire face now, and Clara looked as though she was struggling very hard not to laugh her head off. What was supposedly so funny about the situation, Jenny didn’t know, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out, either.

Jenny had no idea what to expect next, but her attention soon got caught on the stunningly gorgeous woman that appeared beside John, most likely having been drawn in by all the commotion he and Clara was causing. The mystery woman was tall, about the same height as John. She had brilliantly sharp blue eyes framed behind thin, rounded black glasses, well defined cheekbones and jawline, and there was a strip of green running along the middle of her dark brown hair, which she kept tied in a neat bun. Jenny also noticed the woman’s seemingly impeccable sense of style, consisting of a silken form-fitting purple blouse tucked into her black slacks, and flats on her feet with a slightly raised heel. The woman definitely exuded a distinctive aura of flawless elegance and meticulous professionalism, that was in stark contrast with the easygoing atmosphere projected by the other two employees. Jenny couldn’t help holding in her breath at the awe inspiring sight of the beautiful woman, as something told her that this visit to the vet was going to get a lot more challenging.

The Doctor gave Vastra a far too gleeful look. “Ah, Vastra, glad to see you sticking your head round these parts. We got two fresh female samples for you to look at!” He tried to keep a serious tone, but utterly failed, and Jenny once more found herself confused as to why the doctor was referring to her and her lizard in such a way.

The woman, now identified to be Vastra, appeared to be utterly unimpressed as she shook her head and grumbled, “God grant me the strength to deal with these two foolish comedians without losing my sanity!” Vastra then stepped in closer and peered at Jenny’s lizard in the carrier cage for a moment, before looking back over her shoulder at John to say, “Nice try, Doctor Smith, but this one is a male. Honestly, for you to be a veterinarian, your horrendous grasp of biology troubles me!”

“Oi! I am a female!” Jenny objected sharply. Honestly, for a woman like that, gorgeous as she might be, to come here and call her a male. Like a male animal!

“And I do know biology!” John added, in response to the insult against his credentials as a veterinarian. “It’s just lizards that are, well…green and not green. Or the other way around!”

Completely ignoring John’s complaint, Vastra simply turned her head to face the visibly indignant Jenny and spoke smoothly, “Calm down, miss, I was actually referring to your pet, not you.” She allowed herself to do a quick visual scan of Jenny’s physical features and attire, noting that she was in fact rather attractive. Vastra immediately dismissed such inappropriate thoughts and continued in the same strictly formal tone, “Now, if you wouldn’t mind following me into my office room, I will be able to start properly examining your lizard there. It’s absolutely beyond my knowledge how Doctor Smith over here manage to get any work done, when he’s too busy making juvenile jokes with Miss Oswald.”

Sharply, Vastra turned around on her heels, and Jenny bit her lip hard to keep herself from letting out a noise as she caught sight of the woman’s well trimmed arse. It was the perfect, circular shape and Jenny could feel her cheeks heating up as she bit her lip even harder. Now was definitely not the time to lose herself to the appeal of the Lizard veterinarian, but by god, she was hot.

Holding the cage up in front of her like a shield, Jenny reluctantly turned to follow Vastra into her office.“Coming, Ma’am.” She said quietly, holding the cage a little tighter as she looked back at John and Clara by the desk, seeing them still giggling among themselves. “His name’s Greeny, by the way.” She didn’t know why she said the last part. It was stupid, extremely so, and she knew it. She knew no one who named their lizard Greeny, and yet, she had, thinking herself funny.

She just never thought she’d have to answer for it in front of an extremely hot lizard veterinarian.

Vastra stopped just before the door to her office, already having her hand on the doorknob, and Jenny swore she nearly dropped the cage when the oh so magnificent woman struck her with an expression of dubious disdain, one perfectly curved eyebrow raised up toward her forehead

“You can’t be serious, Miss Flint. ‘Greeny?’” Vastra scoffed in a haughty manner that was beginning to rub Jenny’s skin the wrong way. Throughout her years working in this clinic, Vastra had encountered pets with almost every single name you could imagine under the sun, but ‘Greeny’….now that was a new one; And by far, the least original she’ve ever heard. “You ought to be more creative than that, even my three year old nephew could come up with something better!“

Then without further ado, Vastra effortlessly twisted the doorknob to open the door leading into her office before walking in herself, and leaving Jenny standing outside with her mouth hanging agape in the wake of her surprisingly rude comment.

“Well I’m sorry, but I rather like calling my lizard Greeny. He is green.” Jenny couldn’t help but get defensive, because she couldn’t believe how unimaginably rude Vastra had just been. As if she had the right to judge what Jenny named her lizard!

Vastra wordlessly walked over to her desk at the other end of the room, where she picked up a disheveled stack of papers and proceeded to shuffle them.

“Well anybody with properly functioning eyes can clearly see that to be true, so my point still stands that naming him ‘Greeny’ is terribly redundant,” retorted Vastra while loftily waving away Jenny’s statement as if it was a pesky and insignificant fly.

Jenny huffed in annoyance. She’d told herself she wouldn’t care what they had to say about her and Greeny, but it was proving increasingly difficult, seeing as the veterinarian seemed to be hellbent on making everything harder and more embarrassing for Jenny. “Then what would you call a lizard? I, for one, cannot think of a better name.”

Vastra continued to occupy herself with various little miscellaneous tasks around her desk in order to avoid looking directly at her client, who she had mentally admitted to being the very most loveliest creature she’d ever laid eyes on, albeit not without tremendous difficulty. God knows it had been an excessively arduous task for her to maintain a steady, neutral composure out in the waiting room with Clara and John. No doubt those two would be cackling their heads off like hyenas if they could see her now, flustered out of her wits because of this stupidly beautiful girl with dark brown hair and charming brown eyes. She was exactly Vastra’s type, much to her utter dismay.

Using her naturally embedded cynicism as a pretense to mask her rising attraction, Vastra quipped in response,“How would I know, I’m only the vet around here. I don’t get paid enough to consult with painfully bland pet owners who can’t look beyond their animal’s physicality to give them an appropriate name.” Very subtly, Vastra’s head and shoulders seemed to become tense as she anticipated Jenny’s inevitable rebuttal, and the intoxicating sound of her Cockney accent that would come along with it.

At this, Jenny gave her an ice cold glare. Even for such a gorgeous woman as her, there wasn’t any good explanation for being quite so rude. The woman wouldn’t even look at her! It was almost as though she was not worthy of being acknowledged, for Vastra had better things to do.

Even with Clara’s warning poking at her from the back of her mind, it was frustrating. "Well then, maybe you could do your job, instead of complaining about things you clearly claimed are none or your concerns?”

Vastra could practically feel Jenny’s probing glare on the back of her head, causing an involuntary shiver to run down her spine. Nonetheless, she still managed to produce an articulate reply, “I simply stated my sympathies for your poor lizard who has to live the rest of his life with such a mediocre name as ‘Greeny’.” Then closing her eyes, Vastra inhaled a deep breath, and eventually was able to muster just enough courage to turn around toward her client. Obviously trying to be a bit more cordial, Vastra suggested, “Perhaps it would be best if you go ahead and tell me the reason you’re here, since we’ve just wasted half an hour debating your lizard’s name.”

Seeing her eyes, Jenny almost couldn’t breath. Gone was the frustration and anger, it all washed off of her like an unpleasant shower coming to an end. The brilliant blue eyes looked at her, waiting for her answer, and unconsciously, Jenny smiled. She didn’t even care that she had to spend half-an hour justifying her pet’s name to a stranger when she should have been at work. It didn’t matter anymore all of sudden.

“Yes, of course, uh, well…” Taking a deep breath, she tried to gather herself and figure out what to say next. “I recently bought this lizard, you see. I’ve only had him for little under a week, but he already seems to have gotten sick. He barely moves and won’t eat.”

It required every last ounce of willpower for Vastra not let herself become undone right there at the sight of Jenny’s radiant smile. She mentally cursed herself for getting too carried away with her unnecessarily snarky attitude, when she really should be helping Jenny tend to her lizard. Her demeanor softened considerably upon witnessing the apparent nervousness written all across Jenny’s face, and she smiled pityingly while gesturing toward the examination table in the middle of the room. “That does sound troublesome indeed, miss. I truly want to do everything I can to alleviate your lizard, but first I’ll need to ask that you take him out of the carrier cage for me.”

Jenny nodded, swallowing audibly as she walked over to the table, putting down the carrier case and opening it. Greeny was hiding in the furthest corner of the space, and she glanced at Vastra uncertainly. “Do you want to take him out?” She asked politely, standing by to lift him out herself if Vastra thought it was better. A little dumbstruck, Vastra nodded positively with a reassuring smile, “It would be my utmost pleasure, Miss Flint.”

Jenny’s ears instantly perked up upon detecting a mild, but still relatively evident Scottish accent among Vastra’s words, thus making her all the more attractive if that was even possible. Vastra went over to a cabinet on the wall where she retrieved a fresh pair of gloves, pulling them on with a satisfyingly audible snap.That simple action drew Jenny’s attention to Vastra’s exquisitely long fingers, which then set loose a chaotic whirlwind of very impure thoughts running through Jenny’s starstrucked mind;They might or might not, have been something along the lines of getting her body pinned against the office wall by the bewitchingly sexy veterinarian, and letting those surely capable fingers have their way with her. All that Jenny could do was keep biting her lip even harder, almost to the point of drawing blood, while simultaneously trying her best to appear normal in front of this goddamn goddess of a veterinarian. Jenny soon stepped aside to give Vastra access to the carrier and watched with baited breath as her hands reached into the carrier.

“That’s it, Greeny, who’s a good green lizard boy. Yes, come here to the nice veterinarian, I’m not going to hurt you,“cooed Vastra in such a beautifully soothing voice that it made Jenny want to laugh and her heart melt at the same time. Thanks to a bit of highly effective coaxing from Vastra, she finally succeeded in bringing Greeny out of his cozy carrier, holding him in a carefully firm, yet gentle grip.

Alas, everything was put into jeopardy, when the calmly quiet atmosphere of the room was suddenly interrupted by someone else bursting in through the door like a mighty blast of gale force wind.

“Madame! Strax is here to assist you, for the glory of this clinic!” The man standing and shouting in the doorway was short, buff and bald. He had slightly brown colored skin, and had Jenny not known any better, she would have compared him to an oversized, sentient cartoon potato. Only potatoes didn’t walk around screaming, nor did they dress like nurses. Still, in her mind Jenny decided to refer to…him? Him, as a potato.

The ruckus caused by Strax’s impromptu entrance did not sit well with Greeny, who began flailing his entire body within Vastra’s hands. That, in turn, caught Vastra off guard and she nearly dropped Greeny out of shock, but luckily she was able to catch herself at the last minute, and narrowly avoided getting her eye poked by one of the lizard’s sharp horns.

“Careful, Madame. The poky lizard would not do well on the floor.” Strax provided unhelpfully, the little potato not moving an inch and grinning like a madman at Vastra.

“STRAX! How many times must I tell you, not to be so BLOODY loud when you come into the office!” Barked Vastra in her exasperation at the rambunctious potato man. Then suddenly realizing the kind of language she had just used aloud, Vastra gave Jenny an apologetic grimace and said, “I am deeply sorry about this, Miss Flint, but my assistant can be quite….enthusiastic in his job sometimes.”

Inwardly, however, Vastra made herself a mental note to remember to kill the person responsible for feeding Strax the sherbert fancies that are making him obviously hyper.

Jenny merely shook her head. Nearly causing Vastra to drop Greeny aside, she found the little potato man quite adorable. “I believe it is fine. It does not appear to have been Mister Po…Strax’s intention to be disruptive. Right?” She smiled at the potato man, who smiled right back, as enthusiastic as ever before.

“Quite right, boy!” He confirmed, missing Jenny’s unamused expression as he turned his attention back to Vastra. “The Doctor was making coffee and thought you might be in need of assistance, Madame.”

Vastra was definitely looking forward to the Doctor’s funeral, in that case. As if this whole ordeal wasn’t already stressful enough, now that lanky buffoon had sent Strax in to cause even more trouble than necessary. This was just perfect, thought Vastra.

Jenny watched the two persons in front of her, swallowing hard as she felt the tension simmering between them. Vastra was obviously angry with Strax, but the latter was either too daft, or too oblivious of his surroundings to notice. Timidly, she spoke up. “Excuse me, I don’t mean to be a bother, but this appointment is coming out of my salary, so perhaps we can get on with it now?” She smiled half-heartedly, hoping it would be enough to get everything back on track.

Jenny’s voice cut right through Vastra’s flaring temper and brought her back to the situation at hand. Once again, she smiled sheepishly at Jenny saying, “Oh, yes, that we do indeed, for surely I would hate to put your paycheck at risk.” After taking a few seconds to compose herself, Vastra looked back toward Strax in silent resignation to address him with, “Alright, Strax, I’ll let you stay in here to assist me, but only if you promise to be quiet for God’s sake, and not touch anything until I tell you otherwise.”

Hearing that he was allowed to stay, Strax punched one of his short, stubby arms in the air, trying to make some kind of victory gesture. “I will help you Madame! For the glory of this clinic!”

Jenny laughed a little, not able to hold it back. Strax really was adorable. “Thanks. Scotland Yard doesn’t pay nearly as much as you’d think.”

Vastra paused in the midst of her inspection of Greeny the lizard to look at Jenny, equally impressed and curious. “Really, you work at Scotland Yard? Well, that does sound to be rather exciting, is it not?”

Jenny shrugged. “Yes ma’am, though it’s not very exciting. It’s mostly a lot of paperwork. Gets a bit lonely, too. That’s why I got a lizard - so I’d have some company that doesn’t require being walked three times a day and are allowed in my flat.”

“I see….even if it’s not as glamorous is you say, I have immense respect for anyone willing to risk their life in the name of justice at Scotland Yard. Although, I am sorry to hear that you’re feeling lonely,” spoke Vastra sympathetically, making casual conversation with her client as she continued to study Greeny. “I was just under the impression that such a seemingly likable, and decent girl as you would have plenty of friends to keep you company.”

Jenny blushed a little at Vastra’s glowing compliments, looking down at the floor. “I didn’t have many people before I joined Scotland Yard, and my current working schedule doesn’t exactly encourage lots of socialising and spending time with friends.” She bit her lip, trying not to let the other woman’s words get to her. It never bothered her that she had few people that she considered close to her, why would it now?

Vastra risked a brief discreet glance at Jenny and replied, “It would appear that you and I are the same in that regard, since I’m not exactly the type of person to put myself out there for all the world see. I’ll admit that I am much more adept at dealing with animals than I am with people. Apart from Doctor John, Clara, and even Strax, there’s actually nobody else that I can view as my friend.” Sensing Jenny’s increasing discomfort, Vastra then cleared her throat and decided to immediately change the subject. “I must say, Miss Flint, this is a really handsome Jackson Horned Chameleon you have here. It’s a shame that he had gotten sick so soon….what are his symptoms again, if I may ask?”

“He is not handsome, but well equipped for battle! It is most glorious!” Strax declared, before Jenny had a chance to repeat her lizards symptoms.

His eyes shone like stars as he spoke and Jenny found herself a bit uncomfortable by the thought that maybe he was attracted to things and people that could defend themselves. She shuddered.

“He’s not eating, and barely moving, ma’am.” Jenny told Vastra, trying to push Strax’s comment into the back of her mind where she’d never have to think of it again.

Vastra shot Strax a heated death glare as a warning before inquiring further, “Hmm, yes, he does appear to have lost some weight….what have you been feeding him?” Vastra then became aware of how Greeny was gradually curling himself against her arm, seemingly attracted to her natural body heat.

“I feed him insects. Mostly crickets, as instructions says.” Jenny said, looking straight at Vastra, a little questioning.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Asked a befuddled Vastra, afraid that she might have somehow offended her pretty client again. “I swear, I wasn’t trying to accuse you of any wrongdoing. Jackson Horned Chameleon diets are typically composed of insects and crickets, so at least you’re doing that right. Do you have some kind of enclosed habitat in your home to contain him in?”

Jenny nodded rapidly. She felt eager to please the gorgeous woman handling her lizard, wanted to show her that she was not some clueless person who just adopted an animal without a plan. “Yes, I have an enclosure at home, as one should have.”

Jenny’s confident statement was then rewarded with a dazzling smile of approval from Vastra that knocked all the air out of her lungs. Vastra’s tone was almost rather playful when she said,“Quite the responsible pet owner now, aren’t you? Very good, and can you please describe this enclosure to me?”

Jenny blushed at the praise, looking down at the floor, but glancing back at Vastra as she spoke,”It’s a mesh cage, as the guide said to avoid glass enclosures, and there’s a little tree for him to climb. That is about it.”

“Well I suppose that minimalism does have its appeal to some people, but I will advise you to add in a few more plants for his habitat,”Vastra suggested wisely. “What about the climate and average temperature of your home? Do you have any type of heat source that can be kept near Greeny’s cage?”

Jenny stared at her as though she’d suddenly grown a second head, or possibly a third eye. “Heat source? Climate?”

Jenny’s confused expression prompted Vastra to tilt her head, and lift one skeptical eyebrow as she spoke, “Miss Flint, you are aware of the fact that reptiles like Greeny are cold-blooded, and must gain heat from their surroundings in order to function, aren’t you? Or did they not teach you that back in grade school science class?”

At this, Jenny gave Vastra what she believed was the most apologetic smile ever to have existed, eyes quickly diverting and looking back down on the ground. The peach carpet sure was interesting to look at, Jenny decided. “I’m afraid I was never the sharpest one, ma’am. Haven’t had much education altogether, and can’t say I remember being taught anything about lizards.” She sighed, embarrassed. She had really hoped she would have done enough research to avoid exposing her rather lacking education in general.

The underlying sadness in Jenny’s words struck Vastra’s heart heavily, and she immediately regretted being so snide in her remark without actually meaning to. It physically pained her to see this beautiful, sweet young girl defeated by her own insecurities, which was preventing her from recognizing her full potential and self worth. Vastra, too, dropped her gaze to the floor as she was suddenly desperate to find something that could cheer up Jenny.

“There’s no reason why you should be embarrassed, Miss Flint,” Vastra began sincerely, eyes fixed onto Jenny’s depressed form. “Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, it’s a natural part of life. I know that you are trying your best to take care of Greeny, and I do not blame you for being uninformed regarding the biological anatomy of reptiles. You may not be well educated, but I can tell that you must possess a considerable amount of merit since you were able to get into Scotland Yard. So chin up a little, will you, for Greeny’s sake?” Vastra held up Greeny as if he was a sort of mascot in an attempt to uplift Jenny’s falling spirits, while acquiring a pleading puppy dog face herself to boot.

Jenny couldn’t help but smile a little. No one had ever tried so hard to encourage her and make her happy. If you want to be happy, you make yourself happy, her mom had used to say. But here this gorgeous veterinarian was, cheering her up like her life depended on it, and Greeny looking confused as he twisted around in her hands. “Alright, for you and Greeny.” She agreed finally, giving Vastra her largest grin.

Vastra released a little sigh of relief, and returned a pleasant smile of her own to Jenny; She was most delighted to witness how Jenny had transformed from a hopelessly wilted plant, to a lively blooming flower being fed by the rejuvenating waters of a spring shower. Another, albeit quite unexpected, result was that Vastra also found herself having a strange and powerful urge to always make Jenny happy like this in any way possible….depending on the probability of whether or not she’ll ever see her again at the clinic, that is. A part of her was already wishing and praying for Jenny to come back someday.

Vastra was so enraptured by her client’s joyous beauty, that it took her several minutes to find her tongue again. “Excellent! It is a scientifically proven fact that pets thrive much better when their owners possess a positive attitude, as opposed to being down in the dumps,”proclaimed Vastra, who included a sly wink to show that she was only teasing. “Now, I assume you will be glad to know that Greeny’s condition isn’t as serious as you think, and he can easily be cured with the use of a proper heat lamp. I’m sure that you will be able to buy one at your local pet store, or online if you prefer. Either way, I highly recommend that you get one as soon as possible, because Jackson Horned Chameleons need to be kept at a temperature of between 20 and 32 degrees celsius.”

At this point, Vastra didn’t mind in the slightest that Greeny was practically holding her arm captive, because the poor thing had clearly been deprived of warmth for so long.

Jenny nodded at her words, acting like a school kid confirming her teacher’s instructions for her homework assignment. “I’ll see about getting one uh…,”She glanced at the clock, trying to estimate how long she’d been there,”…on my way home. My shift’s over, by now, so I won’t really have anything better to do. Besides, the sooner Greeny gets what he needs, the better.” Jenny turned to Vastra and smiled, stretching out her hands expectantly.

“Smart thinking, Miss Flint, Greeny will certainly appreciate the sentiment. He should consider himself lucky having such a thoughtful and committed owner as you,” concluded Vastra while she prepared to give Greeny back to Jenny.

What was supposed to be a standard transaction suddenly became much more complicated when their hands touched upon Greeny. Both Jenny and Vastra gasped softly as sparks seemed to fly from the very first second they made that physical contact, feeling the invisible electricity race up their arms before ultimately exploding against their hearts. Their bodies trembled due to the sheer force of the impact, which continued to echo in massive rippling waves throughout their entire frame. Meanwhile, their overlapping hands had become extremely hot as if they were laying on a furnace, though the two of them fought the urge to jerk away lest they drop Greeny. The heat quickly spread to their faces, and their cheeks lit up with a blazing red color. Hearts pounding, palms sweating, minds spinning, neither Jenny nor Vastra had ever experienced anything this intense before, and they both struggled to fully comprehend what was happening to them. Eventually, they were able to remove their gaze from Greeny and locked eyes with each other instead. They immediately froze in place where they stood, as if some kind of mysterious unseen power had stripped them of all their ability to move. Everything else seemed to fade away until it was just the two of them left in this lofty, and surreal dimension that separated them from the rest of reality;The very air surrounding them had morphed and shifted itself, becoming significantly heavier with a daunting, unspoken question that loomed over their heads. Despite their current immobility, there was still a distinctly spiritual energy of restlessness that caused their souls to be irresistibly attracted to one another like opposite ends of a magnet. Vastra and Jenny both realized that something needed to be said if they were to break free of this awkward situation, but every word they meant to say instantly evaporated off of the tip of their tongues before they even had the chance, thus rendering their voices utterly useless.

Whether they liked it or not, they are completely, effectively, undeniably stuck.

They kept standing there, stagnant and unable to move for several more moments, before the door suddenly opened. Stepping in through the opening, was none other than Dr.John Smith himself.

“Strax, I need you! That pitbull that likes you is here and…” As he saw what he walked in on, he stopped, confusion quickly replaced by a mad grin. “Oh my…I’m sorry, Vastra, I thought you and Miss Flint would have been finished by now!” He let out a small laugh, and Vastra could see the joke in his eyes. “But I guess she required a lot of care!” He did a not-so subtle wink with his eye at this, and Vastra wanted to strangle him for his shameless behaviour.

The Doctor’s surprise intervention was enough to startle Vastra and Jenny into jumping apart from each other, with Jenny frantically clutching Greeny close to her chest. His gaze kept switching back and forth between the two women, as he was clearly relishing in the rare sight of a highly flustered Vastra. The other veterinarian glared daggers at him with laser point precision, being not thrilled at him barging into her office wearing that infuriatingly smug grin that she would love to tear off his face. Vastra fastidiously wiped her hands on her coat and hardened her facial expression, all in a futile attempt to make herself appear more dignified, yet the tell-tale fiery blush on her cheeks still remained. The Doctor always had the worst sense of timing, and Vastra hates the fact that this one incident has now given him basically unlimited ammunition to bombard her with.

“Ahem…uhh…Strax, it would seem that I will have to relieve you of your duties here at the present moment,” began Vastra calmly, as she was determined to pretend that nothing had ever happened. “Go ahead with Doctor Smith and report back to me when you are done.” She then turned her head to look directly at the Doctor and said to him, “And you, Doctor Smith, I simply cannot comprehend why you still insist on calling Miss Flint’s lizard a ‘she’ after we’ve been over it already. He did require a lot of care, but fortunately we were able to reach a viable solution. Now, do be so kind and remove yourself from my office, your unsightly hideous face is apparently causing Greeny some considerable discomfort.”

Vastra also made sure to punctuate her biting statement with an equally sardonic smile that told the Doctor ‘two can play at this game’.

“Ma’am!” Jenny couldn’t help the complaint that escaped her lips. Despite lacking in many other areas, Jenny had very good manners, and she knew what Vastra had said was not acceptable. Though the man had been immensely rude to his co-worker, and Greeny did look quite uncomfortable, it was simply not right to say such mean things to anyone.

John, however, didn’t seem as bothered by it. He simply gave her a wink and a smile, showing that it was all okay. “Don’t worry, my dear, the cold blooded tend to behave this way. Now, if you excuse me, I must be off.” Wasting no more time, John turned around and left the room, Strax hurrying to follow in his lead.

“Sir, wait for me!” He called out as he, too, left the room, short legs moving him as quick as possible away from Jenny and Vastra, leaving them completely alone once more.

Jenny glanced awkwardly around the room, trying to avoid looking at the veterinarian as she finally settled in with the task of putting Greeny back into his traveling cage. “Well, if there is nothing else, I suppose I should get going. I’ll remember to buy a heat lamp whenever I can.”

Jenny didn’t know why she was saying goodbye. She didn’t want to go, didn’t want to leave this gorgeous woman before her and likely never see her again. Yet, she had no choice, as there was no longer anything keeping her there. She sighed, deep and heavy.

Vastra’s head instantly swiveled back toward Jenny, her anger at the Doctor suddenly replaced with a grim sense of despair upon hearing Jenny say that. Truth be told, Vastra really didn’t want Jenny to leave either, but she knew she couldn’t risk violating professional business protocol by letting her suspiciously not-so-platonic feelings be revealed in front of this beautiful and lovely client, who had become the object of her affections. Rubbing the back of her neck with one hand, Vastra merely gave a small sheepish smile as she responded, “Yes, of course, it’s getting rather late….and I’m certain there are other clients that I need to attend to. Before I do that, though, I’d just like to say that it’s been my absolute pleasure helping you and Greeny today, Miss Flint.” Vastra paused for a moment, overcome with a sudden bout of self-consciousness, and temporarily diverted her gaze to the floor. She was soon able to look at Jenny again while her blue eyes shone faintly with optimism, and added, “I hope that you found my services here to be satisfactory then?”

Although they had gotten started on the wrong foot earlier, Vastra did genuinely mean what she said. Out of every other client that Vastra had come across during the course of her four year career at the clinic, none of them had ever fascinated or outright perplexed her quite like Jenny does. There was an unexplainable, penetrating, persistent feeling deep within her gut telling Vastra that maybe….just maybe….it will be different and special with Jenny. She had utterly no idea why she is willing to get her hopes up so high for this girl who she never knew existed until an hour ago, but at the same time she found herself unable to stop, too. While Vastra may be a certified know-it-all expert of lizards, she is actually terribly ignorant when it comes to matters of love.

Jenny couldn’t help but feel disappointed. After their hands had touched, she’d actually believed there was something between them, a connection perhaps. That maybe Vastra felt the same and shared even just a fraction of her own feelings. But, of course, not for her as she was just another worried pet owner. “Right. Yes, your service was excellent and much appreciated. Goodbye, Miss McIntosh.”

The two of them approached the door together, and there was a brief episode of awkwardly treading around eggshells, before Vastra finally insisted on holding the door open for Jenny to get through.

Glancing back wistfully at Vastra as she went, Jenny left the room, walking down the corridor and back to the waiting room. At the reception section, she saw Dr.Smith and the receptionist, Clara, standing there and chatting away amongst themselves. Quickly, Jenny tried to make a bee-line for the door, hoping to avoid any more awkwardness by escaping unnoticed. She really didn’t feel up to listening to another of the other veterinarian’s comments, with his painstakingly clear innuendos.

She was just about to open the door and step outside, when suddenly, she heard someone calling her name.

“Miss Flint, wait! Please don’t leave yet!

Jenny was able to recognize that voice as belonging to Vastra, who nearly tripped and fell over her feet while rushing to catch Jenny at the door before it was too late. Dr. John and Clara both ceased their animated conversation in favor of watching their co-coworker chasing after a particular client like a madwoman, which was something they’ve never seen before. Every muscle in Jenny’s body became notably rigid with anticipation, and she closed her eyes, gathering herself so that she could face the gorgeous veterinerian again without automatically falling apart on the spot. When Jenny finally turned around, Vastra was standing only ten inches away, looking rather out of breath as her chest heaved rapidly to refill her lungs with air, and there was a thin sheen of sweat covering her forehead. Even in this disheveled and exhausted state, did Jenny still considered Vastra to be the most extraordinarily attractive woman in the whole world. She also noticed that Vastra was holding a sheet of paper in her hand, inspiring a newfound sense of curiosity within her mind.

Once she had recovered enough of her energy to speak, Vastra said, “Pardon my, err, inconvenience, Miss Flint, but I’ve just realized that I forgot to ask for your phone number. It’s a precaution to help us keep in contact with you, in case any problems should arise with your pet, Greeny, later on in the future.”

Not really knowing what else to say, Vastra simply held out the sheet of paper in front of Jenny, silently requesting her to sign it.

Seeing the paper, Jenny couldn’t help but smile. It was only for Greeny’s sake, she knew, but a small part of her just couldn’t help but hope that there was something more to it. Smiling nonetheless, she took the offered paper and pen, quickly writing down her number before giving it back. As she did, however, a sudden and crazy idea hit her. “There you go. And, uh, if you wouldn’t mind, could I have your number as well? In case something does happen.”

It wasn’t until now that Vastra became aware of two other pairs of eyes watching them intently from across the opposite side of the room. Vastra blinked obliviously and tilted her head aside, trying to confirm if she had heard that correctly, or were her ears playing a false trick on her? Naturally, she found it hard to believe that anyone would ever want her number, especially this angelic, amazing young girl who she had been so insensitive to.

“Come on Vastra, do it!” Vastra could hear John whispering behind her back. “I know you can do it!”

“No way, she won’t!” Clara protested, indicating that there was probably a bet taking place between the two of them. “She’s always been all talk and no action!”

As soon as Clara said that, it was like two circuit wires had been inserted inside Vastra’s brain to shock it back to life again, and she managed to smile charmingly at Jenny. “I suppose that would be alright, even if it’s not something that I normally do,” answered Vastra, who then unceremoniously grabbed Jenny’s hand and scrawled her own number on it. “Well, there you have it! That’s actually all the information that I need, so….have a wonderful evening, Miss Flint.”

Vastra couldn’t understand why she just did that, writing her number onto Jenny’s bare hand instead of a piece of paper, like any other reasonable and normal person would.

Jenny smiled at her hand and turned around with the intention of walking out the door, but somehow ended up colliding headlong into it. Though a bit disoriented, Jenny was luckily able to find the door handle and swiftly exited the building. She wore a huge grin on her face, feeling more satisfied with herself than she’d been in a very, very long time. As she began heading down the sidewalk towards her apartment, Jenny abruptly stopped and carefully put the carrier on the ground. She then pulled out her phone from her pocket, typing the number on her hand into her phone’s contact list, and also taking a picture of her hand for good measure. She really didn’t want to lose the number, after having gone through so much just to get it.

And who knew? Maybe she would need to call and ask about Greeny….wait, who’s Greeny? Oh yeah, her pet lizard, how silly of her to forget for a minute there, again.

Still smiling, she bent down and picked up the carrier. “Love you little guy!”

Jenny truly did love Greeny. She had originally bought him to be less lonely, and now it seemed as though it had all worked out, in the best way possible.

————————————————————————

People on tagging list for uodates/Chapters are:

@idemandaspinoff @zaridaxe @dorvanie

If you want to be tagged in future uodates and chapters, contact me and I will add you!

[jacewilliams1]

On automation and airmanship

“I believe any good pilot has a certain skepticism. If he or she isn’t a skeptic, they are headed for trouble. This seems especially true with the computer—and when I say computer I include FMS, autopilot and all. Being skeptical means a pilot refers to raw data to be certain the FMS etc., is doing its thing correctly. This is not always easy because as the computer develops it makes raw data more difficult to see, find and use.” – Captain Robert Buck, TWA

I have been known, on occasion, to talk to the autopilot. “Why on earth are you closing the throttles now?” or “What? Who told you to fly at 210 knots?” It’s possible that this could be a little unnerving to an unsuspecting first officer, but there are occasions when it is necessary to question the autopilot’s intentions or even its situational awareness. Sometimes I have to intervene: ”No, no, let’s not do it that way… here, let’s try this mode…” And every so often, “Oh for goodness’ sake, stop making this harder than it is…” a comment usually associated with disconnecting the thing.

Some of that comes from the early days of my career, the first five thousand hours of which involved Convairs and Metroliners with no autopilots and no flight directors. We hand flew all day, er, night, every day and night. This was a pattern only gradually altered by flying the 727, whose autopilot was equipped with an input control that we commonly referred to as the “lurch lever” because the spring tensions were not well calibrated to the G tolerances of the typical passenger’s posterior. On legs under an hour, many of us never engaged the autopilot at all, nor did we activate the flight directors unless we were flying an instrument approach. We simply flew pitch and power like we always had.

It might sound crazy, but airline pilots once flew trips without ever engaging the autopilot.

But most of it comes from a strategy to manage two parallel and integrated situational awarenesses: the old, original one (where are we, where are we going and at what angle of attack), along with a new one (where does the autoflight system think we are, where does it think we want to go, how is it going to get us there and, perhaps of separate but equal importance, where are we within one or more flight envelopes that it is designed to protect us from departing?). Both situational awarenesses are vital to safety. But with the advent of the second awareness, the automation awareness, it has become common for the authorities, manufacturers and various other august bodies of expertise to start describing pilots as “systems operators” or “system managers.”

This is not really a new idea. In 1953, Guy Murchie, writing in his book Song of the Sky, rather presciently predicted “a maplike screen on which will be projected pips of light representing not only his own position but those of other craft, enabling him to monitor the traffic situation continuously and check navigation by eyesight in the densest cloud.” This is a curiously accurate description of an FMS-driven Navigation Display with TCAS superimposed. By 1959, General Pete Quesada, the first FAA Administrator, observed that, with respect to military pilots, “The day of the throttle jockey is past. He is becoming a true professional, a manager of complex weapons systems.”

But back in 1939, writing in his masterpiece, Wind Sand and Stars, the French airmail pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery anticipated how we might lose control of this evolution. He wrote that,

In the enthusiasm of our rapid mechanical conquests we have overlooked some things. We have perhaps driven men into the service of the machine, instead of building machinery for the service of man.

It is easy to intuit how the concept of a manager of systems veers toward a man in the service of the machine. With the acceleration of automation in the cockpit, and the mishaps and accidents that have resulted, it seems to me that we have never truly resolved Saint-Exupery’s point. On the one hand, the pilot in command remains the final authority as to the operation of the aircraft. On the other, the pilot is an operator of complex systems that he is no longer expected to understand.

A few years ago, David Blair and Nick Helms published a thoughtful paper entitled “The Swarm, the Cloud, and the Importance of Getting There First,” a treatise on remotely piloted aircraft operated by the US Air Force. They concisely and carefully captured Saint-Exupery’s dichotomy in more contemporary terms:

The first truth of special operations holds that humans are more important than hardware. In other words, technology exists to enable people to fulfill the mission. This is the capabilities view of technology: machines are amplifiers of human will, better enabling them to make something of their world. By exercising dominion through technology, people gain greater command over their environment. The alternative is that humans are important to operate the hardware—that people are subsystems within larger socio-mechanical constructs. This view, cybernetics, encloses people within closed control loops that regulate systemic variables within set parameters. Rather than human versus machine, the true discussion about the future of RPAs addresses capabilities versus cybernetics.

The original intent of contemporary cockpit automation arose from the capabilities view of technology, in particular the capability to optimize aerodynamic efficiency while also optimizing airspace utilization. This was, and still is, clearly a machine in the service of man. The intent of automation began to migrate toward the cybernetics view with the notion that we could automate human error out of the equation. In my experience, this migration happened about the same time we transitioned from experienced instructors hand-drawing schematics on whiteboards to well-meaning but very inexperienced people flipping Powerpoint slides salted with schematics from the maintenance manual.

Is this technology in service of man or vice versa?

Cockpit automation is today widely discussed and trained from the cybernetics view of technology. This has been powerfully reinforced by the extensive understanding of human factors as a deterministic, predictable discipline, indeed, by the fundamental understanding of behavior from the deterministic view of neuroscience.

In their 2014 report entitled “A Practical Guide for Improving Flight Path Monitoring”, the Flight Safety Foundation noted that,

Multiple studies have shown that many pilots poorly understand aspects of autoflight modes, in part because training emphasizes correct “button pushing” over developing accurate mental models. Simply stated, it is impossible to monitor a complex system if a pilot isn’t sure how to correctly operate that system or what type of aircraft performance can be expected from each autoflight mode. A pilot who has an accurate mental model of the autoflight system can then learn how to use each mode and will be able to accurately predict what the aircraft will do next in a given mode in each specific situation.

A short trip through Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine will place us in a new-hire flight engineer classroom. The instructor is a retired chief master sergeant, and he is diagramming by hand the disassembly, piece by piece, of an air conditioning pack. By the time he is done, the new pilots will thoroughly understand how a pack works, and therefore have a solid grasp of what they are looking at on the pack temp gauge… at least that was the plan in those days.

In order to get rid of the flight engineer, we had to get rid of the pack temperature gauge. The thinking was that by automating the systems and improving the system status annunciations, we could make the task of monitoring systems much simpler. As we automated, we also watered down the ground school; there was no longer any reason to truly understand the system at a component level, since the automation would tell you all you needed to know. This is precisely the trajectory that Murchie had in mind when, continuing his 1953 description of a future cockpit, he said that,

Elimination of everything unessential is a big load off the crew’s brains. When the flight engineer wants to check whether his battery generators are working he used to have to read a dial needle pointing to numbers of amperes of charge or discharge. In the future he will only see a green or red light indicating “yes” or “no.” With fifty such indicators shorn of their wool, the crew will be spared much of the dangerous excess of information from which they have long had to select, abstract, interpolate, extrapolate, derive, and ignore—sometimes literally to the point of death. The airplane will enter a new phase of progress.

But along the way, I believe a very subtle paradigm shift occurred. Back in the day, we had a vague idea of approximately where we were in space. Between the A-N ranges, ADF pointers and LORAN systems, we were generally sure of which hemisphere we were flying in, and with some skill we could place the airplane over a runway threshold safely and reliably, albeit with little surety of exactly where we had been in the process of getting there. Whilst sorting out the bearings, radials and tones, it was essential to keep all one hundred and twelve cylinders lubricated, firing properly and not consuming more gasoline than was absolutely necessary. Monitoring had a great deal to do with aircraft systems, and less to do with the flight path. The flight path was more a matter of technique as long as one avoided an unintended stall.

But at the same time we were automating away little dials pointing at numbers indicating amperes, we were increasing airspace occupancy exponentially. Frequency, frequency, frequency. More flights, more options, more consumer choice, more tailored load factors, more capacity and then more capacity management… all while still operating approximately the same number of outer markers as we have for over sixty years. Capacity is choked; this leads immediately to tightening the longitudinal and vertical spacing between aircraft, as well as such things as Performance Based Navigation (PBN), Reduced Vertical Separation Minimums (RVSM), RNAV departures and arrivals, and the like. All of this is basically intended to obtain the maximum arrival rate possible for each runway at each terminal.

About the only way to fly an RNAV arrival to a busy airport is with lots of automation.

So the importance of flight path management has become supreme, and highly automated. In this manner, the airspace infrastructure has evolved into the kind of larger socio-mechanical construct that Blair and Helms described, in which people are subsystems. Along the way, the shift in paradigm, as well as a culture mesmerized with automation and digitization, slowly and unwittingly displaced procedural knowledge with declarative knowledge.

Simon Hall, of Cranfield University, has described declarative knowledge as, “the knowledge that the system works in a certain way,” and contrasted this with procedural knowledge, which he describes as, “ knowing how to use the system in context.” He explains that

The basic skills associated with “manually flying” an aircraft are predominantly based on procedural knowledge, i.e. how to achieve the task. However, the use of automation to control the flight path of an aircraft is taught as declarative knowledge. Pilots are required to manage systems based on a knowledge that the autoflight system works in a particular fashion. So, the pilot is faced with the same operational task of controlling the flight path but employs two different strategies of cognitive behaviour depending upon whether the task is manually or automatically executed.

It is important to stop for a minute and put this concept under a microscope. In the days of the flight engineer, declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge were more or less balanced, and they were integrated. Declarative knowledge supported procedural knowledge, and we were taught both. If you wanted to get the generator on line, you were going to have to synch the generator frequency to the bus frequency; you had to understand how this worked, and you had to be able to make it work, because it wasn’t going to do it by itself.

But right there, at that inflection point, is where the problems of automation gain a foothold, precisely because automated systems will do it by themselves. It is no longer a matter of procedurally operating a system; it is a matter of watching the system procedurally operate itself. When the Flight Safety Foundation describes an “accurate mental model which will enable the pilot to predict what the airplane will do next in a given mode for each specific situation,” they are referring entirely to declarative knowledge, a knowledge of how the system works, with the expectation that the pilot’s speed of cognition will exceed the system’s own procedural operation.

In the old days, the pilot’s speed of cognition controlled the procedural operation. Nothing would happen until you were ready for it to happen, because you had to make it happen. You could get behind the airplane moving in space, and you could get behind the situation in time, but it was pretty hard to get behind the systems. Today, you’d better be on your toes, because the automated system is going, with or without you. Indeed, the very phrase “predict what the airplane will do next,” as if this were a matter of conjecture, implies that the airplane has a mind of its own.

Yet the premise behind watered-down training is that the modern, sophisticated, fly-by-wire airplane is too complicated for the pilot to fully understand, and thus he or she has no need for extensive knowledge of the aircraft design and architecture. This is entirely in line with Murchie’s 1953 prediction that the crew “be spared much of the dangerous excess of information from which they have long had to select, abstract, interpolate, extrapolate, derive, and ignore.” Sixty years later, in the 2013 report Operational Use of Flight Management Systems, the Performance Based Operations Aviation Rulemaking Committee said that:

Pilot knowledge of the basic airplane systems is not as detailed as in the past. The WG recognizes that in the past, information was trained that was not needed or beneficial. The concern is that depth of systems knowledge may now be insufficient, and this may be operator dependent.

And so we arrive at the rather matter-of-fact condescension expressed in a pivotal statement following the 737 Max debacle:

A high-ranking Boeing official told the Wall Street Journal that “the company had decided against disclosing more details to cockpit crews due to concerns about inundating average pilots with too much information—and significantly more technical data—than they needed or could digest.”

Saint-Ex would have disagreed with some of Boeing’s philosophy.

St.-Exupery would have disagreed with this view. He wrote, also in Wind, Sand and Stars, that

The machine which at first blush seems a means of isolating man from the great problems of nature, actually plunges him more deeply into them. As for the peasant so for the pilot, dawn and twilight become events of consequence. His essential problems are set him by the mountain, the sea, the wind. Alone before the vast tribunal of the tempestuous sky, the pilot defends his mails and debates on terms of equality with those three elemental divinities.

In today’s terms, the cybernetic view of technology may, at first blush, seem a means of isolating the pilot from the essential problems of flight; it is easy to interpret envelope protection features this way. But at the same time, the capability view of technology amplifies human will, better enabling us to make something of our world. By exercising dominion through technology, we gain greater command over our environment… and thus we are plunged more deeply into those essential problems.

The deeper plunge into the essential problems of flight brings us, inevitably, to the problem of airmanship in an automated cockpit. When Staint-Exupery refers to the terms of equality on which we debate those three elemental divinities, he is referring specifically to the airmanship of his day. He began his approach to this question with an understanding of the mountains, the seas and the winds… the things which influence the sky, the great problems of nature into which the airman will shortly be plunged. He was interested in “all that happened in the sky,” things which signaled “the oncoming snow, the threat of fog, or the peace of a blessed night.”

We are still very interested in the threat of fog or oncoming snow. We are also very interested in windshear, convective available potential energy, lifted indexes, microbursts, outflow boundaries, ice crystal icing, collision coalescence freezing drizzle formation, and certainly turbulence, including mountain waves—pretty much anything that can ruin the peace of a blessed night.

To this we must add an understanding of the machine, an intuitive sense of its balance, its harmony, and its energy, a feel for how the machine leverages its precipitous position in the sky to resolve the problems of nature. To Saint-Exupery, the machine was the engine and flight controls all connected by stringers and spars and cables; today, we must include the complement of automation as part of the machine. For example, we must be constantly aware of pitch, power and vertical speed, while we also scrutinize Actual Navigation Performance (ANP) exactly as Saint-Exupery scrutinized the howl of the wind in the wires of his Breguet 14.

But in Saint-Exupery’s day, the idea of the pilot as a systems manager was unheard of, as was the contemporary suite of management school lexicon used to describe the systems manager. Terms such as discipline, professionalism, team skills, self-improvement, and skill acquisition were barely yet in anyone’s vocabulary. Nor were the now-classical superlatives, such as uncompromising, optimal, systematic and exceptional. Recent definitions of airmanship tend to include some or all of these terms; yet, in my opinion, all of them really beg the question. So what is airmanship really, and how does it work in an automated cockpit?

Let’s leave the management school semantics and centuries-old conceptual structures about discipline, obedience, and compliance behind for a while. All of these are tools we use to achieve the goal; they are not the goal. Rather, let’s begin by revisiting the words of FAR 91.1065(d):

For the purpose of this subpart, competent performance of a procedure or maneuver by a person to be used as a pilot requires that the pilot be the obvious master of the aircraft, with the successful outcome of the maneuver never in doubt.

Airmanship starts with the person in the left seat, no matter what the airplane.

The pilot, as the obvious master of the aircraft, forms the anchor of a definition of airmanship. This clearly refers to Saint-Exupery’s idea of the machine in the service of man. It also focuses responsibility and authority for the operation of the aircraft solely with the pilot, while placing distinct emphasis on knowledge and expertise. And yet, we have to be careful of the subsequent language, because the phrase “never in doubt” suggests the elimination of uncertainty, and that is a dangerous premise.

Looking back through early revisions and amendments to this regulatory language, it seems likely that the elimination of uncertainty was never really the intent; the language is always qualified with the words, “The applicant’s performance will be evaluated on the basis of judgment, knowledge, smoothness, and accuracy.” Indeed, the presence of the word judgment belies certainty; however, the problem is that an implicit expectation of certainty can create barriers to effective airmanship. For example, the successful outcome of a landing is always in doubt; this is the point of a no-fault go-around policy, which leverages the judgment and knowledge parts cited above.

Sadly, the expectation of certainty has a long history of coloring the understanding of mishaps. From the 1930s through the 1950s, the Civil Aeronautics Authority was so certain it understood what caused accidents that it published this axiom: “The capable and competent pilot will never allow an airplane to crack up.” Simple as that.

The paradox is that while we must have some degree of certainty that the flight will be successful—if it we didn’t, we would never fly—flight itself is inherently uncertain. While we cannot accept unmitigated specific risk (an unsafe condition with a probability of one), we have to be prepared to accept, and manage, the uncertainty associated with probabilistic risk (an unsafe condition based upon the averaged estimated probabilities of all unknown events). The interface between our own actions and the operating environment is the critical focal point. We can get into trouble if we assume that our own actions will assure the certainty of a successful maneuver.

The French philosopher Edgar Morin describes this paradox in what he calls the “ecology of action:”

As soon as a person begins any action whatsoever, the action starts to escape from his intentions. It enters into a sphere of interactions and is finally grasped by the environment in a way that may be contrary to the initial intention. So we have to follow the action and try to correct it if it is not too late, or sometimes shoot it down, like NASA exploding a rocket that has veered off course.

Ecology of action means taking into account the complexity it posits, meaning random incidents, chance, initiative, decision, the unexpected, the unforeseen, and awareness of deviations and transformations.

From this perspective, airmanship may be less about managing systems and quite a bit more about managing uncertainty. To some extent, this permeates our early flight training; we are warned by our mentors to “always have an out,” and we spent a lot of time looking for good fields to use in the event of a forced landing. As young pilots, we are impressionable and can easily envision a myriad of things going wrong, and as we strive to blend into the level of competence that we believe surrounds us, we prepare as thoroughly as we can. But as we develop an experience base, certainty seems more accessible. Indeed, one of the significant problems of modern aviation is that serious failures occur extremely rarely, and the uncertainty of our early flying days is replaced with an almost inevitable, and comfortable, complacence.

Morin goes on to discuss the use of strategy to manage uncertainty. He says that,

Strategy should prevail over program. A program sets up a sequence of actions to be executed without variation in a stable environment, but as soon as the outside conditions are modified, the program gets stuck. Whereas strategy elaborates a scenario of action based on an appraisal of the certainties and uncertainties, the probabilities and improbabilities of the situation. The scenario may and must be modified according to information gathered along the way and hazards, mishaps or good fortune encountered. We can use short term program sequences within our strategies. But for things done in an unstable, uncertain environment, strategy imposes.

A stabilized approach is not a program, it’s a strategy.

Probably the best definition of strategy that I have seen describes it as a “high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty,” a definition coined by Miryam Barad. This definition fits well with Morin’s concept. So what is an example of a strategy in the cockpit? The most compact example might be the stabilized approach concept. This can be achieved with or without automation, with or without a glass cockpit, and can be arrived at from a wide variety of descent profiles and lateral entries to the approach procedure. It can be achieved with or without a normal landing configuration, for example, in the case of a flap or slat failure. Nor does it necessarily lead to a smooth landing! Rather, it represents a high level plan to achieve a landing within the touchdown zone, on centerline and aligned with the runway, under conditions of some uncertainty, such as wind, braking action, pilot technique, even nominal fatigue.

A program, on the other hand, is manifested in profiles, litanies, callouts, checklists, and automated sequences. These have critical value as short term program sequences. But they themselves will not resolve instability or manage uncertainty.

Note that Morin is quite clear about the need to modify the scenario of action “according to information gathered.” The pilot must know exactly what he or she wants to do with the airplane, how the environment is likely to influence the plan, how the plan is evolving with the changing situation, and then how to utilize the all of the tools, including the short term program sequences inherent in the automation, to execute the plan.

With the strategy established, the application of Morin’s idea of the ecology of action is best considered through a short exploration of two concepts: prudence and mindfulness. These are common terms, and most of us assume that we know what they mean. In fact, both have very specific definitions, and in the case of prudence, a very long history.

In the fifth century, St. Augustine described prudence as “the knowledge of what to seek and what to avoid.” More specifically, in the seventh century, Isidore of Seville said that, “A prudent man is one who sees as it were from afar, for his sight is keen, and he foresees the event of uncertainties.”

But oddly enough, and at the risk of freewheeling completely off the rails of technical discussion, the best description of prudence that I have found was offered by St. Thomas Aquinas in his historically pivotal tome, the Summa Theologica, which he compiled during the thirteenth century. The word prudence derives from the Latin “providentia,” which means foresight. Thomas strengthened Isidore’s idea when he said that foresight “implies the notion of something distant, to which that which occurs in the present has to be directed.” He said that prudence is “right reason (what today we might call observed truth) applied to action.”

It turns out that St. Thomas’s ideas on prudence more or less make up the original foundation of what we consider as crew resource management. He describes three core elements:

Taking counsel, an act of inquiry, often seeking the opinion of others… first officers, flight attendants, dispatchers, mechanics, flight instructors, FSS briefers… lest something be overlooked. Thomas was quite clear on the assertion that a single person is often unable to capture all that matters to a given situation. Today, this speaks to the limits of human cognition within a dynamic environment.

Judging of what you have learned, an act of consideration, speculation, and for us, forming the opinions required by FAR Part 121, followed by an act of decision. Thomas splits this into two capacities: docility, the willingness to learn from others and decide accordingly, and shrewdness, the ability to draw accurate, “just-in-time” conclusions when there simply is no opportunity for extensive counsel or contemplation.

Executing command, the act of authority, in other words fulfilling the obligation bestowed on the pilot-in-command by FAR 91.3.

Thomas Aquinas, the first man to define CRM?

These three elements form the structure within which “that which occurs in the present” is directed toward “something distant.” If we listen carefully, we will hear these elements in the FAA’s explanation of FAR 91.1065, when they state that “The applicant’s performance will be evaluated on the basis of judgment, knowledge, smoothness, and accuracy (taking counsel, judging of what was learned, and executing command).” Remarkably, in the summer of 1901, Wilbur Wright reached back to these early discussions and penned what was probably the first description of prudence applied to air safety:

All who are practically concerned with aerial navigation agree that the safety of the operator is more important to successful experimentation than any other point. The history of past investigation demonstrates that greater prudence is needed rather than greater skill.

This brings us to an exploration of the more contemporary idea of mindfulness, “a rich awareness of discriminatory detail,” in the words of Karl Weick and Kathryn Sutcliffe. They elaborate on this by saying that being mindful means paying attention in a different way; it is to see more clearly, not to think harder and longer. You stop concentrating on those things that “confirm your hunches, are pleasant, feel certain, seem factual, are explicit, and that others agree on.” You start concentrating on things that “disconfirm, are unpleasant, feel uncertain, seem possible, are implicit, and are contested.” Mindfulness acknowledges the very same uncertainties which Isidore claimed a prudent man would foresee. This is the debate with Saint-Exupery’s elemental divinities.

Airmanship, in this context, can then be salted with more of Weick and Sutcliffe’s organizational ideas. First and foremost, the airman is preoccupied with failure, meaning what has already failed, what is failing at the moment, and what is likely to fail. The periodic twitch of a torquemeter, an unusual imbalance in generator load, a steady divergence between actual fuel burned and planned fuel burned, an unexpected collapse of the visibility, an unexpectedly long—or short—touchdown, an omitted checklist step, or certainly any number of unexpected automation behaviors… all of these things preoccupy the airman. What went wrong? Why did it go wrong? What does a particular failure mean? Is it a precursor?

Secondly, he or she is reluctant to simplify, despite seductive pressure to “eliminate everything unnecessary,” because simplification “obscures unwanted, unanticipated, unexplainable details and in doing so, increases the likelihood of unreliable performance.” This is certainly applicable to autoflight system function, but really to almost everything we do. There is no way to simplify the effects of airframe ice accretion, microbursts, or runway braking action, nor is there any simplification applicable to human behavior and error. Simplification invokes certainty, which flies straight into the face of the uncertainty which Isidore claimed prudence would anticipate. We cannot afford to obscure unwanted, unanticipated or unexplainable details.

Thirdly, the airman is sensitive to operations, a “watchfulness for moment-to-moment changes in conditions.” In this way, the airman “slows down the speed with which we call something ‘the same.’” The airman recognizes that today is not the same as yesterday, that the situation is ever changing, evolving, and uncertain. The same flight, in the same airplane, from the same gate is not the same today as it was yesterday. There are small differences which can have disproportional effects.

Lastly, the airman builds and maintains resilience, the quality of “recalibrating expectations, making sense of evolving uncertainties, and learning in real time.” To borrow from Weick’s writing on this, with some adaptation, a resilient cockpit works to keep errors small, improvises workarounds that preserve adherence to the strategy, and absorbs change while updating the strategy.

With the ideas of prudence and mindfulness front and center, let me turn to what I believe is the most important strategy implicit in good airmanship: the protection of the margins. Whether it be a forty five minute fuel reserve, 1.3 Vso, a 0.8% margin over net climb gradient, or a twenty mile berth around the downwind side of a thunderstorm, a core strategy of airmanship is the protection of the margins. The margins anticipate and buffer uncertainty. They provide space and time for any subordinate strategy to be modified. We cannot allow things of which we are already certain to erode the margins, lest the buffer against further uncertainty be lost.

Checklists and SOPs maintain safety margins and catch errors.

To that end, we land on the centerline for a reason: to preserve a seventy five foot margin of pavement on either side, to accommodate at least some of the threats that are “infinite in number, [and] cannot be grasped by reason,” like some combinations of hydroplaning and wind gusts, main gear trunnion fractures, airport snowplows wandering aimlessly around runways… in other words, the average estimated probabilities of all unknown events.

Further, we use standard operating procedures to track the centerline of the safe operating space, and to ensure that the procedural margins, and the error traps integrated within those margins, are available to function in the background. Standard operating procedures are themselves a strategy, a subset of the idea of protecting the margins; they are not a litany. They are intended to manage the ecology of action, and to track an action as it begins to deviate from our intention. This, too, is another way of looking at envelope protection, seen through the lens of the capability view; we gain greater control of our environment by using automation to ensure that critical aerodynamic margins are protected when hours and hours of sheer boredom lead to distraction or inattention, or are occasionally interrupted by brief moments of stark terror followed by a startle response.

These ideas largely inform both the old situational awareness, the aeronautical one, and the new situational awareness, the one aimed at automation. The thread that ties all of these ideas together is the acceptance of uncertainty. When Saint-Exupery uses terms like a debate with elemental divinities, or a tempestuous sky, he is describing uncertainty.

At this point, we can perhaps suggest a general definition of airmanship:

Airmanship is the application of both prudence and mindfulness so as to always remain the obvious master of the aircraft, and to construct, modify and execute the necessary strategies to ensure that the safe outcome of the flight is never manifestly in doubt, while always protecting the margins in anticipation of uncertainty.

If we see the operating environment only as a socio-mechanical construct, such as the National Airspace System, and thus teach only the cybernetic view of technology, we create a systems operator who is unprepared to debate on terms of equality with the mountain, the sea, and the wind, or, for that matter, with the central processing unit of the flight control computer. His terms have been dictated by the set parameters within a closed control loop, designed to trigger Morin’s “sequence of actions to be executed without variation in a stable environment.” The foresight is pre-programmed, trapped within the closed control loops, and limited to a narrow set of anticipated threats, or specific risks. This is antithetical to airmanship, because those parameters will eventually fall out of equality with the vast tribunal of a tempestuous sky.

The fundamental flaw in attempts to adapt the cybernetic view of technology to the problems of flight lies in the belief that we have expanded our knowledge to a point at which we have absolute, predictable, and repeatable control within a tempestuous sky. We don’t, and likely never will. An analog world will simply swat away a digital mindset.

If, on the other hand, we interpret automation through the capability view of technology, automation will always be subordinate to strategy, a machine in the service of man. Further, if we approach automation as capability, we are prepared for the degradation of that capability. Such degradation merely leads to modification of the strategy. Eventually, if need be, we will fly the approach by hand, using basic or even standby instruments, still remaining within the strategy of a stable approach.

Airmanship thus begins with strategy. Prudence facilitates an expectation that the action we have taken will begin to escape our intentions. A continuous loop of taking counsel, judging of what we have learned, and executing command, modifying the scenario “according to information gathered along the way and hazards, mishaps or good fortune encountered,” tracks the action and corrects its evolution, as it is grasped by the environment, so that the strategy is preserved, or, if necessary, modified, such as when we abandon the approach and go around. In this way, we remain the obvious master of the aircraft.

But human will cannot be amplified in ignorance. We need to recalibrate our automation training paradigm. We must begin with a discussion not of how the automation works, but of how we want to fly the airplane, what the essential problems of flight are, and then augment this broad discussion of strategy with the greater capabilities afforded through automation. Likewise, in all cases, we must emphasize how degraded automation impacts that capability within the original, overarching strategy. Finally, we must remain aware of uncertainty, and reference the training curriculum to the management of uncertainty. Memorizing “the litany” in isolation just won’t cut it, because the litany is a short term program, a closed control loop.

In the end, we can only preserve mastery of the aircraft if we understand airmanship as the management of uncertainty, not simply the management of systems. We must know how the airplane is constructed to achieve the design capabilities, and match this with a strategy for how we want the airplane to be flown to utilize those capabilities, and then insist that the autoflight systems fly our plan. When those systems don’t fly our plan, we need to step in and do some of that pilot stuff. The automation can never be allowed to become the master of the airplane, obvious or otherwise; in no case can it be allowed to place the successful outcome of any maneuver in any doubt whatsoever.

That is the essential nature of the conversation that I have with the autopilot.

The post On automation and airmanship appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/08/on-automation-and-airmanship/

[differentkindapiratemovies-blog]

Narrative Theory Essay

Discussing the perceived oversaturation of narrative archetypes in modern media with reference to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory.

“As the old saying goes, there’s nothing new under the sun. For fans of movies and TV, that means that every story that can be told already has been. But sometimes, the movies that seem to be retelling a well-known story TOO closely are singled out, accused of being a ripoff, copycat, or unoriginal. There's no more famous (or successful) example than James Cameron’s Avatar: a story of a human being welcomed into a native tribe, who betrays their trust, but eventually saves the day by fighting on the good side in the end. As soon as the movie hit theaters, people dismissed the billion-dollar blockbuster as a ripoff of Fern Gully, or even Pocahontas before it. The truth is... it’s telling the same story told by dozens, even hundreds of famous films. But that’s not a reason to attack it, or any other re-skinned movie myth.”

It’s common to have the notion after coming out of a movie theatre that the experience was strikingly similar to the previous time you went. There is a common thread line throughout all of movie and storytelling history. Since the dawn of man, the human race has used narratives and stories to communicate ideas and emotions with each other - usually either trying to capture a part of history or with the purpose of fictional entertainment value. However, primarily I believe narratives are there for communication, being carefully crafted by storytellers of all different generations. Cave men used to draw on the walls of their caves and their fire would illuminate the images, causing them to flicker back and forth to create the earliest animation and stories recorded. Some of the most prominent fictional stories ever created, including religious texts such as the Bible, are stories we haven’t stopped recreating in two thousand years. I refuse to believe that it is the only formula that works despite being undoubtedly effective. Some might think of it as a stale structure.

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, first theorised in Hero Of A Thousand Faces, and Tzvetan Todorov’s structure of narrative are commonly combined to create a story that seems to resonate with the majority of an audience and seemingly never ceases to fail. Movies such as The Matrix and Star Wars use both these theories in order to make up a successful story. (Although debatably the whole original trilogy acts as the entire journey seeing as Luke Skywalker, the main character, is at his lowest in the finale of the second movie resulting in a pitfall ending). George Lucas, the creator and director of the first Star Wars film, considered Joseph Campbell to be his friend and mentor.

“My last mentor was Joe... who asked a lot of the interesting questions and exposed me to a lot of things that made me very interested, a lot more in the cosmic questions and the mystery… and I've been interested in those all my life but I hadn’t focused it the way I have until I had got to be good friends with Joe.”

George goes on to say he took the mythological and religious ideas behind narratives and simplified them for a modern audience. Perhaps it would be beneficial to drop religion altogether when writing stories for the modern and less religious generation.

The Dragon Quest video game series also follows these rules with the main character literally referred to as “The Hero”. The journey of a character rising up, facing hardships, being at their lowest then being born again for their worlds to be restored to equilibrium is something I think people either feel like they can relate to or, probably closer to the truth, is fantasised about and idealised. Everyone would like to be hero in the story, overcoming their problems and saving the world. Joseph Campbell says this in his book Hero With A Thousand Faces.

“The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realisation. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realisation transcending all experiences of form - all symbolisations, all divinities: a realisation of the ineluctable void.”

There’s something gripping about watching this structure play out, and it is engaging for an audience - but they’ve seen it thousands and thousands of times before. As much as I appreciate movies that put a creative spin on the traditional structure of narrative, I really respect and love movies that go against the curve. Obviously this happens quite frequently but probably not at your local Odeon cinema - mainstream media is often streamlined for the purpose of easy consumption. For example, I enjoy films from the Marvel universe, but all too often they all play out in the same format. You could argue that companies have monopolised certain narrative structures and have a tendency to recycle them.

However, films like Richard Linklater’s 1991 day-in-the-life-of debut Slacker go against traditional “hero journeys” and plot point one/plot point two narratives, instead working like a series of loosely connected vignettes; in each scene we spend time with a different character and closely follow events occurring in their lives in real time. There’s no arcs, no beginning, middle or end. No rebirth, just a movie about strange characters hanging out in Austin, Texas, on a sunny day. It’s not an art film or particularly experimental. It’s just that, well, nothing happens. It’s an accurate depiction of reality. It's what real life actually is. I don’t wake up every day and go through a hero’s journey. We may develop as people and these situations can occur, but nine out of ten times life just isn’t like that. We wake up and things stay the same and in life, at moments when the credits are supposed to roll after we’ve achieved something, after we’ve overcome something, it just kind of keeps going. Life moves on and our “arcs” and problems to overcome reset, or new ones appear like a constantly stream of wildly uneventful sequels. New problems come up and sometimes they’re never solved and sometimes people don’t change. In my short film “Campussies!” I was really interested in trying to capture a kind of nothing day and interactions with strange people - not really making anything particularly interesting or high tension. The short was also influenced by Linklaters’ other seminal film Dazed and Confused, however that follows a slightly more traditional take on story telling, depicting a character develop throughout the movie. Jim Jarmusch is another director who often uses abrupt endings and whole scenes that literally stop moving forward. A lot of people say there’s almost an amateurish fine line however I believe this to be completely intentional.

In my narrative-based website I recreated the story of Homer’s Odyssey, a very classic tale that has been recreated and re-skinned many times over many years. Through the website, I make you, the person, interact with the story and go on the hero’s journey by yourself. There is only one correct path however the “reincarnation” implies you are constantly reborn until you get it right. Little is told about the situation in my narrative purposely, so that you can project what you would like onto it. It’s about a person, you, traveling from somewhere dangerous, perhaps enemy territory of some kind, and getting back home safely, set in a nonspecific period of time. However the roads are dangerous - filled with sword wielding enemies and no consistent place to be safe from the elements.

There’s other forms of narratives we’re told in between the lines in media such as what we’re told about certain people; these are pervasive narratives. On television we are exposed to poverty porn, depicting that all low income people are a certain way - intended to give the viewer a sense of superiority. In eighties movies we’re told that punks are ruffians and troublemakers. There’s an endless list of mainstream movies from that period showcasing punks as “bad guys”, such as The Terminator (a movie chock full of visual cues) and The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2). Of course there were movies made with more of a punk rock sensibility, such as Return Of The Living Dead, and exploitation movies of the time in which punks were portrayed as the “good guys”. This was most likely due to the media’s take on punks during the movement in the late seventies. The papers themselves named these angry kids “punks” and they wore it as a badge of honour in response to the criticism - that they were a bunch of violent thugs who held switchblades, beat you up and stole your lunch money. Their anti-establishment ways often had them the basis for dystopian movies. In actuality, it wasn’t really like that at all and personally I would feel safer if I saw a gang of whatever the modern day equivalent of punks are. Although I would agree with the anti-establishment sensibilities, most aren’t true anarchists. They’re not gonna mug you.

Again, another example of pervasive narrative we are consistently exposed to is the connotation between women and make up. Media tells us that it is the norm and it’s heavily tied to what is considered the standard of beauty for women. However, anyone of any gender can choose whether or not to wear make up. In my photography piece “Three Studies of a Woman in the Sun” I photographed my subject both wearing make up and without, one subverting the expectations of a photographed woman in modern media and one showing how she often feels comfortable. I often wonder why women choose to wear make up and why it improves their confidence. Do they truly believe that it makes them feel more in touch with their identity, or perhaps we live in a misinformed society in which it is more acceptable for one gender to present themselves a certain way, when in reality it doesn’t really matter and there’s not much of a difference. John Berger had this to say about the representation of women and their identity in the media.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

My three portraits as part of my DCMP Photography brief are of my friend and artist Katie. Shot on a Canon, I wanted to capture her identity through three images. The middle image you see in the three panels on my blog is her in a natural environment and utterly neutral. That one is relatively light in tone due to the summers day behind her, however she's looking off and something implies it’s more melancholy than the photo lets on. Perhaps the uplifting summer isn’t enough to hold her inner more negative emotions, or that maybe the summer is no longer a good thing in light of the summer getting hotter and hotter each year. Maybe this isn’t a summer of celebration, but one of the end of the world. The bottom one is a real captured moment of her closing her eyes perhaps to imply her shyness in an industrial area, somewhere I often find comfort due to high containers and is generally aesthetically pleasing to me almost because of how not pleasing it is. The top one is how Katie would usually be and dress in her own environment, the lighting highlighting how she expresses herself through her own image. I like how the darkness is almost bleeding in around the edges of the photograph. I experimented with lighting a lot with this one and took several different photos that were the contender for the third portrait. Here, now she is herself, she seems to project more confidence looking directly into the camera like this time the camera is invading HER space as opposed to the other ones where she’s almost a part of the scenery. Now she’s out of the sun, she is the one who is shining. Notice how she also seems to fill up the frame the more comfortable she gets.

Unseen stories hide in advertising and movie posters. In these places you will find signs that speak to us sub-consciously. The movie posters for most horror movies will always use the colour red. Why? Our brain tells us when we see red that there’s danger and that the film will most likely contain plenty of blood. We understand what genre the movie is without even being told so due to semiotics. This can be seen on the movie poster for Shaun of the Dead where the doors our main character is standing behind are red, with white text to pop and in other iterations red text. You see he is surrounded by zombies, hoarded by them, most likely foreshadowing to what the movie is going entail. This is the same in food advertisements. If you watch a television ad about food the colours and aesthetics used often will tell you about the product. Most of the time, fruits and vegetables will be wet, to make them seem fresh and often whoever is starring in the ad or the dialect of the voiceover is who that product is for. If there is a voiceover speaking in a cockney accent then it’s marketed toward the working class, but it’s all just an illusion using stereotypes to manipulate the sub-conscious and the masses into relating to it. It does this all without ever actually telling us.

I wrote a short science fiction script called “The Great Hydration War” and shot a scene from it. In this scene, I did my best to make every shot tell us something. I played around a lot with power dynamic and it’s constantly changing using nothing but visual clues. When our main character thinks they are in control, the camera angle is low, making them seem large and powerful, but when the villain gets the upper hand you’ll see that they have the power. When they are both pointing guns at each other you’ll see that they’re both at the same level and share the power of the scene because it could go either way. Jazoor, the main character from the script who is from outer space, sees a figure after returning to Earth for the first time in years. Unsure of who it is, we see them in a wide shot, impersonal and unidentified. But when they stand up and Jazoor realises that it’s her twin from back when she grew up on the now ancient Earth. “It’s you!” Jazoor exclaims. With what she knows she gains the power to deal with the situation. She’s got this. However she’s flooded with doubt; “You sure?” Says the Dryborg, an evil futurist cyborg whose one weakness is water. The camera swoops up, leaving the character feeling vulnerable with no idea what kind of situation this is now. Then she brings up her gun, bringing the power back to her. I did this throughout the entire scene and tried my best to make sure I was expressing the characters feelings and positions in the scene through the camera angles even though obviously it’s quite a non-sensical script and a mildly ridiculous scene. I thought about the lighting, as the scene was based on an alternate reality Earth in the past where the sun is blue so I made sure all of the scenery were glowing in this blue light which I managed to do in post-production. The costumes were designed by myself and my friend who played the characters. I wanted something science fiction-esque, but obviously I had no budget and not a lot of time, so I decided to try to take the comedic route and rely on it having more charm than actually trying to make the audience believe what was going on. The scene is a pivotal part of the larger structure and story that I had written, however the storyboards for the scene were in fact drawn before I wrote it.

Even when I wrote the script I realised I sub-consciously loosely followed the hero’s journey, most likely because I take so much inspiration from movies. Even when writing, I instinctually had thoughts like “yes, now this kind of scene has to happen”. It was very condensed but it’s still there. We begin the story introducing our hero Jazoor, she continues to go on a journey across the universe before falling and being at her lowest in the third act before facing off her demon she’s been fearing the whole film. She overcomes the Dryborg but not in the way she probably thought. However, I did forget to film the character limping throughout the scene.

Everything is a journey, our lives are one. They’re not always structured how we want them to be but they’re a journey. Every day when we wake up we begin a new micro journey, a new chapter in a much bigger story that is how we view our lives. Stories are almost telling us how to live and that what we’re doing is okay. In my opinion modern mainstream cinema is stale, and I find it hard to believe that in just over a hundred years of film (and a few thousand for storytelling as a visual medium), storytelling has already dried up of all its originality and that we just keep repeating ourselves. Perhaps it's time we took a look at how we structure and create our characters and stories and try to make something more relevant and authentic. Stories reinforce our sub conscious beliefs behind our morals, between good and bad. People don’t want to be seen and thought of as the bad guy within society, hence why most stories are in fact about what we perceive as the “good guy”, the hero. I always find something to latch on to when enjoying a film, something to reassure me that I have my humanity or reassure me when I feel like I don’t have it - and that it’s okay if I don’t.

I don’t like to talk about the internet or politics in context of any work because I feel like those are things that have tainted some elements of different art forms. The only issue with making movies people can relate to is that also means you don’t want to offend anyone, which almost seems like an impossibility in recent years. Too much is focused on these subjects but perhaps that’s why people like movies. Social and political commentary have made many movies hits throughout all of time, but I believe a lot of the time story and characters are being sacrificed out of fear of offending or not being politically correct. It doesn’t seem to matter which stance you take within media, there will always be people that disagree. The internet has given everyone a loud voice and usually it's used for criticism. In terms of relating to a movie, I don’t think it should be a case of representation of sexual orientation or race, it should be about values and character - although I suppose it is human nature to want to relate to something or something who appears like us. Whatever the case, we need to relate to character as a person, and become engaged in the narrative. I think that is is why Campbells and Tzvetan’s theories and myths are continued to be used to this day, because they work.

I would personally love to see more change and experimentation in mainstream and modern cinema, and not to have to constantly and actively seek it out. Even recent movie posters are directly copying each other with the use of colour and framing, which directly relates to the signs we use to communicate information with an image. It would be refreshing to really open up the limitations and possibly of narratives - or in some cases close them off completely.

Bibliography

The Matrix. (1999). [video] Directed by L. Wachowski and L. Wachowski. United States: Warner Bros.

Star Wars. (1977). [video] Directed by G. Lucas. United States: 20th Century Fox.

Shaun of the Dead. (2004). [DVD] Directed by E. Wright. United Kingdom: Universal Pictures.

Slacker. (1991). [DVD] Directed by R. Linklater. United States: Orion Classics.

Dazed and Confused. (1993). [DVD] Directed by R. Linklater. United States: Gramercy Pictures.

The Terminator. (1984). [DVD] Directed by J. Cameron. United States: Orion Pictures.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. (2019). [DVD] Directed by G. Miller. Australia: Warner Bros.

The Return of the Living Dead. (1985). [DVD] Directed by D. O'Bannon. United States: Orion Pictures.

Campbell, J., 1949. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. 1st ed. United States: Pantheon Books.

Square Enix. 1986. Dragon Quest. Video Game. Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft.

Berger, J., 1972. Ways Of Seeing. 1st ed. United Kingdom. Penguin.

George Lucas. (1999). “George Lucas in Conversation With Bill Moyers”. Bill Moyers. George Lucas Tells Bill Moyers About the Mentors in His Career.

Dyce, A.D. 2016. How Every Blockbuster Movie Tells The Same Story. [Online]. [8 July 2019]. Available from: https://screenrant.com/how-all-movies-same-secret-truth/