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the-king-andthe-lionheart · 4 years ago

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A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes - Arya Stark and her Cinderella Motifs

In A Song of Ice and Fire, GRRM often uses fairy tale motifs to help tell a character’s story. Sometimes this motif spans all throughout the characters arc while other times it will only be used for one or two scenes, or anywhere in between. And often one character can have several fairy tale motifs at different times in their arcs or even running concurrently. For Arya, she has quite a few fairy tale motifs in her arc, but for now I’m going to focus on her Cinderella motifs that are mainly prevalent in A Clash of Kings but do show up at other times all throughout her arc as well. I’m going to focus primarily on Arya’s A Clash of Kings arc, but we will be stopping by A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows a few times too. And I am going to use several versions of the retellings of Cinderella, including the Disney version, but only the 1950 original and none of its sequels. I also want to note that not all the parallels are obvious due to things being more metaphorical or symbolic, while other times being whatever subversion that tickled GRRM’s fancy at the time.

There are many common aspects across the board when it comes to Cinderella retellings. Often it entails the heroine losing one or both of her parents, being oppressed by her abusive stepmother and stepsisters and being forced into menial, backbreaking labor that leaves the heroine dirty and often covered in ashes. It usually entails a magical guardian who helps the heroine, magical transformations, ballgowns and a ball where she falls in love with either a Prince or a King. An identifying item is also involved, usually a slipper made of gold or glass, where one of the pair is lost when the heroine is running from her beloved. And the Prince/King almost always searches the realm for the woman that identifying item belongs to, and when he finds the heroine they usually marry.

Written out like that it’s hard to believe that this is a motif used for Arya. After all she’s not in the position to be going to balls and she’s just a child so it seems unlikely at the time she’s at Harrenhal she’s going to fall in love. However, this motif appears all throughout her arc in various and creative and subversive and repetitive ways, and motifs don’t have to be all or none and they don’t have to be in the order the original stories were laid out. A lot of people also don’t like the idea that Arya has an actual Disney Princess motif in her story because she’s a “tomboy”, but the fact is that Arya is a Princess at the time she’s at Harrenhal, it’s even explicitly stated in Arya X ACOK, whether people acknowledge it or not, where a lot of these motifs take place. I know some people will be dismissive of this and think I’m reaching, but I hope upon reading this I’ll have convinced you of this motif being present. :)

Step-Mother and Step-Sisters

Some of the two most common features in any variant of Cinderella is the “Persecuted Heroine” and the “Female Persecutor”. Often this manifests as the wicked stepmother and the evil step-sisters, but in some versions a stepmother does not appear, and it’s the heroine’s older sisters who confine her to the kitchens instead. In the opera, La Cenerentola, Gioachino Rossini inverted the gender roles where the heroine Cenerentola is oppressed by her stepfather. And in some retellings at least one of the step siblings is somewhat kind to the heroine even. We symbolically see these archetypes many times in Arya’s narrative with various types of inversions.

When we enter ACOK, we find a dirty and disguised Arya traveling with Yoren and the Night’s Watch recruits, having just lost her father (a subversion of the prevalent theme of Cinderella losing her mother very young). She is also being bullied by two older boys, Lommy and Hot Pie:

At Winterfell they [Sansa and Jeyne] had called her “Arya Horseface” and she’d thought nothing could be worse, but that was before the orphan boy Lommy Greenhands had named her “Lumpyhead.” - Arya I ACOK

That wasn’t the hardest part at all; Lommy Greenhands and Hot Pie were the hardest part. - Arya I ACOK

“Look at that sword Lumpyhead’s got there,” Lommy said one morning […] “Where’s a gutter rat like Lumpyhead get him a sword?”

[. . .]

“Maybe he’s a little squire,” Hot Pie put in. […] “Some lordy lord’s little squire boy, that’s it.”

“He ain’t no squire, look at him. I bet that’s not even a real sword. I bet it’s just some play sword made of tin.”

Arya hated them making fun of Needle. “It’s castle-forged steel, you stupid,” she snapped, turning in the saddle to glare at them, “and you better shut your mouth.”

The orphan boys hooted. “Where’d you get a blade like that, Lumpyface?” Hot Pie wanted to know.

“Lumpyhead,” corrected Lommy. He prob’ly stole it.”

“I did not!” she shouted. Jon Snow had given her Needle. Maybe she had to let them call her Lumpyhead, but she wasn’t going to let them call Jon a thief.

“If he stole it, we could take it off him,” said Hot Pie. “It’s not his anyhow. I could use me a sword like that.”

Lommy egged him on. “Go on, take it off him, I dare you.”

Hot Pie kicked his donkey, riding closer. “Hey, Lumpyface, you gimme that sword.” […] “You don’t know how to use it.”

[. . .]

“Look at him,” brayed Lommy Greenhands. “I bet he’s going to cry now. You want to cry, Lumpyhead?” – Arya I ACOK

In the first two quotes we have Arya likening the behavior of Hot Pie and Lommy to that of Jeyne Poole and Sansa. In AGOT, Sansa and Jeyne took on the “evil step-sister” archetype (and before anybody attacks me, I don’t think these two are actually “evil”, just children who think it’s okay to bully someone who is different from them), but now we are shown that this archetype has temporarily shifted onto Lommy and Hot Pie, with some subversions. These two are now male and they aren’t related to Arya in any way. Some variants of the Cinderella story do portray male siblings mistreating the younger “Cinderella” sibling though. One of the stories in One Thousand and One Nights depict a story called “Judar and his Brethren”, in which the main character is poisoned by his biological brothers in the end, depicting a rare tragic ending for this retelling. However, these subversions are completely fine because either way, they took on the role of the “bully” to Arya’s Cinderella archetype currently in the narrative.

Furthermore, while Septa Mordane was the obvious “wicked stepmother” archetype to Arya’s Cinderella archetype in AGOT, I think arguably this has fallen to Cersei now (and the Lannister’s as a whole). Cersei may not be present, but she is the reason why Arya is in the situation she is in right now. After all, Cersei takes on the role of “Evil Queen” for Sansa and Jon (they both share Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs motifs) so I do think she is the metaphorical “wicked stepmother” in this equation regardless of the fact that Cersei isn’t anything remotely close to a stepmother to Arya in the narrative, but she fits the general archetype of “female persecutor” the most in the current situation. For the case about Septa Mordane being a “wicked stepmother” archetype, I want to point to Cenerentola by Basile, in which the “wicked stepmother” started out as being the heroine’s governess, and Septa’s are the closest substitute to a governess in the universe of ASOIAF.

This isn’t the end to these archetypes being in play. As the early chapters of ACOK go on we see the animosity between Lommy, Hot Pie, and Arya disappear to the point where they become allies and then friends. With this shift in dynamic we see the archetypes disappearing with some of these same characters taking on entirely new Cinderella archetypes, while the “wicked stepmother” and “evil step-sibling” archetypes move onto other characters as well.

At Harrenhal we are introduced to two wicked women who next take on the “evil step-sibling” archetype, Goodwife Harra and Goodwife Amabel. These two even comment on Arya’s feet:

When Arya's turn came round, Goodwife Amabel clucked in dismay at the sight of her feet, while Goodwife Harra felt the callus on her fingers that long hours of practice with Needle had earned her. "Got those churning butter, I'll wager," she said. "Some farmer's whelp, are you? Well, never you mind, girl, you have a chance to win a higher place in this world if you work hard. If you won't work hard, you'll be beaten. And what do they call you?"

Arya dared not say her true name, but Arry was no good either, it was a boy’s name and they could see she was no boy. “Weasel,” she said, naming the first girl she could think of. “Lommy called me Weasel.”

“I can see why,” sniffed Goodwife Amabel. “That hair is a fright and a nest for lice as well. We’ll have it off, and then you’re for the kitchens.”

“I’d sooner tend the horses.” Arya liked horses, and maybe if she was in the stables she’d be able to steal one and escape.

Goodwife Harra slapped her so hard that her swollen lip broke open all over again. “And keep that tongue to yourself or you’ll get worse. No one asked your views.”

The blood in her mouth had a salty metal tang to it. Arya dropped her gaze and said nothing. If I still had Needle, she wouldn’t dare hit me, she thought sullenly.

“Lord Tywin and his knights have grooms and squires to tend their horses, they don’t need the likes of you,” Goodwife Amabel said. “The kitchens are snug and clean, and there’s always a warm fire to sleep by and plenty to eat. You might have done well there, but I can see you’re not a clever girl. Harra, I believe we should give this one to Weese.”

“If you think so, Amabel.” They gave her a shift of grey roughspun wool and a pair of ill-fitting shoes and sent her off. – Arya VI ACOK

Later Goodwife Amabel even threatens to rape Arya:

Three Frey men-at-arms were using them that morning as Arya went to the well. She tried not to look, but she could hear the men laughing. The pail was very heavy once full. She was turning to bring it back to Kingspyre when Goodwife Amabel seized her arm. The water went sloshing over the side onto Amabel's legs. "You did that on purpose," the woman screeched.

"What do you want?" Arya squirmed in her grasp. Amabel had been half-crazed since they'd cut Harra's head off.

"See there?" Amabel pointed across the yard at Pia. "When this northman falls you'll be where she is."

"Let me go." She tried to wrench free, but Amabel only tightened her fingers.

"He will fall too, Harrenhal pulls them all down in the end. Lord Tywin's won now, he'll be marching back with all his power, and then it will be his turn to punish the disloyal. And don't think he won't know what you did!" The old woman laughed. "I may have a turn at you myself. Harra had an old broom, I'll save it for you. The handle's cracked and splintery—" - Arya X ACOK

Menial, Backbreaking Labor

When Arya is enslaved and forced into the oppressive walls of Harrenhal, she is forced to scrub floors and do other menial, backbreaking work from sunrise to sunset, just like Cinderella:

Weese used Arya to run messages, draw water, and fetch food, and sometimes to serve at table in the Barracks Hall above the armory, where the men-at-arms took their meals. But most of her work was cleaning. The ground floor of the Wailing Tower was given over to storerooms and granaries, and two floors above housed part of the garrison, but the upper stories had not been occupied for eighty years. Now Lord Tywin had commanded that they be made fit for habitation again. There were floors to be scrubbed, grime to be washed off windows, broken chairs and rotted beds to be carried off. The topmost story was infested with nests of the huge black bats that House Whent had used for its sigil, and there were rats in the cellars as well . . . and ghosts, some said, the spirits of Harren the Black and his sons. – Arya VII ACOK

She spent the rest of that day scrubbing steps inside the Wailing Tower. By evenfall her hands were raw and bleeding and her arms so sore they trembled when she lugged the pail back to the cellar. Too tired even for food, Arya begged Weese's pardons and crawled into her straw to sleep. – Arya VII ACOK

Magical Transformations and Mice

In Disney’s Cinderella, the fairy godmother transforms mice into different creatures. On the road to Harrenhal, Arya not only likens herself to a sheep, but a mouse and continues her time at Harrenhal referring to herself as a “mouse”. This is also a subversion, while Cinderella in the Disney incarnation befriends mice, in our story Arya becomes the meek mouse:

On the road Arya had felt like a sheep, but Harrenhal turned her into a mouse. She was grey as a mouse in her scratchy wool shift, and like a mouse she kept to the crannies and crevices and dark holes of the castle, scurrying out of the way of the mighty. – Arya VII ACOK

He does not know me, she thought. Arry was a fierce little boy with a sword, and I’m just a grey mouse girl with a pail. – Arya VII ACOK

She was very small and Harrenhal was very large, full of places where a mouse could hide. – Arya VII ACOK

Even Jaqen calls Arya a mouse:

She crept up quiet as a shadow, but he opened his eyes all the same. “She steals in on little mice feet, but a man hears,” he said. How could he hear me? She wondered, and it seemed as if he heard that as well. “The scuff of leather on stone sings loud as warhorns to a man with open ears. Clever girls go barefoot.” – Arya VIII ACOK

However, through Jaqen, Arya begins to feel more in control of her situation, stronger and is transformed, if only for a short time.

“…Some are saying it was Harren’s ghost flung him down.” He snorted to show what he thought of such notions.

It wasn’t Harren, Arya wanted to say, it was me. She has killed Chiswyck with a whisper, and she would kill two more before she was through. I’m the ghost in Harrenhal, she thought. And that night, there was one less name to hate. – Arya VII ACOK

I was a sheep, and then I was a mouse, I couldn’t do anything but hide. Arya chewed her lip and tried to think when her courage had come back. Jaqen made me brave again. He made me a ghost instead of a mouse. – Arya IX ACOK

Lucifer the Cat

In Disney’s Cinderella, Lucifer is Lady Tremaine’s cat who is described as being a sly, wicked, and manipulative mouse consumer. He spends the whole film trying to torment and catch the mice. I feel that Weese takes on aspects of this feline character, and I think this because of certain descriptors that are given to Weese to make him appear almost catlike:

“Weasel,” Weese purred, “next time I see that mouth droop open, I’ll pull out your tongue and feed it to my bitch.” – Arya VII ACOK

In his own small strutting way, Weese was nearly as scary as Ser Gregor. The Mountain swatted men like flies, but most of the time he did not even seem to know the fly was there. Weese always knew you were there, and what you were doing, and sometimes what you were thinking. He would hit at the slightest provocation, and he had a dog who was near as bad as he was, an ugly spotted bitch that smelled worse than any dog Arya had ever known. Once she saw him set the dog on a latrine boy who’d annoyed him. She tore a big chunk out of the boy’s calf while Weese laughed. – Arya VII ACOK

So here we have Weese purring, strutting, being compared to the Mountain who swats at peoples, and being watchful and observant, very much like a cat. And like in the movie, a dog attacks him. Now Weese didn’t fall from a tower window, but Chiswyck fell/was pushed. Considering these two are the two people Arya had Jaqen kill, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are meant to make up two halves of a whole in this regard. After all, they are both wicked creatures who prey upon the weak, just like Lucifer and they both got their just desserts for it.

Jaq the Mouse

In Disney’s Cinderella, Cinderella rescues mice from traps, as well as from Lucifer, and dresses and feeds them. They perform favors in return. At the beginning of the film, a mouse named Gus is trapped in a cage, and the leader of the mice finds him and retrieves Cinderella to free him. The leader of the mice is a mouse named Jaq, and he was also a mouse that was saved by Cinderella from a cage. This sounds awfully familiar…

Rushing through the barn doors was like running into a furnace. The air was swirling with smoke, the back wall a sheet of fire ground to roof. Their horses and donkeys were kicking and rearing and screaming. The poor animals, Arya thought. Then she saw the wagon, and the three men manacled to its bed. Biter was flinging himself against the chains, blood running down his arms from where the iron clasped his wrists. Rorge screamed curses, kicking at the wood. “Boy!” called Jaqen H’ghar. “Sweet boy!”

[. . .]

“Good boys, kind boys,” called Jaqen H’ghar, coughing.

“Get these fucking chains off!” Rorge screamed.

[. . .]

Going back into that barn was the hardest thing she ever did. Smoke was pouring out the open door like a writhing black snake, and she could hear the screams of the poor animals inside, donkeys and horses and men. She chewed her lip, and darted through the doors, crouched low where the smoke wasn’t quite so thick.

A donkey was caught in a ring of fire, shrieking in terror and pain. She could smell the stench of burning hair. The roof was gone up too, and things were falling down, pieces of flaming wood and bits of straw and hay. Arya put a hand over her mouth and nose. She couldn’t see the wagon for the smoke, but she could still hear Biter screaming. She crawled toward the sound.

And then a wheel was looming over her. The wagon jumped and moved a half foot when Biter threw himself against his chains again. Jaqen saw her, but it was too hard to breathe, let alone talk. She threw the axe into the wagon. Rorge caught it and lifted it over his head, rivers of sooty sweat pouring down his noseless face. Arya was running, coughing. She heard the steel crash through the old wood, and again, again. An instant later came a crack as loud as thunder, and the bottom of the wagon came ripping loose in an explosion of splinters. – Arya IV ACOK

So here we have Jaq who is leader of the mice, who also helps Cinderella by doing her favors. Then we have Jaqen H’ghar who is the leader of Rorge and Biter (this name seems even more fitting now) and who is performing favors for Arya, which leads me to Jaqen’s dual Cinderella archetype: Fairy Godmother.

Magical Helpers

Some versions of Magical Helpers come from fairy godmothers or talking animals or genies. In other versions this help comes to the heroine through her dead mother, often manifesting through animal aid. In One Thousand and One Nights, in the story of “Judar and his Brethren” Judar is our Cinderella figure, whose own brothers betray and poison him, but before that he was gifted a genie named Al-Ra’ad al-Kasif who granted Judar’s wishes. In the passage below Jaqen grants Arya three “wishes” which is typical for genies to grant in our popular consciousness:

She remembered that she hated him. “You scared me. You’re one of them now, I should have let you burn. What are you doing here? Go away or I’ll yell for Weese.”

“A man pays his debts. A man owes three.”

“Three?”

“The Red God has his due, sweet girl, and only death may pay for life. This girl took three that were his. This girl must give three in their places. Speak the names, and a man will do the rest.”

He wants to help me, Arya realized with a rush of hope that made her dizzy. “Take me to Riverrun, it’s not far, if we stole some horses we could—”

He laid a finger on her lips. “Three lives you shall have of me. No more, no less. Three and we are done. So a girl must ponder.” He kissed her hair softly. “But not too long.” – Arya VII ACOK

Later, we also see that “wishes” have consequences, which is also prevalent when genies are concerned. GRRM himself is a big fan of consequences and unintended side effects.

Jaqen is not Arya’s only form of Magical Help at Harrenhal however. Jaqen may take on the role of Fairy Godmother/Genie, but we also see Arya experiencing the help of not only an animal aid, but from a dead parent. For instance, the heroine in Aschenputtel, by the Brother’s Grimm, is given a hazel twig by her father that she plants over her mother’s grave. She waters it with tears and over the years it grows into a glowing hazel tree. The girl prays under it three times a day, chanting, and a bird emerges from it that grants her wishes. There are two instances of something similar happening in the books:

In the godswood she found her broomstick sword where she had left it, and carried it to the heart tree. There she knelt. Red leaves rustled. Red eyes peered inside her. The eyes of the gods. “Tell me what to do, you gods,” she prayed.

For a long moment there was no sound but the wind and the water and the creak of leaf and limb. And then, far far off, beyond the godswood and the haunted towers and the immense stone walls of Harrenhal, from somewhere out in the world, came the long lonely howl of a wolf. Gooseprickles rose on Arya’s skin, and for an instant she felt dizzy. Then, so faintly, it seemed as if she heard her father’s voice. “When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives,” he said.

“But there is no pack,” she whispered to the weirwood. Bran and Rickon were dead, the Lannisters had Sansa, Jon had gone to the Wall. “I’m not even me now, I’m Nan.”

“You are Arya of Winterfell, daughter of the north. You told me you could be strong. You have the wolf blood in you.”

“The wolf blood.” Arya remembered now. “I’ll be as strong as Robb. I said I would.” She took a deep breath, then lifted the broomstick in both hands and brought it down across her knee. It broke with a loud crack, and she threw the pieces aside. I am a direwolf, and done with wooden teeth. – Arya X ACOK

Here we see an inversion. Arya’s mother isn’t dead at this time, but her father, Ned is. He is who we hear through the heart tree giving Arya this empowering “Mufasa” moment that gives way to Arya’s true transformation in this arc, she reclaims her identity. And as soon as Arya asks the old gods for aid, a wolf howls in the distance as if in answer. It’s not confirmed but I do truly believe that this howl came from Nymeria, by way of the Old Gods/Greenseers, who somehow helped strengthen their bond. It is after this moment that Arya starts having full on wolf dreams in earnest and it’s through her first wolf dream that we see that Nymeria may have become Arya’s animal aid:

Her dreams were red and savage. The Mummers were in them, four at least, a pale Lyseni and a dark brutal axeman from Ib, the scarred Dothraki horse lord called Iggo and a Dornishman whose name she never knew. On and on they came, riding through the rain in rusting mail and wet leather, swords and axe clanking against their saddles. They thought they were hunting her, she knew with all the strange sharp certainty of dreams, but they were wrong. She was hunting them.

She was no little girl in the dream; she was a wolf, huge and powerful, and when she emerged from beneath the trees in front of them and bared her teeth in a low rumbling growl, she could small the rank stench of fear from horse and man alike. The Lyseni’s mount reared and screamed in terror, and the others shouted at one another in mantalk, but before they could act the other wolves came hurtling from the darkness and the rain, a great pack of them, gaunt and wet and silent.

The fight was short but bloody. The hairy man went down as he unslung his axe, the dark one died stringing an arrow, and the pale man from Lys tried to bolt. Her brothers and sisters ran him down, turning him again and again, coming at him from all sides, snapping at the legs of his horse and tearing the throat from the rider when he came crashing to the earth. – Arya I ASOS

We see here that Nymeria and her pack protected Arya, Gendry, and Hot Pie against their pursuers after their escape from Harrenhal.

Here is another instance of Arya praying under the heart tree:

Arya went to her knees. She wasn’t sure how she should begin. She clasped her hands together. Help me, you old gods, she prayed silently. Help me get those men out of the dungeon so we can kill Ser Amory, and bring me home to Winterfell. Make me a water dancer and a wolf and not afraid again, ever.

Was that enough? Maybe she should pray aloud if she wanted the old gods to hear. Maybe she should pray longer. Sometimes her father had prayed a long time, she remembered. But the old gods had never helped him. Remembering that made her angry. “You should have saved him,” she scolded the tree. “He prayed to you all the time. I don’t care if you help me or not. I don’t think you could even if you wanted to.”

“Gods are not mocked, girl.”

The voice startled her. She leapt to her feet and drew her wooden sword. Jaqen H’ghar stood so still in the darkness that he seemed one of the trees. “A man comes to hear a name. One and two and then comes three. A man would have done.”

Arya lowered the splintery point toward the ground. “How did you know I was here?”

“A man sees. A mean hears. A man knows.”

She regarded him suspiciously. Had the gods sent him? “How’d you make the dog kill Weese? Did you call Rorge and Biter up from hell? Is Jaqen H’ghar your true name?

“Some men have many names. Weasel. Arry. Arya.”

She backed away from him, until she was pressed against the heart tree. “Did Gendry tell?”

“A man knows,” he said again. “My lady of Stark.”

Maybe the gods had sent him in answer to her prayers. – Arya IX ACOK

In Cenerentola, the heroine’s (Zezolla) father is given a date seedling by a fairy and he gives it to his daughter. Zezolla cultivates the tree in which a fairy lives. This fairy gives Zezolla magical aid. When Arya prayed beneath the heart tree in the above quote it almost seems like Jaqen appeared from the trees, leaving Arya to question if the old gods sent him.

And like in Aschenputtel and Disney’s Cinderella, Arya spends time at Harrenhal singing/chanting to herself as well:

Barefoot surefoot lightfoot, she sang under her breath. I am the ghost in Harrenhal. – Arya IX ACOK

This is very strange for a couple of reasons. When we first meet Arya she claims not to like songs and doesn’t sing. She continues this up until she goes to Braavos. There she discovers that she likes the bawdy songs when she is using the name, Cat of the Canals. The only exception to this is when Arya is at Harrenhal. Another reason this is odd is because of where Arya is at physically and mentally. So either Arya was always lying about not liking songs, or Arya singing here is supposed to tell us something.

And while this might not mean anything, I found it interesting that Arya spends a lot of her time in ACOK barefoot. Now Cinderella isn’t really said to be barefoot in the stories, but she did usually lose a shoe when running away from the Prince/King, hence making her barefoot. When Arya decides to escape Harrenhal, she does don a pair of shoes again and from then on out she mostly wears them. This also leads to a fun bit of subversion. In the originals tales it’s always the Prince/King saving Cinderella from further oppression. But in Arya X ACOK, not only did she (a princess) plan the escape, but she saves Gendry, a lost (albeit bastard) prince, along with Hot Pie, from further oppression (and torture and death) by their slavers in their prison camp. (Hot Pie definitely reminds me of Gus Gus as well by the way :D)

From Rags to Riches

In many versions of Cinderella, we also see the heroine become physically transformed. The heroine is usually dirty, covered in ashes, and wearing “rags” before they are made over. In the most popular version, Disney’s Cinderella, the Fairy Godmother magically turns her from dirty household servant to highborn lady, adorning her in a silver ballgown and glass slippers. In Ye Xian, magical fish bones, help the heroine dress appropriately for a local Festival, including a light, golden shoe. And in Aschenputtel, the doves that emerge from her hazel tree, that grant the heroine wishes, drop a gold and silver gown and silk shoes down to her to wear to the ball. Also, noticeably, this is the time the Prince/King notices Cinderella and finally “sees” her.

While we didn’t get anything like that in ACOK, we don’t have to look much farther than ASOS, when Arya goes to Acorn Hall and meets Lady Smallwood, who puts her in two different dresses:

And afterward, they insisted she dress herself in girl’s things, brown woolen stockings and a light linen shift, and over that a light green gown with acorns embroidered all over the bodice in brown thread, and more acorns bordering the hem. – Arya IV ASOS

It was even worse than before; Lady Smallwood insisted that Arya take another bath, and cut and comb her hair besides; the dress she put her in this time was sort of lilac-colored, and decorated with little baby pearls. The only good thing about it was that it was so delicate that no one could expect her to ride in it. – Arya IV ASOS

And while there is no ball, Arya and Gendry spend their time in the forge together. This is the very first time Gendry has seen Arya look like a proper lady. Cinderella and Arya are no longer dirty and in rags and they are now in gowns looking their place in society, despite Arya’s dress not being nearly as grand. However, it’s enough of a change for Gendry to finally realize just who Arya truly is when it comes to her place in the world. And judging by his behavior after this event, he also begins to acknowledge that if he continues to stay by her side he could potentially love her romantically in the future as well:

Gendry reached out with the tongs as if to pinch her face, but Arya swatted them away.

[. . .]

Gendry put the hammer down and looked at her. “You look different now. Like a proper little girl.”

“I look like an oak tree, with all these stupid acorns.”

“Nice, though. A nice oak tree.” He stepped closer, and sniffed at her. “You even smell nice for a change.” – Arya IV ASOS

Runaway Princess

Now we may not have had a ball, but while taking shelter in a stone stable with the Brotherhood Without Banners, Arya does run outside, trying to get away from everyone:

His words beat at her ears like the pounding of a drum, and suddenly it was more than Arya could stand. She wanted Riverrun, not Acorn Hall; she wanted her mother and her brother Robb, not Lady Smallwood or some uncle she never knew. Whirling, she broke for the door, and when Harwin tried to grab her arm she spun away from him quick as a snake.

Outside the stables the rain was still falling, and distant lightning flashed in the west. Arya ran as fast as she could. She did not know where she was going, only that she wanted to be alone, away from all the voices, away from their hollow words and broken promises. All I wanted was to go to Riverrun. It was her own fault, for taking Gendry and Hot Pie with her when she left Harrenhal. She would have been better alone. If she had been alone, the outlaws would never have caught her, and she’d be with Robb and her mother by now. They were never my pack. If they had been, they wouldn’t leave me. She splashed through a puddle of muddy water. Someone was shouting her name, Harwin probably, or Gendry, but the thunder drowned them out as it rolled across the hills half a heartbeat behind the lightning. The lightning lord, she thought angrily. Maybe he couldn’t die, but he could lie. – Arya VIII ASOS

Now it’s not explicitly clear that it was Gendry who ran after Arya, calling her name, but due to the possible symbolism in the scene, and also his behavior in AFFC, it makes me think it was him. But whether he was or not I believe just Arya believing it might be him makes this applicable enough as a loose parallel for the Prince chasing after Cinderella, only for Cinderella to disappear like in many of the Cinderella retellings.

Searching the Realm

At the end of ASOS in the epilogue we learn that Lady Stoneheart and the Brotherhood Without Banners, who Gendry is a part of is actively searching for Arya:

The outlaw gave him (Merrett Frey) an encouraging smile. “Well, as it happens, we’re looking for a dog that ran away.”

“A dog?” Merrett was lost. “What kind of dog?”

“He answers to the name Sandor Clegane […] Did you see him at the wedding, perchance?”

[. . .]

“He would have had a child with him,” said the singer. “A skinny girl, about ten. Or perhaps a boy the same age.”

“I don’t think so,” said Merrett. “Not that I knew.” – Epilogue ASOS

In many retellings of the Cinderella story, the Prince/King searches the realm looking for the heroine with an identifying item, and typically that item is a shoe of some sort. Once the shoe is placed on the heroine’s foot it symbolically means the heroine is reclaiming her identity. Arya, however, didn’t lose a shoe, and I’d argue that when Ned/the Old Gods/the Greenseers spoke to Arya through the heart tree, empowering Arya, that’s when Arya reclaimed her identity, at least for that time as Arya must reclaim her identity multiple times in her arc. I’d argue that Arya’s connection to the North and her family is her overall identifying item. But I fully believe Gendry himself might be another “identifying item,” along with him still taking on the archetypal role of “prince”.

Why do I say this? Because in AFFC Gendry is stationed at one of the last known places Arya was sighted at with the Hound, the Crossroads Inn, where he is blacksmithing while also helping to look after orphans. He was likely stationed there by Lady Stoneheart and the Brotherhood Without Banners because he knew Arya the best out of everyone (remember LSH would probably have a hard time recognizing Arya after two plus years and a resurrection). So if she returned, he would not only have a better chance at recognizing her, but also possibly a better chance at keeping her there compared to anyone else. If people are doubting that this is Gendry’s role, just remember that the BWB is actively looking for Arya, and also note Gendry’s personality shift post-ASOS. Gendry has always been rude and moody, but in AFFC it has been taken to the extreme. He is absolutely furious and instead of being just plain rude, he’s actually become mean and more violent. He also seems to have something against the Hound now, someone who he previously had nothing against during the Hound’s trial by combat earlier in ASOS:

…The boy came and stood beside her, his hammer in his hand.

Lightning cracked to the south as the riders swung down off their horses. For half a heartbeat darkness turned to day. An axe gleamed silvery blue, light shimmered off mail and plate, and beneath the dark hood of the lead rider Brienne glimpsed an iron snout and rows of steel teeth, snarling.

Gendry saw it too. “Him.”

“Not him. His helm.” Brienne tried to keep the fear from her voice, but her mouth was dry as dust. – Brienne VII AFFC

That “him” was very pointed and because of the symbolism in the scene surrounding that “him” and the overall change in Gendry’s behavior I definitely take it to mean Gendry does have a problem with the Hound now. So what changed? The Hound kidnapped Arya. I think it’s safe to say that Gendry is just as invested as the rest of the BWB, if not more so, to finding Arya again, hence making him the “prince” searching the realm for his lost Cinderella.

A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes

In Disney’s Cinderella, songs like “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”, “So This Is Love”, “Cinderella”, “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes”, “Oh, Sing Sweet Nightingale”, and “The Work Song” are included into the film. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this in the previous retellings however. Like I mentioned earlier the Brother’s Grimm, Aschenputtel, features this as well to some extant. In Aschenputtel, the heroine would “sing a chant” to call upon the white doves that came from her glowing hazel tree. These birds would help her grant wishes and help her complete tasks, and it was most likely the inspiration for why birds were included in the Disney version, although birds have featured in more than just Aschenputtel. I mention this because GRRM wrote Arya a song in the novels:

“My featherbed is deep and soft,

and there I'll lay you down,

I'll dress you all in yellow silk,

and on your head a crown.

For you shall be my lady love,

and I shall be your lord.

I'll always keep you warm and safe,

and guard you with my sword.

“And how she smiled and how she laughed,

the maiden of the tree.

She spun away and said to him,

no featherbed for me.

I'll wear a gown of golden leaves,

and bind my hair with grass,

But you can be my forest love,

and me your forest lass.”

This is very clearly a love song also and we know it’s most likely about Arya and her foreshadowing a possible future relationship with Gendry. And it’s very clearly about them as Gendry is a bastard Baratheon “prince”, hence the mentions of “yellow silk” and a “crown”, and also because Arya quite literally is dressed as an oak tree at this time and almost a maiden and will be a maiden when they reunite later in the series. We also know the song is meant to foreshadow them because of the context. Tom O’Seven’s specifically winked at Arya as he sang this song, and after the song was sung Lady Smallwood, when taking Arya to get changed into a different dress, said to Arya, “I have no gowns of leaves,” which further tells the readers that this song is Arya’s song, her future love song.

A Mother’s Legacy

In the Magical Helpers section above I mentioned that a dead parent may be the one to help the heroine instead of the typical fairy godmother, by either sending an animal to aid the heroine and/or granting wishes, or by the heroine’s mother transforming into an animal. In some Greek versions, in “the Balkan-Slavonic tradition of the tale”, and in some Central Asian variants, the heroine’s mother comes back as a cow who is then killed by the heroine’s sisters. The heroine eventually gathers the bones and from her mother’s grave the heroine is gifted wonderful dresses. In other variants, the heroine’s dead mother comes back as a fish or a female dog. These animals represent the heroine’s mother’s legacy.

Jon chuckled. “Perhaps you should do the same thing, little sister. Wed Tully to Stark in your arms.”

“A wolf with a fish in its mouth?” It made her laugh. “That would look silly…” – Arya I AGOT

That night she went to sleep thinking of her mother, and wondering if she should kill the Hound in his sleep and rescue Lady Catelyn herself. When she closed her eyes she saw her mother’s face against the back of her eyelids. She’s so close I could almost smell her…

…and then she could smell her. The scent was faint beneath the other smells, beneath moss and mud and water, and the stench of rotting reeds and rotting men. She padded slowly through the soft ground to the river’s edge, lapped up a drink, then lifted her head to sniff. The sky was grey and thick with cloud, the river green and full of floating things. Dead men clogged the shallows, some still moving as the water pushed them, others washed up on the banks. Her brothers and sisters swarmed around them, tearing at the rich ripe flesh.

[. . .]

The scent was stronger now [. . .] Only the scent mattered. She sniffed the air again. There it was, and now she saw it too, something pale and white drifting down the river, turning where it brushed against a snag. The reeds bowed down before it.

She splashed noisily through the shallows and threw herself into the deeper water, her legs churning. The current was strong but she was stronger. She swam, following her nose. The river smells were rich and wet, but those were not the smells that pulled her. She paddled after the sharp red whisper of cold blood, the sweet cloying stench of death. She chased them as she had often chased a red deer through the trees, and in the end she ran them down, and her jaw closed around a pale white arm. She shook it to make it move, but there was only death and blood in her mouth. By now she was tiring, and it was all she could do to pull the body back to shore. As she dragged it up the muddy bank, one of her little brothers came prowling, his tongue lolling from his mouth. She had to snarl to drive him off, or else he would have fed. Only then did she stop to shake the water from her fur. The white thing lay facedown in the mud, her dead flesh wrinkled and pale, cold blood trickling from her throat. Rise, she thought. Rise and eat and run with us. – Arya XII ASOS

“So you sewed his head on Robb Stark’s neck after both o’ them were dead,” said yellow cloak.

“My [Merrett Frey] father did that [. . .] I only drank some wine…you have no witness.”

“As it happens, you’re wrong there.” The singer turned to the hooded woman. “Milady?”

The outlaws parted as she came forward, saying no word. When she lowered her hood, something tightened inside Merrett’s chest, and for a moment he could not breathe. No. No, I saw her die. She was dead for a day and night before they stripped her naked and threw her body in the river. Raymund opened her throat from ear to ear. She was dead.

Her cloak and collar hid the gash his brother’s blade had made, but her face was even worse than he remembered. The flesh had gone pudding soft in the water and turned the color of curdled milk. Half her hair was gone and the rest had turned as white and brittle as a crone’s. Beneath her ravaged scalp, her face was shredded skin and black blood where she had raked herself with her nails. But her eyes were the most terrible thing. Her eyes saw him, and they hated.

“She don’t speak,” said the big man in the yellow cloak. “You bloody bastards cut her throat too deep for that. But she remembers.” He turned to the dead woman and said, “What do you say, m’lady? Was he part of it?”

Lady Catelyn’s eyes never left him. She nodded. – Epilogue ASOS

In the Chinese retelling of Cinderella, Ye Xian, the heroine befriends a fish, which is the reincarnation of her deceased mother. In The Story of Tam and Cam, a Vietnamese version, the heroine Tam also had a fish which was killed by the stepmother and the half-sister, and its bones also give her clothes. And a typical scene in Kapmalaien tales is the mother becoming a fish, being eaten in fish form, the daughter burying her bones and a tree sprouting from her grave.

So not only is Lady Catelyn a symbolic fish, a daughter of House Tully, but she’s also been resurrected (reincarnated), and is looking specifically for our heroine, Arya, who I believe will be gifted several various things (both good and bad) by this incarnation of her mother, but we shall see if the parallel continues when TWOW and ADOS come out.

Conclusion

I really hope that after you read this monster you were as convinced as I am that Arya indeed has Cinderella motifs, and an extensive amount of them as well. Whatever it may mean I don’t rightly know, but what I do know is that at the end of the day, the many stories of Cinderella are an analogy. An analogy about someone “who unexpectedly achieves recognition or success after a period of obscurity and neglect”. Of someone whose attributes were unrecognized in their society, only for them to be recognized. And I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty hand in hand with one of her other biggest fairy tale motifs as well that runs concurrently with the Cinderella motif, and that is the story of “The Ugly Duckling”, who after years of neglect, finds acceptance within society, as well as self-acceptance within themselves. :)

#arya stark #gendrya #asoiaf

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harringrooves · 3 years ago

Text

Inspired by the #cherrylanechallenge day 1 prompt knife but this is not spooky at all so technically this is just a random little ficlet! AO3

The chair outside the principal's office is already taken when Billy gets there. He lets his eyes follow the trail from the clean, white sneakers up the impossibly long stretch of denim clad leg and even further upwards over the two toned striped polo shirt to the moles peeking out from just under the collar.

Steve Harrington glances up at him, then grimaces. Sighs.

"Jesus Christ," Harrington mutters.

"What are you doing here?" Billy grunts. There's no where left to sit, so he flung his jacket onto the linoleum and drops down onto it, back resting against the wall directly opposite Harrington.

Despite the distance of the entire width of the hallway between them, when Billy stretches his legs out the scuffed points of his boots almost touch the edge of Harrington's sneakers.

"Waiting for Mrs Reyes."

"Yeah, no shit."

That earns him a glare from Harrington. Billy's stomach turns a little at the disdain in Harrington's dark eyes, but it's the curiosity shining through that makes him squirm. Like an ant under a magnifying glass.

"Why're you here?"

Billy rolls his eyes, letting the familiar motion draw out the equally familiar sneer. "Same as you, dumbass."

Harrington huffs and turns away again as they both fall silent, glancing at the door every so often as the minutes tick by. It's not at all a comfortable silence. Harrington's not looking at Billy so Billy shouldn't be looking at him. But the walls are blank and the only other remotely interesting thing is the name plaque on the principal's door.

So Billy traces the letters dutifully, keeps going even when he gets nearer to the end of Reyes and stripes creep into the very edge of his vision. Even when he hears Harrington shift in the chair, moving his legs under him onto the seat then over the arms than back down to the floor. Even when Harrington asks, "You go crazy on some kid again?"

Billy goes round and round the shape of the capital R. "No. The fuck is that supposed to mean?"

Harrington laughs. It's loud and braying, and not what Billy would've guessed King Steve's laugh would sound like. He imagined something smooth and dark, something that would exude effortless charm with an undertone of something mysteriously rich and out of reach.

It just sounds like a teenage guy laughing, if a teenage guy was also part donkey. Billy would find it funny, if Harrington wasn't laughing at him. "What?" he repeats harshly.

Harrington eventually quiets. "What do I mean? The night at the Byer's, you went like, fully psycho. Your eyes were fucking dead. Did you get like that again, is that why you're here?"

Finally, Billy tears his eyes away from the plaque and meets Harrington's head on. "No," Billy says firmly. "I didn't fucking- no."

Harrington shrugs. "Whatever. Wouldn't surprise me if you did, sooner or later."

That stings. In California he was good at skating and surfing and babysitting and he was top of his class in English and History. Even after she left everyone knew him as Rosaline's boy (never Neil's), with the blonde hair and the yellow surfboard and the white smile that was a little too charming for his own good. Here in Hawkins, he was the Hargrove kid, the one who fucked and ditched, the one who fought and drank.

Maybe Billy's fine with everyone else thinking that about him, but not Harrington. Billy won't let himself think about why, but he wants Harrington see him. To look at him and think he's better than that night.

"I got kicked out of shop class," Billy bites out quietly. Harrington blinks at him.

"You got in a fight in shop-"

"I didn't get in a fight, for fuck's sake!"

Harrington holds his hands up in mock placation, bobbing his head mockingly. "Alright, alright." He stretches his leg out and lazily nudges at Billy's foot. "What'd you do then?"

"Made a knife," Billy mumbles, eyes back on the plaque.

Harrington laughs again. "You what?"

"I made a-"

"A knife, yeah." Harrington cocks his head like a little dog, some of his fringe flopping into his eye. "You know that just makes you sound even crazier, right?"

Billy just shrugs and lets his head fall back against the wall. "Wasn't for me, it was s'posed to be a gift. For- for Max." Harrington freezes.

"You were gonna make Max a knife as a gift?" It sounds like Harrington's struggling with every implication of that sentence. That Billy would gift Max something. That a knife was an appropriate gift. That Billy would care enough about anything to create something hand made.

"Yeah." He can't help but let a little bit of defensiveness slip into his tone. Billy kicks Harrington's foot away, probably a bit harder than necessary. "It was a replica of that one her character has in that stupid game her nerd friends play. Demons in Dungeons, or whatever." Dungeons and Dragons. Billy's not that stupid, but he's also not that shameless to admit to knowing what it's called. "It was a full scaled up one, even got the pattern on the handle half done."

"That's- cool," Harrington says hesitantly. "Didn't know you cared, Hargrove."

"Shitbird's birthday soon. Thought she'd like it." Billy glances over to Harrington, who's watching him with narrowed eyes. Billy coughs, shifting his shoulders a little to roll off the weight of the scrutiny. "Doesn't matter, that fucker Morrison confiscated it anyway."

Silence falls again, still just as awkward as last time but lacking a large amount of the hostility. Harrington's still watching him. The plaque's lost it's draw and Billy resorts to tracing the seams of his jeans with a fingernail.

"I'm failing English," Harrington offers abruptly. Billy's head snaps up, but for the first time Harrington's looking away as he speaks. "That's why I'm here. They're not sure if I'm gonna graduate."

"Sucks," Billy says roughly. Harrington nods slowly.

"Yeah."

Billy swallows, fingers clenching into fists atop his thighs. "I could, uh, give you my notes."

"Why would I need your notes?"

"'Cause you're failing English." Billy doesn't mean to say it like Harrington's an idiot, but those big brown eyes are wide and confused, like he's never thought about actually asking for help. "And 'cause I'm acing it."

Harrington's nose wrinkles in obvious disbelief, but he doesn't challenge it. He just sighs and lets his head loll to the side, propped up by his fist. "Yeah. Whatever. I'll do anything, at this point."

Billy nods silently. Harrington opens his mouth again, but he's interrupted by the click of the office door finally opening. Mrs Reyes pokes her head out.

"Steve," she greets him warmly. Her eyes slide over to Billy on the floor and her lips thin ever so slightly. "William."

"Hi," Billy says as obnoxiously peppy as he can manage.

"I'll see to you in a minute, after I've spoken with Steve." And then Harrington steps through into the office and the door swings shut once again.

Billy could get up and sit in the now vacant chair, but he stays right where he is until it's his turn to be called in. Harrington looks at him as he passes him in the doorway, but it's obvious that he's a million miles away, frowning at Billy but his mind no doubt occupied by something else.

Mrs Reyes doesn't ask what happened, just gives him a Friday detention and a lecture on how badly his behaviour is going to affect his record and how that's such a shame given his academic achievements. Billy lets it wash over him, not bothering to really pay attention. He's heard it all before.

When school lets out and Billy makes his way out the Camaro, he almost trips over his feet at the sight of Steve Harrington leaning against his car, twirling a knife in his long fingers.

"Here," Harrington says as soon as Billy gets close enough, holding the knife out to him blade first. Billy takes it gingerly and slips it into his jacket pocket.

"How'd you get it back?"

Harrington's chest puffs up in some god awful display of smugness as he smirks at Billy. "Morrison leaves his office unlocked during lunch. Everyone knows, it's like the number one place to make out. I was in an out, the couple in there didn't even notice me."

"That's disgusting. But, thanks, I guess-"

"Don't." Harrington holds up a hand, wincing a little. "I didn't do it for you, I think Max will really like the gift so if anything, I did it for her. And consider this payment for the notes."

"Payment?" Billy's brow furrows. "I didn't ask you to pay me." But now that Harrington's mentioned it, he definitely should have. Harrington's rich, everyone knows that. Billy could've got an easy $100 or some of the good weed Tommy's always talking about Harrington having.

"And now you don't have to," Harrington says smugly. "I give you the knife, you give me the notes. I don't want you asking me a month down the track to give you like $80 or a bag of weed or whatever in return. So there's the knife, aaaaand we're even."

Billy glowers as Harrington grins smarmily at him. "Fine. We're even. Now fuck off, some of us got places to be."

Harrington dutifully pushes off the Camaro, walking backwards towards his own car a few rows over. "Cool. Give me the notes whenever this week."

Billy doesn't say bye, just gets in his car and drives off, studiously not watching the fading image of Steve Harrington in his rear view mirror.

...

Max loves the knife. She doesn't hug him, but she nudges his shoulder with hers and declares that she's going to tie it to her belt and carry it with her at all times from now on. Neil goes purple trying to hold back his commentary on just how ladylike and appropriate for a young woman that is. Billy gets a cuff to the back of the head later, but it's worth it.

Harrington does get to graduate. He leans over from his seat beside Billy's (alphabetical order) during the opening speech of the graduation ceremony and whispers closer than necessary into Billy's ear, "Thanks, man." He doesn't so much as glance at Billy for the rest of the three hour ceremony, or during the party later that night that goes until daybreak the next morning, but it's worth it.

Billy bides his time. He can handle one more summer if it means getting enough cash to be independent when he leaves for college in a few months. Neil sucks as much as always, and driving Max everywhere cuts into the hours he's able to put in at the pool, but when she drags him to the new mall after his shift and right into the blissfully cool ice cream shop, Steve Harrington's eyes catch tellingly on the bare skin between the bottom of Billy's crop top and his tiny, red shorts and it's so, so fucking worth it.

#harringrove #billy hargrove #steve harrington #this isn't spooky at all i'm so sorry 😩#also unedited af #where does this fall on the canon timeline??? nobody knows!!#hg fic #harringrove fic

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awaytogo · 4 years ago

Photo

gif credit @pariztexas

optimal control theory (Nathan Bateman/m!Reader) Rating: explicit Word Count: 8.2K Warnings: smut, exhibitionism, robot sex, vaginal sex, squirting, anal sex, anal fingering, spanking, creampie, daddy kink, size kink, dirty talk, cockwarming

“Would you fuck me?” Nathan asks you in the middle of the afternoon in the lab, dangerously sober, which is what makes you the most concerned. It’s possible it’s still an ego thing, but it would’ve been way easier to pass off had it been during or after dinner, when you’d known he’d had something to drink. He doesn’t even bother to look up at you, still typing furiously at the computer, but the way he’d called it across the room, calm and clear, makes it clear he expects an answer. Would you fuck me? Like you haven’t been imagining choking on his cock since the day you met him.

“Theoretically?” you reply, stalling for time. Maybe he’s broken through on something, though he doesn’t need the validation. You stop taking notes, stop double checking his work he never needed you to look at in the first place.

“Sure,” he says, in a dubious tone. “Theoretically, would you fuck me.” It’s still a dangerous question to answer. He’s still your boss, as much as he’s loath to admit it. You take a respectable amount of time and maintain an even keel to your tone.

“Let’s say yes,” you answer, swallowing, scared to look at him. But the immediate silence that follows draws your attention to him, and he’s staring at you, his expression neutral.

“So let’s say in actuality.” It feels strange, to be proven right but never in a way you necessarily expected. Nathan never struck you as swinging that way, as being particularly interested — you’d had a boyfriend when you started working with (for) him. There had been polite conversation about it. He’d asked you about him months after you’d broken up; you told him the truth. You weren’t torn up about it.

You weren’t pining for Nathan, at least not to your own detriment. The work itself was all-consuming in its own right; working with Nathan was rewarding. It was validating. Just because you so happened to fantasize about him sitting on your face was really your own business. You had no real romantic notions about him. He’d probably be horrible to you, romantically speaking. But you knew he’d be a good fuck, and it was a healthy outlet for your fantasies.

Healthy-ish.

“In actuality,” you repeat, lifting your chin somewhat as you say the first thing that comes to mind, which is, “bringing me to a remote, undisclosed location makes the notion of consent a bit dubious, doesn’t it?”

“Only if you don’t feel you can tell me no,” Nathan says, like the idea is preposterous to him. He wants to run through the entire game. So be it.

“You’re my boss.”

“I’m your mentor.”

“Not an entire world of difference, there.”

“It’s hotter, for one,” he snaps back, sounding almost annoyed, “I’m not telling you what to do, I’m teaching you, and I’m sure I can be teaching you sex things, too. Not to say that boss stuff isn’t hot, but it’s a different flavor.”

“I’m not even entirely sure if you’re interested in me or if I’m the only warm body around,” you say, already knowing how insecure you sound and hating it. He has you on the defense. You hate it when he does this.

“You know, I haven’t actually heard you say no yet,” Nathan says, leveling his gaze at you. You wonder what would happen if you gave in to him, if he’d just pull down his gym shorts right then and there and fuck you with his donkey dick. If he’d tell you to do things. If he’d use protection. You’re almost certain he’d bear no risk of disease he wouldn’t be able to immediately treat; you could have his cum filling your ass in about twenty minutes.

You make sure to look him in the eye and tell him, “No, Nathan,” before you return to your notes, finding a mistake like he’d left it there to test you.

—-

You dream of the stretch of his cock, the way he’d put his back into nailing you, his tight grip on your hips. You dream of straddling his thick thighs, leaning back until you feel his balls flush against your ass, your hand planted on the breadth of his chest. You dream of his teeth on your neck, him hissing something about how much he has to teach you before you come hard on his cock.

You wake up hard and grinding into your bed, your ass arched in the air like a bitch in heat. You rut mindlessly for a few seconds before remembering the cameras stationed all over the compound, and then you roll over onto your side, weighing the pros and cons of jacking off in the shower.

You don’t.

It leaves you a bit tightly wound as you head up for breakfast, knowing already you’ll find Nathan outside in the gym. You fix yourself a coffee and step outside for a breath of fresh air — and maybe a whiff of his musk.

He’s prowling around the punching bag, well into his workout, if the sweat he’d worked up is any indication. His hands are taped, his tanktop is soaked through, and you try not to notice the movement in his shorts as he quick steps around, try not to think about whether or not he’s wearing underwear. Maybe a jockstrap, if you’re lucky; you imagine it framing the generous cheeks of his ass, maybe soaked through with the sweat of his balls. Your mouth waters. You sip your coffee and let it sit scalding hot on your tongue for a second, just to bring you back to the moment.

“Morning,” he says, jabbing and then hitting hard, his hand making a satisfying sound as it lands a hard blow into the punching bag. “How’d you sleep?” He hasn’t asked that since you first came to his facility. You ignore the question.

“How long have you been up?” you ask. He’s always up first. Sometimes, he just doesn’t sleep. It gives him an advantage. At the very least, it helps him recover from the previous night, slumped on the couch. You wonder when you started keeping score. All of this is by design.

“Bout an hour,” he tells you, straightening his posture, turning to you. “You wanna spar?” He’d have you pinned to the floor in two minutes flat. Maybe if you were lucky, he’d lean his entire weight into you, maybe even give you a surreptitious grind of his hips, let you feel what you’re missing. All of that solid, sweaty flesh, suddenly in direct contact.

“I’ll pass,” you say, choosing that moment to make a tactical retreat. It’s a solid few moments until you hear him hitting the bag again. It’s impossible to discern any emotion from the sound of the impact, but you try all the same.

—-

He doesn’t mention fucking you again. It doesn’t stop you from thinking about it — you had never stopped thinking about it, but now he brought it to the forefront of your mind, dropped it like a grenade and walked away. You hate knowing this was his intent all along. You spend your day in the lab minding your own work (technically, minding his) while he works with whatever model he’s currently on. The distance helps, in the sense that there’s less inspiration.

It hinders you as well, because you have plenty of time for your imagination to run wild. You rerun yesterday’s conversation, last night’s dream, this morning’s encounter over and over again, trying to gauge his interest, trying to imagine how things could’ve played out differently.

Jacking off is an admission of weakness. You cannot guarantee he won’t be watching, and if he sees, he knows he’s gotten to you. Part of the resistance is the game, but you hate the feeling of losing all the same. You want to impress him. You want him to bury his cock in you, again and again, until you can’t move, until his cum is overflowing from your ass. Somehow, these things seem mutually exclusive.

But by the time night falls and you have dinner and you eventually retreat to your room, you need to relieve some tension. Maybe you’ll be able to refocus yourself. So you lock the door behind you and make your way to the bed, kneeling and retrieving your bag out from underneath it. You pull out the lube you’d had stashed away and then feel around for the dildo you brought — something you used sparingly, only when you missed the feeling of being filled, really only brought in the case of an emergency such as this.

Your hand closes around a mesh encasing and you pull out an unfamiliar sleeve of considerable size. From feel alone, you already know what it is but you can’t believe it until you open the drawstrings and pull out a metal dildo, sleek and shiny and weighty in your hand. There’s no realistic design — no head or balls, just a hefty shaft with seamless design. You check the bottom for a battery cap, but it just ends with a black base, no power source to be found.

“Fuck you,” you whisper, running your hand up and down the shaft, feeling your knees spread slightly just at the thought.

Sometimes an admission of weakness is a strength in and of itself.

—-

Climbing up the stairs is a herculean effort you bear with little more than a grimace. Still, it doesn’t go unnoticed.

He’s waiting in the kitchen. Of course he’s waiting in the kitchen, big hand wrapped around a disgusting looking juice, and the way he looks at you, which is to say no particular way at all—

“Morning,” he offers diplomatically, and you are mindful of your posture as you sidle past him to pour yourself a cup of coffee. “Sleep well?” You bite the inside of your cheek, staring with concerted effort at the countertop. You nod. “That’s good,” Nathan says, with exaggerated kindness. You can feel his stare burning into you. “I didn’t sleep well at all.”

“Something keep you up?” you ask, like your voice isn’t hoarse from screaming his name clenching around the unyielding metal, like you hadn’t given him a show. You finally look at him, catch his exasperated expression.

“You could say that.” You hum your mild disappointment and amble over to the cabinets, not even sure what you could manage to put in your mouth right now. “You okay?” You hear Nathan ask, sounding too close and too faraway all at once. “Walking kinda funny.”

“Tell me something, Nathan,” you say, turning on a heel, “is it true to size?” The question brings him up short; at least, it has the appearance of bringing him up short. It’s hard to imagine which scenarios he hasn’t planned for in this game of his. The thought is almost overwhelming — no matter what, you’re playing into his hand. You want to be playing into his hand. You hate losing.

“Nah,” he says after a moment’s hesitation, like an admission of guilt, and quickly quashes whatever vindictive thrill that rushes through you by following it up with a simple, “I got a fat dick.” It’s your turn to be brought up short, as the two of you stand there, both knowing you’re imagining the fat dick in question.

“How do I know you’re not just interested in me because I’m the only person who’ll say no to you?” you ask.

“How do you know you’re the only person who’s said no?”

“When’s the last time you asked someone?” you shoot back, and he’s silent for a moment. He’s thinking. You don’t press what little advantage you have.

“Let me show you something,” he says, eventually. You let him.

—

He takes you, of course, to his room. You’ve been in it before, often helping him stumble into his bed. This time he isn’t leaning on you for support. He isn’t touching you at all. He asks that you sit in a chair; you do, and he doesn’t even touch you then. He just leaves you.

You stiffen in your seat when he returns, leading in a woman. What looks like a woman. You almost don’t want to look at her face; you’d long since stopped taking interest in his latest models, had focused on the coding and the theories alone. You hated to see the look in their faces, first because they were too inexpressive and then because they were too realistic. She looks at you, placid, perhaps a spark of curiosity in her eyes.

“Easy,” Nathan says, his voice startlingly soft, and you realize only belatedly that he’s talking to you. You have to unclench your jaw. She’s wearing a slip; you’re surprised she’s wearing anything at all. The false modesty makes it worse.

“Nathan,” you breathe, your voice thick in your throat. He looks at you for a long moment, waiting for you to ask him to stop. You think about leaving. You sit there instead.

“Hey, baby,” he murmurs, and this time he’s ostensibly talking to her, guiding her chin with his finger so she looks at him. Her smile comes naturally and then he kisses her, slowly, filthily, letting you see the way he licks into her mouth with sure, insistent strokes of his tongue. The sound of their kissing is so loud in the silence of his room it’s practically obscene; he hums low in his chest and nibbles on her bottom lip. It comes away slightly swollen and flushed, and she almost seems like she’s breathing harder. She doesn’t have to breathe at all.

She steals a glance at you, almost furtive, as he removes her slip, revealing her pert breasts, her pebbling nipples, her creamy, unblemished skin. Your eyes catch sight of the small thatch of hair at the center of her legs and you avert your gaze for a moment, swallowing thickly. He created all of this. All of it for him to enjoy as he pleases. You aren’t sure if you’re envious or nauseous.

He cups her breast and runs a thumb over her nipple, bending down to suckle it. Nathan takes his time to explore her tits, at first gentle and sensual before becoming possessive, almost cruel, and she smiles up at the ceiling beatifically. He carefully guides her onto the bed and she clambers up onto her hands and knees; he directs her, aware of his audience, decides to give you her profile. Once he’s finished, he gives her a firm slap on the ass, and you flinch like it was you he was hitting.

And then he takes off his shorts.

He wasn’t kidding about having a fat dick. Though the dildo ran on the larger end, Nathan’s cock is downright intimidating — he’s hung like a donkey, and worst of all, he knows it, casting you a sideways smirk as he gives himself a few pumps to get to full hardness. It’s big and meaty between his thighs, the foreskin stretched so tight around the dark head just barely peeking out. It’s a mouthwatering dick, a dick that could leave you aching for days, the kind of dick you’d always fantasized about him having: a real man’s dick, one that would truly own you.

“She’s not the latest model,” Nathan says casually as he climbs onto the bed and positions himself behind the woman, still presenting herself with no mind of what’s about to split her open. “I just use her to test body mods sometimes. Scratch the itch and all. Got the sweetest little pussy, though.” He begins to push into her cunt, giving her his cock nice and slow but meeting no resistance, just pushing and taking until his balls are flush against her ass. He presses down on her lower back and she arches obligingly, pushing herself against his cock. “Creams like nothing else. Even squirts.” Before you can even think to respond, he asks, “You wanna see?”

“Yes,” you say without thinking, wishing you could see the stretch of her cunt around his cock, but it’s still a sight to see him gripping her hips and beginning to fuck her, hard and rough and perfect. She’s wet; you can hear the squelching of him fucking his cock into her tight pussy over and over again, that and the slaps of his balls against her ass filling the room, along with his slightly labored breathing.

“You’re into that,” he says, casually, too busy plowing her to look at you. “The squirting, I mean — you search for that shit a lot. Lot more straight porn than I woulda thought.” He pulls out to show you his cock, big and red and shiny with her wetness, giving it another few slick strokes. “Why do you think that is?” Nathan asks as he flips her over, spreads her legs like they’re his to spread. You hold your breath as you watch his cock sink into her — it shouldn’t fit, it’s too big, but he presses in to the hilt anyways.

“Because,” you say, unthinking as he braces her legs on his shoulders and goes to town. Her entire body shakes with every thrust, he’s fucking into her so hard.

“Cause you wanna be fucked like this?” he pants, spreading one leg to the side so you can see better, watch his dick disappear into her. “Wanna be owned like this?” You make a strangled noise and he almost laughs as he rails her, moves her around like an acrobat — pressing her legs to her chest, practically bends her in half. “You like it when guys keep their shirts on,” he says, and you realize he’s still wearing his tanktop, which he’s quickly sweating through. It almost makes the curve of his ass look more pronounced; you want to bury your face between his cheeks.

He pulls out again, now panting as he turns her over, props her up on hands and knees again. Another spank as he gauges your reaction, your sharp intake of breath. “You like that,” he says, not much of a question, but there’s a teasing edge to his voice as he pushes in again, a bit rougher. He groans. “So fucking tight.” He takes his time now, rocking his hips into her with slow, sensual thrusts — you can only imagine how her pussy feels, filled with his cock. He reaches around and begins to play with her clit, forcing himself balls deep in her as he says, “Come for daddy.” It feels like a gut punch.

You aren’t sure if it’s because she’s programmed to do it or not, but she lets out an effective, evocative moan as she squirts around his cock, soaking him down to his balls. His thrusts pick up as she keeps on coming, almost endless as he says, “Aw, yeah, there we go — it’s so goddamn wet.” You almost think he’s about to come but he pulls out to let you see his cock; he’s dripping, his dick so fully engorged that the foreskin has fully pulled back to reveal the fat, red head. He gives himself a light stroke as he catches his breath, watching you take him in.

“You like the daddy shit,” he tells you, dipping his fingers into her dripping cunt, three at a time, just pumping them in and out thoughtlessly. “Even the shirt thing — I don’t really get it, but it makes you feel more owned, right? Doesn’t have to be daddy, either. You like ‘em all: stepdads, teachers, bosses. Even mentors?” A gleam of white in his beard from his teeth.

“Not an easy search term,” you somehow manage, your voice sounding level despite the fact that your cock is aching in your pants and you’ve likely soaked through your pants with your own precum. You feel scarcely able to move, but speaking somehow makes you aware of how physically aroused you are, of how actually close Nathan is. You could reach out and feel his cock, hot and creamy in your hand.

“Fair enough,” Nathan says, turning back to the model as he pulls his hand out, considering his three wet fingers. “You love it,” he muses, seeming for a second unsure of what he may do next. “You love this, too.” He brings his wet hand to grip her hips and he mounts her again, but this time, he begins to force his donkey dick into her ass.

You gasp as you watch him do it, inch by inch — surely she cannot feel pain, but he must’ve constructed her hole to be tighter, to be more of an effort to get inside. If anything, she seems more visibly pleased by this development, her face contorting in obvious strains of pleasure as she presses back against him. He steadies her and sinks in to the hilt with a deep, satisfied groan.

“God, I used to love fucking girls in the ass,” Nathan tells you, rutting into her even though he can’t fill her any more. “Guys, too, I mean — I just think they come harder. I always liked it when girls needed a little convincing, but as soon as I was in them, whew — they were fuckin’ animals.” He takes his time with his thrusts, drawing himself in and out of her with maddening deliberateness, maybe to let you see the stretch of her hole around his fat hog. “Maybe I got the right kinda dick for it. Maybe it was just the satisfaction of giving into the chase, you know?” You did know. You know at that moment that when you give into the chase, which may be imminently, you will come harder than you ever have before.

“Fuck,” he breathes out, drawing out the vowel as his thrusts pick up and his hips clap into her, tilting his head back. “Ohh, fuck, man, she’s so fuckin’ tight.” Another slap, and he’s really pulling her back onto his cock now, just railing into her with abandon, so much so that you wonder if—

“You know what,” Nathan grunts, setting his jaw as he fucks her like a bull, “I really picked up on in your search terms?” He gives her a few more solid thrusts before he pushes in and lets out a deep groan, trying to get as deep in her as possible as he empties his balls. He grinds his hips, making soft, satisfied noises as he twitches with the aftershocks. He looks at you. “Creampie.”

You swallow thickly. He stills for a moment, catching his breath, his tank top now spotted with dark rings of sweat at the pits and along the stomach. “Fuck,” he breathes, his entire expression softening, if only for a moment. But before you can register any vulnerability, the moment passes, and he pulls out of his cock out of her, drenched in her juices and his own spunk. There’s even a pearl droplet sitting at the head, one you wish you could collect on your tongue.

You stare at Nathan’s cock until he positions her and spreads the cheeks of her ass to expose her hole. You gasp softly as you see it, gaping and well-fucked, a trickle of his cream already dribbling out. Rather than using his fingers, Nathan kneels and licks into her asshole without any preamble, groaning deeply as he tonguefucks her, as sloppy and as loud as possible. He plunges his fingers into her cunt again, adding to the obscenity, and you think he makes her come again as he eats himself out of her, if the noise she makes is anything to go by. Satisfied, he leans back and turns to you, some of his own cum caught in his beard.

“I can craft the sweetest, creamiest pussy,” he says, now moving across the room to stand before you, his large, softening cock startlingly close to your face until he kneels down to meet your eyeline. “The tightest asshole. I can program objectively one of the best fucks anyone’s ever had, and I can dump my load in them any time I want. But it’s nothing.” He glances down at the wet spot in your jeans and grins. “Nothing compared to the feeling of a real, warm human body underneath you. The feel of you trying to accommodate my dick because you want it that bad. The shock when you feel how hot my cum is inside you. I never have to ask again, if I don’t want to. But I’m asking you. You’ve seen what I can do.” He gives your cheek a light pat, making you jolt. Nathan grins with all of his teeth and winks. “Think about it.”

He stands up and ignores his shorts, letting you get a good view of his fat ass as he collects the model from the bed with a quiet, “come on,” and walks out of the room. You stay seated, feeling the wetness he left on your cheek.

—

He’s gone by the time you emerge from the shower, resolve thoroughly shattered and knees still weak. It’s not just that he’s busy in the lab, or locked in his room, or hidden somewhere else in the facility. He has completely disappeared.

You go about your days because you have no other choice, but what is worse is that you do not think about how there is no other choice. You go about your days with utter and absolute certainty that he is coming back, and when he does, he is finally going to fuck you, and the thought is enough to keep you afloat. You think back to all of the conversations you had, you think back to watching him ream that woman — thing — woman in front of you, you think of how his lips will feel against yours, how his cock will split you open, and you wait. And you are calm until you’re not, until the day he inevitably comes back, perhaps because he has you down to a science. It’s flattering and discomfiting and infuriating all at once.

But perhaps your reaction takes him by surprise because by the time you emerge from your room and head up to the kitchen to find him leaning against a counter like he’d never left, all you can think to say is “Do you want to spar?”

He blinks at you. “Hi,” he says slowly. You can see he’s assessing you, studying you, the slight tension in your jaw, the light in your eyes.

“Hi, Nathan,” you say to him, like you’re placating a child, “do you want to spar?” He sniffs, narrowing his eyes at you in slight disbelief. Waiting for the catch. The stakes, maybe. You stare back at him coolly, and when he takes too long to answer, you go to move past him, to grab the pitcher from the fridge. His hand is warm and calloused when it grabs the inside of your elbow. When you look at him, you notice that you’re taller. You’d never noticed before. He could knock you on your ass in a minute.

“Let’s do it,” he says, his gaze boring up into yours.

——

“Take off the glasses.” You’re down in his training room, the two of you standing a healthy measure apart, him stretching and you watching. He looks up at you and cocks his head.

“Why?” he asks, and then there’s a flash of white in his dark beard. “You think you’re gonna break ‘em?”

“I think I’m gonna knock them right off your fucking face,” you tell him seriously, and he grins at you again, beckoning you with a twitch of his fingers. He crouches a bit now, braced for action as you start to move, the two of you circling each other like sharks. You keep your posture loose, your arms only slightly tensed at your side, openly taking in his physique: the breadth of his chest in his grey tanktop, the meat of his arms, the flash of his thighs as his shorts move.

You lunge for him suddenly, dead-on. He moves to the side and slaps your hand away, jabbing you in your exposed ribs. It smarts, but you know it can hurt worse. It’s just a tap, to prove to you that he can — he’s the one who retreats, beckoning you to him again, reeling you in. You mirror his posture, slightly tensed and defensive, and the next time there isn’t a need to charge him. He’s close enough that it’s two steps and then you’re swinging again, feinting with your right hand and then swinging wide with your left, hoping to cuff the side of his glasses. He grabs your arm and uses your momentum against you, throws you away from him. You stumble and right yourself, huffing as you turn on a heel and advance again.

He bats away all of your attacks like this, with the patience and infuriating, placid calm of a teacher. He wants you to do better. Every sharp tap he gives you, to show you where you’re weak, feels like it’s lighting up your body, and you want him to really hurt you. You want him to take your body and do what he will with it. You could just tell him this. But you seek out a more difficult opening instead, find yourself growing more and more frustrated the longer he evades every one of your attempts at him.

You get lucky — or maybe he lets you get lucky, but it requires enough effort, dodging his jab and essentially slapping the glasses right off his face. They fly across the room and skitter to the floor; you stare at them for a moment before Nathan sweeps your legs out from under you and you land flat on your back, his forearm braced to your throat. You knee him in the chest, giving yourself enough room to roll over and brace yourself to get up before he kicks your legs out from under you again. Suddenly all of his weight is on you as he wrenches your arm behind your back, only as painful as he wants, which is to say utterly bearable. You’re prey, submitting to the predator; you practically bare your throat as you feel your pulse flutter, feel his breath hot in the shell of your ear as he straddles you, forcing you onto your belly. He pulls your arm a bit, to show you how much more he could make it hurt.

“This what you wanted?” he buzzes right into your ear, and you can barely look behind you to see him or gauge his expression. He gives your arm another twist and you make a broken sound. “Huh? You wanted Daddy to teach you a lesson?” You make a noise at that, swallowing your protests and trying to wriggle to loosen his grip and make a bid for your freedom.

Your breath catches — audibly, loudly — as he grinds his hips against yours, lets you feel his half-hard cock right against your ass. The sudden contact is so overwhelming, bringing a rush of heat to your cheeks. Your body reacts without any conscious thought, pressing back into the heat of him, no longer trying to wrest yourself from his grip but trying to put as much of yourself in contact with him as possible. “Mmm,” he hums in your ear, the groan vibrating through your chest, “that’s what you want?” You feel the scratch of his beard against your temple as he moves closer to your face — when you turn to him you can see the glimpse of an eye. You wonder if he’ll kiss you. You twist your head to offer him your mouth, but you feel his breath hot against your cheek. “You been thinking about me?”

“What do you think?” you ask him, your voice too strained to hold any heat, your throat thick with tension. You still underneath him, stop pushing your ass against his cock, just lay there and feel his breathing. What happens next is up to you.

“I think you’re still not asking me,” he says, infuriatingly calm. His thumb strokes your wrist, feels your pulse jump. You feel like you can’t get enough air in your lungs to voice the request; you breathe in a few times, know you’re becoming bright red under his patient gaze.

“Nathan,” you choke out, your voice trembling, averting your gaze, “please—”

“Look at me,” he instructs, his grip tightening on your arm now, “look at me when you ask me.” He shifts his weight ever so slightly, allows himself to fully face you as you force your eyes back to him. He licks his lips in anticipation.

“Oh, fuck,” you whimper, feeling your heart thundering against your ribs as you say, “Nathan, please, fuck me.” He’s still for a moment, save for the slight smile hidden in his beard, before suddenly he’s moving your arm, not twisting you further and not letting you go but pinning your arm over your head, burying his face in the crook of your head as he—

“Feel that?” he asks, his words muffled against your skin as he grinds his hard cock against your ass, relentless. You moan like the air’s been knocked out of your lungs, his hips moving so sensually, so expertly. “You want that?” You feel beyond words, trying to push back against him but all too happy to submit to him, to remain pliant in his grip. He huffs a laugh of disbelief. “You’d let me do anything to you, wouldn’t you?” Nathan leans in, pitching his voice low. “Would you let me fuck your mouth? Blow my load all over your face?”

“Please,” you beg, wanting to touch him, to feel him, to let him wreck you in whatever way he sees fit. “Please, anything.” His hands, still holding your wrists above your head, give you a squeeze before they release you — you hold yourself there, performing as expected even as he sits up and leans back, denying you his warmth and weight for a moment. And then he says something miraculous:

“Next time.”

His hands pull down your shorts, not off all the way so he doesn’t have to move away from you but enough to have you spread out underneath him. He pushes up your shirt as well, exposing as much of you as he pleases, his hand grabbing a cheek with a firm grip and giving it a proprietary jiggle before giving it a light slap. You gasp, feeling him soothe the sting with the flat of his palm before he parts your cheeks to look down at your hole.

“You been using your dildo?” he asks, massaging your cheeks now, touching you as much as he wants with his warm, rough hands. Your cock is trapped beneath you, pinned into the hard floor and profusely spitting precum. You’re almost concerned that you’ll shoot your wad just from him touching you; you’re trembling underneath him.

“No,” you admit, with some difficulty focusing. “I’ve been — waiting for you…” He exhales softly behind you, still rubbing your cheeks methodically, handling your ass like it belongs to him.

“You know why I left?” Nathan asks softly, holding your cheeks apart and peering down at your twitching hole. Suddenly, he spits onto your crack, his thumb rubbing it onto the surface of your asshole. You gasp, feeling him begin to press in before he relents. “I went to sit in a hotel to sit and do nothing for a week so I’d have a big load to give you when I got back,” he admits, sounding half-distracted as he presses the pad of his thumb against your hole again, and your hole finally sucks him in to the first knuckle. It’s nothing compared to the dildo, but a part of him is inside you, and he’s telling you how big a load he’s going to give you—

“Jerked off on day four, though,” Nathan says, sounding unrepentant, pushing his thumb in further. “Thought about eating you out. But you…” He withdraws his digit and lets another glob of spit drip onto your ass, now twisting his index finger in. “You’ve been a good boy, haven’t you? You wanted to wait for Daddy to cum?”

“Nathan,” you gasp, clenching tight around his finger even as he forces it deeper, pumping it in and out a few times before adding another. “N-nathan, please,” you beg, his two fingers feeling so thick inside of you, curiously crooking in search of your prostate. You feel like you’ve soaked your stomach, either with sweat or your own precum, but you’re about to make a worse mess if he doesn’t stop.

“Must be pretty keyed up,” he coos sympathetically, giving your ass another light smack just to feel you tighten up around his fingers. You claw at the floor uselessly, shaking. “Poor baby,” he says softly, his thumb pressing on your taint as he keeps fingerfucking you. “Daddy’s gonna take care of you real good.” You sob, knowing he’s pressing your buttons, hating how your cock jumps every time he calls himself Daddy. “Don’t worry,” he tells you, his voice drowned out by the yowl you make when he finds your prostate and begins pistoning his fingers into it, all while pressing down on it from behind your balls. “I cum a lot. I still got a good creampie to give you.”

You feel your cock spurt hard before you realize you’re cumming, but you chase the orgasm anyway rather than trying to hold back, letting yourself spurt and spurt against your stomach as he fingerblasts you into oblivion, prolonging the earth-shattering pleasure of it all. You make a low, gutted sound and for once, he’s silent behind you, though he continues his ministrations enough to make you go as long as possible. Eventually, you make a weak noise of protest and he lets up on your prostate, though he doesn’t remove his fingers right away. Instead, he gives you a few more cautious pumps, feeling your hole relax around him.

Nathan pulls himself out and turns you over on your back, your head lolling to the side and seeing the puddle of cum you’ve just unloaded onto the floor, not to mention your stomach. Your arms still remain stretched out over your head, your shirt rucked up to your armpits, and Nathan finally removes your shorts entirely before spreading your legs for you, planting your feet on the ground. He admires you for a second, and you lazily roll your head to look at him, flushed and dark-eyed, not able to see the tent in his shorts from his angle.

“Okay, killer,” he says, ignoring your half-hard cock, instead scooping up some of the cum from your stomach and rubbing it onto your hole, into you. You moan weakly but angle your hips towards him, let him do whatever he wants with you. He continues this, using your load to lube you up until he stands and shucks his shorts. His big cock is peeking out from behind his jock, so turgid the underwear has just been moved to the side. He slides that off too and tosses it onto your face. “Hold onto that for me. Hands and knees.” He gives your flank a tap, but you take a moment to touch his jock, sweaty and potent, breathe it in deep.

Suddenly, his hands are on his hips and he’s picking you up, turning you around. You scramble to rebalance yourself on your hands and knees and gasp when he lands a sharp slap to your ass. “Pay attention,” he grouses without any real heat, though he doesn’t rub your ass this time. Instead, he uses more of your cum to slick up his cock, rubbing it in the cleft of your ass but not giving it to you yet. “Ask me nicely,” he demands. His dick is so wide it fills the entire space of your ass, keeps your cheeks spread apart.

“Please, Nathan,” you beg, rubbing yourself back against him in hopes to entice him, no longer sated but desperate to have him inside you. You look over your shoulder at him, struggling to hold yourself up with the effort. “Please, Daddy, fuck me with your big cock. I need it.”

Apparently satisfied, Nathan refocuses himself and guides his fat dick into your eager hole, though it’s no easy task. It’s a conscious effort to accommodate him. “Relax,” he grits out, barely inside you and feeling your hole clench against him like a vice. “Be a good boy. Let me in.” You take a deep breath and try to push back, but he stills you, slowly inching his way in. “Fuck,” Nathan spits, laughing in disbelief. “Fuck, it might not actually — I haven’t had to think about this in a while, it might not even fit.”

You feel dizzy, wondering how much of him is inside you but knowing that it is not all of him. And you’ll take all of him. You keep trying to push back, but he spanks you again with a heavier, urgent hand. It has the opposite of the intended effect, making you moan and clench around him. “Fffuck!” Nathan shouts, losing his cool, “don’t fucking do that — so goddamn tight. Goddamn!” He stills for a moment, and when his hand rests on your hip, you can feel the slightest tremor. Your cock is drooling again, rock hard.

You two remain silent and still for a moment; you can tell he’s controlling his breathing, controlling everything in himself. It almost excites you more, makes you want to make him lose his cool. You moan impatiently, arching your back and thrusting back against him, even if it does force his cock deeper inside you when you aren’t fully ready.

“You’re barely gonna fit,” you tell him, sounding slightly out of breath, like he’s been pushing the air out of your lungs. “Daddy, your cock is too big—”

“Fucking brat—”

“I should’ve used the dildo,” you pant, “got myself ready for you, but I wanted you so badly, Daddy, I wanted it to be you, and your cock is so nice and fat—”

“Fuck!” Nathan yells, suddenly thrusting himself fully in and drawing out a wail from you as he suddenly sinks in balls deep, planting himself deep in your guts and immediately withdrawing before thrusting hard enough that you drop your shoulders, plant yourself on your elbows to endure his force. “You want it like this, huh?” He demands, gripping your hips as he fucks you, barely giving you a chance to adjust to his full gargantuan size. “Too goddamn impatient, was going to give it to you nice and good, but I know what you like, you brat. Wanna be owned, right?” He spanks you again, and then again for good measure, your ass stinging where he hits you in the same spot. “I own this ass — gonna fucking ruin it for whatever little boyfriend you wanna get next. None of them got a dick like me. None of them can fuck you like me. I own your ass, baby?”

“Y-you own it, Daddy,” you cry, unable to think, unable to move, just making yourself prone and taking all that he can give you. You’ve never been fucked like this before, not with a hog like his — never been just taken. “F-feels so good!” He plants his hand between your shoulders and presses you down further, leaving only your ass up in the air as he fucks into it, his big balls slapping against you with every forceful thrust.

“Gonna ruin this tight little hole for everyone else,” he says, watching the way your rim clings to his thick, juicy shaft as it plunges in and out of you. “Gonna ruin your mouth — all of it. No one will give it to you like I do. Fuck, we’re gonna take a week off. A month.” He smacks your ass again. “You’re mine, baby. All mine.”

Nathan hikes a leg up next to yours to change his angle and get in deeper, and all of a sudden it’s not even like he’s brushing your prostate so much as providing constant pressure. You’re crying out beneath him as he pumps himself in and out of you with abandon, clearly not going for longevity so much as vigor. It feels like every nerve is suddenly alight, his fat, juicy cock stimulating every part of you perfectly as it stretches out your hole.

And suddenly he pulls out entirely, leaving you feeling gaping and empty. It’s a profoundly upsetting feeling, and you look back to beg him to fuck you again but he’s leaning back, holding the base of his cock in a tight grip as it twitches violently in hand. It looks obscene like that — angry red, the head swollen beyond the foreskin and angrily spitting precum that arcs in the air. His big, hairy balls have drawn up tight. You gape at the sight, and he sees you gaping and he swears and then he’s maneuvering you again.

You can barely think before you’re flat on your back again, legs hiked up over his shoulders as he braces himself against you. His face is inches from yours but he looks far off as he guides his cock back into you. From this angle, it feels even bigger, stretching you more. You moan and he’s close enough that you can hear him whimper as he drives in, going balls deep again before readjusting his positioning. He fucks you slowly at first, his juicy cock twitching inside you dangerously, and then his tempo quickens until he’s riding into you again, his stare still distant.

“Nathan,” you whine, and his eyes snap to you, so dark they look black, and his pace slows somewhat, though his hips grind in a different way that leaves you short of breath. He’s redfaced and sweaty, breathing hard through his mouth. He’s never been more handsome. “C’mere,” you said, hooking your hand behind his neck to pull him in for a kiss.

The beard itches around your face but then you find his soft, warm, wet mouth, a startled breath puffing against your lips before he gets the memo. You lick into your mouth and he moans into you and suddenly his thrusts are picking up again, losing control and becoming reckless. He surges down and kisses you harder, tonguefucking your mouth as he reams your ass, and the only indication you get that he’s about to come is the grunt he issues into your lips.

You gasp at the warmth you feel from the first spurt and try to pull away, but he kisses like a drowning man, now cradling your head as he pumps and pumps into you. He creams your ass hard, unloading spurt after hard spurt of his thick, hot cum — and it still does feel like he’s built up a significant load, because your ass feels so full and creamy. His hand snakes between you and pumps your cock once, twice before you’re cumming too, your ass clenching around him and milking more cum from his juicy cock. You force yourself to break away from his kiss just to gulp in air, and he distracts himself with kissing your face and your neck, all while wringing you dry and emptying his balls inside of you.

Eventually his pace slows and he just sits inside of you, his dick still feeling big and hard, enough so to plug all of his heavy load inside of you. You two remain like that, breathing in the silence, him occasionally returning for kisses that turn softer and sweeter as time goes by.

“Don’t pull out,” you tell him, when he goes to move, but he simply relaxes your legs from off his shoulders, even massaging your calf as he does so. He does extract himself for a moment, giving you a glimpse of his half-hard, creamy cock that almost looks more appealing now. But he just moves you onto your side so he can spoon you, guiding his cock back into your waiting hole. It’s a comforting feeling for you both. His arm wraps around your side. “So,” you say, at last, feeling him plant his chin on your shoulder. “Better than a fuck you could program?”

“Who’s to say I didn’t program you?” he asks, all too seriously, but for once, you feel ahead of the game. A miracle, considering he fucked you brainless.

“Maybe I programmed you,” you tell him, smiling softly. “You just accommodated my every interest. You put all of the energy into pursuing me.”

“You needed it.”

“Maybe you need it,” you counter, holding his hand. “Maybe you need someone to tell you how big your dick is without you building them first. Maybe you needed to be called Daddy.” He huffs in disbelief, but he has no response for the moment. “You would not be able to last a week if I left.”

“You wanna find out?” Nathan challenges.

“No,” you tell him honestly. You clench your hole around his softening cock, making him grunt. “I want to take a week off to do this. And then maybe we can find out.”

#oscar isaac #ex machina #nathan bateman #nathan bateman x reader #nathan bateman x you #reader insert #fanfic

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ahh-fxck · 4 years ago

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Here is my gift for @mossymel for @thewitchersecretsanta 2020 gift exchange! I hope you like it!!

Title: Heat and a Healer

Rating: Explicit

Pairing: Geralt x Female!Reader

Cross-posted to Ao3

Geralt is injured in a hunt to save your village. You find him in the snow and bring him inside to keep him from dying.

The courtyard is muddy and cold, the air in front of your face misting with every breath. It is crisp with a light dusting of snow that crunches under your feet. Pale fingers of dawn light are creeping over the rooftops as you go about your morning chores. As you round the corner of your barn to break the water on the livestock trough you let out a startled gasp.

The water on one end is already broken and there is a strange brown mare contentedly drinking from it. It takes you a moment to realize that her rider is there as well; He is barely visible at first, huddled in a snow-encrusted cloak at the base of the trough. When he hears your gasp he jerks, as if he hadn’t meant to fall asleep and is slightly startled to find that he had.

The movement draws a thin, reedy noise of pain from him. Milky white hair spills from the cloak, and you see a flash of silver around his neck. With a start, you realize that you’ve seen this horse before. The road to the south has been terrorized by a griffin and no trade has gotten through in months; Everyone’s larders are bare and tempers in town have been growing short. The Witcher riding into town a week before had been a welcome sight.

It’s a relief to see him back again, but your heart plunges as you take in the state of him. You kneel to inspect him, frowning at what you see. His lips are blue with cold and his face is streaked with dried gore of some sort. When he opens his eyes you can see they are a startling shade of gold, like a cat’s. They are hazy with pain and exhaustion.

“Witcher?” You say, beginning to brush the snow off of him. “Oh Melitele, look at the state of you! Can you walk? Quick, let’s get you inside.” You bend to help him as he struggles painfully to his feet. The clothing all down one side of him is stiff under your hand and his armor is ominously tattered.

“My horse,” he croaks through dry lips.

“I’ll see to her once I have you settled,” you promise. “You need heat and a healer first, Witcher. She’ll keep.” He is too weak to do more than nod, allowing you to guide his stumbling steps across the courtyard. You hurry him into the kitchen and ease him down on the floor in front of the roaring fire.

He goes down with a grateful groan, settling in a sodden heap on the well-swept floor. As quickly as you can, you pull the sleeping mat you use for guests out of the crowded storage room. Next, you bring a pile of blankets and set them aside. Then you hurriedly help him remove his wet clothes before the chill can set any worse. As the full extent of his injuries is revealed, you can feel your blood running cold. He is gouged and bruised all over one side, still slowly leaking blood from ugly wounds in his flank. Every movement, every breath, pulls at them and causes his face to flicker with pain.

As soon as he is tucked under the blankets near the fire you race out of the house, battering at the healer’s door until she shuffles out to greet you. Her eyes widen as you breathlessly tell her what happened. In short order, she is dressed and hurrying after you. The crunching of your footsteps on the empty streets is loud in the hush of dawn.

You spend the rest of the morning running at the healer’s beck and call, boiling water and making simple herbal preparations at her instruction. During a lull, you slip out to tend the animals and stable the Witcher’s horse. The mare is stroppy and irritable, but you’ve known your share of horses and you aren’t impressed. Far more impressive is the griffin’s head dangling from the far side of her saddle, where you hadn’t been able to see it before. A rush of relief goes through you; the alderman will be pleased to see that, by the gods.

Before long, the horse is clean and dry, munching on her feed. The same cannot be said for her rider. The sun is well in the sky by the time the healer straightens from her work, and even then he looks gaunt and pale. He lies on the floor sleeping soundly as she cleans up and prepares a basket of supplies for you. She explains each item as she puts it in the basket, then instructs you to let him rest. As she leaves, she squeezes your shoulder silently. You and she both know without speaking that keeping the Witcher alive is the right thing to do.

Not long after that, the alderman comes to call, no doubt notified by the healer. Bodily blocking him from entering your home and seeing the state the Witcher is in, you insist on walking the alderman over to the griffin’s head yourself. He eyes it skeptically, hemming and hawing about whether or not the Witcher has earned the full price.

Your eyes flash with fire. Your alderman is a fool and a scoundrel, else you’d expect him to have some compassion for the man who nearly died to save his bloody town. You tell him that and a fair few other things besides, letting him have the sharp side of your tongue. There are few women he’ll take this treatment from, but as the best baker in town, you happen to be one of them. By the time you threaten to refuse baking his daughter’s wedding cake, the alderman buckles, handing over a far fatter sack of coin than he’d intended to.

Pleased, you hand him the griffin’s head to dispose of and march him off of your property. Then you return to the kitchen with the Witcher’s coin. He wakes when you come through the door, eyes bright with fever and exhaustion. When you toss him the bag of coins he catches it though, and his crooked smile lights his face handsomely.

Over the following days, he slumbers in front of your hearth as he heals. At first, he is too exhausted to do much but wake occasionally to eat and use the privy. Though your larder is as bare as anyone else’s in town, you feed him as if he were your own. With gentle hands you tend to his wounds, cleaning them, spreading salve on them, and finally wrapping them with clean bandages. You can see sometimes in unguarded moments how much he likes your touch. His face relaxes and sometimes you can even see the brief flicker of a smile. He is handsome when he smiles.

You find yourself enjoying the time you spend at his bedside, treasuring the little flashes more than you'd expected to. It turns out under the grime he's gorgeous. Wide golden eyes, a square jaw, a cupid's bow lip, and that's only his face. Each of his long limbs is cabled with heavy muscle, and his skin is almost as milky as his hair. It gives him a very striking appearance, and you frequently find yourself struggling not to stare as you change his bandages.

He becomes more alert as he heals. At first, all he does is silently watch you from the floor, golden eyes following you about the room. You don’t mind, filling the air with friendly talk as your hands work. You tell him stories about your childhood, your family, sharing the little memories held in chipped teacups and lovingly crafted decorations.

In his turn, he tells you little things as well. You learn that his name is Geralt and that he’s trying to get north before the snows close the mountain roads entirely. You also learn that he loves baked apples and that he adores his horse. They’re small things, but they put you at your ease, making him seem less remote and strange.

Though he heals quicker than any man has a right to, it is still days before he can limp around your house on his own power. He moves first from the sleeping mat to the chair near the fire, where he listens to you talk while you work. Although supplies are scarce you ply him with tea and treats from your bakery as you work. It gives you joy to feed him nice things after everything he's been through. The kindness and the treats both seem to confuse him, but he devours the pastries without complaint as he listens to you talk. Before long he is alert enough to mend his tattered clothing and armor as he sits there in the corner, his big hands working skillfully.

On the day that the caravans finally arrive in town, he has made it as far as the yard. He is slowly moving through forms with his massive steel sword, limbering his healing body. A clamor arises all through the town as a horn sounds. By the time the first wagon is through the outer gate, half of the town has surged out to greet them.

At the sound of the ruckus, the Witcher’s head comes up. Yours does as well, and you race to the gate. When you realize that the caravans have arrived at last, you let out a joyous whoop, dancing around your courtyard. You catch Geralt up before you can even think about it, so overcome with excitement that you plant a huge kiss right on his lips.

“The caravans! We’re saved! Oh, we’re going to have such a feast tonight, just you wait!”

It’s only then that you see how wide-eyed he is, looking between your hands fisted in his shirt and your lips. You drop his shirt with a start, worried that you’ve caused him offense, but as you back away he breaks into a slow smile. The corners of his golden eyes crinkle handsomely, and you feel your heart trip over itself.

Cheeks heating, you look over your shoulder and then back at him. He’s still smiling. You smile back, giving him a thoughtful look, then tap him gently on his chest. “You just wait here. I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail! Then you’ll see why they call me the best baker in town!” Without waiting for him to reply, you race off to get ready for the impromptu market already forming in the town square.

You walk back to your house sometime later with your cart and donkey in tow. The cart is practically overflowing with supplies, and your heart is glowing as you pull it up in the courtyard and begin to unload it. All your worries about the winter’s food have been wiped away, and you are in a very merry mood indeed.

The kitchen is rich with the smells of good food and mead that evening, and it’s already groaning under the weight of all the treats you’ve baked for the next day. Geralt sits on a stool at your kitchen table. He munches pastries and chops herbs for you while you cook and sing. You catch him smiling to himself as you overflow with happiness. It’s the nicest meal you’ve been able to make in months, and it’s a joy to share the bounty with the man who’d made it possible.

When dinner is cooked and dessert is cooling, you sit down to dine with him. For once he’s able to eat his fill. Even though he puts away a truly surprising amount of food, there is still enough for leftovers. It’s satisfying to see him warm and contented at last, his belly full and his pale complexion flushed with drink. He’d come into your home so gaunt and pale, but now…

You realize you’re staring a little when he smiles at you over his cup of mead. You break away, flustered. When you look back at him, though, there is a little gleam in your eye. You rise from the table and go to where the honey cakes are cooling on the counter. You retrieve some sugared rose petals from a jar, which you arrange on two of the cakes. Then you dress them with cream and a little rose syrup. It runs and gathers prettily at the bottom of each bowl.

You make eye contact with him as you offer him his little bowl, a smile playing about your lips. He looks at the bowl, then at you, his pupils dilating subtly with interest. A slow smile breaks out across his face and he carefully takes the bowl from you, letting his fingers linger against yours as he does. A little shock of delight goes up your arm, and your eyes twinkle. You sit across from him to savor the sweetness of your dessert. As sweet as the honey cakes and cream are, still sweeter is the way he can’t seem to stop watching you, his gaze lingering on you as he licks delicious crumbs off of his spoon.

When he sets his empty bowl aside and rises from the table to go to bed, it feels as natural as breathing to stand with him. Your own bowl is left empty and forgotten on the table. You step closer to him and he brightens with interest, head cocking to the side. Emboldened by the mead and the desire waking in those lovely amber eyes, you lean up and capture his lips in a kiss. He sighs hungrily as you do, drawing you wordlessly closer.

His broad chest is warm and firm under your hands, and his lips taste of roses and honey. You hum happily as he brings his hands to your hips, drawing you firmly against him. Parting your lips, you wind your arms around his neck as he slips his tongue into your mouth. His breath hitches as you lean up to meet him, your clever tongue twining with his.

The kiss is heady and hot, leaving you wanting more when he draws back for air. He swirls his fingers up the back of your clothing, a playfully sensual gesture, and you smile. Your hands trace down his flanks, feeling the firm muscles flex beneath. His beautiful eyes are alight with desire, watching your every movement, wanting more but not daring to take it.

Then you lean up, inviting him in for another kiss. He gives a little shiver, rumbling a low noise of approval. The kiss is deeper this time, slower and more sensual. You take your time with each other, fingers gently tracing the edges of clothing, plucking at laces without pulling. The only sound is the crackling of the fire in the hearth. Heat pools between your thighs and you sigh, rocking idly against him. You can feel him stir in his trousers where his hips are pressed against you and you rock more firmly, finding yourself suddenly dizzy with desire. He hitches in another breath, then growls oh so softly against your lips. He rolls against you and you can feel his cock hardening, pressing against you. You let out a little moan, fingers pulling at his laces in earnest now.

A flurry of clothing is left in a trail leading to your bedroom door. Geralt walks you back until your bare thighs are pressing against your bed, kissing you hungrily. You wiggle your way up onto the bed, giggling as he snuffles at your neck between kisses to take in your scent. He helps to lift you onto the bed, big hands squeezing your thighs as he settles between them. Making low noises of pleasure he mouthes his way to your breasts. His tongue is velvety-hot, and you give a low little cry as it flicks across your nipple.

He savors your belly and your thighs in the same way, hungry and eager, like he hasn't been with a woman in far too long. When his lips finally brush the soft thatch of hair between your thighs you can’t help but groan, watching him from beneath lowered lashes. He teases at you gently, eyes alight as he takes in every little reaction. When he finally bends to trace the tip of his tongue up your inner lips they are sensitive and slick, causing you to whimper and shiver. You wind your fingers in his hair as he sets to work, savoring the warmth of his tongue.

A look of bliss suffuses his golden eyes as he laps at your dewy cunt, his pale lashes fluttering against his cheeks. You tremble with delight, your soft cries filling the room. When he slips gentle fingers inside of you and flutters them just so, a swell of pleasure breaks over you. You cry out as you buck against him. A low rumble emerges from somewhere deep in his chest, an intent look coming into his eye as he redoubles his efforts. His clever tongue circles and dances, bringing the pleasure to a fever pitch, working you until you are coming harder than you thought possible. He withdraws only when you have fallen back to the bed panting, your thighs trembling with the aftershocks.

You run your fingers through his hair as you quiver, savoring the glow that suffuses you. He hums and smiles, nuzzling you. His eyes flutter half-shut as he lets you stroke his hair and face, enjoying the affection. After a lazy moment, you draw him up onto the bed with you. He goes willingly, pulling you down on top of him with a wolfish smile. From the way he moves you can tell he is still stiff and sore, but the bandages are gone. Though you worry about hurting him, he doesn’t seem to care. His smile broadens as you lower yourself to rest across his hips, your lower lips kissing the base of his cock with wet heat.

That grin wipes all your worries out of your mind, replacing it with a sudden rush of desire. His hands guide your hips to start moving, encouraging you to take your pleasure. You smile wickedly, placing your hands on his broad chest as you start to rub your clit against his throbbing cock. He moans softly, his hands sliding up your flanks as his amber eyes trace the beautiful curves of your body. He begins to tease at your nipples, his eyes sparkling with enjoyment at the sounds he draws from you. His touch on them is surprisingly delicate, sending exquisite little shocks of pleasure down to your cunt.

Before long you are rocking hungrily against him, your composure unraveling by the second. He moans and shivers beneath you, arching. The feeling of his thighs tensing sends a shock of heat through you, hunger for more. With a twist of your hips you rise, using a quick hand to position his cock at your entrance. His eyes fly open as you groan happily, circling your hips on the blunt head just barely pressing into your wet heat. He looks at you with wide eyes, breath hitching as you twist your hips again. You lock eyes with him as you sink slowly down, savoring his guttural moan when he bottoms out inside you.

His gold eyes are hazy with need as you begin to rock on top of him. He matches your tempo carefully, watching you with a now-familiar intent expression coming across his face. Without a word he presses a hand against your abdomen, pushing you until you are leaning back with your hands on his thighs. He shifts his angle and you let out a sharp gasp of pleasure, the change allowing him to hit your spot with every thrust.

You cry out as he grins breathlessly and begins to fuck you in earnest. He is surprisingly vocal as he does so, making up for days of silence with murmurs and growls of pleasure. When he brings his thumb to your clit you can’t help but join him, your shaking cries punctuated by every thrust.

He fucks you with care and precision, one hand on your hip, the other working your clit until you come with a ragged yowl. Your muscles clench tight around him and a sharp groan punches out of him as his hips stutter, losing rhythm. Grabbing your hips, he only lasts for a few more short, sharp thrusts before he is spilling inside of you and crying out, his body arching beneath you. His head tosses, white hair scattering across the pillow as he holds you close against him.

In the thundering silence that follows you collapse against him, laying your head on his shoulder. Both of you go limp, too exhausted at first to crawl under the blankets. You lay there listening to the crackle of the fire in the kitchen, the occasional creaking of your old home, and a soft hissing noise that you can’t place at first. He looks to the window and your eyes follow. You see thick white flurries of snow, and once you see them you realize that the hissing is the sound of them being blown against the windowpane.

The first blizzard of winter has come.

You turn back and eye each other thoughtfully, then smile and settle into the blankets. Until the snows clear, what else is there to do but enjoy one another?

And you do, all winter long.

#the witcher fanfiction #the witcher fanfic #geralt x reader #the witcher fic #thewitchersecretsanta

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darkdevasofdestruction · 4 years ago

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Remember Me ~ Worick Arcangelo x Reader

Disclaimer: This is going to have mentions of past abuse and supposedly illegal behaviour, but considering it’s Gangsta we’re talking about, I don’t think anyone should be surprised by darker themes addresses.

Birthdays...Have always been tedious. A drag. More work than they are worth...So, I wonder...Why do I actually bother doing a party at my home?

I mean, it’s true, I get it, I’m 21, I’m of age...Legally an adult, legally allowed to drink, legally everything whatever...The same as it has been for the past 3 years...

And MAYBE it’s fun to sometimes gather around with your friends and do the same things everyone always does at parties, loud music, alcohol, cigarettes and gossips...

But there is always that annoying anxiety feeling surging through my veins whenever I have to be around more than 3 of my friends, considering this is a party organised by me, and everything has to be done perfectly, everyone must feel good, and at home, not to be left out...

I can already envision myself being the only outcast, anyway, but that’s besides the point.

It’s already evening, the alcohol is sitting on the table, the pizza boxes are stacked up in a mountain on the floor, plastic cups everywhere, ash trays placed strategically, dim lights, coloured light projectors to make the room look like a disco...

And then there’s me. Sitting anxiously on the couch in the living room, dressed in a pair of dark jeans and a long plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, along with some silver rings and a necklace. Casual, comfy, yet pretty elegant in its simplicity.

My friends arrived soon, very loudly congratulating me on aging one more year, fantastic...But they had a mischievous smirk on their faces...

And they brought in a tall, blond man who looked very macho, and I could only blink in confusion as everyone walked inside.

“Uhm...Who is he? One of yours boyfriend or something?” I asked, eyeing everyone attentively. “Nooo, silly! He’s our gift for you!” my best friend grabbed the man by his arm, shoving him towards me. “I’m...Not sure I follow.” I spoke with even more unease, not wanting to believe what I was hearing. “He’s Ergastulum’s most wanted Gigolo! And tonight, he’s all yours to do with as you please! C’mon, you deserve to let loose and have fun once in a while, y’know? Forget about all those jerks and enjoy pleasure like you’ve never felt before~!” my other best friend grabbed me by my shoulders from behind, putting her chin on top of one of her hands, slurring seductively. “...I see.” I muttered, looking away, trying to mask my displeasure at what I was hearing. “Anyway, let’s get you drunk! You won’t get to enjoy anything if you’re so cold and reserved with everyone, y’know? Maybe that’s why you’re always alone! Now c’mon, let’s have fun!” she dragged me to the drinks table, and we started playing drinking games like never have I ever...

Gotta say, Vodka and Bailey’s has always been a shot combination that I adore, and I’m grateful that it takes a long time to get me drunk, because these girls are wasted, while I’m not, so I can escape their grasp. Drunk dancing isn’t that fun, even to watch, and they were making fools of themselves, screeching, giggling...More or less sounding like pained donkeys.

Or maybe I’m just too judgemental and mean because I’ve been in a bad mood and spiraling since they got in my home. To be fair, I don’t even care what is the truth. These are my feelings and I’m not going to play them off as insignificant or non-existent.

Eyeing them carefully, I take a pack of cigarettes and make my way out of the house and sit on the stairs, taking a deep breath of the cold winter night air, I light up a cigarette, taking a drag and staring up at the sky, letting my endless train of toxic thoughts overwhelm me.

I was so long in my own mind that I didn’t notice the door opening until a shadow blocked my vision, and I noticed the platinum blond man sitting down on the stairs below me, resting his back on the wall on the side.

“Y’know...I haven’t been to many birthday parties before, but I’m pretty sure the birthday girl is supposed to be pampered and the center of attention, and yet, here you are, outside, alone and sad.” the man spoke seriously, with his usual light glint. “How much did they pay you?” I muttered, lighting another cigarette, realising that the other one burn without taking another drag of it. “Hmmm? What do you mean?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at me. “I’m tipsy, not stupid. You think I can’t think rationally after 8 shots? You’re dead wrong. Now, tell me, how much did they pay you and what exactly did they tell you to do?” I asked in a pressed tone, side-eyeing him. “You’re certainly perceptive, I give you that. T’was quite a lot of money to spend the night with you.” he tilted his head in a playful way. “Not only they have no faith in me to get someone to even remotely like me...They have to pay someone to do something that I dread with a burning passion. Do you even know my name? I don’t know yours.” I shrugged, hanging my head, gritting my teeth in annoyance. “I see your friends screwed up a bit. Name’s Worick, nice to meet you.” he extended his hand towards me. “...Y/N. Nice to meet you too...I think.” I sighed, staring reluctantly at his hand, before slowly shaking it. “Pretty name for a pretty girl. Wanna talk to a guy you’ll never see again? I heard that venting and letting out pent up emotions helps.” he offered, making me look at him with a weird face. “You know you’re not gonna get any action, so you try to do something for the money you earned, huh?” I snorted, raking my fingers through my hair. “Hey, don’t look at me like that. Contrary to my profession, I’m a pretty chill guy. What do you have to lose, talking to someone you’ll never see again? And besides, I have little room to judge you, so if that’s your worry, you can throw it away.” he lit up a cigarette, puffing up into the sky. “You’re...Not wrong here. Okay, fine, Pretty Boy. Imagine this. You’re not even of age, you get your first lover and you’re happy. You finally feel superior. Someone gives a fuck about you...That’s the definition of a lover, after all, I guess...But here’s the deal. Barely one month into the relationship, the person starts getting very pushy and pressures you, without you realising. Words and actions. It goes to the point that they force you to do things that you don’t want to and you’re not ready to, mentally or physically...And you can’t do anything except for denying, since they don’t listen and they overpower you. How is that, so far?” I spoke, taking a few breaks in between sentences to keep myself grounded and lucid. “Very suckish. Does any of your friends know that?” Worick asked in a gentle voice. “They do...My two best friends do. The ones who apparently paid you. I don’t know what’s in those tiny brains of theirs, but I don’t think a one night stand is going to somehow magically get me rid of all problems, traumas, self-issues and nightmares I’ve been having for the last years. Or maybe I’m just paranoid. I don’t know, and at this point, I can’t stay that I care.” I shrugged, leaning back on the stairs. “Maybe you have the wrongs friends. I heard words about you that I don’t think friends should speak like that about their so called best friend who trusted them enough with their bad experiences.” he pointed out nonchalantly, as I shifted my gaze towards him with a frown. “After today...I...Think the same. I...Just...Wasn’t expecting something like this. What more can I say. I am disappointed. And if that wasn’t enough, my second boyfriend, who was a virgin, saw my own virginity as a prize. And the third pity-dated me. Can it get any worse? Because, if yes, I honestly give up.” I sighed, ruffling my hair, obviously done with life. “Life sure sucks, huh? And most people don’t make it any better. All we can do is get stronger, carry on, and fight our nightmares.” he nodded in agreement, clearly sympathetic. “...I see you’re speaking from experience. I wonder what happened to your eye...It may sound insensitive, but after what I just told you, I don’t think there’s any more need for caution.” I smirked at him with a dark sort of self-deprecation that I could also sense in him. “Well, y’know...Sometimes parents aren’t the safe haven they ought to be.” he shrugged, extinguishing the finished cigarette on the stairs. “I see. Yeah, life sucks. I guess I can see why you become a Gigolo. An attractive guy selling his body for money...By what they said, you are the most popular. I can see why. I feel sorry for you.” I gave him a sympathetic smile that disappeared as fast as it came. “You have a pretty smile, y’know? I always thought that people who can smile despite all they’ve been through are the strongest.” he commented, smiling back. “Is that why you appear to be so cheerful? You’re strong, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally too? Wish I was the same. Maybe people won’t find me such an easy target to take advantage of.” I snorted sarcastically, making him chuckle. “It’s a pity people are shit to the few remaining ones who don’t give in to society’s awfulness. But what is a sweet girl like you doing in a shithole like Ergastulum? Doesn’t quite add up.” he asked, getting in a better sitting position. “Life happened. Dad left us, and mum is abroad working to get me enough money to go to university by the end of this year. This place, despite how scary and dangerous it is, was the cheapest place I could afford.” I bit my lip, trying not to worry too much about the future. “I’m sure you’re gonna nail it, so don’t worry too much. You seem like a smart girl, so just study hard and don’t forget to enjoy life. By your standards, not others’.” he smirked, tilting his head towards the door. “You’re funny, Worick. I wish we met under different circumstances.” my voice became lower, only to get interrupted by the door slamming open and the girls leaving the place. “Well, look at you two, lovebirds! You look so cuuuuuuuute! Hey, Gigolo, better take good care of her, got it?! The night is still young for you two! Awesome birthday party, as usual, Y/N, see ya next time!” the girls left, making me blush from embarassment, looking away. “You’ve got very sensible friends.” he muttered ironically, shaking his head. “I’ll...Go tidy the apartment. Maybe I’ll be able to focus on something else. Come one, I’ll warm up some pizza.” I shrugged, getting inside the house. “I didn’t think you’d want me around in your home.” Worick pointed out, leaning on a wall. “You got paid to spend the night with me, correct? Then you’ll do what you got paid for. Keeping me company. You have no idea how refreshing it is talking to someone with some fucking brain in their head.” I plopped down on the couch, putting my feet on the table, turning on the TV to a rock music program and patting the seat next to me for him to join. “It’s an honour to spend time with you.” he chuckled, taking a slice of pizza, leaning back on the couch and mimicking my position.

For the rest of the night, he was gracious enough to help me tidy up and clean everything, and when we were finally done, I went to change in my nightgown, taking a book and getting in bed, only to see the man leaning on the frame of the door awkwardly.

“Ah, yes, how could I forget. Let me find some larger clothes for you to change into.” I put the book down, going to the wardrobe and finding some oversized clothes in which I sometimes sleep. “Are these yours?” he chuckled in amusement. “Yep.Gotta be comfy when you sleep, right?” I shrugged, getting back in bed. “Yeah, you’re right. That’s why I sleep naked.” his grin grew wider, making me frown in confusion. “Sleeping naked is comfy for you?” I put the book on my lap, looking at him for an answer. “Did you try?” he asked smugly. “Yeah. I felt incredibly uncomfortable and anxious the for hours and couldn’t sleep. At 4 AM I couldn’t stand it any longer and I put a nightgown on.” I scratched my cheek, looking away. “That’s adorable. What were you reading?” he asked, getting closer to me. “Get changed and you can come over. I’m not letting you sleep on the couch. You got paid, you deserve better.” I waved my hand at him dismissively, only for him to leave the room, get changed, take the book from my hand, flip through all the pages, and return it. “Ah, Picture of Dorian Gray. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while, thanks for the opportunity, I have to say, I rather appreciate his monologues.” he gave me a shit-eating grin, plopping in bed next to me. “I...You...Huh?! You can’t tell me you just read THIS book, right now, for the first time in your life, by just flipping rapidly through the pages!” my expression was that of pure shock and disbelief, which clearly amused him. “That’s exactly what I’m saying, sweet cheeks.” he smirked, laying his head down on the pillow. “You...You have an extraordinary visual memory?!” I asked in a voice that I wasn’t sure was heard. “You’ve got that right, darling.” he chuckled with a satisfied smile. “...WHY THE HELL ARE YOU A PROSTITUTE?! YOU ARE A GENIUS! YOU COULD DO SO MUCH MORE WITH YOUR LIFE! EARN AN UNBELIEVABLE AMOUNT OF MONEY! DO YOU HAVE NO AMBITION AND SAFE-LOVE?!” I grab him by the shoulders, shaking him, until he stopped me. “Calm doooown, Y/N, calm down. Thanks for looking out for me, but life is life. Don’t worry about me. I’ve got all I need here. You, however, have the whole life ahead of you, so don’t waste it like I did.” he advised in a soft voice, making me look at him for a few seconds, before sighing, getting up, and picking another book. “We won’t be seeing each other again, will we? Well, if that’s the case, take this. It’s a thanks for being nice to me today...But promise me you will take your time reading it, unlike now. Rest, relax, drink a hot cup of tea, and read each page carefully. Enjoy it, live it, feel it. Can you promise me that?” I asked, handing him the book. “The Hobbit, huh? Pretty cover, intriguing summary on the back...Fine, Y/N. I can’t 100% promise you, but I will try. Are you really willing to part with this one? It seems special for you.” he asked, more serious this time. “...Maybe sometimes the stupid ideas that your heart gives you are better than the rational ones from your brain. Now go sleep, I want to read.” I looked away from him, opening my book and pretending to read, away from him.

Five minutes passed, then ten, and fifteen, all of them in a deadly silence, almost awkward, until a chuckle split the atmosphere, making me turn around, looking at the man with a confused look.

“Usually, when people read, they turn the page after five minutes. What’s on your mind?” he asked, taking a strand of my hair and loosely twirling it with his finger. “..Well...You’re a stranger. And...We’ve only talked for a few hours. I know it makes no sense to ask this of you, but...I won’t be seeing you tomorrow anyway, so...Uhm...Do you think...I'm...Cold and mean...And unapproachable?” I mutter, looking away from him. “Not at all. I find you very endearing. The quiet ones are always the ones who have the best surprises once you get to know them. People deal with problems differently, it just takes the right person to want to understand you.” he kissed the strand of hair, making me bite my lip and turn off the lap light so my possibly pink cheeks won’t be noticeable. “Great. Thanks for the info. Now...How about you earn the money you got paid? You can do that by holding me and playing with my hair until I fall asleep.” I try to keep my voice from wavering. “You don’t have to put that pretext as a front, I would do that even if I wasn’t paid.” he chuckled lightly, holding me close to his chest, his fingers masterfully soothing my senses as he caressed by hair. “...Thanks.” I muttered, hiding my flustered face in his chest. “I have insomnia and general sleeping problems, including sleep paralysis and nightmares...And the only thing that used to be able to put me to sleep without waking up in the middle of the night would be mum holding me and playing with my hair until I fell asleep.” I confessed, my voice becoming softer and more emotional. “Thank you for trusting me with this precious memory, Y/N. It’s going to be okay. Now close your eyes...Sweet dreams, Y/N.” his peaceful, velvety voice was the last thing I heard before falling into a restful and calm sleep, for the first time in ages.

When morning came and I woke up, the bed was empty on the side that Worick was and I almost feared I imagined the whole thing...Until I noticed a piece of paper on the pillow where he slept.

“You’re a beautiful person, don’t let the darkness take over you. I hope to hear from you again, in the future, under better circumstances. ~ Worick”

To that, a phone number was written, and the first thing that came into my mind was to get that it tattooed on my body so I won’t lose it. Of course, that will never happen, so I’ll settle for writing it everywhere I can.

For some reason, I wanted to make him proud, and I still had no idea why, so I only called him once a year, on my birthday, and on that day, we would chat on the phone all night, in memory of that night. Finally leaving Ergastulum to go to University and get a better life for myself was something revolutionary for me, but after over 6 years, I managed to do just that. However, there was something that never left my brain, and that was the platinum haired man that completely changed the way I viewed life and how to approach it.

And I returned to Ergastulum after almost a decade.

I was dressed in a cute dress, and this time, unlike last time, a confident smile was on my face. Even though it’s fake, I adopted the “Fake it till you make it” motto, and nobody has to know about my problems.

I vibe.

Asking around for Worick, I find out he works as the Benriya with another man called Nicolas, who’s a tag, and even better, I got his address, so I knew just where to go.

As I entered the shabby apartment that was, for some reason, unlocked, I see a meek looking woman sitting on the couch, looking down.

“Did Worick get a girlfriend?” I leaned on the wall, a playful smirk on my face. “Wh-What?! G-Girlfriend?! W-Wait, who are you?!” she shot up to her feet, looking at me with big, blue doe eyes, frightened, might I say. “You’re adorable. What’s your name? And can I ask where Worick is? I’ve been told this is where he lives.” I played with a strand of my hair, trying not to intimidate the girl...Too much. “U-Uhm...He...He’s in his room...Who are you, miss?” she asked, trying to get some courage. “A friend, I’d like to think. From about ten years ago. Now, if you’ll excuse me...” I was ready to go look for him, only for a door to open, and the man in cause to appear, wearing only black boxers, and stretching...He obviously just woke up. “Ally? What’s all the noise?” he yawned loudly, rubbing his eyes. “Do you have a cute nickname for me too, Worick?” I smirked at him, as he widened his single eye, his jaw dropping in shock. “Y/N...?” he muttered my name, making me grin widely. “Glad you remember me. It has been quite a while since we’ve seen each other...And you age like fine wine, I’m telling you...You’re a sight for sore eyes.” he chuckled softly, only for him to come and pick me up, spinning a bit, before putting me down, cupping my face and kissing my forehead, leaving me a surprised and flustered mess. “And look at you! Can you get prettier than this? I told ya, you have a beautiful smile!” he grinned childishly, pinching my cheeks, making me yelp in pain and slap his hands away. “Jerk! That hurts! Ahem...Anyway, dear Gigolo, how are you? I heard some stuff about you working with someone named Nicolas...But I doubt her name is Nicolas.” I chuckled, pushing him softly away. “Oh, yes! Y/N, this is Alex, our new friend. You can say she’s kinda...Our secretary? I guess? Anyway, come over, we have a lot to catch up on!” he guided me to his bedroom that was, unsurprisingly, messy. “Wonderful and clean, just as expected. Have you ever thought of opening the window?” I teased him, plopping on his bed that was unexpectedly soft. “You, lazy little vixen...Here. I bought it years ago, after finishing the book you gave me, and I wanted to find out more. Now, I’m giving it to you. Are we even?” he smirked, handing me a copy of Fellowship of the Ring book. “We’d be even if I’d spend the night over as well. And if you gave me drinks and pizza. Basically a date. That will do.” I told him, looking dearly at the book I got gifted, although I already read it before. “My God, since when are you so bold?” he asked, getting on the bed, resting his chin on my knees, looking at me like a happy puppy. “Did you miss me, Worick? I hope you did, otherwise that little piece of paper you left would be incredibly disappointing and misleading.” I pointed out, booping his nose. “I’ve been thinking about you since then. By the looks of it, so did you. Are you sure you want a date with someone like me? You are beautiful, you are brilliant, your attitude in endearing as hell...And I’m still a Gigolo and my life is here, in Ergastulum. Don’t regret it later on.” he asked with a more serious tone, only for me to scoff and pull on his hair playfully. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Besides...Unlike you, I don’t need to be paid to spend quality time with you, doing nothing but chilling and chatting.” I teased him, making him laugh, as he plopped next to me, poking my cheek. “Great, problem solved! You’ve got yourself a parasite latching on you. Good luck getting rid of him now.” he grinned cheekily, only for me to cup his face and pull him into a kiss. “Why would I wanna get rid of a parasite this cute? Now shut up and hold me, it’s been ten years and I’m touch starved.” I grinned, nuzzling in the crook of his neck. “Damn, how I missed you.” he held me tightly to his chest, occasionally peppering my face with kisses.

It was definitely worth coming back to this God Forsaken place, even if it is for only one person. There’s place for everyone in this world, and in others’ hearts, and I found my place, in Worick’s warm arms, where I feel safest and most loved.

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mylordshesacactus · 5 years ago

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An Exhaustive Blow-By-Blow Analysis Of The ‘To Catch A Jedi’ Warehouse Duel That Was Definitely Asked For And Desired By People Other Than Us: An Essay By Alex And Jo

Or: It Is The Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand FUCKING Twenty, And Yet Here We Are, At The End Of All Things, Still Analyzing Barriss Offee’s Terrible Life Decisions.

Yes we’ve been saying we’d do this for the past five years minimum yes we’re girls what about it.

Before we begin, a moment of acknowledgement. Of all the people she’s faced, with all her skill and cunning and strength in the Force, the one and only character we have ever seen completely get the drop on Asajj Ventress--take her out without even giving her time to go for her lightsabers, stone cold, no duel no banter no challenge—

Is BARRISS FUCKING OFFEE. DEPENDABLE BARRISS™. LUMINARA UNDULI’S KID. THE NERD WHO MEMORIZED THE ENTIRE INSIDE OF A GEONOSIAN LABYRINTH, YOU KNOW, JUST IN CASE.

WITH A PIPE.

In the library.

And once she’s done that, this happens:

...and Jo and Alex spend the next seven years going absolutely feral.

A brief moment now where we drag Ahsoka for failing to notice that in the last ten minutes Asajj Ventress has somehow managed to lose about six inches of height. But of course she doesn’t; the entirety of To Catch a Jedi is spent establishing that Ahsoka is firing on zero cylinders. She’s exhausted—she’s probably been awake for over 24 hours at this point—she’s confused, she’s scared, her entire world is crumbling all around her and she doesn’t understand why. So we see her make slip-up after slip-up, making a lot of stupid mistakes that get her noticed by the Coruscant police, and also briefly forgetting how elevators work.

“I, uh, guess I’m not exactly on my game these days.”

So...yeah. She doesn’t notice Asajj’s height loss or the real damning difference: Barriss is completely silent the entire fight, and Asajj never shuts the fuck up.

Of course, Barriss doesn’t need this deception to be perfect. She just needs to make it believable enough. This little Makashi salute—a duelist’s formality, something that screams Dooku—is the first little Ventress-y quirk she throws in, and that’s relevant, because it’s central to her entire motivation for this fight.

Barriss isn’t here to kill Ahsoka.

Barriss is here to save her life.

...Like, she’s bad at it. She’s making horrible decisions that keep getting worse. But there’s a reason she’s disguising herself as Ventress—Ventress is the perfect catspaw, and Barriss desperately needs a catspaw right now, because Ahsoka was never meant to take the fall for the bombing.

Letta went off-script and came within inches of naming Barriss—who, going by the timing, was almost certainly already infiltrating that secure facility (which...gotta respect the skill that took, at least) to silence her—or free her, we don’t know what Barriss intended but we’re not giving her that much benefit of the doubt right now. If she hadn’t called for Ahsoka as quickly as she did, Letta would have died alone in her cell, killed by a nameless Force-user, and the trail would have gone cold.

Instead Ahsoka was there, and when Barriss was faced with a choice between her actions being exposed and letting Ahsoka take the blame, she took the latter. But then Barriss breaks her out, with every indication being that something...went very wrong, as the situation spirals out of control. It’s obvious that Barriss is in the vents during that escape because the clones in Ahsoka’s path keep mysteriously dying and their wounds are fresh, and also there’s no more convenient interference once she gets outside. So now Ahsoka’s free but the subject of a planetwide manhunt that makes her look even MORE guilty…which wasn’t meant to happen.

Remember that Ahsoka is the one who contacted Barriss for help, and Barriss clearly wasn’t expecting it. She spends most of this episode desperately flailing for something, anything to do to fix all this, and she’s lost until she discovers Ahsoka is now with Ventress.

Ventress. Ventress is a darksider. If Ventress is linked to this at all, people will believe it. Ventress could easily have gotten into that prison—through the vents, someone would inevitably have suggested, and probably discovered whatever lightsaber sabotage Barriss used to get in. Case closed.

So all Barriss has to do to fix this without coming clean is frame Ventress believably. Then the person being executed will...well it’ll only be Asajj Ventress, and she deserves it, right?

(Asajj Ventress--and all those clones Barriss killed in the breakout. And that’s very telling. Barriss who memorized 800 junctions of a Geonosian labyrinth for one singular mission, because “other people’s lives” depended on her success, doesn’t seem to have factored in the lives of those clones. They don’t seem to be registering in these calculations.)

The point is that Ahsoka’s name will be clear and Barriss’ will never have been in danger.

If you watch that short opening bout, before Ahsoka kicks her away, it’s...well, in Luminara’s words, amateurish and sloppy. All the blows, including that ostensibly fatal double-overhead strike, are DRAMATICALLY telegraphed. In a few cases, she is visibly missing on purpose:

This strike right here? This strike is HILARIOUSLY transparent in slow motion. She has an opening and instead sweeps her lightsabers ALL THE WAY back on the opposite side; and when she brings them down again…

Apologies for the motion blur but—Ahsoka moves to block and MISSES, which doesn’t matter because the blades were like a full foot away from actually making contact with her body. Barriss is striking at her lightsabers half the time for this first flurry of action, before letting Ahsoka break away for that salute. And this is not an animation error. TCW has plenty of those, but they know how to choreograph a lightsaber duel.

So the goal of this fight is very clearly not to kill Ahsoka. It’s to LOOK like she’s trying to kill Ahsoka, while mostly just trying to attract attention and act as much like Ventress as she possibly can.

As a result, Barriss spends a lot of the fight creating space. She pulls a sheet of metal down at Ahsoka, while gesturing dramatically to telegraph her intentions and give Ahsoka plenty of time to dodge:

And then she runs away to a higher level, letting Ahsoka pursue and then hiding.

This fucking pipe trick is NOT a Ventress thing, mind. This is 100% Mirialan using-the-environment bullshit and also, Barriss, a massive bitch move. We’re pointing it out mostly because of how dramatically Ahsoka JUMPS here. Because...listen, she’s better than this. She’s a wartime Padawan. She’s Anakin Skywalker’s wartime Padawan. She has way more duelling experience than a Jedi of her age normally would, and in a vacuum—in a normal sparring situation, where they’re both rested and prepared for it—Ahsoka would probably beat Barriss nine times out of ten in a duel.

This is anything but a vacuum. As we established, Ahsoka is firing on zero cylinders, she’s exhausted, she’s in the midst of a complete mental breakdown, she’s lost her offhand blade, and she doesn’t know the layout of the area like Barriss does. Ahsoka may be a more skilled and experienced duellist, but in this situation that means exactly fuckall. So Barriss runs rings around her.

So after the pipe trick—again a “cinematic” detail, something to ramp up the tension and sell the deception that otherwise has massive holes in it—Barriss gets in ONE solid blow.

Ahsoka’s off-balance, she’s blocking with both hands, Barriss could use her primary to slice under her guard—

At which point she does a FUCKING CARTWHEEL over the point of contact, which is not REMOTELY a Ventress thing, that is all Luminara Unduli all the time. That is the Mirialan Unnecessary Acrobatics Bonus Action.

And then again, a sloppy midsection slash that was nowhere near connecting and serves entirely to create space. A few more standard telegraphed blows.

And then what we generally refer to as the first turn in this duel.

Barriss roundhouse-kicks Ahsoka in the ribs hard enough to send her flying through a stack of boxes and bounce off the wall behind it. And that was an actual, solid injury. Ahsoka takes a moment to get back to her feet, clutching her side like she’s broken ribs, and her already-poor form takes even more of a dive after this. If Barriss wanted to, she easily could have killed Ahsoka here, but instead...

She backs off. Slowly and deliberately, making what’s very nearly a come-hither gesture with her offhand lightsaber.

And again—Ahsoka is better than this. She is smarter than this. This is such, such glaringly obvious BAIT. She’s being drawn deeper into the factory; Barriss is absolutely herding her, and she falls for it, because she’s not doing great right now.

(And of course Barriss is herding her. Thus far, there’s no actual evidence that Ventress was here except for Ahsoka’s word. For this deception to work there have to be witnesses. She has to attract attention.)

So she does a bunch of flippy bullshit (#Mirialans) to knock those barrels off, slowing Ahsoka down and tiring her out some more.

And when Ahsoka’s done playing Donkey Kong, she COMPLETELY crits on her spot check and does the exact thing that will get Anakin brutally dismembered in about a year. She flips onto the upper level, right past Barriss, who’s just sort of politely waiting for her to land and get her feet under her.

It...is genuinely heartbreaking, honestly, how out of it Ahsoka is during this fight.

And this is actually the second turn, because while it’s impossible to get a high-quality screenshot, this is the first moment where Barriss begins to show that she’s...getting a little too into this. Ahsoka flips onto the platform, and for several seconds she’s slashing wildly around herself while Barriss dodges...completely unarmed.

There’s a few more halfhearted exchanges of blows, culminating in Ahsoka’s only near-hit in this episode. And it comes CLOSE, too; she’s still Ahsoka Tano, after all. Barriss dodges this blow by inches, and Ahsoka impales her saber to the HILT in that support column.

At which point Barriss dodges around the other side of the column and, again, just...waits, for Ahsoka to come at her again.

(We honestly have no idea how so much of the fandom misses how INCREDIBLY staged this whole thing was, because it’s not subtle. The animators are brilliant. It’s fast-paced enough that it’s believable that AHSOKA would believe it, but when you actually watch what’s happening...)

Barriss does ANOTHER FUCKING backflip and they exchange a few more strikes, at which point Barriss pulls what’s actually the bitchiest move she pulls in this whole fight. But it’s also...one of the most interesting and lowkey AWFUL things. Because right now, she is still trying to be Ventress.

She slashes the gas canister open to set up the upcoming explosion, but she also times it so that Ahsoka gets blasted in the face with hot compressed gas that staggers her and briefly impairs Ahsoka’s vision. And that is...a move that we have seen Asajj Ventress use, onscreen, before.

Against Luminara.

The only possible way Barriss could know about this little compressed-steam trick of Ventress’ is through her master.

Barriss was not there for this fight. Barriss did not see this happen. But Luminara has, out loud, credited Ahsoka for saving her life in this fight—and rightly so, because Ventress came within inches of killing her multiple times during that fight and this was one of them. And Barriss would have to know that. And she just used it against Ahsoka.

In a fight, Luminara is a graceful Lady of War. Barriss Offee, on the other hand, is a stone-cold fucking bitch.

By the time of this arc Barriss is convinced that all of the Jedi have fallen, that they’re all in service to the dark side and just don’t see it, and in a lot of ways she’s right. But the fact is that Barriss Offee herself has fallen to the dark side personally in a way that most individual Jedi have not, and what happens next shows it.

Barrels Offee over here uses the Force to shove a bunch of explosives over the red-hot wounds left by her lightsabers and gets the pyrotechnics she was looking for.

And this is the final turn. Earlier, we noticed Barriss getting a little too into this fight, toying with Ahsoka, taunting her with that unarmed dodging; but she was still focused on her objective, still laying a stage for the most part.

And this is it. This is the objective.

By creating that explosion, she caught the attention of local authorities. There will be witnesses any moment now who will see her, wearing Ventress’ mask and holding Ventress’ lightsabers, standing in a munitions factory that Letta Turmond can be tied to. Ahsoka will testify that she went to investigate and Ventress came from behind to kill her, and suddenly everything will make sense.

Ahsoka...is out of the fight. She’s barely stirring, she’s not getting up. She doesn’t even have the strength to lift that sheet of metal; the only reason she’s able to BARELY get onto her hands and knees is that Barriss uses the Force to lift it off her.

Barriss got what she wanted.

And then she keeps going.

This is Barriss in the FULL grip of the Darkside Tango over here. She’s angry and scared and angry and something about that explosion was cathartic, and this is the point where the duel takes a sharp turn. Something...has changed, about Barriss’ demeanor, here.

She doesn’t appear to be thinking anymore.

This is the point at which this fight is...honestly, just hard to watch. It’s a beatdown. Barriss is now hurting Ahsoka on purpose, and for no other reason than to hurt her. She puts her ALL behind flinging a ragdolling, half-conscious Ahsoka into the wall so hard it shakes some of the steel loose. It’s brutal, and Barriss’ body language is cold and confident the whole time.

She is completely lost in the sauce on the Dark Side at this point.

The absolute worst thing from here on in is the way Ahsoka just…Keeps. Getting. Up.

She can barely stand at this point. She’s got her saber up trying to hold a guard position and she physically can’t. This is legitimately the worst Ahsoka’s ever gotten beaten in a fight in her life, and she knows it. She’s staggering. Her eyes aren’t even fully in focus.

Barriss doesn’t bother with actually fighting, because she doesn’t need to. She hits Ahsoka with a casual Force push to knock her back off her feet, and Ahsoka just cringes in anticipation of it because she knows she can’t defend herself properly.

And then there goes her lightsaber, tumbling over the edge, and she never holds it again until the Siege of Mandalore. That Weapon Is Her Life, and we never see it in its current form again.

And Ahsoka GETS UP AGAIN.

Ladies and gentlemen, our hero.

She is DOWN. She’s dead on her feet, she can’t even walk; she just sort of stumbles across the floor with her own momentum. But she is still SOMEHOW trying to square off with “Ventress.”

And this, right here? This is how we know exactly what Barriss’ mindset is right now, because Ahsoka never gives up. She just doesn’t. She’s the biggest cockroach in a universe containing Darth “Just A Flesh Wound” Maul. Ahsoka doesn’t just lie down and accept her fate. She doesn’t just let people win.

And Barriss...has.

There’s a viciousness in the way she ends this fight. Like, it’s Barriss—all of her fights are a little bit vicious. She is a BITCH when the chips are down. But this is...vindictive. From the moment Ahsoka trembles to her hands and knees after that explosion, the overwhelming cold cruelty Barriss shows from that moment until she spin-kicks Ahsoka down like two and a half stories of broken slats onto solid concrete is raw, bitter:

Will you just STAY DOWN for once in your FUCKING life?!

And we want to take a moment to give Ahsoka the dignity of acknowledging that she still doesn’t.

And then the GAR shows up, and Barriss really shows her true colors. Because the moment she hears Republic forces arriving...

Barriss runs.

We worry sometimes that because Barriss is our favorite character, people will think that means we think she’s justified in her actual actions in this arc, or that her worst actions are somehow not her fault. But let us be very clear: Barriss Offee fucked up royal and is entirely responsible for that.

The fact that it’s very clear she didn’t come into this fight with intent to kill, the fact that her actions are calculated to clear Ahsoka’s name, is the FURTHEST thing from absolution. Even as she tries to find a solution throughout this episode, it all stems from her original decision to frame Ahsoka for Letta’s murder rather than let Letta spill the beans. There’s a very, very simple solution to this mess, a simple way to clear Ahsoka’s name and make amends for the attack that Barriss regretted almost the moment it happened. But she consistently refuses to even consider it as an option.

Barriss Offee does not want to face the consequences of her actions.

She came into this to fix things, but when push comes to shove—she wants to save her own life. She wants to be a radical dissenter and still get to be the Jedi Padawan poster girl, and the security that comes with it. She doesn’t stick around to make sure she’s seen by witnesses because as evidenced by that brutal beatdown, she’s...stopped caring, that much. She doesn’t value Ahsoka’s life enough to risk her own anymore.

So when this fails, when the clones don’t see her and there’s no evidence to back up Ahsoka’s story that Ventress was the one behind it, when three words from Barriss would save her from a death she doesn’t deserve, Barriss says absolutely nothing until she’s compelled at lightsaber-point.

At the end of the day, this whole elaborate deception was only ever about one thing, and it wasn’t Ahsoka. It was the fact that Barriss Offee doesn’t want to get caught.

#barriss offee #ahsoka tano #to catch a jedi #tcw #star wars #IT'S BEEN 84 YEARS--

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drethanramslay · 4 years ago

Text

A funny thing called Fate: Chapter 2

Pairing: Bryce X MC (Aisha Khurrana)

Word Count: 4.6 K words (yeah yeah its more than usual)

Series Masterlist

Masterlist

Warning: None, just some cursing

Author’s note: The next chapter is here and it is in Aisha’s POV!!

I decided to take part in @choicesseptemberchallenge20 and the prompt is heaven which you will find in bold.

TERMS THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

- IIT, Delhi: It’s one of the most premier institute for engineering in India. Delhi campus is said to be the best one in the country. The majority of the Indian CEO’s like Google, at least have a degree of IIT under their belt.

-ku'uipo: Sweetheart

-'Ae: Yes

- Beta padhai par dhyaan do, dost aate jaate hai: Child, focus on your studies, friends come and go (TBH this is the one line which maximum desi kids have heard while growing up. That's why we can be uh.. awkward in making new friends lol)

-Main kya gadhi hoon: I'm such a dumbass (side note: gadhi (female) actually means donkey in hindi)

-Duniya main maine itna bada gaandu kabhi dekha nahi hai maine: I have not seen a bigger asshole than this guy. (yes I love swearing in hindi and what about it)

Forgive me if i made any errors

10 YEARS AGO- AISHA'S POV

My fingers ran against the spines of the book, my head tilted as I searched for a new book to dive into.

"Found anything of your liking, Aisha?" Tina, the librarian asked, her kind eyes twinkling. The old librarian loved me because I always helped around in sorting the books or with checkout. She suggested that if I were to help her, she would pay me so I decided why not?

But the lack of people coming to the library and their constant need to be fake on social media, flexing about their looks instead of textbooks often left the library empty which consequently resulted in free time.

Not that I minded.

In that free time I would either catch up on my study assignments or I would read the books recently added to the collection be it fiction, politics, history, astronomy... I wasn't picky about the genres.

But lately, my attention is being drawn to medical journals and textbooks. Yes, I'm 16 and that its definitely not people my age do but, to be the person balancing on the tightrope between life and death, the person who stands between existence and heaven... it's just a beautiful paradox that I can't help be captivated by the concept.

That and my strengths are biology and chemistry so its just an added plus. So, I definitely dream of being a world class doctor.

Not to brag, but I know all the pulse points in the body and can name the bones of the skull in my sleep. My parents don't know that because... let's say there is a reason why I stay out of home for the majority of the day.

Are we again going to go over this? I am sick and tired of your fucking indiscipline. How I wish you could be more like Aditya... Mama's voice rung in my ears which made me close my eyes and take a shuddering breath.

Now is not the time to think about how awful you are. I repeated it in my head like a mantra, making it a point to message my brother and rant about the newest development.

Despite our parents trying to pit me against bhaiya, we were thick as thieves. We always had each other's backs and we're there to cheer each other up. Whenever our parents would scream at any of us, we would wait until they fell asleep to do something to lift the other person up. Midnight feasts, movie binge or just cuddling and imagining a future where we were away from them... That always managed to cheer me up and I knew bhaiya enjoyed it too.

I don't think we fought that much either because we were pretty close in age, with only three and a half years difference. We are pretty like-minded and scientifically inclined only he was interested in computer engineering while I was fascinated by the engineering of the human body.

It sucked that he is in IIT, Delhi while I'm so far away. We still manage to video call irrespective of the time zones but it is not the same as having the comfort of your older brother.

"I think I will take this." I handed her a battered copy of Gray's anatomy.

Tina just gave a knowing smile and I checked out. I headed to the nearby Fleming Beach Park, which is one of the most popular beaches in Maui. It was a five-minute walk from the library and the majority of the school population used to come here to hang out in the evenings.

Not that I was paying any attention to my oblivious classmates.

I headed to Kimo's Beach Shack and the owner gave me a gentle smile.

"What will it be, ku'uipo? The usual?" They asked as they wiped their hand on the dishtowel.

"'Ae." I smiled at them and they started making my favourite drink- Strawberry milkshake.

Precariously balancing my bag, the drink in one hand and my wrist-thick library book under the armpit of my other hand, I headed to the quieter side of the beach, away from the raucous.

I settle down under the shade of the palm trees and lean back against the rocks, taking in the view around me. I could see people from my school roaming around in their swimming suits either playing volleyball or surfing. As I sipped my milkshake (looking like an absolute loner, must I add) my eyes drifted to their happy faces as the joked around, laughing and having fun with their friends.

The two concepts that are so unfamiliar to me.

When I was back in India, I had a good group of friends who I would hang out with and play basketball with. It was good but shifting to a new place can strain those relationships. I do follow them on social media but seeing them enjoying and doing the things which we used to do together, it causes my heart to ache.

And I never really tried making friends here in Maui because a) The people here didn't consider me as one of them and b) My parents kept on saying it is temporary so there was no point focusing on that. Beta padhai par dhyaan do, dost aate jaate hai. My dad told me the one night I decided to express my excessive loneliness.

Thanks papa, real helpful. I shook my head, sipping my drink as I carefully opened my library book.

"You look sad." A childish voice spoke up breaking me out from my melancholy. I looked up and saw a four-year-old girl, her doe-like eyes staring down at me. She was wearing a pink summer dress and a cute bow hairband, taming her light brown hair.

"Huh?"

"You look sad... and lonely."

"I am okay, keiki... Don't worry."

The kid's eyebrows furrowed with confusion. "How did you know my name?"

My eyes widened. In the two years in Hawaii, I had learnt a little bit of Hawaiian and spoke in bits and pieces. And I'm pretty sure keiki meant 'child' in Hawaiian so you could imagine the shock I felt when her name was the literal translation of child.

Who the fuck names their child... child?

"A lucky guess. It is nice to meet you Keiki." She moved her hand forward and Keiki's hand clutched my big hand with her small ones shaking it. Her hand was as big as my palm.

"What's your name?" Keikie asked as she sat down next to me.

"I'm Aisha. And, what are you doing here all alone?"

"I came with my elder brother but he and his friends were playing and he forgot his promise to build a sandcastle with me. So I just went walking." She huffed and crossed her short arms across her chest.

"Well, your brother would be worried about you, won't he?" I asked as her eyes scan the crowd, looking for a guy who remotely looks like my little companion.

"Well, I think that's a go-good puni-shi-ment for him." She struggled with the big word.

Aisha chuckled and soon Keiki's giggles joined hers.

"You remind me of the times when I used to bother my elder brother like that. He would get so mad."

"Where is he now?" She asked as her hands fisted the sand, her eyes moving to look at the brunette.

"Well, he is in university, in a completely different country."

"Do you miss him?"

"A lot." I sighed. Her puppy eyes met mine and she reached to hold my elbow. I smiled down at her, appreciating the gesture. She opened her mouth to ask me more questions when we heard a commotion.

"KEIKI!! There you are!" A shout wafted towards us, interrupting Keiki. I saw a tall guy jogging towards us and when my eyes landed on him, I immediately recognized him.

Bryce Lahela. The golden boy of my school, with girls and guys falling for him, left, right, centre. And right now, he was approaching me completely shirtless, his abs glistening in the evening sun. He had a Polynesian tattoo wrapping around his left bicep and ending a little below his collarbone which had me feeling... uh thirsty?

Cool, cool, cool, just act like yourself.

Yeah as if that's helped you deal with your awkwardness. Her conscience snarked at her.

“Shut up.” I muttered to myself. But, I wasn’t subtle enough and Bryce turned towards me, a weird look in his eyes.

Off to a great start, Aisha. Keep up the good work. I mentally groaned as I went back to reading my library book.

"Thank god Keiki you are okay... I was so worried." He kneeled and hugged her, immediately forgetting my weird mumblings. I could feel the body heat emanating from him and suddenly, the anatomy of the kidney seemed more interesting than the hot guy beside me.

"Its okay Bryce. I was talking to my new friend." Keiki squeaked as she pulled away from the hug, two sets of hazel eyes staring at me now.

My eyes widened and I subconsciously reached to push my glasses up my nose, feeling the back of my neck heating up.

"Well, thank you so much." His voice reverberated and I swear I felt as if I would combust at the spot.

I looked up and shot a tiny smile. "No worries. Keiki here makes a nice study buddy."

I internally smacked my head. Study buddy? Really? Who uses that term now?

"Of course. Daddy says that I'm a beauty with brains." She said with a smug smile.

"Well, that's the one thing that I agree with dad," Bryce said as he settled down on her other side. The one feet distance enabled my mind to resume working.

I smiled down at Keiki and I found that Bryce was looking at me intently.

O... okay?

"Wait... You go to my school right? Lahainaluna High School?"

I nodded my head. I was about to introduce myself when his eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

He was snapping his fingers when his face lightened up with recognition. "You are Aisha, right? The newbie who joined us last year I was in your chemistry class last year."

The drink almost fell from my hand and I had to clutch it tighter to prevent myself from making a bigger mess. Clearing my throat I smiled nervously. "Yeah, that's me. You are Bryce, right? You are on the basketball team, right?"

"You know me?" He asked, shocked and I could hardly stop myself from rolling my eyes.

"Duh?! You are Mr. Popular with really good looks and either people love you or hate you." I rambled off.

A small smile played on his lips. "And which category would you belong too? The love or hate category?"

I gave a shy smile. "Let's just say I'm on neutral grounds. Give me a good reason why I should like you."

"Because of my dashing looks? My tattoo?" He stretched his hands wide, gesturing towards himself. His hair caught the evening light, making it look like a halo. His hazel eyes had flecks of gold which threatened to drown me but before I could get lost in his sheer beauty, I shook my head to snap out of the daze of his presence and gave a mocking sigh.

"Aaaannnndd, he is just like other dumb jocks who is overly obsessed with his looks. Why are they all the same?"

Keiki put her hand sympathetically on my lap. "Don't worry Ash. I don't like Bryce when he talks about his looks either."

Bryce gasped. "Keiki you are breaking my heart."

"Good."

He reached for her and started tickling her which made her squeal with laughter. I had to get up so that the sand doesn't get on me, laughing at the sight. "Brryyccee!! Stopp!!"

"Not until you tell me I'm the best brother in the world."

Gasping for breath with tears in her eyes, Keiki breathed out in defeat. "Okay, okay. You are the best... brother in... the world."

Bryce pulled back a grin playing on his lips.

"Good."

My phone rang and I saw Mama's name flash on the screen which made me sigh.

"Your mom?" Bryce asked.

"Yep. should reach home before she turns into momzilla." We chuckled as I put my book into my bag.

"Bye Keiki, it was nice talking to you."

"Bye Ash. I like you. Can we make sandcastles next time?" I laughed and nodded, "Sure sweetie."

"Where is my goodbye?" Bryce pouted.

I rolled her eyes. "Bye Bryce. See you around."

And with that, I turned on her heel, and walked home, feeling much better.

PRESENT

Aisha felt like banging her head against the wall of the hospital out of utter embarrassment. In the span of 7 hours, she had pissed off her superior, met her ex from ten years ago, got stuck with a partner who hardly did anything and now managed to embarrass herself yet again in front of her role model.

Rookie... Are you hiding from me? The way Dr. Ramsey had an eyebrow raised, as if to question why she was hiding behind another intern and the appalled expression as she stumbled over her words were forever imprinted in her mind.

Not my brightest moment. Aisha recollected as she sighed at the way she stuttered and finally came up with an excuse.

I'm doing charts. She mocked herself as she shook her head. There was a table right next to me!! I could have come up with anything but that weak ass excuse.

And she had always dreamed that if she were to meet Bryce in real life, she would definitely insult the fuck out of him and then for the finishing stroke, she would probably punch him in his handsome face or kick him in the crown jewels.

But sadly, you seldom get the things you wish for.

I don't have time for this - Main kya gadhi hoon. She mentally groaned as she tried to shut off the part of her brain which was so hell-bent on making her feel humiliated.

She entered Annie's room to find her curled up in her bed, playing idly with her phone. She perked up a little when she saw Aisha, forcing a smile on her face.

"Oh. Hi, Dr. Khurrana."

"I just came by to see how you're feeling Annie."

Annie shrugged. "The same. The nurse came by and gave me some medication a little while ago.."

Opening Annie's chart she checked. "Yeah, antibiotics. It's too soon to see any improvement yet, but hopefully, we'll see some results soon."

Aisha was about to turn on her heel and leave when she heard Annie's small voice. "hey, could you stay awhile? It's... kinda lonely, being here all on my own."

Aisha gave an empathetic smile and reached to sit down on the chair near her bed. "Of course I can."

"Thank you once again doc."

"No, thank you. I haven't been off my feet since I got out of bed this morning. So Annie," Aisha leaned forward, "what are you studying?"

Annie blinked as if she was confused by the question. She took a couple of heavy breaths before attempting to answer.

"My master's is in... English... but my... my..." She swayed, her voice woozy as she tried to finish her sentence.

Aisha was on alert. "Annie, are you feeling okay?" She asked as she felt her pulse which was dropping before Annie passed out.

The heart rate monitor sounded a long, flat tone as her heart stopped.

"OH MY GOD!! Code blue, I need some help here!!" Aisha shouted, pressing the button near her bed.

"C'mon Annie stay with me." As Aisha stood on the nearby stool, performing CPR as she waited for the code team to arrive.

"Aisha?!" Jackie's shocked voice made her lookup.

"Jackie, where is the code team?"

"Room 502 called a code blue just before you. Just keep up with CPR. They'll get to you when they can!"

Aisha's eyes flashed. "That could be too late!! Help me, Jackie we are losing her fast."

"What were her symptoms?" Jackie asked as she snapped on the latex gloves and moved towards the bed.

"Symptoms were headache and nausea. Started during her vacation to Indonesia. Aurora and I did a blood workup and gave her cefpodoxime." Aisha opened the gown and Jackie's eyes narrowed in on the rash rapidly spreading on the side of the body.

"She is breaking in hives. She is in anaphylactic shock!"

"Now that I think about it, it may be because of her allergy to the antibiotics I gave... I had fucking asked her, dammit." Guilt made her chest heavy.

Jackie's face turned into a scowl as she wheeled the defibrillator cart closer. "It doesn't matter whose fault it is. This girl needs you now! We have to get her heart started ourselves."

Aisha nodded as she opened Annie's gown, baring her chest. She took a steadying breath. You have done this numerous times in AIIMS, you can do this.

Taking the paddles, she placed one paddle on the right side, beneath her collarbone and the other paddle on the left side, just beneath her armpit.

A small impressive smile made its way on Jackie's lips. "Good, now set the charge."

"Charging to 300 volts... Clear!"

Annie's body spasmed as the paddles discharged. Keeping them aside, Aisha resumed her compressions on Annie's chest.

C'mon Annie... You can do this... Come back to me. Aisha prayed.

The monitor beeped twice before Annie's heartbeat returned, accelerated but constant.

She let out a sigh of breath as she bent over the bed. Jackie clapped her back. "You are soooo lucky."

"Shut up. Now just give her an epinephrine injection and intubate while I maintain compression."

Jackie nodded her head and Aisha shot a grateful smile as she continued her compressions, her hands aching.

"What the hell is going on in here, Rookie?"

Yikes. Aisha winced at the tone and looked up to find Dr. Ramsey glaring from the doorway.

Time to own up, buddy. She sighed and spoke up. "Dr. Ramsey, she was allergic to the antibiotics I prescribed.

She couldn't gauge his reaction from so far away. "Well... at least you are taking responsibility. Sometimes patients don't know about their own allergies. That's why you always have to be cautious."

Jackie injected the epinephrine pen into Annie's tight. Still unconscious, Annie took a shuddering gasp of air.

"And now we intubate."

"Excellent work, Doctor...?"

A self-satisfied smile made its way on Jackie's face. "Varma."

"You were assigned to this case?"

"No, I was passing and I hear Dr. Khurrana calling a code blue."

A smile made its way on his face which shocked Aisha. This man voluntarily uses his facial muscles to smile? I wouldn't have known. "The patient's very lucky you were here. I'm not confident Dr. Khurrana could have handled this alone."

Now, wait a damn minute... Aisha clenched her jaw. This wasn't her first time she was getting insulted and yeah it was called for but it didn't help her feel any better either.

Jackie bit her lip and glanced at Aisha, which Aisha pointedly ignored. Watch her jump at the opportunity in 3...2...1

"Thank you. Just doing my job, Dr. Ramsey."

There it is.

Gulping down her annoyance, Aisha spoke up. "Dr. Varma really bailed me out." Aisha turned towards Jackie and nodded stiffly. "Thank you, Dr. Varma."

Jackie tried to read her, guilt swimming in her eyes.

She should be guilty, she took the credit of the save when I was the one calling the shots.

"...Anytime."

Fuck you. She narrowed her eyes slightly which made Jackie wince.

Luckily, Dr. Ramsey gave Jackie an out. "Dr. Varma, you should return to your patients."

A relieved smile made its way on her face. "Yes, Doctor." Throwing a backward glance towards Aisha, she walked out.

Dr. Ramsey swivelled towards Aisha, his face drawn tight with annoyance. "And you... you need to have a long hard think about whether or not you're ready to be here. It doesn't matter that it's your first day, or that you're still learning. Whether this girl lives or dies is on you. Is that clear?"

"Crystal, Dr. Ramsey."

"You still have no idea what's wrong with her, and your first attempt nearly killed her. This is the real world. No room for mista--"

"Hi, Dr. Ramsey? Sorry to interrupt." A short Asian intern interrupted him and Aisha let out a small sigh of relief.

This guy would give my parents a run for their money. Why do I meet assholes everywhere I go?

"For the love of God, what now?"

"One of the nurses told me... that one of the other interns told them... that one of the doctors said..."

Dr. Ramsey certainly didn't enjoy beating around the bush. With a biting voice, sharp enough to make both Aisha and the intern to flinch, he commanded. "Skip to the point."

"Dr. Toussaint needs to see you urgently." She rushed.

Dr. Ramsey pinched the bridge of his nose, muttered something about 'interns' under his breath.

Straightening his coat, who gave pointedly glanced at Aisha. "Remember what I said, Rookie. Next time I see you, you'd better have solved the case." He turned on his feet and stormed out making the petite intern jump.

Aisha stepped out into the hall with the intern, leaned against the wall and let out a sigh.

"Thank god for Dr. Toussaint. I swear if he wouldn't have called, Dr. Ramsey would have burst a vein or something."

The intern leaned against the wall adjacent to Aisha. "Yeah... Too bad he doesn't actually need to see Dr. Ramsey."

Aisha's eyes widened and she turned to stare at the other intern. "Huh?"

"I made it up! I could hear Ramsey chewing you out halfway down the hall, I figured you might need a save."

Oh my god, that is the sweetest thing anyone has done for me.

Aisha smiled brightly. "Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. But you could get in serious trouble if he realizes it."

She shrugged with a cheeky grin. "If. Besides, I'm tougher than I look. I'm Sienna by the way. Or Dr. Trinh. Whichever floats your boat."

"I'm Aisha Khurrana. Thanks again." Aisha's pager beeped and she looked down and sighed. "As fun as our little adventure was, I need to get back to work. Nice talking to you Sienna and once again, thanks for the save."

"Bye, hope you solve the case. Also, wait! I heard all the doctors hang out at this bar called Donahue's. I think, just down the street. Apparently, it's like the place to go and decompress after a long shift. Wanna come?"

"Sure!! If only I survive my first shift."

Sienna gave a brilliant smile. "Assuming you live through the next few hours, I'll meet you in the atrium after we clock out."

And Aisha got back to work, tending to her other patients but Annie's unconscious face kept on flashing behind her eyelids and Ramsey's words echoed in her head, like a broken tape recorder.

You need to have a long hard think about whether or not you're ready to be here.

She took a shuddering breath, doubt slipping into her mind, making her question everything she did. Every patient she treated and every prescription she signed.

Am I really cut out for this?

She tried to stop the rising anxiety but it still continued to swell in her like a balloon. Her throat began to dry up and it felt as if the weight on her chest didn't allow her to breathe.

Oh god, it's happening.

Feeling like she was on the verge of a breakdown, she ducked into a dark supply closet so nobody could see her while she tried to pull herself together.

It's okay. You worked your way through med school to get here. You are worthy. She chanted, taking in gulps of air.

It had hardly been a minute when the door suddenly opened and she heard footsteps.

Aisha internally groaned in annoyance. "Get in or get out. Just quit holding the door." She turned around and saw Bryce.

Oh fuck.

He nervously cleared his throat and walked towards her, maintaining his distance. "I feel like I'm interrupting something. Are... are you okay?"

Thanks to the dark, he couldn't see her tear rimmed eyes. Sighing loudly she untied her hair and ran her fingers through it, something she often did when she felt like her life was on the verge of falling apart.

"Nothing. I'm just looking for something." She tried to speak in a sharp tone but it just sounded like her voice was cracking.

She knew that Bryce had definitely heard how close she was to crying. Concern laced his voice. "Hey, I know when we met I was nothing but a dumb, self-obsessed jock but it's different now. I... I know you are not okay. Want to talk about it? Or vent?"

Goddamit Bryce. "Fine! I almost killed my first patient and I fucking swear to god I saw my career flash before my eyes. But it was lowkey my fault. I should have checked for allergies. But I tried fixing my error by calling the shots and Jackie helped me. BUT that's not it! Instead of being a humble person, Jackie swoops in and takes the credit of my save and Dr. Ramsey just goes on congratulating her as if she won some fucking AMA Award-"

"Aisha, breathe."

Taking a lungful of air she continued. "- And don't even get me started on Dr. Ethan Freaking Ramsey. Duniya main maine itna bada gaandu kabhi dekha nahi hai maine. What a dick!! He should get fucking laid to work off all his anger issues-"

Bryce snorted but didn't dare to interrupt Aisha. From the short time they dated, he knew better than to interrupt her mid-rant, it only managed to instigate her.

Another deep breathe. "- Boy does he manage to make me doubt myself in every step of the way like am I worthy of being here? I mean, I threw my heart and soul into med school because I wanted to be the best doctor out there but dammit I don't think I am ready."

When he made sure she wasn't going to launch into a new roast session, he spoke up. "Wow. You managed so many years of med school, but eight hours into the shift and you're surrendering? Didn't take you for a quitter."

Excuse me? Aisha's eyes narrowed.

"You don't know me anymore Bryce. The Aisha you dated is long gone and dead." She said in a low voice.

He shrugged. "True, but I know that you still have the fire in you to do what you love the most. C'mon, you have dealt with worse but yet you are here, standing tall. This is just temporary. I know you can pick yourself back up and break down all the obstacles in front of you."

She looked up at Bryce, only able to see the faint outline of his body. He still was the same- tall, well built and with really good hair. "No offence but... you used to be the guy who would wet himself during chemistry practicals, what happened to make you so...?" She gestured her hand at him, accidentally hitting his hand.

He hesitated. "As you said, things changed and you don't know me anymore Aisha."

"Fair enough."

The lack of space and the awkward silence just fueled the tension between them. She could feel his converse bumping into her shoes and the heated gaze on her face.

There used to be a time when Aisha and Bryce would talk for hours on end and they never ran out of topics to talk about. Be it something as lame as which is the superior flavour of ice cream or as deep as life after death.

Look at us now... Aisha thought to herself, gulping.

Her hair fell on her face as she averted her eyes, unable to come up with something to talk about. Bryce's hand involuntary reached to push back the rebel strands behind her ear, his hands caressing her cheek in the process. It felt as if electric sparks shot up her cheeks, making her blush.

Bryce opened his mouth. "Aisha-"

The door opened and she heard a feminine voice. "Bryce I saw you giving me the look so I decided to join you-"

A woman walked around the corner of the help and Aisha's jaw dropped. It was not because she was shocked that he was dating, he could screw the entire hospital for all she cared but, no... she was topless.

"Oh." The unknown woman placed her hands beside her.

"Sam-" Bryce began and Aisha spoke up at the same time. "I was just-"

The confusion was interrupted again when the closet door opened again and a senior resident stood before them, aghast. "What is going on over here?"

"Oh fuck." The expletive spilt from Aisha's lips.

The topless woman, whose name apparently was Sam, quipped in. "Yeah what she said."

Well, this is totally not awkward.

AUTHOR”S NOTE #2:

Number one, yeah I dragged PB a bit in regards to Keiki’s name.. PB do your research challenge 🙄

Number two, okay so about the tattoo part, me and @bratzlahela were just talking about Bryce having Polynesian tattoos based on this post and I had to integrate it in my series lol

This is something I imagined 🤭

Number 3, Also I tried to change up the scene a bit with Jackie because tbh, Aisha is pretty fucking smart and she won’t be like “Boo-hoo. I don’t know anything” And about the part where she spoke about using the defibrillator numerous times in AIIMS, In India the medical education is a little more hands-on and focuses more on clinical practice rather than theory. Medical students from first year start doing ward duty and help around in the hospitals taking patient history, etc. Also, they have a mandatory year of internship without which you don’t get your license.

Number 4, So about that supply closet scene, how many of y’all thought would you get a make out sesh?

If yes, here is your clown wig 🤡

Number 5, AND CAN WE TALK ABOUT TODDLER KEIKI I SWEAR I WAS JUST GUSHING THE ENTIRE TIME 🥺

Lastly, IT PHYSICALLY HURT ME TO ROAST ETHAN LIKE IM SO SORRY SWEETIE 😭🥺🤧

This was a pretty long author’s note heheheh

Like, comment, reblog and share your thoughts ❤

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Permanent Tag list: @trappedinfandoms @agent-breakdance @dailydoseofchoices @colossalpainintheass @siaramsey @raleigheffingcarrera @kaavyaethanramsey @theeccentricbibliophile @ac27dj @ramseysno1rookie @justanotherrookie @jamespotterthefirst @checkurwindow @chasingrobbie @junggoku @bellcat2010 @choicesstan1 @mvalentine @crazynutella @hatescapsicum @dr-ramseys-rookie @lilypills @vampireblissblog @decadentwinnerjudgedream @starrystarrytrouble @drariellevalentine @choicesficwriterscreations @nooruleman @anonymously-cool @sanvivrma

(Let me know if you want to be added or removed from the taglist)

#anushka writes #oh bryce #bryce lahela #bryce x mc #open heart bryce #bryce lahela x mc #aisha khurrana #bryce x aisha #open heart #open heart mc #choices oh #choices #playchoices #choices stories you play #choices stories we play #pixelberry #a funny thing called fate #series

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keanureevesisbae · 4 years ago

Text

So Henry, you want to start a YouTube channel? - Chapter 3

Summary: Twenty five year old YouTuber Sandy Choi has no idea that one of her five million subscribers is the one and only Henry Cavill. When he asks her to help him out with starting his own YouTube channel, she falls more and more in love with her. But she should’ve known that dating one of the most desirable bachelors, does come with a prize.

Henry Cavill x Sandy Choi (ofc)

Warnings: None

Wordcount: 4k

A/N: If you want to be on the taglist, please let me know. Also, I really like reading that you like the story. Such a great way to make my day xx

Masterlist // Channel introduction // Previous chapter // Next chapter

So, this is where Henry Cavill lives. It’s a cute home, but never figured he’d be the one that would live here. I take a few deep breaths, but it doesn’t calm down my nerves. I look down at my white dress and wonder if it’s too much.

I think it’s too much.

I don’t know what I could wear to meet him. I was thinking about a short and a top, but felt that was a little bit too revealing, but come to think of it, this dress is pretty short.

I still don’t know, it looks almost wedding dressy. I shouldn’t have worn this. I stare at my Dr. Martens sandals, thanking the fashion angels that I didn’t wear the cute white heels that I initially had in mind. The only thing I would be missing, was a bouquet.

I grab my phone from my purse, to check what time it is. I was supposed to be at his place at eleven and 10:59.

I walk up to the door and press the doorbell. I hear a loud bark, causing me to jump. From behind the door, there are some stumbling noises and I can even hear his long and deep voice. The door opens with a crack and Henry greets me with a bright smile. ‘Hi Sandy.’

Holy shit, is this even legal? Why on earth is he wearing a tank top? Why would he do that to me? What is the point of doing such thing? Is he actively trying to kill me, because if so, it’s working. I can barely function anymore, since his arms are really distracting. I mean, I noticed it yesterday, I noticed it on the best video online, the PC building one, but now…

Holy shit, I can’t even seem to find the right way to greet him.

‘Are you okay, Sandy?’ he asks, when I haven’t said anything at all.

‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ I say, way too quickly. I clear my throat, not knowing what to say to him.

‘Please,’ he says, ‘come in.’ Henry takes a step to the side and I walk past him. He has a nicely decorated house, something that I hadn’t expected. It’s really neat too, didn’t expect that from him. ‘You want something to drink?’

‘Water would be nice.’ Kal has noticed me too, because he slowly struts towards me, his butt wiggling from side to side, while he wags his tail. ‘Hi, you big ball of floof. You are nice and clean again.’

‘It was pretty hard washing him in the tiny bath tub,’ Henry recounts and hands me a glass of cold water, with some ice cubes in it.

I clear my throat. ‘Right,’ I say. Standing in front of him shouldn’t make me feel this awkward, especially not after yesterday. I slowly managed to loosen up, but from the looks of it, we are back from square one. I feel my hands shake a bit from the nerves and my shoulders feel painfully tense.

It doesn’t help that Henry is this tall, this bulky, the complete opposite of me. I can’t seem to make eye contact with him and I curse myself for that. Why do I even feel tears out of pure frustration burning in my eyes?

‘You play video games, Sandy?’ Henry asks me. His voice is sweet and thick at the same time.

I scratch Kal behind his ear. ‘Just some Animal Crossing.’

‘Is it worth the hype?’

‘Mhm.’

‘Why do you play it?’

Though it almost feels like a third degree, I’m happy that he is asking me questions about simple things like Animal Crossing and not those deep questions about the existence of life. ‘It’s relaxing,’ I confess. ‘I need that from time to time.’ I look up again, when I know for a fact that my eyes aren’t glossy anymore.

‘So, you don’t play other games?’

I shake my head, not ready to confess that I sometimes grab my old Nintendo DS to play Style Boutique on it. I mean, I like Henry a lot, but sharing this, is one—or five—bridges too far.

‘I think you played this one,’ he says with a confident smile, while he walks to the television.

Is he wearing some perfume? I inhale again, only to be met with a mix of salty and sweet, the perfect combination for a male perfume. He didn’t wear that yesterday and I know that, because I was pretty damn close to him and you bet your ass I took a sniff.

Henry holds up two Mario Kart wheels and I see the remotes are already attached to it. ‘Look at that precious smile,’ he says and only then I realize that I’m indeed smiling. Did he just call my smile precious? ‘You want to play?’

‘Mhm.’ I walk up to the couch and place my glass on a coaster. He hands me a wheel with a remote and plops on the couch, as he starts up the Wii. There is only one more spot left for me to sit and that is right next to him.

As if Kal senses I’m hesitating, he pushes his nose against my leg and I sit down next to Henry. I feel his warmth radiating against my skin, causing me to nearly hyperventilate. His bulky arm accidentally touches me and I clear my throat, not knowing what I should do with myself. Sitting next to him on this couch, is less intimidating than standing in front of him, but it’s still pretty scary.

And I know that I shouldn’t be scared of him, but I can’t help but feel nervous. ‘Are you any good?’ I ask quietly.

‘I always kick Jackson’s ass.’ He looks to the side and our eyes meet. ‘But he is so so. Usually ends at sixth place.’

We pick out our characters (he is Donkey Kong, while I opt for baby Daisy) and once we have chosen our vehicles, Henry leaves it up to me to choose an entire cup for us to race. ‘Special Cup.’

‘You know Rainbow Road is on that cup?’ he mentions.

‘I’m aware, yes.’ I get ready for the first course: Dry Dry Ruins. ‘Good luck,’ I say to him.

‘You think I need it?’ His eyebrow is cocked and he has a smug grin on his face. Besides him getting more and more confident, he is also getting more handsome every passing minute. ‘I’m really good, Sandy.’

‘I figured. Just, don’t hold back for me, okay?’

‘Sure?’ he asks. ‘Because… I don’t want you to feel bad or anything afterwards.’ That’s adorable, oh my God.

‘I’m not a sore loser, so just race like you would usually do.’

The first race is about to start and we both watch the countdown. I push in the right button at the exact moment I know it’s going to give me a better start. Baby Daisy shoots from the 11th place to the sixth, while Henry stutters Donkey Kong to tenth place (from twelfth, if I may add so). While I soar over the roads, pushing myself to a first place, I manage to stay there for the rest of the race, making the gap between me and second place (and everyone else) bigger and bigger as the race continues. I race over the finish line, making a wheelie as I do so and I watch Henry trying to get himself from seventh to sixth place. He is muttering to himself, growing more and more annoyed.

He finally crosses the finish line. ‘I do need luck,’ he mutters. ‘Can’t believe you kicked my ass like that.’

Our second course is Moonview Highway and I snort every time Henry gets run over by a car or a truck and even drives himself off the road multiple times. He ends up in twelfth place and he is visibly frustrated now.

I shouldn’t be thinking like that, but he looks hot as hell when he’s angry like that. He could easily break the Mario kart wheel and the remote in half and knowing that he can do that, it’s something I’ll probably dream about tonight.

‘We can stop, you know,’ I say to him.

‘No, no, no,’ he says, ‘there is still a chance I can not make a total fool out of myself.’

The third course is Bowser’s Castle and this time, Henry is not a total disaster. He managed to earn himself a third place, while I’m still at number one. ‘I have come to realize and accept that I won’t be beating you, but I have to make sure I’m not losing from the computers.’

I can’t help but chuckle.

The final race is my favorite. I love Rainbow Road and know exactly how to maneuver over the roads. While I’ve crossed the finish line, Henry is still falling behind. I press the + button to pause the game. ‘Let me,’ I say and gently pull the steering wheel from his hands. I race Donkey Kong from eighth place to fourth (I’m good, but I’m not a magician. I can’t poof myself over the finish line) and when I cross the finish line, I hand him back the steering wheel. ‘Congratulations,’ I say, ‘you managed to become fifth.’

‘How on earth are you this good? This was unbelievable!’ Henry starts to laugh. ‘You were crossing the finish line twenty seconds before number two would finish, or worse, a whole minute.’

‘Back in college, we did this a lot. We even had a championship.’

‘Tell me you became first.’

I smile. ‘I did, was the best of entire UCLA, three times in a row.’

‘You never shared that on your vlogs.’

That’s cute. He really watches my videos intently, something that is insanely endearing. ‘I didn’t, no. Seemed a bit: oh look at me, you know?’

‘There is nothing wrong with flaunting,’ Henry says. ‘I mean, you do it with your dance videos right?’

I know that he has seen a lot of my videos, but thinking about him sitting on this couch, Kal pressed against his side and him watching those particular videos, makes me uncomfortable. ‘It’s barely flaunting.’

He tilts his head, I notice from the corners of my eyes. ‘You shouldn’t be this hard on yourself, Sandy,’ he says in a soft tone. ‘You are amazing, five million people and probably more watch your videos. There are a lot of people who are reading your books and…’ He doesnt finish his sentence, while he is looking for the right words to say.

‘You’ve read my books?’ I ask him.

Now he’s blushing a bit and he isn’t looking at me anymore. ‘I’ve read them,’ he admits.

I chuckle. ‘That’s sweet.’

‘But I’m not the only one who adores your videos and finish your books from cover to cover in one sitting. There are tons more and you being modest is absolutely admirable and it only makes you more likable, but there is nothing wrong with admitting that you are talented in many other ways. There is nothing wrong with saying that you are indeed amazing, because it’s true and it shows confidence.’

I bite my lip. ‘Well, fake it till you make it, isn’t that what they say?’

‘Eventually it’ll not be fake anymore.’

A deep sigh leaves my lips and I look at my hands, my thumbs fumbling together. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper.

‘Why are you apologizing, Sandy?’

‘That I’m like this again,’ I say. ‘I have a lot of trouble meeting new people and after yesterday…’ Why am I sharing this with him? He’ll probably think I’m the biggest whiny baby on the planet. ‘Never mind.’

‘No, no,’ Henry says, ‘tell me, please. I want to know.’

Kal sits in front of me and I place my hands on the sides of his face, scratching him. ‘I felt really good yesterday after we met, but now I feel like none of that is left. I feel like we’re starting over again. It’s just that I’m not sure what I can say to you now. And you do make it easier and I’m already less nervous and you being a total loser at Mario Kart obviously helps too… I think I don’t want you to think that I’m not having fun.’

‘Sandy,’ Henry says, ‘we’re not starting over. I’m happy that you told me this, though.’

I look up from Kal, to only notice he is already looking at me again.

‘You’re not mad?’

‘This is the last thing I should be mad about. I’m just grateful that you trust me enough to tell me this.’ He bumps his knee against mine and says: ‘I don’t think I can handle it again if I lose.’

‘Figured.’ I look around me, to find something to talk about. As if he is waiting for me to take the first step, he doesn’t say anything. ‘Do you have filming equipment?’

‘I have my phone.’

I scrunch up my nose. ‘But a camera is better. You can separate your files more easily, believe me, you’d want that.’

‘I’ll have to believe the expert on that one,’ Henry laughs.

‘Editing software?’

‘Well, I have a few computers around here, but I also have a MacBook, with iMovie on it. Heard that was pretty good. I bet you use something else.’

‘I used to use iMovie,’ I tell him, ‘but now I use Final Cut Pro. It’s around three hundred bucks, maybe a bit more.’

Henry nods. ‘So, I should buy a camera?’

‘Mhm and more.’

‘What?’

‘A hard disk, a tiny tripod, a big tripod. I was thinking you should buy like a microphone and better lightening, but that’s not really necessary. Yet.’

‘Right.’ Henry rubs his hands together and asks: ‘Want to go shopping with me?’

⟢⟡⟣

Henry spend around five hundred pounds on a camera. In a different store we bought a hard disk and indeed two tripods, though they were heavily overpriced, but Henry said that it was fine.

For the occasion, Henry put on a shirt, but this one still accentuates his arms. For a second my mind wanders to my lovely daydreams: thinking about how it would be if he’d wrap those arms around me, pulling me against his insanely strong body and kissing me on top of my head. But to not go into cardiac arrest right here and now, I decide I’ll just have to wait and dream about that when I go to sleep.

Henry is unpacking his camera and turns it on. ‘God, this is beautiful,’ he says, holding the camera up, to take a picture, while he is watching the screen. He packed everything in a blue backpack, that rests between his legs as we sit on a park bench in the shadow. He looks around him and his eyes fall on a field filled with flowers. ‘Let’s have a little photoshoot,’ he says when he turns around, to meet my eyes.

I frown. ‘What?’

‘I have to test out this camera and when I have you with me, you should be my model.’

I’m visibly confused. ‘You want to take pictures of me?’

‘Yes,’ he simply states. ‘Come on.’ He grabs his backpack and walks to the field. I follow him, but now I’m growing more nervous.

Henry Cavill wants to make pictures of me?

‘Go stand over there,’ he tells me and points to the sunflowers. I walk up to it, my legs nearly turning into jello as I stand next to the sunflower that is around my height.

He crouches down and I cock an eyebrow. ‘I’ve seen your editorials, Sandy, you’ll do amazing here. Besides, it’s just me.’

It’s never going to be just you, Henry, don’t you get that? I take a deep breath and start to pose for the pictures. He clicks his tongue, as he continues to snap pictures, telling me I’m looking beautiful, but finally the sun is frying my head. ‘Can we stop?’ I ask him. ‘I’m a sweaty mess.’

Henry starts to chuckle and looks at the screen. ‘Sure thing.’

I walk up to him, so I can look at the pictures as well and oh my God, these all look really good.

‘Wow,’ I mention. ‘Those are pretty decent.’

‘It helps when the model is easy to photograph.’

I clear my throat. What does one say to that? ‘Judging from these pictures, you’ll probably do great with filming,’ I say and together we walk back to the road again. ‘Oh look,’ I say, when Henry has put the camera in his backpack. ‘Cotton candy.’

‘Candy floss. You’re in the UK now, Sandy.’

I roll my eyes. ‘Fine, candy floss then.’

Henry tells me to wait, before he takes a few strides and he’s at the stand, buying one. I decide to watch from a far, especially when the man behind the stand wants a picture with him. I don’t want to intrude, so I wander a bit down the road, making sure that Henry can still see me.

Henry walks up to me, with a giant ball of cotton— candy floss on a stick. He plucks off some of the sweet stuff. ‘Open your mouth,’ he tells me.

If that isn’t something right out of my fantasies, then I don’t know anymore. ‘You’re going to feed me?’

‘Yeah, so your hands don’t get sticky.’ Henry has a lovely smile on his face and I wonder what is he going to be like as a boyfriend? As my boyfriend to be exact.

Would he be rough, dominant and strong, like the fanfics suggest (yes, I read those) or is he soft and cuddly? Now I do suspect a bit of both.

He could be pretty dominant. I mean, he told me to open my mouth and my first reflex was wanting to ask how far open he would’ve liked it. But on the other hand, he is also pretty soft, especially towards me. He wants me to be at ease with him, keeps giving me thoughtful compliments and he even said I was beautiful and that I’m easy to photograph.

I mean, who says that kind of stuff?

Boyfriends do right?

Rolling my eyes, I open my mouth and he feeds me some of the candy floss. He retract his hand, before my lips can reach his fingers. I shouldn’t be thinking like this. I can barely look at the man from time to time, let alone if I have these kind of impure thoughts.

‘Last time I had candy floss,’ he says, ‘was when I was sixteen. My friends laughed at me, because I wanted a pink one. I know they all taste the same, no matter what color, but pink is the color it’s supposed to be, right?’

I nod. ‘Agree,’ I say as the sugar dissolves on my tongue.

‘When was the last time you had it?’

‘I think I was eight. My dad took me out to the park, because we knew there was a stand where they sold cotton candy. We always walked passed it a few times, because my mom told us that it was really unhealthy and that your teeth would rot off if you ate it. But my mom wasn’t with us then, so we ate like three of those sticks together and we had to lie down on a park bench for about an hour, because we felt so sick.’

‘Does your mom know now?’

‘No, we’re too scared to tell her.’

Henry chuckles. ‘Are you close with your parents?’

I nod. ‘Yeah, I am. My mother reminds me every single day I should take my vitamins, to stay hydrated and not to frown, but that’s her way of showing me how much she cares. My dad texts me everyday, just telling me how his day is going.’

‘Don’t you miss them?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Why did you even move to London?’ He plucks off some more cotton candy and brings it to my lips. Butterflies flutter inside of my stomach. I feel myself getting more relaxed around him again and him doing this, it feels so normal to us. ‘You never mentioned it in your vlogs.’

I smile, licking the sweet stuff off my lips. ‘I wanted to see the world and I earned enough money to afford it. My parents were really supportive and they wanted me to explore the world. They just hoped I was going to New York or Canada. But they are excited for me. They always watch my videos and even wake up in the middle of the night if I post in the mornings. They have been there for me since the beginning and though I’m in another continent, I feel like they are always right there.’

‘Isn’t it scary?’ he asks. ‘Being in another continent, without your parents at like twenty five?’

‘Every single day.’

We walk down the street and he continues to feed me the cotton candy. It feels weirdly intimate, but not awkwardly intimate. I open my mouth again, but he holds it a little above my reach. ‘Henry,’ I mumble, ‘not funny.’

He chuckles, lowering his hand, but I could’ve known that he was just messing with me. When I stand on my toes, he holds it further above my head and eventually eats the pink stuff himself.

I want to grab some off the stick, but even that he holds above my head. ‘Henry, come on. Don’t be mean.’

He doesn’t think this is mean, because he continues to do it, laughing the entire time. He does it again and I jump up, hoping I can reach it, but it’s hopeless.

I jump up again, but this time I fold my fingers around his forearm, pulling his strong arm with me so I can finally get a bite.

But holding his thick arm like this, it’s giving me all sorts of thoughts. He feels so strong and it’s quite intimidating of course, but something about his warm skin, is also intensely soft.

‘I knew that was there,’ he says with an almost proud smile.

‘That was there what?’ I ask, letting go of his arm.

‘That bit of assertiveness.’

My cheeks flare up. ‘Hardly.’

‘Hence the bit part.’

I glance at him, but it doesn’t last long. He can’t seem to stop smiling and to be fair, I don’t want him to. He looks breathtakingly handsome and like a perfectly sculpted human. He licks his fingers and I bet he knows exactly what that is doing to me. He throws the stick away and wants to wipe his fingers to his shirt or pants, but I stop him.

‘Wait,’ I say, before digging through my small purse, finding a tissue. ‘Here.’

‘Well prepared,’ he comments, as he takes the tissue out of my hand.

‘Always.’

He cleans his hands and throws the tissue into the bin. ‘Thanks for coming with me today.’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘What do you want to film first?’

‘No idea yet. I want a bit of everything, you know.’

I nod. ‘Get it. When I started my channel, I was thinking about doing a fashion channel. When I thought about it, I realized I didn’t want that and wanted more lifestyle related videos.’

‘What stopped you from doing fashion videos?’

‘Not being fashionable enough.’

‘Nonsense,’ he tells me in a stern voice. ‘You look fashionable.’

I hold in a giggle that bubbles up. Dominant boyfriend Henry is definitely a concept.

‘What even made you start your channel?’

‘I wanted to romanticize my life,’ I answer. ‘I felt like I was wasting my life and realizing that ever moment is worth noting, it’ll give you tons of footage. Just keep that in mind when you film. Nothing is too boring for a vlog, as long as you edit it nicely.’

Henry nods. ‘That’s beautifully said, Sandy.’

Taglist: @flhorah // @henrythickcavill // @toomanystoriessolittletime // @tumblnewby // @newts-fan-case // @thelastsock

#henry cavill #henry cavill x ofc #henry cavill x oc #so henry you want to start a youtube channel #henry cavill fanfic #henry cavil x sandy choi

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skinks · 5 years ago

Note

I would just like to say Bongo Smugglers killed me. I’m sitting in class giggling thinking about a Losers movie night where they have a dramatic showing of the movie. Audra and Richie are less embarrassed then they should be. It becomes an annual tradition to play a bongo smugglers™️ drinking game at Christmas.

AHH this is amazing, I just shoved two words together that I thought were funny and suddenly it’s this whole ugly 2002 sex comedy fully formed in my head. Glad it killed you during class. And yeah, they’re definitely not embarrassed, everyone’s heckling the writing and the early 2000s fashion more than anything else anyway.

Richie happily provides commentary the whole way through even though he’s only in the sex scene, waving his tortilla chip in Eddie’s face because he’s got his arm around his shoulder, hugging him close into Richie’s side. Eddie keeps snapping bites at it so often that Richie just ends up hand feeding him chips.

“Aaaaaaand... that’s the first time I touched a boob, right there!“

“Glad to help,” Audra winks.

“The exact moment I realized I was totally lying to myself. I’m having an entire existential sexuality crisis right there on camera, but can you tell? Does my fratty façade crack an inch?”

“I could tell, because you spent fifteen minutes before the scene pacing around set and chanting you can do this, you can do this, don’t throw up, you like girls, but not too much, because you don’t get paid if you pop a boner, c’mon Richard, c’mon—”

“Like I said,” Richie shouts, over all his stupid friends laughing at him, “no one can tell, ‘cus I’m a pro—”

“You call yourself Richard during pep talks?” Stan’s grinning at him sharp-beaked, like a vulture. Has Richie seen him blink even once since he came back from the dead? Not sure, not sure, make note to ask Patty to spy.

Onscreen Audra is shimmying down her low-rise stone-wash boot-cut jeans, boots with the fur, the whole club was in fact lookin’ at her. What the fuck was anyone thinking back then? Richie privately blames the Bush administration, and continues.

“You’re a great scene partner, Audra-my-deah, and I respect you for cougaring not one but two of our little balding Brady Bunch here, but you were kinda the reason I figured out I’m gay. Like, big time gay. Well, the second reason.” He rubs tortilla-salt fingers through Eddie’s hair and feels his stomach go fuzzy when Eddie kinda thrums out a low noise against him. Oh, he’s purring. Some deep down part of Richie’s caveman psyche, lodged right in the hungry reptilian nub of his central brain wants to bear-hug Eddie to a pulp, wants to Lenny him like a mouse until they both stop breathing at the same exact moment from the pressure.

Yeesh, dark!

He smooches one of Eddie’s Easter Island eyebrows instead, keeps his lips mushed there. Smooches again. “Biiiiiiig time.”

“My wife,” Bill whips around from his seat on the floor at Richie’s feet, cheeks bulging with wontons, “my wife did not cougar me.”

Eddie shushes him. Everyone else is exchanging Looks, including Audra, because she totally did cougar Bill. Good for her!

“My wife,” Richie mimics, all sing-song and bugling. “Who the fuck are you, Borat?” Eddie snorts, hard. “Turn around and watch me make sweet love to ya woman, Bill.”

Onscreen Richie is struggling out of a giant hockey jersey at the sight of Onscreen Audra’s nubile charms. Everything is lit terribly, to a Smash Mouth deep cut.

“Oh man, check out that figure.” Richie whistles at himself, twenty-six years old with muscles like long ropes. “These were the pre-gut days. Even though my diet was just Adderall and instant ramen.”

“I like your gut,” Eddie murmurs, squidging at it with the hand not shoved up the back of Richie’s shirt. He’s already looking pretty tipsy, because he told everyone loudly and at length that he’d have to be what he deemed, shithouse drunk, to cope with whatever 90 minute dick jokeathon he was about to endure for the sake of two minutes of Richie-ass. “You’re hotter than him.”

Richie preens. “I am him, dude.”

Eddie’s hand lands clumsy on his cheek, pulling Richie’s attention away from his own foregrounded bare ass and Onscreen Audra’s shocked expression, to face him. Eddie’s all unfocused, flushed in the cheeks. “You’re both hot. Him and you, I’d fuck you both. I’d let both of you fuck me at once.”

“Um,” says Ben. Mike keeps slorping up noodles, but his eyes are saucering at Bill’s giant TV.

“Hhohkaaay,” Richie breathes.

“Is this when you saw it, Audra?” Bev asks. She waggles her eyebrows at them from the muscular nook of Ben’s arms. “The famous Tower of Tozier? You mentioned in the group chat.”

“What group chat,” Richie croaks, wrenching his eyes from the sight of Eddie’s slick tongue pulsing gently against his lower lip, hanging open like he wants Richie to see inside his mouth. Yowza-yowza-yowza, this is so much better than movie-nights back in the 90s. “I never saw anything about that? And I monitor you all on WhatsApp twenty-four-sevs. I literally have nothing better to do while Eddie’s working.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Beverly dismisses him with a flick of her wrist.

Audra is nodding vigorously while Onscreen Audra tilts her head comically far to the right. “That’s when I saw it,” she says. “They couldn’t find a modesty sock that fit you, Richie, remember? I didn’t have to fake that reaction. And that’s with them blasting the A/C on high so my nips would poke through my shirt.” She nudges Eddie’s shin gently and stage-whispers, “Well done.”

Eddie growls hot miso breath into Richie’s neck. Snarls, really. That’s the only word for it. Richie’s not embarrassed—he’s been telling people about his donkey schlong for years, not his fault nobody ever believes him. It’s a boy who cried wolf situation, perhaps, if the boy was actually telling the truth every time and just wanted to brag to everyone about seeing a really big, thick wolf.

“Honey,” Bill says, visibly distressed, “this is already weird enough for me, please don’t say nips.”

“Nips, nips, nips.” Audra tickles into Bill’s ribs, and Richie joins in the chant, they all do. It’s a hailstorm of sesame toast raining on Big Bill’s protesting head. “Stiff nips! Stiff nips!”

“Shut up, I’m, uh’wanna see Rich fuck!” Eddie roars, wrestling the couch cushions for the remote and stabbing the volume obscenely loud.

Moans fill the air. Rice sprays from Mike’s mouth, between his hasty fingers. Patty is laughing so hard into Stan’s shoulder Richie would be kinda worried about her, if he wasn’t so distracted by the way Eddie’s leaning forward, hand on Richie’s thigh and eyes locked to Onscreen Richie’s bare bucking hips. He remembers this part horrible and clear, preserved behind glass in his mind like the embarrassing ninth grade school photo his mom still won’t remove from the mantelpiece. Braces like train tracks and his eyes squinted up small and moleish because his mom said she wanted to see his handsome face without his glasses for once. Eddie laughed at it for five whole minutes the first time Richie brought him up to visit mom and dad as his—as his, at last, before snapping a careful picture of the photo with his phone and muttering, so cute.

It’s the noises.

“This was the day I learned women really can, uh, fake orgasms,” Richie says. He coughs. Eddie’s fingers tighten on his thigh and he looks back at Richie over his shoulder, eyes all drunk and dark and dilated like a shark’s to the backdrop of Onscreen Richie and Audra’s plastic din. Richie’s head thumps dizzily, sliding his hand secret under Eddie’s shirt to the damp small of his back, watching his neck go pink. This, now this is familiar from 90s movie nights, how sweaty they’d get, tangled together like pocketed earbuds the longer the VHS spun. Always on the same couch by unspoken agreement, kicking and left to do so by the others, like the clubhouse hammock flirting was more RichieandEddie status quo than behaviour tethered to any one location. Feeling your heartbeat in your ears and everywhere your limbs are shoved between another sapling boy-body, and the couch.

Richie can see exactly what Eddie’s thinking, in that darkness. That’s not how you sound in bed with me.

“This is revolting,” says Stan, mildly, but Richie holds up his hand like a stop sign, pulled roughly back to the present.

“Wait, wait, here comes my line!”

“Thought you said it was a non-speaking—”

The camera cuts from Onscreen Audra’s bouncing breasts to Onscreen Richie’s slack-jawed face, his ill-conceived soul patch. He was asked to remove his glasses for the scene, he remembers, and was glad of it, feeling useless and young and stupid and exposed enough already just by virtue of needing the money, he didn’t need to see this perfectly nice and reasonable actress pity him for not even knowing how to pretend at being with a woman. Onscreen Richie tilts his chin up, and Bill’s entire rec room holds its breath. There will be bruises on Richie’s thigh tomorrow.

A grunt, a groan. An unsubtle trumpet fanfare musical cue on the soundtrack, but hey, neither of them ever claimed Bongo Smugglers was a masterpiece. “¡Ay, chihuahua!”

Richie throws his arms up in triumph. “All my own improv, folks! And they kept it in the final cut!”

Eruption. He’s pelted with howls of disgust and prawn crackers. Eddie grabs one of his arms and just shakes him, ragdolls Richie’s laughing body around until he tips over and sprawls into Eddie’s lap, shielded from assault. Eddie chews his insistent teeth into Richie’s shoulder, and finally, the scene ends with Onscreen Richie leaping a naked escape from Onscreen Audra’s balcony.

“Worst,” Eddie mumbles against Richie’s nape. “Worst thing’ve ever seening m’life.”

He’s so drunk, sweet thing. Richie sits back up, still wheezing. He rests his cheek on Eddie’s shoulder and gazes starrily up at his plastered little face. Steel-cut jaw softened with laughter and stubble, un-gelled hair curling around like a chestnut lamb’s. “Worst ever-ever?”

“No,” Eddie says plainly, and that’s true, “but it’s up there. Woulda rented the shit out of this at Blockbuster.”

Richie flings his leg over Eddie’s knees, kicking Bill in the process. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eddie agrees, gathering up all Richie’s loose ends in a big circling cuddle. “Every week. Woulda worn it out. Broke the disc.”

“Got your ‘Lil ‘Busters membership card revoked for being a creep.”

“Worth it.”

“Aw, Eddie-baby.”

“Would you two stop, you’re making the rest of us look bad,” Bev says, smiling fondly. The movie’s moved on, and none of them are really paying attention now that the main event’s over, but everyone’s still coming down, dismounting from belly-laughter and landing ankle-deep in giggles. “That was inspired.”

“He made me laugh so hard on that take,” Audra sighs, leaning against Bill. “I remember thinking, shame he’s a closet-case. I always knew you were a good guy under all that fake stand-up.” She rolls her head back on her neck to look at Richie, upside down. “D’you remember right after, too?”

“Ah,” says Richie, tensing up. Eddie must feel it, because he makes a lowing noise of concern and turns the volume down.

“What you did to those guys?”

“Ahaha, uh.” Richie struggles to sit upright with hot embarrassment tugging at his stomach. “They don’t need to—Audra, it’s not, anyone would’ve done the same—”

“No, actually, you were the only one who ever did,” Audra says, sharp-eyed, and Richie remembers that too. How much surer and in control of herself she was than him, even back then, when they were both just simple bottom-feeders on L.A.’s sludgy floor.

“What happened?” Patty asks. They’re all looking. Richie stares at the wall beside the TV’s garish over-saturation, scratches at the back of his neck, until Eddie takes his hand softly back to hold in his.

“I was pretty much always the only woman on set,” Audra explains. “Par for the course on a movie like that, it was whatever. It’s nothing like real sex, obviously, you have to stop and wait for lighting changes, new set-ups and stuff, you’re surrounded by crew. But you’re the only ones naked, and pretending to fuck, right? It can be a little.” She pulls a face, tilts her palm back and forth. “Degrading.”

Richie snorts, humorlessly.

“Anyway, that scene wrapped and they called cut, and a few of the guys in the crew said some stuff. About me. The director ignored it, the producer ignored it. I was used to it,” Audra says. Richie can see the edge of Bill’s jaw clench and re-clench like a fist as he watches his wife speak. Audra smiles widely, then, and jerks a thumb at Richie. “But this guy?”

They’re grinning, they’re all grinning, because they know him. Richie squirms under it. He can feel blood pounding behind his ears, across the surface of his scalp in pulsing waves of embarrassed heat, because it’s one thing to spend your life running your big fat Trashmouth to distract the bullies’ attention onto you, but it’s another for people to treat you like some kinda hero for it. Like it’s not just something friends do.

Bev’s eyes go all emerald-shiny with delight, like the quarry in sunlight. She covers her mouth. “Oh, Richie.”

“Knocked the first one out cold,” Audra crows. “You tried your best after that. It was three against one and he had a black eye before the rest of us could separate them, but he had the element of surprise at first. I mean, he flew at them, if you can imagine it—you’re what, six-one, six-two?”

Eddie’s trembling ever-so-slightly against him. Richie screws his eyes shut. “Six-two.”

“No wonder the asshole shit himself, you came at him all six-foot-two naked inches, pissed as hell, with a massive—”

“Alright!” Richie yelps, because if there’s anything more embarrassing than his brief Bongo Smugglers cameo, it’s the fact that he left set that day with a black eye and no money. Who cares. His closest friends are alive and they’re cheering, and Eddie is shoving himself into Richie’s lap just like it’s movie night in 1991 but with 100% more enthusiastic frenching, seating his drunk ass in Richie’s startled hands and hissing god, you’re such a crazy dumbass, I love you so much, Richie, even back then with that soul-patch I’d have loved you so much, god, sexy, Rich, wanna see you with a black eye, can I give you one, can you give me one, Richie, I’m gonna fuck you so good for this later, ay chihuahua—!

#long post #once again i did not mean to write over 2k about fake sex comedy Bongo Smugglers (2002) when i started answering this message #reddie #ficlet #bongo smugglers

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