#except instead of prompts it's kind of a self prompt I guess?

[akirakirxaa]

Y'ALL please do this music is how I get inspired and I have a literal writing playlist that has like three hundred songs on it that I listen to for said inspiration.

Ask game! Have your followers send you a number, then go to your favorite playlist/album/whatever and press shuffle and skip that many times, and then write a little mini fic based on the song you get!

[zorrasucia]

Promptober 22. Costumes

from @carmenberzattosgf list

Reader x Carmy Berzatto (The Bear FX)

Rating: Mature (1k)

Tags: Many References to Pretty Woman (1990), Established Relationship, Roleplay, Dirty Talk, Smut, Cut to Black, Both Carmy and Reader have a bit of a praise kink

It was past midnight when you returned from your Halloween party. Carmy usually got home late from The Bear, so you weren't surprised to find the lights on when you opened the door.

You left your bag on the counter and walked towards the bedroom.

"Getting ready for bed?" you asked, catching a glimpse of Carmy shirtless.

"Yeah," he said. "How was the party?"

"Really fun. Lots of dancing. I just hope I never have to drink a Halloween themed cocktail ever again," you sighed and Carmy smiled. "Thanks for letting me borrow this, by the way."

You took off Carmy's blazer, slightly boxy on you, and handed it to him. Except he didn't take it, he was frozen, his eyes fixed on your outfit.

"Baby, what the fuck?" he mumbled softly.

"Oh!" you remembered you hadn't actually told him about your costume. "Have you ever watched Pretty Woman? It's, uh, Julia Roberts at the beginning of the movie..."

"No, I can see that," he rasped, not moving.

His gaze traced the edges of the old tank top and jean skirt you had sacrificed to make her outfit. The cutouts framed your waist and your thighs were in full show, your boots reaching up to your knee. He frowned - was he upset?

"Carm... You okay?" you asked, unable to decipher his expression.

"What?" he looked up, breaking from his trance. "Yeah, good, great," his face was red.

"Are you mad or something?" you tried to guess why he was acting so strange. He had never cared about what you wore so this was definitely out of character. "A friend drove me home, if that's what you're worried about."

"No, I know you can handle yourself, baby," he chuckled nervously. "Just, uh... You look good."

"Thanks!" you blushed at the compliment and when you looked down you saw he was hard inside his jeans. "Oh."

"Sorry. I'm like a fucking loser teenager," he rubbed his face. "I'll take care of it while you get ready for bed. You must be tired."

You stopped him from leaving by hooking your fingers in the belt loops of his jeans.

"I'm not that tired, Carm," you giggled and got closer, your noses almost touching. Then, you prompted in a teasing tone: "So you have watched Pretty Woman."

"Nat was obsessed. Watched it at least once a month," his voice was choked and his hands hovered above your body, unsure of where to touch. You smirked.

"Did you have a thing for her? Julia Roberts?"

"Uh, kind of," it looked like he was struggling to concentrate, his eyes landing on your body every few seconds. "Just- Fuck. You look so fucking good in it."

It was your turn to get tongue tied. When you first started dating, you got shy when Carmy said things like that, the self conscious part of you not really believing it. After months of him worshiping every inch of your body, hands greedy for even the bits you were most insecure about, you couldn't possibly doubt him and you tried your best to enjoy it instead of question it.

"Come, sit," you pushed him gently to the edge of the bed. He plopped down on the mattress. "That way you can see it properly."

You did a slow turn so he could see the cut outs of the dress and your hair falling down your back.

"Fuck," he mumbled as you turned round to face him.

You moved to straddle Carmy's lap, placing one knee on each side of his thighs, agonizingly slow.

"You can touch me," you prompted, shivering when his hand went underneath the fabric that covered your spine, long fingers splayed all over your back.

He arched his neck, aiming to kiss your lips, but you swayed in his embrace so that his mouth landed on your jaw instead.

"No kissing on the lips, remember?" you teased.

"Is that a thing in the movie?" he asked, disoriented.

"Mhmm," you nodded.

"Right..." he frowned, still chasing your lips.

"You can kiss anywhere else, touch anywhere you like," you whispered into his ear, enjoying the feeling of Carmy writhing underneath you, a little frustrated that he wasn't getting exactly what he wanted.

"You're going to kill me," he groaned, nuzzling the length of your neck, tracing figures on your skin with his fingertips. You could feel his hard cock against you, feel his jeans against your underwear. "Can I fuck you like this?"

"Yes," you hummed in delight as you ground against his erection. "I'm guessing the costume stays on," you said breathily.

"Please."

You got off Carmy's lap only for a moment, just enough to take your underwear off, and went back to your place straddling him.

"Hadn't seen those on you," he mused, distracted for a second by the black lace panties thrown carelessly on the floor.

"They're new. Felt right for the character," you shrugged.

"You're a method actor now?" he teased.

You smirked and reached inside your boot, by the zipper, and took out a handful of condoms.

"She did this in the movie too," you explained.

"Were you carrying those around all night?" he asked, the corner of his mouth quirking up.

"Thought it would be fun. Sort of naughty trick or treat for my friends," you giggled at Carmy's embarrassed flush. "One of them left with a guy dressed like a werewolf. I'm doing a public service here."

He laughed, looking up at you lovingly, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear.

"You sure I can't kiss you?" he insisted.

You shook your head. "I take dressing up very seriously," you said and offered him the array of condoms. "I think I ran out of flavored ones but there's a good selection still. Pick one."

He closed his eyes and pointed blindly.

"Oh, you're feeling lucky?" you reached for the button of his jeans, a textured condom in your hand, the rest forgotten by Carmy's feet.

"Tonight? Yeah," he said, groaning low when you lowered yourself on his cock. "So fucking lucky."

[fannishstuff]

How would Ford get kicked out instead of Stan?

So, a bit ago, @ckret2 posted an essay expressing frustration about the fandom portrayal of Filbrick. Filbrick is often characterized as violently and irredeemably abusive, whereas ckret2 cites some very convincing evidence that he was a well-meaning but authoritarian father - not a good dad, but not an evil person.

This discussion was prompted because ckret2 was considering an AU in which Ford never goes to college and ckret2 prefers the smallest possible change in AUs.

I wanted to link those posts because they have absolutely gotten me thinking about the subject. The following will make more sense if you've read that essay and this follow-up about Filbrick's regret over Stan's behavior. I accept the contents as canon for the purposes of this post.

(For completion's sake, the entire discussion was prompted by a Ford as a Trucker AU, but the following doesn't actually have anything to do with that.)

Let's make Ford the kind of person Filbrick would kick out of the house

Stan's eviction is the end result of many, many years of contention between Stan and Filbrick - an earnest last-ditch effort by a desperate father to get his delinquent son to shape up, and a decision he only made because he thought Stan was legitimately malicious. Most AUs in which Ford is kicked out instead of Stan will just rewrite the Science Fair scene so that Stan has more to lose than Ford. If we're talking "smallest possible change," though, I don't find that convincing. If Filbrick was an unpredictable maniac who's ready to ditch his kids at a moments notice? Yeah, fine, any small mistake by either one of them would work. But if Filbrick has been earnestly trying to be a good father, and just didn't feel like he was getting through? One mistake, even a big one, from his less troublesome son would be unlikely to prompt a disowning.

So, my question is: what "single small change" early in life would lead Stan and Ford to develop in a way that flipped Filbrick's expectations of them?

Personality traits and how they affect the relationships

Let's talk about Filbrick, Stanley, and Ford.

So, first of all: Filbrick wants is sons to be industrious, tough, honest, and hard-working. Those are the qualities that matter to him. He makes them box so that they'll be able to stand up for themselves and others. He fights with Stanley because Stanley is a thieving scam artist. He demands the kids be profitable and successful because that is a mark of success as an adult for him. If we assume that the twins were an unplanned pregnancy, then he also firmly believes in taking responsibility for your mistakes -- in owning up.

Stanley is a born liar. Like, even his playful and friendly interactions with his family involved good-natured lies. (He reminds me of one of my uncles, who was an avid prankster up until the time he went up against me, but that's a whole story that I won't get into here.) I think in order to be on Filbrick's good side, he'd have to prove that he was honest in his own way - for example, by defending people when it really mattered even at the expense of his own reputation, or by refusing to take advantage of someone who has wronged him. I don't think canon Stan would do either of those things for anyone except family, but canon Stan is also convinced that nothing he does will ever be good enough. His last, dying words were "I guess I was good for something." He never until that moment thought he was. We need to make sure that he earns some self-respect earlier in life.

Now we need to find a flaw in Ford to exacerbate to the scale Stan had in canon. This isn't really hard, honestly. Ford may have been the less troublesome kid in high school, but he is ruthlessly ambitious, and as an adult he will steal or destroy anything to get the results he wants. I think that the reason he was the less troublesome kid is because there really isn't a good way that a high schooler can be ambitious at the expense of the people around them on a scale that matters. The stakes are just too low. Maybe Ford put down his classmates to secure a win in a spelling bee or stole an answer key once or twice, but it's hard to imagine Filbrick caring about schoolkid drama. That said, if Ford did have an aspiration - a science project, for instance - that he became truly obsessed with, it's easy to imagine him stealing or breaking things to achieve it.

So, how would we make stealing and destroying things a pattern of behavior for Ford, instead of a single one-off mistake? And how would we make Stanley's good-heartedness and self-sacrificing nature something that is visible to his father and overwhelms his tendency to lie?

Oh, and one more thing:

The big fight didn't just happen because Ford lost something he wanted. The entire Tale of Two Stans is about two twins who are very close to each other when they're young drifting apart over time as their needs, ambitions, and hobbies begin to diverge.

How do we make this separation happen in a way that flips the script?

Ford as a more isolated kid

Ford has a one-track mind.

In order to make this alternate canon work, I want to isolate Stan and Ford from each other very quickly. Filbrick might not be violently abusive, but he does ignore the kids, and Ford is already isolated from his peers due to bullying and poor social skills. If Stan isn't spending all of his time with Ford, then Ford might become more and more withdrawn. I don't think he would even be unhappy! Maybe a little lonely, but he's a bright kid with varied interests, and he'd keep himself occupied. But he might get a little... unhinged.

My Ford sans Stan is a kid that gets into trouble. A lot of trouble. Way more trouble than parents should have to deal with.

He gets arrested for disassembling abandoned cars. He gets detention for melting things in the chemistry lab. He gets stitches and tetanus shots after climbing under bridges, or ends up in the burn ward because he stuck a fork in an outlet. (I knew multiple academically gifted children who did this, what is wrong with you guys.) He might make a weapon like a nail gun because he thinks it's cool, and while that wouldn't cause as many alarm bells in 1980 as in 2020, it gould get someone seriously hurt. And, moreover, no matter how many times he's yelled at or bailed out or suspended or has his privileges revoked, he just doesn't get it. He'll express genuine remorse every time, but Filbrick will stop believing him after a while because he never changes. He never changes because... well. Because he is incorrect about what's wrong.

This version of Ford is isolated from his peers and doesn't have his brother to entertain him, so he's extremely self-centered. He doesn't think about the consequences of his actions and he doesn't think about how they might affect others. Let's say he snuck into the chemistry lab after hours, did an experiment without adult supervision, and ended up catching a shelf on fire. When he is punished, he's contrite and apologetic. He earnest in his expression of grief. He feels horrible. You'll tell him what he did wrong, and he will say, "I know," and accept his punishment without complaint. But, if you were to actually ask him what he did wrong, the answer will be:

"I used the wrong solvent." Or, at best: "I wasn't careful enough."

Nothing about disrespect for property. Nothing about breaking the rules. Nothing that reflects the fact that he is a child using someone else's resources to try a dangerous experiment without permission or supervision.

I don't think the adults around him, least of all Filbrick, would notice the communication error. Filbrick isn't in the habit of asking young boys about their feelings. Even if they did notice it, I don't think they would handle it well; this is before modern mental health science, and it might actively frighten the adults around him to realize that he doesn't understand morality in the way the kids around him do.

I think that if we start with this version of Ford, it would be very, very easy for him to screw up so badly that Filbrick felt the need to kick him out.

Some ways we can reduce Stan's influence

Option One: Stan might actually be worse off.

Usually, these reverse AUs are about Stan being the golden child and Ford being the one who Filbrick has it out for. However, that doesn't necessarily have to happen in order for Ford to be the one who gets kicked out. If Stan gets caught (or framed) for a crime big enough to send him to juvie for a while, or for Filbrick to send him off to a reform school, Ford would be left alone for years - long enough for Ford to develop the habits I just described.

This AU would fit really well with the themes of canon, too. The show is about how, even though family has its ups and downs, we're better together than we are apart. If Stan is separated from Ford against his will, and the rest of the Pines live to regret it, we address that theme head-on.

In an AU where Stan goes to boarding school, juvie, or something like that, I personally think Stan would still love Ford dearly and do his best to support him. Ford would do his best to make his own way in the world after his falling out with his father, and Stan meets up with him whenever he can. They have their own lives but remain friends.

Option Two: The ever-so-beloved Sports Stan option! If Stan ends up in a successful hobby, it might keep him out of trouble enough to curb his more dishonest tendencies. If that's the case, Ford's isolation comes from Stan having more friends (teammates!), more extracurricular responsibilities, and possibly the kind of social life that keeps him busy during school hours. I figure that in this version, Stan might stand up for Ford getting bullied, and he would be listened to, because you don't fuck with the football team. That would leave Ford with neither friends nor enemies. Ford might hang out with the sports kids for a while, but it would be really awkward, since he's just Stan's brother and doesn't have much in common with these guys.

This version leaves Stan slightly less delinquent but otherwise the same as his canon counterpart. Sports keep him out of trouble, might get him a scholarship, but otherwise leave him pretty much intact.

My problem with both of these two options is that I feel like, for maximum effect, we need to isolate Ford in middle school or earlier - I think fifth grade would do it. Sports don't really get that serious until late middle school or high school, and it's hard for a ten-year-old to get in enough trouble to get sent away.

The sooner the twins begin to separate, the better for this narrative.

Option three: Boy Scouts (or something). In this version, Stanley doesn't just have a hobby he likes - he has a hobby that becomes a lifestyle. He joins a club or meets a mentor that has a profound impact on him as a person. This, I think, would be the biggest possible impact with the smallest possible change.

I'm going to use Boy Scouts as my example, even though I can't really imagine Stan joining a troop without Ford. Just know that this is a placeholder, and it could be anything: he might find a car repair shop with a kindly and avuncular war veteran mechanic, he might fall in with a volunteer group, et cetera. If we go with the boy scouts, though, here's what happens:

Stan is bored and frustrated and has too much energy as a prepubescent or barely pubescent kid. He ends up hanging out with some boy scouts, and they do things that he thinks are really cool. They're the first kids he meets who like boats as much as him, and they know all the rigging knots. Maybe one of them tells him all about how to take care of lizards, and that other kid knows how to light a fire using a flint.

He convinces his parents to let him join the troop. At first, he doesn't fit in at all. All of the other kids have been doing this since first grade, and he's bad at making friends. However, one of the troopmasters becomes a mentor to him: this man intentionally gives him attention, spends time with him, asks him about his interests, teaches him skills that he's missing, et cetera.

If you've ever been or known a young kid who didn't get enough attention and then, suddenly, met someone who made them feel included, you know what happens.

Stan would sell his soul for this guy.

Stan memorizes his handbook, he attends all the functions, he mentors the cubs, the whole shebang. I think Stan would have a blast, too. Boyscouts make up bullshit to tell the little kids constantly. They play pranks on each other and the troopmasters. They haze the new kids. The develop complex internal mythologies for their troops. They get up to all manner of ridiculous shenanigans, oftentimes with the help of knives, ropes and fire. Stan would love it.

By high school, he's working hard toward his Eagle Scout badge, and that means he isn't just attending troop functions. For those who have never been scouts, the whole program is supposed to be about leadership training. The Eagle Scout status is one you earn by doing a project of your own - usually some small but tangible improvement to your hometown, such as building some benches or making an improvement to a museum. So, in the Sports Stan version of events, Stan is busy because of regularly scheduled team sports; in the Scouts Stan version, he's spending a huge chunk of his own free time planning, fundraising for, and building his project.

But there's another thing at play here.

Boy Scouts have a strict code of honor. If Stan was a gung-ho boy scout, he would probably become exactly the kind of person Filbrick wants him to be.

And, well,

I think he'd also become judgemental as hell.

Yeah, he still loves his brother, but here Stan is living his best life and being a good citizen who contributes to society, while Ford's out there... drawing pictures of ghost he insists he saw? Reading about mermaids? Catching the chemistry lab on fire?

Like, seriously bro, you need to get a real hobby.

You know how by the end of high school, Ford was treating Stan as an immature and ignorant kid with no real aspirations who wasn't going to amount to anything in life? You know how Ford was so sickened by Stan's relative lack of ambition that he really believed that Stan would deliberately sabotage his science fair experiment just for a chance to hang out more?

Yeah.

Now imagine that reversed.

[youcouldmakealife]

SOTM: Lourdes Family, David; family traditons

For the prompt: Jake's sisters slowly warming up to David

The problem with Nat and David, Allie decides early on, is that they’re too alike. Not in most ways, really — she doesn’t think they’d agree on much when it comes to their taste in media, or hobbies, or any of that, and she’s sure they’d both be surprised if she said they were similar at all.

But Allie knows Nat better than she knows herself, probably, and she’s made an attempt at getting to know David, because she knows how important it is to Jake, and some of the things that make Natalie Nat to her seem to be pretty similar to the things that make David David.

They’re both quiet, but it’s not shyness with either of them, though it can seem like it unless you know them. As often as not, Nat’s quiet because silently dismantling whatever’s being said in her head, about to spring it on whatever poor unsuspecting person just claimed they ‘could care less’ or called a pterodactyl a dinosaur or something that matters to nobody but Nat. 

Though mostly she doesn’t actually say it to them — unless they’re family, she corrects Allie all the time, and poor Jakey doesn’t stand a chance — she’s saying it as an aside to Allie, or recalling it later ,‘my co-worker thought Babylon was a mythological place, and when I said 'oh yeah, like Bethlehem?' he said 'yeah, exactly!'’ or ‘If I hear someone use literally when they mean figuratively one more time, Allie, I swear I'm going to snap’. 

She’s quiet, and sometimes she seems checked out, but she’s always paying attention to what everyone else is saying. Allie’s learned it’s the same with David — she’ll mention something and then nine months later David will have gotten her a Christmas present based on her offhand comment. Or he’ll ask if she wants the same drink as last time, last time being like, six months ago. Allie doesn’t know if he’s got that kind of memory for everybody, or if it’s just because she’s Jake’s sister, and he’s still trying to impress all of them, but, well — consider her impressed, she guesses.

But also, she’s pretty sure he’s also picking up on the mistakes everybody else makes, except instead of ‘Allie, let me tell you the misspelled bumper sticker I saw today’, she isn’t hearing shit from him. She doesn’t think Jake is either, at least if the people making mistakes are them. And they probably are. Allie has no illusions that she makes no mistakes: if she did, Nat would have beaten that belief out of her by now.

“He thinks he’s better than us,” Nat complained once, and Allie pressed her lips together very tightly, and she didn’t say a thing, and frankly, she thinks she deserves a medal for that.

As similar as David can be to Nat, he’s absolutely nothing like Jake. If Allie was asked to list their similarities, it’d be like — ‘very athletic white dudes around the same age’, and then a bunch of hockey specific things. Beyond that, she’s got nothing. It isn’t just their personalities — they have completely different taste in everything. Different priorities, outside of similar career ones. Some overlapping friends, but Allie just attributes that to Jake being able to make friends with a table leg if he wants to. They could not be less alike.

Allie’s never been a big believer in the whole ‘opposites attract’ thing, but honestly, maybe she should be: mom and dad are a pretty good example of it, and Jake and David seem to bring out the best in each other.

It took Allie a little while to come to terms with them getting back together, but she can’t deny that Jake seems to grow when he’s around David. Maturity wise, but he also just seems to stand up straighter, like just being around David makes him more alert, or aware, or maybe even self-confident, though that’s never been something he's lacked.

It probably isn’t just David he’s like that with — Allie hasn’t seen him around the Panthers too much, but he is the captain, after all — but either way, it’s a nice thing to see Jake grown up.

He’s still the baby to her, will probably always be the baby to her — anyone she put in pigtails and pulled around in a little red wagon while telling everyone to look at her pretty little dolly is going to be a baby to her forever, let’s face it — but for all that he’s been taller than her since he was twelve, he felt like a kid to her the whole way to the show, and for awhile after. He doesn’t feel like a kid anymore. Baby, sure, he's always going to be that, but not a kid. 

If anything, David feels more like one. Not that he’s childish, or immature, or whatever, because Allie suspects he wasn’t even childish when he was an actual child. Maybe more someone suddenly immersed in a foreign culture — he doesn’t know where he’s supposed to be, what he’s supposed to do, what the hell is up with the wishbone thing. 

She’s seen Jake explain things to him, the traditions she thought everyone did, and the traditions that are very Lourdes specific, the way mom gives extra mashed potatoes if you're a suck up, and how if people don’t take turns opening presents it turns into a free-for-all, and how nobody actually eats the cranberry sauce.

When Jake isn’t there to do it — rare, but the dude does need bathroom breaks — Allie figures it’s no skin off her nose to do it instead, and she even overhears Nat doing it once, though  she might have just been venting about someone saying dumb shit again. She does love to do that. 

The important thing is that he keeps showing up, even though he’s uncomfortable every single time — though maybe Allie’s imagining it, but she thinks he’s reached the ‘almost comfortable’ stage this Christmas, like, maybe feeling a little awkward, but no more than anyone else would, spending Christmas with his boyfriend’s family.  Maybe more than someone typically would if they’ve been doing it every year, but Allie knows they can be a lot, that most people have trouble keeping up with the rapid back and forth — even Jake gets left behind sometimes, then pouty when they start tease him about it.

David was a wide-eyed spectator, the first few times he saw that. Jake told Allie later that he didn’t hear the fondness in it, just the mockery, got defensive on Jake’s behalf. Allie doesn’t know how he’s survived locker rooms for so long — their love language is basically just mockery and punching each other in sensitive places, at least judging by Jake and his teammates back in the day. Probably now too. She’s met Cody Gallagher, unfortunately.

He takes it better now though, even joined in yesterday when everyone was shit-talking Jake’s recent stab at growing facial hair, while Jake tried and failed to defend himself through giggles. On the one hand, Allie’s just glad it isn’t a mustache, but on the other hand, maybe he’d do a better job with that. This morning, Jake comes down to breakfast clean-shaven. Allie isn’t delusional: he didn’t shave it because his sisters gave him shit. That was all David.

“High five,” Allie says when David joins them downstairs, and she’s half expecting a quizzical look, maybe even the ‘what the hell are the Lourdes talking about now’ one that surfaces sometimes, but instead she gets a tiny smile and a high five.

“I’m sitting right here, guys,” Jake says, but once again, he’s laughing.

[infiniteeight8]

I did not send the trans!Stephen prompt, but am intrigued and would like to submit a proper prompt for it: Stephen is trans, and as such does not have intimate relationships. Then Tony happens.

(The prompt referenced here was turned down because it was too detailed.)

I read a few posts about experiences dating as a trans man (which is about the extent of research I do for any drabble), and people being as varied as they are, it ran the whole gamut from “no problems, everyone was great” to some awful stories I won’t repeat. So I sort of figured anything goes. 

-

Stephen had decided not to bother with dating in medical school, when he was mid-transition. 

That was probably, he realized, a terrible time to make the decision. His classmates had seemed to take their shared studies as blanket permission to both make their unsolicited opinions known and ask incredibly invasive questions. Those years had left Stephen with a deep appreciation for medical privacy and a lasting distaste for sharing anything about his transition in specific or his body in general.

It hadn’t seemed like much of a sacrifice, at the time. He’d always prioritized his career, and he’d always known that that would make finding a partner difficult or impossible. In a way, deciding not to try was a relief. It certainly simplified things.

Stephen was regretting that now.

Maybe if he’d had some kind of experience dating, he’d know what to do with the almost giddy anticipation that sparked every time Tony suggested they hang out. Maybe he’d be able to tell if Tony’s invitations were meant to be platonic or romantic. Maybe he’d have figured out how to tell someone he was trans.

He’d never actually bothered before. Whether or not someone could tell—and they rarely could, Stephen passed very well—it wasn’t necessary. The last time he’d given it any thought at all had been after the Ancient One had knocked him out of his body, when he’d been belatedly relieved that his astral body matched his self-image.

But now… Now it felt… relevant.

In the end, Stephen blurts it out halfway through a movie night, prompted by nothing except the fact that he’s spent the last hour mentally measuring the distance between them on the couch and trying to decide if it was getting narrower. Just two words, blunt and irretrievable: “I’m trans.”

Tony turns to look at him, still relaxed. “Okay,” he says. 

It takes Stephen a minute to realize that Tony is waiting for Stephen to say more. That the revelation itself didn’t, apparently, need any kind of discussion. “That seemed like something you should know,” Stephen goes on, awkwardly, “before I…” He’s blushing now. Vishanti, he didn’t plan this at all. “Before I ask if this is a date.”

There’s a long pause before Tony smirks. “You haven’t actually asked yet.” Stephen throws popcorn at him and Tony laughs. “Sorry!” he says, eyes sparkling. “It’s a pre-date, I guess? You seem like a friends first type.”

Stephen wasn’t any sort of type, given his inexperience, but that conversation could wait for another day. “We are friends,” he announces instead, and raises an eyebrow at Tony.

Tony grins. “Then next time will be a date.”

But he also slides across the couch to close the gap that Stephen has been silently measuring all night.

[gold-rhine]

hm.. kaeya, albedo, and childe for mirror sex, begging, and exhibitionism? tried to avoid the ones I've already seen asked with Albedo, since a couple of my first ideas were (if one of these is accidentally repetitive... your choice I guess??)

warnings nsfw

don't worry about making it repetitive, as long as there are other characters, the whole point of this game is mix and matching :)

actually i think each of them can be fun with each prompt, so instead of usual process of elimination, i'm just gonna go in order of hotness, and since i'm biased, it starts with the prettiest and the only character in genshin impact. fucking kaeya in front of a mirror would be insanely delicious. this is the shit devils are tempting saints with. tying him up wearing nothing but his choker, gorgeous and lithe in half-shadows and slanted moonlight, highlights in his hair turning silver where the light touches them. meeting his eyes in the mirror while fucking him and he smiles, a slow lop-sided smirk, filthy and pleased. making him fuck himself on your cock\strap, and he's shameless, in fact, he's posing, arching to look more seductive, but sometimes, when it suddenly gets too real, teeth scraping on the side of his exposed neck, cock hitting just the right spot, fingers digging into his thighs, when his composure wavers, he meets his own eyes in the mirror both to check that he let nothing show and to make sure he's being the same perfect fantasy. imma stop here bc i plan to sometime write an actual piece on kaeya's relationship with sex as the performance and watching himself in the mirror both to evaluate his own performance and make sure partner enjoys it, the struggle with being watched, but not seen.

albedo is breathless, overwhelmed, so used to feel in control that he doesn't know how to handle so much desire, so he reaches to you, almost as for help, despite you being the one who inflicted this on him. "please" as if "i don't know what do with myself, but i trust you to know", bright blue eyes wide open. "please what?", stroking the tender inner sides of his open thighs, and he swallows, but doesn't look away, doesn't blush, bites his lip with a concentrated little frown "Please fuck me. What do you want me to say that you don't already know? You know I want this badly enough to say anything, you've brought me to this on purpose. What would exact words matter?"

childe is so into exhibitionism, like have you met this whore. what the fuck is that half-open jacket on the naked torso. his shirt is like literally closed on only one button up top. that's ridiculous. tartag, wear some fucking undershirt. and this is not the same as geo men's straightforward sluttiness with crop tops or just being shirtless, no, childe wants to have some intrigue, to pretend it's a tease. except he doesn't have patience or self-control to be a tease, so he's like one step above the flashers. oh i'm srs business fatui, i'm wearing a srs bsns suit, it just happened to be dangling on a single clasp and showing off my abs wink wink. shut up, you whore, no one is buying that shit. if i met him in public and he introduced himself as "toy salesman", i'd think he's gonna try to sell me some vibrators by demonstrating them on himself right there. hold still girlie, im taking a dick pic. ok this somehow derailed into tartag slutshaming, but to be fair, if you made him undress somewhere where there's a chance he could be seen and then just kept telling him what a pathetic whore he is, he'd come untouched in ten minutes flat, which would be too soon bc i didn't even get to the fact that he's 11th harbringer and after signora and scara are out, there are only like 9 ppl left in harbringers AT ALL, what kind of LOSER do u have to be, so he'll have to keep standing on his knees, covered in cum, like a cringeslut failwhore he is

[jamneuromain]

Creative Writing

Andy Barber x Reader (You)

Warning: Professor-Student relationship (possibly?), College AU, a lot of curses. A bit enemy to friends(?)lovers(?) vibe

W/C: ~4k

Summary: based on this prompt

A/N: dividers are from @firefly-graphics, and I spend another couple of hours on fanfic instead of my deadlines, yay!

Dancing in the Daydream M. List

Week 1

Three minutes into the class, you feel like not only you are listening to complete nonsense, but also you disagree with each and every word that comes out of your professor, who is currently standing on the podium, criticizing the shit out of your favorite author.

You regret selecting Creative Writing just because it sounds fun. Although you have been fairly warned by seniors, who took this class last year, Professor Andy Barber who taught Creative Writing runs his class with a tight fist, and of course, not kind with his comments and his marking. Not only does he want the “best” answer from students in class, but also ask everyone in the class to address him as “sir” or “Professor”.

Though he is fairly hot, as the seniors have warned you, with the trimmed beard and occasionally slipped-out Bostonian accent, with the suit and shirt and tie.

To be honest with yourself, you have been writing fanfic and whatnot for over five years, and you hoped that you could learn something from this class to improve your writing. And you love writing. If anything, this awful Professor Barber just gave you more reason to stay, because you want his approval, even if it would only be demonstrated via your grades.

You are not a quitter.

“Now speaking of a writing example that I highly recommend; this is a work I recently come across. Twenty thousand e-copies have been sold so far, now that’s a pretty good number for an author. I don’t expect you to read it thoroughly after class, but the writing style and the balance between story-telling and own reflections of the main characters are something that you should learn from.” Professor Barber takes off his glasses, twirling the frame between his fingers, hitting the button that would let the computer display the next slide.

You huff. You seriously doubt he would present anything barely readable to actual humans. Considering his comments on your favorite book, you take a rough guess that the only thing he will recommend is ancient European Lit.

Except ancient European Lit wouldn’t be in creative writing class.

You lift your head from your iPad, and you widen your eyes, unable to contain the astonishment on your face. Your jaw slams on the table – if it could, while in reality, you press your palm to your mouth, crushing your cheekbones so hard, that you feel your jaw will disconnect the next second.

Your mind blank, unable to come up with any thoughts. Apart from “THIS IS NOT HAPPENING”. In all caps.

On the slide, there is one picture, cropped out from a chapter online. Two paragraphs on the picture, the first describes the action and the verbal communication of two characters; the second describes the mental activity of one character. Below the picture, there is a bracket that contains the source of this snapshot.

The bracket and what’s in it catch your eyes, before the picture.

Well, if it isn’t your damn penname from 9th grade staring right at you in the face.

(A.  Vulpecula, 2020)

Your dumb idiot self wanted something unique and stand out among all the writers in the world. You were, unfortunately, in your Harry Potter phase, and wouldn’t it be a brilliant idea to pick your penname out of constellations, just like a lot of Slytherins?

You ponder what on earth have you written in 2020, raising your head to read your own writing.

Shit, at least it wasn’t your College AU.

This piece is a long story about a witch and a demon. The paragraphs he cropped out happened to be where the witch and the demon didn’t know each other’s true identity.

Your face is burning. You don’t know if you are humiliated by reading your own fanfic in your fucking college class, or if you are gloating because the man who criticized your favorite author thinks your writing is exceptional.

Yes, that “thing” on the screen started out as fanfic.

You also don’t know whether you want to quit this class right this second or stay to hear his opinion on your work.

Or if there’s any value in his comments at all.

Your humiliation doesn’t stop there.

Oh no, it gets way worse.

At least ten slides are focused on your witch/demon au. Barber actually likes your concept of a magical world. He goes on to explain the importance of details, which runs along your story, complimenting how your designs fit perfectly into your story and your characters.

You are flattered, you guess?

But also extremely awkward when he pulls more examples from your fanfic to illustrate his idea.

“Alright, for the upcoming three weeks, we are going to look into more stories. Here is the reference reading, remember to take notes. If you want to, send me a short story or a few paragraphs you have written via email before Wednesday, no more than 500 words, and I’ll see you here next week.”

Before you even notice, the class is over. You, however, are still shocked over the fact that your mean professor likes your work.

You grab your iPad and your bag slowly, scoffing as a bunch of girls swarm up to the podium and giggling, asking Professor Barber for his contact information.

“My email address is in the course handbook, so are the office hours. If you have questions, send an email or make an appointment prior.” He nods them off coldly, though this does not discourage the girls from swooning over his broad shoulders and back under his navy-blue suit.

Your barely-friend sighs, jumping off the podium, obviously displeased by Barber’s cold demeanor. She counts as a “barely friend” because she’s just as active in class as you. Though you sometimes don’t like the way she disregards the lecturer and whisper-yell in your ear when she doesn’t understand.

She pouts: “Can’t get a hold of him.”

“You can always book an appointment for his office hour.” You swing your bag over your shoulder, shrugging, “seniors said he was harsh. I wouldn’t recommend you ‘contact’ him too much.”

“Can’t hurt to try.”

“True.” You wave your hand as a goodbye, leaving the lecture room and a bunch of disappointed girls.

Week 2

On second thought, you should have quitted this class.

Because then you wouldn’t be listening to this ridiculous remark about description over characters.

“I’m just going to let you sit on it for a minute.” Professor Barber pauses his lecture, “think about why Vulpecula describes the man’s blue eyes and red flannel.”

Then there’s silence in the room.

Knowing how easily he gets disappointed, you are not surprised.

Barber wants the “answer”, the best one, the correct one. Well, shocker that students don’t know what he has in mind.

However, in your opinion, which is: For Christ’s sake, the celebrity, Chris Evans, on whom you are basing this fanfic, has a red flannel.

What else are you going to write? Him wearing a suit being a lumberjack? In the middle of nowhere? In a fucking forest?

“What do you think?” Your barely-friend whisper-yells to your ear. Sitting in the front row, she probably makes herself heard for Professor Barber.

You lean away from her, toying with the hem of your sweatshirt, whispering back: “No idea. I’d probably say brings out the characteristics and stuff like tha-”

“Is there something interesting you’d like to share with the class, Miss …?”

Professor Barber lands his piercing sharp gaze on the two of you. Your friend ducks her head to read on her laptop. While you spare a glance at her, you silently spew a curse in your mind.

“Well, Miss…? What do you want to share with the class?”

Great. Now his gaze lands solemnly on you.

You state your name, most unwillingly, and usher out the only reasonable response you can think of: “… because the character the author is basing on has blue eyes and red flannel?”

He repeats your name, “I’d like you to address me as Professor, or Sir. Anybody else?”

He didn’t even say if your theory was interesting, needs work, or some other commentary, which he normally does, trying to inspire thinking and criticality. Like that’s going to work with his tight fist.

You roll your eyes out loud.

“I think red flannel brings out the main character’s – Christopher’s -warm and welcoming character. Red symbols the feeling of fire and warmth, and it’s only plausible that he’s wearing that color, Professor.” Your barely-friend fake coughs, then chirps “her” answer with great confidence.

Professor Barber nods, humming with approval, “very well, you are on the right track. Anybody else?”

Yeah, like anybody is going to know better than you, the author, about how and why you choose to describe his red flannel.

You begin to ponder the question, how is it possible that people interpret too much into the text they are reading? How much people are reading these days are actually the thoughts of critics instead of the authors?

But you are not standing up and revealing that you are A. Vulpecula.

Maybe in your next life but not now.

However, seeing the shocked expression on Barber’s face would be worthwhile.

You can almost imagine how his red lips form an “O” and he stutters due to the bomb you deliberately drop in front of him.

You bite your lips from smiling, too indulged in your imagination to notice Barber glaring at you a couple of times.

“Just a quick reminder that I wouldn’t be looking into more works that are submitted after today. If you want a little feedback on what you have written, send me an email before 12 o’clock midnight. Again, this is not compulsory, it wouldn’t affect your marking, think of it as a fun exercise.” Professor Barber announces once more, shutting off the projector, “we will discuss the coursework for this week next time. Class dismissed.”

Students take their belonging and move slowly toward the exit. You are sitting in the middle of the front row, which means, you are going to be stuck here for a while. A few girls go to the podium to ask questions, which you tune out completely when their questions become giggles.

You are scrolling through your phone when someone calls you by your last name.

Surprise, surprise, it’s Andy Fucking Barber.

“Yes?” You put your phone away, confused as to why he is talking to you.

“Yes, Professor. And I would expect you to pay more attention in class,” his blue eyes feel like ice, numbing your body inch by inch, “that’s all.”

Mother – Fucking - Idiot dickhead - Thickest skull in the fucking galaxy - Every curse word inside your head is cut off by one another, tangling together because none of them is able to describe your fury.

How dares he?

You were paying attention to class compared to at least two-thirds of the students present here. Focus on the word “present”, because you are fairly certain some of them skip this class because Andy Shithead Barber is too harsh.

So what you didn’t provide the answer he had in mind? And the answer he liked was not even close to your thoughts when you wrote that chapter.

You are fuming. You grab your bag and go to the library, sit there for the next two hours, and post a chapter on your Tumblr account about a love story between two vampires.

Your anger blend into your motivation to write. You wrote four thousand words in two hours, which is a record.

Yeah, you will show Mr. Professor Sir your “attention to the class”, see if he likes it next week.

Week 3

You are sure this would be the death of you.

He sent you an email two days prior, asking you whether you have time to discuss your piece of writing in his office, right after his class.

Of course, you RSVP-ed yes, but you have completely no idea why he wanted to talk to you, while other students have already received their feedback.

“OOOOOhhhhhhh, he said I am creative, but my descriptions are a little too detailed.” Your barely-friend squeaks dramatically, earning herself a silent eye-roll from you.

You can’t think of any reason that could explain his email. You wrote as yourself, you have given him a piece of your ongoing work, which was about two vampires. You are satisfied with your work. He could have just written feedback and sent it to you, even if he didn’t like your writing. What could possibly be the problem here?

Professor Barber takes off his suit jacket, rolling his shirt sleeves to his elbow, his calm voice circles the classroom, “coursework from last week, anyone has any idea about why the author wrote ‘There are two trees in the yard. One is a jujube tree. The other is also a jujube tree’?”

You turn to the page of your notes, not looking up at him, “because that’s exactly what the author sees when he looks out of his house?”

As if it couldn’t have been worse, with an extra reminder for you to call him “Professor”, his cold blue eyes glide over you, commenting on your answers to his questions that your ways of thinking and dissecting texts are “far from those of an author”.

His words, not yours.

At this point, you don’t even bother listening to his comments, instead, you start writing on your iPad.

Might as well use the time to do something at least meaningful.

“Did you make an appointment with him before, like during office hours?” When the class is over, you ask your barely-friend in a low voice.

“No.” She shakes her head, a smirk on her face, “I’m trying my best not to get on his bad side. Why? Why’d you ask?”

Like you were trying to. You get on his bad side so very easily. You grunt a “nothing”, waiting for Barber to finish packing his things.

“Okay, see ya!”

Your barely-friend slips out of the room.

You highly doubt if Barber wants you in his office because he would like to give you a compliment.

Andy Barber calls your name to snap you out of your mind. He has shrugged on his suit jacket, his lecture notes in hand, “shall we?”

At least his office is in this building so you don’t have to endure the long and awkward silence when you are walking.

You follow him into his office.

His office is a small room. Three desks are put together, taking up most of the space. His desk is by the window, equipped with computers and office supplies, while he points at the empty desk near the door, “please, have a seat.”

He drags his chair over to sit on the same side of the same desk as you. He sighs, taking off his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose. Finally, he puts on his glasses again, rubbing his bearded chin, “do you know why you are here?”

“The homework of 500 words …?” You chew on your lower lip, hesitant to give him the answer.

“It’s Professor or Sir. And yes.” He sits straight on his chair, his blue eyes staring into you, his voice sterner than ever, “and?”

You let out a long breath, gathering enough courage to say what you have always wanted to say in the last three weeks, “to be honest, I have completely not the slightest clue what you want me to say.” You pause, then add a word for good measure, “Sir.”

He sighs again, taking a moment to organize his words, “the reason you are here today is that I want to talk to you about academic malpractice. Now it might not be stressed enough in your past studies, but the university takes academic malpractice very seriously.” He slows down as if trying to imprint you with each and every word he says.

Your brows furrow: “And how does that have to do with…”

He is NOT implying what you think he means, right?

He is NOT implying that you copied someone’s work, right?

Or you let someone copy your work?

“I don’t understand what you mean.” You cross your arms, almost defensive, looking back at him in disbelief, “I can guarantee there’s no academic malpractice.”

Pause.

Oh right, you nearly forget, “Sir.”

“I’m gonna cut to the chase here.” Sir Professor Andy Barber pulls over his own laptop, turning it toward you so that you can clearly see the content on his screen, “the document on the left is your work, the one on the right is a chapter of A. Vulpecula’s stories.” He leans back in his chair, crossing his arms too, allowing what he said to sink in, “can you see the similarity?”

Um.

Okay.

You did not expect this. Not one bit.

Of course, what he shows you are two identical snippets.

But since when is “presenting something that you have personally written” a crime?

You cannot hide the amusement on your face. No matter how hard you try to suppress your grin, it just keeps getting wider and wider.

“I know that it’s only homework, a practice at writing, if you will,” he gestures at the screen, unaware of your grin at first, “it won’t be reported to the university, but I strongly suggest you, not to copy other’s work just because you would like to impress your lecturer.”

He stops talking when he sees your expression, which must be a mix of half-laugh and holding back, though none of the above successful.

“I’m sorry, is there something funny?”

His voice ice-cold, clearly not pleased with your reaction, your behavior, and you as a human being.

Yeah, you can tell he is pissed.

“No, nothing,” you nearly snort out because of suppressing your laugh, “please, continue.”

“No. Indulge me.” He purses his lips into a thin line, blue eyes so sharp that they could pierce your skin.

Silence.

You thought about letting the misunderstanding of “academic malpractice” grow, but if there’s one thing you simply could not abandon, it would be your academic integrity.

You cross your legs, loosening your arms, “I just … I find it funny because I submitted my own work.”

You wait for your words to sink in.

Barber shakes his head in disappointment, “academic malpractice is what -”

“I have submitted my own work.” You cut him off, “I am A. Vulpecula.”

You really don’t mind beating the information into his thick skull.

But, alas, battery & assault is a crime here.

You pull out your iPad, opening the folder of manuscripts. Clicking on the vampire AU, you show him your own manuscript and what you have written in the past hours.

“I can post this chapter early to prove my point, if you like.” You lay your iPad in front of him, leaning back in your chair, “anything else, Professor?”

More silence.

“No. Nothing.” His mouth slightly agape, not entirely what you had in mind, but close enough, “thank you for coming by.”

“No worries.” You pack your things, heading to the door. “For the record,” you turn on your heels before stepping out of his office, “week 2, the discussion about the red flannel?”

“Yes?” He raises his head.

“That was really because Chris Evans has a red flannel, Sir.” You look at him one more time, then lower your eyes, “goodbye, sir.”

Two months later, you are celebrating with your friends in a pub, that the finals are over.

Your real friends, not your barely-friends.

“Phew! Tell me about what you wrote for your Creative Writing!” Your friend fans her tongue for having swallowed a shot, nudging you to tell them more about your major and your classes.

You down your shot in one gulp, wincing due to the burn in your throat, “well, I did learn my lesson. I wrote a new piece, about a cheesy princess-bodyguard romance.”

Your friends don’t know about the full story. You altered the details a little, not telling them about you being a part-time some-what-famous writer, but enough for them to understand your situation.

“We also had this ridiculous lecturer, a skinny guy, who keeps asking you why about everything and every question-” Your friend rambles about her life story, with a round of “No way” “No shit” “What???”.

“I’m gonna need drinks, not shots.” Another one of your friends stands up, dragging you along with her to get drinks, only for her to dump you at the bar while she hurries to the bathroom.

You wait for the bartender, slightly bored.

“Hey,” your first name was called, a slight tap on your shoulder having you turn around. Andy Barber is standing in front of you. He is wearing a casual shirt without ties, and denim from the waist down. With a beer in hand, he smiles at you, “fancy meeting you here.”

“Likewise,” you nod curtly, “Sir.”

He waves his hand as if it was nothing, “please, no need for that, Sir or… just no.” He smiles nearly apologetically, “I never get the chance to say I enjoy your writing. I’m sorry for discouraging you in class. You are an exceptional writer.”

This takes you by surprise.

“Oh! Okay…? Thanks?” You twist your fingers together, unable to think of anything that could respond to him, “I’m … flattered?”

“Please, if anyone is flattered, it’s me. I am very glad to meet an author I appreciate.” He extends your hand for you to shake. You shake his hands lightly, engulfed in his large and warm hand for a second.

The friend who abandoned you for bathroom slings an arm around your shoulders, although she can barely walk straight, “oooohhhhhh, I think he’s cute!” She yells in your ear, giggling, “you should sleep with him!”

You are pretty sure Professor Barber heard that.

He looks flustered, his neck a shade redder than before, mumbling, “I suppose I’ll leave you with your friends.”

Speaking of your friend, she disappeared – more like dashed - to your table with your drinks, yelling to your other friends about how you are “getting laaaaaaaaid” tonight.

“There goes my ‘said’ friend.” You chuckle, “it’s nice seeing you, Professor.”

Barber lowers his eyes before looking into yours, his blue eyes sparkling with joy, “please, I’m not teaching you anymore. Call me Andy.”

[ssukidesu]

Inextricably Knotted (an Inukag + Jane Eyre AU) [Chapter 7]

Summary: Kagome Higurashi was orphaned as a baby and raised by her cruel aunt until the age of ten, after which she went to school and learned the art of service and self-suppression. Now eighteen, Kagome takes a job as the governess of Shippo, the young ward of the great and mysterious Lord Inuyasha Taisho.

But as Kagome gets to know her bemusing master, a ghost seems to haunt his estate, hinting that there is a long-lost secret hiding on the third floor.

(Read on AO3)

tag list: @heynikkiyousofine @xanthippe-writes

Chapter 7: Portraits and Wings

The presence of guests at Jidai-Ju Hall persisted into the following weekend. The days were not much changed—Shippo received most of her attention, even though she received very little of his. Despite his fascination with the goings on of the company, Kagome managed during most lessons to wrench some productivity out of him.

During the evenings, Kagome would sit as she was bid among their company silently. Her presence clearly disconcerted everyone—except him who ordered it, as he instead preferred to ignore her altogether. Kagome would pretend not to notice as she read lines of whatever book she chose to accompany her that night, with varying degrees of success. 

The group would often play games—cards, billiards, darts, guessing games, and so on. Tonight—which was a misty Saturday night that hinted at spring's approach—it appeared the game of choice would be charades.

It was Mr. Taisho’s idea. “Let us test the skill of our silence,” he had proclaimed dramatically as he came into the parlor last, as he always did. The room bustled in anticipation, and during the commotion, he walked over to grab a book off the shelf adjacent to Kagome’s seat. 

“Will you play?” he asked simply, gaze flicking to her face for a brief moment.

Surprised by the address, Kagome only shook her head.

To her relief, he did not insist. He returned to the heart of the room and declared himself the partner of the woman of the hour. 

Lady Yura sported a fine dress of pale blue, floral buds of beads and lace decorating the sweetheart bust and form-fitting sleeves. Her short hair was distinctly straight, and a dainty white ribbon worked to frame her face as a headband. The other women in the room donned similar, though less remarkable, attire. The men wore typical vests and shed their coats once the fire’s heat permeated the room. Mr. Taisho shared the fashion. 

The other pairs were named: Kagura with Ayame—the young demoness with brown hair—and Naraku with Kouga—the unfortunate recipient of Ayame’s too-frequent affections. In the last few days, Kagome had learned that both Ayame and Kouga were wolf demons, and Naraku and Kagura were some other type seemingly unassociated with a specific animal. But whatever they were, they were indeed kin of some sort, though the precise kind evaded Kagome still.

With the parties ready, Mr. Taisho opened the book, which housed charade prompts. “Who would like to go first?” he asked.

“I think we should, dear Inuyasha,” said Yura. “Someone must show everyone how it’s to be done.”

As Kagome’s grasp of the nuances between each relationship deepened, she found Yura’s air of confidence surprisingly fragile. The woman’s beauty proved unmatched; however, whenever her desired devotee did not fully satisfy her with their attention, her expression became strained, and her smile fabricated. And worse for her, Kagome thought for certain that Mr. Taisho noticed, too.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Kagome watched her master as he navigated through the weeds and waves of whatever bog this party was proving itself to be. But he did not miss a beat—every joke, he built upon masterfully; every flirt, he returned with charm. And yet, Kagome was becoming less and less convinced of the truth of her master’s affections for the woman. 

When she first arrived, Kagome bristled and flinched at Mr. Taisho’s smiles and trifles with Lady Yura. But Kagome’s observations—once she gained the courage to allow them—revealed that their companionship was quite hollow. 

And this was not merely the hopeful opinion of a naive girl. Kagome watched herself just as carefully, and she was confident that she was seeing with the undeceived eyes of a self-controlled woman: indeed, Kagome saw that Lord Inuyasha was going to marry Lady Yura—for rank, for family. But not for love. 

And this game of charades, with all of its coquetry and costume and comedy, was nothing more than the ironic pastime of the larger parody between the players. 

What frustrated Kagome the most was that, where Lady Yura failed to genuinely please Mr. Taisho, Kagome saw where she would have succeeded. Lady Yura was all too upfront: where she brushed the master’s shoulder, a subtle smirk would have proven more effective. Where she feigned bashfulness, a statement of distant confidence would have won. With the certainty of a woman, Kagome now knew what her heart had felt from the beginning: it was she who understood Mr. Taisho best. He was not to them what he was to her. They were akin to each other—more than any pair with so different experiences could be. Kagome was certain that she and Mr. Taisho shared more sympathy in a single passing glance than Yura could manage wrangling out of an entire evening.

And with all of this, Kagome remembered his words to her so many months ago: You’ve never felt jealousy, have you, Miss Higurashi? Of course you haven’t—for that would require that you experience love, first. When the day finally comes that you feel the prick, you’ll learn that one can only feel jealousy when the person usurping your love is truly better than you.

Kagome indeed did not feel jealous of Lady Yura. But the heartbreak was no easier. Perhaps if the woman had been a lady of grace and kindness, of wit and wisdom, Kagome would have been capable of blessing the union with all her heart. But it was the inferiority of Lady Yura—her inability to earnestly charm him—that kept Kagome discontented with her impending union with her master. Because he was going to marry her anyway.

Thus, she sat silently in her seat and watched as Mr. Taisho and Lady Yura, now dawning half-complete costumes relating to whatever their prompt was, enacted some sort of ceremony. The lady wore a white curtain about her body over her dress, and she draped a corner of it over her head and face like a veil. Mr. Taisho had restored his black coat to his person and added his top hat to the mix, and he filled his hands with the contents of a now-vacant flower vase and offered them to her on bended knee. 

“Proposal!” cried Ayame.

“Love,” said Kouga.

“Groom!” tried Kagura.

“Bride,” concluded Kouga.

Naraku sat absently, seemingly uninterested in the game.

The two actors signed that Kouga’s latest answer was the first word in the phrase. They then disappeared behind the makeshift curtain to prepare their second performance. In the interim, Kagura leaned over to Naraku from her place beside him for a curt whisper, most likely a rebuke for his lack of enthusiasm. He met her scowl with equal fervor. 

When Mr. Taisho and Lady Yura returned, their appearances had changed. Some Middle Eastern fabric had been retrieved and fashioned into scarves, which draped about the lady’s head and the master’s neck, respectively. The pair proceeded to mimic the Genesis meeting of Rebecca and Eliezer at the well—another allusion to matrimony. The only things missing were the camels.

“Bridewell,” said Kouga pridefully, and the players assented. Kagome smiled at Kouga’s obvious self-satisfaction, and she flicked her gaze to Mr. Taisho, who also seemed amused by his friend's joyous victory. Her master’s dark brows quirked, and his lips twitched into a subtle smirk. 

It was then the turn of the two gentlemen, who halfheartedly managed to perform “French Ballroom” with an abundance of proud jabs at the invoked inferior country. Ayame and Kagura somehow enacted “Aurora Borealis”, the revelation taking many hard minutes of struggle from all parties.

The game ended around midnight. Kagome could not have guessed the time, as she felt so far from sleepy that she wondered if she would get any rest at all after retiring. She kept picturing Yura in her blue dress, fingers pressed against Mr. Taisho’s shoulder as they conferred together during the other pairs’ performances. 

Kagome would not paint tonight, the mess seeming burdensome, but she could make do with the colored pencils that Lady Kaede had brought her alongside the paints. She began at her own desk, her draft sketches swirling and scraping on the first white page. But soon, the window above her space was abandoned by the moonlight. She had only one candle to spare, and though it had another couple of hours remaining, it was not enough. 

It was likely around one thirty. Everyone would be asleep, she assured herself. Kagome gathered her materials—the pages pressed between her arm and torso and the pencils clenched in her right fist—and gripped her candle. She departed from her room and turned down the westward hallway. She came upon her desired place—a large bay window that would bear moonlight for another hour or two. Its cushioned bench was large and would fit her easily. She settled herself, placed her candle on the sill, and continued her work. She completed the final version of the first piece—its flawless face, shining black hair, and pale blue dress filling the page masterfully—only thirty minutes after; she filed it beneath her new page and began working again. She would not use color for this one.

Kagome did not know how much time it took, but she was soon finished with her own portrait. She raised and compared the two—submitting to her purpose in drawing them. Lady Yura’s was titled: “An Accomplished Lady of Rank.” Her own, which brought a cringing curl to her lip and an emptiness to her chest, was titled: “A Governess, Disconnected, Poor, and Plain.” Kagome exhaled, satisfied with her efforts in humbling her recent illogic.

“What are you doing up at this hour?” inquired a voice from beyond the raised portraits.

She managed to smother her squeal of surprise. Lowering the papers and inhaling deeply, she admired Mr. Taisho’s curious face and ruffled sleeping clothes—his white shirt again open near the collar, exposing the top sliver of his muscled chest, and loose red pants—akin to his red coat, she noticed. As frightful as his appearance often was, there was a beauty to his ruggedness, to his long hair and wrinkled shirt, to his broad shoulders and strong legs. But she was forgetting herself—forgetting already the lesson to which she had dedicated the last few hours.  

She cleared her throat and brought her legs closer to herself. “Just drawing. I couldn’t sleep. And you?”

“I walk the grounds sometimes, when I’m restless. Such is part of my duties as lord here, anyway.”

“I see.”

A beat. “Can I look at them? Your drawings.”

Kagome swallowed hard, panic swelling in her chest. “I don’t know…”

Her hesitance brought a challenging look to his face. “Come on, where’s the harm? Have you made something horrible? Intimate, perhaps?”

“All my works are intimate.”

“Yes, but none have been so much so that you’ve hidden them from me before.”

“And how would you know that?” she shot back. “If I’m hiding some, by necessity you would know nothing about them.”

His smile was wolfish. “Ah. An admission?”

Kagome scowled. “A criticism of logic.”

Air left his nose in a puff. “Do you mind if I light a cigar? You’ve your creature comforts; I’d like my own.”

“I don’t mind,” she said.

He sat himself on the other side of the bench, situating his legs so that they mirrored hers. Kagome suddenly felt bashful about her slipperless feet. He seemed to notice them simultaneously, and she slid them backwards to hide them somewhat under her night gown. He made no comment, himself having bare feet, opting instead to place his cigar between his lips and pull a match from his pocket. The movement jostled the sleeves of his shirt, and Kagome noticed a single thin bandage wrapped around his forearm—exactly where he had been burned. Kagome would have asked him how it was possible that he had not fully healed after so many weeks, but the words would not form. The match’s fire erupted passionately when it scratched against his flint, then soothed to a subtle flicker. Once its duty was fulfilled, Mr. Taisho snuffed the flame. The first ring of smoke obscured his piercing gaze like a ghostly curtain.

Kagome peaked back down at the portraits in her lap. She pulled Yura’s out from beneath her own and studied it. What would be its effect on her master? The curiosity came upon her like a muse. “I don’t mind if you see this one,” she said finally, pulling it out and handing it to him.

He looked surprised at her acquiescence, his golden eyes flicking down to the paper only after he was assured by the certainty on her face. A moment passed before he spoke. “A beautiful picture of Lady Yura. You’ve captured her essence, certainly.”

Her toes curled beneath her dress. “But do you like it?”

His eyes flicked up at hers for only a second, a strange lilt in his brow forming at her inquiry. “As well as I like the person whom it depicts.”

Kagome puzzled at the riddle. She didn’t dare question his meaning further with words; instead, she felt a sudden courage unfolding in her ribs. “If I show you the other one, would it receive a more detailed review?”

Inuyasha smiled, then released a puff of smoke from his pursed lips. “If you wish.”

Wordlessly, Kagome unsheathed the second page from her lap and handed it to him. His clawed fingers took hold.

The silence was unbearable. She bit her lip and shrunk down to hide herself between her shoulders and behind her knees. Her elbows dug into her ribs like a clamp.

When he looked up, the reproachful disappointment on his face made her feel her own adolescence more than she had in years. When he spoke, his voice was slow, calculated. “The one of Yura was nothing short of perfection. This one, on the other hand… I must withhold my praise.”

She could have thrown up. Averting her eyes to the window, she focused on the moon as it peaked and wove through wispy clouds. “Why?”

“Because this is the only work of yours I’ve seen that houses a lie.”

Her head whipped back to face him. His look was serious, if not a little irritated—probably mimicking her own. “And what lie is that?”

Inuyasha retained his harsh expression, but he leaned forward till his elbows draped over his knees. “You dishonor yourself.” He brought a hand to brush an orphaned lock of hair from her face, reminding her that this was the second time he’d seen it down. His voice quieted for their increased proximity. “Do you want to hear my criticisms in greater detail?”

Kagome felt her jaw clench. She remembered the purpose behind her two drawings, and she could not help but feel that he was spitting on her efforts of self-preservation. Her words were clipped. “You may find fault with it, but a piece cannot be criticized for reflecting an artist’s thoughts and feelings. Such is the nature of art.”

His eyes seared into her own despite their focus out the window. His voice carried a firmness that reminded her of a lost friend. “A romantic attitude. But while an artist may claim immunity to mechanical criticism for such reasons, they cannot claim immunity to criticism of the perceptions themselves that produced the piece. No one is ever immune to being critiqued for their thoughts and feelings. In fact, it is these things alone that are worth criticism. All else—social rank, familial history, physical characteristics…” he paused, finally succeeding in regaining her strangely watery gaze, “…are arbitrary. Wasn’t it you who said you cared far more about judging me for the characteristics of mine you couldn’t see?”

As if struck dumb, Kagome only nodded. He tilted the page to make it visible to her, and she relented, leaning forward to join his scrutiny.

He spoke slowly, “Here, you’ve intentionally emphasized the slightest trace of defect and neutered every point of expression that gives life and light to your countenance. You’ve drained your color, dulled your eyes. Your lips have been dried out. Your lashes thinned. I have not once seen this expression on your face; even now, as annoyed as you are with me, your cheeks are alive, your eyes large with lighted emotion. Your lips…” His gaze traced her physiognomy as he spoke. Reorienting himself at her eyes, he concluded, “And you’ve left something out.” 

When he didn’t elaborate, she bemoaned her curiosity and took the bait. “What have I forgotten?” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears.

His smile was half tender, half menacing. “Your wings.”

Kagome couldn’t help the tension-relieving laugh that escaped her upturned lips. Whatever he said about the color in her face, she was sure it was growing now. She folded her arms and situated her unburdened legs to cross beneath her. “My wings are retractable. I save their exhibition for times when they’re needed.”

He was pleased with her play, and he scooted forward to chase her, knees bent and closing in like a cage around her. “Oh? And what sort of times are these? I would love to see them one day.” His posture had him so forward that his face was a mere foot from hers, their lines of sight equal. The smell of his cigar, forgotten in his fingers, curled around her nose.

Kagome’s smile grew, but something in her words pierced her own heart. “Impossible. If I’ve unsheathed them, I’ve done so for flight. I’d be gone long before you could notice.”

His eyes carried a strange emotion. “And what of my traps? The invisible nets I’ve splayed out in the sky to catch runaway fairies?” At the word catch, he again intertwined his finger with a lock of her hair.

“You of all people should know that you cannot confine such creatures.”

“I said nothing of confining,” he began, leaning in even closer. Kagome watched his mouth intently, gaze locked on the points of his teeth past his lips. He continued with a whispered sardonic lilt, “I only wish to study one of God’s highest creations. After which, if she wishes to go, I’ll pack her bag myself out of good will. But only after appealing intently for her permanent residence, and sulking petulantly at my failure.”

Kagome was sure she’d turned scarlet now. She pushed his left knee with the tips of her fingers, breaking his cage. She ignored the rough intake of his breath at the contact. She cleared her throat and said, “I’m afraid I can script our play no further, Inuyasha. I was never one for theater.”

“Nor I,” he said with a grin, seemingly pleased at her using his name. His finger relinquished her strands. After a moment with no response from her, he added, “No more of this.” He dropped both papers back into her lap. “If you’re going to steal my supplies, you’ll be sure to not use them for blasphemy. I order you to fix it.”

“I’d much rather destroy and forget about them altogether, sir. Additionally, though I am your employee, I don’t see the propriety of such commands that have nothing to do with my employment as Shippo’s governess.”

If he noticed her jocular tone, he didn’t show it. “I’m not commanding you as an employer.”

Kagome’s mouth sealed shut. She waited for him to explain his meaning, but he never did, opting instead to kiss his cigar once more. His golden eyes had caught fire, their glow outshining that of the candle on the sill, whose flame flickered from the easy draft and made their shadows sway together. Scared of his elaboration should she invite it, Kagome decided that the late hour demanded her retirement, even if it meant ripping her away from this dreamlike exchange. “As you wish.”

She saw the irritation on his sharp features at her obvious self-censorship. But he let it go. He reclined to his original place leaning against the wall. “You’re tired. If you’ve any desire to sleep tonight, you must go this instant.”

If he meant it innocently, his frustrated expression and clenching fists did not help depict it. Kagome felt a ghostly finger trace up her spine at his gaze, which fought to force its way into the depths of her own to assess its secrets.

Gathering up her things, Kagome stood, holding her papers flush to her chest to hide her unbound breasts which had before been protected by her dress’s loose drape. “Goodnight, sir. You might consider trying to sleep again, as well.” 

“I’ll consider it,” he said, eyes flicking down to her bare feet and the lower half of her shins, now exposed by her night gown. 

Blushing bright, she bowed her head in goodbye. “Till morning,” she said.

[lizhly-writes]

Hello— ORV whump prompt because I’m Thinking So Many Things and want to see what cool authors like you think about it!

Scenario fic: one member is brought back to the event that led to the first meeting between the party. Of course it’s our Rat that disappears in a poof of sparkles, and of course KimCom think the first people to meet were KDJ and YSA so they rush to head to Minosoft… BUT!

a) on the way they pass a certain all boys school at Just The Right Time

b) LSK is there and knows the Truth and Freaks Out

c) they don’t find him in time and track him down when he’s on the verge of d**th

Dealer’s choice hehe!

hello! i finally sat down and started writing through this ask! i appreciate that you came into my askbox and immediately slammed the button on 'misery', always a fun time lol

anyway. i have ideas. unfortunately if i attempted to fully finished these ideas, you would probably see this ask either in a year with a full fic or in uh, never, so you get this.

There is a teenager.

She looks much like any other teenager bored out of their mind in class.  Chin propped up on one hand, other hand wielding a pan tapping out a distracted staccato on her notebook, perfectly in time with the tap-tap-tap of her foot, watching the blackboard up front but mostly watching the clock above it, waiting for everything to be done. 

She’s so sick of class.  Sitting in one place, trying and failing to listen to a teacher saying shit she doesn’t care about – ahhh, but she’s got to care about it, doesn’t she?  Gotta make sure she knows enough to score good on the CSAT, except that’s never going to happen because she’s got shit-for-brains, shit-for-grades.  At this point, wouldn’t it be easier just to drop out?  Who wants to live this kind of life?  Not her.  Not anyone else.  Who likes school?

…Yeah.  Jung Heewon was like that, as a kid.

“Hey, you,” Jung Heewon says.

That image of her younger self ignores her.  So does everyone else in her old middle school classroom.  The teacher drones on, uninterrupted – and it really is a droning, the kind of indistinct murmur you hear as background noise, only occasionally cut with actual lecture material.

Everything here is indistinct.  There’s a vague sense of blurriness about everything.  The faces of her teacher and the few classmates she remember are clear, or at least, almost clear.  Everyone else?  Faceless.  Unmemorable.

… Maybe that’s the point.

…

Yoo Sangah likes to think her memory is good, but truthfully, it’s hard to remember the faces of her middle school classmates when she hasn’t talked to them in years.  A few that she kept in contact with, sure, but everyone else, she’s likely to get wrong.

They’re in some kind of scenario space right now, and if the scenario is drawing things from her memory, that might be why everything is so… unclear.  Unreal, almost, the edges of reality soft instead of well-defined, only sharpening around her younger self as she files out of the classroom, chatting with – is that Ahn Minji?  Yoo Sangah hadn’t thought about her in years.

Things only get worse as they head outside. The younger Yoo Sangah is a beacon of clarity, but everything else is just fog, white and dense and casting a featureless pall over everything.

…No.  Wait.  Not quite.

…

Lee Hyunsung had taken some time to tear his eyes away from that boy he’d once been, talking to one of his seniors – “I guess I’m not really sure what to do.  I don’t have to think about it if I go directly into the military after high school, right?”  In the end, though, there wasn’t any use to paying attention to that sort of thing, not when he was alone.  He hadn’t entered the scenario alone, so where were the others?

Not in his school, he’d looked.  The only other thing he could do is go straight into that strange white fog, even if it meant he was walking blindly towards nowhere.

Except it hadn’t turned out like that.  In the backdrop of nothingness, he could make out a building, getting clearer and clearer as he ran towards it.  So well-defined – that had to mean something, didn’t it?  

…

Shin Yoosung pressed her nose against the glass of the window.  That building, the only one she’d seen in what felt like forever, was getting closer.  Maybe that was where the train would finally stop.

Maybe the train wouldn’t stop at all.

But no, that’d be weird, wouldn’t it?  There had to be an end to the scenario somewhere, and it couldn’t end if she was just stuck on a train that never stopped.  Or, well, maybe it could, but – the point.  The point was that the scenario had to have some way of ending it.  It couldn’t go on forever, that wasn’t any kind of proper entertainment at all.  That was just throwing an incarnation into an infinite commercial break, wasn’t it?  No dokkaebi would let that kind of scenario pass.

Yeah.  There had to be a way out, right?

[Ahjussi, are you there?] she sent up tentatively.  

Still nothing.  There had been nothing for a while.  But she had to keep trying, didn’t she?

…

Lee Gilyoung had been trying.

But there weren’t any bugs on this train.  Sometimes, he’d get the faintest impression that there was something there, and then – nothing.  If he could get a bug, any bug, he could – he didn’t know.  Scout.  Get some information.  Call a plague against anyone moving against him.  Something.

That was Plan A.  Plan A wasn’t working out, so he was stuck with plan B, which was this: if he kept running through this fucking train, he’d run out of carriages eventually.  He’d run into something eventually.  Maybe the conductor’s carriage, and then he could press some buttons and force it to stop, or maybe drive it into a building or whatever.

…

Yoo Joonghyuk pressed his hands into his eyes.

He’d really thought that he had died.  Ended regression three, back to the start at regression 4, back in that same train carriage all over again, and this time with a death he hadn’t even seen coming.

He’d died three times now, but the shock of it, even though it wasn’t real – hard to snap out of without a scenario in his ears telling to kill someone to live.

What had happened?  

There had been a scenario.  

He had been with his companions.  There had been a scenario, and Kim Dokja had vanished.  Then that subscenario had kicked in… what was it?

…  

[Sub Scenario  – Will to Survive]

Category: Sub (Personal)

Difficulty: ????

Clear Conditions: Help Incarnation, Kim Dokja, realize the will to survive.

Time Limit: ????

Compensation: ????

Failure: ????

…

Kim Dokja blinks.

He had the strangest feeling that he had forgotten something.  Something important.

…It can’t have been that important if he’s forgotten about it.  He’d already run through his list of things to do, anyway, not that the list was very long.  He supposed the right thing to do was to talk with somebody, but really, he had no one to talk to, so there wasn’t any point.

There was maybe Mother, but… no, she didn’t count.  He didn’t talk to her, he talked at her, and she never cared enough to give a response back.  If she, by some miracle, cared enough to be upset about what he was doing, then – well.  She could get over it.  There was nothing wrong with him enjoying the sunset.  There was nothing wrong with anything he did after that, either.

With that thought firmly in mind, he took one last breath of the air – cool, refreshing – and headed towards the edge of the roof.

[essayofthoughts]

Thinking back to when you kept getting asks about nigh every Percy ship imaginable... but I don’t think I've ever seen you prodded about one.

How do you think Percy would have reacted if Pike had piped up about her feelings? In what context vould you see it happening?

Hell, how would *Vex* have reacted (given Pike pointedly didnt tell Vex or Kiki during that girl talk)- Pike is someone both of them seem to understand as being more good/more deserving of good, so it would be fun to see 'Pike is awesome and deserves the best' conflict with 'nooooooooo'.

I can't see it as ever being more than a one-sided interest, but I can't help but wonder what knowing about it would do to Percy's internal states, and potentially party dynamics if word got out or if their behavior changed as a result.

So I think this depends hugely on when it comes out and who it comes out to. As you say, Pike didn't tell Vex and Kiki, and she didn't even tell Grog when he asked. Thinking long and hard over it (you sent this several days ago) I have come to the conclusion that shortly before the Feywild would be Interesting mostly because that places it before Percy fully realises he loves Vex, after that girl talk you mentioned (ep57) and I think that'd make the most interesting combo?

Because... I think it might prompt Percy to realise his feelings for Vex sooner and probably feel guilty about them because that means hurting Pike's feelings. So... Percy might even feel a bit more relieved about the Feywild, because initially at least, Pike wasn't coming with them.

And then she does. And Vex is very perceptive and while I don't know that she'd 100% guess what had happened... I think she's smart enough to put together Pike's words and Percy's awkwardness and I think that'd make her more hesitant to ask for Percy's help with things? Because friends code of "don't make a move on someone you know a friend is interested in" - except she doesn't know for sure, she's guessing, but Vex is often really considerate of people and their private feelings or what they tell her in confidence.

So it might take a bit more gentle probing on Percy's part for Vex to tell him about Syngorn, if she does at all, and it might prevent the titling depending on if Vex talks and how self-conscious Percy is about how it could look. It might even mean Vex is more willing to consider Saundor's deal - unless Percy speaks up during the meeting with Syldor which is unlikely because Percy doesn't like interposing himself between his friends and danger. He trusts and respects them and to do that without being asked to would imply he doesn't trust their ability to handle something. Maybe he and Vex have a talk after the Syldor meeting instead, him trying to reassure her she is more than what her father thinks of her. Who knows.

And in turn with Percy I think Pike confessing feelings would kind of fuck him up a bit? Partly because this would be right on the heels of Scanlan proposing to Pike and also partly because he wouldn't understand why Pike has such feelings. It's one thing for them to be friends - they've been through a lot together, they trust each other, of course they're friends - but I don't think he gets why it'd become anything more. I think there's a part of him that'd wonder if it comes from a desire to fix him or even pity and Percy is prickly so while I think he might be a bit standoffish with Pike at least until she de-astrals and he gets some space to process things.

And...

I mean Ashley never brought up who it was during the stream and in the Campaign Wrap-Up she explained why Pike caught feelings which, it seems, was a slight hope of "we can fix him" and a bit of just... spending a lot of time dwelling on him and his wellbeing, most likely during the Briarwoods Arc. She was specifically concerned about his darkness and praying for him, and I think part of her not wanting to bring it up is knowing that wanting to help someone isn't necessarily the best basis for a genuine romantic relationship. So for her to say something, she'd have to have some genuine cause to think Percy is mending - perhaps, like Vex, she spots the blood behind his ear but doesn't talk to him about it - and that her feelings will persist - perhaps she responded differently to Scanlan's proposal.

The thing is, I don't really know how she'd go about confessing feelings to Percy because sure, we all talk about how Vex and Percy compartmentalise and hide their trauma behind confident masks, but whoo boy, Pike is really private about feelings too? So I don't actually know what would be likely to prompt it or how she'd go about it, though I do think that if she'd been at Glintshore that... that would have been interesting.

All in all, I don't know that it'd change much? At least not if we assume best outcomes. I think it'd slow and stall a few things, but I think Glintshore would shake it out back towards canon.

Assuming worst outcomes, however, which I know is one of your preferred spaces *winkwink* then we might end up with tree-creature Saundor-linked Vex and her getting burned to a crisp against Thordak.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Title: By Nightfall

Author: Deborah Eisenstein

Rating: 3/5 stars

Clouds are good writing prompts

Clouds are good writing prompts! Who would have thought? (Well, I guess plenty of people.) In By Nightfall, clouds are used to good effect as a sort of minor deus ex machina. Which is fun, and also happens to work in thematic/structural terms because, well, clouds are one of those things about which you can't know everything -- they look very different depending on the angle from which you're viewing them, and when one is so close to the sky, it's (literally) difficult to know where one ends and the rest of the atmosphere begins. This is not especially consequential for the book except in its use of the "foreshadowing at night" device, but it's cute.

More importantly, the clouds function thematically as an archetypical breakdown of the kind of view that the narrator -- and the narrator's grandmother -- relies on (for different reasons), especially given that the disruptive forces are not actually of cloud origin. The disruption itself is the very cause of the friction between the two main characters, which is fine, but at this point, the clouds are no longer really relevant -- it could just as easily be any other disruptive force, or many of them -- and it's a little weird to find them reappearing at the end in a manner that feels almost gratuitous. I mean, there's nothing wrong with gratuitous, and here it's tied to the construction of this very strange, almost solipsistic view of the world that the narrator chooses to impose over everything else. So it's good in that it fits the thematic and character stuff, bad because it's yet another friction between things.

Oh, and let's talk about these characters, shall we?

I think there's something about the type of character the narrator is that I didn't quite buy -- how self-consciously "postmodern" he is, but how insecure and immature at the same time. The postmodernism is endlessly cute and jokey and clever, but often so cute and clever that it runs away from any real emotional weight or point, which is very much not the purpose of fiction -- at least, not as I understand it -- and so you get a sense of this guy who's sort of a show-off, but also a guy with little going for him except for the ever-shifting, ever-tenuous layers of "meta" upon "meta" upon "meta" that can be this grandiose, grandiloquent special snowflake all the time.

I guess it's hard for me to believe that, were I in this guy's position, I would use these same resources. Instead, I'd probably be focused entirely on the inescapable emotional dimension of the situation, that this was, for real, my grandmother, that I was suddenly in her fucking world, that I knew nothing about her or her world because I'd never given a shit before. It would be full of disgusting psychological moments like:

I keep telling myself to enjoy this. This is perfect! I've told myself so many times that this is perfect, this is what I wanted! It is perfect! But I still feel the deep, inexorable horror of my new self, even though I keep telling myself that it is perfect.

Which, I don't know, maybe does not mean a whole lot on its own, but sounds like something a person really in this situation might think, maybe? The guy's internal monologue is endlessly self-deprecating, and always a bit pompous and tinged with self-conscious irony, but also seems entirely focused on these highbrow, intellectual, "witty" ("meta") reframings of everything he sees and hears, and it's just not that interesting to me. The character is fun to read about, and his behavior is interesting, but his thinking is endlessly ironic and self-conscious, and so you never really get under the surface. It's a version of solipsism-as-egoism that I've never been able to buy -- this intense discomfort with one's self, but this unshakeable sense that all of one's horrible self is unique, special, and therefore necessary. Kind of unsatisfying.

The only real bright spot in this guy's pretty dull characterization is the way he grapples with his brother and his father -- the characters who do not interact with the weird world of his grandmother and her stories, and whose responses to that world seem (as far as they're shown to us) to be pretty reserved, matter-of-fact. Of course, their response is also simply "I hate that my father's a bastard," and I find that response less interesting than I should. (What does it mean? I don't know.) But there is a sense of real, grounded emotion attached to this, insofar as it's just that the guy is horribly upset that his father's a bastard, and doesn't care much about his "ability" to express it, or how well he does so.

This is a fascinating moment, because at the heart of it -- like all "cultural critique" I've ever seen -- is an almost complete lack of interest in engagement, in helping people, in acting on personal responsibility, in anything but the special snowflake's declaration of their specialness. The characters in this book can't stand one another, of course, because of the endless frictions of class and status and outlook between the cultured intellectual and the philistine (because "cultured" and "philistine" are more or less terms that mean almost nothing), and they can't stand one another because the characters feel the tug of the surface of life, the truism-haunted surface of class and status and outlook that characterizes these people -- and yet at the same time they want to know what this weird old woman's stories have to say.

She's rich and mean, but somehow still a "cultural elite," and the most significant thing about that is that she knows the truths of that status, and then tells those truths with a kind of red-hot integrity that fries the skin right off of everything these characters feel like "life is." She is, in other words, something of a truth-teller, and what's more -- and this is key -- she is not a cultural truth-teller; her "truths" are not the pillars of the culture she is part of. They're too weird, too strange, too much like "fairy tales" (which, as we all know, are not a part of the "great books" and "classics" beloved of the "cultured" characters here).

(Did you know: the Western literary canon is actually . . . ? The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. A complete coincidence that the boy who took the SATs and went to a good school would have read it.)

One of the (many) things this narrator is particularly uninterested in is doing the work of bridging the gap between himself and his relatives. It's like he thinks "I will notice these idiots won't like me because I'm all about how much smarter I am than them," and then that's it, he's done with the thing! There's no actual connection made, no working together to make the thing work, and no attempt to even create the thing. Maybe he doesn't have enough time to do this kind of work, but for some reason it feels like this is always the case -- that when it comes to his relatives, he simply refuses to make the effort.

"I try to focus on the knotwork, and how this family will never understand, and how it is my only salvation to sit here, at this moment, and compose a poem." Fine. That's a character choice, I guess.

"This family doesn't care about what I do. I just do my thing, then. I'm aloof. I'm disaffected. In any case, I don't have time for that kind of thing. I do my thing, then, with the utmost care and control." Fine. That's a character choice too.

But this is not a realistic character choice, is it? At no point in the book is there a realistic character choice. The guy's grandmother is someone who has a whole life outside of the impoverished and miserable suburban scene in which these guys live, and she's also a storyteller. If he's going to learn anything from her, well, one would imagine she's going to have something to say about how she tells her stories. But she does not. She doesn't have time. She will make the minimum effort. She will be a bit "abrasive," but she will not tell him anything he

[casliveblog]

Custom Toonami Block Week 119 Rundown

Kaguya-sama: Love is War: So this episode is fucking kickass, like I’ve been kinda mellow about my reactions to this series thus far but this season finale was hype as fuck. Just all the crazy shit people do to get Kagura smuggled out to the fireworks festival, Hayakasa is still best girl, Chika and Ishigami do their part and Miyuki is pretty badass weaponizing his usual mind game tactics and we even get a cameo from one of Chika’s ramen buddies, all of it’s pretty fantastic. It’s pretty funny how in the next part Miyuki thinks all the cool stuff he said came off as cringe because that’s definitely a matter of perspective and definitely a part of social anxiety but at the same time even the cringe versions of events he gives are still pretty cool, just more in an unhinged Jack Sparrow Guile Hero kind of way than the Shojo Manga Man way that Kagura saw them. Still you know how it goes, shenanigans and everything and we’re basically back where we started with a net no progress, like I like to think there’s at least some experience gained here but the nature of the show is fucking over any dynamic these two have that isn’t mind games. Still all that said it was pretty funny, I don’t know if I’ll be watching future seasons on the Custom Toonami Block specifically since it seems like a show that’s more fun to casually binge than do this sort of format for but we’ll see how it goes.

Inuyasha: So IMMEDIATELY after setting up the whole ‘Inuyasha is trapped in Jakotsu’s blade’ cliffhanger Inuyasha just gets cut a little and Wind Scars his way out, OHKOing Jakotsu but refusing to finish him off because killing a queer man that is yandere for you while he’s under a pile of rocks just doesn’t feel right I guess. Still Renkotsu comes and steals Jakotsu’s shard and kills him right after, then goes to fight Bankotsu because he’s pissed Bankotsu won’t share the shards and Bankotsu’s pissed Renkotsu keeps killing all his friends. Bankotsu even says he won’t use his weapon to fight Renkotsu and fucks him up just using Jakotsu’s hair pin which is pretty fucking dope. And just like that the Band of Seven has become the Band of One with a superpowered Bankotsu going to fight Inuyasha. Kikyo has a nice little talk with Hakushin about how even though he couldn’t be the perfectly selfless Saint everyone thought he was he did a lot of good for everyone and not wanting to die isn’t a sin but carrying grief in your heart isn’t healthy and he’s not really mad at everyone for using him but at himself for not living up to that heroic façade. She even gives him permission to quit being a saint and let go of the burden to set his soul at ease and it’s really pretty nice, probably one of Kikyo’s best moments given her own perspective on selflessness and death. But yeah with Hakushin gone, Mt. Hakurei transforms into a JRPG final boss arena and we’re ready for the final Inuyasha vs Bankotsu fight.

Yu Yu Hakusho: So we spend the first part of this episode going ‘Genkai’s really dead forever for reals guys, tournament’s over, no dragon balls or anything so home, show’s over’ then we cut to Toguro volunteering himself for ten thousand years in hell when according to his paperwork he should maybe go to the Moderately Bad Place instead of the Very Very Bad Place. And we get his full backstory which is basically the same as Jiren’s backstory in Dragon Ball Super except less terrible. Apparently all his students were murdered by a big demon and he was prompted to join the Dark Tournament just like he prompted Yusuke to and legitimately became cold and ruthless to rise to the challenge, then wishing to become a demon as a form of punishment and to double down on the path of strength he’d chosen. Basically everything in Toguro’s backstory goes ‘maybe he’s being an asshole but maybe also he has another motive’ and you can really go back and forth on each part of his motive about which of these are self-flagellation and which are corruption since it’s probably a mix of both. Even Toguro seems to be going out of his way to zig-zag the tropes as if someone understanding him in any way is a comfort he doesn’t want. Anyway Yusuke and co. are getting ready for the boat and oops Genkai’s alive again, I mean they are friends with the god of the dead and they did get jipped out of their prize for the tournament, seems like he shouldn’t be able to just… do that but here we are, we went through a lot of ‘she’s really dead super for reals this time’ for her to just come back but whatever. Just hope they do something cool with her in future arcs and this isn’t just something to not make Yusuke have to deal with loss.

Fate/Apocrypha: So now Yggy Mcbabyeater is very mad that the Bigger Cup got stolen and makes Vlad turn into Dracula against his wishes so he can fight despite his weird thing of not being able to fight outside his home turf and he kinda just… fuses with him which is apparently something people can do? So yeah now we have Yggycula as our big season-ending midboss and this just became Netflix Castlevania for a bit with everyone fighting him. They get interrupted though as all the Team Shirou Servants get hit with a case of ‘my master has just been poisoned’ on account of their masters just being poisoned, also Shirou has all their Command Seals now. Also Yggycula comes up to Shirou’s terf and Shirou just starts throwing knives at him like ‘bro you’re a vampire and you walked into a church, the fuck’d you expect’? And we go from Netflix Castlevania to Hellsing Ultimate briefly as Shirou does his best Father Anderson and melts the vampire. We got a little flashback for Shirou a little while ago about him being in the same Grail War as Mr. Yggy Babyeater and if I was paying attention or knew anything about Japanese history I’d have known Shirou was a Servant, not a Master from that though to be fair he does have a human alias and everyone’s surprised he’s still alive after the war like they think he’s just some dude, but yeah basically he seems to be what if Saber lost Shirou and went apeshit and also incarnated to loop the Grail War cycle like Gilgamesh because he’s also a Ruler from before this war started. Seems he was Irisviel’s Servant in this verse and we can’t have a universe where any of the homunculi girls aren’t angst fodder for their male leads so of course she died and now Shirou’s all ‘I’m just keep doing genocide until god strikes me down himself to tell me I’m wrong’ so good luck with that.

Speed Grapher: So they send a Euphoric who can make his tattoos come to life after Ginza who is not down for his superpowered bullshit and has already moved Saiga to a secondary location but she gets marked with his tiny middle finger spider tattoo, guess they put that one in the right place cause it’s a real fuck you to her for kicking his ass. Meanwhile Kagura uses the guy that’s been sexually harassing her in the sensual deprivation chamber to escape by offering herself to him if he lets her step outside and then immediately grabbing an axe and holding herself hostage so she can make her escape, some real character development from her taking charge of the situation, not a perfect plan but it gets the job done. Meanwhile her mom and Suitengu are legit getting ready to sign the paperwork to get married because despite Suitengu not breaking character and pretending to be a romantic he’s also not wasting time on this whole takeover plan. We also get a flashback of Shinzen first meeting her now Alzheimer’s-ridden mother and find out she was actually adopted by the modeling agency because her mom saw her getting harassed by an agent and picked her up on the spot. Though also there’s some magic gene splicing they did on her to make her more ‘perfect’ since she had like two genes out of place or something and the one who did it is Kagura’s dad/the doctor she loved. Really kinda paints a sympathetic picture of Kagura’s mom despite what a bitch she is, like she just wanted to be a model and got roped into an international magic gene therapy ring and became a loveless billionaire because the doctor that transformed her was murdered by a higher power and made to look like he ditched her and now as a result of the gene bullshit her daughter has a tumor that lets her give superpowers to rich assholes by letting them sexually assault her… god this plot is weird when I say it out loud. But yeah turns out Shinzen’s adopted mom got into a car accident on the night Shinzen was out seeing Mr. Dr. Kagura’s dad and got ditched because she was driving down the road REALLY pissed off and that may be why she has such a shitty memory and can barely walk or she could just be old or both idk. Funny thing is Suitengu and everyone talk about not knowing Shinzen’s mom was alive but like she has cameras and staff specifically assigned to her and takes her on walks and shit but guess she never specifically told him about it. Anyway Kagura breaks into her mom’s tower and finds her grandma’s room and Suitengu’s goons find her there. Shinzen backs off signing the marriage certificate because she wants her mom to see it which I’m not entirely sure if that’s out of love or spite for her being pissy about her first marriage attempt. She finds Kagura and Suitengu’s Team Rocket squad in Grandma’s room and is like ‘yo Suitengu wtf bro’ when Kagura starts talking about the eyes wide shut cult of superpowered billionaires he’s been running. She doesn’t seem to believe either of them and for some reason still thinks Suitengu’s just fucking Kagura on the side because she’s really fixated on that and gives him a gun to play Russian roulette with along with Kagura, giving them a 75% chance of survival but playing with their lives. Suitengu’s goons take the gun and try to shoot Shinzen with it but this is why you always fucking use your own guns because turns out there were no bullets and she just wanted them to pull the trigger as a show of faith and apology so she busts out a room full of dozens of kimono girls with automatic rifles because apparently she just had that at the ready at a minute’s notice at like 2am in her marriage certificate ceremony. Luckily Suitengu is Blood Sephiroth and is able to make a Blood Barrier out of blood strands and then turn them into tentacles to Elfen Lied the kimono girls, also killing the poor city worker who was there just because no one that sees his powers can live (except Kagura I guess cause he told his goons to close their eyes). He then uses the blood to do the blood bullet thing from Deadman Wonderland to kill Shinzen’s mom and then choke Shinzen herself out. Kagura desperately tells her mom that her dad didn’t abandon her and was just late and that he loved her even as he was dying and Shinzen dies happy knowing that. Suitengu also has Mr. Dr. Kagura’s Dad’s left arm for some reason so I guess he’s the original Euphoric and is made of a bunch of frakenstein’d body parts that give him blood powers or some shit since he does say “I’m the original’ when talking about Mr. Dr. Kagura’s dad and tells Shinzen that she was always really in the left arm of the man she loved even if it wasn’t him. So yeah now Suitengu’s going to marry Kagura to control the company which she’s like fourteen so that’s kinda fucked up, dunno how the media’s going to spin that one.

Durararax2: Tom takes over the narration and goes on about how everyone needs to chill the fuck out which is fair. Meanwhile Haruna and her teacher crush have turned the Saika army into an actual zombie apocalypse overtaking the town with the same infection types, like can’t believe that’s the most widespread threat with all the weird factions going on here. Izaya has a flashback of Shinra saying how even when Shizuo dies he’ll have a legendary legacy that may exceed his ridiculous exploits since people will be bound to talk about how strong he is. It seems like that ends up getting at the heart of Izaya’s character because that’s kind of what he wanted going into this war for Celty’s head. Meanwhile Shinra’s dad gives Celty her head back and her memory is wiped as expected and she advents like a god from the sky down to the city which is ridiculously cool. Chikage has a ridiculously convoluted plan to pretend to kidnap Masaomi just to get him and Mikado to fucking talk to each other meanwhile Mikado’s about to send Aoba to cap Chikage at the Dollars’ birthplace as Chikage and Namie doxx Masaomi, Mikado and Anri about their parts in leading these huge gang wars. Kujisaki and Varona end up fighting Izaya’s karate girl midboss like this is a scene out of Kill Bill (and Varona has the outfit for it, huh… may be onto something) while Izaya and Shizuo set out to have a Mastermind vs Supertank battle that puts every Batman vs Superman incarnation to shame. So in summary: shit’s about to go down for the tenth time, we really are getting to the endgame here.

[toofasttoocool-reborn]

Any of the DMU couples at least trying to take part in NNN? Giving it an honest go....or did they say 'fuck it' and immediately lose on day 1?

"Do you hear about NNN?"Celestia asked, turning the pages of a German book from her own collection, this kind of downtime in their tumultuous lives was rare enough to not be interrupted by such trivial manners,as such, the question seemed to be completely irrelevant,which still prompted an answer: "I heard about it, Chérie,I participated in it too...not of my own volition..."Makoto was busy admiring his last flower he imported from South America, a wonderful and pristine Mexicain Sunflower.

He shook when he realise the delicate hands of Celestia were grabbing his massive penis through his pants "Good, Because you are not participating into it any time soon..."She said it in her usual seductive and snake like tongue, while using said muscle to lick his left ear.

It didn't take them twenty-second to start breaking the NNN rule as Makoto carried her in a lifted missionary and inserted his dick in her all too ready pussy.

"Hmmmm....why bother with that kind of useless challenge? Those are for peasants!"

If Makoto wasn't too busy trying to suck out the silicone out of her massive breasts he would have sure answered, but that wasn't his attention to let go.

---

"Self control is the absolute quality of a Japanese lady,a true A-R-I-S-T-O-C-R-A-T-E can hold her lustful passions!"This declaration full of braggadocios bravado, was only heard by an unfocus and unconcerned Ex-Nurse whose ideas of "being a pure Japanese lady" seem obscure and nebulous at best,she therefore addressed the short, pompous lady in a term that could be described as unpolite "...Why should I care?...Hajime hasn't...said anything about your...retarded internet trend...."Mikan since her days as a public enemy, has hated everything related to the internet and the slang that comes from it, considering it to be a bunch of lies and opinions that didn't matter even a single bit,as such she avoided using social media like she would avoid the pest, which contrasted to the attention grubbing Hiyoko.

"Hum,that could be fun..."The deep, booming voice that resonates around the room could be that of only one man,the husband of the opposite standing woman immediately agreed to this fun game, but knowing him, there was going to be a catch "But of course you will be the one participating...and no anal either!"Hajime in his deep, childlike mindlessness, simply said this and stuck his tongue out before leaving from his next "job".

"Ahhha...ah" the deep breathing of the nurse could be heard through the entire house as seemigly sick Mikan tried her best to stand up,the fact that her legs were dripping wet could indicate why she seems so "sickly",the 100 cm dictator on the other hand, didn't seem any different except maybe an increased sadism that came from finally having the upper hand on her co-wife "Come on, show some restraint; it's been only 8 minutes and the floor is already wet!You are not an A-R-I-S..."the familar sentence couldn't be heard, instead the sound who didn't seem as familiar was that of a head meeting a table, which is exactly what happened as Hiyoko beautiful and youthful nose hit the table after the nurse made her shut her big mouth. She loved to run, which paradoxically made the floor only wetter.

Recluse in her Shrine and twisting around,the poor Mikan tried to calm her mind by working on her next project, the "Apa-67" but all her thoughts just ended with her coming back to Hajime,it's been only three hours, and she couldn't bear it anymore, shaking like she was trapped in a snowstorm "I will never make it...Hajime...Hajime....Hajime..."Her mind was like a broken record, and on repeat...Much to the fun of her Husband.

---

"Huh...sure?I guess?"Shuichi wasn't expecting his wife to ever address him with such a weird idea in mind but the fact she was so peppy and happy about it didn't lead to any answer other than "yes",then not missing a beat (which is perfectly normal for a piano player of her level) Kaede proposed to her Husband a "gift",a Chasity cage big and strong to contain him!This was, of course, done by a professional and very talented blacksmith, and the steel was strong enough to contain a raging elephant.

The detective was suspicious of the idea, but ever the gentleman, he tried it out, and...it kinda of fit? Pretty sure that if he ever got hard, the thing would rupture immediately,but unable to say the obvious flaw of such an object, he simply smiled and thanked her...making sure not to hug her,then he addressed her "By the way does that mean..." Kaede in a rare moment of clarity, said, "Yep,it means not pegging either!"Shuichi couldn't believe the bubbly bimbo speedchessed him,he was getting rusty...and horny, for that matter. November is going to be long.

[nomotorobison]

Ageism and Artists

A few weeks ago I had my worst day of film production in my life.  I’ve lost a lot of sleep in the weeks since. Trying to make some sense out of what happened and why.  As I stepped through trying to analyze all the events of that day I would do online research and after nearly a month I have come to the conclusion that I was the victim of ageism - not a word I was very familiar with prior to all of this.

I'm sixty-eight years old so certainly not the first time I have experienced ageism but never had it have such a damaging affect to my self-esteem.

At this point I feel like I could write a 300 page book about this entire experience but I won’t take the time to do that (at least not this month).  What I do wish to do is share a couple links and a few quotes and statistics in the hopes that maybe it will help to prompt a decline in ageism in America.  With that let me start with a definition and a fact:

Ageism is prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a person's age.

According to the American Psychological Association: Ageism is one of the last socially acceptable prejudices.

Next I ask you to please watch this video: 

Here are some of my favorite statements from the video:

“Retirement was thought of as a gift at one time and now it is a bludgeon.  Now it’s ‘get off the stage, or we’re going to get rid of you’.”

“Here’s the thing.  I don’t think anybody likes to be a whiner but at some point you kind of want people to understand that there’s a issue here and you got to fight for yourself”

“They are invested heavily in this idea that young people have this access to new ideas that old people don’t because for some reason we (older people) are set in our ways and are not willing to be bold and experimental.  I disagree with that completely.”  My feeling has always been that you work and you work and you work until you can no longer work.  Essentially you die with your tool in your hands.  That’s a perfect creative career and ageism is this enormous wall that sticks itself up in the middle of that and says NOPE.”

“We talk about ageism as being the last form of socially acceptable discrimination” 

“The World Health Organization in 2017 did a study and they found that the most prevalent form of discrimination in the world is ageism.”

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

Why do I feel that I was the victim of ageism?  As I analyzed what happened I asked myself: with everything else equal and the same events happening except I'm 35 years old - instead of more than 3 decades older than that - would the three people have taken the same action they did.  My answer is no they would not have.  I imagine that if you asked those three people they would disagree; but I believe it would be like the racists who believe they aren’t racists because they have friends who are POC. I don't believe those three see their own ageism.

I have often pointed out that one of the things I love about film production is that I get to work with people of a wide range of ages.  The nature of filmmaking opens itself up to that because when a film script includes a child, a teenager, a middle-aged person, an elderly person; there will likely be people of those ages on set with you.  In addition to this an independent film crew will typically have a wide range of people of different ages.  I very much like this.  I enjoy being around people of different ages as it keeps me more rounded, grounded and connected to the world, to our society.  I guess I assumed everyone else had this same appreciation but after this recent experience I’ve come to realize that not all people are completely comfortable with people of different age groups, especially not comfortable with older people.

What is not new to me is discrimination from film festivals because of ageism.  Film festivals view films as an art form. Which I totally agree with and when you look at how other arts groups view artists it only makes sense that ageism exists in film festivals.  There is an article in artprof.org titled Ageism in the Art World which states “Ageism is prominent in all parts of the art world: in the gallery scene, in academia, on social media, and more.”  To me the ‘more’ is film festivals.  The article goes on to state:  “The art world is most focused on artists who are 20-35 years of age.” I believe film festivals are focused the same.

At this point I will add in one more of my favorite statements from the video above. “I entered my photos in a few contests that were being held by this art gallery . . . and I got (my work accepted) in and was invited to the opening night gala,  As usual there was a young woman with a clipboard at the door.  I say ‘Oh, I’m on the list’. She looks up and down and says ‘Are you the parent of one of the artists?’ That was the moment when it struck me. To some peoples’ eyes I’m no longer a viable creative person. I’ve either passed my prime or they didn’t think of me that way. Creativity is something practiced by young people and I’m no longer young.”

The events of earlier this month had me feeling very down. I even thought about how it might be time for me to quite filmmaking and to move on to more traditional retirement activities. I knew this wasn't what I wanted to do and that if I did I would be allowing myself to be bullied into leaving my passion of filmmaking. So here is another quote from the film: “If I exit my career I want to do on my terms and I want to do it because I’m blooming in to something else.”

Hopefully the future brings more awareness of ageism. It does exist and everyone has the potential to be affected by it.

[vukovich]

Peculiar Prompt!

Character 1: Draco

Character 2: Harry

Relationship type: it’s like friends with benefits except instead of sex its blood-drinking (and maybe a little bit of sex) to lovers

Mythical creature: one of them is a vampire

Flavor: hot cheetos

Thing you see while driving: ducks

Fetish: tiny cock ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Weather: blizzard

(i humbly request a not-sad ending, very excited to see what you do with all this!)

Fit to Bust

The hematologist was named Dr Sanguine, which felt fake. His exam table felt plenty real, though.

"Polycythemia," he said.

"Huh?" Harry replied. "Oh. Uhm, monogamy- I mean, monogamous, I guess. If the opportunity arose."

Dr Sanguine shook his head. "It's polycythemia. Not lupus. Dr Histoid owes me a round of golf."

Harry glanced down at the sheaf of handouts. "Huh," he said again. "So now what?"

Dr Sanguine shrugged. "Oddly, this is the only condition in existence that leeches were good for. Call the West End blood donation centre and make an appointment. Once every month or so ought to do it."

"Huh."

--

"I'm sorry," the woman said primly. Her lipliner looked like a smooch-shaped cookie cutter. "But you were declined."

"Huh?" Harry reached for the single sheet of paper on the clipboard in her hands. How could ten questions disqualify him already.

A trim, dark-haired man skidded out into the hall on an exam stool. Cubic zirconia stud earrings glinted on both sides of his head, his perfect hair made Harry self-conscious, and his scrubs were entirely too tight in very nice ways.

"They don't want your sort around here, darling!" the man yelled, then winked. Harry very much wanted to rub his dick on the man's chest.

"Oh," Harry said. "Huh."

--

The St Mungo's Department of Blood Maladies and Sudden Losses was eerily quiet. There were no windows. No ceiling fixtures, only lights in wall sconces. If the halls had been carpeted, it would have felt more like a library or mansion than a hospital wing.

An elderly witch in vintage cat eye glasses silently waved him over to the counter. "Mister Potter," she whispered putting down her book. "We've been expecting you."

"Oh, uh, okay," Harry muttered. It was a far sight better than the Muggle blood donation route, at least. "The Healer I saw said the donors get to choose the vampire... not the other way around... right?"

Visions of being fed on by redheaded women had plagued his nightmares of late.

"Yes," the woman said, nodding. "The rooms have one-way glass, so you can peek in from the hall before you decide to go in."

"Okay, thanks, I-"

A man came out of one of the furthest rooms, delicately pressing a wad of gauze to his neck. Harry gave him a quick head-to-toe assessment. Tall, dark hair, good face, nice chest, trim wai- BULGE, WET SPOT, muscular legs.

The man cleared his throat as he passed the desk. The woman nodded to him. "Four weeks, Mister Ravenswood?"

He licked his lips and caught Harry staring at his crotch. "Yeah, four weeks'll do."

The woman nudged her glasses up higher and addressed Harry. "Go on, then. Take your time. Some of them are more popular than others."

Harry nodded and set off down the hall. There were four doors on each side, and above him, two gold placards. One said "Ladies" and the other "Gents". Harry moved to the "Gents" side of the hall, assuming it was addressing him, then realized that they'd sorted the vampires inside the rooms, not the blood donors.

Across the hall, a woman with curly red hair looked up from her book and waved through the glass, showing a good half-inch of fang. Harry squeaked and huddled against the wall.

The vampire inside the first door looked like Filch, but cleaner, which should have been an improvement, but just felt suspicious. The vampire in the second room looked like a youth Quidditch coach, but not in a sexy DILF sort of way. More of a pins-his-hopes-and-dreams-on-kids kind of way. Both sat in mauve vinyl hospital recliners looking as though they, themselves, were the patients.

The third vampire was missing. His room didn't have a chair, just a bright Persian rug and a heap of satin and velvet throw pillows.

Harry was ready to give up and research phlebotomy spells when he peeked inside the last room. The last vampire looked like David Duchovny.

Harry pushed the swinging door open, and the vampire leapt to his feet. He bared his teeth like a snake.

The back of Harry's head hit the wall first, then his shoulders, then his arse, then his hands. He let out a startle cough, and the vampire slammed a hand around his throat.

Harry groped in his pocket for his wand, found it, and whispered, "Lumos-"

The vampire leaned forward, his nose brushing along Harry's jaw.

"Lumos sol!"

Golden sunlight streamed out of Harry's pocket. The vampire hissed, grabbed him by the neck, and shoved him though the swinging door.

Harry kept his wand pointed at the door for several long moments, watching as the vampire went from snarling at the glass to pacing, to sitting back down in his chair.

Harry rubbed his neck. Leave it to St Mungo's to get donors killed.

The third room was still empty. Unless there was a vampire hiding inside that pile of pillows.

Harry looked at the not-DILF Quidditch coach. The man looked like a skinny Jack Black, which should have been a compliment, but wasn't. He pushed the door open slowly.

The vampire glanced up once, curtly, then announced, "No blokes."

Harry threw a hand up dismissively and turned around and went back out into the hall.

The redheaded vampire across the hall waved to him again. She was using a fang to tie off yarn on a knitting project. Absolutely not.

Nobody had told him that the whole blood drinking thing actually was sexual, but he'd assumed it couldn't not be sexual. And the fact that the one vampire had a no-penis policy seemed to prove it.

And the human who'd left as he was coming in had obviously had a good time, presumably with the vampire from room three, who'd already fed and left.

How could it not be sexual to have someone stronger than you, faster than you, hold you down, pierce into your body, and drink you down. Every single bit of that was sexual.

But if he had to choose between that kind of intimacy with a blood-sucking, Argus Filch-looking son of a bitch and experimenting with blood letting spells, the spells sounded like the better bet.

He waved back to the knitting vampire and headed to the desk on his way to the lifts.

The woman at the desk didn't look up from her book, but cleared her throat loudly. "No luck?" she said in a creaky old voice.

"Uhm," Harry said, "No, I suppose not."

She nodded ambivalently.

Harry started to leave, but stopped. Maybe that missing vampire was worth asking about. Blood letting spells were notoriously hard to control, and the leading cause of false death reports.

"The, uhm," he started. "The vampire in the third room. What's his, uhm..."

Harry left his question in the air.

She arched an eyebrow and marked her page with a finger. "Well, he certainly never goes hungry. Quite popular." She gave Harry a tiny smirk. "I think you'd get along fine. He comes every few days."

"Huh," Harry said. "Alright. I'll try again on Thursday."

She opened her book and shooed him away with "Wear something nice."

--

Harry showered, put on nice trousers, a clean shirt, and arrived five minutes before donation hours started, only to find out...

It was Malfoy. Harry's entire body slumped, standing in the hallway, and he considered kicking the door like a petulant teenager.

Of course it was Malfoy. Who else would drag a Persian carpet and a cubic yard of throw pillows into a hospital room just to eat a meal twice a week?

Malfoy.

Malfoy would require the trappings of luxury for a fucking snack.

Harry lingered in the hall and watched Malfoy, sprawled in his pillow nest like a Victorian courtesan. He appeared to be asleep, but as far as Harry knew, vampires didn't sleep.

There was a good chance Malfoy would just tell him to fuck off. There was also a good chance he wouldn't, and Harry would have to reconcile having a pseudo-sexual encounter with Malfoy, of all people. Quite possibly an actual sexual encounter, which could be brilliant, because Malfoy was hot. Or it could be a disaster, because the world at large had yet to notice that Harry Potter, media darling, had a dick the size of his thumb. If anyone was willing to sell that story to the tabloids, it would be Malfoy.

Harry rested the tips of his fingers on the door, but didn't push it open. Maybe he could pull this off without getting his dick involved. If he could summon enough loathing for Malfoy, maybe it could just be a blood letting, and nothing else.

He sighed and pushed the door open.

One of Malfoy's eyes slid open, then the other, like an annoyed snake. He licked his fangs, and Harry waited for a snide remark.

Instead, Malfoy's nostrils flared. His voice was lazy and thick. "Polycythemia?" he asked, as if questioning the daily special at a restaurant.

"Uhm," Harry muttered, "yeah. How'd you know?"

Malfoy shrugged, one-shouldered. "Smells like it." He yawned and sank into the pillows.

The points of his fangs caught the light from a small lamp in the corner, and Harry's arms ran with goosebumps. He blew out a breath and willed himself to calm the fuck down. It was just Malfoy. Stupid, pointy, pasty (extra pasty now) Malfoy.

Malfoy made no effort to move, so Harry stood nervously at the edge of the rug. "So, uhm, how'd you end up a vampire? Last I heard, you were a Cursebreaker."

Malfoy shrugged again. "Still am. I didn't use a containment ward on an artifact I should have. Ended up bleeding to death here in hospital, but Mum knew someone who knew someone who knew someone undead, so... Night shift Cursebreaker now."

"Huh." Harry wondered if he needed to take his shoes off to step on the rug, but Malfoy had his shoes on. But his shoes were cleaner than Harry's. "So... how's being a vampire?"

Malfoy's smile was slow and left his eyes cold. "No complaints."

Harry stepped on the rug. "You don't mind hunting people for food, do you?"

Malfoy's grin showed his fangs. "You think I have to hunt?"

Harry tried to ignore the thrill that raced up his spine. "Don't you?"

The toes of Harry's shoes met the edge of the mound of pillows, but Malfoy made no move to rise.

"Mm, no. Not once." Malfoy ran his tongue over a canine. "My prey comes to me, doesn't it?" He patted the royal blue velvet pillow next to his hip.

Harry licked his lips and sank to one knee. The rug gave way slowly under his kneecap. It was one thing to have a vampire pin him against a wall, or tackle him to the ground. That was a trial to endure, and that's what most of his life had been. But never had he crawled eagerly into a predator's lair. And definitely not with his dick rubbing against the back of his zipper like this.

Malfoy lifted an arm and let Harry settle in along his side. They sank down together, and Harry wiggled closer. There was no magic to it beyond a warm, welcome body and a soft bed.

"You're warm," Harry said.

Malfoy shrugged. "Only hungry vamps are cold."

Harry laid his head on Malfoy's arm and rolled onto his side. He bent his knees up a bit to hide the little tent in his trousers. The entire length of his neck was exposed. Any second, Malfoy would strike. He'd move like a bolt of lightning. He'd pin Harry down and sink his teeth into Harry's neck.

A tiny squeak snuck out of Harry, followed by an embarrassed flush across his cheeks.

Malfoy glanced at him sidelong, not even turning his head toward Harry. He swallowed, and Harry did, too.

Harry's cock was far too hard, and he was sure Malfoy could smell it. If he could smell a blood disorder, he could surely smell Harry's arousal. Any second, he'd strike.

Malfoy sighed. "I'm not just going to bite you and suck the blood out, Potter."

"Huh?"

"I was raised to appreciate a meal." Malfoy turned his head, nose to nose with Harry, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "Anticipation and all."

"Uhm, okay. What... I mean... How..."

Malfoy licked his teeth, and Harry felt the heat of his mouth ghost over his lips. "I want you ready to burst when I finally bite you."

Harry gulped.

Malfoy rolled onto his side and wrapped his arms loosely around Harry. His lips grazed Harry's chin. "I want to barely nick you and have you flood my mouth."

Harry's entire body ran hot, and his cock throbbed against his trousers.

Malfoy's lips kissed a slow, soft line along Harry's jaw. "I want your heart in your throat when I put my teeth in it."

Malfoy slipped his thigh between Harry's, and Harry's cock rubbed against Malfoy's hip.

"Oh, God," Harry blurted.

He lifted his chin and gave Malfoy his neck. Malfoy's breath shuddered out as he lowered his mouth to Harry's neck. His hand left Harry's hip to slide between them, cupping Harry through his trousers. Malfoy moaned again when he found Harry's cock.

"Oh, fuck," Harry whispered. "Fuck-fuck-fuck."

Malfoy's tongue was hot and wet against Harry's neck, and he wasn't certain who was making more noise. He thrust into Malfoy's hand, tension building at the base of his cock with every thrust.

"Fuck," Harry gasped, "bite me."

His balls tightened, and he tried to stave of the weight of his impending orgasm, but it was too much, too good.

Malfoy sighed against Harry's ear, and Harry moaned and humped into Malfoy's hand.

And Malfoy finally struck, slow and seamless. Harry didn't know he'd done it until his vision wavered, and he felt Malfoy's jaw working against his throat. His body faltered as Malfoy stroked him through his trousers. His muscles went lax. Black spots danced in front of him. And he was still so fucking close to coming, held in suspended animation as his blood pressure dropped, his brain starving for oxygen.

His vision went black. His ears rang. He let out a strangled, helpless peep of a moan as he sank into the nothingness.

Malfoy took a deep breath, and, like a gunshot, the room rushed back into focus. Light, then sound, then arousal flooded Harry, and the suspended tension in his hips broke like a tidal wave. Malfoy stroked him one last time, Harry's body went rigid, and he came in his trousers like a fucking teenager.

Malfoy licked Harry's neck as he came, and Harry clutched his head. Malfoy let out a low, satisfied chuckle, then gave Harry's neck a final kiss. He rose, licking his lips clean. In the dim lighting, it looked like barbecue sauce.

"Shit," Harry whispered. He stared up at Draco, wide-eyed and thoroughly dazed. "That was good."

"Mm hm," Draco hummed. "What did you have for dinner?" He licked his lips and hummed appreciatively again. "Curry? No, no real spices, just the capsaicin."

"Uhm." Harry's boxers were absolutely plastered to his groin. "Flamin' Hot Cheetos."

Draco sucked his spit through his teeth. A pink flush was rising in his cheeks. "Hot Cheetos," he said absently.

Despite the sticky situation in his pants, fatigue washed over Harry. He yawned and snuggled down into the pillows. He half-expected Draco to nudge him to leave, but he tucked a pillow under his own head and curled his arms around Harry.

Harry tucked his head under Draco's chin. "So you're here twice a week?"

"Mm hm."

"What do you do the other nights?"

Draco nuzzled his chin in Harry's hair. "Wouldn't you like to know."

Harry yawned and butted his forehead against Draco's chest. "Maybe I would like to know."

Draco huffed in surprise. "Huh."

[alixinwwonderland]

Prompt: Midge/Lenny: another snow storm.

let's set this one in the week following to my heart he carries the key:

"You've got to be fucking kidding me."

In the nearly three decades Midge has lived in New York, she can count on one hand the number of times she's seen a real, serious snowstorm in March. Not a little flurry as the last breath of winter gives way to the first breeze of spring, but a full-fledged, wind-in-your-face, choose-appropriate-footwear snowstorm.

But, of course, the universe sends one tonight, right now, just as she and Lenny are leaving the jazz club that has served as the setting for their very first real, official, on-the-same-page date.

It's deja vu as Lenny grabs her hand, grins, and says, "C'mon, let's see what those shoes can do," and guides them through the storm. It's not quite as bad as the last storm they dodged together, but bad enough that getting a cab is a risky proposition. Instead, in what seems like no time at all, Lenny is steering them into the lobby of a tidy, if nondescript, apartment building.

Midge brushes the snow from her shoulders and shakes off her hat, grateful that she at least had the foresight to bring appropriate outerwear this time. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror hung (slightly crooked) on the wall across, and she can't help cringing. Her hair is wet and stringy, except for the hat-shaped indent around the crown of her head. Her makeup is smudged, and, she notices as she looks down at herself, she's got a run in her stocking.

She can't help herself. She starts fussing, trying to tug at her hair and run a finger under her eyes in a futile attempt to return herself to a more... put-together state. Lenny being Lenny, of course he notices.

"You know, I was all set to go on a spiel about how we seem to be falling into a pattern here. I even had a delightful little bit about how I did in fact personally alter the atmosphere this time, as well as some self-deprecating boilerplate about how you don't have to stay, you can just dry off, I'd never try to pressure you, et cetera. But now, I'm finding myself getting a little jealous of a mirror."

Midge tries to be nonchalant.

"I'm just trying to..."

"Trying to...?" he prompts her. She waves her hands aimlessly, gesturing at herself.

"Fix... all this up."

"Uh," Lenny begins, "I don't know what you think needs fixing but I can promise you that-"

"This was all supposed to be perfect." Midge blurts out, cutting him off. "This was our first real date, or our first date that we actually are calling a date, and I spent ages on my hair, and bought a new corset, and matched my shoes and my purse and my hat, and now it's all... a mess."

Lenny puts his hand on her shoulder, forcing her to turn around and face him.

"Midge," he says, pushing back a limp curl from her cheek. "I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I love that you did all that. I appreciate it. Very much," he adds with a wicked smirk that sends heat straight to Midge's core, even as she still shivers. "But if you wannna know the truth... seeing you like this, a little messy, not perfect? That's kind of my favorite Midge."

"Really?" she can't help asking. Lenny doesn't make a habit of lying to her, she knows, but she's been around enough men whose "favorite" Midge is nothing like this Midge.

"Really. Not only is it very, very hot," he grins, "but it seems like I have a pretty great track record when it comes to this Midge. First time we met, the raid at the Wolford, now our first real date..."

"You're just saying that because you heard me mention my corset, aren't you?" Midge teases. Lenny's smirk is back, even though he covers it with a hand over his mouth.

"Well, it's not not because of that."

She takes his hand.

"Well then, Mr. Bruce. I guess you'd better show a girl where she can get warmed up, and maybe you can judge that corset for yourself."

And he does. Enthusiastically. On both counts.