#ethan cord | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

orphicdreamers-wp · 8 months ago

Text

Scared Of My Guitar — Luke Hughes

Summary; In which you and Luke both come to terms that your situation is wrong but neither of you can let go.

Content Warning; pure sadness(not really angst) , situation-ship, use of the names Jules, Parker, Katya and Bailee. Readers pov is with the pink lyrics, Luke is with the red.

Pairing; Music Major Reader & UMich Luke

Perfect, easy, so good to me. So why’s there a pit in my gut in the shape of you?

Part of you growing up believed you were unlovable. You were an only child to two busy parents. Your mother was a criminal defense attorney and your father was a renowned neurosurgeon. So a lot of your childhood was being raised by your babysitters over the years. Throughout high school you never had relationships, not because you didn’t want to but because it seemed that no one wanted to have a relationship with you.

So meeting Luke your freshman year at University of Michigan and being oddly pulled to him terrified you. By then you had ultimately decided that you had little to no interest in being someone’s girlfriend. And contrary to your sorority sisters Jules and Parker, that never changed when you started whatever you and Luke were doing. Part of you yearned for a relationship especially watching your best friend Kayta and her boyfriend JJ and Bailee and Ethan have perfect relationships.

But whenever you thought of being someone’s girlfriend it made you nauseous. You just had no interest of being anyone’s girlfriend. And everything someone called you Luke’s girlfriend a doomed feeling arose in your chest.

Barely sleep when you’re sleeping next to me.

Early into whatever you and Luke had started after hooking up in the bathroom at one of the many parties that Rutger and Luca had thrown, you guys began to frequent each other’s beds. You loved your room it was your safe place. You absolutely loved being in your bed. But oddly enough whenever Luke slept over you found it impossible to get to sleep.

You felt like you were being a horrible person, you felt like you were giving to less to Luke than he was giving to you. You were worried that your inability to desire a relationship would somehow hurt Luke so you just kept your mouth shut. Even when it caused you to lose sleep over.

But I’m so scared of my guitar cause it cuts right through to the heart.

You had been cleaning your room up before Luke was coming over for the weekend and you ran your fingers across your guitar, pulling away with dust covered fingers. You had been avoiding using your guitar because your music came from the heart and you were unsure you wanted to voice how you truly were feeling about your situation with Luke.

I can’t lie to it the same way I lie to you

You and Luke had been lying in your bed later that night watching Suits on your tv when Luke spoke, “You should come to the lake house with me this summer. My brothers can’t wait to meet you.” Your eyes darted to your guitar absentmindedly before you smiled softly as Luke looked up at you and you lied straight through your teeth, “Of course I will. That sounds so fun.” Luke hummed as you massaged his scalp lightly, “I’m glad you think so.”

I’m so scared of my guitar if I play it, then I’ll think too hard

Luke had gone to Vancouver with his parents and Jack for Quinn’s birthday so you had a little bit of free time to yourself to be in your head. You sat cross legged on your bedroom floor with your acoustic guitar resting on your lap. You had been brainstorming a song for your spring showcase and it was not going well when Luke was around. He sort of fogged up your musical thought process.

You picked up the guitar and began to strum the cords at random until you felt your cheeks dampen with tears. You set it on the floor beside you and pressed your back against your bed and let the tears stream down your face, not having the energy to fight them back. You barely lifted your head when your bedroom door creaked open. Katya popped her head in and her facial features softened when she noticed you were crying, “Oh baby, are you okay?” You shook your head and sniffled, “I don’t think so. I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Katya sat on the floor beside you and pulled you into a heartfelt embrace, “Nothing is wrong with you sweet girl. Do you want me to call Luke?” You shook your head, “No he’s on his way back from his brothers. I don’t wanna bother him”

So I lay in your arms and pretend that it’s love.

Luke had come straight to your place after he left the airport. He had brought you one of your favorite snacks that you’d mentioned liking when you had met early on. You should have melted inside when he did but you didn’t. Luke had sworn up and down that all he wanted to do for the night was just hold you because he missed his girl. So you let him, you laid in his arms in your bed as Tangled played from your laptop. That had been the only time you had ever in any way convinced yourself that you could love being Luke Hughes’ girlfriend one day

If I was brave and noble like you I’d have the nerve to just stop stringing you along.

Luke wasn’t a bad person by any means, but the relationship or lack of made him feel like he was. It wasn’t that he intentionally started the situation with you with the intention of it not working. He just wanted his brothers to stop bothering him about not being over his ex. And then he met you. You were simple to know and easy to love. Luke would admit he had grown to love you over the year and half you two had been involved.

But he was never in love with you. He loved you because you were funny, he loved you because you watched the same tv shows as him, he loved you because he could beat you in a video game and the next round you’d beat him, he loved you because you were a good friend. Loving you as his friend was easy, he would truthfully call you his best friend. But he never saw you and him being together romantically in a serious relationship.

I’d rather be tied to someone, even if they’re wrong.

But you and Luke fell into the groove of being slightly more than friends but way less than a relationship. You guys would hold hands, go on dates, sleep together and everything in between. But you two were never going to be in a relationship. And Luke was okay with that until his mother invited the both of you to the lake house for the entire summer. And when he asked you about it you agreed a little too quickly. So Luke was sure to make it known to you that you were not his girlfriend.

But when that summer came and you joined him at the lake house and meshed perfectly with everyone in his life, he knew he had made a mistake bringing you. You and his mother had shopped for linens and you had won her over by purchasing what she had picked out instead of letting her. You had won his father over by offering to man the grill and when the steaks turned out better than when his father made them, Jim had asked you to come back every summer. You’d win Jack and Trevor over by beating both of them in beer pong multiple times. You had won Quinn over by your infatuation with working out, none of the other inhabitants of the lake house were up at 4 am going to the gym besides you and Quinn. So two ended up going together every morning for the remainder of the summer.

But despite his entire family adoring you, Luke still wasn’t seeing you in a romantic way. But he wasn’t going to give up what he had to try and find something else.

Say that I’m fine, I tell them all the time as they watch all the light fade away.

Luke’s teammates had begun to notice something was off with Luke following that summer. He had grown irritable and easy to piss off. He had always been spending less time with you. His friends had asked him if he was okay and they always received the same answer, a grumbled out ‘I’m fine.’ They were in no way believing it but they knew better than to push any further.

Cause what if I never find anything better?

Following summer Luke had been conflicted. You were everything a guy could ever dream of. So why wasn’t Luke in love with you? You were smart, kind, funny, good with kids, parents loved you, and you were easily jaw dropping stunning. Luke felt bad keeping you to himself when he wasn’t in love but how would he find anyone better than you?

So we’ll stay together cause how could I ever trade something that’s good for what’s right

So he kept his mouth shut and kept whatever you had going on. He didn’t want to trade a perfectly good friendship with things you’d have in a relationship, for what could have been. He didn’t want to take that chance.

I let the thought in, it’s already done.

Summer had changed everything for you. You fell in love with Luke’s family and Luke himself. He had such a welcoming family who made you truly feel like you were a part of something. You and Luke were laying in his bed, you were sure Luke was asleep. It was 3:02 in the morning. He had to be, he was laying in your arms. You whispered through the darkness secretly hoping Luke heard you, “I’m in love with you Luke Hughes.” You had closed your eyes after and were met with silence like you always were. “Yeah me too.” Oh..

Yeah I lay in your arms and pretend it’s enough.

Luke closed his eyes as he could feel the vibe in his bedroom shift. He was pretending to be asleep to avoid any confrontation with you. Your soft voice filled his ears, “I’m in love with you Luke Hughes.” He should have felt something right?

#fanfic #hockey player x reader #hockey #umich hockey #umich imagine #lh44 #luke hughes x y/n #luke hughes x reader #luke hughes #luke hughes fic #angst #sad #scared of my guitar #guts deluxe

58 notes · View notes

3thansl4ndry · 2 years ago

Text

never felt so alone

pairing - ethan landry x fem!reader

summary - ethan's conflicting emotions come out to play when he realises what he has to do to avenge his brother.

cw - canon violence, intended lower case, angst, character death, swearing

a/n - my first ethan landry fic im so fucking terrified, i kinda hate but also love this.

word count - 1.5k

ethan knew that he didn't want to kill you. his sister, quinn, had picked you out for him, you would be ethan's first real kill following on from what had happened in New York - you would also, as it turns out, be his first real girlfriend. you were the perfect first kill, you lived alone; your parents were killed in a car accident when you were 12, and since they had burned all of their bridges with their extended family members, you were left to the broken foster care system, of which you were released when you turned 18 - it was perfect, ethan would kill you, and no one would miss you. that was the initial plan, until ethan found himself getting attached to you - he didn't actually love you, did he?

he knew he loved you when he realized he couldn't end your life the way that his father and sister wanted him to. he knew that there was no one in your family that would miss you, but he would - he would miss the feeling he got in his tummy when he would fall asleep in your bed with you beside him, he'd often wake up with your arm in his face from the way you sprawled out when you slept, but he never minded. he would miss the way that you make jokes about his geek-ish interests, about how you never understood the order of any of the star wars or the marvel movies he loved - and despite all of your jabs at his interests, you watched every single movie with him, even if you were bored to death, his excitement at the little details made your heart warm.

it was all of these things that made what ethan was about to do all the much more difficult. he really, really didn't want to kill you. but he had to. he had to do it, to finish of his brother's movie and honour his legacy - to try and make his father proud. however, ethan wasn't sure if all of those factors were worth your life. before he could rethink his choices, he crouched down by the wall of your apartment building, holding onto the railing of the fire escape as he pulled out his phone - double checking that his caller id was off, if it wasn't, he wouldn't do it - and called your number.

you looked over at your desk as you heard your phone vibrating, shoving your laptop off of your lap and pushing your duvet off, you got out of bed to go and investigate who was calling you, your brows furrowing as you saw that the number was withheld. you unplugged your phone, letting the cord drop to the floor as you held the device to your ear, accepting the call.

"hello?"

ethan poked his head up, making sure you were focused on the call, but he couldn't think of anything to say to you, opting to stay silent as he tried his hardest to quietly break into your apartment. guilt was starting to eat at him, he had told you he couldn't hang out with you tonight, saying he had econ and he would see you the next day to make it up to you, even though he knew that the likelihood was that you would be bleeding out by the next day, dead in your apartment. when you heard nothing but radio silence on the other end of the line, your heart rate picked up, along with your adrenaline levels - you had seen a lot of horror movies, and claimed you would be smarter than any of the girls that they portrayed in them, this was the moment that you know that all of that was out of the window.

"This isn't fucking funny," you scolded the person on the other end of the line, you didn't have time for childish bullshit like this. you turned around, swallowing hard as you saw the figure of a ghostface standing on your fire escape, the dark figure illuminated by the streetlight and the light provided by the moon. acting fast and on your pure adrenaline, you reached for the knife you kept tucked in between your mattress and bedframe, gripping it tightly in your hands. you jumped back as the figure threw themself through your bedroom window, smashing the glass into pieces as they fell to the floor with a grunt before quickly picking themselves up before charging at you. you sprinted out of your room and down the hallway, where the masked person followed you to. "What do you want?" you tried your hardest not to show how terrified you truly were.

ethan knew that you were scared, but he wanted this over with. he would make it quick for you, hell, maybe he'd even tell you it was him, maybe it would make it hurt less, but there was something not right, he watched as your fear turned into...excitement? what was going on? he moved towards you, only to be met with a picture frame smashing over his head, the glass shattering as it fell to the floor.

"stay the fuck back. i'm warning you," you waved the knife in front of the ghostface's mask, noticing they had dropped their weapon in your attack. "you think you can come in here and just try and kill me? yeah, nice try. the last people who tried that ended up in a car wreck, brake failure." ethan's heart dropped. you had killed your parents? now it all made sense. your reluctance to talk about what had happened was not merely a trauma thing, it was a murder thing. ethan now realised he was now both the prey and the predator, either one of you could be the crime scene in the days following, this was yours and his game now. before he could react, you shoved your knife through ethan's shoulder, forcing him onto the ground, you pushed through his back, driving the knife into the floor of your apartment. acting upon an adrenaline rush, ethan pulled your knife out of his shoulder, anger flooding him - you were going to kill him?

no, he couldn't have that. he had something to prove. suddenly, the entire way ethan felt about you changed - your life to him was no longer of any importance. his anger took over as he discarded the ghostface mask, you didn't deserve to die thinking that he loved you anymore.

"ethan?" your voice waivered. no. no no no no no. ethan, your sweet, dorky, nerdy boyfriend was trying to kill you. you no longer felt as confident as you did, your heart breaking as ethan got up onto his feet, gripping your knife. he chuckled as he pointed your own weapon at you. "no. what...what are you doing?"

"what do you think i'm doing? you think i'd show you my face if i was gonna let you live? oh, you sweet, dumb thing," you were convinced this was another ethan, this wasn't your boyfriend - this was just a monster that possessed his body - he told you that he loved you, no one had told you that before. you trusted him more than anyone in the world. you struggled in ethan's strong grip as he held you, your back to his chest. "you know, i really did love you," he told you. "well, that was until you tried to kill me, bitch."

before you could react, he drove the knife into your stomach, twisting the offending weapon as he plunged the knife further into your abdomen.

"ethan! please stop!" you begged him, your hand covering his as it held the knife which stuck out of your stomach. you screamed as he dragged the blade up your torso, cutting into and slicing through your intestines. "please! i love you!"

he started to feel guilty again. but he had committed now, what would you say at the hospital if he let you go? the police would take a statement, you would stick him into the cops. no, he had to follow through now. he pulled the knife out of your stomach, and took a minute to look at your blood on his hands - bright red and a stark contrast against the paleness of his hands, the blood loss from the stab wound on his shoulder. ethan held you up since you had started to slump, the life draining out of you along with all of your blood. he jerked you back before plunging the knife into your chest repeatedly, you didn't have it in you to beg or plead anymore, blood trickling out of your mouth as your boyfriend made hole after hole in your torso. feeling you go limp, ethan dropped your lifeless body onto the floor, still bleeding out from the holes in your chest and stomach.

ethan watched you lay there, blood spilling out from your body and onto your white carpet. his heart broke this time, the realisation of what he had done hitting him. he had killed you, and you loved him, you trusted him and loved him, and he did this to you.

#ethan landry #ethan bailey #ethan kirsch #ethan landry x reader #ethan bailey x reader #ethan kirsch x reader #scream 6 #x read #ethan x reader #angst #scream fanfic #jack champion

273 notes · View notes

slippinmickeys · 6 months ago

Note

I am so deeply immersed and in love with your stories. Soon after reading all of the new POL prompts, Taylor Swift’s ‘invisible string’ came up on shuffle and my brain went back to that world. I’m wondering if you could write something inspired by that song? Love your work. <3 pobmmm

Their first goodbye since Paris. Their first promise to call, to write. On their last parting, they were pulled apart by soldiers; echoing shouts in a stairway, the chaos of fighting, of war, the cacophony of helicopters pulling them apart. This feels both somewhat better, and much, much worse.

***

She has to go back to DC. She’s been on leave from CNN, but has to commit to desertion. There is paperwork to sign, exit interviews, a stilted handshake with Ethan, a warm hug from Kirby. Her mother’s Baltimore guest room awaits.

He has a meeting in New York; a gallery wants to display ‘1055.’ There is money to be made, profit squeezed from tragedy. It will be Scully’s face hanging from the walls of an industrial space in Tribeca, but Mulder who will reap the rewards.

“You’re sure this is okay?” he asks for the twenty third time. And for the twenty fourth she tells him the zoetrope of their tragedy is a love story with a happy ending, and that light in dark places should always be shared so that it can grow.

He nods, kisses her again, tightens the backpack strap on his shoulder. She smiles, but pulling away feels like something breaking, like entering into an unnatural state of being, knocking the symmetry of life off-kilter. They’ll only be a train ride away, she says.

Still, something in his chest stretches tight.

***

“Do you feel it?” he asks.

She has the phone to her ear, her head on the low arm of her mother’s dark floral sofa. The lights are mostly off, the only sound the ticking of a dark-stained mantle clock. The air is still redolent with the oily smell of roast chicken and she can’t remember if her mother wants her to leave the dim stove-top light on overnight or turn it off before she retires. It doesn’t matter. The grand scheme-big picture stuff is louder than it used to be, leaving minutiae buried in its subtle wake.

Instead of asking Mulder what he means, she closes her eyes and flings her psyche to the hovering air around her, trying to commune with whatever energy he claims to be casting out. Ridiculous, usually, but she feels something tonight, a pull behind the bones of her chest. Not something propelling her forward so much as holding her up.

“Yes,” he says, “That.” A brief tug on the invisible string that connects them, that is sewn through her heart, through his. It took a big needle to do it, she thinks, but the cord connecting them is gold; heavy, bright.

“When will I see you?” she asks, indecorously breathless considering where she is.

“Soon,” he says. “Soon.”

#the x-files #fanfic #my fic #msr #au #prompt #proof of life universe

39 notes · View notes

tutyayilmazz · 1 year ago

Text

The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.

The American visitor to Rome arrives with certain preconceptions that feel like stereotypes but turn out to be basically accurate. There really are mopeds flying around everywhere, and traffic seems governed by the principle that anyone can be replaced. Breakfast is coffee and cigarettes. Despite these orthopedic and nutritional hazards, everyone is better looking — not literally everyone, of course, but statistically, as if whatever selective forces that emerge from urban density have had an extra hundred generations or so to work. And they really do talk like that, an emphatic mix of vowels, gestures and car horns known as “Italian.” To be scolded in this language by a driver who wants to park in the crosswalk is to realize that some popular ideas are actually true. Also, it is hot.

The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin — arguably the only rock stars of their generation, and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time — coincided with a heat wave across Southern Europe. On that Tuesday in July the temperature hit 107 degrees. The Tiber looked thick, rippled in places and still in others, as if it were reducing. By Thursday morning the band’s vast management team was officially concerned that the night’s sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9:30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s — which was too bad, because there would be pyro.

There was no opening act, possibly because no rock band operating at this level is within 10 years of Måneskin’s age. The guitarist Thomas Raggi played the riff to “Don’t Wanna Sleep,” the lights came up and 60,000 Italians screamed. Damiano David — the band’s singer and, at age 24, its oldest member — charged out in black flared trousers and a mesh top that bisected his torso diagonally, his heavy brow and hypersymmetrical features making him look like some futuristic nomad who hunted the fishnet mammoth. Victoria De Angelis, the bassist, wore a minidress made from strips of leather or possibly bungee cords. Raggi wore nonporous pants and a black button-down he quickly discarded, while Ethan Torchio drummed in a vest with no shirt underneath, his hair flying. For the next several minutes of alternately disciplined and frenzied noise, they sounded as if Motley Crüe had been cryogenically frozen, then revived in 2010 with Rob Thomas on vocals.

That hypothetical will appeal to some while repelling others, and which category you fall into is, with all due respect, not my business here. Rolling Stone, for its part, said that Måneskin “only manage to confirm how hard rock & roll has to work these days to be noticed,” and a viral Pitchfork review called their most recent album “absolutely terrible at every conceivable level.” But this kind of thumbs up/thumbs down criticism is pretty much vestigial now that music is free. If you want to know whether you like Måneskin — the name is Danish and pronounced MOAN-eh-skin — you can fire up the internet and add to the more than nine billion streams Sony Music claims the band has accumulated across Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. As for whether Måneskin is good, de gustibus non est disputandum, as previous Italians once said: In matters of taste, there can be no arguments.

You should know, though, that even though their music has been heard most often through phone and laptop speakers, Måneskin sounds better on a soccer field. That is what tens of thousands of fans came to the Stadio Olimpico on an eyelid-scorching Thursday to experience: the culturally-if-not-personally-familiar commodity of a stadium rock show, delivered by the unprecedented phenomenon of a stadium-level Italian rock band. The pyro — 20-foot jets of swivel-articulated flame that you could feel all the way up in the mezzanine — kicked in on “Gasoline,” a song Måneskin wrote to protest Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. From a thrust platform in the center of the field, David poured his full emotive powers into the pre-chorus: “Standing alone on that hill/using your fuel to kill/we won’t take it standing still/watch us dance.”

The effect these words will have on President Putin is unknown. They capture something, though, about rock ’n’ roll, which has established certain conventions over the last seven decades. One of those conventions is an atmosphere of rebellion. It doesn’t have to be real — you probably don’t even want it to be — but neither can it seem too contrived, because the defining constraint of rock as a genre is that you have to feel it. The successful rock song creates in listeners the sensation of defying consensus, even if they are right in step with it.

The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problem of fans’ taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adolesced after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand — i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way my generation (I’m 46) experienced jazz. The members of Måneskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting this month, Måneskin will take this business on a multivenue tour of the United States — a market where they are considerably less known — whose first stop is Madison Square Garden.

“I think the genre thing is like ... ” Torchio said to me backstage in Rome, making a gesture that conveyed translingual complexity. “We can do a metaphor: If you eat fish, meat and peanuts every day, like for years, and then you discover potatoes one day, you’ll be like: ‘Wow, potatoes! I like potatoes; potatoes are great.’ But potatoes have been there the whole time.” Rock was the potato in this metaphor, and he seemed to be saying that even though many people were just now discovering that they liked it, it had actually been around for a long time. It was a revealing analogy: The implication was that rock, like the potato, is here to stay; but what if rock is, like the potato in our age of abundance, comparatively bland and no longer anyone’s favorite?

Which rock song came first is a topic of disagreement, but one strong candidate is “Rocket 88,” recorded by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythym band in 1951. It’s about a car and, in its final verse, about drinking in the car. These themes capture the context in which rock ’n’ roll emerged: a period when household incomes, availability of consumer goods and the share of Americans experiencing adolescence all increased simultaneously.

Although and possibly because rock started as Black music, it found a gigantic audience of white teenagers during the so-called British Invasion of the mid-1960s (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who), which made it the dominant form of pop music for the next two decades. The stadium/progressive era (Journey, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner) that now constitutes the bulk of classic-rock radio gave way, eventually, to punk (the Ramones, Patti Smith, Minor Threat) and then glam metal: Twisted Sister, Guns N’ Roses and various other hair-intensive bands that were obliterated by the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam in 1991. This shift can be understood as the ultimate triumph of punk, both in its return to emotive content expressed through simpler arrangements and in its professed hostility toward the music industry itself. After 1991, suspicion of anything resembling pop became a mark of seriousness among both rock critics and fans.

It is probably not a coincidence that this period is also when rock’s cultural hegemony began to wane. As the ’90s progressed, larger and again whiter audiences embraced hip-hop, and the last song classified as “rock” to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 was Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” in 2001. The run of bands that became popular during the ’00s — the Strokes, the Killers, Kings of Leon — constituted rock’s last great commercial gasp, but none of their singles charted higher than No. 4. Let us say, then, that the era of rock as pop music lasted from 1951 to 2011. That’s a three-generation run, if you take seriously rock’s advice to get drunk and have sex in the car and therefore produce children at around age 20. Baby boomers were the generation that made rock a zillion-dollar industry; Gen X saved it from that industry with punk and indie, and millennials closed it all out playing Guitar Hero.

The members of Måneskin are between the ages of 22 and 24, situating them firmly within the cadre of people who understand rock in the past tense. De Angelis, the bassist, and Raggi, the guitarist, formed the band when they were both attending a music-oriented middle school; David was a friend of friends, while Torchio was the only person who responded to their Facebook ad seeking a drummer. There are few entry-level rock venues in Rome, so they started by busking on the streets. In 2017, they entered the cattle-call audition for the Italian version of “The X Factor.” They eventually finished as runners-up to the balladeer Lorenzo Licitra, and an EP of songs they performed on the show was released by Sony Music and went triple platinum.

In 2021, Måneskin won the Sanremo Music Festival, earning the right to represent Italy with their song “Zitti e Buoni” (whose title roughly translates to “shut up and behave”) in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. This program is not widely viewed in the United States, but it is a gigantic deal in Europe, and Måneskin won. Not long after, they began to appear on international singles charts, and “I Wanna Be Your Slave” broke the British Top 10. A European tour followed, as well as U.S. appearances at festivals and historic venues.

This ascent to stardom was not unmarred by controversy. The Eurovison live broadcast caught David bending over a table offstage, and members of the media accused him of snorting cocaine. David insisted he was innocent and took a drug test, which he passed, but Måneskin and their management still seem indignant about the whole affair. It’s exactly this kind of incongruous detail — this damaging rumor that a rock star did cocaine — that highlights how the Italian music-consuming public differs from the American one. Many elements of Måneskin’s presentation, like the cross-dressing and the occasional male-on-male kiss, are genuinely upsetting to older Italians, even as they seem familiar or even hackneyed to audiences in the United States.

“They see a band of young, good-looking guys that are dressing up too much, and then it’s not pure rock ’n’ roll, because you’re not in a garage, looking ugly,” De Angelis says. “The more conservative side, they’re shocked because of how we dress or move onstage, or the boys wear makeup.”

She and her bandmates are caught between two demographics: the relatively conservative European audience that made them famous and the more tolerant if not downright desensitized American audience that they must impress to keep the ride moving. And they do have to keep it moving, because — like many rock stars before them — most of the band dropped out of high school to do this. At one point, Raggi told me that he had sat in on some classes at a university, “Just to try to understand, ‘What is that?’”

One question that emerged early in my discussions with Måneskin’s friendly and professional management team was whether I was going to say that their music was bad. This concern seemed related to the aforementioned viral Pitchfork review, in which the editor Jeremy Larson wrote that their new album, “RUSH!” sounds “like it’s made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150” and “seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom” en route to a score of 2.0 (out of 10). While the members of Måneskin seemed to take this review philosophically, their press liaisons were concerned that I was coming to Italy to have a similar type of fun.

Here I should disclose that Larson edited an essay I wrote for Pitchfork about the Talking Heads album “Remain in Light” (score: 10.0) and that I think of myself as his friend. Possibly because of these biases, I read his review as reflecting his deeply held and, among rock fans, widely shared need to feel the music, something that the many pop/commercial elements of “RUSH!” (e.g. familiar song structures, lyrics that seem to have emerged from a collaboration between Google Translate and Nikki Sixx, compulsive use of multiband compression) left him unable to do.

This perspective reflects the post-’90s rock consensus (PNRC) that anything that sounds too much like a mass-market product is no good. The PNRC is premised on the idea that rock is not just a structure of song but also a structure of relationship between the band and society. From rock’s earliest days as Black music, the real or perceived opposition between rocker and society has been central to its appeal; this adversarial relationship animated the youth and counterculture eras of the ’60s and then, when the economic dominance of mass-market rock made it impossible to believe in, provoked the revitalizing backlash of punk. Even major labels felt obliged to play into this paradoxical worldview, e.g. that period after Nirvana when the most popular genre of music was called “alternative.” Måneskin, however, are defined by their isolation from the PNRC. They play rock music, but operate according to the logic of pop.

In Milan, where Måneskin would finish their Italian minitour, I had lunch with the band, as well as two of their managers, Marica Casalinuovo and Fabrizio Ferraguzzo. Casalinuovo had been an executive producer working on “The X Factor,” and Ferraguzzo was its musical director; around the time that Måneskin broke through, Casalinuovo and Ferraguzzo left the show and began working with the stars it had made. We were at the in-house restaurant of Moysa, the combination recording studio, soundstage, rehearsal space, offices, party venue and “creative playground” that Ferraguzzo opened two months earlier. After clarifying that he was in no way criticizing major record labels and the many vendors they engaged to record, promote and distribute albums, he laid out his vision for Moysa, a place where all those functions were performed by a single corporate entity — basically describing the concept of vertical integration.

Ferraguzzo oversaw the recording of “RUSH!” along with a group of producers that included Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker best known for his work with Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. At Moysa, Ferraguzzo played for me Måneskin’s then-unreleased new single, “Honey (Are U Coming?)” which features many of the band’s signature moves — guitar and bass playing the same melodic phrases at the same time, unswung boogie-type rhythm of the post-Strokes style — but also has David singing in a higher register than usual. I listened to it first on studio monitors and then through the speaker of Ferraguzzo’s phone, and it sounded clean and well produced both times, as if a team of industry veterans with unlimited access to espresso had come together to perfect it.

“There’s hundreds of people working and talking about you and giving opinions,” De Angelis said at lunch. “So if you start to get in this loop of wanting to know and control and being anxious about it, it really ruins everything.” Here lies the conflict between what the PNRC wants from a band — resistance to outside influences, contempt for commerce, authenticity as measured in doing everything themselves — and what any sane 23-year-old would want, which is to have someone with an M.B.A. make all the decisions so she can concentrate on playing bass.

The other way Måneskin is isolated from the PNRC is geographic. Over the course of lunch, it became clear that they had encyclopedic knowledge of certain eras in American rock history but were only dimly aware of others. Raggi, for instance, loves Motley Crüe and has an album-by-album command of the Los Angeles hair-metal band Skid Row, which he and his bandmates seemed to understand were supposed to be guilty pleasures. But none of them had ever heard of Fugazi, the post-hardcore band whose hatred of major labels, refusal to sell merchandise and commitment to keeping ticket prices as low as possible set the standard for a generation of American rock snobs. In general, Måneskin’s timeline of influences seems to break off around 1990, when the rock most respected by Anglophone critics was produced by independent labels that did not have strong overseas distribution. It picks up again with Franz Ferdinand and the “emo” era of mainstream pop rock. This retrospect leaves them unaware of the indie/punk/D.I.Y. period that was probably most important in forming the PNRC.

The question is whether that consensus still matters. While snobs like Larson and me are overrepresented in journalism, we never constituted a majority of rock fans. That’s the whole point of being a snob. And snobbery is obsolete anyway; digital distribution ended the correlation between how obscure your favorite band was and how much effort you put into listening to them. The longevity of rock ’n’ roll as a genre, meanwhile, has solidified a core audience that is now between the ages of 40 and 80, rendering the fan-versus-society dimension of the PNRC impossible to believe. And the economics of the industry — in which streaming has reduced the profit margin on recorded music, and the closure of small venues has made stadiums and big auditoriums the only reliable way to make money on tour — have decimated the indie model. All these forces have converged to make rock, for the first time in its history, merely a way of writing songs instead of a way of life.

Yet rock as a cluster of signifiers retains its power around the world. In the same way everyone knows what a castle is and what it signifies, even though actual castles are no longer a meaningful force in our lives, rock remains a shared language of cultural expression even though it is no longer determining our friendships, turning children against their parents, yelling truth at power, et cetera. Also like a castle, a lot of people will pay good money to see a preserved historical example of rock or even a convincing replica of it, especially in Europe.

In Milan, the temperature had dropped 20 degrees, and Måneskin’s show at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza — commonly known as San Siro, the largest stadium in Italy, sold out that night at 60,000 — was threatened by thunderstorms instead of record-breaking heat. Fans remained undaunted: Many camped in the parking lot the night before in order to be among the first to enter the stadium. One of them was Tamara, an American who reported her age as 60½ and said she had skipped a reservation to see da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in order to stay in line. “When you get to knocking on the door, you kind of want to do what you want,” she said.

The threat of rain was made good at pretty much the exact moment the show began. The sea of black T-shirts on the pitch became a field of multicolored ponchos, and raindrops were bouncing visibly off the surface of the stage. David lost his footing near the end of “I Wanna Be Your Slave,” briefly rolling to his back, while De Angelis — who is very good at making lips-parted-in-ecstasy-type rock faces — played with her eyes turned upward to the flashing sky, like a martyr.

The rain stopped in time for “Kool Kids,” a punk-inspired song in which David affects a Cockney accent to sing about the vexed cultural position of rock ’n’ roll: “Cool kids, they do not like rock/they only listen to trap and pop.” These are probably the Måneskin lyrics most quoted by music journalists, although they should probably be taken with a grain of salt, considering that the song also contains lyrics like “I like doin’ things I love, yeah” and “Cool kids, they do not vomit.”

“Kool Kids” was the last song before the encore, and each night a few dozen good-looking 20-somethings were released onto the stage to dance and then, as the band walked off, to make we’re-not-worthy bows around Raggi’s abandoned guitar. The whole thing looked at least semichoreographed, but management assured me that the Kool Kids were not professional dancers — just enthusiastic fans who had been asked if they wanted to be part of the show. I kept trying to meet the person in charge of wrangling these Kool Kids, and there kept being new reasons that was not possible.

The regular kids, on the other hand, were available and friendly throughout. In Rome, Dorca and Sara, two young members of a Måneskin fan club, saw my notebook and shot right over to tell me they loved the band because, as Sara put it, “they allow you to be yourself.” When asked whether they felt their culture was conservative in ways that prevented them from being themselves, Dorca — who was 21 and wearing eyeglasses that looked like part of her daily wardrobe and a mesh top that didn’t — said: “Maybe it turns out that you can be yourself. But you don’t know that at first. You feel like you can’t.”

Here lies the element of rock that functions independently from the economics of the industry or the shifting preferences of critics, the part that is maybe independent from time itself: the continually renewed experience of adolescence, of hearing and therefore feeling it all for the first time. But how disorienting must those feelings be when they have been fully monetized, fully sanctioned — when the response to your demand to rock ’n’ roll all night and party every day is, “Great, exactly, thank you.” In a culture where defying consensus is the dominant value, anything is possible except rebellion. It must be strange, in this post-everything century, to finally become yourself and discover that no one has any problem with that.

#måneskin #maneskin #i had a free nyt article so here you go #the article is so painfully a middle aged american perspective #which the author admits #and like thinking the fans on stage is staged?!??#or like how there can be no more authentic rebellion - maybe that's what it's like from your cushy position #but doesn't go into tdi at all #the stuff about the industry surrounding them i agree and its worth the read though

82 notes · View notes

little-annie · 2 years ago

Text

Something More | Little_Annie

The smuty start to something more

TW homophobic language & threats

He's not gay. He's not.

But he'd be lying if he said his eyes didn't linger in the change rooms or on the court every once in a while.

But he'd be lying if he said there wasn't anything he found intriguing about other men. But it's just appreciation, that's all it is. He can appreciate Billy Hargrove's toned exterior, his tanned skin and piercing blue eyes. He can appreciate 'The Freak's,' slender frame, bouncy curls and deep chocolate gaze. Or Jake's biceps or Ethan's smile or Andrew's laugh. He can appreciate all of it, doesn't mean he's attracted to them. Doesn't mean he's gay. He can't be. He likes women.

He likes women so much he has a new one under his tongue weekly, sometimes even daily. He likes their soft skin, their gentle curves, their buttery moans. The way they wither and whine beneath him. The way they scream his name and claw his back.

But if he's being honest, it hasn't been enough lately.

Who would've thought 'The King' would have issues getting off, let alone getting it up. He's found himself in that unfortunate scenario more often than he'd like to admit lately. Choosing to eat a girl out not only because he wants to but because he can't get hard enough to fuck her or lord forbid fake an orgasm because he can't get off and his mind is trying to wander to places he really doesn't want it to.

But those times when he does let his mind wander, well, then there's no problem at all. Smooth sailing. It's just that he's maybe imagining corded muscle and strong hands versus the delicate body and dainty touch he's experiencing.

He's not gay. He just needs more.

And well, maybe he has an idea on how to get more.

You see, he's heard rumours, saw the scribings on the bathroom stalls. He knows or at least he thinks he knows who he can go to for… more. Though his past assholery might make that a little difficult.

He wouldn't say he's proud of how he treats people; the geeks, the freaks, the band nerds. But it's not like he's the one doing it, he just doesn't say anything when it's Tommy or another jock being the asshole. As much as people make him out to be the bad guy, he just doesn't like conflict, doesn't want to get in the way, doesn't want to be the nuisance, doesn't want to step in front of it for the chance of a crushing blow to the side of his skull. Lord knows he gets enough of that at home.

So yeah, maybe when Tommy is sneering down at 'The Freak,' snarling slurs and ramming his head into the cold steel of the lockers, he doesn't say anything, only stands off to the side and avoids eye contact because he can't quite bring himself to intervene and can't quite bring himself to contribute to the abuse.

It's an unfortunate thing because he's pretty damn sure 'The Freak' is the only guy he can go to for 'more.' The guy the scribings in the bathroom stalls speak of, the guy the whispers in the halls talk about. The guy said to give the best head of your life if you go to the bleachers after school.

He's not gay. He just needs more.

And that desire for more leads him to the belly of the bleachers, waiting impatiently after the last bell rings to see a leather clad man with appreciable brown eyes and flowing hair. It's only a few minutes that Steve has to wait before he sees him, leather and black, thick silver rings and an air of attitude. The definition of more.

"The fuck are you doing here Rich Boy?"

He can't quite bring himself to respond to the man's teasing tone, doesn't think he's ever actually talked to 'The Freak.' His voice, syrupy and thick, forces a knot to twist behind Steve's navel. He winces at the sensation, watching the other man approach with a daunting stride of confidence.

Why's his mouth so dry?

"Hey Pretty Boy, I'm talking to you."

He's closer now and still, Steve can't bring himself to speak.

"Listen, I don't know what the fuck you think this is, but I really don't feel like getting my face beaten in today by some dumb jock. So if you're not here to buy drugs or participate in other nefarious activities that I shall not name in your company, you can kindly fuck off."

Steve swallows around the nerves bubbling in his throat, can't quite pinpoint why he's so nervous. It's just 'The Freak', 'The Drug Dealer' the supposed 'Best Blowjob Giver in All of Hawkins.' Well maybe it's the latter, maybe that point is a little daunting. Or maybe it's that fact that his skin crawls with something akin to need, something that flares hot and heavy in his core when said 'Freak' steps into his space to snarl, "What the fuck do you want?"

"More?" He whispers, it's a quiet shaky thing, nearing on a question he sounds so unsure of his single muttered word.

'The Freak's' brows pinch together, his mask of confidence and aggression slipping for a second before he moves, devilish smirk across his lips, a single ringed finger catching under Steve's chin to turn his gaze up as he whispers, "Don't tell me 'The King of Hawkins High' is a queer, coming to lil' ole me for something his pretty little women can't give him."

Well, that problem he seems to have in the bedroom, yeah, um, it's currently a problem for another reason right now. His jeans are painfully tight. It's damn embarrassing the way this fucking guy is affecting him. The smell of leather, weed and cheap cologne. The cold sting of metal pressed under his chin, holding his head high to meet hauntingly dark eyes. His attitude, the snarl and the grit in his voice.

He can't manage words, only gulps, Adam's Apple bobbing around a non existent sentence. But his face must give something away, if the way 'The Freak' draws an eyebrow up and darkly chuckles is anything to do by.

"No shit, hey? I'd say I'm surprised, but I'm not really. I see the way your eyes wander in the change room or linger just a little too long over Hargrove's ass. I'm not fucking blind Pretty Boy, just didn't think you'd have it in you is all."

"I do," Steve says out of absolutely nowhere. Where did that come from? That whiny, needy, nearly begging tone.

He's not gay but 'The Freak' is kinda making him weak in the knees.

God if the man's expression doesn't shift to something predatory at Steve's tone. It makes him needy, anxious, fucking desperate like he's never been before.

The finger that was once resting under his chin, moves to the back of his head, a large hand skating through his hair until it grips tight and gives a sharp pull forcing a rather embarrassing gasp to slip past his lips.

Dark eyes sear into his own as the other man speaks, "You listen and you listen fucking good. If this is all a ploy for your jock buddies to catch me in the act and beat me half to death for being a 'fucking fag,' know that I won't hesitate to shove a knife into your pretty little side." Punctuating his words with another sharp tug, he continues, "Got it?"

Steve nods, because what else can he do, he's speechless, hot, desperate and painfully horny. This is the definition of more and he's fucking weak for it. The grip in his hair is the only thing keeping him grounded as much as it's the same thing threatening to send him into orbit.

Another sharp tug, "Words."

"Got it," Steve chokes out, words mostly all air and heat.

'The Freak's' eyes search Steve's for a moment, probably looking for sincerity or the hint of a lie, but he must find what he's looking for because no less than a few short seconds later, Steve feels the grip in his hair tighten and a hand tightly clasp his hip,"Good. Now how about you get on your knees Sweetheart."

It's not a question, it's a command and Steve's gut twists with nerves. He wasn't expecting this. Not for him to be on his knees. He opens his mouth to protest but he's cut off with another sharp tug to his hair, encouraging him towards the ground, "Oh Honey, you weren't thinking you'd get off today were you? You've been a right prick to me for the last three years. Gotta make up for that if you want anything from me."

He's not Gay but he's a weak man and he drops to his knees with crushing force, face turned up, waiting for his next command.

"Look at you, being such a Good Boy for me already. Who woulda thought. 'The King' on his knees for 'The Freak." The man combs ringed fingers gently through Steve's hair, "I hate to say it, but you're quite pretty on your knees for me Rich Boy."

Never in his life had Steve Harrington been on his knees for a man. But god dammit if it doesn't get him going. His normally too soft cock is straining against the denim of his jeans, rubbing painfully along the seam. He attempts to swallow the whimper that the sensation shakes out of him.

Needless to say, he's unsuccessful.

'The Freak' smirks, sharp teeth and a dangerous smile, "You've never sucked a dick before have you Pretty Boy?"

Steve shakes his head, fighting the need to bury his nose in the prominent bulge in front of his face. Nerves and need swarm in his core but all he can manage is a desperate stare, no words, just hazel eyes looking up to the man above him. Waiting for instruction.

He looks contemplative for a moment, brown eyes searching Steve's face once again before he says, "Keep your hands to yourself. Behind your back. And do as you're told or we're done. Understand?"

Steve obliges, nodding wordlessly, moving his hands to clasp behind his back.

The other man leans down, a near terrifying glint in his eye while his grip in Steve's hair tightens, a sharp tug pulling him back to make eye contact while he growls, "I said: Understand?"

He doesn't know what comes over him, a needy whimper leaving his lips as absolutely mortifying words follow, "Yes Sir."

'The Freak' darkly chuckles against Steve's cheek, lightly biting the now rosy flesh before he whispers, "Good Boy."

Oh.

Oh wow.

Yep. That does something to him.

He's not gay…But having 'The Freak' call him a Good Boy and in that fucking tone…Well…

Steve stifles another groan watching as the man stands upright, moving to unfasten his stupid handcuff belt buckle with practised ease.

He speaks with a seriousness as he continues his motions, "As much as I fucking hate you, I'm not going to make you do anything you don't want to, because frankly that's just disgusting." He stops his motions, belt undone, button unclasped and zipper down, his cock's nearly on display and Steve's mouth waters with the need to feel its weight on his tongue, "You know the Stoplight System?"

Steve whispers a quiet "No."

"Figured," 'The Freak' says with no malice to his tone, "There's Green, Yellow and Red. Just like a Stoplight you follow the same rules. Green means go, yellow means yield or slow down and red means stop. You can communicate colours anytime you need to. But when I ask you questions or for your colour, you respond accordingly. Got it?"

Steve nods

The other man asks, "Colour?"

"Green," Steve answers with a heat rising to his cheeks, his knees already beginning to burn from where they're resting in the rough soil.

And god dammit if that doesn't make 'The Freak' smile, "Good," he says, carding his fingers gently through Steve's hair, "and if your mouth's full Sweetheart. You tap out your colours. One for green, two for yellow and three for red. Okay?"

Steve nods again while the other man wordlessly moves the hand that was in Steve's hair down his cheek so it's resting on his jaw. Fingers holding light, his thumb brushes over Steve's bottom lip gently pressing it into the wet heat of his mouth. Steve hums around the intrusion, instinctively running his tongue over the tip and hollowing his cheeks.

'The Freak' hums in approval, pressing down with the lightest pressure against Steve's tongue, "Colour?"

Slowly Steve moves his hand to the man's wrist, porcelain skin cool under his warm touch, he taps gently, once, 'Green.'

"Good, now you're ready."

From there it's pretty straightforward, Steve knows how a blowjob goes, he's gotten many in his lifetime, but still, on the other end of this, it feels kinda foreign. At least with the instruction to keep his hands out of the mix he doesn't have to worry about what to do with those.

He watches as the other man pulls his hearty length from his boxers, thick and leaking and he can't help but feel a swell of pride in his chest knowing he did that. His mouth waters at the sight and wordlessly he drops his jaw and lays his tongue out flat.

"Eager are we?"

Steve hums an affirmative, inching closer on his knees.

He'd be lying if he said the sight before him wasn't doing anything to him. Christ, he hasn't been this hard in months, almost painfully throbbing in his jeans with need. He isn't gay but well… he's something.

The other man takes his own length in hand, ringed fingers wrapping around a thick base, tight curls pressed against the curl of his palm. It's warm and salty when the head of it slaps against Steve's tongue, a taste he'll savour like it's the nectar of the gods.

He's being impatient and he knows it, a needy whine escaping his throat he inches even closer. He doesn't know what's gotten into him but before he knows it he's choking, struggling to breathe as he pushes his head all the way forward, trying to bury his nose in dark curls.

The man above him chuckles around a gasp, voice almost shakey. Hand clasped tight in Steve's hair he pulls him back, "Don't hurt yourself there Princess. Breathe through your nose and swallow when you feel like you're going to choke."

Steve nods, his motions pulling on the grip on his scalp and he tries again, a hot coil of need blooming in his core as the man above him lets out a sharp gasp. With the little instruction he's managed to take all of the man in, swallowing around the length, thick head pressing down his throat. His nose is buried in the thick thatch of hair and he can't help but nuzzle into it with a greedy inhale. Sweat and musk and something that makes his toes curl wafts through his senses.

Steve hums around 'The Freak's' length in his own appreciation, the vibration travelling through the other man's body in a wave of pleasure. The grip in his hair tightens and Steve can't help but whimper at the sensation and good god he nearly combusts when he opens his eyes to take in the man above him.

Hair wild, dark and rolling in waves over his shoulders, gathering in the streams of sweat along his neck. Cheeks flushed in a rosy hue of need, a rather beautiful contrast to his pale porcelain skin. His brows are creased, lip bitten and eyes squeezed shut.

It's obvious he's trying to stay quiet, though he's failing miserably. Steve continues to watch him from below, eyes open and watering as he chokes down every inch. He pulls back and off with a dramatic 'pop', diving right back in to nose his way under the man's cock and take what he can of his testicles in mouth.

It's a weird feeling being on this end of things, generally he has no idea what he's doing but he can't hold in the carnal need to make the man above him crumble. Steve feels nearly desperate, his cock painfully straining against the seam of his jeans for what feels like eternity. Fuck, if this goes on for much longer he might just come in his pants.

And wouldn't that be fucking embarrassing.

Steve continues his ministrations while trying to focus on anything other than the balls in his mouth or the cock hanging heavy above his face. He focuses on the grip in his hair, the bite of gravel against his knees, the throbbing pain between his legs. Nothing works, it's just too fucking good.

He takes the man back in his mouth after licking a thick stripe from root to tip and begins bobbing his head. A sinful wash of sounds pollutes the air, gasps and moans and shaky breaths. Wet squelches and muffled gags. Steve's sure he contributes his own noises as he rocks his hips against the seam in his jeans.

The taste of precome continues to flood over Steve's taste buds, salty and sweet and god dammit if he doesn't become addicted to it. Addicted to the taste of this man's essence on his tongue, the sounds that escape his lips, the way he looks as he approaches the edge.

Above Steve, 'The Freak's' babbling, gasping around moans and hardly formed words, "mmm fuck, ho- how are you so good at this?" He chuckles an unbelieving laugh that's drowned out by a choked back moan as Steve takes him down to the hilt. "Jesus H Christ." He gasps, grip tightening in Steve's hair.

Every syllable sends Steve careening towards the edge along with the man. He's close, every roll of his own hips, every sharp tug against his scalp, every moan from the man above.

But god dammit he still needs more.

Steve pulls off, a quick gasp of air and spit and precome hanging between them. 'The Freak' looks down at him with a brow raised and he's beautiful, looks absolutely wrecked, onyx eyes blown wide, face flushed red with his pending release and before he can say anything, Steve asks or more or less begs, "Fuck my face, please."

"Fuck," the man huffs before he checks, "You sure?"

Steve nods, "Please."

"Jesus Christ." He huffs once again before laying his cock over Steve's tongue once again, then he's snaking his other hand into Steve's hair, giving him an experimental pull forward.

Steve's eyes flutter in response, the man's thick length sliding slowly over his tongue and down his throat. He can't help the whine that rattles up his throat.

"You like that or something Sweetheart?"

Steve hums again, moving his hand to the man's wrist to tap once, 'Green' and he chances to leave it there. He'd be lying if he said he didn't want to feel more of this man under his touch.

They continue from there, 'The Freak' pressing his length over Steve's tongue until they're both leaking and shaking with the need of release.

Gravels digs into his knees and his scalp burns in such a beautiful way, Steve's hanging off the edge by his fingertips and he's only pushed that much further as the man above him gasps, "Wh-Where - fuck - mm- can I come in your mouth Baby?"

Baby

Baby. Baby. Baby.

Steve fails to hold back a groan at not only the question but also the nickname, it vibrates down the other man's length while he tightens his grip on a pale wrist and taps once, 'Green.'

For some reason in that moment Steve feels compelled to slide his hand into his own hair, lacing his fingers between thick rings and hard earned calluses, holding his hair tight, together. He's not shrugged off like he thought he would be and for some reason, that's the moment they both topple over the edge.

Salt and heat floods Steve's taste buds at the same time it does his underwear. Warm and slick, exiting his body with force. He groans something needy and desperate, bucking his hips forward as his mouth is pulled closer, nose pressed to pubes. The man above him gasps and bucks his hips forward with force, shuddering while squeezing Steve's fingers between his own.

Steve swallows, or at least tries to -god, now he kinda gets why girls hate that so much- he pulls off with a sharp inhale and presses his head the a denim clad thigh, spitting on the ground between them.

It's oddly tender for what it is, 'The Freak's' hands don't leave his hair, his grip only loosens and gently cards through mousy strands as they catch their breath together.

Steve's exhausted but satisfied; probably for the first time in months and all he had to do was blow a guy. Nothing even happened to him other than some nicknames that made his stomach flutter and some not so awkward hand holding.

They stay silent for a long while, Steve feels like he might fall asleep leaning against this man and it's an odd thing that he feels comfortable here, safe even. And that's a fucking wild thought, especially with a dick dripping come not more than a few inches from his face.

Steve can't help but chuckle at the thought.

"What?" The other man laughs quietly, tucking himself back in his jeans, standing upright, trying to help Steve do the same.

Steve shakes his head, burying it in the other man's shoulder. He can feel him tense beneath him and then seconds later slowly there's cautious arms wrapping around his shoulders, slow and soft while he continues to shake in silent laughter.

They stand there in what should be an awkward moment, but it's not and maybe that's the craziest part about this whole moment.

Steve Harrington knows this man from brash gestures and yelled opinions from atop lunch room tables. From the smell of leather and the clatter of chains. He's supposed to be weird and scary, he's supposed to be 'The Freak,' but for some reason Steve sees him as something else.

He sees him as more.

They're quiet for a moment and in those few short seconds a wild thought passes through Steve's mind. He pulls back, ever so slightly, only enough to meet the other man's eyes. He takes in the man's gaze, dark and speckled with amber, the freckles that dust over his nose and cheeks, the faint scar across his bridge and then he allows his eyes to wander lower.

Pink and perfect and beautiful, lips he wants to kiss with every fibre in his being. Steve sucks in a subtle breath letting his eyes float back up to meet those of the man before and like a silent gesture, he glances at his lips again as he whispers, "Colour?"

He watches sharp teeth bite into a pink bottom lip as he feels the grip around him tighten and then there's a subtle, hardly audible whisper, "Green."

#eddie munson #steve harrington #gay eddie munson #bisexual steve harrington #eddie x steve #steve x eddie #steddie #steddie fic rec #steddie fanfiction #steddie au #steddie headcanon #steddie ficlet #steddie fic #stranger things #stranger things fanfiction #steddie fandom #steddie smut

163 notes · View notes

malebodyexhibit · 2 years ago

Text

Proving a Point (a Next Door Boy tale)

“You proved your point, can we switch back now?” My friend texted. I swiped his message and watched it clear from my notifications.

We had switched bodies through the Next Door Boy agency a month ago. We had occasionally rented ourselves out for petty cash, but when my white friend told me that racism wasn’t such a huge deal anymore, the agency provided a solution to our disagreement.

“Live one week as me and let’s see if you change your tone,” I taunted. We were both college age and fit, but we differed in our upbringing. He was white and rich. I was black and middle class.

“One week? Give me a challenge at least. Make it a month!” He leaned back like he always did during our study sessions. We had became friends after majoring in the same field, but he had the confidence not to stress about the course. I stressed. I got in through scholarships and I don’t have the easy charm developed by assured acceptance. “What makes you think this place is racist?”

I stopped my typing at my essay and glared at him. “It’s just this place but everywhere. Have you ever felt the need to wait a hundred feet away from a someone at night so they don’t assume you’ll attack them? Or trying to get people comfortable talking to you? Don’t mention my dating life before I met Dave. I’m so lucky to find him. Dating as a gay black man was a stream of rejections.”

Dave, my boyfriend for over a year, was a joy in college. We were both black men who found solace in our shared experience. I tried dating, but black was a preference not everyone had. I won’t lie. I wanted to date white guys. But unlike my friend, I didn’t have the pleasure to whore myself out. He brought home a new guy every night. His dating profile was a shirtless pic and that was enough.

So when we switched bodies, the first thing I did was look at what I was missing out on. Starting with my friend’s body. I looked at his body, now mine, in the mirror of his apartment. I stripped off my shirt. I ran my hand over my new white skin. I tickled my nipple and felt my arms. The corded muscle beneath my hands as I flexed. His abs. The thing that attracted men of all ages, I strummed it like a guitar. I listened to the washboard sound from my new sculpted stomach.

My friend called me while I was investigated his white cock. “Hey, dude. This is a bit weird. I had no idea what you were packing.” He said.

“Yeah, well I’m more impressed with what you have,” I sneered. I stroked his member while holding my phone in the other hand. “What was our rules on hook ups?”

He paused and said, “It’s okay, just be protected. Are you really going to test drive my body with hook ups?” He sounded incredulously but with good humor intended. “Guess I have no choice but to do the same.”

That night, I merely had to check the dating app and found a daddy to plow me. It felt so good having a guy so intensely attracted to my body. He wrapped his hands around me and called me by my friend’s name, Ethan. After a while, I began moaning Ethan’s name and slowly felt it become more and more me.

The next morning, Ethan in my old body told me in frustration that he spent the night trying to find guys to hook up with, but kept getting rejected. “Those racist fucks,” he blurted. “It’s just goddamn sex, why are they so picky?”

Of course, he’d think that way. He had his choice.

Over the following weeks, he got in trouble when he tried to strike up conversation with other students while walking back from class at night. Soon he began to withdraw into silence as he felt the world begin to judge him. “This is getting difficult,” he told me a week ago. “I just keep trying not to make other people think I’m weird but it’s awful.”

I, on the other hand, just merely acted like myself and… wait that’s a lie. I just acted more like him. Confident and easy going. I didn’t need to filter myself and people enjoyed my presence anyway. I was finally becoming part of the class.

Things got a bit complicated when Dave approached me. He knew about the swap but he was feeling betrayed. He assumed I was cheating on him and I told him he was right. I didn’t see any reason to be with him any more. I finally felt like I could be myself. Ethan reproached me asking why I did that to the man I loved a month ago. I asked him point blank, “Did you find him attractive when you were in your old body?”

His silence was answer enough.

“I finally see that I settled for some guy that wanted me and that made me desperate to make a relationship work. But as you, I feel I can finally find someone who loves me for me.” I smiled. He looked horrified. I picked up my bag and headed to class.

“You proved your point, can we switch back now?” My friend texted me. I wasn’t sure how to react to his message. In my heart and mind I feel that I had already made my choice. I finally felt like Ethan and that Ethan was someone I was always supposed to be.

“Counter offer. I stay as Ethan and you can be me.” I texted back.

“NO. That’s not how it’s supposed to go. We’re supposed to switch back. This is bulls-“ he texted. He didn’t even finish the word before he called me. But I ended things immediately that night when I approached him and worked the ol’ Ethan charm. I smiled and melted his defenses. I ran my hand over his cheek. I did everything I wanted Ethan to do to me in my old body. I said the words I always wanted to hear from Ethan. But now that I was Ethan, I felt but kindness to my old body. To bring small relief to the way it was harmed. To help my friend, now Josh, live with this cruel world.

He let himself get plowed by me. This black jock who intimated most people was on his back, moaning and screaming as I, with my rich boy body, thrusted into him. We both knew how to satisfy our old bodies. Eventually he accepted being Josh and I Ethan. Now officially a couple, it was a kindness for me to introduce him to my circle of friends.

With my family’s money, I take us on trips. For our spring break, we went to a rocky beach in Mexico. He might not offer much with money, but I’m glad to help him see the larger world.

#male body possession #body possession #body swap #gay male story #male body swap #body theft #racial change #a next door boy tale #next door boy

289 notes · View notes

wen316 · 6 months ago

Text

Wishing Lee Horsley a very Happy Birthday today ! May 15

1 note · View note

honeybeeloxs · 2 years ago

Text

CENTURY MALL

Ethan Landry x Male Reader

I got really bored, very much inspired by the Fear Street opening scene because idk I lack creativity when I am hungry, and let's just say. I AM STARVING ATM. Also, Reader is related to Tara and Sam but moved to New York after the Woodsboro massacre.

Ethan's relationship with Reader is more minor, but it's stated that they are playing double dutch with their tongues. I also may make this more than one part, but yea... idk

“The night we met, I knew I needed you so, and if I had the chance, I'd never let you go.” The speakers blare, echoing through the empty mall.

“I’m going to clock out. Can you handle closing the store for me? I would do it, but my girlfriend is going to flip.” Elijah told Y/N, who just nodded in response, “Here are the keys,” he said to Y/N as he handed him the keys; he turned on his heels and began walking out; Y/N follows him, “Okay, so… Um, do I have to go out through the back? I don’t like the back.” Y/N said to Elijah, who turned around, “No, you can go out through the front; just make sure there is some room for you to slip underneath the gate,” the blonde replied; he stopped sipping his Orange Julius cup. “Just don’t forget to set the alarm; we don’t want Jasmin to fuck us over and fire us, and don’t forget to restock some shelves with some new records,” he said before turning away and walking to the nearest exit. “Alright! See you tomorrow.” Y/N calls out, and Elijah gives him the thumbs-up before he walks out the mall doors.

"So won't you say you love me? I'll make you so proud of me. We'll make them turn their heads every place we go." Y/N bops his head to the song's rhythm as he slowly dances while walking back to the store.

The leading lights shut off, and the only light left is the neon signs from the stores illuminating Y/N’s face; he stops dancing and huffs; Y/N sees Chris from the Hot Topic a few stores away, and he waves at him. Y/N waves back at him and turns around, heading back to J.A. Records; Y/N pulls down the gate, leaving room for someone to squeeze in or out, and he walks to his right and sets the alarm. Y/N needs to restock some shelves filled with new cheesy country records or some weird tiktok RnB records. The phone rings; Y/N gets up and answers, “Hello, this is J.A. Records; we’re closed.” you can tell he’s a bit irritated. “Hey, Y/N,” Y/N pauses for a moment; it’s Ethan, “Hey, Eth, why’d you call?” his voice softens as a smile creeps on his face, “You weren’t at my dorm like you usually are when I got out of Econ, I thought you didn’t work late?” Ethan questions his boyfriend, “Yeah, I was supposed to clock out an hour ago, but Elijah wanted me to close tonight; something is happening with his girlfriend.” Y/N tells his boyfriend by phone, and he leans back on the counter. “Hey, um, can you take me to my dorm tonight? I don’t wanna walk back to campus; it’s scary when it gets dark,” Y/N asks him over the phone. “Okay, just give me about 15 minutes to close this shit store down, and I’ll meet you outside,” he tells him, holding the phone up with his shoulder as he flips through a magazine. Y/N bids his lover farewell and heads back to the shelf he was restocking, but he stops when the phone rings; he groans and picks it up. “J.A. Records; we’re closed.” Y/N plays with some nicknacks on the counter, “Hello…?” Y/N says through the phone, looking around the counter; he stands there, he repeats, “Hello…? Anybody there?” nothing for a second; Y/N starts walking around the counter entangling the phone cord, “Hello?” finally a response comes through. “Hey, sorry, but J.A. Records is closed tonight; feel free to call tomorrow, K? Okay, bye now,” Y/N tells the caller, “Wait, Wait, don’t go,” he replies; Y/N’s eyebrows raised in amusement.

Y/N walks around the store, sometimes having to move the phone cord as it’s stretching way too far; too much pressure, and it’ll snap. “So… you gotta boyfriend?” he asks; Y/N sits on the counter, “Why? You wanna ask me out on a date?” Y/N taunts the caller, smiling to himself, “Maybe… So do?” he questions, “Yeah, I have a boyfriend, real horror geek.” he replies; Y/N loves Ethan, but the movie genre he likes isn’t the best, a bunch of chicks getting stabbed and making shitty decisions. The person clears his throat, “Well, what’s your favorite?” Y/N hums, “I don’t like horror movies, a bunch of dumbasses.” He jumps off the counter and leans back on the counter. “What’s yours?” he asks the caller; he chuckles in response, “The one I’m watching right now,” Y/N’s eyebrows raise, and he laughs. “Oh really? What’s it called.” Y/N asks as he picks at his nails, “It's called ‘Y/N gets skewered like a fucking pig!’” he laughs, he fucking laughs over the phone; Y/N stops picking at his nails. “That’s… That’s not funny….” he mutters, “You still wanna watch it, Y/N?” The phone line goes dead. Y/N puts the phone back on its holder; he starts laughing, “Ha-Ha, Real FUCKING funny, Christopher.” he yells out, running around the counter, “You got me good, okay!?” Y/N runs and walks between the aisles, “You had your fucking fun, alright? Now tell Ethan I’m still closing up and will be out in a minute.” He walks back to the shelf he was supposed to be restocking.

"I'll make you happy, baby, just wait and see for every kiss you give me, I'll give you three." Y/N can only think about his sisters, Sam and Tara.

Y/N hasn’t talked to his sisters in a while; he distanced himself since the attacks last year; Sam doesn’t care, while Tara tries to hit him up once a time. Y/N knows that if he’s connected to his sisters, he will also be targeted over some stupid shit they caused, and that’s why Y/N moved to New York; he’s attending college and met Ethan but also met his best friend, Quinn. Y/N continues to stack the shelf, but he’s stopped when he hears a record fall; Shit, Y/N knows he had to talk to Jasmin about these old shelves. He constantly has to pick up fallen records. Y/N gets up; He’s a bit paranoid, alone in this big ass mall, and hears a noise. He walks down the aisle and sees the record that fell off the shelf; Y/N bends down, picks it up, and looks at the stand; weird… the record didn't drop from here. Y/N gets up and places the record in its spot, and his breath quickens as he hears something running down the aisle, and his eyes widen as Y/N hears another record fall off its stand. “Okay, Chris, you win. I’m scared now; cut the shit out.” Y/N yells out, hoping for Chris to pop out, “Chris…?” Y/N calls out as he walks to the counter; he looks around wearily. “Fuck this.” Y/N spits out, and he’s getting the fuck out of here; he’s putting that record on its shelf and leaving. Jasmin can kiss his ass. Y/N hears shuffling behind him, and he chuckles and turns around, “Okay, Christopher, you got me; I’m spooke-” Y/N’s sentence is cut off when he sees someone wearing the Ghostface mask; fearful, he screams and pushes him away before running towards the gates.

Y/N slides to the ground and wiggles through the gate; his attacker slashes his leg, and he shrieks. He wiggles his way out, but he’s grabbed by the foot, puts his left foot on the gate, and propels forward. Y/N limps his way to a store that’s gate is closed, but he knows Anika is working late, “ANIKA! You have to help me! Call 911; Someone is attacking me!” you plead; her eyes widen as she dials 911 on the store phone,

“LEMME IN, ANIKA LEMME IN!” Y/N shakes the gate, pleading, "911, what is your emergency?" the operator asks, "I-I… I'm in the Century Mall; uhm… One of my coworkers is being attacked. Can you send someone over?" Anika runs over, fumbling to open the gate, the store phone cord being pulled to its limit. Anika stops what she's doing and backs up, "What…? Wait? Anika, please don't do this." Y/N turns around to see Ghostface a few feet away; Anika screams when Ghostface charges; Y/N moves out of the way, and Ghostface stabs through the gate; he punches him before running away, leaving Anika with his attacker.

"So won't you, please (be my, be my baby) Be my little baby? (My one and only baby)." echoes throughout the mall as Y/N runs into the food court.

“HEY FUCKER!” Y/N screams; his head turns fast as Y/N hits him with a chair; groaning, he falls to the ground. Y/N sees the red and blue flashing lights and runs to the front doors; his leg hurts like shit, leaving a trail of blood; Y/N stumbles to the ground and gets back up while Ghostface recovers from the blow and sprints. “HELP ME, SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP” Y/N screams; Ghostface runs up behind him and stabs him in the back; Y/N tumbles to the ground taking down his attacker with him, sliding across the mall floor, smearing blood. Y/N crawls to the doors as he’s getting stabbed.

The doors fly open, and Ghostface runs off, going deeper into the mall. Y/N crawls, smiling and giggling like a crazy person; he’s safe; he can see Ethan again. He beat death.

#scream vi #scream x male reader #ethan landry x male reader #ethan landry x reader #scream

204 notes · View notes

starseneyes · 1 year ago

Text

Spock / Nurse Christine Chapel - Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S2 Ep 1

Yes, folks, I am back with more Meta analysis of my unexpected-but-welcomed favorite ship of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. If you missed my Season 1 Meta, here's a handy link to my Spock/ Chapel fun!

Yes, we know from the TOS timeline that it all ends in tears. But I'm still wildly invested because Ethan Peck and Jess Bush are crushing these compelling scripts. If you're like me, you're going to have a blast with this one!

I hadn't decided if I was going to post weekly or all at once, but the poll was overwhelmingly for weekly. So, the weeks we get solid Spock/Chapel, I'll post a Meta. If it's borderline, I'll batch the episodes, instead.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm as liberal with spoilers as Spock is with Blood Wine. Don't click the Read More button if you want to keep your obliviousness intact!

Everyone clear on how this works? Huzzah! Let's dive in.

The Broken Circle

Feeling All the Feels in Sickbay

Spock sits in the observation area with Dr. M'Benga, still reeling from the events of the Gorn. It reminds me of T'Pol confiding in Dr. Phlox on Enterprise. Both Vulcans found themselves in similar situations—usually carefully-guarded emotions unleashed.

And both will have to learn to live with it.

For T'Pol, a part of her enjoyment of emotions was the new intimacy she found with Commander Tucker—Trip. For Spock, his growing attraction to Nurse Chapel is torture.

But I love the set up of Dr. M'Benga as confidant. He is the only one who knows both sides of what's happening, here, even if he doesn't have the details.

All of Spock and Christine's more intimate moments prior to this episode have been in a bottle, so-to-speak. Yes, T'Pring and the Serene Squal crew witnessed the fake-out-not-so-fake kiss.

But T'Pring wrote it off as part of deception, as did most of the crew (save Angel, who was actually paying attention).

None of the Enterprise crew was there to witness their lip-lock and subsequent unease. Nobody was listening in on their conversation in Sick Bay later. When she held him in the corridor, everyone else was at the wake for Hemmer.

To this point, Christine hasn't even spoken to Erica about Spock. She's kept it bottled up inside.

But Dr. M'Benga is observant. And he has a whole array of sensors (or sen-sores, if you're Spock) on our half-Vulcan/half-human boy.

As Spock plays notes and cords his fingers remembering the fundamentals of mathematics and music taught as a child, Dr. M'Benga monitors. Yes, that's helping. His heart rate is going down.

Until, whooosh, she walks back into Spock's life. And his heart rate shoots up. The discordant note rings out as Dr. M'Benga looks back to the monitor.

Spock's eyes follow and he awkwardly stands, trying to right the askew chair without looking back at it.

Chapel greets him without emotion.

"Lieutenant."

This is even more divorced from intimacy than her typical, "Mr. Spock". Because now they both know he has a growing attraction to her.

Before the hallway in 1x09, I think we could argue that Spock was not completely aware of it. Yes, he felt things in 1x07 with that kiss. But both T'Pring and Christine told him what he wanted to hear—it's not possible for him to have feelings for her.

But as he wrestled with the floodgate of emotions overwhelming him during Hemmer's wake, it was Christine who was there for him. She enveloped him in her arms, offering comfort and respite. She offered herself as a safe space in that moment.

And as they pulled away, I'm convinced they were still holding hands or she was holding his arm, based on how her arm swung as he departed. Spock didn't understand what he was feeling as he looked at her, but he knew he was feeling.

Spock made the choice to walk away that day because he knew he wanted to kiss her. And she knew it, too.

Christine has always been the one to put up hard blocks between them. He's a shipmate, and I doubt she sleeps with shipmates in her quest to avoid attachments. She certainly didn't want to be on Dever's ship!

And I get the impression she doesn't want to be the other woman. She doesn't even want a real relationship. They terrify her.

But Spock's a relationship guy. She already knows that because he's bloody engaged. So, she's going to do everything she can to create distance between them... even though we all know she feels something for him, too.

The awkward chair adjusted, Spock excuses himself. Christine's eyes follow him long after he's walked out the door and down the hall. Yes, she's putting up barriers... but only because she needs them as much as he does.

"Fascinating." "Isn't that typically his line?"

She's still looking his way. This awkwardness sucks because they actually have a pretty decent friendship. But it's necessary to keep the distance.

"It's just that when he saw you, I-" "Don't even." "No. No. I wouldn't."

These two are dear friends who have been through hell together. He knows her so well, and I appreciate that so much in this episode—their beautiful friendship.

I've replayed this scene over and over. I don't think it's likely she's confided in Joseph what happened in the hallway. But, I think she also knows he's got a unique view, here.

And he knows better than to meddle in her love life.

He also knew from the moment she walked in that she had more to discuss than coming on duty. That suggests to me that he properly took a read on the room—whatever this Spock/Christine thing is... it goes both ways.

Remember that as we work through this episode.

The Plan

Spock stands in front of the amassed group, speaking equally in all directions. What stands out is who he has assembled for this conversation. Most of them make perfect sense, right? Folks from the Bridge, the head of Sick Bay.

And Nurse Chapel. None of the other nurses have been invited to this shindig. But no matter what else is going on between them, Spock trusts her. He wants her there, to be someone to offer counsel, if needed, as she always has.

"What plan?" "I would have thought it obvious..."

Christine is standing on the other side of the island, putting some physical space between herself and Spock. But she's leaning toward him—all in.

He looks to her in surprise, then surveys the rest of the group to see if they are also confused. Yup. Spock managed to leave everyone out of his plan even as he's stating it.

"We must steal the Enterprise."

Look at our girl smirk. I saw a bunch of people post, "hijinks!" at that moment in the show, and it made me laugh. We know she's up for some hijinks.

"Stole the Enterprise? ... Wow. I would have lost so many bets." "Yeah, Vulcans can surprise you."

Christine is swelling with pride looking at him right now—her eyes not leaving him during this entire exchange. It was the right call, even if it technically was the wrong one.

And look at Spock staring back like a schoolboy basking in the radiance of his crush's attention. We both know she's been surprised by him on more than one occasion. But this time is different.

This time, he had to disobey a direct order to make the right call. That's a very difficult thing for any person to do, let alone someone who is half-Vulcan. Logically? This was a crazy call.

But it was the right call. And that's fucking sexy.

Also, there's a very personal edge to Christine's line and the way she holds Spock's gaze. This isn't the first time he's surprised her.

I think nothing surprised her more than his hand on her ass and his tongue in her mouth. Like, seriously, the guy can kiss. But, again, that's something only the two of them (from their crew) know about.

Now, others are getting to see just how surprising their resident Vulcan can be.

"Sir. What if Nurse Chapel and Dr. M'Benga on that ship?" "They thought it worth their lives to prevent another war. Logical."

Simultaneously this hurts like hell and feels like warm sunlight after a frigid night. Because from the point of view of everyone on that Bridge, Spock's words are pretty stark.

Void of emotion. Praising their logical choice of self-sacrifice. Ouch.

But we know beneath the surface, there's a volcano churning and waking, just waiting to erupt.

I think it also makes him care for her that little bit more. Not just that she's in danger, but that she's able to make such logical decisions where others might surrender to emotion. I think they're very evenly matched, there, at this point.

Christine shirks emotional attachments and love. She keeps a shield up around her heart and leans into logic. Spock was raised on Vulcan to be a Vulcan—attached to logic and devoid of emotion.

As he is grappling with the emotions unleashed in the wake of losing Hemmer and battling the Gorn, she is struggling to keep a cap on her own emotions—to keep him at a distance when more and more she wishes she could close it.

It's not a lack of desire that keeps them apart. Spock is engaged and doing his best to stay true to the promises he has made. He's never had to struggle to this degree before.

And Christine understands his struggle more than most—she witnessed him wrestling with it after crushing a bulkhead. She knows he struggled with judgment and derision growing up. She knows he doesn't know what to do about this.

So she's making the decisions for them, and that's a good thing.

"Photon torpedoes locked on the federation ship. Full spread. Mr. Spock?"

Watch his face. He knows he needs to order it. He knows what the logical thing to do is. But his emotions are getting in the way, like he feared.

"Not yet. Any signal from Nurse Chapel or Dr. M'Benga?"

And there it is. He's waiting. He's trying to wait it out long enough to give them a chance to escape. To give her a chance to escape.

"Mr. Spock, it's now or never." "Fire photon torpedoes."

The emotion in his voice. He knows this is what he has to do. It's the right call. But this time it feels wrong.

Spock closes his eyes. He can't watch it happen. He can't watch his order destroy the ship where she is.

He can't handle the impact of his emotions swirling and swimming within him, threatening to explode in the Captain's Chair as the False Flag Federation ship does in space.

He killed her. Of course, we know that he didn't. But he believes that in this moment where he chose to do the right thing... he killed her.

And we all saw how destroyed he was with his loosed emotions by losing Hemmer—a friend. Yes, Christine is a friend, but she's also his safe place, his confidant, the first woman he's ever desired in a Human way.

Notice I put that last. Because the connection he and Christine forged was over shared bullying, over her being a good friend and offering advice, over the two of them sharing hijinks and learning to trust one another.

The desire came in later. It's not desire for her that's destroying him right now—it's the severing of one of the deepest connections he's ever made in his life with another soul.

Christine has been there for him. She stood up for him. She helped him. She accepted him. She comforted him. They forged their bond strand by strand, and to have that cord suddenly severed... it's agonizing.

Spock's eyes finally open, and there are tears in his eyes as he beholds the destruction. He's holding back... but barely. It won't take much for those tears to spill.

"Sir, I'm detecting a Federation EV suit transponder."

Hope. It hits him hard, and he leans into it as he stands and strides off the bloody Bridge to meet them in the Transporter Room.

He doesn't know what he'll find when he gets there. It's a single transponder, right? Will he find M'Benga standing there without her? Find Chapel standing without M'Benga?

All he knows is that he has to be there. He can't hear about it secondhand from the Bridge. He needs to see it with his own eyes—whatever he's about to see.

Transporting to Enterprise

Visually, this is a stunning sequence with us wrapped in the transport with M'Benga and Chapel, then settling with Dr. M'Benga as he reaches helplessly for the out-of-focus, unconscious Christine. We're seeing through his eyes—the blurry vision of a friend who's too still.

We're at floor level when Spock rushes into the room. He can see M'Benga clearly moving, but zeroes in on the lifeless Christine.

He kneels on one knee and shakes her shoulders, hoping for a response, for some smart-ass comment. But none come. He shakes, again. Nothing.

He leans down to her lips, hoping to feel the rush of her breath, hear the exhale and inhale of life. But it doesn't come.

Now, I'm not going to get into the science of Spock's actions, because I've seen a lot of discourse about it, and smarter people than I can say what is feasible and not after 45 seconds in space. I'm only going to talk about Spock, Chapel, and M'Benga.

Spock laces his fingers together, and for the first time we see the perspective staring up at him. The voice is distorted—as though heard through a tunnel.

"I waited. I waited. I waited for you."

Oh my gosh. Spock just admitted to her that he held off on destroying that ship and stopping the restart of the war... for her. How very... human.

And, oh, how Spock's heart is breaking right now. He's desperate for her to know that he did what he could... that he didn't want to kill her... that he chose to hold off. He needs her to know.

And he doesn't even fully understand why, yet. I posit he's never experienced romantic love. Marriage to T'Pring is logical. He cares for her, but he does not love her.

He's falling in love with Christine... and he doesn't even realize it. He doesn't understand it. But when he thought she was dead, a part of him was dying, too. It was revived long enough for him to find her... lifeless.

No. This is not how this ends.

"You don't die. You don't die. You do not die."

It's a plea. A wish. A dream. And somewhere in her haze between life and death—she hears him. She feels him. She knows he's there.

A gasp escapes her lips and as it does, Spock collapses to the side, nearly on top of her, his leg that was holding him up as he administered compressions giving out.

The weight is gone. She lives.

His right hand goes to her shoulder, gripping as though releasing her would lead to losing her, once more. His left hand falls the other side of her as he leans on it for balance.

Christine focuses first on getting air back into her bloody lungs. But her second urge is comfort. She sees Spock hovering over her, knows he's the one who brought her back, and can feel his weight against her.

M'Benga smiles to see her breathing, again, and bears the only witness to this interaction (save the Transporter tech, who is apparently somewhere off-camera and not at all bothered by lifeless bodies).

Christine's hands both reach up, but one can't make it past a bent arm. Her right grips onto Spock's left arm, working its way up to cup his face.

Her fingertips graze his Vulcan ear as her thumb wipes away his Human tear. All parts of him, she accepts. And what a beautiful visual representation of that.

Spock is exposed, here. Completely vulnerable. Yes, the block that kept his emotions at bay has been removed. But he makes no attempts to conceal his pain and relief from Christine. He is wholly himself—for better or worse.

And Christine knows him. Much as she fights what is between them, right now, those lines don't matter. Neither of them is pretending.

She sees that even though she's the one who almost died, he's the one who needs comfort. And as her fingers linger as long as her strength remains, she quips.

"Why you gotta be so rough?"

Her hand falls to his shoulder, then his arm, and then down. Her strength is gone, spent on a moment of comfort for Spock... but not wasted. No, never wasted.

Because whatever this is, it's far from one-sided. Yes, they are both running from it, and for good reason. Spock is engaged. Christine doesn't want to tangle with that, or the threat of an actual relationship.

I mean, c'mon, Spock's clearly a relationship guy. That's not what Christine wants at this point at all.

But in this broken moment caught between life and death, they allow themselves that contact they would otherwise shirk—they allow themselves the moment.

SIDE NOTE: The instinct of Jess Bush to wipe that tear away is so fucking perfect. Do I know for certain that it wasn't in the script? No. But looking at the angles, that perfect falling tear isn't always there. So, I like to think Ethan Peck pulled out an amazing performance and Jess Bush's instincts kicked in and we got that stellar shot that says so much. And I'm grateful.

The door opens and others whisk in. Spock straightens, breaking away from the intimacy, but he holds his grip on her shoulder until Uhura's voice breaks through, calling him back to the Bridge.

Have you ever had someone in your life you could break around? Just completely break down and let all the stuff show without worrying about them judging you? That's what Spock's found in Christine.

He gave into that moment. He let the emotion flow. Yes, he's having trouble controlling it, right now, but we see him composed in the very next scene talking to the Klingon Captain. He can rein it in.

But with Christine he doesn't have to. He lets her see his brokenness. Lets her wipe away his tear. Lets her see his hurt.

He doesn't have to be anything in particular when he's around Christine. He doesn't have to worry about being too human or too Vulcan. He can simply be.

"You wanna know the worst thing about living almost forever?" "The loss of those you love." "Oh, you sweet, un-Vulcan Vulcan. No. That's a pain shared by all those who live with even a half-open heart."

This strikes me. Because while I don't know if I'd call what Christine and Spock share "love", yet, it is certainly a form of it.

Spock nearly lost her before they had a chance to figure out what it is. And while we all know it'll end in tears based on the TOS timeline, I'm still strangely addicted to finding out what happens next with these two.

And, not for the last time this episode, someone calls Spock out on being an abnormal Vulcan. And he appears to take ownership over that distinction a little more each scene.

Angel once told him that it wasn't about "what" he is but "who" he is. And though these emotions flowing freely are a pill, they are forcing him to confront that a little faster than he might've.

Sleeping Beauty

Spock stands over her bed, as if holding vigil while she sleeps. She's still recovering, still resting, still recuperating from her time in space. And much as he doesn't understand it, Spock knows he has to be there.

He has to reassure himself that she's living. He has to relive the moment of losing her, getting her back, losing her again, only to bring her back to life with his own hands.

With his words he killed her. With his hands he restored her.

And yet he still cannot believe it until he sees her there, in the flesh.

"Mr. Spock. I didn't hear you come in. Are you alright?"

It's almost a courtesy to even ask. He can tell from the man's posture that he is far from alright. In fact, I feel like M'Benga is almost giving Spock an out... the opportunity to deflect.

But he is still Vulcan... and lying isn't his strong-suit.

"Yes. I just..."

Because physically, he is alright. But emotionally, he's a wreck. M'Benga reaches out, placing a hand on Spock's shoulder. You can see him relax into his emotions just that touch more with the acknowledgement.

"She'll be fine."

She will. It's true. Someone else said it. And we know how much Spock values people telling him what he wants to hear.

But he's still crumbling. Because he knows, now, what it's like to lose her. Yes, it was only for a moment... but that moment destroyed him.

And, look, I'm not trying to be melodramatic. But Spock's emotions are running crazy, and we already saw what he was like losing Hemmer. He was unhinged. He was denting freakin' bulkheads.

He was angry about losing Hemmer. Losing Christine? He was devastated.

Hemmer was a friend. Christine is so much more. So, even though they're destined to burn out and it'll all end in tears... she's a part of him, now.

And losing her—even for a moment—tore into those fresh emotions like a hot knife through flesh. Burning, aching, agonizing.

Scars from something like that don't just disappear—even with dermal regenerators. Spock is going to be feeling the side effects of that moment for a while, yet.

"I'm not... I..."

Words fail him. Because he doesn't know what truth to tell. What truth this is. Because all of this is new, and it's frustrating, and it's confusing, and he's not sure what any of it means.

There isn't a nice, neat formula when it comes to love. It's messy. It's problematic. It's heartbreaking. It's chaotic.

"I have no words for what I feel."

Facing him fully, Spock puts a level of trust in M'Benga, here. And M'Benga sees just how upset Spock really is... to the point of tears.

"Yes," M'Benga breathes as they both look to Christine.

Spock tears himself away, turning over the same should he did when he left Christine in the corridor in 1x09.

The camera zooms in on Christine, turning a little fuzzy around the edges before cross-fading to Spock's fingers on the instrument... an expression of emotion, right?

And right now, he's overwhelmed with emotions for the blonde nurse who stood up for him against a bully. For the woman who refuted his belief that he was broken, and instead offered him comfort. For the person who bonded with him over childhood trauma, but isn't afraid to tell him plain truth when he needs to hear it.

He plays for himself as he tries to let the melody unwind all the tightly wound emotions choking him within.

This episode spent a lot of time establishing Spock's status as "not your typical Vulcan". The Klingon Captain calls it out. Pelia calls it out. And Spock himself affirms it.

He's still a Vulcan... but his humanity does make him unique.

And while M'Benga established that Spock's emotions are heightened due to his Vulcanness, he's approaching therapy from a Human angle—and it's working.

Is Christine Chapel more than a vehicle for Spock to explore his burgeoning emotions? Heck, yeah! I think this episode did a good job of establishing that for the season. A war veteran. A kick-ass fighter. A brave Human willing to give her life to prevent a war.

Yes, there's going to be more Spock/Chapel to come in this season... but the show did a good job of establishing early in episode 1 that there's so much more to her than that.

And even if she's destined to meet her future fiancé on bloody Vulcan (how cruel is that!?), I'm still excited to see what comes of her and her pointy-eared would-be suitor.

Where do we go from here? Heck if I know. But I do know that I'm enjoying the ride.

Thanks for reading! And I hope to see ya on the next.

#Spapel #Christine Chapel #Spock #Spock x Chapel #Nurse Chapel #Chapel x Spock #Jess Bush #Ethan Peck #Star Trek Strange New Worlds #Strange New Worlds #ST: SNW

87 notes · View notes

regaliasonata · 3 months ago

Text

For: @ninjastormz @skyland2703

Ethan: My new laptop was made by yours truly, flawless without any issues.

Tommy: It’s kinda slow.

Ethan: You must be on drugs cause no fucking way that’s true.

Tommy: Excuse me but having to wait for my files to download put me off schedule, your work is garbage.

Ethan: I mean it’s looking like your hair appointment is off schedule too but you don’t see me complaining!

Tommy: …I’m just going to get a new laptop.

Ethan: IF YOU BRING A MACBOOK INTO THIS HOUSEHOLD I’LL BEAT YOU WITH YOUR CHARGING CORDS!

Hayley: *dying of laughter in the corner*

#ethan James #tommy oliver #Hayley zitkor #power rangers #mmpr #mighty morphin power rangers #incorrect quotes #incorrect power rangers #power rangers dino thunder #dino thunder #incorrect power rangers quotes

18 notes · View notes

billy-cockblock · 5 months ago

Text

REV AU one shot: Chris finds out

Crawls out of my hole covered in blood and mold: I don't know why this was so hard to write, but the writer's block is hitting me hard. I could see several parts of this scene so clearly in my head, but my brain just really didn't want to put words to paper. Once my brain's better I'll probably come and edit this a bit, but I hope y'all enjoy it. It's definitely one or the favorite scenes I've come up with.

He quickly lifted heavy limbs, picking them up from the ground. Leon’s vision had gone dark, but his rapidly came into focus.

He fumbled for the gun dropped when they went flying, foreign hands finding familiar purchase against the metal. Taking aim, he let off a volley of shots at the monsters encroaching on them.

They were tougher than infected he’d faced before; the center body of the strange knife-whipping tentacles needing to be basically shredded before they died, and bullet holes slowly sealed over with black tendrils if it wasn’t killed completely.

He felt like he was wasting ammo, but it just took so many bullets to drop the monsters. The larger one that’d flung them across the room and slammed Leon’s head into a desk was getting closer, lumbering steps slow. He tried to shoot its head like the rest of them, but the gun only clicked.

He swore under his breath and pulled Leon’s knife out; he hated close-quarters combat, but he didn’t have time to reload. Diving past flailing, dangerous limbs, he buried the knife in its main body. It grabbed and sliced at them, but he kept stabbing and cutting until it was too shredded to keep moving. He shoved it with more strength than he was used to, and it fell to the ground, dead.

Head still on a swivel, he made sure there were no more infected. The room looked clear, but there were a few desks and filing cabinets something could hide behind.

While he checked the room over, Ethan took a breath. He felt bad for having to break his promise of not taking control, but Leon wasn’t waking up in time. He’d pull back once Leon woke up, but it felt like he’d gotten a concussion with how hard he’d gotten his head hit. He spread his mold, stitching closed the scratches and scrapes Leon’s body had accrued. Skin and muscle was easy to regenerate, then pull his network from, and it’d almost become second nature since he’d gotten permission from Leon.

Nerves were a little harder. The mold naturally liked to cling to the nervous system, trying to take control and upload a person’s consciousness to the megamycete. It preferred to envelop or take over nerves, and that took more coaxing from Ethan to get it to untangle.

That’s why he was hesitating trying to do something about the concussion. He’d done his best to take control of Leon’s motor functions without getting the mold too tangled with his brain, but he’d have to root even deeper if he wanted to heal it. He subconsciously felt along his connection from the megamycete to the brain-

He froze. Damaged cartilage, more mold present, fractured vertebrae, and frayed nerves. A lot of frayed nerves.

He reached for the back of Leon’s neck, both with the body’s hand and his mold. The joints in the spine felt like they’d been misaligned before snapping back into place, nearly severing Leon’s entire spinal cord. His brain still sent and received continuous waves of signals to and from the body, impulses carried across the gap by Ethan’s mold network tangling with Leon’s nervous system.

Ethan felt like he was going to be sick. Or, as sick as he could feel in the state he was in. He didn’t think Leon hit his head that badly, but he guessed his neck did snap in a weird angle when they hit that desk.

After the horrific stories Leon had told him, a desk is what would have done him in?

He tried to pull the nerve fibers back together, but the mold that had taken their places was stubborn. It had locked itself firmly in place to keep the cord from coming detached and shutting down Leon’s body functions. He’s glad it obeyed when he tried to program it to protect Leon without his input, but he needed the mold to move if he wanted to heal it enough that he could remove it. He’d have to work to remove his network from his nerves anyway, so he might as well work on healing the concussion. He could practically hear the megamycete sing in joy as he spread to repair the battering Leon’s brain had taken-

“Close call, huh?” a familiar voice asked from behind them, making him tense up.

“Y-yeah, no kidding,” he replied, trying his best to speak like Leon. He nearly enveloped the man’s brain to speed his healing; he needed Leon awake now.

“I got worried when I saw one of them toss you, but I knew you’d have it handled,” Chris Redfield continued, none the wiser that he wasn’t talking to the real Leon. Ethan could hear him do that dumb slow pace he does while talking, where he wouldn’t look at him; dramatic asshole. Leon would’ve been dead if he didn’t have the mold. “You aren’t hurt too bad, though? Or infected?”

“No, I’ve had worse,” he replied, echoing what Leon said every time he’d close his wounds. He did his best to keep casual while hiding every inch of skin he could. His dark veins under Leon’s skin were visible even on his hands, and Ethan was sure his face was worse.

“True, but this is my case,” Chris stopped his pacing and sighed. “This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t lost control of E-003.” A bolt of white-hot anger flared through Ethan’s entire network, and he felt a tingle from Leon’s brain. “Someone got to her, and-“

“What did you call Rose?” a voice, distinctly not Leon’s, left his mouth. Ethan whirled around without thinking, face pinched in anger, before freezing, rage forgotten.

He met Chris’s eyes for the first time in sixteen years, and it was like the horror and dread never left them since that day in Europe.

Without breaking eye contact, Chris pulled his pistol from its holster but kept it trained on the ground. With his other hand, he clicked the radio on his shoulder.

“Redfield reporting,” his gravelly voice didn’t give anything away, but Ethan couldn’t let him finish. “Kennedy’s been-”

A pillar of mold extending from Leon’s arm slammed him in the shoulder and enveloped the radio. He rolled with the force and raised his gun. The bullets aimed straight for Leon’s head harmlessly embedded themselves in a thick, carapace-like shield formed on his other arm.

Ethan had to get them out of there. The door was behind Chris, but the windows behind them were busted. They were on the second floor, so climbing to the roof would be better.

With half a plan, he tried to form tendrils to drag them back while he kept guarding their front. The mold twisted up in the space the megamycete laid in and instead formed four long, spider-like legs from Leon’s back.

Whatever, I can work with it, he thought, sending a tendril off his arm to pull Chris’s feet out from under him. He lifted them off the ground, pulling them back to the window. He found it with the limbs and hooked them outside the frame. He grew claws over Leon’s hands to scramble up the side, earning him a bullet to leg once his guard was dropped. He ignored Chris’s shouts as he climbed over the edge of the roof and jumped for another.

He strengthened his legs and used the spidery limbs to get him as far from Chris as he could. He wouldn’t let Leon get found out, he wouldn’t let him get killed, and he’d only stay until he knew Rose was safe. Now he just had to find a place to settle down enough to finish Leon’s healing.

A sudden stab of pain to his consciousness nearly sent him careening off a roof. He thought it might’ve been something from the megamycete trying to fight its way out before he heard him.

What the hell was that?! Leon mentally shouted; he was wrestling for control back to his body, and was doing a damn good job of it. You promised! And why did you attack Chris?!

Ethan pulled any mold back back from his skin and shoved control back so fast, Leon fell to his knees.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry… he said on repeat. He felt Leon’s shoulders loose a little tension as he shakily stood to find cover behind an air conditioner. Once he’d gotten settled down, he laid a hand on his chest over where the megamycete rested.

“Hey,” he said, tapping his chest to get Ethan’s attention. “I feel like I missed something while I was out. Mind filling me in?”

#re venom au #resident evil #ethan winters #leon kennedy #I dont feel like designing enemies yet #but my idea is that they're some combination of plagas and mold #maybe plagas infested with cadou #but the mold basically makes the knife tentacle ganados really hard to kill #ethans still a little salty at chris for how he handled the whole “dont tell ethan anything” thing #and how he treats rose #he didnt want to have to talk to him #when ethan turns leon around he kind of looks like how mia did when she gets possessed in re7 with grey eyes and stuff #chris kinda has his “foot in mouth” syndrome from re8 where he somehow says the perfect thing to piss ethan off #ethan also promised to help hide that leons infected with mold so the government wont have any reason to stop him from retiring #thats why he only attacks when chris grabs his radio to call it in #and woohoo the plagas-shaped hole influencing mold form shape #i gotta finish actually describing the final mold-venom form #later #not beta read #enough stalling time to post #my writing

19 notes · View notes