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creativeashproductions · 4 years ago

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We Wouldn’t Be Us // Charlie Gillespie

IN WHICH: We get a look into the timeline of the reader and Charlie’s relationship from the first date that wasn’t so perfect to the news they get. The relationship has its ups and downs like all relationships do but this one brings the birth of a song. They know in their relationship that anything less just wouldn’t be them

Warnings: Swearing, an argument, allusion to sex (NO SMUT), pure fluff

Words: 3.1k

A/N: I suppose this is an entry for @cherrymaybank’s Valentine’s Day Fic Challenge.

Based on the song We Wouldn’t Be Us by Alexandra Kay

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Masterlist

Every dress didn’t seem to fit properly no matter what mirror with different light in your apartment you tried. The spare bathroom’s bulb was dying, so that made the colour appear off, and the best mirror was dirty, which would dampen the romantic goal. Nothing made you feel that oomph that you desired for this date.

You could wear the standby little black dress of which you had two options, the clubbing one or the work appropriate one. It didn’t seem right to choose a standard black and no colour for this insanely sweet guy that had this insane energy. With that thought in mind, you dug deeper in your closet for that special dress that you’d never found someone worthy of it. It was your best dress and your most expensive with the tags still on. You would have gone for the maroon dress but it was Valentine’s Day and that seemed like over kill.

Somehow it still fit perfectly despite the length of time from purchase, it was a vibrant green satin with lace matching the colour. The dress's satin ended just below the knee with the matching lace falling an additional six inches past. The A-line skirt was loose flowing contrasting to the form-fitting material across your bust and midsection.

One of your favourite parts of the dress was the off-shoulder bateau neckline that gave a tasteful sneak of your cleavage. The bottom of the thick straps came to make a perfectly straight horizontal line. Across your waist was a one-inch wide satin ribbon attached to the dress that formed a perfect bow that tied the outfit together, no pun intended.

“Whoa.” You breathed stepping in front of the floor-length mirror kept in the spare bedroom, it had once been your roommates’ room before she moved.

You had to admit the dress was magical with it, bringing out all your curves and went with your skin tone. It was a pure shock to see how you managed to make the dress come to life with just a makeup look that was easy to do. All you did next was your favourite beige heels that went with everything. You had just slid on the left heel when the buzzer sounded and slid the right on as you hit the button unlocking the apartment building door.

“This is going to be perfect.” You breathed leaning into the mirror beside the front door. You inspected your lipstick as a knock sounded on the dark brown wood of your door.

“You look gorgeous.” Your date breathed, widening those colour changing irises as he took in your outfit, “You take my breath away. Happy Valentine’s Day”

Your cheeks flushed, “Thank you, Charlie.”

He stepped into the apartment as you quickly went to the kitchen to grab your coat and purse with your essentials. He had gently retrieved the coat from your arms to help you into the cold jacket.

“I know traditionally I would have brought you flowers, but I also know you love books.” Charlie breathed grasping the items in his hands, “So I got these flowers.”

His warm hands held three books. The top one was The Orchid House by Lucinda Riley with a cover that had the background blurry with only the back of a girl in clarity. The girl’s pink dress matching the flower in the upper corner of the book. The next cover proudly displayed The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley with red flowers growing down on a stone building. The third one was a light pink book with an anatomically correct heart with flowers growing out of the arteries, veins and valves; a collection of poetry I Saw You As a Flower by Ellen Everett. Lastly, you held Rupi Kaur’s second collection of poetry The Sun and her Flowers that had come out a couple years ago.

“Charlie, this is so thoughtful. You even has a rose one!” You breathlessly spoke gently touching the covers, “Thank you so much for these.”

“I thought we could read them together?” Charlie was bashful as he quietly asked with flushed cheeks. He didn’t know why he felt like this was his very first date all over again.

“I’d love that.” You softly told the Canadian with the manners a mother would be jealous to have in her home. Charlie’s fingers linked with yours as he tugged you out of the apartment into the hallway.

Your hands swung during the short walk from the apartment building to his bright orange Subaru across the street. The sound of the light wind rustling the trees lining the sidewalk mixed with the humming from Charlie was a perfect film score. He was the ideal gentleman even before he asked you out.

You couldn’t wait to tell your close loved ones about Charlie. You could really see this going somewhere. The relationship that is, as you were now on the side of a road with the Subaru’s hazard lights flashing.

“I forgot to fill the tank.” Charlie moaned, pressing his forehead against the steering wheel. His eyes clenched just as tight as his fists.

The Canadian was so embarrassed to have had what he thought was the best date of his life. He’d played music from the playlist he had patiently curated specifically for this date, and he held your hand to the restaurant. He’d already made plans for another date when his car’s warning beeped.

In Charlie’s haste, he’d forgotten to fuel up his car, so here he was with the prettiest person he’d ever seen in his passenger seat. His confidence in a second date had greatly diminished.

“Char, you said Owen was on his way. There isn’t anyone else I’d prefer to be stranded with. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“I wanted this date to go perfect. This is my first Valentine’s Day with someone.” Charlie admitted turning his head to stare into warm pools of your e/y colours. His eyes scanned the soft smile that appeared on your face as his confession, “I had this whole thing planned out, and now you definitely won’t want a second-”

“I’m gonna kiss you. If you don’t want that, let me know.” You murmured before pulling him in for what would be the best kiss of your life thus far.

Sure his car broke down, but you kissed him anyway. He tasted of the complimentary chocolate dessert from dinner.

A Year Later

A young, admittedly broke couple sat on the cold floor of the unpacked kitchen eating SpaghettiOs. You had only just moved into the studio apartment with Charlie that had drained most of your savings. Had it not been in a decently safe area in the city and a close commute you would have said no.

But it was the perfect starting place for you two as you both were unfamiliar with living with an SO. It sucked on each of your ends to not have a better situation, Charlie wanted nothing more than to spoil you on the first day living together. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible but sitting on the floor with a cheap candle was imperfectly perfect.

“I’m sorry we’re eating out of cans.” Charlie whispered pointedly, keeping his eyes on the spoon, stirring the red sauce with the beige circles.

“Char this is perfect. As long as it’s you and I then anything is perfect. Besides we didn’t label the boxes, I have no idea which box has our kitchenware.” You admitted glancing at the boxes boarding the edge of the room.

You ate out of cans for at least a week before you had unpacked the kitchen and had the means to buy actual groceries. Living together thus far had been going super smooth until wasn’t.

It was a bad day on both your parts, your entire work was deleted after a computer glitch. Charlie had auditioned for a role he had been really really wanting since he heard about it. Your father came down with the flu axing the plans to meet for dinner; it would have been the first time in six months you saw him in person.

The apartment's atmosphere had been rising and very volatile by mid-afternoon when Charlie blatantly forgot a deal. If he was going to play music, it had to be in the study so you could focus on your work.

Today he’d decided to be in close vicinity to have a virtual jam session with both Owen and Jeremy. He’d chosen the room you were in solely because it had the best wifi reception which you needed as well.

“Charlie, please can you go to the study? I’m trying to finish this!” You cried out as he struck a chord on the electric. His eyebrows came other in the glare he sent you, “I lost all my work last night.”

“The guys and I are working on songs-”

“-Charlie, this is due tonight. I can’t concentrate with-”

“It’s not my fault you have a shitty attention span!” Charlie angrily snapped contradicting the gentle touch on his guitar. He placed it back on the stand to not accidentally damage it, “The wifi is best in this room.”

“I’m very much aware of that Charlie. Out of the two of us, I use it the most. Can you please either move to the study or at least wait an hour so I can finish?” You pleaded with the Canadian actor ignoring the two guys on the computer silently waiting for the fight to be over.

“Why can't you mov-”

“Fine. I will.” You fully stared down your boyfriend for a full five seconds before you harshly closed the top of your computer. It took seconds to gather your work stuff into the leather satchel you stored the computer in, “You didn’t even mute the call.”

Charlie watched as you swiftly pulled on your jacket, “Babe-”

The sound of the door slamming shut cut his sentence before he even had a chance to speak his thoughts. The apartment was eerily silent compared to the sounds of music that always played through the Bluetooth speaker.

The inspiration to play evaporated with the aftermath of a stupid argument permeated the apartment typically filled with love. All three actors quietly said their goodbyes before they ended the video call.

You spent an hour uncomfortably sitting in a cafe finishing up what you’d needed to finish with the argument replaying. Your finger barely hit the button to send the email before you had already stepped outside the business. You spent the walk struggling to draft a text to your boyfriend.

It didn’t matter because when you walked into the apartment, you heard the soft song you’d both deemed yours. It was cheesy, but that was part of Charlie’s charm. Speaking of your boyfriend, he was sat on the floor of your kitchen with matching mugs of brownies.

“I’m sorry. I was insensitive.” Charlie started as soon as your jacket was draped over one of the kitchen chairs. His usually wide smile was as bashful as the one he’d worn on the night of your first date.

“No I’m sorry, Charlie. I could have easily put on my headphones or moved to the bedroom for a bit. The fight was stupid, and I love you so much that sometimes I think I take you for granted. I mean, look at you! You made the brownie cups-”

“Even sitting on the cold floor like when we moved in.” Charlie cheekily inserted, reaching over to hold your hands in his, “I like our tradition. I definitely like how we upgraded from SpaghettiOs to brownies.”

“Me too.” You breathed leaning over to press a lingering kiss on his lips. His hands delving into your hair to keep you close.

The butterflies stormed your stomach as the heat slowly inflated from your toes until it reached your flushing cheeks. Raw emotion pouring into the passionate kiss that only closed down as you broke for air. But you also went back in as that warmth slowly built in your tummies. Charlie’s eyes marginally opened to ensure he wasn’t imagining the Angel he got to kiss.

Finally, with heavy breathing, you pulled apart, but only a fleeting moment froze the time in the apartment. For, as soon as Charlie caught your dilated pupils, his one hand cupped the back of your hand, fingers tangled in your h/c tresses.

Soon enough, you were making up on the kitchen floor with each article of clothing tossed in the vicinity. A shirt landed on the kitchen sink spout. The brownie mugs forgotten as you gave into the passion with your boyfriend. Your lovemaking had you missing supper.

Charlie’s solution was a trip to the local authentic English pub founded by a nice guy from London. You never failed to stop him for a dance in the empty street as his smooth voice gave music for smooth motions. Dancing was a common thing from pulling off the road in Dieppe to dance. You drank and danced at the pub until Jack cut you off at 2am as his pub rules had.

You and Charlie just laughed in a love bubble as the real-world worries faded because you always came together in the rough times.

Months later you returned to Dieppe with Charlie to spend the holidays with them. The entire family together creating such a welcoming atmosphere.

“I’m gonna grab a glass of water.” You informed the group of gals ad non-binary pals who had gathered in Meghan’s bedroom. The group had decided to sleep over Meg’s childhood room with face masks, nail polish and lovely wine.

Meg and Jeannette both nodded to acknowledge your announcement before they returned to their respective conversations. You took a moment to take in the great group of Gillespie and Co you had the honour to be part of. The thirst was only temporarily forgotten in the happy bubble you found yourself in.

You practically skipped to the kitchen, barely noticing the two people in the living room, but their words stopped you in your tracks. Your boyfriend, Charlie Gillespie, stood close to his older brothers Ryan, Patrick and Michael.

“I’m gonna ask her to marry-” Charlie caught himself from finishing the sentence when he saw you standing pale-faced at the opening into the living room.

His entire body was encapsulated by the lights casting in the living room from the Christmas tree. The tree couldn’t hold a candle to the ring of your dreams that promptly had you bursting into tears.

“I RUINED THE SURPRISE!” You sobbed dropping your face into your cold hands, avoiding the gaze of the Gillespie brothers. Had you not been hiding in your hands you would have known the older three had vacated the room.

“Hey, it’s okay.” Charlie cooed with the ring safely put away in the box he had shoved back in his pocket, “You didn’t ruin the surprise. I shouldn’t have been telling my brothers in the middle of the living room.”

Charlie’s warm hands slowly pulled your hands from your soft post-mask skin with such a pretty healthy glow. He could see the remnants of the mask on the edge of your scalp, but it didn’t take away from your beauty.

“I’m sorry.” You whispered, staring up at him from underneath your eyelashes. The soft hazel eyes not upset in the least, things often didn’t go the way you wanted to together.

Take the first date from over two years ago where you and Charlie had waited for Owen to meet you with a jug of gas. You’d shared childhood stories and future dreams. Or the time you hadn’t marked the boxes creating an entire week of eating out of cans and cartons.

Ruining the proposal was almost expected at this rate.

“I knew from the moment I saw you in that emerald dress I knew that you were the One for me. I’ve adored each moment I’ve gotten with you from the spontaneous dances on the side of the road. To bursting into song in the middle of the street.” Charlie shakily started with sweating bands but an open heart, “When your best friend told me the emerald dress was the special one, it melted my heart.”

“Charlie.”

“Other than my belief that this relationship will last, I was only ever sure of one thing in my life. I was sure I would be an actor, but now I’m more sure that my favourite role will be supporting you, loving you and evolving with you as your husband.” Charlie sniffled, taking one hand from yours to wipe the tears flooding his cheeks, “Will you marry me?”

“Yes.” You breathed lunging on your tiptoes to kiss him with as much passion as you could. Your hands caressed the skin of his cheeks; his long tresses tickling your wrists.

“God I love you.” Charlie gushed with a gentle shake of his head. His hazel pinned to your e/c eyes as if you were the most precious gem in the world.

A voice cut the bubble enveloping you, “Well are you gonna put the ring on her finger or what?”

Charlie’s head moved to meet the teary eyes of his mother surrounded by his siblings as they bounced on their feet. You laughed as your now fiance clumsily rushed to slide the absolutely gorgeous ring on your finger.

“Welcome to the family officially.” Jeannette cheered along with the celebratory whistles and yells as the crowd of the family grew more and more. Soon enough, the entire room was overflowing with people congratulating your new engagement.

Months later, you stood in front of that same group holding the hands of your handsome fiance. Both dressed to the nines in front of the officiant.

“I wasn’t looking for a fairytale, because they all end the same. The princess has a conflict that she revolves with the help of the prince. They get married and live happily ever after. I adore how we’re writing our own story that fits our relationship. Charlie Gillespie, I wouldn’t change a thing about our lives. I wouldn’t have it any other way even with the fighting and slamming doors, but we always end up on our kitchen floor making up with two brownies in mugs.” Your vows brought tears among the onlookers along with the Canadian barely keeping it together.

The vows would later be eloquently transformed into lyrics from you with the accompanying melody provided by Charlie. On Valentine’s Day, you played the song on the kitchen floor with a plate of brownies. Three brownies waiting to be devoured.

“Three for each of us.” You wept as you watched as Charlie melted into a puddle of joyful tears. He took no time in placing his hand over your flat stomach.

Yeah, you wouldn’t have it any other way. Especially when Valentine’s Day become more to the Gillespie family; a new little love taking up the day.

(Reader’s Dress In Beginning)

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likecastle · 4 years ago

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In which Jaskier cuts Geralt’s hair

Well, folks, I was inspired by Geralt’s slightly wavier wig in the new S2 promo photos to write a story in which Geralt finally gets some proper haircare and it brings out his natural curl pattern. This somehow turned into 7,000 words of Geralt musing about his own terrible self-image and Jaskier tenderly negotiating a haircut.

Credit for Geralt’s 3-in-1 shower products goes to @exrayspex, with my thanks for their enthusiasm about this exceedingly soft concept!

I’d like to put this up on AO3 at some point, but the title has me stumped, so if anyone has a suggestion, please let me know.

“When are you going to let me cut your hair?”

Geralt snorts, incredulous. “I’m not.”

Jaskier fixes Geralt with a pleading look. The streaks of peacock blue Jaskier recently added to his hair really bring out the color of his eyes—all the better to beguile him with. “Come on, Geralt, don’t you trust me?”

“No,” Geralt says, trying without much luck to keep his attention on the TV screen. Suddenly he has to fight the urge to tuck a stray strand of his hair behind his ear.

“It would look so nice if you just took proper care of it,” Jaskier wheedles.

“It doesn’t need to look nice.” Geralt can feel his shoulders creeping up towards his ears, and he wishes Jaskier would look at something else besides him. “It’s just hair.”

“But—”

Geralt jabs the remote in the direction of the TV. “Are you going to let me watch this or do you want to go home?”

“Fine, you grouch,” Jaskier says, returning his attention to the screen.

It must not hold Jaskier’s interest, though, because he can feel Jaskier’s gaze returning to him periodically throughout the rest of the film—which in itself isn’t all that unusual, since Jaskier watches even movies he really likes with one eye on his phone. Except that when Geralt meets his gaze, Jaskier’s looking at him with a wistful, almost sad expression. Geralt doesn’t let himself wonder what might be on his mind.

Later, Jaskier yawns wide and says he’d better be going if he doesn’t want to fall asleep at the wheel on the way home. It’s just a dramatic excuse not to help clean up, Geralt knows, but he can’t help smiling at the way Jaskier rubs at his eyes, smudging the faded remnants of his eyeliner. Geralt walks him to the door, and for a moment Jaskier just stands there on the porch, looking at Geralt thoughtfully.

When his hand reaches up, Geralt freezes. He thinks for a moment that Jaskier’s about to cup his cheek and drawn him down—but he just takes a strand of frizzy hair that’s come loose from Geralt’s ponytail and twists it around a finger.

“I thought so,” Jaskier says, with a private little smile.

Geralt’s sure Jaskier must be able to hear the way his breath’s gotten jammed up in his chest. “Thought—?”

“Nothing.” Jaskier digs his hands into the pockets of his jacket and starts down the front steps. “G’night, Geralt.”

As Geralt tidies away their takeout containers and empty beer bottles, his mind keeps wandering back to Jaskier’s offer. He knows Jaskier’s just trying to be nice—or trying to fix him, the way he tried to “liven up” Geralt’s wardrobe early in their friendship and tried to set him up on dates after he split up with Yen last year. But the options he tries to push on Geralt—the overpriced bomber jacket Jaskier bought him that’s still sitting at the back of his closet, the gorgeous chestnut-haired nurse Jaskier introduced him to—always seem to reflect more about Jaskier’s idea of Geralt than they do about Geralt himself.

Because the thing is, he’s not brash and stylish like Jaskier, who’s all eccentric colors combinations and flashing rings that accentuate his expressive hands. Jaskier knows how to construct an outfit that tells the world exactly who he is at any given moment, from his ever-evolving hairstyles to his painstakingly-sourced vintage clothes. Geralt, on the other hand, is just—nothing, an absence of style. His idea of a good outfit is one he can forget he’s wearing, one that will make everyone else forget him when he’s wearing it. His relationship to his appearance is as estranged as his relationship to his ex-wife. Being in his body, making use of it when he’s lifting weights or hammering a nail or swinging Ciri up in his arms—that makes sense to him. But thinking about his body is the opposite of that. He doesn’t like being looked at, even by himself. He avoids the mirror on his medicine cabinet as much as he can and starts feeling close and queasy if he so much as looks at himself in a dressing room mirror.

Before he goes to bed that night, he shakes his hair out from his ponytail and makes himself take a long, hard look in the mirror. All he sees is the sallow, tired-eyed face of a man who can hardly remember how to smile anymore, a face scarred from carelessness and creased from years of worry. His dull white hair, which Jaskier had twisted so carefully around his finger, is somehow greasy and dried out at the same time, limp around his face but bristly at the ends. He can’t find any sign of the potential Jaskier seems to think is there. He suspects it was never there in the first place—a mirage visible only to well-intentioned flatterers like Jaskier—and he feels foolish for looking.

No, Geralt decides, he’s not going to let Jaskier cut his hair, or do anything else to him. Better not to bother at all.

The next time the topic of Geralt’s hair comes up, he’s brought Ciri into Jaskier’s salon for an emergency haircut. Ordinarily, Yennefer handles things like haircuts and clothes shopping, but Saturday night, Ciri emerged from the bathroom with the front her hair lopped off somewhere around her eyebrows and a dawning expression of anxious regret on her face. Geralt had reassured her that everything would be OK, while texting Jaskier frantically for help and silently panicking about what Yen was going to say when she came to pick Ciri up on Sunday night. Thankfully, Jaskier was able to squeeze Ciri into his schedule this afternoon, and he promised to fix Ciri up.

So now Geralt is sitting awkwardly in the waiting area, hunched on a squeaky vinyl-upholstered chair. He’s been to Jaskier’s salon plenty of times—to meet him for lunch or a post-shift drink, to drop off something he left at the house or to give him a ride home—but he rarely does more than stand uneasily just inside the door. The relentless pop music and the echoing acoustics never fail to overwhelm him, as does the muddle of scents—clouds of different hair products and the pervasive smell of something sharp like ammonia. The abundance of mirrors unnerves him, too. Nobody can possibly need to see so many views of their own reflection, can they? Between the curious patrons peering at him in the mirrors and passersby staring in through the plate glass storefront, Geralt feels like he’s on display. And to make matters worse, he keeps catching glimpses of his reflection, his own hunted expression looking back at him from unexpected angles.

Ciri, at least, is having a great time, chatting happily with Jaskier as he snips away at her hair. The last time Geralt took Ciri for a haircut, it was at one of those children’s salons where the chairs looked like toy cars, and now here she is, sitting beside grown women almost like she’s one of them. It scares him, sometimes, to think of her growing up—more than sometimes. There are so many ways the world can fail her, and he can only do so much to protect her. There’s going to come a time when she’s going to get into some kind of trouble he won’t be able to bail her out of, and he’s not sure what he’s going to do with himself when that day comes. But for now, at least he can pay Jaskier to fix her disastrous home-brew haircut.

“What d’you think, Dad?” Ciri calls, and he looks up to see Jaskier removing her cape with a flourish. When he turns Ciri’s chair around to face him, Geralt’s heart catches in his throat. How grown up she looks, he thinks, but what really makes his chest ache is how much she’s coming into herself—becoming someone with her own unique taste in clothes and books and music, who won’t compromise about the bullshit dress codes at school and is brave enough to try something new even if the results are atrocious. He doesn’t know where she gets it.

“You like it?” he asks, not trusting himself to say something that won’t embarrass her.

“Yeah, I guess,” she says with a shrug, and hops down from the chair.

“We could do yours next, Geralt,” Jaskier offers, sweeping up the little blonde fragments of Ciri’s hair from the floor around his station.

“Ooh, yeah!” Ciri grins up at him. “I bet Jaskier would give you a really cool haircut.”

“I’m sure he would,” Geralt says mildly. He doesn’t want to quash Ciri’s enthusiasm or impart his own discomfort to her. It’s one of the things that keeps him up at night, the fear that he’ll pass down all his insecurities. He tries so hard to keep that shit buttoned up, to shield her from his own shortcomings—and he knows it’s inevitable that he’s just going to mess her up in other ways, but he wants to do better for her, has to do better. “Maybe some other time.”

“So you’ll consider it!” Jaskier says triumphantly, coming over to tell the receptionist the total for Ciri’s cut.

Geralt notices Ciri looking at herself in the big mirror behind the front desk, fussing self-consciously with her new fringe. Jaskier must notice, too, because he gives Ciri a big hug and says, “You look great, kiddo. Right, Geralt?”

“Definitely,” Geralt says, surrendering his credit card to the receptionist to pay a frankly staggering amount. He tips a hundred percent.

“You should take him up on it,” Yennefer says that evening when Geralt concludes the story of Ciri’s haircut by telling her about Jaskier’s offer to cut Geralt’s hair.

Geralt blinks in surprise. “Really?”

She glances back to where Ciri is waiting for her in the car. “Jaskier did a good job. She and I are going to have a serious conversation later about when to ask for permission and when to ask for forgiveness, but I have to admit it suits her.”

“It does,” Geralt agrees. He realizes he doesn’t know what it would be like, to feel his appearance suited him. He’s never tried, really, to make his exterior reflect his interior, wouldn’t even know where to begin.

“Besides,” Yennefer says, gesturing to his haphazard ponytail, “you really do need to start taking better care of yourself, now that I’m not around to make sure you’re presentable anymore.”

Geralt’s eyebrows shoot up, a smile twitching his lips. “Is that what you were doing? Looking after me?”

Yennefer lifts one hand to tug a lock of his hair, the gesture so similar to Jaskier’s that it makes him shiver, for some reason. “No, but somebody ought to.”

He ducks his head, hoping to hide the ache that washes through him—a longing for something they both wanted but never quite managed to find together. “If you keep Ciri waiting much longer, she’s gonna make a break for it.”

“She would, too,” Yennefer says affectionately. “Take care of yourself, Geralt.” She surprises him by brushing a kiss against his cheek, then turns to go.

Geralt waits until Yennefer’s car is out of sight before he goes inside. As he loads the dinner dishes into the dishwasher, he thinks again about Jaskier’s offer. He’s never been good at asking for things, let alone holding on them once he has them, but it’s been especially hard since he and Yennefer split—even the littlest things feel like they require an effort it’s not worth making. It’s so easy to tell himself he doesn’t need anything—a fancy haircut, a new jacket, a reassuring glance, a gentle touch. But sometimes, maybe, it’s enough to want them.

Wiping soapy water off his hands, Geralt pulls his phone from his pocket and texts Jaskier. Does your offer to cut my hair still stand? Only if you’ve got time.

OMG YES!!! comes the immediate reply. I can be there in 20. Then, a moment later, Jaskier amends, Shit wait make that 40 need to run to get some supplies

Geralt huffs out a laugh. Have to get up early tomorrow. This weekend?

All booked up this weekend but I’m off on Tues so I can come over to your place in the pm if that works for you

He’d hoped to give himself a few days to cancel, just in case he changes his mind, and in this respect Tuesday’s almost no better than forty minutes from now. But he does like the idea of doing this at home, instead of in the salon. He types out OK and hits send before he can think better of it.

Don’t chicken out before then

No promises, Geralt answers.

Jaskier responds with a string of emoji that Geralt finds completely inscrutable, but which make him smile nonetheless.

Jaskier arrives on Tuesday evening with a six-pack of cold beer and bag crammed full of supplies.

“I thought you were going to cut my hair, not outlast a siege,” Geralt says, trying to ignore the way his stomach twists with nerves over this impending ordeal. He should have cancelled. He should never have said yes to this ridiculous idea.

“Oh, none of this would be remotely useful in warfare,” Jaskier replies. Then, contemplatively, he says, “Well, maybe some of it. But first, I thought we could have a drink.”

“So you can cut my hair drunk?” Geralt asks.

Jaskier rolls his eyes and brushes past Geralt into the kitchen, dumping his bag into an empty chair at the table. “So you can relax a little for once. And so we can talk.”

Geralt feels the knot of anxiety in his stomach tighten even further. “What is there to talk about? It’s just a haircut.”

Jaskier lets out a long-suffering sigh as he rummages around in Geralt’s cutlery drawer in search of a bottle opener. “Geralt, have you not listened to a single word I’ve said about my job?” He pops off the caps of two bottles of beer and hands one to Geralt. “No, don’t answer that, I know you haven’t.”

Geralt takes a sullen sip of his beer, but he doesn’t dispute the accusation.

With a nod of his head, Jaskier gestures for Geralt to follow him into the living room, and flops down on what Geralt has come to think of as his side of the couch. Geralt sits at the other end, turned to face him. “You need to know what you want going into this, or you won’t get good results.” Jaskier fixes him with a gaze that makes Geralt take another swallow of his beer. “Have you ever given any thought to what you like, or don’t like, about your hair?”

“Not . . . really,” Geralt mumbles, wondering how angry Jaskier would be if he called this whole thing off now.

“Well,” Jaskier says patiently, “why do you keep your hair long? I always assumed it was because you liked how it looked, but I’m realizing now I’ve never asked about it.”

Geralt takes another sip of his beer and tries to think of answer that’s not Because I do. He’s worn it long since high school, when it was primarily something to hide behind. It felt like a kind of fuck-you, an off-putting choice to keep people from looking too closely at him—and to help him forget about other people, too. “It’s easier,” he says finally. “Don’t have to get it cut every few weeks, and I can keep it out of my face.”

“OK, that’s good to know.” The calm, encouraging tone Jaskier’s taking should feel condescending, but Geralt finds he doesn’t mind—or maybe it’s just the beer starting to relax him a little.

“You don’t always tie it back, though, do you?” Jaskier goes on.

Geralt shakes his head. “When I’m working, yeah, but the rest of the time . . .” He shrugs. It depends—on who he’s around, how comfortable he feels with them, hell, how hard the wind is blowing. Sometimes he can’t stand the feeling of it in face, and sometimes the pressure of the hair elastic at the base of his skull is enough to make him want to rip it out.

“Can I . . . ?” Jaskier gestures to Geralt’s hair, and Geralt inclines his head. It’s inevitable that Jaskier will have to touch him if they’re going to go through with this, so there’s no point in being shy about it. Jaskier scoots forward on the couch, and Geralt holds very still, letting him reach back and undo the tie holding his hair back. A sheet of frizzy white strands spills around his bowed head, almost obscuring Jaskier from view.

He can feel Jaskier, though, running his fingers through his hair. The touch makes Geralt’s scalp tingle and a shiver runs through him that he tries and fails to suppress.

“OK?” Jaskier asks, and Geralt nods.

“You’ve never told me when you went grey.” Jaskier’s voice is hushed, almost as if he’s afraid of startling him. He continues to card his hand through Geralt’s hair—with professional curiosity, Geralt realizes, but the touch is so gentle it also feels like a reassurance. Geralt closes his eyes, grateful to be shielded from Jaskier’s view.

“Started in high school,” he says. It’s been a long time since he thought about how, when those first thick streaks of white were coming into his dark hair, kids at school would call him skunk and Cruella de Vil, shit he knew better than to respond to but that just made him even more self-conscious. It occurs to him now that most of his memories of being looked at—really noticed—are colored by other people’s derision for things he can’t help. “It was all like this by the time I was twenty-one, twenty-two. Someone told me once it’s genetic, but . . .” He shrugs again. He’s got no one to ask about a family history of premature graying, no photos of distant relatives to compare himself to.

Gentle fingers tuck his hair back behind one ear, and Geralt looks up to see Jaskier smiling at him. “I would pay good money to see pictures of you in high school. I bet you were so surly.”

“You wouldn’t have liked me,” Geralt says “I was insufferable.” Miserable and ungrateful and roiling with self-righteous anger all the time, hardly able to string a civil sentence together.

Jaskier rewards him with a snort of disbelieving laughter. “You’re insufferable now and I like you just fine.”

This is true, Geralt thinks. His anger has banked down somewhat since those days, but he’s no less difficult to be around, and Jaskier’s never seemed to mind his rough edges. If he’s being honest, he wouldn’t have been able to appreciate Jaskier in those day. His constant talking and absurd jokes would have grated on Geralt’s nerves, back then. They did when he first met Jaskier, in fact. He tried, for a long time, to keep his distance, sure that there was nothing he and Jaskier could possibly have to say to each other. But Jaskier kept turning up, kept surprising him, kept being kind to him for no damn reason. Geralt’s glad he did.

“So,” Jaskier says, pushing the conversation back in his desired direction, as he always does, “what I’m hearing is, you like wearing your hair long?”

Geralt considers, taking another swallow of his beer. Liking doesn’t figure into his thinking much, but it’s not just out of habit that he keeps it this way. “Yeah.”

Jaskier’s nod is solemn. “Anything you don’t like about it?”

Again, Geralt has to give this serious thought. “There are, uh . . .” He gestures to the wiry flyaways that tend to form around his head by the end of the day. They tend to tickle his face unpleasantly as he works, which is irritating when he doesn’t hand a hand free to brush them away.

“Yeah, it’s a little dry,” Jaskier says. “But we can fix that up.” Geralt knows exactly how soft Jaskier’s hair is, and he can’t imagine his own ragged hair could ever come close. “Anything else?”

Geralt shrugs.

“OK,” Jaskier says, “enough with the interrogation. I think I’ve got everything I need.”

Jaskier gets up and retrieves another beer—not for himself, but for Geralt. Jaskier’s fingers brush his as he hands over the bottle, and it gives him the same little shiver that he felt when Jaskier was combing through his hair. “D’you want me to tell you what I’m thinking, or just surprise you?”

Geralt’s gut instinct is to make Jaskier tell him what he’s got in mind, so that he has the option to veto it and put this whole thing to a stop. But he thinks of Jaskier’s teasing question the first time they talked about this—Don’t you trust me?—and how he’d said no when the answer is really yes. So he takes a deep pull of his beer and says, “Surprise me.”

The look of glee on Jaskier’s face is worth the knot of dread that immediately forms in Geralt’s stomach. He takes another drinks and reminds himself that it’s just hair. It’ll grow back.

“You’re not gonna regret it, I promise,” Jaskier says, and then his warm hands are urging Geralt up and off the couch.

It takes them a while to get everything situated to Jaskier’s liking—the bathroom is too cramped to accommodate a chair, so Jaskier has Geralt drag one into the kitchen, covering the floor in newspapers to catch the stray clippings. Then Jaskier sends Geralt to wash his hair while he sets up the rest of his supplies. When Geralt comes back downstairs, his hair soaking into his t-shirt, there is a truly staggering array of equipment spread out on the counter, Jaskier’s own little traveling apothecary kit, with everything from dangerously sharp scissors to brightly-colored bottles of product to some kind of instrument that looks like a bowl full of dull spikes, which Jaskier says attaches to his hair dryer.

“Rule number one,” Jaskier says, grabbing the towel out of Geralt’s hands. “No more regular towels on your hair. Your hair deserves to be treated with care.” Geralt snorts, but the towel he hands Geralt is pleasantly soft, with finer knap that’s soft as fleece in his hands. “And don’t rub at it,” Jaskier scolds. He steps closer, wrapping his hands around Geralt’s to guide him, his hand moving in a gentle squeezing motion. “That’s good,” he says, and Geralt feels his cheeks flush.

Once Geralt’s hair is toweled dry, Jaskier maneuvers him into the chair, and combs out his hair with a wide-toothed comb. Jaskier is exceedingly careful not to yank on the knots, but even so the gentle tug sets his skin tangling. Geralt knows his scalp is sensitive—he can remember fighting back tears while Vesemir struggled to brush out his unruly hair as a kid—but it’s never felt like this before. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that ordinarily, when he finally breaks down and subjects himself to a trim, he just asks Eskel do come over and cut it with the kitchen scissors. Even with someone he trusts as profoundly as he does Eskel, it’s still an uncomfortable ordeal that makes him unaccountably tense. But this isn’t painful, or unnerving at all. It’s . . . nice, embarrassingly so. He can’t help wondering what it would feel like if Jaskier were to drag his nails along his scalp—and then he has to force himself not to think about it, because even the thought of the sensation sends a shudder through him.

Thankfully, Jaskier is busy fiddling with his phone, and a moment later he puts on a playlist he likes to call Geralt’s Sad Dad Rock mix. Geralt appreciates the background noise—familiar songs he can tune out if he wants to, quiet enough that the music’s not intrusive.

“OK,” Jaskier says, snapping a cape around Geralt’s throat. His hand comes to rest on Geralt’s shoulder and he leans in to speak almost directly into Geralt’s ear. “Ready?”

Geralt suppresses another chill and says, “As I’ll ever be.”

Jaskier gives his shoulder a reassuring squeeze and gets to work. Geralt’s grateful for the lack of mirrors, because it means he doesn’t have to see what Jaskier’s doing, but at the same time it leaves him without much to go on—just the touch of the comb, Jaskier’s hands carefully repositioning his head, his fingers pulling this or that lock of hair taut to snip at them with the scissors. Eventually, Geralt closes his eyes and lets Jaskier’s voice wash over him. Jaskier often accuses Geralt of not listening to him when he talks, but in truth it’s easy to get lost in the lilting cadence of his speech, like hearing a song but not its lyrics.

“. . . and the thing is,” Jaskier’s saying, though Geralt lost the thread of his rambling long ago, “the more you do it, the better your results will be. You just have to help them along . . .”

He can see why Jaskier’s clients like him so much, how nice it is to fall into the pattern of someone else’s words, especially when that someone has as nice a voice as Jaskier. He’s often grateful for Jaskier’s conversation, which fills silences Geralt didn’t even realize were empty until he came along.

When Jaskier says, “OK, you’re all done,” Geralt is surprised by how quickly the time has passed. “We can just leave it at that and just let it air dry, or . . .” Even though he can’t see Jaskier, he can picture the hopeful expression on his face.

“What?” Geralt asks, twisting around in the chair to look Jaskier in the eye.

Jaskier bites his bottom lip, looking almost nervous. “Or I could show you how to style it. If you wanted. Nothing over the top, I promise.”

Geralt thinks it over. On the one hand, there’s no way he’ll ever bother repeating anything Jaskier shows him how to do, but on the other hand, he wouldn’t mind having Jaskier’s hands on him a little longer. “All right.”

“Really?” Jaskier’s eyes go wide. “Nope, never mind, I’m not gonna second-guess this. No take-backs! You’re committed now.”

Which is how Geralt finds himself being hustled back upstairs and into the bathroom. Jaskier pulls back the shower curtain and is about to start issuing instructions when he lets out a squawk and staggers backward.

Geralt looks around in alarm, expecting to see a giant spider in the tub. It’s only belatedly that he realizes he’s thrown an arm out in front of Jaskier, as if that will protect him from whatever nonexistent threat he was reacting to. “What?”

“Geralt, for shame!” Jaskier exclaims, pointing to the bottle of 3-in-1 shampoo/conditioner/body wash on the edge of the tub. “Is that yours?” He says it with all the breathless horror of someone discovering a murder weapon.

“Uh . . .” Geralt has the distinct feeling he should try to deny it, but there’s no point in trying to pretend. “Yes?”

And then Jaskier is laughing, but it’s warm with delight, not mocking or cruel. In fact, he looks up at Geralt with such fondness that Geralt almost can’t bear it. “Oh, you poor man,” Jaskier says between gusts of laughter. “No wonder your hair is so dry!”

“. . . It’s efficient,” Geralt mutters in a half-hearted attempt to defend himself.

“It’s like washing your hair with dish soap. But don’t worry,” he adds, pressing a hand to Geralt’s chest, “I’ll get you sorted out and then your hair will be so soft it’ll be completely irresistible.”

“Hmm,” Geralt says dubiously, but Jaskier just grins at him.

“OK, this next part is going to be a little awkward. Ordinarily you’d do it by yourself in the shower, but I’m gonna take a wild guess and say you’d rather not jump in the shower with me right now.”

Geralt very much does not acknowledge the wave of heat that rolls through him at the thought. “Probably wouldn’t fit, anyway.”

“Eh, I’ve made it work in smaller spaces than this,” Jaskier says, with such casual confidence that Geralt’s mouth goes dry. “But luckily, you’ve got one of those detachable showerheads, so we should be just fine. Might be easier, though, if you, uh, take off your shirt off.”

Geralt’s already come this far, and, besides, it’s not like Jaskier hasn’t seen him without his shirt on before. As Geralt strips off his shirt, Jaskier puts a towel down on the floor and beckons him to kneel down at the edge the tub. He’s careful to get the water to a comfortable temperature before he puts a warm hand on Geralt’s bare back, guiding him to lean over, his head bowed.

The routine Jaskier directs him through is more complicated than Geralt could ever have anticipated. There’s a thick, dark purple shampoo that Jaskier instructs him to use only once a week—he has another shampoo he’ll give Geralt to use at other times, but really, Jaskier insists, he should only be washing his hair a couple of times a week, anyway. Jaskier shows him how to rub the shampoo into his scalp only and let the water draw it down through the rest of his hair. The pressure of the spray on his scalp makes his skin tingle, as does the press of Jaskier’s body against his side. When Geralt doesn’t apply the conditioner to Jaskier’s liking, he adjusts Geralt’s hands with his own, smoothing their joined fingers through Geralt’s slippery hair. And when it comes time to rinse the conditioner out, he shows Geralt how to cup the water in his palms and press it into the wet mass of his hair.

“You’re doing great,” Jaskier tells him, and Geralt is grateful his face is hidden behind ropes of his wet hair.

Finally, Jaskier pronounces himself satisfied and turns off the water. Now that they’re done the task of washing his hair, Geralt’s awkwardly aware of his chest dripping with water in the cool air of the bathroom—and of Jaskier standing less than an arm’s length away from him.

Jaskier, on the other hand, is nothing but professional, rubbing a series of products into his hands and then smoothing them over Geralt’s hair. After each application, he gathers Geralt’s hair in his hands and presses it up toward Geralt’s scalp, just like they did with the water. It’s a bizarre motion, like nothing Geralt’s ever seen before, but it seems to be having the desired effect, because the strands of hair hanging down in front of his face are slowly forming into thick coils, and Jaskier keeps making little satisfied humming sounds with each new application. Jaskier finishes by wrapping Geralt’s hair up in another one of those extra soft towels.

“And now we wait,” he says, hopping up onto the sink.

Geralt pulls his shirt on again, careful not to disturb the towel on his head, and he might be wrong but he thinks that he catches a little disappointed frown cross Jaskier’s face, but it’s gone before he can be sure.

“Thanks for indulging me,” Jaskier says. “I know you don’t really like this kind of stuff, but I’m having a great time.”

“It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” Geralt replies. But that sounds worse than it did in his head, and he hastens to add, “I mean—it’s nice—when it’s you.”

Jaskier’s smile is something Geralt can’t quite get to the bottom of—fond and wry and maybe a little sad, too. “Well, I’ve been dying to do this pretty much since the moment I met you, so, you know, thanks for that.”

It’s strange to think Jaskier has been harboring private aspirations where Geralt is concerned. But then Jaskier’s always been full of surprises when it comes to him—immune to his ill temper, amused by his rudeness, tenacious enough to bully his way past his silences. He’s never understood what Jaskier sees in him, and he often feels he offers a poor reward for the hard work Jaskier puts in to being his friend. Because it’s not easy, Geralt knows. Plenty of people have decided Geralt was too difficult to get to know, or too prickly to stick with. Even Yennefer, who’s loved him better than he could possibly deserve, struggled to make inroads against Geralt’s defenses. It never seemed to matter how much he loved Yennefer, he could never bring himself to relax around her. He was always on tenterhooks, waiting for the other shoe to drop—until, in time, it did, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. He can’t blame Yennefer ending things. She wants things he doesn’t know how to give. He couldn’t figure out how to change himself into the sort of person she deserved.

“D’you want another beer?” Jaskier asks, nudging Geralt’s knee with his bare foot.

He wouldn’t mind another drink, but he’s loathe to puncture the peaceful little moment that’s grown up between them. “Let’s just stay here.”

Jaskier nods, and a moment later Fleetwood Mac comes on over Jaskier’s phone speakers—one of the only bands they can agree on—and Jaskier treats him to an inspired rendition of “Dreams,” his voice turned otherworldly by the chill acoustics of the bathroom tiles. Geralt watches Jaskier dance on his perch on the edge of the sink and wonders, with an ache in his chest, what it would be like to be so uninhibited, so comfortable in his own skin. He can’t imagine it, but sometimes he feels like he’s maybe just a half-step closer to knowing when he’s around Jaskier.

When the song fades out, Jaskier hops down from the counter and says, “OK, time for the last step.”

Jaskier sticks that torture device attachment onto his hair dryer and lets Geralt’s hair down from the towel. Jaskier lets him stay seated, and starts drying his hair. He doesn’t pull Geralt’s hair taut with a brush, as Geralt has seen Yennefer do when styling her own hair. Instead, he gathers it up a section of hair in that little torture device accessory and holds the dryer still, letting the air work around the strands. Geralt closes his eyes against the noise and sensation of the air against his scalp. It lasts a long time, Geralt bracing his arms on his thighs as Jaskier moves the hair dryer around his head. The noise of the dryer makes conversation difficult, and Geralt feels strangely distant from Jaskier all of a sudden, even though he’s standing so close Geralt could press his face to the soft flesh of his stomach if he wanted to. He knots his hands together between his knees to keep himself from just reaching out and pulling Jaskier close.

When Jaskier finally switches off the hair dryer, the silence it leaves feels big. It’s probably just the heat from the hair dyer, but Geralt feels flushed and a little rubbed raw.

“All right,” Jaskier says, fixing him with a considering look. “Let me just . . .” He reaches out and grips Geralt’s hair in both hands. He doesn’t so much tug as gently crush the strands, but the pressure is enough to make Geralt’s mouth fall open, and he doesn’t exactly make a noise but something happens in his chest like his lungs kickstarting. Jaskier glances down at him with an inquisitive smile. “Sorry, too hard?”

It’s all Geralt can do to shake his head.

“All done,” Jaskier says. When he lets go, Geralt immediately misses the touch. “Wanna take a look?”

Geralt stands up and turns to regard himself in the mirror. To say he doesn’t recognize himself would be an overstatement, but the sight of his reflection is a surprise. The cut doesn’t seem all that different in terms of length, but the ragged edges are gone. The dingy white of his hair has turned a gleaming silver, and it hangs around his face not in its usual lank tangle, but in softly curling waves. It’s almost . . . pretty, a word he’s never associated with himself in his entire life. The new brightness of his hair makes his face seem clearer, more open somehow, and the gentle curls offset the hard lines of his face in a way that make his features look almost delicate, or in any case less roughly hewn than usual. He reaches up to touch it, and to his amazement, it’s just as soft as Jaskier promised it would be. Maybe not as soft as Jaskier’s own hair, but much nicer than he can remember it ever feeling before.

“You like it?” Jaskier asks, and in the mirror, Geralt can see he’s looking at him with a hopeful expression. It makes something twist in his stomach—longing, and at the same time a rejection of what he wants, the certainty that he can’t possibly hang onto anything nice for long enough to enjoy it.

“You know I’ll never go to all this trouble,” he says, gruffly, and immediately regrets it when he sees Jaskier’s smile slip from his face.

“No, I know,” Jaskier says, and starts packing up his supplies. “I just wanted to try it. I’ll still leave you all the products, just in case you change your mind, or—”

“Jaskier.” Geralt swallows hard, and puts a hand on Jaskier’s shoulder. “I—”

Jaskier looks at him with such a searching expression that Geralt hardly knows how to look at him. He’s never known someone who’s so much all the time, expansive and loud and demanding and generous and so goddamn bright.

“What I should have said,” Geralt says, against the tension threatening to stop his throat, “is that I wouldn’t have tried this if it weren’t for you. It’s . . .” He’s not sure how to answer Jaskier’s question. Does he like it? He looks so unlike himself that he honestly doesn’t know what to make of it. He can’t tell if it suits him or not, because he still isn’t sure what that would mean. But he likes the idea that Jaskier’s uncovered this version of him, that this might be how Jaskier sees him in his mind’s eye. “I’m glad we tried it. Thank you.”

“I am, too,” Jaskier says, quietly. “Even if you never do it again, I’m glad you trusted me enough to try. And for the record?” The twist of his lips is almost pained, but it’s a smile all the same. “You look fucking gorgeous.”

Geralt ducks his head, his shoulders inching up. “Jaskier . . .”

“No, I’m serious, Geralt.” Jaskier sounds annoyed, almost angry, all of a sudden. “I know you don’t care about superficial stuff—”

“That’s not—”

“—but take it from someone who spends a lot of time looking at people and doing my best to make them look as good as I possibly can: you’re objectively really fucking good-looking.” Jaskier lets out a harsh, reckless laugh. “And if you don’t care about my professional opinion, I also happen to think you’re the most attractive person I’ve ever met in my entire life, so there’s that.”

“I—”

Now that Jaskier’s started talking, he can’t seem to stop. “You’re the most incredible person I know, Geralt,” he says, in a breathless rush, “and I’m not talking just about your looks—although you are genuinely so ridiculously handsome that it’s really not fair. You’re kind for no reason and incredibly devoted and, OK, sort of a dick sometimes, but also so goddamn careful with other people and so fucking hard on yourself, and I just—I wish you could see yourself the way I do. I wish I could show you, even for just a second, because—”

“You did,” Geralt says. Jaskier stares at him, stunned into silence, and Geralt takes the opportunity to continue. “You do. Not just tonight.” He’s breathing hard, and he tries not to think about how dangerous this feels, like standing up on the top of a tall ladder or walking the line of a roof that might collapse under him at any moment. “When I’m with you, I feel like I could be that person you see in me, maybe. I just . . . don’t know how.”

Jaskier laughs again—softer this time. “You dummy,” he says, “you already are. You’ve just got to believe it.”

“Oh, is that all,” Geralt says.

“Yeah, no big deal,” Jaskier says, waving one hand dismissively. “You’ve got me to convince you, after all.”

“Oh, yeah?” Geralt can’t help the smile spreading across his face, despite the shivery feeling still simmering under his skin. “How’re you gonna do that?”

“Well . . .” Jaskier takes a step towards him, and then another, settling his hands lightly on Geralt’s hips. “I’d probably start a little like this . . .”

The first touch of Jaskier’s lips on his is like a breath of clean air after a storm, and Geralt can feel something that’s been knotted tight inside him for a long time unfurling itself. It doesn’t feel dangerous anymore, that buzz under his skin transmuting into a golden glow. He knows it’s not as simple as it feels—he can’t expect Jaskier to change him with a single kiss—but for the first time in a long while, something feels purely, unequivocally good, and he wants more of it.

In time, Jaskier’s hands creep up Geralt’s sides to his back, even as Geralt’s own hands drift down past Jaskier’s waist. When Jaskier’s hands slip into his hair, Geralt wrenches himself free with a shiver. “You’re going to undo all your hard work,” he says, teasingly.

“D’you really care?” Jaskier asks, and scratches his nails along Geralt’s scalp, wringing a whine from deep in Geralt’s chest that should be embarrassing but isn’t.

“Not really,” Geralt gasps, his whole body pressing closer against Jaskier’s. “You can always do it again.”

Jaskier’s smile is wide as he bends to kiss him again. “That’s what I thought.”

#the witcher #witcher modern au #geralt #geralt of rivia #jaskier #yennefer of vengerberg #cirilla of cintra #geraskier #geralt x jaskier #geralt/jaskier #gerlion #some background yennalt here #i've got 99 problems and aus are all of them #hairdresser!jaskier #i can't believe i wrote modern au witcher fic and still wound up writing a bath fic #the witcher fandom loves baths apparently #somebody please help me title this thing #i need a title that isn't when the rain washes you clean you'll know

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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 4 years ago

Text

But You Can Never Leave [Chapter 11: The Rush]

Chapter summary: Queen and Y/N attend a party and experiment with hallucinogens.

This series is a work of fiction, and is (very) loosely inspired by real people and events. Absolutely no offense is meant to actual Queen or their families.

Song inspiration: Hotel California by The Eagles.

Chapter warnings: Language, drugs, partying, injuries, sexual references, angst, some baby stuff.

Chapter list (and all my writing) available HERE

Taglist: @queen-turtle-boiii @loveandbeloved29 @killer-queen-xo @maggieroseevans @imnotvibingveryguccimrstark @im-an-adult-ish @queenlover05 @someforeigntragedy @imtheinvisiblequeen @joemazzmatazz @seven-seas-of-ham-on-rhye @namelesslosers @inthegardensofourminds @deacyblues @youngpastafanmug @sleepretreat @hardyshoe @bramblesforbreakfast @sevenseasofcats @tensecondvacation @queen-crue @jennyggggrrr @madeinheavxn @whatgoeson-itslate @brianssixpence @simonedk @herewegoagainniall @stardust-killer-queen

Please yell at me if I forget to tag you! :)

“You’re trying to make us late, aren’t you?”

Roger looms in the doorway of the hotel bathroom, arms crossed, a baiting ghost of a smile on his lips. His eyes—blue like a summer sky, like blooming delphiniums, like veins beneath skin—trace you from your black heels to your dangling diamond earrings, feasting, craving.

You smile back at him as you rearrange your hair for the fourth time. “The later we are, the drunker everyone else will be and the less agonizing small talk I’ll be forced to make with random music industry people.”

“I can assure you, they’re already drunk.”

“I don’t want to get there before the boys.” Freddie and Brian had left the hotel earlier to pregame in the bars of the French Quarter, and John is...actually, you don’t know where John is at the moment, which is unusual.

Roger chuckles, lights a cigarette, takes a deep drag as he gazes at you. “Come on, baby. You’re not getting any more stunning. It’s not possible. And you don’t want Deaks to be the first one to get there, do you? Can you imagine? He’ll end up telling his life story to the golden retriever or locking himself in a closet or something. We can’t abandon him.”

“No, of course not.” You give your reflection one final appraising glance. It’s not bad: sleek black dress, black Prada bag with a thin diamond-studded shoulder strap, smokey eyes, spritzes of Chanel No. 5. It’s pretty freaking great, actually.

Roger nods to your purse. “You got your kit, Nurse Nightingale?”

“Naturally. You think I trust eccentric and impaired musicians not to do gymnastics down a staircase or punch out misbehaving fellow guests? Oh no. Not a chance. I come well prepared.”

“Good.” Reflexively, unconsciously, he shakes his right arm a few times, stretches the hand, winces. It hurts him all the time, and you know that even if he’ll never say it. He drinks more or less constantly when Queen is on tour, and pops pills on top of that. You can’t ask him to stop; he can’t play without the booze and pills, and he can’t live without the band. He wouldn’t even want to try.

“Roger, is it—”

“I’m fine.” His eyes are on you again, everywhere, soaking up every curve and crevice like rain seeping through parched earth. Dusty ashes trickle from his cigarette onto the white tile floor.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says, meditative in a way that is quiet and still and very unlike Roger. “Just thinking.”

“About what?”

He shrugs nonchalantly. “How much I love you.”

~~~~~~~~~~

New Orleans is cool and humid and the streetlights shine beneath the constellations of the night sky: Auriga, Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor, Orion, Perseus. The salt-tinged dampness in the air sticks to your bare forearms, your ankles, your collarbones, your cheeks; the chaotic ocean wind rolls in off the Gulf of Mexico. It’s February 14th of 1977, Valentine’s Day, a day you’ve always thought of as a sort of anniversary for you and Roger; not the day you told him yes, but the day you surrendered to the eventuality, the day you agreed to fall in love with the world he promised you.

Is surrender the right word? you wonder, because part of you doesn’t like it, part of you flinches like you’ve been hit. Yes, it is. Whether I like it or not.

You’ve never spoken of anniversaries to Roger. He’s never asked.

The mansion, a Southern-style manor with columns and fountains in the front yard, is raucous with music and trimmed with twinkling white lights; there are dozens of people—men in suits, women in gowns, strippers, drag queens, mistresses, wives, acrobats, magicians, drug dealers—mingling on the wrap-around porch, sipping drinks, shouting at each other over the music, snatching appetizers off platters that waiters balance on their shoulders as they weave from one end of the house to the other. You and Roger swim through the crowd towards Brian’s mass of dark curls and Freddie’s brash laughter that carries through the night air like smoke signals.

Some man in a lavender suit—a producer or manager or record company executive—is talking to Freddie and Brian with a cigar smoldering between his fingers. “...And it’s extraordinary, really, this new album, everyone’s talking about what a success the tour has been so far. What’s it called again?”

“A Day At The Races,” Brian offers matter-of-factly, as if he’s in a business meeting.

“Ah, that’s it!”

“What’s so interesting,” Bri continues, “is that this time around the audience has started really getting into it, singing along to almost every song, sometimes we can’t even hear ourselves! And at first we were a bit annoyed by it—”

Freddie adds: “We were thinking, ‘shut up, bitches, you paid to hear us sing!’”

“—But then we realized that we should be appreciating that enthusiasm, that maybe we could even figure out a way to harness that energy and write songs with the audience’s participation in mind.”

“Fascinating!” Lavender Suit Guy replies.

“Good evening, everyone!” Roger announces as he sails into the middle of the conversation. “Hey man, how are you? Enjoying yourself? Have you met Y/N? Yes, she’s a Yankee just like you, from Boston originally, and she can cure hangovers like nobody’s business so she’s incredibly handy to have around. Have you heard the new Eagles record yet? Jesus christ, it’s bloody brilliant...”

As they chatter, you scan the pulsing throng of strangers for John. After a moment—as Freddie is recounting the band’s escapades in Miami last week—he appears wearing a black leather jacket and hair that barely covers his ears.

“Deaky!” Fred gasps.

“John!” you squeal in delight, and he grins enormously as he wraps you in a hug. He smells like cigarettes and Manhattans and that verdant, ancient mystery of the American South.

“Hi,” he says sheepishly.

“Your hair...?!” You reach up to run your hands through it, to flip his bangs one way and then the other, to tug gently on the ends. “I’m in shock. Good shock, but definitely shock.”

“Yeah, some American girl told me once that I had good bone structure and should chop my hair off someday so people could appreciate it.”

“Hmm, who could that be?” Roger teases, turning to you.

“I believe I described the aforementioned bone structure as fantastic, not good, but close enough.” You can’t stop staring at John. You blink a few times, waiting for it to sink in. Instead, something feels unnerving in a way you can’t pin down: new, different, anomalous, inviting.

“You’ve all gone shorter, haven’t you?” Lavender Suit Guy remarks. “Well...except Brian, of course.”

“He had much shorter hair once, if you can believe it,” Freddie says. “Back in the very early days. Before John joined us. Bri would straighten it too, it was horrid, the poor man looked like a Lhasa Apso.”

“You have a new baby at home, don’t you?” Lavender Suit Guy asks John.

“I do, yes, my second. A wonderful little girl named Anna.”

“Congratulations! And Brian, you’ve got one on the way as well?”

Brian smiles proudly. “Two, actually.” Chrissie has curbed her comments concerning Veronica’s dreadfully banal, domestic, decidedly unposh existence now that Chris is bedridden with morning sickness and carrying twins. ‘I feel like the fucking Hindenburg,’ she’d told you over the phone. ‘If the Hindenburg had sore tits and smelled like vomit.’

“We’re drowning in babies,” Roger quips in a tone you can’t quite read. Annoyance? Curiosity? Disapproval? Envy?

“Well, since the wives are away and you’re free to play...” Lavender Suit Guy flags down a waiter holding a small tray of sugar cubes. “Ever dropped acid? There’s blow floating around somewhere too, if that’s more your scene.”

Brian smirks uneasily and stirs his Vesper. You look to John. John looks to Roger.

Freddie laughs and lifts a sugar cube daintily off the tray with his thumb and index finger. “Marvelous, darling! Will it make me hallucinate all my wildest dreams? Will an imaginary cheerleading squad of Farrah Fawcetts suck my cock all night?”

Lavender Suit Guy chuckles. “I make no guarantees.”

“Nothing in life ever does. Isn’t that tragic?” Freddie pops the sugar cube into his mouth and grins. “Beam me up, Scotty.”

Roger asks you: “You want to? It could be an adventure.”

LSD wasn’t exactly the adventure you’d had in mind when you agreed to follow Queen across the globe all those years ago in Boston; still, an adventure is an adventure. And if I don’t keep things interesting, he’ll find someone who will.

Oh, that’s not a thought you knew you had.

And I would like to return it to that repressed, dimly-lit, cobwebbed corner of my subconscious where I’d buried it, thank you very much.

“Is it safe?” John asks Lavender Suit Guy.

“Do you think I’d give you something that wasn’t safe? It’s perfectly safe. It can’t kill you. It’s not heroin. Worst case scenario you get a bad trip. And I’ve never gotten a bad trip from this stuff.”

You conjure up a smile for Roger. “Let’s do it.”

“Excellent,” he says, his face lighting up; and you realize that that’s what he’d wanted. He picks up a sugar cube, lays it on his tongue, and then slips it between your lips as he kisses you. Freddie whistles and claps. The cube dissolves with a pleasant, innocent, nostalgic sweetness. Then Roger turns to John. “You in, Deaks?”

John hesitates, then nods. “Alright.”

Roger passes John a sugar cube (with his hand this time), picks up one for himself, and toasts them like champagne glasses. “Cheers!” The sugar cubes disappear behind their teeth.

Freddie stares at Brian. Brian gnaws his lip and stares back. Freddie wiggles his eyebrows impishly. Finally, Bri sighs, exasperated. “Fine, okay, what the hell, I’ll do it.”

“I’m so proud!” Freddie cries, pressing his palm to his heart. “I am a proud mama.” Brian grimaces as Fred stuffs a sugar cube into his mouth.

“How long does it take to work?” you ask Lavender Suit Guy, feeling no different at all.

“It varies. Not too long, usually.” He whirls, spies someone else he recognizes, waves, and rushes off to greet whoever it is and presumably offer them illegal drugs.

After fifteen disappointingly uneventful minutes of trailing behind the band as they chat with various rich and famous party guests you don’t recognize, you depart to find a restroom.

“Don’t be gone long,” Rog calls after you. John watches with a Manhattan in his right hand. “I don’t want you to be alone if things get...you know...weird.”

“Sure thing.”

You find a small restroom just off the downstairs hallway of the mansion. The clock above the doorframe reads 9:47 p.m. You duck inside, muttering about your first acid experience being a total dud, about defective LSD and Valentine’s Days spent with strangers. As you scrub your hands with rose-scented soap, you glance up to check your makeup in the mirror. Your face isn’t there. Instead, Dominique Beyrand stares back at you.

You gasp, and Dom does too, in that delicate and prodigiously feminine way that she has. You peer penetratingly into the mirror as you gingerly tap your fingertips against your face, which is Dominique’s face now: her olive skin, her high pump cheeks, her large dark eyes like a doe’s, her pink lips. You experiment with a smile, and then a frown; you even emote the same way she does, with a charming candidness, with a rare sort of grace.

Why am I thinking about Dominique?

You’d seen her a few times since Queen’s Hyde Park concert, following Richard Branson around at industry parties and dodging mindless gossip and tedious networking, the same as you. She always greeted Freddie warmly and mostly ignored Roger. He always asked her a few questions anyway, questions you thought he already knew the answers to.

I guess the acid wasn’t a dud after all.

You titter uncertainly. You knot your fingers through your hair—Dominique’s hair—which is thick and glossy and onyx. Her eyes gaze unflinchingly back at you. They blink when you blink.

I have to find Roger, you think suddenly. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know who he’s with.

You spin, wrench open the restroom door, and stagger out into the hallway, your hands pressed against the floral wallpaper to steady yourself. The yellowed, antebellum walls breathe as you do, subtly, sighing as they exhale cool air into the soft clammy skin of your palms. The boards of the hardwood floor clang like piano keys when you step on them. You check the clock hanging above the bathroom door. It reads: 11:09 p.m.

“Uh oh.”

I have to find Roger.

You creep through the hallway as other guests pass you—some zooming by, others moving in slow motion as if they’re treading water, none apparently noticing the breathing walls or musical floor—peeking into each room to see if Roger is there. He’s not in the living room, the kitchen, the dining room, the parlor. Instead there are strangers in all of these places, laughing in each other’s arms, drinking, dancing, touching each other beneath suits and skirts and dresses, smoking cigarettes and blunts, rolling up hundred-dollar bills to snort white powder off silver trays like mirrors.

I have to find Roger. I have to find Roger. I have to find Roger.

In the backyard of the mansion is a cobblestone patio, a garden, a swimming pool which must be freezing but nevertheless has several naked guests thrashing around splashing each other in it, and a bubbling hot tub. You recognize one of the two people in the cloud of mist with their arms resting above the roiling water on the concrete rim. They’re giggling and pointing up at the stars, telling the stories of the constellations, their faces flushed and glistening with steam.

“Hi, Brian!” you cry, relieved.

He turns, sees you, summons a smile; but it’s not a true smile. It’s cagey, it’s dissatisfied, it’s nervous somehow. “Ah, there you are, love.” The girl sitting next to him in the sweltering water is very much his type and entirely unlike Chrissie: tall, slim, blonde, curly-haired. She has a tattoo of a lush, pristine peach on one tanned shoulder blade.

“Have you seen Roger?”

Brian’s brow furrows. “He didn’t find you?”

“Evidently, he did not.”

“Huh. Well, I’m sure he’s around.” Brian waits for you to leave. The blonde girl shoots you a polite but anxious smile. Peaches, you think hazily. Peaches from New Orleans. Just like the girl he told me about when I first arrived in London. Just like the girl in Now I’m Here.

“Bri, come inside with me.”

“I’m fine here,” he replies curtly.

“Bri, please. It’s late. It’s cold. We’re so far from home. There could be sharks.”

Peaches gawps at me, confounded. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Brian snorts. “Sharks can only live in cool water. Everybody knows that. We’re perfectly safe. Stay out of the pool though.”

“Oh. Right. Of course.”

“Good luck locating Roger.” That’s your cue to go.

“Come with me. I’m freaked out. The floor sounds like Somebody To Love.”

“That’s nothing. The bubbles in here play Beatles songs when they pop.”

“Brian...”

“Y/N,” he says harshly, darkly. “Go find Roger.” What he means is: Y/N, get lost.

What about your wife? you almost shriek at him. What about your children? What about those vows that you made three days before Christmas in 1975, the specter of global fame beckoning from the doorway of the Anglican church that Chrissie grew up attending, Roger’s arm tight around my waist and sprigs of holly in my hair?

But Brian already knows about all that, and he doesn’t care.

I have to find Roger.

You leave Brian and Peaches and slip back into the mansion. You search each room as the floorboards shift and chime beneath your feet; now they’re playing the intro to Seven Seas Of Rhye. You realize that you’ve lost your heels somewhere along the way. You aren’t terribly concerned; you have more pressing matters to attend to.

Behind the fourth door you open is a library with books and menacing portraits lining the walls. Everything inside is blue and wibbly and palpably sad. Freddie is slumped on the floor next to a grand piano, his hair in his face, each hand clutching a full champagne flute.

“Darling,” he slurs, thrusting a glass towards you. Fizzy champagne lurches over the edge and trickles down the side of the glass. “Come join me!”

“Is it the LSD or is the room actually that color? I feel like I’m trapped in Picasso’s Blue Period.”

“Do you? It’s all black and white to me. But blue fits. Welcome to my melancholy room.”

“Your melancholy blues,” you pitch with a grin.

Freddie chuckles. “Drink this champagne before I’m forced to pour it down your throat.”

You take the flute and sit on the floor beside him. “Have you seen Roger?”

“I have not.”

“Oh.”

“Darling,” Freddie asks drowsily. “Do you think one goes to hell for being gay?”

“I don’t think you’d go to hell for anything, Fred. You’re too good a person.”

“Ahhhh,” he sighs, dreamily, peacefully. “You are a delight, my dear. Truly. I adore having you around. I do hope you stay with us, even when Roger makes you want to kill yourself.”

“How would he do that, Fred?” you ask softly.

Freddie doesn’t answer. Instead, he lifts your hair away from your face, tucks it behind your ear, smiles patiently at you. “I tried to warn you, you know. We all did. I know you thought we were all being insufferable pricks. But we did it out of love.”

“John never tried to warn me.”

Freddie smirks. “Well. He’s got his own demons, doesn’t he?”

You aren’t sure what Freddie means. You down the champagne and climb unsteadily to your feet. “I have to go find Roger now.”

“Of course you do.” Freddie’s umber eyes flick to the ceiling. “Good god, there are birds up there. That is not sanitary. Leave the door open when you go so they can fly away, would you dear?”

“Okay. I’ll love you no matter who you are, Freddie. We all will. You don’t need to worry about that.”

“Thank you, darling.”

“Will you come with me? Will you help me? I’m worried about Roger.”

“You should be more worried about you.” Freddie waves goodbye. “I have to stay. I’m writing songs.”

“You don’t have a paper and pen, Fred. Do you need them?”

He grins and pokes his temple with a black fingernail. “It’s all up here.”

“Okay. See you around.”

“Au revoir,” Freddie replies, and closes his eyes as he leans back against a breathing wall.

You step out into the hallway and journey towards the main staircase. Someone has put on the new Eagles record; Hotel California rocks deafeningly through the mansion. The air quivers with slow, ghostly notes strummed on an acoustic guitar. The floorboards have abandoned their piano keys and now jolt with each drumbeat. The house has taken on a shadowy, violet hue.

“There she stood in the doorway

I heard the mission bell

And I was thinking to myself

This could be heaven or this could be hell...”

You clutch the banister as you ascend, studying each guest that passes you for a familiar face. There are none. They’re all blushing and glassy-eyed and cackling as they paw at each other, ignoring you, not seeing you at all. Emerald snakes dart between their rushing feet, forked tongues tasting the lust and impending amnesia in the air. What happens in the darkness tonight will be forgotten tomorrow. It has to be. All the world’s rules and obligations depend upon it.

“Her mind is Tiffany-twisted

She got the Mercedes Benz

She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys

That she calls friends

How they dance in the courtyard

Sweet summer sweat

Some dance to remember

Some dance to forget...”

You catch your reflection in the night-draped window halfway up the staircase. You’re you again, not Dominique. Part of you is comforted by that; part of you feels more alone than ever. You stare at yourself, beautiful, extravagant, dusted with jewels and luck. You have everything. You have nothing. You continue up the staircase.

“Mirrors on the ceiling

The pink champagne on ice

And she said, ‘We are all just prisoners here of our own device’

And in the master's chambers

They gathered for the feast

They stab it with their steely knives

But they just can't kill the beast...”

A woman in a shimmering scarlet dress is sitting on the top step and taking a drag off a cigarette excruciatingly slowly. She exhales, the smoke curling out of her red lips like tentacles, her pale eyes tracking you.

“Last thing I remember

I was running for the door

I had to find the passage back

To the place I was before

‘Relax,’ said the night man

‘We are programmed to receive

You can check out any time you like

But you can never leave.’”

You summit the staircase and peer down the hallway to your right. At the end of it is a vast, broken picture window. Cold night wind pours in through the jagged hole in the glass; you can see stars outside. A man is lying on the floor next to the window. You know him.

“John!” you shout, and sprint to his side.

“Hi.” He’s cradling his right arm to his chest. His knuckles are shredded and drenched in crimson blood. Incandescent shards of glass protrude from his hand and glint under the lights. There’s a heavy, coppery, sick-sweet scent in the air.

“John, honey, why would you attack an innocent window...?”

“It wasn’t so innocent. You should have heard what the bastard said to me.”

“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up—”

“Stop,” he hisses when you try to touch him.

“John—”

“No!” he screams, pushing your hands away. “Stop it, just leave me, just fucking leave me!”

You step back, cross your arms over your chest, raise your eyebrows impatiently. “You want to tell me who you’re really so mad at?”

He frowns down at the rug, which is streaked with his blood. “Me, I guess.”

“Well you can be mad at yourself at the hospital.”

“No, no hospital,” he insists.

“Your hand is positively mangled. Your playing hand. You need to get it cleaned out.”

“You can fix it. No one else.”

“Since I’m tripping on acid, I probably shouldn’t be the one to fish glass shards out of your skin.”

“You can fix it,” he repeats, confidently now.

“Fine. Have it your way.” You help John to his feet, lead him downstairs, and sit him down at the kitchen table. You open your purse, unpack your supplies and position them in a neat row, shake out your hands to get them limber, give John a glass of water. “Are you going to have to write whoever owns this place a check for the window?”

“No one knows I’m the one who did it. No one even knows who I am.”

“I know who you are, John. Here comes the lidocaine.” You land a series of injections into the flesh surrounding his wrist, his knuckles, the back of his hand. You pause each time you get distracted by the murmurings of the table, which apparently speaks German. Okay table, this is important, kindly shut the hell up. Danke.

“Ow,” John says lethargically.

“And so what if these people don’t know who you are? Who the fuck needs them? You don’t need anyone who doesn’t know you’re the backbone of this band. Who made the Deaky Amp? Who wrote You’re My Best Friend? Who stays focused and calmly waits for the others to stop bludgeoning each other on a nearly daily basis? John fucking Deacon, that’s who.”

“Yeah. Alright,” John agrees, smiling. “Who needs them.”

“You’re gonna get your moment in the sun, don’t you worry.” You pick up your tweezers and begin plucking slivers of glass out of John’s bloody hand, plinking each into a white ceramic bowl. “Everyone is going to know you one day. You’re gonna spread your wings and write a ton of hits and unforgettable basslines and show the world what a genius you are.”

“Sounds thrilling. I’ll see what I can do.” He gazes down at his hand. “It doesn’t hurt at all now, that’s incredible.”

“That’s the magic of modern medicine.” You drop another shard of glass into the bowl. “How’s your first-ever LSD experience going so far?”

“Aside from the window business, quite well. Better now that you showed up.”

“Sorry. I spent an hour being confused by my own reflection and then tried to find Roger. You haven’t seen him, have you?”

“I have not.”

After a while you set your tweezers down on the table and inspect John’s hand closely. “Does this look glass-free to you? My eyes aren’t super trustworthy at the moment. I just saw a fish swim by outside.”

“It looks perfect, in my layperson’s opinion.”

“Okay. Let’s wash and sanitize, then we’ll wrap...”

John follows you placidly to the sink, lets you scrub and towel off his hand, returns to the table so you can bandage it with gauze. It’s quieter in the house now, the guests slowly dispersing, the music turned down and something mellow by the Stones; Gimme Shelter, you think.

“What made you so angry?” you ask him. “You know. Angry enough to assault a window.”

For a long time, John doesn’t answer. He looks up at the ceiling, his gentle greyish eyes chasing something you can’t see; birds, maybe, like Freddie. Maybe he’s looking for the sun. Maybe he’s looking for himself. Finally, he says, very quietly: “I’m just so fucking tired of lying all the time.”

“You never have to lie to me, John.”

“Yeah,” he sighs. “I do.”

Then you hear a laugh, an untamed one, a familiar one. You turn to John. “Was that just me or...?”

“I heard it too.”

You both leap from the table and hurry after the sound. You burst outside onto the cobblestone patio. Roger is doing backstroke laps in the pool, howling up at the moon. There’s no sign of Brian or Peaches.

“Roger!” you yell.

“Hey, baby! I’m winning! I’m in the Olympics! I made the team! Do you see me winning?”

“You’re totally winning. Please come out before you get pneumonia or attacked by a shark.”

“Shark...?” John inquires.

“I’ve discovered something amazing,” Roger declares, still swimming. He flails his right arm in the air for you to see; the serrated mark that mars the underside appears to be slithering, a snake made of scar tissue and interrupted plans. “When you’re on drugs, nothing hurts!”

“Baby, please come out now.”

Roger obliges, hauling himself up the ladder and out of the pool. He’s still in his black suit; it’s ruined and clings to him and is dripping buckets of chlorine-smelling water. John yanks a towel off a chair and tosses it to Roger, who drapes it over his shoulders like a cape.

“Jesus christ, where have you been?!” you demand. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”

Roger grins toothily. “A sheer one?”

Despite yourself, you smile back. “Oh yeah. A sheer heart attack. Real cardiac.”

“I had the best idea. Baby, you gotta hear my great idea. It’s so great.”

“Okay, I’m listening.”

He lunges to wrap you in a cold, sopping hug. “Everyone’s having babies, right?”

“Uh, well, not everyone...”

“We should have a baby.”

John’s eyes go wide. You swallow noisily. “Roger, love, I don’t think right now is the ideal time to make a decision like that.”

“Why...? Oh. Right.”

“Yeah.”

“If I still feel this way in forty-eight hours, can we have a baby?”

“Roger, I...” You glance to John for help. He raises his hands in surrender, one bare, one clumsily bandaged. You’re on your own, kid, that look says. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. That’s a lot of responsibility. I’d have to stay home with them. I wouldn’t be the tour nurse anymore.” I would never know where you were, who you were with.

“I’ll fly you out to visit all the time. I’ll have to. I can’t do this without you.” His eyes—blue like frigid pool water, like bruises, like dreams—are euphoric, effervescent.

I can’t say no to him, you realize, and it sends a biting shudder up the rungs of your spine. I didn’t just fall in love. I took a fucking nosedive.

Oh, this SO did not go according to plan.

You remember when you first met Queen, how independent and fearless and guarded you had been, how forcefully you had resolved not to put your happiness in a pair of wild, reckless hands like Roger’s.

What happened to that girl? How do I get her back?

And there’s something else, too: a thought you barely recognize as your own. A child would make us permanent.

John is watching you, edgy, apprehensive; but he doesn’t say anything.

“Okay,” you tell Roger. “We can try. If you still feel this way in forty-eight hours.”

“And I will.” Roger’s teeth skate up your neck and he whispers, his breath hot against the goosebumps rising on your skin: “Let me know when you’re late.”

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limenysnocket · 4 years ago

Text

I Despise The Way You Make Me Love You pt. 2

(Taika Waititi X Reader)

Summary: Today, Taika gets the day off of work. He gets to lounge about his house, wear sweatpants and watch whatever t.v. he likes without having someone to tell him otherwise. His plans are soiled and revamped as an unexpected visitor pays him a visit.

Warnings: Horny Taika vibes, it gets very lime-ish in here, some foul language too.

Request: @honorarytenenbaum

Author's note: I really don't know what to put here except I'm excited and enjoy the story lol.

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Boring. Boring. Boring. That's all today is going to be, huh, Taika?

Without (Y/N) here to pester or other directors to bother and ask for their plates of cheese from-- even though he has his own God damn plate of cheese in his tent/office-- he just can't seem to find the joy in the matter of a "day off." I mean, what's the point of it? Why couldn't he just stay at work with his very special girlfriend, where he could "take naps" with her in a broom closet or his office any time he pleased! It was all bologna, if you asked him. Total absurdness.

He couldn't sleep, no, even if he had all the time in the world to take naps like the nap God he is. He could be doing anything else, walking around, talking on the phone, or catching up on his favorite television show, but nooOoo. You invaded his vision, either dressed in skimpy outfits... or not dressed at all. Just as he would reach out to touch you, your skin would dissipate into the air like mist and he would find himself back awake again, hot, sweaty and horrifyingly turned on.

Would it be alright to text you? He knows you're at work, but he can always invite you over for a little late night cuddling and a bottle of wine. He just stared at his phone, his nose twitching every once in awhile, watching, waiting and contemplating. Would he text you or would you text him? The suspense was killing him!

He pushed himself up, grunting and shaking his head. "God damn it," he muttered. He had reasoned with himself. You were at work and you had every right reserved to be left alone. He didn't know, at the time, that you were dying to see him again.

He sat down at a table, in the mini courtyard of his home, with a laptop, just as the sun turned the sky orange. It was right about time he got back to work on Thor: Love and Thunder, because he was clearly days behind... maybe a few months, actually. Inspiration was hard work, especially whenever he has to find the right timing to put a shirtless Chris Hemsworth somewhere in the film.

He rapped his fingers against the metal table and rubbed his temple with the other hand, a fresh sheet of virtual paper already giving him a headache. He closed his eyes again, which was totally a bad move, but he didn't care in the slightest. There you were again, that little vixen that made his more perverted side crawl out from beneath his usually goofy demeanour. (Y/N), dressed in nothing but one of his sweaters, and he was almost completely positive that there was nothing beneath that. You stepped closer to him, placing your warm palms on his shoulders and squeezing them, massaging them. He felt your bum rest in his lap, the skin brushing against his loose sweatpants and sending sweet shudders down his spine.

The sensation of your warm hands cascading across his stubble beard drove him crazy and his own hands started to travel, reaching out and seemingly running his hands along your curves, down your thighs and back up again. He started to slip up the sweater, exposing more of your skin to his hungry eyes and he came close to seeing what he wanted to see, until he felt warm palms over his eyelids and his fantasy was pressed flat. He didn't jolt, because he recognized the warmness and the softness of those palms.

"Guess who?" He heard you say, giggling all the while. He scrunched up his face to make it seem as if he were thinking extremely hard.

"Jemaine?" He answered, after a few long moments of total silence, not including the scream of cicadas from bushes and trees. He heard you burst into laughter and those warm palms lifted from his eyes. He titled his head back and smiled to see your flustered and smiling face.

"Man, I must suck at this," he chortled and teased. You only nodded, laughing still, before leaning over him and placing a kiss on his lips. "Ah, this is the perks of you having your own key to the house. You can surprise me whenever you'd like, but I'm still waiting for the one where I come home and you're sitting naked on my couch for me," he winked and shimmyed his shoulders, which earned him a playful slap on the arm.

"You're a dork," you giggled then stood up, "I'm just here to cook dinner for you and make sure you're not driving yourself insane."

"But I'm already insane," Taika twirled around in his chair and made a mass amount of kissy faces at you, "Insane for you, baby~." Before he could even flash you with another smug face and pick up line, you had gone inside of the house, leaving him high and dry.

What you were making him wasn't the most expensive meal in the world, but it certainly was delicious. Steak, keto friendly fettuccine Alfredo with sliced zucchini noodles. It was a healthier option but certainly very delicious, plus, you knew Taika could be very picky about his eating habits, but not, all at the very same time.

You slipped into his "kiss the chef" cooking apron and started to get to work, taking out groceries from bags that you brought over and cooking appliances that you knew he didn't have or never heard of. You were so focused on what you were doing, you didn't hear the courtyard door slide open, then shut. Nor did you notice that Taika was watching you cook with a very lust hazed look, from behind his island.

Taika would be drooling at the moment if he hadn't known that he actually was amidst your presence. There he was, fantasizing about you again. He was imagining that all you had on was the apron you were wearing, and the best part of all, he got a great view of your cute ass as it swayed in rhythm while you cooked. Every time you would bend over to grab out a pot or pan, conveniently not turning his way, he would stretch out his neck as far as he could and try to peep on whatever he could without throwing himself down on the counter and startling you.

Suddenly, even surprising him, you turned around and whispered to him, "Kiss the cook, Taika." You gave him the most fucking smug smile he had ever seen, he almost didn't think this all was real.

It wasn't. It was his imagination. What you actually said was, "Are you alright, Taika?" He seemed to be straining against the counter, nails digging deep into the granite top. Once the fantasy had lifted from his eyes, he shook his head and almost seemed to wheeze. "Huh?" He said, his eyes fluttering and he swallowed thickly.

"I asked if you were alright," you responded quietly, almost knowing exactly what he was thinking about. It had been awhile since Taika hadn't been allowed to get you alone for enough time to rock your world. It was one of those things where he knew he had it, but he couldn't touch it and it was killing him inside.

He coughed into his fist and shifted the weight on his feet, "Yeah, yeah, I'm okay." You could see the visible shudder shoot down his body as he tried to compose himself once more. It was adorable to see him get all hot and bothered over just the sight of you cooking, but you couldn't just get up on the counter and let him take you while you let your food burn into a crisp. He would have to wait until after dinner.

"Okay, so, I'm gonna turn around, and you're... not gonna be horny? Correct?" You cocked a brow at him, raising your hand up like it would convince him more. He only gave you a wry smile which is how you obviously knew that he was about to lie straight up to you.

"Sure," he shrugged. Yeah. He was about to pull a bastard move the moment you turned around, whether it be lifting up your skirt and being a peeping tom, smacking your ass expectedly unexpected, or grinding down on you until you finished or out down what you were doing and giving him a nice, dirty fuck. He's done all three, on set and at work, not to mention.

You gave him a terse look, then turned back around slowly, your mind boggling around while you scraped tiny cutlets of steak into the skillet where they started to sizzle loudly. Loud enough, apparently, to cover up the footsteps of a certain ornery, sex-bitten kiwi.

You quietly started flipping the pieces over so each one of their sides could get a bit of attention. One, however, when you noticed it, wasn't soaking in the brown color you needed, so you wanted to flip it again. You didn't know if it was your nerves that were from Taika's obvious white lie that had you ready to jump and touch the ceiling or what, but you just couldn't flip this cutlet. It was stubborn. You tried it every which way and all it did was slide across the buttered pan and push up against the sides.

Wait! Suddenly, you had a snag on it, the tip of it just scooching onto your spatula, and you let out praises of glory in your mind as it toppled over and landed flat and perfect on the spatula. You had just saved the perfect steak cutlet from burning. You were proud of yourself, and all those nerves had disappeared. Well, all up until all of them came rushing back to you at once when Taika shoved his hand down your panties and started squeezing your ass through your skirt.

You yelped and flinched, which made you fling your spatula backwards and that sent the perfect steak cutlet flying, landing with a nice, firm slap on the island countertop. Your mind almost didn't register the rubbing of Taika's hand over your folds, trying real hard to get you wet for him. You weren't having it. "Taika, you have no idea how fucking pissed off I am right now," you growled, your voice dripping with raw irritation and anger. "I lost a perfect bite of heaven, because of you."

"Mm, I know, and I'm sorry, but you know how I am sometimes," Taika continued to rub, seemingly dipping his fingers between the slit to check the water levels. It's still running pretty dry. He started rubbing faster, but that wasn't enough. He barely grazed his finger over your clit, when you grabbed his hand and yanked it out from his panties. You whirled around and threatened him with the steaming hot spatula. All he had left on him now was a smug grin and playful eyes that stared into your cold and displeased eyes. "What's up, babe? You seem tense."

"Taika, how long has it been since we last fucked," you said sternly, your other hand reaching back and taking the heat off of the steak.

"A week," he replied, proud of himself, yet still smug and still quite needy to put himself in your pants.

"Wrong," you corrected him with a flat gaze, "It's been five days, Taika."

"That's technically a work week, for me," he shrugged, biting his lip a little while he tried his best to keep his hips from bucking desperately, "And now we're on the weekend, darling, pleaassee, you won't even have to bite down on a washrag this time to keep from screaming! I mean, unless you're into that. It was kinda hot--." He was stopped by the familiar press of lips against his. He fluttered his eyes closed and let his hands fall and grab your hips, bringing them to press firmly against his. The crotch area, specifically.

You were the one who initiated the kiss and you were also the one to break it. You took both sides of his head in your hands and you shook it around a little. "Dumbass," you started, giving his head a little shake while he gave you a cheeky grin, "let me cook! Then, MAYBE, we can fuck, alright?"

"You're the boss, darling," he said, his hips doing a little happy wiggle, then he scooted away, back to behind the island, elbows resting on the surface while his hands kept his head up. You knew he was watching you intently, getting a little impatient sometimes and lightly rubbing his hips against the counter with need. Because he did this, and you saw him doing it, which confirmed your kill, you decided to take your sweet time with this meal, make it painfully slow and put an amazing amount of effort into a healthier version of Alfredo sauce.

This game didn't last long though. Taika was smarter than he let on, an intellectual of solid mind, though one wouldn't couldn't possibly see it if you had only one conversation with him. He started eye fucking you with every chance he got, giving you his sexiest, dirtiest look that he could muster, while rubbing his hard-on against the counter and whispering your name between gritted teeth. "You're making this so much harder than it has to be," Taika said through muttered, lust filled curses.

"What? Your dick or the tension in the room?" You said, turning you head so you could look at him from over your shoulder. He grimaced. He was on the verge of going up to his room and finishing things off himself.

"You can't just do this to me, (Y/N)," he groaned, leaning on the counter and whining like an injured puppy.

"Uh- ha! You did this to yourself! Even when you knew how hard it is for you to recover from something like that," you grinned, starting to plate the food and get it all nice and neat. "Plus, a bonus for me, this is practically like revenge for all the times you thought it would be okay to get me all riled up all the times I would casually be talking to another guy."

"Ah, they were flirting with you, I had to do it before they took you away from me," he grinned at you, now biting his lip so intensely, he left teeth marks on his lower lip.

"Taika, no one's going to take me away from you without a fight, you know that," you rolled your eyes and smiled at him, finishing with the pretty plating and bringing it over to Taika, where he was bouncing on the balls of his feet.

"Okay, food's done, now can we fuck?" Taika whined desperately. You could see the hefty bulge through his pants and it made you swallow thickly, but you stood by your own opinion and decided he could take a little more torture.

"No, we have to eat first," you said which drew a long, high pitched, goofy whine from the depths of his throat. Taika looked down at his plate, grumbling, then picked up his fork and started to shovel food into his mouth at a fast pace, eager to finish. He forgets that you have to finish your food too, and you weren't even starting at the same time as him, because you buried yourself with pouring the expensive wine that you knew he liked.

Whenever you finally were seated across from him, half of his plate was already gone and he was swallowing a hefty mouthful at the time. "Taika, you're going to choke if you keep eating like that," you laughed and shook your head, tangling the zucchini noodles around your fork.

"It's worf ut," he said with his mouth full and started to chew violently. You took your time with your plate, spindling the noodles around until it was a decent bite then stabbing a cut of steak and running it throughout the sauce. You only made this meal on special occasions, really, so you took time to cherish the flavor of it. Taika wasn't having it. He finished his food way before you did and chugged his wine like the madman he was. When he finished that, he slammed his glass down like he just finished a shot. He was a mess.

You shook your head, "I still have to finish, you know." Your plate was just about half way done. Surprisingly, he allowed you to finish your food in peace, well, enough peace at least. Every time you looked up, you were met with big, brown puppy dog eyes and a pouty lip. He watched you eat your food, begrudgingly, flicking the little piece of half cooked steak that landed on the counter awhile ago.

The longer you took to finish your food, the more the longing inside of you grew. You thought this was going to be just a night for snuggling and cute little romantic stuff that they never got to do at work. It was supposed to be a time to get to know each other better, besides already knowing what his favorite brand of wine was. It was a night meant for togetherness, and the want for that must have shown on your face, because, when it did, Taika's puppy-like expression seemed to lessen.

Finally, you finished off the last of your zucchini noodles, took both your and Taika's dishes to the sink, dumping what was left of your wine down the drain, and you started to rinse them. No one likes scrubbing off crusty food.

"Hey," you heard a specific New Zealander whisper gently from behind you. "You're tense again."

You set one of the wine glasses down in the sink, and it hit the metal with a soft clunk. That was the only noise between you two for a long while, except for the rush of the running water spinning down the drain. You took a deep breath and turned the water off, slowly, then dried your hands. Once you were done, you slowly turned towards him, "Is... Is sex all you're really wanting out of me? If it's true, then I really don't want that and I'm sure there's some clean hooker out their who is dying to get their hands on you and maybe would be willing to work for as long as you want." You started making hand motions as you spoke. They were awkward motions, but they were necessary.

"What? Why would I-- (Y/N), I don't understand, why would I try every day to get you alone, like during our first time. The only reason I needed you alone is because I wanted to confess and kiss you, I wanted to protect our privacy, because no one truly wants to be the newest hot couple cover of People Magazine. When we... When we fucked, it just so happened by chance. We were both in the mood and we got what was needed. I actually didn't expect this streak to go on for so on like this... but," he paused, coming around the island and grasping one of your hands with his, "every time I saw you at work after that, I thought back to our first kiss, then the first kiss leading up to the first time and... well, you're a smart girl, so I'll let you figure out the rest."

This managed to put a dismal smile on your face, you were still a bit upset. "But, why can't we ever have these days where we get to know each other, just cuddle and talk about things and learn things about each other that aren't liquor related!" It was more of a statement than a question. The two of you only had one night together like that. You cuddled up with him under a blanket and watched his and your favorite movies, occasionally talking, up until you both fell asleep in each other's arms.

Taika pulled you closer, gently, "Why didn't you say something, then, babe? You know I'm always open to stuff like that. Hell, I love that stuff." He brought the hand he was holding up to his mouth and he pressed a gentle kiss to the back of it, sending warmth shooting straight to your cheeks.

"I was too embarrassed to admit it," you whispered to him, looking down at the floor until he used his free hand to tilt your head up and your eyes met with his. Eventually, your lips met his as well. It was brief, but soft and love filled. He didn't hesitate to pull you into a hug afterwards as well. The only problem was, his hard-on still existed.

"You know, I would love to settle down and watch a movie and all with you to talk about all your favorite things, but my boner is still here too," He joked, softly pulling away from the hug and looking down at you, cheeks alive with color.

"You want me to take care of that for you, don't you?" You ask with a stiffled laugh and look up at him to see that he's blushing, embarrassed now, and nodding his head yes. "Alright, fine, but once we're done, we're staying in your room for the rest of the night, watching Flash Gordon and you're going to give me ten reasons why Soul Rebel is your favorite Bob Marley album."

He grinned brightly at you now, "Deal."

#what we do in the shadows #taika waititi #fanfics #taika waititi x reader #Taika Waititi X Reader #Jojo Rabbit #The Mandalorian #This man I swear

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ginnyweatherby · 5 years ago

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How Could I Ever Forget?

So I don't expect anyone to read this since I'm a decade too late, but I've become absolutely obsessed with Next to Normal lately, and since I've been neglecting my writing, I had to get this on paper while inspiration struck.

About 950 words of Dan's musings, because I find him to be an interesting character, and I believe that despite everything, he truly does love Diana. Takes place somewhere between Better Than Before and I Don't Know (Reprise)

Dan rolled over with a frustrated groan. He'd hardly slept in weeks and it was really beginning to take its toll.

He opened his eyes and stared at the empty bed beside him. Diana wasn't there once again.

… but why would she be? She hardly knew him anymore.

In the weeks following her procedure (that damned procedure), he'd found her asleep in the guest room, on the couch, or most frequently (and where he suspected she was now), asleep against the kitchen table, stacks upon stacks of photographs piled up beside her.

She was working so hard to remember.

He'd never meant for this to happen. He'd never meant for her to lose nineteen years of her life.

Their life.

Abandoning the idea of sleep, he threw his legs off the bed and padded to the closet, reaching to the back of the highest shelf to retrieve a box he purposely hadn't touched in months. Years? Time didn't make sense anymore.

The box was covered in enough dust to make Diana faint, the black Sharpie lettering on the outside faded into a dull gray.

(It seemed as though the entire world was dull gray these days.)

He glanced to the door to make sure Diana wasn't around, before reaching into the box.

There he was.

Pictures of a grinning baby boy, of a sleeping baby boy, of a crying baby boy, of the sweetest, most precious gift Dan had ever been given.

His baby boy.

Beside the pictures were a few bottles, a rattle, a stuffed penguin, two pacifiers, and the picture book Dan used to read every night.

Under ordinary circumstances, they would have been the dust collectors of an overly sentimental father… but to him, they were the only reminders he had left of a life that never truly got to live.

How could he take those reminders from Diana? How could he?

… But how could he tell her either? It would break her. It would send her back to the beginning of the mess they had only just begun to clear away.

Dan could hear Natalie moving around her room. It seemed he wasn't the only one unable to sleep.

He wiped away a stray tear, quietly returning the box to its proper place in the closet, before walking down to the kitchen - where just as he'd guessed, he found his sleeping wife, a photo stuck to her cheek against the table.

"Oh, Di," He muttered, gently prying the picture from her face. It was a wedding photo.

It may have been raining, and it may have been Portland, but she really was a sight to see. If Diana looked closely at the picture, she may have noticed the tiny baby bump beneath the cream-colored dress she'd bought on clearance at the department store the night before. Her hair was tied up in a loose bun, with little white flowers peeking out. She was lovely.

Dan peered down at the current Diana, snoring softly, a picture of Natalie as a toddler clutched tightly in her hand. She had gray hairs now and lines around her eyes and mouth, but when her face was softened with sleep, he could still see that girl with flowers in her hair.

She was still a sight to see. At least to him.

He bent down and wrapped his arms securely around her, lifting her up and holding her against his chest.

She was so thin these days, but whether that was from medication, stress, or lack of appetite he couldn't be sure. He didn't like to think about it.

His knees creaked as he stood to his full height (Diana wasn't the only one getting older, he supposed), and carried her up the stairs, something he hadn't done in years.

He contemplated putting her in the guest room, but he wanted her close tonight. They may have lived in the same house, but he missed her terribly.

He gently placed her in the bed, pulling the quilt over her shoulders, just how she liked it.

He climbed in beside her and watched as a small strand of hair rose and fell against her lips with each breath.

When she was asleep, while her face relaxed, Dan knew her mind never quieted.

She had always been a fitful sleeper, tossing and turning throughout the night, snoring, muttering, often times waking up with nightmares that haunted her for days afterward.

He wondered what it was like to live with a mind that fought you every moment of your life. With a mind that even the sweet relief of unconsciousness wouldn't settle.

His wife was braver than she was given credit for.

He placed a kiss against her forehead, smiling as she began to mutter in her sleep, just as she used to.

She rolled over, instinctively curling herself against Dan's side, muttering about groceries, swim meets, and squashed cats. All things Natalie had told her a few nights ago.

Dan - feeling much more relaxed with Diana at his side - was almost asleep himself, when he heard her murmur something else. Something Natalie hadn't mentioned.

Something Natalie hardly ever mentioned.

A name crossed Diana's lips. A name Dan hadn't spoken in quite some time.

A name he never wanted to remember, but never wanted to forget.

A name that proved his wife's memories were still there, even if they were locked away and hidden even from herself.

"It's alright, Love, shh," Dan whispered, running a hand down her back, just like he used to when she would have dreams about him.

On a normal night, he wished that name would leave her alone and allow her rest, but tonight... he was thankful for it.

#i wrote this at literally 3am and that is why it is Bad #and why the title is worse #next to normal #diana goodman #dan goodman #n2n fan fiction #ginny watches musicals #random ramblings #weatherby writes

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polar-stars · 5 years ago

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3rd out of an 5 part ask of @smokeprincess24 (sorry that it took a bit)

👹 How does you OC act around different people and how does their personality change to match the environment they’re in? How do they act with: friends, family, strangers, children or their lover(s)?

For the most part, Yasu is just more open and comfortable around people he's close to. He's friendly and polite to strangers, but also rather closeted and he won't expose all too much of himself. Around his friends and family he's just a bit more prone to be more talkative, even joke here and there and just generally be more laid-back so to speak.

🍅 How easily is your OC embarassed? What subjects make them flush and why? What event has made your OC the most embarassed they’ve ever been?

Yasu is not all too easily embarrassed and when he is, he's still rather good at hiding it actually. He blushes mainly at sexual things being openly discussed because he thinks that's inappropriate.

He's usually good enough at reading people and a situation to know what to say…So when someone gives him the impression he said the wrong thing, that certainly embarrasses him as well.

💥 Are there any emotions your OC doesn’t know how to deal with, doesn’t understand or hates having to feel? Any reason behind this?

Answered already.

🏀 Does your OC have any skills that people wouldn’t expect them to have? Do they have a hobby or pass time that others would consider strange or weird? How did they learn this particular skill or pick up this hobby?

The fact that Yasu can dance as well as he can is much of a surprise to quite a few people and not many find out, since he does not often dance anyway and rather sits somewhere at the sides of parties.

He also has aa hidden poetic side to him and writes poems and song texts in secret at times. He himself doesn't consider them good enough though to show them to anyone.

⭐ Does your OC like to sleep alone or do they enjoy sharing their bed? Have they been to any sleepovers? Have they ever been camping? What did they think of the experiences if so?

As I've said already, he did share a bed at times with Chieko when they were really small smols and he never really minded it. It was fun listening to her discussing various theories and stuff she had thought over throughout the day and he liked it.

He does not have all too much experience beyond that, except for having to share a bed with his sister Kasumi at times (which was also not much bother to him since Kasumi is rather peaceful) and he does not think off it as anything special.

🍏 When your OC says “I had a bad day” what does that tend to mean? Is it really as bad as they’re saying or are they being a bit dramatic?

When Yasu speaks about a bad day it's most likely truly, truly bad. He's not really one to over exaggerate and he's also not one to speak up a lot over being upset or something in the first place. So when he actually opens his mouth and says he's having it rough this day? That definitely means that it's serious.

At the same time he doesn't really use this phrase as a way to say "please comfort me" but it's more of a way of telling whoever he's talking to that he's most likely not going to be as polite and friendly as usual….it's an advanced apology in a sense should he maybe snap. In order to avoid such he quickly retreats in his room anyway.

Again…Yasu pushes people away when upset.

🐉 How religious is your OC? Do they pray to any god(s) or do they not believe in that kind of stuff? What is their view of religion in general? Where do they believe people go when they die? If your OC is not religious why not and what do they believe in otherwise?

Yasu was raised to be a Buddhist by Ryoko and does hold on to the religion all his life. But at the same time his beliefs do not really affect his daily life all too immensely.

To him it does still have something comforting though in a sense.

💧 What is something from your OC’s past they’re the most ashamed of and why? What is something they’re really proud of? And lastly what is something in their past that could make them shake with dread?

What Yasu is truly going to be massively ashamed off is yet to come in the future,

Other than that, Yasu is very skilled off avoiding blunders and while of course he was embarrassed here and there there's no real major event so far that truly stands out to him as the most embarrassing thing that ever happened.

🐟 What was your OC like as a baby? What were they like as a child? A teenager? An adult? How do you think they’ll develop ten years into their future? Twenty years? Will they live to old age?

As a baby, Yasu was already more calm than other babies and didn't make all too much tumult; which Ryoko interpreted as a sign for having chosen the right name for him ("Yasu" means "peace, quiet"). He showed an affinity for nature early on and would show himself incredibly happy when Ryoko or Shun would take him outside into their garden or a park or something and set him down in the grass.

As a child he was not really the most social kid around but thanks to his mother he had learned enough polite phrases to get on everyone's good terms. While he did not make all too many friends, he was always pretty well-liked and in the end he always had Chieko as a friend. He ultimately spent most of his time with his parents however (Chieko in the end still lives in Tokyo, while he grew up outside of town and as I said he didn't spent all too much time with his peers in the small town he lives in) and helped them out a lot. His favorite hobby as a child was most definitely the exploration of the forest that's close to the family's house.

As a teen he'd grew into a very friendly and calm young man who does usually not have all too much problems to get on people's good sides. While he's still much of an introvert, he's more sociable and open than he was as child thanks to Polar Star's influence mainly. He also came to idolize his parents however and carries an everlasting fear of disappointing them.

Yasu won't change all too much as an adult, given that he was already rather mature for his age when he was a teen. He will have learned some of the errors in his ways however (like his overexaggerated protectiveness over Chieko) and also his worries regarding his parents will have been eased. I see him getting married rather late in his 20s honestly.

🍇 Does your OC have any bad habits? Does your OC have any addictions like smoking or drinking? How did they fall into these habits and why?

Yasu's major bad habit is definitely trying to gulp down all of his negative emotions because he feels he would be a bother if he were to vent and just let them out. He looks out for other people a good bunch of times but when it comes to his own emotions he likes to ignore them until he's alone with them at night creating the perfect conditions to overthink everything (which does not help…ever).

He also drinks on Polar Star Parties but he can hold his liquor. No one ever saw Yasu drunk.

🔮What does your OC think is their best trait. What is actually their best trait? What about their flaws? Are they one to admit these flaws or do they like to pretend they’re perfect?

Yasu thinks his best trait is his politeness but I'd say his best trait is his care.

A flaw of his is that his own worries, anxieties or envy can cloud his view and his judgement immensely at times.

🌸 What’s a sentence that would make your OC’s day better? One that would make them laugh? One that would make their day worse? Why? What words would you have to say to them to completely ruin their day?

A sentence that can always make his day better is certainly "Can I use your [insert fermentation product here]?" He really wants to support his mother's business on Totsuki and advertises it whenever he cans. It really makes him happy when his efforts pay off.

A sentence that can ruin his day is any sentence that has both "Chieko Marui" and "Shigeo Eizan" in it.

🌷 How much effort does your OC put into their looks? Do they care much about how they’re dressed or what their hair looks like or are they not bothered? Could they be considered a snob or a slob?

Yasu's pretty casual in his fashion choice and is mainly concerned over wether the clothes are comfortable and loose than anything else.

He takes rather good care of his hair though but there's not much else that concerns him a lot.

❤️ What inspired you to make this OC? How long have you had them? How have they changed in the time you’ve been developing them?

Shun/Ryoko was one of my first ships…of course I wanted to give them a child. Yasu is one of my first Fanchild OCs and was created alongside Kimiko, Mika and Hiroshi. He was really tough to design as I had a lot of trouble mixing Shun's and Ryoko's designs. Eventually I came up with the idea to give him Shun's blinding bangs and Ryoko's silkiness but…how exactly that would look changed multiple times throughout the years ahdhd He truly took long to be finalized in that area.

Character-Wise, I decided very quickly that he'd be Chieko's best friend. Because of course he would. It also didn't took me long to characterize him as peaceful, calm and such…given that I had literally named him that.

Over the years he hasn't changed all too much personality-wise. But I went through a lot, a lot of story-ideas with him…many of them very angst.

🧡 What traits of your own do you see in this OC? Are they a little bit self-inserty? Don’t be shy, we all put parts of ourselves into the creations we love!

I do always try my best to be polite, especially in Real Life. I don't think I excel at this as good as Yasu does because I do tend to be inattentive to my surroundings at times but well….It's still something?

I do ultimately prefer the ocean but I also like the forest as well. Also we have a bit of the same view on religion, although we're not part of the same religion ahdhd

What I majorly can relate to in Yasu though is his tendency to always attempt to shut down all negative feelings because I do as well like to pretend that sadness and anger do not exist.

💚 Are you writing anything with this OC or planning on writing anything for them? Do you rp with them or are they just for fun to mess around with?

You gave me asks for them but I'm still into figuring out how exactly to write them ; 7 ;

💗 Ramble a bit about this character!

Yasu can be greatly used for angst but in the end I do want to know him happy. He deserves it.

He'll makes some mistakes here and there but in the end, he's always trying his best. I really don't know how to construct his future really…ovo;; But I hope I'll eventually figure it out.

#Gofer answering to stuffz #Yasu Ibusaki #Shokugeki no Kimiko Stuffz

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authorized-trash · 5 years ago

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Pesky Poltergeist (1/2)

Note: I was writing an actual long one-shot for this but don't have the time and am quickly losing inspiration, so have a bullet-point fic.

Trigger Warnings: Panic Attacks, Gore, Mild to Extreme Body Horror, Screaming, Panic Attacks, Vomiting, Death Scenes, Murder, Terror, Violence (It isn't all scary, it has a nice ending)

~•~

Roman, Logan, and Patton had known each other since they were small elementary schoolers.

Patton was the one to suggest the now-college students move in together.

The others quickly agreed, and they bought a small cabin that was on the outskirts of their town, not too far from their community college

Things were great at first, nothing out of the ordinary

...yet

The occurrences started small. Things would go missing, moved to the other side of the room

One time, Patton was cooking and dropped a fork. When he reached to pick it up, it was no where to be seen. Standing back up, he saw it sticking straight up and down on the plate of spaghetti.

Another time, Roman had been practicing his guitar when his pick was suddenly yanked from his fingers, thrown half-way across the room. He shrugged it off, perhaps it was a gust of wind.

Logan was reading when suddenly his book slammed shut on his fingers, causing him to yelp

The occurrences began to get larger, harder to ignore.

Pictures would peel from their frames, tumbling to the ground. This wouldn't be too odd if it wasn't for the fact that the glass was still intact

Roman was washing the dishes when he witnessed a plate role across the counter, around the back of the sink, and into the trash can.

Patton came home early from school to find the cabinets were all completely rearranged.

They had a family meeting about the occurrences, and Logan suggested they leave.

Patton refused, as did Roman. Living with a ghost would be so bad.

All Hell broke loose.

Roman walked home from school, and went to turn on the light. He only caught a glimpse of the shadowy figure down the hall as he did, and he hurried to turn the light back off for a better look.

There was a figure dressed in a black cloak down the hallway, barely darker than the shadows. Roman turned on the light again, nothing. Off, something. On, nothing.

He continued to do this, paralyzed, his body too afraid to stop.

Then, the thing appeared inches in front of his face, it's eyes beady and black, mouth sewn shut.

Roman screamed, turning the light on and running out of the house as fast as possible.

Logan was the first to make actual contact with the entity.

He was getting out of the shower, and was drying his hair when the steam on the mirror began to wipe away, leaving words.

'You have to get out'

He stopped, staring at it for a moment, "What do you mean?" He had asked, his voice thick with terror.

A few days later, and the trio learned a vital piece of information. There wasn't one ghost, but many. The other's were just less strong.

Roman had caught sight of once, sitting on the couch as he walked by. He did a double take, and there it was. The apparition was so light, it was almost like the very beginnings of a rainbow, he could see it, but couldn't at the same time. Wasn't sure if it was real.

Patton found out that one of them could be contacted through a mirror. He could be seen somewhere in every mirror, no matter the time of day, you just had to look.

The mirror ghost introduced himself as Emile.

Emile told them of the other three ghosts in the house, and explained that there were so many more, but only those four could appear or were strong enough to do stuff.

In fact, Emile was the second weakest of the four.

The occurrences hadn't stopped, they grew worse.

Logan had a dream where he had slowly shoved his glasses into his eye sockets, blood and flesh hanging loose and dripping.

Patton fell and scraped his knee, hallucinating ravens that came down to pick at the flesh until his lower half was nothing but bone

Roman was singing when suddenly he felt a searing pain in his mouth, his tongue had fallen out.

These were all just really vivid and painful hallucinations however.

The worse was yet to come.

Roman was the first to hear it, the long, low, and painful wailing that came from the walls. It terrified him, but honestly, he was used to fear at the moment.

Patton asked Emile one day why his friends were so mean to him and his friends. Emile just shook his head sadly and wrote out an answer.

There were four ghosts, and none are strong enough to do such things. No, the trio of humans lived with four ghosts, and one very angry poltergeist.

It was Logan who met the third ghost. This one could only appear in dreams, and Logan, someone who had very vivid dreams, found that he was quite different then Emile.

"Hey babe, you're gonna have to wake up, you slept past your alarm sweetheart. Go get yourself some coffee, you totes need it," The male ghost had said. He was incredibly flamboyant, feminine.

He introduced himself as Remy one night.

And with the reveal of the third ghost, the beginning of the worst had finally began.

Logan had times where he'd be talking to Remy, only to be ripped from sleep and thrown against a wall. Loud laughter and snickering caused his ears to hurt, hand tore at his clothing as he flailed, trying to grab something. He was being aggressively dragged toward the ceiling.

Roman lost control of his hands while cooking, watching as his own hand took a knife and went slice slice slice. Every cut resealed immediately, but they hurt like Hell. He watched as his right hand forced the knife through the left, but instead of amputating, it resealed.

He screamed and called for Patton, who ran downstairs and wrestled the knife from Roman.

Patton was getting a glass of water to calm his nerves, days after the knife event. He drank it, the liquid cool and comforting. It took a moment, but then he felt it. Wriggling and movement in his throat. He vomited, maggots and worms and dirt and bugs. He felt centipedes crawl from his ears, his nose, small worms crawling out of his eyes.

That was it! He had had it!

He marched up to every door, hitting them with his fists. It was an hour after the bugs had cleared up. And he was done.

"Hey! You dumb stupid fucking poltergeist!" He shouted, causing both Roman and Logan to run and put and get him to be quiet.

"I want to have a word! I want you to stop hurting my family you fucker! I'm sick of this! We did nothing to you!" Patton shouted. He knew something was troubling the entity, by now they had all heard the wailing at night. But he couldn't find it in himself to care.

In a flash of light, something appeared in front of them. A person.

"Shut it, will you?" The ghost hissed, "If you piss him off we'll all be in trouble!"

The apparition had a huge melty-burn on the left side of his face, and an old 1930s outfit.

The trio questioned the ghost, finding out that they were the fourth, the strongest. He was able to appear fully physical and could move stuff.

"Well tell your friend to stop bothering us! I'm sick of it!" Patton snarled back, going full-dad mode.

"I can't let yo-"

"Where is he?"

"Pardon?"

"Right now, where is this stupid pesky poltergeist.

"The- the attic but-"

Patton pushed past him, walking to the closet at the end of the hallway, slamming it open. He pulled down the latch for the latter and climbed up without hesitation, despite Roman and Logan's shouts.

Patton landed in the room, seeing something hunched in the corner. He turned on the light, watching as a sad, sallow face turned to lurk at him.

The spirit's eyes were completely black, bloody dripping from the sockets. Black circles that matched the blackness of it's hair hung under it's eyes. It wore a black button up, but the back was full of large, bloody hatchet wounds.

~•~

That's all for now, I don't have the time arm to continue the last stretch of this story. If I make a second part, I will most likely not include any specifics about the spirits, so if you would like to ask something like, "Who was the first ghost?" or "How did they die?" Send me an ask.

If I so write more it will most likely be out tomorrow or tonight

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desi-pluto · 6 years ago

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知的愛 Chiteki Ai - “Intellectual Love”

Summary: Her intelligence was his aphrodisiac just as his love for literature sparked her desire to read more books - (a tiny hint of NejiTen and SuiKarin as well) College AU

Rating: Teen

For the lovely @uchihaharunoss who loves reading school/college AUs.

Note: the term "aphrodisiac" doesn't just apply to sex; it’s other definition is: a thing that causes excitement.

Freshmen Year

There she was studying at the grand library of Rikodu Sennin University, wearing a pair of thin framed reading glasses as she was studiously taking notes from her thick molecular biology textbook. Something about seeing a beautiful woman intently studying motivated him to step up his A-game. Especially if that woman has the same hair color of cherry blossoms and eyes like shimmering emeralds. That woman's name was Haruno Sakura. He had heard that she was a one-of-a-kind genius who got a full scholarship in the Rikodu Sennin medical school, and that she was also the apprentice of the infamous Doctor Tsunade Senju ever since she miraculously concocted an antidote to counteract the spider virus.

Here he was sitting on the other side of the library with a friend of his in the middle of a study session. It was getting hard for him to concentrate, because he was constantly tempted to sneak glances

"Hey Sasuke, can I copy your timeline notes of the Tokugawa Shogunate period? If you remember that I didn't make it to class last Thursday." Neji Hyuga, a sophomore from the esteemed Hyuga clan asks him if he could borrow his notes. With a grunt, Sasuke takes out his binder to take out the sheets of papers he took his notes, and then staples them in order before handing them to Neji, "Give them back to me by Friday, Neji."

"But of course." Was Neji's reply before he carefully puts the packet of Sasuke's precious notes in his file.

"Why were you staring at Haruno Sakura?" Neji changes topic.

"Why were you staring at Yu Tenten during basketball practice?" He retaliates with a smirk. Neji's fascination towards Tenten was no secret.

"She was cheering for me Sasuke, like any good friend would." Neji quickly responds with a faint blush growing on his cheek bones.

"Aha, keep telling yourself that Neji." Sasuke continues teasing him mercilessly.

"Don't you have to write a 10 page research paper for Law?" At being reminded of his arduous assignment, Sasuke's face momentarily turns pale at the thought of completing an all-nighter to write his paper.

'Damn it, I guess I'll have to make time to read The Silmarillion tomorrow then.' Sasuke thinks defeated with a sigh. Yes, the pragmatic Sasuke Uchiha has a love for literature. If he had the time, he'd consider joining the literature club, but alas his major forces him to study very hard in order to become a better criminal lawyer than his father; and it would mean reading more books with legal jargon.

"I must leave now Sasuke, I promised Tenten that I wold help her in understanding functional analyses." Neji stands to pack his books, while trying his best not to blush at the prospect of having alone time with Tenten.

"You don't even take calc. 1." Sasuke knew for a fact that Hyuga Neji was probably on the linear algebra level, considering he was known to be a prodigal math genius back in high school.

"I'm the best person to help her Sasuke." Neji haughtily tells him, "you'll understand when someone deems you worthy enough to help them." And with that he left the library leaving Sasuke all by himself on the table.

After Neji leaves, Sasuke with a "hmph" puts on his earphones that were attached to his cellphone so he can listen to his playlist of classical European music from Beethoven to Mozart to Tchaikovsky.

Sophomore Year

"Hey Sakura, my mom's hosting my birthday this weekend, you should come over!" Karin Uzumaki removes her glasses and pouts her lips, as she sweetly invites her for her birthday party.

"Geez Karin you don't need to act all 'cutesy' to make me go somewhere when you know the answer is yes." Sakura irritably answers her. At hearing her confirmation, Karin's expression turns ecstatic and then tells her to wear something nice but not too casual this coming weekend.

"Great, and just so you know Sasuke will be there too." Karin leaves her with a knowing smirk.

::::

Saturday comes and she's the first one to arrive at Karin's birthday party, and is grabbed by the arm to Karin's bedroom. When she goes inside the red head's room, Sakura instantly knew what needed to be done. Which was to help Karin get ready for the party.

"What will make you stand out the most?" Sakura looks through her closet of designer clothes until she hit the jackpot. She took out an unsaturated red tube dress that reached mid-thigh with a black denim jacket to go on top of.

"This will do, it compliments your hair and eye color!" Sakura hands the outfit to Karin and then turns around so she can slip her clothes on.

When she was done changing, she found Karin looking in the mirror with a sad look. "Do you think Sasuke will notice me like this?" She's been having a crush on him since they were in Oto high school but, things recently started to get complicated with their long time mutual friend Suigetsu Hozuki; who's also known to quarrel with Karin a lot. She also wasn't oblivious of Sakura's crush on Sasuke either, even if the pinkette doesn't know it herself.

"It doesn't matter how you look for him Karin, no one knows what his tastes are." She honestly answers, because it was hard for nearly anyone to guess what Sasuke is up to most of the time, aside from his close friends. 'I'd be more worried about Suigetsu not keeping his eyes off of you.' She quietly thinks to her self.

"Don't make this night about impressing him." She gently rests her palm on Karin's right shoulder.

When the house became too crowded for Sakura's liking, she decided to take a seat inside the gazebo of Karin's backyard. Aside from knowing Karin, nearly all the party guests were from said girl's high school called Oto High which was located in downtown Tokyo; plus most of them intimidated the crap out of Sakura. Basking in the fresh night air she closed her eyes and let her body absorb the cool summer wind.

"I thought I'd find you here." Sasuke's voice startles her out of her reverie and causes her to open her eyes only to see that he was taking a seat next to her. She couldn't help but admire his choice of clothing for the evening. Wearing a navy blue collar shirt with the sleeves rolled half way up - exposing his muscular arms.

"Hey." Sakura politely acknowledges him, wondering if he came to return the book he borrowed from her - ironically the book she's had for years in her home, but never finished reading it.

He takes out the hard copy of The Chamber by American author John Grisham from his black satchel and hands it over to Sakura, "It's a pretty decent book, I'm surprised you haven't read it yet." It had everything Sasuke loved to read about; suspense, history, politics, and a thorough examination of America's horrible legal system. Not to say that he loved America's justice system, he is actually appalled by it, from its prevalent racism, gender biases in careers, its lack of healthcare, the amount of countries it destroyed, he hated all of it.

"I'm not quite fond of America's justice system Sasuke, even my dad thought it could've been written better so I chose not to bother after chapter 4." She dryly tells him, which made him smirk a little. "Can't argue with that." He agrees with her while taking a good look at her. The sight of her sitting in the gazebo with that faraway look as she looks upwards toward the star-filled night sky would be the perfect inspiration for a painter or a photographer. Her long pink hair was let loose, her sea green eyes sparkled in the dark, and her choice of clothing was lovely as well, Sasuke observes her admiringly. She chose to wear a white frock that reached mid leg, and a pastel pink chiffon cardigan.

"What is it Sasuke?" She caught him staring at her, feeling genuinely confused, because he never looked at her like that before.

"Nothing Sakura." He gives her a gentle smile, that reminded her of the one her father would give to her mother.

Perhaps she'll finish reading The Chamber.

End of Junior Year

"You want me to do what with you?" He asks her amused, this was just too good to hear from her.

"You heard me loud and clear Sasuke, would you like to go out with me tonight, you know..to hangout?" Sakura asks with her arms crossed, a faint blush decorating her cheekbones.

"Alright," He fake surrenders with his hands up, "I'll see you at 7 at my place, oh and Sakura…" He walks close to her until there's very little space between them and boldly pecks her forehead where her purple diamond tattoo was, and whispers "Thank you." With that said, he goes off to class leaving Sakura with her heart beating fast as she replays the kiss on her forehead.

::::

"Wait, thee Sakura is taking you to the movies?" Sasuke's mom Mikoto Uchiha, eggs her son to tell. "Yes okasan, it's her - hold on," He paused as his cheeks darken a little bit, "how do you know her name?" He never recalled sharing her name to anyone in his family, just vague information that she's a medicine student and came from Okinawa.

"I heard you whisper 'Sakura' in your sleep, when I came to wake you up from your power nap." She wickedly grins at him, causing heat to reach at the back of his neck, now hoping his father won't walk in, in the middle of this conversation.

Just as the clock went 7:00 pm, the doorbell of the house rung. Faster than lightning, Mikoto opens the door with a smile and is delighted to see a pink haired maiden with green eyes in front of her.

"You must be Sakura! Please do come in." The elder woman grabs the younger one by the elbow to pull her inside.

Remembering her manners, Sakura clears her throat and with a traditional bow she says "Konbanwa Uchiha-san, I am a close friend of your son, and I would like to take him out to the movies with me. Rest assured, I will not take any advantage of making him pay for the two of us just for the sake of traditional gender roles, I will -"

"She gets the point Sakura." Sasuke comes right next to her as he helps her straighten her back to stand up.

"Well you sure are a chivalrous woman." The ebony haired woman chuckles at the slightly nervous young lady standing next to her son. "I mean you're both adults, so I don't see the point of you asking for my permission. Just don't get lost in any alleyways." She jokingly says a little bit. 'It's not everyday a girl comes to me to ask Sasuke out on a date.' She thinks to herself amused. 'Just friends. I see, as if I was born yesterday.'

"Have fun kiddos!" She sees them go out the door, and once their gone she feels her body relax and with a loud voice, "You can come out now Fugaku."

"So that was Sakura." Fugaku walks next to his wife with a mini smirk forming on his usually serious face. "I never expected her to be so unique."

"Neither did I dear." She agrees as she rests her head on his shoulder.

::::

Sakura couldn't contain her excitement, ever since her self-discovery of having feelings for Sasuke, she's been wanting to see if he might also like her beyond friendship. She was tempted to grab his hand and hold it firmly in her's, but she didn't want to make him feel uncomfortable as she fails to not reach for his hand before he caught her.

"What are you doing?" He whispers so the other occupants in the cinema wouldn't hear him.

"Just stretching." She answers in a steady tone.

"Is that so?" He comes near her ear as his breath tickles when he adds, "is it not because you want to hold my hand, like lovers do?" He further agitates her until she aggressively grabs his much larger hand and grips it in her smaller one. "Yes. Yes Uchiha Sasuke I like you a lot and I would love for us to be real lovers." She confesses to him. "However, I won't force you to be in a relationship just because I wish it. We can continue on as friends and forget this entire conversation." She stiffly finishes and tries to let go of his hand but Sasuke unexpectedly tightens his hold on her.

"We'll talk it through when the movie is done." He tells her without turning to her. They resume to watch the rest of the Batman movie in silence.

When the movie finished, Sasuke without hesitation offers his hand to Sakura which she takes and leads them outside the cinema.

"We're going back to my place." Sasuke leads them to the train station, "Don't ask any questions."

After 40 minutes, they arrive to his fancy neighborhood while holding hands. Once their in front of his door, he rings the bell and was surprisingly welcomed inside by his father.

"Come in you two." Fugaku gives a small grin at the two of them.

"I have something important to tell you and mom." Sasuke says loud enough so his mom can come out of the kitchen, which worked because she arrives to stand next to her husband.

"As of today Sakura and I will begin to date." He says it so bluntly that Sakura's eyes widen like saucers at him. 'How is he saying this all with a straight face?' Her heart thumps loudly at Sasuke's reciprocation of her feelings.

"We're happy for you son." Fugaku pats Sasuke on his left shoulder with a proud smirk on his face.

"How about you stay the night with us Sakura-chan? It's almost midnight anyway." Mikoto side glances Sasuke with a knowing grin 'you brought her home so she wouldn't leave, you're not that slick Sasuke.'

"Arigato-gozaimasu Uchiha-san, I'll be gone by morning." Sakura promises, even though she could've called a taxi to drop her at her 1 room apartment.

"You can sleep on Sasuke's bed for the night, and he'll sleep on a futon. Sound good to you kids?"

"Yes ma'am." Sakura agrees with the conditions.

When they arrive in Sasuke's bedroom, Sasuke hands her a disposable tooth brush and a pair of black trousers and shirt to wear.

When it was time to sleep, Sasuke gently pulls Sakura down next to her on his futon and they just stare eye to eye for a long time. An old habit of their's. Not before long Sasuke caresses her cheek and leans closer to her until she places her lips on his. The kiss was tender, romantic, and longing with love.

Before things would go out of hand, Sasuke reluctantly pulls back and pecks her forehead before saying "Goodnight." As he urges her to lie down on his bed at the same time he lies on his futon.

This was just the beginning of a new chapter for the both of them.

#my fic #sasusaku #sasusaku fanfiction #anum!writes #college au #sasuke x sakura #modern au #naruto fanfiction #sasuke #sakura #sasuke uchiha #sakura haruno #fluff #humor #dork sakura

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soundofseventeen · 6 years ago

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This is Halloween 🎃

It’s almost Halloween and I’m in love. -Bee

Seungcheol: He is the one decorating the place on October first with everything he can find. Somehow manages to convince Pledis to decorate the studio as well. Takes everyone costume shopping and seeing who can get the best costumes. Dresses up as Jack Skellington at least once a week. Buys the candy and eats it...except the chocolate which he gives away.

Jeonghan: He is the asshole taking “trick” to a whole new level. If he lets Junhui open the door, he’ll wait for the kids to say, “Trick or treat,” before he pushes Junhui outta the way wearing the scariest mask he found. Either that, or he’ll throw fake pieces of shit into the kids’ bags. But if he likes them, he’ll give them handfuls of candy. Drinks pumpkin spice lattes for the hype. Eats candy canes to spite everyone who says it isn’t Christmas.

Joshua: He’s the one who got roped into taking everyone to the haunted houses. He’ll occasionally go in but mostly waits outside to see everyone come out. Snacks on the candies he took from Jeonghan’s bowl while he waits. Takes deep breaths outside, letting the fall season overtake his senses. Constantly reminding the boys to stay away from Vernon if they’re had peanut candies.

Junhui: Junhui is the one who goes all out on his costume, especially if it’s inspired by a slasher film (Freddy Krueger in this case.) and talks on all of his quotes. His favorite is, “Welcome to my world, bitch.” Crunches on the leaves and piles them up so he can jump into them. Used to wear devil horns until he binge watched American Horror Story and decided to go for Tate Langdon‘s look.

Soonyoung: He goes trick or treating as Patrick with Seokmin and Seungkwan. He’s the one yelling, “Trick or treat!” the loudest and pushing Seokmin when he doesn’t get to the door fast enough. Asks if they can wear their costumes before the actual day and begs to go to costume parties. Makes a mental note to wear the fangs he bought and forgets about them half the time.

Wonwoo: stays home to binge watch all the horror films. Can occasionally be heard saying, “This is why you don’t have sex while there’s a serial killer on the loose, Janice.” Randomly says, “I’m not a serial killer, but…” Enjoys the entire month but isn’t 100% committed. Ghost stories are his specialty. Stole Junhui’s devil horns and claimed them as his.

Jihoon: He’s filming everyone’s reactions at the haunted houses to make fun of them later. Goes home early because he wanted to watch at least one scary movie before the holiday is over. Manages to get scared by Jeonghan but gets him back by hanging the mask somewhere in the bathroom. Accidentally scares Seokmin. He also researches serial killers and sees where the real ones tied into the fake ones.

Seokmin: Another trick or treater; goes dressed up as Spongebob. Laughs a lot to keep playing the part. Buys a cat ear headband to wear throughout October and colors his nose black and adds whiskers to act the part. Counts down the days until Christmas and wonders when it’s socially acceptable to play Christmas music.

Mingyu: He’s the one who accompanied BooSeokSoon to go trick or treating because it’s free candy and he likes seeing how other houses decorated their lawns. Is dressed up as a vampire. Comments “spooky” on their Instagram posts. His fingers are constantly stained from the pomegranates. Fights the other boys for them. Breaks out all of Tim Burton’s films (and merch).

Minghao: He wears a Phantom of the Opera mask the entire month. Jumps out of closets to scare whoever passes by. Goes to the haunted houses and tries to pick out where the scary parts are. (It’s a hit and miss.) Is curious about Día de Muertos and the cultures related to it. Lights a candle for his own departed loved ones.

Seungkwan: He’s the trick or treater that goes dressed up as Squidward. Is he playing the part well or is he actually salty? No one knows. Grumbles that next year they’re going as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Buys pumpkin shaped cookies and eats them. This is his favorite holiday because he likes the rush he gets from the things that go bump in the night and faces a new fear each year.

Hansol: He’s the one in the haunted houses making conversation with the guy who comes chasing everyone around with a chainsaw as he runs. Cracks a lot of, “It sure is dead around here, huh?” jokes to lighten the mood. Counts down the days until Halloween via their group chat. Possibly got kicked out. Walks around with a Halloween themed blanket and sometimes uses it to pretend he’s a ghost. Is cautious around everyone watching peanut and peanut butter candies.

Chan: He pretty much knows what to expect at the haunted houses, which is why he doesn’t run. Yells, “Fight me bitch! I’m ready to die!” whenever he does get scared. The thing that gets him every time is hearing the kids with the rhymes chanting. His inner child comes out during this time because of the sugar rushes and the dressing up. Likes remembering the scariest moments of his life. Reads a lot of short horror stories with Wonwoo.

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imaredshirt · 6 years ago

Note

If you're still taking domesticity prompts, maybe 23. Going through old boxes, with Imector?

Domesticity Prompts

19. Date night in

23. Going through old boxes

Sorry for taking forever to write these! D= Also, I hope y’all don’t mind if I combined them? Also also, they’re not quite as fluffy as I had wanted, but I was really inspired today, and this is the result. Enjoy!

Note: Lyrics contained within from the song “Sabor a Mí”

Imelda had opened the first box when she head the beat of a song playing somewhere in the house. The song was too low for her to catch the words, but it was something familiar.

An hour ago, she’d shut herself in her bedroom, opened the closet doors, and dug through a pile of boxes in the dark corner beneath old quilts and a coat she never wore. Each box had been taped shut, and with a box cutter she sliced through all the tape and searched in each box for something she hadn’t held in decades.

When she’d first come to the Land of the Dead, she’d repaired a celebrity's favorite pair of heels, and the woman had been so grateful that she’d given Imelda a dress that would have been worth more than all of her property in the Land of the Living. Horrified at the low neckline and the split that ran up the deep red skirt to the slender waist, but unable to return it to the movie star, she’d rolled it up and hidden it in a box where it would never see the light of day.

“You wear it when the love of your life takes you dancing,” the star had told her, a suggestive light in her eyes, and if Imelda had been a living woman, she would have flushed all the way to her ears. Nevermind that she would never let the love her of life touch her ever again, the very thought of pulling such an elegant, revealing dress was ridiculous.

But now, a year into her new life with Héctor after all their reconciling had passed and the wounds were no longer so fresh, the thought of her husband seeing her in the dress was… was….

Well. Imelda clutched the dress to her ribs and stared at herself in the vanity mirror.

She couldn’t back out now. She didn’t want to back out. She felt nervous enough to be almost sick, but the very fact that she was nervous made her so angry that she was glaring at her own reflection.

What did she have to be nervous about? Even if she didn’t have the shapely thighs she’d had as a young living woman, and even if she was just bones now, she knew she would look beautiful.

She wanted Héctor to see her.

With a nod, she steeled herself, and began to pull the dress on.

Also in the box was a pair of dark heels she’d designed years ago on a whim and had regretted, but were now perfect for the occasion.

As she pulled the shoes on, she thought about the other things she’d found in the boxes while she’d searched for her scandalous dress. There had been the photo album she’d died holding, which had held the very photo she’d ripped to keep Héctor’s face from ever being remembered. Angry notes she’d written to Héctor but had never sent. More photos of the family, shoe designs, old receipts and maps of the Land of the Dead she no longer needed. Odds and ends she couldn’t throw away.

A hair clip that young Elena had given to her before she’d died, with a red paper flower glued to it.

Standing before her vanity, Imelda ran her fingers through her loose hair. The most prominent streak of white fell over her eye. One day, in bed with Héctor, her husband had traced it with his fingers and kissed her cheekbone and told her she had starlight in her hair.

She pinned the flower over the white hair, frowned, took the flower off, and tried to wrap her hair into a bun instead. She narrowed her eyes, let her hair fall to her shoulders again, and considered just pulling it into her usual, daily style.

She could still hear music playing, muffled by the closed door, slow and sweet and Imelda knew Héctor had chosen certain songs to play on their new cathedral radio for the night. With the rest of the family out, leaving the two of them alone, they’d taken the chance to go out for dinner and then return home and, if the dress achieved its purpose, Héctor would be dying to peel it off her before the night was over.

At the moment, he was downstairs, again messing around with the radio while he waited for her. She heard the distant music change to something with a quick beat, before switching back to a slow song, and then back to something fast, before switching back again.

She rolled her eyes, smiling, as she pinned on her earrings. Maybe she’d pick a different hair style with them on.

She shook her hair out, rolled it into a bun that sat high on her head, let it down and parted it far to the side, shook it out again and was so frustrated by now that she was seriously considering changing her dress to something more simple to match her usual hairstyle because the dress really was ridiculous, wasn’t it, for someone like her? She never wore such clothes. She probably looked silly anyway.

Huffing, she let her hair fall to her shoulders one last time before moving to the closet to change her dress. To think, she’d been about to walk out into public in it! What would they say about her if they saw her like that? What would--

Suddenly, the door opened, and Héctor walked in.

“You’re going to laugh at me, amor, but I can’t figure out how to--” His words cut off when he looked up from the loose tie in his hands, and his eyes widened when he saw her.

She was standing in the open closet, in the process of pulling off one sleeve, when she froze the moment he walked in.

His hair was slicked back, and his dark vest was pressed and lint-free, and his eyes were so brown in the light from the lamp and the colors on his skull were bright and lively. For a moment, a brief moment, she imagined him as the young living man he’d once been, slim and tall and gangly but always handsome in her eyes, dressed in clothes they’d never been able to afford when they’d been a young couple. The wave a grief she always felt when she remembered him alive overcame her, but was swept away when he smiled and opened his mouth without saying a word, speechless.

“Imelda,” he finally said. “You’re--Imelda--”

“And you’re Héctor,” she said, smiling at his laugh. Phantom heart pounding, she pulled the sleeve back on, and walked up to him to adjust the collar of his vest. “Where’s your jacket?”

“Downstairs,” he said. Now that the door was open, Imelda could hear the music more clearly now, an instrumental song that she was not familiar with, but felt was perfect to dance to. She hoped the restaurant they went to played good dancing music, too.

She felt his hands touch her shoulders as she picked at his vest, and she smoothed her hands down the vest as she said, “Bueno, go and get it, while I finish my hair.”

“What’s to finish?” Héctor asked, incredulous, as he ran one hand through it. It was always comforting when he did that, and Imelda let her eyes flutter shut as he repeated the gesture. “It looks beautiful like this.”

“Does it?”

“Always,” he said. “You’re always beautiful, Imelda.”

She’d missed this. His voice so full of love and so eager, the comfort of his arms around her, his warmth. Suddenly she wanted him all for herself for the entire night. Why did they need to be out where people would follow them with whispers and rumors and questions? The music had switched to something she’d never heard, a woman’s voice singing slow, “nuestras almas se acercaron tanto así,” and it was perfect.

She placed her hands on his shoulders, and as if reading her mind, he held her waist and they began to sway.

“Que guapo eres, querido,” she said, and reached up to kiss him. Even in her heels, he was taller, but he leaned down to hum and kiss the fresh lipstick on her lips.

“Muy guapo, eh?” He murmured against her, and even with her eyes closed she knew he was waggling his brow at her and she chuckled.

“Always,” she said, rubbing his arm, and his hands pulled her closer as the woman’s distant voice sung, “pasarán más mil años, muchos mas, ya no sé si tenga amor, la enternidad,” and Imelda knew there was no way they were going to make it in time for their reservation.

“This is you?”

“Si,” Imelda said. She pointed at the flowering vine that climbed the tree she stood in front of in the picture. “Coco planted that vine with Victoria and Elena.”

Héctor smiled at the black and white photo as Imelda sipped from her glass of red wine, and he snuggled closer to her where they lay in bed.

They’d lit candles and arranged them around their room, and the soft flickering lights were comforting as the husband and wife went through the photos and trinkets Imelda had found in the closet. After they’d danced and enjoyed each other, she’d ended up showing him photos of their family, of herself, of Santa Cecilia. He’d laughed and listened to her fondly as she told stories with each photo, and Imelda had wiped the rogue tears that had slipped down his cheek bones.

Now, laying in bed, with her red dress on the floor and his suit and shirt and trousers spread about the room, they were going through the last photos, and enjoying the last of the wine they’d saved for months.

Héctor set down his glass and gently traced one finger along the photo’s edge. In the photo, Imelda starred seriously at the camera, wrinkles lining her face, and the white in her hair as evident as it was now.

“I told you,” Héctor said, “Always beautiful.”

Imelda shut her eyes against hot tears. She’d told him, months ago, how she’d grown old without him, and how they’d missed so much time together, and how unfair it was that he hadn’t formed wrinkles with her. It still hurt. But he always found some way to make her feel better.

“I can’t wait to meet Elena,” he said when Imelda said nothing, and Imelda chuckled.

“She’s strong like her Mamá,” she said. “One time, when she was eight, she started arguing with this boy because….”

Héctor listened with a smile, his arm around her, until they fell asleep to the sound of music in the distance, and a hundred more photos and stories waiting to be shared.

#coco #imector #it's kinda disjointed i'm sorry #hector rivera #imelda rivera #specspectacle

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gothify1 · 5 years ago

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It’s finally arrived, everyone. Reformation’s 2019 semi-annual sale is here, which means that the brand’s sale pieces are heavily marked down by up to 50% off right now. This is great news for anyone like myself who has been a fan of Reformation’s vintage-inspired pieces that are not only cool but also created with eco-friendly manufacturing and fabrics. Who What Wear editor Allyson Payer already rounded up the on-sale Reformation finds celebs own , but I ducked into its L.A. store to test-drive the sale items for myself in person. As a digital fashion editor, I regularly shop online, but nothing compares to trying on pieces IRL to try out the fit. Ahead, see 13 pieces from the Reformation sale that landed on my must-buy list—from the perfect trousers for wear this fall to the trend every fashion insider is wearing now to the most comfortable skinny jeans I’ve ever tried on. And fair warning: These pieces are selling out fast, so act quickly if you plan on adding them to your shopping cart. Jeans are typically the lifeblood of my wardrobe, but trousers are taking over on the fashion scene—as well as my closet. Where I typically would throw on denim, now I've been finding myself swapping in tailored pants more and more. This pair from Reformation checks all of the boxes of what I'm looking for: They're high-waisted, tailored, comfortable, and neutral enough to wear with pretty much anything. As you'll notice ahead, I paired these pants with most of the tops that made my list so you can see just how versatile they are. With voluminous sleeves, a button-down front, and a tapestry-inspired print, this pretty top looks like it could be from Brock Collection. If you're looking for the perfect top to pair with anything from tailored trousers to high-waisted denim, this is one you should 100% add to your shopping cart. A LBD is one of those staples that should live in anyone's closet since there are endless reasons to wear one—for a date night, dinner with friends, a vacation packing essential, I could go on… This one is the perfect basic that you can simply pair with heels. You could also go for a more maximal look by piling on accessories like a waist-cinching belt, a scarf, and statement earrings. If there's one thing I can't live without, it's a stylish pair of pajamas. It's the first thing I pack in my suitcase when I head on a trip somewhere and what I change into the minute I get home. This striped pair is as cute as it is comfortable. Plus, it's chic enough to wear outside in the real world (more on that ahead). Like I mentioned, I would 100% wear the pajama top above outside of my house styled like this: buttoned just at the top and worn with jeans. This leads me to my next great find—the perfect black skinny jeans. These ones are not only an incredible fit but super comfortable with just the right amount of stretch. For fall, these will be essentials to wear with the slouchy boot trend that is about to take over. If you take a look at the Instagram accounts of fashion insiders, you will see plenty of jumpsuits sprinkled in their outfit photos. The on-trend piece couldn't be cooler at the moment and this one from Reformation is impossibly chic. I would style it like this with slingbacks, but I feel like it would be even cooler to wear it with strappy heels tied over the pant hems (a rising trend you can read more about here). I'm always looking to add pieces to my closet that I can wear again and again, and this top delivers. This pretty lace-trimmed black top is something I would wear to the office or a date night. It can be dressed down with denim, like I'm wearing it here, or you can wear it with a pair of satin trousers for something more elevated. Remember back in the early aughts when everyone had their signature "going-out" tops they would wear on repeat with a pair of jeans? Well, going-out tops are officially back, and this one feels like a fresh take on the 2000s fashion staple. With a polka-dot print, V-neck silhouette, and slightly ruffled hem, this is exactly what you'll want to throw on once Friday night rolls around. At Who What Wear, our editors are always on the hunt for "boring" basics that we can rely on for repeat wear, and this tank is the latest to land on my list. The scoop neck is the ultimate '90s silhouette to pair with denim or a leather midi skirt. I found that this runs a little big, so I would recommend sizing down unless you want a super-loose fit. While you'll notice that I often gravitate toward minimal pieces, I also love fashion items that exude romance, like this blue-and-white top with a sweetheart neckline and covered buttons. If you look closely at the toile print, you'll notice it has a couple picnicking at a park surrounded by galloping horses. This playful strapless top is detailed with a peplum and dainty floral print that I can envision wearing with anything from jeans to a satin slip skirt. If you want to add a pop of color, might I suggest this bold red bodysuit with ties at the shoulders? It's the ultimate candy apple red, which means you can wear it now but also moving into fall. Consider this the layering piece you'll rely on again and again. A few details I love about this white linen top include its delicate ruffled edges and removable straps. Sure, you can wear it with jeans like I am here—but you can wear it like as a strapless top with Bermuda shorts and a blazer for an of-the-moment look. Next, find out the six shoe brands that will be everywhere next month .

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moevie · 8 years ago

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She Sews

Putting into words my experiences learning how to sew.

I guess I always thought that I could never, ever sew. I have a learning disability which made Maths, among other things, very difficult. I can’t problem slove, never been very good at measuring, and you can forget cutting in a straight line.

I once tried embroidery. I have always loved period drama and that’s what the young ladies did. So in my tween years I received my first cross stitch embroidery “sampler.” Not even an hour in, and I’m exaggerating here because I really don’t remember, I was bored. I didn’t want to sit still, I wanted to be outside exploring. I found myself a failure at being a girl, because all good ladies, historically speaking, loved to stitch. I abandoned that project for other things like romping around in the mud. It’s probably still in a closet, or a box somewhere. I never do thrown anything away.

Since that day I have felt I was destined to be a “Tom-Boy” or maybe just an outside girl, as I really don’t like much rough housing play. Although tickling is fun...

As an adult I tried to pick up embroidery again. This time it was in the middle of an 19th century event I was working. Again it had the label of well, how else would a lady spend her time. I picked it up and stared at it. A beautiful picture of a purple flower destined to be on my hanky. I don’t know if I ever started that project or not. I know that I amused myself that event by wandering around, instead of sitting and sewing.

Two attempts, two failures. I’ll never be a lady who embroiders and I will forever more amuse myself other ways. Then came more involvement in 19th century reenacting, more specifically civil war reenacting.

If you’ve never had to prepare your “Kit” for reenacting it is expensive. Not to mention as a woman you are never fully done with wanting dresses. Yeah they don’t tell you that when you start out.

Basically you are going to drop hundreds of dollars getting your gear in order. When a used cotton dress in in the $300 range, things add up fast.

AND, I have an oddly shaped body. I’m an inverted triangle. Board shouldered, to small waist and no hips. I could stand to loose weight, but I carry it all in my stomach. Anyway, its hard for things to look exactly right. 4 years in and I wanted things to be created for me, to fit me, and most importantly to have a Corset that not only kept the weight of the things off of me, but also supported me. I could only get that with a custom-made-for-me corset.

I started thinking why not learn to sew. Could I sew? Would I like it? I knew it would be hard, I wasn’t sure about my math skills, or about the precision needed. Then I was blessed, in a huge way, as I continue to be blessed. I happened to meet someone on a, 19th century reenacting board, who I just happened to come in contact with 3 days a week at my job. One night, on a break, I started to talk to her. I expressed my wanting to sew, which she had mentioned she did.

That weekend we met at her house, and I started my first foray into sewing. My first lessons, and my first project. Here is it completed. I sewed this corset. I sewed the mock up first. The mock up is made from sturdy fabric and a way to check the fit. I traced and cut out the pattern. Learned how to pin the pattern to the fabric. I also heard all about the salvage edge, bias, and cut edge. I then cut out all the pieces together. After that we pinned the correct pieces to each. (I’m still a mess when it comes to pinning.) Then we sewed the seams, with a seam allowance (another thing I learned) of 5/8ths. For fitting we sewed on eyelet stripes. Pre-done lacing stripes to check for fit.

I was so very proud to create this. This is the first garrmet I have ever made. Fit was wonderful for me. Then it was time to sew the corset itself.

We used white 100% cotton twill from Joann’s for the under layer. The fashion fabric was a pink, 100% cotton as well. I also helped set the gorrmets with our new gorromet machine.

My sewing teacher/ now best friend helped with the rest. She did the eyelets, the boning/boning channels, German Plastic Boning which simulates the real whale bone the Victorians used and sewed on the binding.

My corset is on underneath...

So I what I learned from this is that I actually love sewing! I want to write this sewing blog for all of my projects but also for inspiration too. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Do I sew perfect seams? Nope! Not yet, but I am so immensely proud of myself and the work I create. There is blood, sweat and tears for every piece, and every piece is an accomplishment. (More blogs to come on different pieces.) I can sew! And I can love it! and I can make wonderful clothes someday. I am having the time of my life. Met my best friend, and am learning a new skill. A skill that is so creative and inspiring, and Im having dreams of fabric. :-) Some Math is there, and my learning disability keeps from seeing the whole picture, but I slowly plod along, and create beautiful things. You never know what you’ll like until you try it.

#sewing #she sews #I love sewing #this is me #my life

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nerdywerdyprincess-blog · 8 years ago

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The Final Answer (TFP Redone)

Reposting this due to an offensive title that apparently upsets people. The Final Answer is going to be more appropriate anyway since there will be a question asked at the end of this series. ;)

So again, rewriting The Final Problem to be what it should have been, featuring lots of Johnlock, M-Theory and tying up a lot of loose ends! See previous posts for the Prologue. Part one is below. Part Two will be tomorrow. Hoping to post one part every day until the end.

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Part One

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The sound of the projector whirring in the background was just white noise to him and made the black and white image on the screen feel more nostalgic and romantic. The private theatre seat and the large viewing screen was all part of the atmosphere, and like his brother, Mycroft Holmes knew a thing or two about how to set a stage and how to create the right dramatic setting for the show.

Unlike his brother however, he preferred to indulge in such dramas privately.

“'You know, I could arrest you,” the tough law enforcement agent said in his gruff, sexy voice as he regarded the blond woman in front of him. The trench coat was classic for such a setting, as was the woman’s knee length skirt and red lipstick, although one couldn’t see the exact shade due to the black and white color scheme.

“What for?” the woman responded with a coy look.

Mycroft smiled to himself, relaxing just a little more and glad to be able to lose himself in his favorite film. It was a secret delight of his and one that would have likely shocked anyone who knew him; his fondness for old films and romantic dramas. Perhaps, he philosophized, because he was always guaranteed a happy ending. Life however….life never guaranteed that.

“Wearing a dress like that.”

“Would you like me to take it off?”

“Then I’d really have to press charges.”

“Press away.”

“Isn’t that how they got started?”

“Who?”

“Adam and Eve.”

Mycroft mouthed the words along with the actors and glanced over to the table next to him just in front of where the projector rested and grabbed his small glass of sherry with his free hand, his other holding his lit cigarette, even as he grinned to himself in a way he never did in public. He would be mortified of course if anyone knew he was a closet romantic, but that was alright, because no one would ever know. Ever…

“Oh, them.”

“And that turned out OK.”

“You think so? I thought it was supposed to be the beginning of all human misery.”

“Now what was all that about arresting me?”

“Well, maybe not arresting you.”

“No?”

“I could just keep you under close watch.”

“Very close?”

“A-huh.”

“Shame, I was looking forward to putting myself into the hands of the authorities.”

“You were?”

“Finger-printing, being searched thoroughly…”

“MYCROFT!!”

The door to Mycroft’s private theatre was abruptly thrown open and the lights turned on. Mycroft jumped as if a clown wielding a machete had just burst into the room to attack him and he swore as he burned himself on his own cigarette and spilled his drink on his trousers with his own startle.

“Sherlock! What in God’s name—“ Mycroft began as he stood up to face this intruder, only to pale and tense as he saw he wasn’t alone. Gregory LeStrade was with him too it seemed, wearing a trench coat.

But Mycroft didn’t get a chance to ask questions as he was abruptly grabbed by his brother, wearing his own signature coat and hat and shoved him up against the nearest wall.

“WHERE IS SHE?!” Sherlock shouted like a man possessed. His icy blue eyes bore into his brothers, and Mycroft wondered if he was high again or otherwise mentally impaired. The last time Sherlock had gotten his physical with him, he’d been strung out after all. “Where is Eurus?!!”

The name made everything inside Mycroft go still, and Sherlock knew in that moment that his theory was correct as his brother tensed and his expression went ice cold. His own heart was pounding as well, though this time it had nothing to do with cocaine or any other form of narcotic.

He was motivated entirely by fear and a kind of raw desperation he’d never felt before, save perhaps once, when he’d been inspired to jump off a building.

“Where is she, *brother*? Tell me where she is right now!!” Sherlock shouted again.

Mycroft swallowed. “I don’t know who you’re talking about. I’ve…never even heard of anyone named Eurus.”

Sherlock scoffed bitterly, but didn’t let go of his brother’s collar. “Oh really? Well, let me refresh your memory,” he said darkly and pulled out a note and held it up to his brother’s face, even as he read it aloud.

“Dear Sherlock,

Did you miss me, brother? Come and play.

Love,

Eurus”

Mycroft paled starkly as the letter was read aloud and he reached for it.

“Let me see that!” Mycroft demanded sharply.

Sherlock’s eyes went cold. “Don’t remember her at all, I see,” he mocked sardonically as he saw Mycroft examining the handwriting with his eyes and going stiff and pale. “My conclusion is correct then. I have a sister! Second conclusion; you’ve locked her away somewhere. And third, you’ve gotten sloppy.”

Mycroft frowned at the third, and glanced up to meet his brother’s gaze.

“This shouldn’t be possible,” Mycroft said softly with a slow shake of his head and swallowed tensely. “Where did you find this?”

“In the home of John’s therapist,” Sherlock informed. “Or rather, my sister, pretending to be his therapist. His real therapist was found dead in that same house! And now John is missing.”

“Missing?” Mycroft asked incredulously.

Greg looked somber. “Molly was watching Rosie today and she called Sherlock this afternoon, frantic because John never came back from his appointment. He went to the therapist’s house and found the body and the note. We’ve searched all around the house and made inquiries with his sister and all his friends, but no one has seen him.”

Mycroft felt his blood go ice cold, but he kept his composure as best he could.

“Yes, well, Doctor Watson isn’t the most emotionally stable of individuals right now, is he? Perhaps he simply went on an impulsive holiday,” Mycroft said, handing the note back to Sherlock.

Sherlock’s eyes flashed with something dangerous at the suggestion and he abruptly punched his brother in the jaw.

“Sherlock!” Greg shouted in alarm, even as Sherlock shoved Mycroft forcefully up against the wall again, his arm to Mycroft’s neck as if to choke him.

“You listen to me, *brother mine*! If anything happens to John because of you….because you’re keeping secrets from me….I will kill you, blood or no blood!” Sherlock threatened darkly, almost shaking with vivid anger and….perhaps just a little terror at what might have happened to his—doctor. “This isn’t one of your government conspiracies where you get to play god with peoples lives! This is bigger than that. This is *his* life and mine! Now I want to know who Eurus is! Everything, Mycroft. I want to know everything! Why can’t I remember her? And where is she?!”

Mycroft stared into his brother’s eyes, so alive with….feeling. Sometimes he did envy Sherlock his ability to feel so deeply. Of course, Mycroft knew it was far more trouble than it was worth, and for the most part he was happy with his solitary and purely intellectual existence! But there were times like now, when he saw Sherlock truly moved and willing to do anything for someone, that he envied him that connection to people.

He truly believed Sherlock meant every word. He’d known from the beginning that John Watson would either make or break his brother. Truly, in this moment, he wasn’t sure which one had been accomplished. At one point he had…hoped….that John could be Sherlock’s salvation. Now, he feared that he may be his undoing.

Which he realized was possibly the plan all along.

“If we are going to discuss his, we shall do so privately. This is a family matter,” Mycroft said quietly, ignoring the pain in his jaw as he turned to look at LeStrade.

Greg held up his hands in surrender. “Fine by me. I’m just here to keep Sherlock from killing you,” he informed and then smirked. “You’re really watching ‘Paradise Found’?” he asked in amusement, the film having been playing softly in the background once he found the knob to adjust he volume. He was fond of old films himself, but never quite thought Mycroft Holmes was…the type. Surprise, surprise!

Mycroft went a quite obvious shade of pink. “Out!” he ordered with a frown, utterly humiliated that of all people, he would be the one to walk in and see his most private of hobbies.

Greg shrugged and walked out genially, just glad that Sherlock didn’t try to kill anyone this time.

As soon as the door was shut, Mycroft went over to the projector to turn it off the film completely, not meeting his brother’s gaze as he did so.

“I still believe it is impossible that Eurus was able to escape. I took every precaution.”

“Did you now?” Sherlock asked. “Well, as I said; sloppy. Now start talking, Mycroft! I want the truth.”

Mycroft gave a soft, scoffing laugh. “The *truth*?” he asked, and turned to look at his brother almost piteously. “Who was it that said that said ’the truth is rarely pure and never simple?’”

“I don’t care about your pedantic philosophies, Mycroft,” Sherlock dismissed coldly. “There were three of us then. You, me and Eurus; the sister I can’t remember. The ‘East Wind’,” he said with a bitter sneer.

Mycroft looked somber. “Our parents were fond of unusual names. Eurus is Greek for the god of the east wind,” he informed, as if speaking to a child again.

“I know what it means!” Sherlock snapped angrily and fisted his hands at his side. “You used that to scare me!”

“No.”

“You turned my sister into a ghost story!” he further accused, pacing away and taking off his stupid, silly hat and tossing it down in agitation. Fuck, he wanted a cigarette!

“Of course I didn’t. I monitored you,” Mycroft insisted calmly.

“You what?” Sherlock demanded with a sharp look.

Mycroft looked grim.

“Memories can resurface. Wounds can reopen. The roads we walk have demons beneath…and yours have been waiting for a very long time,” he said softly and then sighed heavily, shaking his head. “I never bullied you. I used, at discreet intervals, potential trigger words to update myself as to your mental condition. I was looking after you!” he tried to insist.

That’s all Mycroft had ever done, it felt like. Trying to look after Sherlock… He knew he’d done a lot of damage over the years of course. His methods hadn’t always turned out expected results, but his intentions had been pure. No matter what happened, he did want Sherlock to understand that!

Sherlock’s expression remained neutral however as he stared at his brother all he more intently.

“Why can’t I remember her?” he demanded quietly.

Mycroft smiled sadly. “You do remember her, Sherlock….in a way,” he specified. “Every choice you ever made, every path you’ve ever taken, the man you are today is your memory of Eurus.”

“Enough, Mycroft!” Sherlock exclaimed, unnerved by that and the idea that….there was something missing in his mind. His mind was so important to him! It was a machine, finely tuned and designed for nothing less than excellence. The idea that there was a flaw somewhere…. Missing information…..a virus in his hard drive, a fly in the ointment….

He shuddered as he heard Moriarty’s voice in his head, mocking him, and he instead turned his brief lapse of attention back to his brother. “Just get to the point. What happened?”

Mycroft bit a lip somberly. “You know how I’m the smart one?”

Sherlock scoffed in response.

“We were tested more than once. I was remarkable, but Eurus was described as an era-defining genius. Beyond Newton. She was….incandescent…” he whispered, his eyes going distant as he remembered he girl with dark hair. “She was different from the beginning. She knew things she should never have known….as if she was somehow aware of truths beyond the normal scope…” he whispered, and looked visibly disturbed as he abruptly closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, as if remembering images from a nightmare.

Sherlock frowned in confusion. He hated such unspecific details. And yet, as Mycroft spoke, he felt an eerie sensation, like a memory from a dream almost….

“What do you mean? Examples.”

Mycroft looked almost haunted as he opened his eyes. “They found her with a knife once. She seemed to be cutting herself. Mother and Father were terrified. They thought it was a suicide attempt! But when I asked Eurus what she was doing, she said: I wanted to see how my muscles worked….” he quoted and felt a shiver as if he could almost hear her voice in his head, and could almost imagine her in the room with them. “So I asked her if she felt pain, and she said: Which one’s pain?”

Sherlock looked stoic at his, his emotions getting a little more in line now that he was getting facts, and yet he found himself watching Mycroft intently, seeing how disturbed he looked and couldn’t help but feel a chill in the air as well.

“Then what happened?”

Mycroft swallowed thickly. “Musgrave,” he said softly and a vivid memory of their ancestral home flashed before his eyes. “The ancestral home, where there was always honey for tea. And you played among the - funny gravestones.”

Sherlock didn’t know why, but that word….Musgrave…felt so familiar to him.

It was on the tip of his tongue…

He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair shakily. “Funny? Funny….how?” he asked, though he felt odd suddenly as if he could remember flashes of old stones with numbers on them. Wrong numbers…

“They weren’t real. The dates were all wrong. An architectural joke which fascinated you,” Mycroft said softly.

Sherlock closed his eyes as he heard something in his head; a distant voice like a little girl…singing in a sing-song voice…and an image of them sitting at a table while she sang…

Deep down below the old beech tree - Help succour me now the - East winds blow.

“East winds blows…. Sixteen by six….and under we go…” Sherlock whispered shakily, his eyes opening again as he stared distantly.

Mycroft watched his brother intently and swallowed thickly. “You’re starting to remember.”

Sherlock shook his head. “Fragments…” he dismissed, but paused and frowned as he remembered leaving the table and running out, wearing his pirate hat and wielding his little wooden sword, and calling a name. “Redbeard…” he breathed shakily and then glanced up to look at Mycroft in horror.

Mycroft nodded darkly. “Yes, Sherlock. Redbeard,” he confirmed quietly. “Eurus took Redbeard and locked him up somewhere no-one could find him. And she refused to say where he was. She’d only repeat that song. Her little ritual. We begged and begged her to tell us where he was! But she said: The song is the answer. But the song made no sense…” he said darkly.

Sherlock looked strained. “What happened to Redbeard?” he demanded intently, because he realized suddenly it was happening again. John…

Mycroft shook his head. “We never found him. But she started calling him Drowned Redbeard, so we made our assumptions. You were….traumatized,” he informed frankly. “Natural, I suppose. You were, in the early days, an emotional child. But after that, you were different. So changed. Never spoke of it again. In time, you seemed to forget that Eurus had ever even existed.”

Sherlock scoffed shakily in incredulity at the idea that he’d been…emotional! And that the loss of a dog had changed him so much! But granted, his memories of Redbeard were….both painful and happy at the same time and so very complicated. And yet it felt unreal that he was missing so much information! There was something not quite right about any of this…

“How could I forget her? We lived in the same house!” Sherlock argued, convinced his brother wasn’t telling him something.

“No,” Mycroft corrected. “They took her away. Not because of Redbeard, but because of what happened immediately after,” he said grimly. “She burned down the house. Almost killed all of us in our sleep,” he said darkly. “After that, our sister had - to be taken away.”

“Where?” Sherlock demanded tensely, because he had to believe that wherever she was, John was too. Or at the very least she could tell him what happened to him!

“Oh, some suitable place, or so everyone thought. Not suitable enough, however,” Mycroft informed casually. “She died there after starting yet another fire.”

“Damn it, Mycroft!” Sherlock snapped angrily. “That’s a lie!”

“Yes!” Mycroft retorted tensely. “But it is also a kindness, Sherlock. This is the story I told our parents to spare them further pain, and to account for the absence of an identifiable body.”

Severus scoffed bitterly. “And no doubt to prevent their further interference,” he accused.

“Well, that, too, of course. The depth of Eurus’s psychosis and the extent of her abilities couldn’t hope to be contained in any ordinary institution. Uncle Rudi took care of things,” he said softly.

Sherlock’s eyes sharpened. “Where is she, Mycroft? The truth.”

Mycroft bit a lip, before he sighed heavily in defeat. “There’s a place called Sherrinford. An island. It’s a secure and very secret installation whose sole purpose is to contain what we call the uncontainables. The demons beneath the road? This is where we trap them. Sherrinford is more than a prison, or an asylum. It is a fortress, built to keep the rest of the world safe from what is inside it. Heaven may be a fantasy for the credulous and the afraid. But I can give you a map reference for hell,” he said with dark pointedness.

The word ‘hell’ made Sherlock’s head snap up and he stared at Mycroft intently for a moment, going cold as words were echoed back to him in Mary’s voice.

Save John Watson… Go to hell, Sherlock.

His heart pounded quickly in his chest as he recalled another time when he’d spoken of hell itself. When he’d offered to shake Jim Moriarty’s hand there…

“Sherlock?” Mycroft queried as he saw his brother zoning out and his eyes doing that thing where they moved from side to side as if he were reading words in mid-air, a sure sign he was thinking and deducing quite quickly. “Whoever it was that killed that woman or left you that note, I promise you, it couldn’t have been her. That’s where our sister has been since early childhood. She hasn’t left, not for a single day!” he insisted.

Sherlock raised his eyes to his brother and then gave him a pointed, determined look as he grabbed Mycroft’s umbrella and tossed it to him.

“Well then, brother….let’s go prove it,” Sherlock said determinedly and then strode out of the room, fully expecting Mycroft would follow.

~*~

#johnlock #bbc sherlock #sherlock #tjlc

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mourningsickness · 7 years ago

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Claire Vaye Watkins’s ‘Gold Fame Citrus’

Claire Vaye Watkins’s debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus (Quercus, 2015), opens on an arid Laurel Canyon, whipped by unrelenting ‘crazy-making’ Santa Ana winds. A dry place that has birthed a host ‘countercultural’ figures – from Joni Mitchell and Jim Morrison to Marilyn Manson –, for nearly two decades “passing through” Laurel Canyon was a compulsory pitstop on the road towards superstardom. It has been mythologised in various cultural iterations – most famously Graham Nash’s ‘Our House’, written about then-lover Joni Mitchell, whose own (better) 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon also drew obvious inspiration from the neighbourhood [1].

More troublingly, the Canyon was also the setting for the brutal murder of silent film actor, Ramon Novarro on 30th October 1968. His killers, brothers Robert and Tommy ‘Scott’ Ferguson, then aged just 22 and 17 respectively, entered his home under the pretext of soliciting their sexual services, believing a vast sum of money to be hidden somewhere in the house. Novarro, a Mexican Catholic, had been one of MGM’s leading Latino stars during the 1920s and a romantic idol, having starred opposite Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Myrna Loy. His homosexuality remained a closely-kept secret throughout his career (Louis B. Mayer reportedly attempted to coerce him into a “lavender marriage”, which he refused), and was the cause of much internal struggle in an era when success was contingent on the presentation of normative sexuality. Then in his late 60s, Novarro had a history of arranging for prostitutes to visit his Canyon home for sex and companionship. The Fergusons obtained his number from a previous guest.

Over dinner, Novarro read the brothers’ palms; during their trial the pair proclaimed him to be a lousy fortune-teller. He was subjected to several hours of torture intended to extort the location of the money from him. Eventually, the pair left the house with 20 dollars retrieved from his bathrobe pocket, leaving Novarro to choke to death on his own blood [2]. These sinister events formed a counterpoint to the Manson Family murders of 1969, which took place roughly a year later, in Laurel Canyon’s northern counterpart – that “senseless-killing neighbourhood” Haight Ashbury [3]. Though the canyon’s entanglement with celebrity soured, it remains a popular residential location. Google informs me that, today, the area is still favoured by stars such as Moby and George Clooney. Both keep homes there.

I read Gold, Fame, Citrus not long after having read Joan Didion’s The White Album (Simon & Schuster, 1979) for the first time, which perhaps explains why I was suffering from a bout of “murder mind” [4]. One of its essays, ‘Holy Water’ takes as its focus the complex, sprawling networks of dams and aqueducts that keep Los Angeles county in water. In it, Didion (a Sacramento native) visits the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project, one of numerous government agencies responsible for shifting the ‘trillion gallons’ of water that are pumped across the state each week. Here, she writes: ‘Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also like to think about exactly where that water is’ [5].

At the time of reading, I found this essay vaguely anticlimactic, following as it does the incendiary piece from which Didion’s book takes its title. As someone who lives in a damp English climate, her preoccupation with the bio-political regulation of water supply across the state of California felt alien to me. Coming from a place where water has always felt abundant, I couldn’t fathom the scale of these operations, nor could I place Didion’s strange anxiety. Despite the glut of climate fictions I’ve encountered, I found it hard to imagine what drought might actually look like. It felt implausible in London, a city where the gravest threat it had posed was the hosepipe ban of my childhood summers, or the ugly reservoir grazing the stretch of motorway on the way to my grandmother’s house. Reading Vaye Watkins’s climate dystopia – with its vision of a west coast drained even of groundwater – brought Didion’s essay, along with L.A,'s broader history of precarity, into stark focus.

Doubtless Watkins, herself raised in the Mojave Desert, has also read ‘Holy Water’. Drawing on the ‘Water Wars’ of the 1920s for her own novel’s casting of the near-future, she reveals a similar preoccupation with how California keeps itself liquid. The Water Wars began following the construction of a 233 mile aqueduct in 1913, which saw the Owens River forcibly diverted towards a reservoir in the San Fernando Valley [6]. Following the project’s completion, the aqueduct guzzled so much water that Owens Valley, known formerly as ‘The Switzerland of California’, was effectively transformed into a desert, stoking rebellion among local farmers and ranchers, who sabotaged part of the system in 1924, laying dynamite at the Alabama Gates [7]. This inheritance is made explicit in the book’s preface, which refers to the words spoken by pioneering engineer William Mulholland over his finished project: ‘There it is. Take it’.

Hollywood, for its own part, has already mined the Water Wars narrative. Roman Polanski’s 1974 noir classic Chinatown is loosely based on legal disputes that were still ongoing in 1970, following the LADWP’s construction of an aqueduct in Inyo County that stood in direct contravention of groundwater protections. Indeed, the film’s first victim, Hollis Mulwray, is purportedly based on Mulholland (if you listen closely, you may still be able to hear the producers riffing on those names). Ironically, the film is also tangentially connected to Watkins’s novel. Her father, Paul, was a member of Charlie Manson’s notorious ‘Family’, though he left shortly before the murder of Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate, later going on to testify in court.

When we first encounter Gold Fame Citrus’s two central protagonists, Luz and Ray, holed up in the former mansion of a Hollywood starlet, we are also encountering this history. Marginalised former residents of California – descended from the feckless grifters responsible for the ‘failed experiment’ of the state – are now known derogatorily as ‘Mojavs’ (GFC, 70). Signs on elementary schools read: ‘MOJAVS NOT WELCOME. NO WORK FOR MOJAVS. MOJAVS KEEP OUT’ (GFC, 23). Those who have chosen not to ‘evac’, remaining behind in Los Angeles, are plagued by a feeling of ‘sostalgia’, a term coined by Glenn Albrecht to describe the alienation and distress brought on by environmental change that lies outside inhabitants’ control [8]. The “good vibes” of LA have endured, if in mutated form. Venice Beach has become a hotspot for raves, but also for black-market trading – of blueberries, Ovaltine, all-cotton socks and other elusive commodities.

Luz and Ray’s days are for the most part consumed with trivial tasks that elide the quiet desperation of their circumstances. Even in this carnivalesque nightmare, traditional gender roles seem to prevail: Ray digs out the ‘shitting hole’ in their backyard; procures crates of stale ration cola; kills a prairie dog that winds up in the library; while Luz (a former model) naps and plays dress-up in the starlet’s abandoned closet. In an effort to shake up this mundanity, they attend a ‘raindance’ on Venice Beach where they encounter a small, pale-haired toddler whose ‘people’ radiate bad vibes. Between them, they make a snap decision to (benevolently) kidnap her, and return to the canyon. They call the ‘baby’ (infantilised because she remains curiously underdeveloped throughout) Ig, after one of the strange sounds she makes. Fearing retribution from Ig’s ‘people’ – a disparate band of punks, seemingly not including her parents – they head east on the advice of a former comrade, Lonnie, whose compound the couple have left on bad terms (Luz having fucked Lonnie, out of obliging boredom rather than actual desire).

When they run out of gas, somewhere on a desert trail flanked by jagged salt-rock formations, Ray heads out to find help. Uttering the haunting last words “I’ll be right back”, he leaves Luz and Ig on the backseat of the oven-like car (GFC, 102). Here, the novel – along with the couple – splits. We follow Luz into the Amargosa Sea (a sprawling, hostile ocean of sand ‘blown off the Central Valley and the Great Plains) and leave Ray for dead (later it emerges he has been holed up in a subterranean prison complex, somewhere in what was formerly New Mexico) (GFC, 72). Though the Amargosa is reportedly lifeless, ‘a dead swath’, it is the source of their salvation (GFC, 72). Their rescuers form part of a lone, nomadic community, a gaggle of lost souls who have dedicated themselves to the dune sea and to their “prophet” leader, Levi. ‘Descended from a long line of dowsers’, Levi is apparently able to glean water from sand, though his methods of extraction are later revealed to be deeply suspect (GFC, 72). The cultish sway of his charisma is, clearly, reminiscent of Manson. In this aspect, Watkins’s novel reminded me of Emma Cline’s wildly successful debut The Girls (Chatto & Windus, 2016), which rehashes many of the same tropes. Like Manson, Levi himself proves to be the worst kind of mirage – an abusive narcissist preying on the vulnerability and soft-mindedness of others.

The encroaching desert, we are repeatedly told, ‘curates’ its inhabitants. Luz, already born a figurehead, has been “chosen". In another life the adult Luz was ‘Baby Dunn’. A propaganda initiative cooked up by the Bureau of Conservation, she was adopted as a symbol at birth, her life and its milestones chronicled by public media. She retains a baby book, stuffed full of newspaper clippings: “Governor Signs HSB 4579; Every Swimming Pool in California to Be Drained Before Baby Dunn Is Old Enough to Take Swimming Lessons”; “Berkeley Hydrologists: Without Evacs Baby Dunn Will Die of Thirst by 24” (GFC, 11). As the ‘fame’ of its title would suggest, the novel is preoccupied with the cult of celebrity, itself a form of self-destructiveness often wilfully sought out. The hardback cover resembles a peach melba, metallic pinks and white leaking over a desert-yellow background, invoking the pastel palettes favoured by Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan in the early 2000s. (Tellingly, its lead endorsement is a quotation from Vanity Fair). Though Watkins depicts a canyon bereft of celebrity residents, this “trashy” aesthetic nonetheless gestures towards the car-crash lifestyle that often accompanies certain brands of live-fast-die-young fame.

Like the Laurel Canyon, the Amargosa also spits out new forms of life. If our own species has struggled to adjust, then animals in Watkins’s novel appear more amenable to life in the scorched world. Midway through the novel there is an interpolated bestiary, a compendium of the Dune Sea’s flora and fauna replete with illustrations: a bioluminescent bat, the Mojave ‘Ghost Crab’, a spiny land eel, a carnivorous turtle that has evolved to walk on long legs resembling stilts. The government have led the public to believe no life exists in this “wasteland” so that it can be “nuked” without qualm, Levi begs to differ. For Luz this revelation – that there are animals where they shouldn’t be – marks a source of hope. She carries the primer around with her, reading to Ig from it like a surreal bible – evidence of weird, wonderful life. Luz’s devotion recalls the novel’s opening and her unfulfilled ‘yearn[ing] for menagerie’:

Where were the wild things seeking refuge from the scorched hills? […] Instead: scorpions coming up through the drains, a pair of mummified frogs in the waterless fountain, a coyote carcass going wicker in the ravine. And sure, a scorpion had a certain wisdom, but she yearned for fauna more charismatic. “It’s thinking like that that got us into this,” Ray said, correct (GFC, 7).

Ray’s commentary is astute: few people would shed a tear at the prospect of a future without such a scuttling, ‘repellant’ creature as the scorpion. But the imagined loneliness of a world without them is palpable here. Notably, the book begins with a ‘little live thing’ bursting onto the scene – the wild prairie dog that Luz locks in the starlet’s library. Luz’s exhilaration during this episode intimates some room for optimism in the apocalypse. Perhaps a new vision of community, grounded in a quest to be ‘part’ of something outside oneself, or a broader desire for communion both across and within species. Yet, quickly, her excitement collapses into anxiety. Having welcomed the prairie dog, she begins to fear it might be rabid. Her willingness to have Ray dispatch with the animal suggests that Watkins’s characters are, in fact, less concerned with the conservation of ‘wild things’ than with safeguarding themselves [9].

Despite its commitment to a post-humanist landscape, Gold Fame Citrus seems ultimately to offer us a humanist vision of apocalypse. And while Watkins's book works beautifully as a novel of ideas, her characters often feel tediously out of step with their circumstances. The plot can feel faltering on occasion. As Emily St. John Mandel puts it in the New York Times: ‘The work suffers occasionally from a condition fairly common to apocalyptic novels, which might be described as the “now what?” problem’ [10]. So, too, does Watkins's prose which, though wonderful at times, is also overworked, or try-hard in places (can a dune, for example, really be ‘dreadful’ with moonlight?). These linguistic flourishes, as well as its formal playfulness, are perhaps part of its charm, adding to the broader disorientation of reading the world's end. While some of these digressions I found myself wanting to ‘get through’, others work to haunting effect. In one stand-alone section, the narrator describes a desert monument, constructed as a sinister hazard-warning for generations to come:

The Landscape of Thorns was erected atop Yucca Mountain to frighten our distant and curious descendants on a primal level. It is an assembly of multilingual stone message kiosks and concrete spikes jutting from the mountain, skewering the sky…. Our young people… made rubbings from the message kiosks there… The rubbings say, This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing of value is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us (GFC, 220).

More terrifying still this is based on a real project, backed by the Trump administration [11] .The abject horror of such a prospect, however, is offset by the narcissism of protagonists who seem consistently absorbed with more pedestrian concerns. Critics have praised Watkins for the fact that her characters undergo no redemptive arc, that they end just as fucked up as at they were at the beginning. Certainly, she does not subscribe to a conformist restitution narrative; the end of the world is not a case for new beginnings here. In this sense, the novel marks a departure from the Roland Emmerich fantasy of the post-apocalyptic world “cleansed” and primed for rejuvenation, or the Spielberg disaster-logic of a bad patriarch becoming good [12]. Gratingly though, the same heteronormative, patriarchal dynamics one might expect of a less conceptually interesting text persist: the love triangle that dominates Book Two, alongside Luz’s guilt over her past sexual betrayal, make it feel almost soapy at times. She worries frequently too about her attractiveness, particularly her attractiveness to men – her 'fat Chicana ass', her thin top lip, her filthy hair. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking to hope that I would be hung up on loftier things in the apocalypse (certainly my browser history, with its tally of eBay visits and skincare vlogs, would suggest otherwise). But I’m unsure that bushy brows, or my boyfriend’s enjoyment of my emaciated breasts, is what would keep me awake at night in a future where my primary liquid intake consisted of bottles of expired cola.

In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Watkins expressed her irritation with the ‘traditional’ genre of dystopian fiction, suggesting that all too often:

It’s just one note. It’s just: it’s dire. We’re plod, plod, plodding along, one foot in front of the other, and the ash is grey – and it’s just the same emotional key struck again and again and again. And I wondered: how come nobody’s ever having sex in the apocalypse? Or telling jokes? [13]

I’m all for having sex in the apocalypse. But surely sex in the apocalypse (and in a world where infertility is rife) ought to be darker, messier and decidedly queerer than this? Instead, the queerest it gets is when Luz submits to an unconvincing tantric partnership with two other women – something she does mostly unwillingly – in an effort to impress the gruff, messianic figure with whom she has fallen “in love”. [14] Perhaps I was expecting something closer to the monstrous, playful sexuality that abides in the work of Angela Carter or Leonora Carrington. At the very least, I hoped that abusive men (or, indeed, ‘benevolent’ men who infantilise women with terms of endearment like ‘baby girl’) might have become extinct. Instead, women still bear the scars of men’s desire – one character in particular, Dallas, does so visibly. Far from anarchic or carnivalesque, sex in Watkins’s apocalypse doesn’t look like all that much fun.

Perhaps one cause of the enduring “brokenness” of its characters, Gold Fame Citrus subscribes to a brand of narrative determinism that dooms us to repeat our mistakes, whether personal or ecological. This transpires most strongly in the novel’s sustained focus on motherhood, together with Ray and Luz's struggle to preserve the figure of the quasi-nuclear family. In this way, the novel appears to harbour a myth of reproductive futurism, wherein survivalism is actually about fighting for our children, not ourselves. [15] It takes the discovery of a child to break through the inertia of Laurel Canyon; notably, it is only once this dream has collapsed, itself becoming unsustainable, that the novel (along with Luz and Ray’s journey) can end. In turn, like Luz before her, Ig is co-opted by a new Manson-esque “family” as a PR object – destined to become the shining face of the campaign to save the Amargosa Sea. In a future plagued by sterility a child is, by its very nature, given over to symbolism. Perhaps this reproductive cliché is unavoidable in dystopian fiction. In his book Liquid Love, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that in our anxious, unsettled times even children have become ‘objects of emotional consumption’, commodities over which we deliberate long and hard before deciding whether or not to ‘invest’ [16]. The act of family-making thus entails a kind of risk assessment; as it transpires, the cost of such attachment proves too great for Luz to bear.

Like love or desire, natural disaster exposes our ineluctable vulnerability to external forces, whether the material impacts nature, or the whims of other. This fact was showcased only recently. Just a few months ago in January 2018, wildfires raged across California’s forests, decimating over 281,900 acres and forcing some 230,000 to evacuate their homes. The chronic drought afflicting the state seems to indicate that, more likely than not, this will only become a broader pattern of events in the future. The fires have also been shown to have long-term negative health impacts particularly for pregnant women, children, the elderly and those of lower socioeconomic status – all of whom have a greater propensity towards asthma, and other respiratory diseases. For humans then, the dystopia Watkins envisions seems already on the cusp of unfolding. And yet, despite the dryness, the desert also teems with life. Ojai Valley, California, originally settled by the Chumash tribe, lies a couple of hours away from L.A. An uncommonly fertile region, wildflowers, olives, apricots, oranges, almonds, as well as “pixie” tangerines all thrive there [17]. Though touched by the fires, this April the valley will witness a rare botanical event: “fire followers”, a particular kind of seed that is activated by exposure to flames [18]. Where most plants can take years to grow after burning, these are germinated only ‘when stimulated by intense heat��: ‘“[Flowers like] cacomite and mariposa lily have co-evolved with fire for millions of years. They’re impossible to start from seed — you literally have to set it on fire, or put it in proximity to smoke, to activate the seed”’. [19] In this parched landscape, it may be the task of the nonhuman to flourish.

Footnotes

[1] See Lisa Cholodenko’s 2002 film, Laurel Canyon.

[2] Less well-known are the 1981 ‘Four on the Floor Murders’, in which three members and one associate of the “Wonderland Gang” drug-ring died a few doors down from the home of then-California Governor, Jerry Brown.

[3] Joan Didion, The White Album (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), p. 15.

[4] See Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts (London: Vintage, 2016).

[5] Didion, p. 59.

[6] See Wikipedia for a fascinating (and more thorough) exposition of these events: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars>

[7] A second diversion in 1941 re-routed water away from outlying farmlands and away from the Mono Lake, forcing its ecosystem (integral to sustaining the patterns of migratory birds) into a state of total depletion.

[8] Glenn Albrecht et. al, ‘Sostalgia: the distress caused by environmental change’, Australasian Psychiatry, 15 (2007), 95–98 (p. 95).

[9] Later, the trustworthiness of the bestiary and its “neo-fauna” are called into question by the fact of Levi's duplicity and psychosis. Though it is inferred that it was probably a fabrication, this remains unresolved at the novel's close.

[10] Emily St. John Mandel, ‘“Gold Fame Citrus”, by Claire Vaye Watkins’, New York Times, 2 October 2015 <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/books/review/gold-fame-citrus-by-claire-vaye-watkins.html> [Accessed 27 March 2018].

[11] For more on the Yucca Mountain revival see: <http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-stranded-nuclear-waste-20170702-htmlstory.html> and <https://knpr.org/knpr/2018-03/yucca-mountain-legislative-action-budget-request-expected-soon>

[12] See Slavoj Zizek, ‘The Family Myth of Ideology', in In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), p. 55.

[13] Alex Clark, ‘Claire Vaye Watkins: "How come nobody’s ever having sex in the apocalypse?"’, The Guardian, 31 January 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/31/claire-vaye-watkins-gold-fame-citrus> [Accessed 25 March 2018].

[14] Levi’s own interest in female pleasure is apparently so lacking that we are – in an offhand detail – he has never once performed oral sex during the length of his affair with Luz.

[15] See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

[16] See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).

[17] Alex Schechter, '"Fire followers" to bloom in California after deadly wildfires', 27 March 2018 <https://www.aol.com/article/weather/2018/03/27/fire-followers-to-bloom-in-california-after-deadly-wildfires/23396358/> [Accessed 5 April 2018].

[18] Schechter, '"Fire followers"'.

[19] Schechter, '"Fire followers"'.

Bibliography

Albrecht, Glenn et. al, ‘Sostalgia: the distress caused by environmental change’, Australasian Psychiatry, 15 (2007), 95–98.

Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003)

Clark, Alex, ‘Claire Vaye Watkins: "How come nobody’s ever having sex in the apocalypse?"’, The Guardian, 31 January 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/31/claire-vaye-watkins-gold-fame-citrus>

Didion, Joan, The White Album (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

Schechter, Alex, '"Fire followers" to bloom in California after deadly wildfires', 27 March 2018 <https://www.aol.com/article/weather/2018/03/27/fire-followers-to-bloom-in-california-after-deadly-wildfires/23396358/>.

St. John Mandel, Emily, ‘"Gold Fame Citrus", by Claire Vaye Watkins’, New York Times, 2 October 2015 <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/books/review/gold-fame-citrus-by-claire-vaye-watkins.html>.

Vaye Watkins, Claire, Gold Fame Citrus (London: Quercus, 2015).

Zizek, Slavoj, In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008).

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