#except this is practically a whole scene instead of a moment but NO MATTER

[dragonedged-if]

Author's Tale Entries

So Merry Christmas my lovely Readers! Yes! I know that I disappeared for a long time but to summarize it I took a break and life is very hectic as of now.

Writing is resuming and as you guys wait I decided to this. Ever since I was a kid me and my friends use to to this type of thing plus I can use it as practice. I'm sure you guys already stumbles stuff like this but to clarify I will explain it. This will be your story where the outcome is random based on your choice and my let's say whims. So expect the writing style will change as time goes on and such. So without further ado let us begin.

Close your ey- Wait! Haha silly me, your reading not listening so I want you instead to visualize. (Keep them peepers open now!)

A.T. Entry 1

The sun, a celestial artist, weaves an ethereal tapestry through the verdant foliage overhead. It bathes you in its warm, golden embrace, illuminating the colors of the surrounding flora with an intensity that leaves you mesmerized. You draw in a lungful of the pristine air, letting it fill your senses with the harmony of nature, before releasing it with a contented sigh that mingles with the rustling of the leaves.

Every pore of your skin basks in the sun's affectionate kiss, sending a delightful tingle coursing through your veins, a reminder of the life that thrums within you. Your ears, attuned to the forest's melody, catch the harmonious chirping of the birds, their fluttering wings beating a rhythm that resonates with the very heartbeat of the wilderness, shaking of the branches as their talons find purchase on its woods..

Suddenly, an unexpected sound - the crisp snap of a twig - punctuates the serenity. Whirling around, your boots send a spray of loose earth and pebbles scattering. A figure emerges from the dappled shadows, and a doe steps into your line of sight. It regards you with its obsidian eyes, an epitome of tranquility as it absentmindedly munches on some fresh leaves, wholly unperturbed by your presence.

Now, isn't this a sight to behold? You, alone in the heart of nature, sharing a moment with a doe - something straight out of a Disney movie, don't you think? Except, of course, without the singing animals and magic. But hey, who needs that when you've got the real deal right here, in all its untamed glory? It's almost as if Mother Nature herself decided to roll out the red carpet just for you.

So go ahead, take a moment. Savor the feeling. After all, it's not every day you get to play Snow White in the woods, is it?

Finish? Well, it seems the doe's novelty has worn off, hasn't it? You turn your back on it, slightly affronted by its lack of interest, and, dare we say, its judgmental gaze? Well, no matter, there's a whole world out there waiting to be explored. One foot before the other, you march forward, your path dictated not by choice but by the whims of this narrative.

But wait! What's that lurking in the distance? A structure of some sort emerges from the verdant sea of green, its silhouette a stark contrast against the sunlit foliage. Even from this considerable gap, the infectious melody of mirth reaches your ears, a siren's call that tugs at your curiosity. It appears the festivities have begun without you, you old latecomer, you!

Intrigued and slightly affronted (because who starts a party without you?), you press on, drawn towards the distant merriment like a moth to a flame. The harmony of laughter and joyous chatter wafts towards you, carried on the gentle breeze, a tantalizing taste of what lies ahead.

Isn't it just like you, chasing after the sound of fun and abandoning our poor doe friend? But, who can blame you? After all, who can resist the pull of a good party, especially when the soundtrack sounds like a scene straight out of The Great Gatsby? So, dust off your boots and straighten your collar, my friend, for it seems the night has only just begun. And remember, punctuality is overrated when you're the life of the party!

As you draw closer to the establishment, your eyes eagerly roam about, searching for any signs of life. And there it is, a sign looming atop the building, its weathered appearance only adding to its charm. The words "Nature's Embrace" are proudly displayed, the letters slightly faded but still commanding attention. It's as if the tavern has emerged from the heart of the forest itself, nestled in a place where magic and reality intertwine.

Vines boldly crawl up the sides of the building, embracing it with nature's touch, as if the very essence of the forest has claimed this place as its own. The wooden facade, weathered and worn, tells tales of countless adventures and laughter that have echoed within.

As you approach the entrance, the sound of merriment grows louder, seeping through the cracks of the door and beckoning you to step inside. You can't help but marvel at the warm glow that spills out from the windows, casting dancing shadows on the path before you. Laughter and the clinking of mugs intertwine, creating a collection of joy that resonates in the air.

With anticipation bubbling within you, each step on the worn-out staircase seems to echo through the air, the creaking boards adding a touch of suspense to your ascent. The sound magnifies the excitement building inside you, as if the very steps are teasing you with the promise of what lies beyond. (Oh, the anticipation must be killing you, my dear reader!)

Finally, you reach the doorknob, your hand reaching out to grasp the weathered wooden knob. Its rough surface greets your fingertips, creating a tactile connection that heightens your senses. You can almost feel the stories embedded within its grains and the countless hands that have turned it over the years. With a firm grip, you push the door open, revealing a burst of light and life within.

As you step further into the bustling tavern, the noise that greeted you outside is nothing compared to the deafening orchestra that engulfs you now. The air is alive with the vibrant melodies of musicians stationed on the side, their fingers dancing across strings and keys with unparalleled gusto. A lute is plucked with nimble precision, its melody resonating with a sense of longing and whimsy. A harp is strummed, its ethereal notes cascading through the air like a gentle breeze. And the xylophone adds its own playful rhythm, its vibrant tones punctuating the music with a delightful charm. (Don't be shy now, go one shake that hip, tap that foot and get your groove on!)

In the center of the room, a roaring fire crackles in the hearth, casting a warm and inviting glow. Its flames dance with wild abandon, casting flickering shadows that playfully dance across the walls. And what a sight those walls present! Adorned with the heads of majestic animals, each trophy tells a story of bravery and triumph. The mighty bear stands proud, its gaze fierce and unwavering. The boar's tusks gleam in the flickering light, a testament to its untamed strength. And the wolf, frozen in a ferocious snarl, seems to guard the room with unwavering loyalty. Among the trophies, a bow is proudly displayed, its wood gleaming with a polished sheen.

With a spring in your step, you confidently navigate through the bustling atmosphere of the tavern, deftly sidestepping two men locked in a heated brawl. The sound of bones crunching fills the air as their punches connect. You manage to avoid the chaos and make your way towards a vacant table, before skillfully maneuvering around a stumbling drunkard, his ale swishing dangerously in his mug. Just as he nears collision with you, he trips over a misplaced stool and crashes to the ground, his muffled groans drowned out by the raucous laughter of the patrons.

Finally, you settle into the comfort of a sturdy chair at the table, relieved to have survived the onslaught of what the locals call "Happy Hour." The tavern is alive with conversation, clinking glasses, and the occasional burst of raucous laughter. Amidst the lively ambiance, a voice, sultry and captivating, slices through the noise, capturing your attention like a siren's call.

You turn towards the source of the voice and find yourself captivated by the sight of a woman in her thirties. A mischievous smile dances upon her lips, and her amber eyes burn with a fiery intensity. Her cascading hair, the color of autumn leaves, frames her face like a soft halo. "Come here often, stranger?"

In one fluid motion, she reaches for a frothy mug on her tray and takes a seat at your table. "On the house!" she declares, her voice a velvety purr, before sauntering off to attend to the other patrons. The rich aroma of the freshly poured ale wafts up to your nostrils, tempting your senses with its intoxicating fragrance.

Hold your horses, my adventurous friend, for no journey is complete without choosing your class and assembling your crew! With your mug in hand, you survey the area, searching for potential allies amidst the lively festivities. Your eyes are drawn to the far left corner, where a group of armored figures revel in high spirits. One particularly enthusiastic individual jumps onto a table, rallying his comrades with fervor.

"Come, brothers and sisters! Tonight, we celebrate our initiation as the Lord's instruments of justice!" the helmet-clad leader exclaims, his voice booming across the tavern. The group responds in unison, their voices harmonizing in a resounding chorus of "AMEN…AMEN…AMEN!" Just as the leader raises his mug to drink, he sways precariously, losing his balance and toppling off the table, much to the amusement of his companions.

Curiosity piqued, you continue your search, your gaze now shifting to the shadowy corners of the room. Two individuals stand apart from the revelry, observing the festivities with an air of quiet detachment. Their eyes dart around, filled with a mix of distrust and paranoia. Squinting to get a better look, you notice tattoos adorning their hands, but before you can discern their meaning, the owners quickly roll up their sleeves, obscuring your view.

As you crane your head, your attention is immediately captivated by a group of adventurers gathered around a grand feast. One of them bears an impressive ax strapped to his back, exuding an aura of strength and determination. An elf, with a sleek bow slung across her shoulder, exudes an air of grace and precision. Your keen eye catches the subtle movements of another figure, a nimble thief, his hands disappearing and reappearing in a swift and practiced manner. And lastly, a fair maiden donning a pristine white robe, her head bowed in prayer, murmuring words of protection for her comrades.

Just as you begin to take in their presence, another voice, filled with confidence and charm, reaches your ears. "Listen, lads and lasses, for I shall regale you with a tale of the legendary Sword Dancer!" The speaker, undoubtedly a seasoned storyteller, captures the attention of the entire group. Their appearance suggests they are mercenaries, enjoying a well-deserved respite after a successful mission. Two members of their party, engrossed in a game of Five Finger Fillet, demonstrate their dexterity as the knives dance across their fingertips, the metallic tips dangerously close to their flesh.

As you take a sip of the complimentary ale, its flavors explode on your tongue, a delightful blend of hops and malt that dances across your taste buds. The liquid glides smoothly down your throat, leaving a warm, lingering sensation in its wake. You can't help but savor the moment, feeling a sense of camaraderie with the boisterous crowd that surrounds you.

Now dear readers as you drink your ale in deep thought, let me present to you four enticing classes to choose from. Each class possesses its own unique abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, along with their own unique captivating stories and journeys.

Let us begin with the Paladin class, noble warriors skilled in the art of close combat. Their proficiency with weapons and unwavering strength make them formidable adversaries on the battlefield. These warriors seek honor and glory, their journey driven by an unwavering determination to prove themselves in combat and earn the respect of their comrades. However, their reliance on physical strength may sometimes cloud their tactical judgment, leading to challenges that test their resolve.

Moving on, we have the enigmatic Assassins, masters of stealth and deception. These silent predators thrive in the shadows, executing covert operations with deadly precision. Their agility and reflexes make them formidable foes, capable of infiltrating enemy lines undetected and eliminating their targets with lethal efficiency. The Assassins' journey is one of secrecy and intrigue, navigating a world where shadows hold secrets and danger lurks at every turn. However, their solitary nature can sometimes isolate them from their allies, presenting a unique set of challenges.

The Mercenary Class, our third option, consists of battle-hardened warriors with vast experience in combat tactics. These versatile fighters adapt to any situation, whether it be engaging in close combat or providing ranged support. Driven by profit and the thrill of adventure, mercenaries eagerly take on contracts and revel in the spoils of war. However, their loyalty lies with the highest bidder, and their actions may be fueled by personal gain rather than a sense of honor or duty.

Lastly, we have the Bard Mage, a mesmerizing combination of spellcasting and musical enchantment. These magical minstrels wield both the power of spells and the captivating melodies of music. With their harmonies, they can heal wounds, inspire bravery, or lull enemies into a deep slumber. The Bard Mage's repertoire of spells is vast and diverse, allowing them to adapt to any situation they encounter. Their journey is one of artistic expression and mystical exploration.

As you contemplate these four intriguing classes, the possibilities unfold before you. The allure of glory and honor beckons as you envision yourself as a valiant Paladin, standing on the frontlines of battle. Perhaps the thrill of adventure and the promise of lucrative rewards draw you towards the life of a Mercenary, where each new contract brings both danger and excitement. Or maybe, just maybe, the enigmatic world of shadows and secrets calls to your soul, tempting you to become an elusive Assassin, a master of stealth and deception. Alternatively, the enchanting melodies and spellcasting prowess of the Bard Mage may resonate within you, offering a path of magic and artistic expression.

Dear readers, the choice is yours. So, weigh the pros and cons, let your imagination soar, and select the class that ignites a fire within your heart, guiding you towards the adventure that awaits.

[thefloatingstone]

How do I give my anime designs more character? I don’t want them to look bland, especially not the girls!

I had a whole different argument here and suddenly realised I was answering a question you didn't ask. I'm sick at the moment so my brain isn't working the best so forgive me if my answers seems a bit all over the place.

Most importantly, and something i think a LOT of modern anime does badly these days, is to not be afraid to PUSH the expressions of your anime girls.

if you'll forgive the mini-rant; modern anime has a really bad habit of not allowing female characters to have "ugly" expressions. Or when they do, they make them simplified emojis or make the one second of extreme emotion SO extreme it becomes completely off putting. Especially as there will be a tendency to only push an extreme expression in one single episode during a "dramatic scene".

This results in most girls in modern anime looking more like the limited expression range of a Vtuber than actual characters. There ARE exceptions, but this is a MASSIVE issue which was not the case in the 80s or 90s and only really started becoming more common around the mid 2000s.

Comparison examples! (you know I love those). I am using still images instead of gifs so the animation doesn't mask the drawing. But I'll show some animated gifs later in this ask

This extends beyond just facial expressions tho. Or rather... it doesn't.

Most modern anime shows will have the characters pull expressions in their face, but have their bodies relatively static, even in extreme emotions. If you compare the two screenshots above, the more modern example has a more extreme push to her eyes, but in the Dirty pair screenshot, not only is Kei's mouth open very wide, but her head is tilted backwards and to the side, her shoulders are drawn up, and she gives the impression even in a still image that she is in the middle of a physical reaction to something which annoyed her. Similarly, Yuri down there is also annoyed, and even though we only really see her eyes, you can tell she's hunched over and seething. In the modern anime screenshot she's just.... got the default "these are my angry eyes!" face with nothing really happening elsewhere.

Her shoulders I guess are kind of drawn up but so barely you wouldn't be blamed to think they always look like that.

And this comes to the second point.

DRAW FROM LIFE AND/OR PHOTOS.

There is NOTHING wrong using a pose doll to figure out a challenging pose. I have used pose dolls when I am unsure how a certain pose looks from a specific angle. But looking at real life, whether photos or if you can, life drawing, will be your biggest tool in figuring out how to breathe more life into your poses and art.

Now, to answer the ACTUAL question you asked about design;

I have to admit that character design is not a strength of mine. I have little to no practice with it myself and when I design OCs I end up not liking them or not enjoying their designs. I feel someone far more skilled at the design part of design might have better input, but I can tell you what I know just from observation;

The first BIG advice is; do not confuse interesting design with clutter.

This doesn't mean strip down your character design to look like a Y/N drawing, but more have every element you introduce into your design be there with some kind of thought in mind as to how it applies to the character and who they are as a person. This is a mistake I often see made with characters both OCs as well as professionally. Where character designers seem to think adding MORE to a design will make a character more interesting to look at. (PreCure has this problem a LOT)

Giving your character too many details without some kind of larger unification or idea, makes them harder to envision for people, because there's too much visual noise.

If I tell you to think of Link from Legend of Zelda, it doesn't matter WHICH Link you picture 9although at the moment it's most likely TotK or BotW Link), Link has unified design elements which means regardless of how detailed or cluttered his outfit becomes, we all know what Link looks like;

1: Blonde hair on the longer side usually, with fringe and side bangs 2: blue diamond shaped eyes, pointed ears, light skin 3: wears some variation of green. Can dress in other colours but Green is an identifying colour. Even in ToTK and BotW where he is most often shown in blue, Green is still the vast majority of the outfits and gear he will wear 4: boots and light coloured tights/pants 5: Twink

You don't need to look at a picture of Link to know this is what Link looks like. Other details like his earring, belts, gloves, bracers, undershirt etc are all there and enhance these elements and distinguish one Link from another exist, but they are not the unifying elements to Link's character design.

On top of this, all of Link's character design make SENSE for his character, what he does, where he comes from etc.

He is a Hylian so he has pointed ears and is generally elf-like in appearance. He spends most of his time in European forests so he dresses in green. When he wears other colours it usually corresponds to where he is currently traveling. He carries a sword and shield so he has a belt with scabbard. He carries an entire pantry worth of food with him, so he has various satchels and bags on his person (but not too many or the design becomes cluttered). He wears light protective gear to show he gets into fights but they are usually not heavy in nature because Link is nimble and relies heavily on movement.

This doesn't tell us anything about his personality because Link doesn't really have one, but it's a very strong character design all the same and informs us what kind of character he is and what sort of life he leads as well as what sort of background he might have (He is a skilled adventurer. Not a rich sheltered boy who has never been outside of a city before or something of the like).

Now I'm gonna compare him to the character design of a Mass Effect character which I don't THINK you'd have played since your profile says you're a teen and the game is rated M 👀 (or you might have, idk I'm not your mom) but ANYWAY! Looking at a character design which tells us about their PERSONALITY as well as way of living.

I'm not going to use any of the aliens as examples because then you have to bring in the subject of alien species into the equation and how they stand apart from the various other members of their species and etc etc. So we'll talk about a human character.

So... this is Jack

Although you may think her tattoos make her design cluttered, they don't because you don't really need to know what every individual tattoo looks like. You just know "Jack is covered in Tattoos".

So just looking at her, you can pretty much instantly pin down her personality. That being; she will most likely fucking stab you if you say one thing to annoy her.

She's like a punk on steroids. Shaved head, heavy make up, COVERED in tattoos, both ears capped in some futuristic piercings, some or other heavy duty uniform except she decided she'd rather walk around fucking topless and boots that could crush a man's skull.

Everything about her design screams "don't fuck with me I am VERY unhinged and will kill a man for less than the $4 in his pocket".

Jacks' entire personality is on display in her design. And the design as a whole present a single concept of who she is as a person, while ALSO tying into her backstory and lifestyle. (escaped prisoner from high security facility, still wearing the prison uniform, has been in an unknown number of gangs, has an extremely casual approach to sex and sexuality, uses her intimidation as a first line of defense to prevent people from getting close to her indicating a painful past)

And then you compare her to her design in the following game

This is a great design because it not only informs you on Jack's personality, but also her GROWTH AS A CHARACTER.

Her design is, at least compared to her first appearance, softer. She's grown her hair long enough to tie it into a ponytail, making her appear more feminine. But she still shaves the sides so you know she can still shank you if she wants.

Her outfit is still VERY revealing but she's also dressed borderline decently. She is not as defensive any more and could probably even walk around in normal society without getting a ticket (and then shooting the cop in response).

However even covered up, she's wearing a leather studded jacket, and she is still displaying her tattoos on her chest and hands proudly. She's still the same person... just less likely to murder you (although the option is still there if needed).

Now compare these character designs to some others which I would count as being "too busy" and tell me if these designs tell you ANYTHING about what kind of personalities these characters might have, what kind of lifestyle to they live, what do their environments and world looks like, or what it says about them

Fun fact; that last one is NOT a magical girl, but is in fact an alchemist who is living in a slowly dying world whose resources are being depleted and the future looks grim and hopeless as humanity tries to navigate this slow apocalypse.

I have no idea if any of that made sense or is useful in any way, but hopefully you get what I mean?

Look at real life. Don't rely on just referencing other anime and pose dolls. Don't clutter a character design with details that don't mean anything. make the parts of your character design you use have meaning or purpose. Even if that purpose is just "to give them a silhouette different to the other characters so she's easy to identify by sight"

[x0401x]

Hello, can you speak about episodes 7 and 8 of Tsurune S2, always enjoy reading your thoughts on the episodes, and thanks so much for sharing them!!

I've talked about episode 7 in a previous ask, so I'm gonna leave my impressions of episode 8 here. As a bonus, I'm also gonna talk about episodes 9 and 10, as an apology for taking so long to answer this ask. ;v;

I'm gonna start with the positive points, just like I did with episode 7, because there's so much goodness in this one. I love the first scenes so much. Sen and Man's morning practice with Shuu, Kazemai and the twins finding out that Ryouhei and Shuu are now friends, Daigo and Nanao bonding, the girls getting excited at Kirisaki's high school campus, Minato being a bow nerd... so wholesome.

But my favorite part has to be that moment where Kaito thinks the Kirisaki girls are about to approach Nanao and tries to block them out... except they go talk to Rika instead. That was so fucking funny. And so in-character too. Plus Seiya noticing the whole thing and giving Kaito a follow-up? Nice touch. He 100% would.

I love that we see more of the Kirisaki team in this episode. We barely get to see Hiroki and Daigo, so it was nice to have them interact in this one. I still think we have a major lack of them and the twins in this season, though, but given the direction that the anime is going, it can't be helped.

I like that we finally got the whole flashback where Minato learns about Eisuke's original shooting style and Eisuke learns about Minato being Saionji's apprentice. It's fascinating how much character study you can do in that one scene, especially the way Eisuke goes from flattered to straight-up hostile in a matter of seconds with a single piece of information. He's being nothing but sarcastic and petty when he says it's incredible that Minato was accepted as apprentice, but Minato (being Minato) doesn't take notice of it.

The joint practice was great and highlighted in very subtle ways why Manji should return to the team. Kaoru and Umetarou getting to have a role in that kind of warmed my heart. Also, the scene in the dorm. Just fantastic. The way we got to see everyone's rooms and the difference in size between the rooms of the first and second-years in comparison to the third-years'. Daigo's Noririn shrine. The crest of the dorm being purple irises. The nod to the novel during the takoyaki party time. Heart eyes. Nothing but heart eyes.

All in all, this episode was really damn good. The only things that had me raising a brow at certain moments were stuff that I have already discussed before, such as Eisuke for some reason insisting that his team should win without help from anyone, not even their school itself (except this time he had to reluctantly give in and take budget money for a training camp). Or Minato being a little too innocent and not realizing, even now that he's in high school, just how openly resentful Eisuke is towards him.

That last one bothers me in particular, as it implies that Minato has no negative feelings towards Eisuke simply because he doesn't notice how shitty Eisuke is to him. Not only is Eisuke's hostility mostly internal, Minato is also unrealistically oblivious of Eisuke's words and actions. The anime even makes a point to change his first interaction with Minato and make it so that Eisuke approaches Shuu instead.

In the novel, Minato knows very well that Eisuke has a deep-seated grudge against him and Shuu, and both of them have been directly and indirectly offended by it in every interaction they have with him, yet Minato chooses to be nice to Eisuke regardless. It takes Minato a while to get rid of his innitial resentment towards Eisuke, but he does, and he does it consciously. He acknowledges that Eisuke is mean as hell and doesn't make up any excuses to justify why he's liket that (because, let's be honest, this is what we'd get in any other sports series). Yet he still decides to be good, not because he's naïve, but because he has matured. That's the difference. Novel!Minato sees Eisuke for what he is and accepts it. He takes in the bad things Eisuke has said and done and forgives them. Rather, I'd say he makes them null. Not because Eisuke had a reason to be like that (nothing justifies it), but because Minato is quite literally above it all. It had irritated him at first, but after he went through a certain amount of enlightenment, it just stopped mattering. That's Zen and that's what his character is about.

The anime seems to think Minato is pure simply because he's clueless. To be fair, he's clueless about a lot of things, but he learns. And then he picks the right path, sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously. It all depends on what the situation calls for, and in this case, it was calling for a conscious choice.

Now for episode 9.

Another wholesome one, though not as much, as there was some friction going on. It's funny that the friction was one-sided on Eisuke's part, though.

Again, this episode doesn't have negative points aside from what I've already mentioned a lot before. I like that the anime also took some time to make Kazemai and Tsujimine bond a little. It was refreshing and cute. I think, if the author had more space within the page count of each volume, she might've included something like this in the story.

Speaking of bonding, gotta love that the show is finally giving us proper interaction between Seiya and Kaito, especially Seiya fucking around, but it's hilarious to me that it was done in the most non-gay manner possible. The scene where Seiya doesn't wear his spare glasses on purpose just to get Kaito to do things for him is the finest example of that. In canon, Seiya makes it very clear that he's pissed and wants Kaito to make up for breaking his glasses, and Kaito responds to his demands without question because he feels genuinely sorry and wants to be forgiven. After all, he broke Seiya's glasses by accident in the novel when Seiya tried to stop him from breaking Eisuke's whole face, so Seiya is twice as angry and Kaito is twice as guilty. And of course, the anime didn't show what happens after that. Nor did it show Seiya's implied jealousy of Nanao, his prank on Kaito during the night or him cleaning up Kaito's face the next day.

The anime is also insisting on Eisuke's don't-wanna-own-anyone-anything attitude without explaining why exactly he is like this. It's getting a little tiring to see that in every single episode and not be given a concrete reason for it. We got an explanation as to why he's so hellbent on winning against Shuu and Minato, all right, but why the insistence in not relying on anyone? The only thing I can think of is that anime seems to be trying to sell him as a tsundere. They keep trying so hard to make him cute and likable and don't see that it makes his character kind of confusing. He's so determined to win, yet he keeps nitpicking his methods only when it comes to relying on adults and on using money. Even money from the school and club budget, which he 100% has the right to use as a student. He wouldn't be owning anyone anything for that, since his family is literally paying for him to go to school in the first place. Make it make sense, KyoAni.

Also, I really like that the anime decided to give us more details on his relationship with Shigeru, but did they have to add that scene where Eisuke is rude as fuck to him? That one made me cringe big time. I don't know how it got translated in the subs or dub but I don't like that dialogue. Nope. Not cool.

Especially not cool when it's followed by, you guessed it, Masaki and Eisuke's exchange at the beach. It's a very different interaction from what we got in the novel and seems to have been framed in order to favor Eisuke and how amazing he is. In the novel, they have a talk during practice, prompted by Eisuke's willingness to do anything in order to get a hit. He's basically doing yumiate, which isn't the point of kyudo, so Masaki approaches him discreetly and lectures him in the nicest, most indirect way possible, AKA the Zen way. But in the anime, Zen is out the window. Masaki and Eisuke even boast about their school getting stronger and being the one that will crush the other's team, and I can understand Eisuke having that kind of beginner mindset because he's just a teenager, but Masaki? Hello??? Winning isn't the goal. Even having a goal isn't the goal. Kyudo isn't a sport. That's literally the first thing about it and KyoAni forgot. They got so caught up in trying to show off that they completely slipped up in this one. I'm crying blood. They 100% don't realize this was a fail.

Other than that, this scene is all about praising Eisuke, and his only flaw is that he doesn't take it to heart due to his trust issues. Like. At this point, it just feels like we're being force-fed the same information over and over again because Eisuke just keeps getting so much attention, way beyond what seems necessary, while Kirisaki is relegated to the sidelines with Shuu being the only exception (but even he isn't getting as much attention as in the books). It's a little bit too obvious by now that KyoAni is trying to invest in Eisuke as their trumpcard to attract a bigger audience for this season. They're doing with him the same thing they did with Seiya in S1, changing his whole character in a desperate attempt to make him endearing and seem desperate to make the fans like him (as well as Koushirou, by extension). They also have to fill up the extra time they get from trying to get rid of any actually gay content, so they're giving us excessive amounts of him, while simultaneously managing not to expose what truly matters.

I mean, I don't know who else noticed this, but after getting this far into the story and having so much Eisuke content shoved down our throats in every episode, we haven't been presented to a lot of basic things about him. For example, the fact he has photosensibility and that's why he wears a hoodie all the time. Or his claustrophobia. Or his mental and emotional instability. Those are all things that make him relatable, but they're not cute, so there doesn't seem to be much interest in showing that part of him. So yeah, it's not really about Eisuke, it's about how KyoAni can use him as a tool to get viewers hooked while simultaneously buying time.

This trend continues into episode 10, where we begin with a flashback of how Eisuke joined Tsujimine's kyudo club. Eisuke is portrayed as the guy who brought the members of the club together and is leading them single-handedly to the nationals like some messiah. The novel scene where he tries to cheat during practice half-assedly makes it to this episode, with Touma making the mistake instead of Eisuke (for no reason other than not knowing any better) and Eisuke deciding to cover it up instead of doing it himself. Once again, Eisuke is doing something wrong, it's watered down to make him look good even when it's not a good look.

At long last, Minato finally finds out that Eisuke basically sees him and Shuu as enemies on a personal level. Not because he realized it but because Koushirou decided to spill the beans. And yet it doesn't seem to affect him much. In the end, he manages to know and stay clueless at the same time, so there's no need for him to make an effort to process and accept Eisuke and his resentment.

On the topic of Koushirou, he's as out of character as can be, but I like his description of what goes on in his mind when he draws the bow. The Heike reference was great. An awesome nod to how old kyudo is and how much it permeates Japanese culture. Chuunibyou as fuck, but good.

And then there's Masaki and Eisuke's convo at the baths. Nice visual language where Eisuke is in the smaller bath in comparison to Masaki, which highlights that Masaki is more experient, more mature and more knowledgeable, therefore more skilled. The content of the conversation is also good. The only problem is that the anime is getting closer to a territory that I'm not sure it wants to go, which is to present Masaki as an excellent coach only when he's lecturing someone from a different team. When he's teaching Kazemai, he's portrayed a fine mentor, but his real worth only ever seems to be revealed when he's before either Kirisaki or Tsujimine. That's where he truly stands out. Easy to tell that it's because those moments are mostly shown through Minato's perspective in the books, with him either admiring Masaki or longing for him all the while, and KyoAni is having none of that gay shit. But by trying so hard to keep Minato and Masaki five feet apart like two bros sitting in a bathtub, they accidentally make Masaki a better teacher when he's helping out or making demonstrations to rival teams.

I'm losing my mind because, holy crap, what have we come to? Masaki is literally having a bonding moment with Eisuke out of all people before having any bonding moment with Minato this entire season aside from that one scene at Yata Shrine, if you can call that a bonding moment at all. KyoAni has managed to make them barely give a fuck about each other in the span of 10 episodes. Actually, screw that; it managed to give them nothing to care about regarding each other aside from club-related stuff, since KyoAni has rid the anime of anything these two could bond over to begin with. Masaki didn't get his scar saving Minato's life, Minato's hand injury was never a thing, their fight never happened and so neither did their make-up, we never get to see what Minato is thinking outside of the dojo, Masaki's background is never touched upon again aside from archery-related facts, Minato didn't get sick so no hospital scene, etc. The list is endless. They've been stripped bare of any reason to care about each other on a personal level, so they just... don't.

As a result, at least to me, it feels like they barely exist within the story. I feel like I've hardly seen them at all this whole time, even though they were always there. I've learned nothing about them even though we've been shown a lot of stuff about Minato, because almost none of it was his emotions or the inner machinations of his mind. It was mostly just facts. This is probably the most fatal mistake that Yamamura Takuya made in S1, and he's repeating it in S2: he seems to have no interest in Minato as a protagonist.

This anime almost feels like an experiment to prove that Minato and Masaki are so deeply connected to each other as characters that when you take Masaki out of the equation, Minato is almost empty. Nearly every bit of personal information regarding Minato is related to Masaki one way or another, and Minato is usually the readers' gateway to getting to know Masaki. So when KyoAni insists on keeping them away from each other, the result is that they lose a lot of their essence and the story is left with holes in it, which KyoAni tried to fill up with Seiya in the previous season, and now they're using Eisuke for it. In short, Minato is being pushed to the background in the story he was supposed to be leading as the main character while secondary characters are used as a disposable means to draw the audience in because the director apparently can't bring himself to give two shits about him.

And, like, some people will enjoy this season and some won't, but regardless of opinions, this approach is objectively a fail on KyoAni's part. Whether the anime is good or not on its own is up for debate, but as for whether it's a good adaptation or not, I think we can all agree by now that no, it isn't. Not even because it's not faithful to the original, but because it keeps committing these narrative suicides. The plot doesn't care much for its own protagonist and tries to seek depth by latching onto a specific character. Minato is basically becoming a secondary character in his own story.

I think episode 10 did a great job on showcasing that, even though it obviously wasn't the intention. Especially the latter half of it, from the moment Minato and Eisuke get stuck in the elevator. In the novel, this scene was about both of them, but mostly about Minato. In the anime, it's entirely about Eisuke. Minato is literally used as a vessel for more of Eisuke's backstory to be revealed. We don't get Eisuke hyperventilating and Minato helping him stay grounded because he's had the same experience after the car accident that took his mother's life. Instead, we get Eisuke receiving a call from his aunt about Shigeru being hospitalized for the nth time and Eisuke freaking out. We don't get Minato collapsing with a fever from the emotional batter and Masaki taking him to the hospital, which leads to a heart-to-heart and Minato getting the necessary strength to overcome the hurdle. Instead, we get Minato and Masaki taking Eisuke to see Shigeru, and the whole thing is about how Eisuke feels and how helpful they were to him. This ordeal was originally Minato-centric in the books, yet KyoAni does everything in its power to make it be about Eisuke instead, because the original content is too inexcusably gay for the screen.

Which brings us to the last scene of this episode before the credits roll: the car scene. The only thing it has in common with its novel counterpart is that it's a scene where Minato and Masaki are having a conversation in Masaki's car at night in the middle of nowhere. I do like that it added a reference to volume 1, because we completely missed Minato's inner monologue during the last match in S1. But that's about it. We didn't get anything else.

And then the credits roll, and we end this episode with Minato promising that Kazemai will defeat Tsujimine. Again, the whole point of kyudo goes way over KyoAni's head. So does the point of Minato as a character. Minato isn't my favorite character, but I almost feel bad for him. I wish someone in this production team would bother to make him the protagonist aside from when the tournaments are going on.

[nappybones5]

What are your favorite things about Raven x Taiyang ship? Outside of their whole relationship not getting showed in the show, is there something you don't like about the ship?

What songs remind you of them?

Thanks for the ask, first off, and sorry I’ve taken a little to get back to you. This took me a bit to type up and I did it instead of working on more Phoenix stories lmao. I did end up getting a bit grouchy about Tai as a character, so fair warning, there’s a bit of critical content here; you can of course scroll right past it to get to the good stuff.

Probably my favourite thing about Raven x Taiyang is the fanfiction; it’s as you say, their relationship is never actually shown in the show, a ship that sunk well before it even sailed-which, fair. It’s not their show. But it still irritates me, because Raven was a character who immediately caught my interest on Youtube because she was hot, and then I watched those videos and I thought “oh wow this lady’s got some serious baggage”. That scene in V5, where Raven’s gaze drops from Yang to the ground and she breathes Tai’s name piqued my interest in that man a thousandfold, and then it turns out he’s…there. He’s been sitting on his ass at home, gardening and gawking the telly while his children fight in the forever war that he must have some idea of, if his glare to Qrow at the end of V3 meant anything. It’s been said before by others: Tai being the stay-at-home parent in an empty house makes no sense. It’s authorial intervention to make sure the protagonists didn’t curbstomp their way through the events of V4-5 with two veteran Huntsmen (sidenote, how cool would it have been if instead of doing nothing and getting left behind by the story, Tai had accompanied Yang to Raven? I mean, shit, if Raven had an out-of-body moment at the mere mention of her ex-husband what would his presence in those scenes have done? The angst! The drama! I AM LITERALLY PICTURING A SCENE IN WHICH Raven ushers them into the tent without a fight, she’s twiddling her thumbs like “aha well, you see…fuck” while Vernal is like “why…is she…OH YOU MUST BE TAI” and then Weiss breaks out of the cage and she’s wiping the floor with those tribal jobbers-and Raven turns to Tai and Yang while they have no idea what's going on, Yang’s instinctively stood up before Tai’s like “nah this sounds like a her problem” and Yang goes “oh yeahhhhh! Good luck bitch lmao”).

You ask what I don’t like about the ship. I’d argue there’s nothing to dislike, because there is practically nothing there, beyond the maddening tease of a handful of scenes that never amount to anything. What I do dislike are the characters as they are written in canon-Raven is hilariously incoherent (“Salem only uses people until they are no longer useful” “…Are you having a stroke” “Yes. Vernal get help”) and Tai is boringly incoherent. They make no sense and they reek of wasted potential.

But the fanfiction. The shit that fan writers get up to when they’re not being hemmed in by canon. <> I originally had a little list of recommendations written up, but on second thought I am unsure how comfortable those writers would be with getting mentioned in a post that is probably going to be tagged RWDE. So…rest assured, there’s some good shit out there, you just have to look. But my favourite one is a genfic that isn’t tagged Raven Branwen/Taiyang Xiao Long. So I’m sorry. <>

Aside from the fanfiction that started all this, I guess I’m also very fond of my own interpretation of Phoenix; think black cat golden retriever, except that the cat is a desperate thing and the dog is mangy as all hell, because I’ve said it before, I don’t like fanon STRQ-era fuckboy Tai. It’s nothing personal, I just don’t care for writing that kind of archetype. Canon Tai isn’t particularly interesting to me either. I consider him a narrative deadweight EXCEPT in the matter of how he relates to Raven, who is far and away the more compelling character to me (hopefully it doesn’t show in my writing, considering what I’m about to get into).

Writing Tai for me personally has been like constantly asking myself the question: Who did Raven Branwen fall in love with? My answer, and I guess parcelled with it the answer to your first question, about what I actually like about Phoenix, is that Raven fell in love with someone who was so unexpectedly like her-with all her rage and doubt and hurt-someone who has suffered, if not measure for measure, a life not unlike hers, and who yet despite it all is still holding out hope-is still fundamentally a good person. Life in the tribe broke that scared little girl-it made her solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Tai, on the other hand, drank his milk. With Tai, she doesn’t get the excuse of ‘life was shitty to me so I’m dealing it back’; he sees her, and Raven likewise, because to their mutual shock and rage, they’re looking into a mirror.

I know opposites attract is and probably always will be in romantic vogue, but I like to think that that trope is only the superficial appearance of Phoenix. I imagine them initially enraged by each other, barely able to breathe in the same room without scoffing or making some biting joke (more often than not Raven instigating, Tai retaliating). As the seasons change, rage cools to resignation, and a kind of morbid curiosity sets in. From Raven’s perspective: Why are you like this? Where do you find the will to care? I need to know. From Tai’s: Why are you like this? Can I help you? I want to help. Them working their way from a tentative ceasefire to a comfortable peace; days and days gone without a backbiting that feels so petty and pointless to them now-or if it persists, everyone can feel that there’s no more heat to it. They’re together more often than they’re not-they’re the only people that can pull each other back from the brink, that can realise that the ever-mediative Tai or the taciturn Raven was even there. One blazing day in spring, the sun is on her skin and his hands are in her hair and her mind can only stutter out a double ‘Oh’ before their lips brush and it occurs to her that even if she runs now, she’ll stay. So for a brief and blessed time, she stays, whole, taking an anxious, guilty pleasure in this life that she hates she doesn’t hate. Even after everything she’s done, maybe she has a right to life too. Coming home every day to a home she’s never known-he smells like timber and stock, roses and earth. He’s warm when she’s cold, he’s kind to her when she’s cruel to herself-he holds her as the setting sun washes them in rosegold and she hopes.

And then Yang is born. It’s hardly her fault-for the first week or so, Raven loves her. But the creep of post-partum depression exacerbates all that old rage and doubt and hurt. She’s angrier than usual and she doesn’t know why. Why is she here? She’s killed dozens of men like Tai before-good men, fathers. She’s killed the occasional scrawny kid who fought back, who decided their mementos were worth more to them than their shitty lives. And she gets to be a mother? One day she looks at Yang and she’s just. Disgusted. She’s disgusted by her, and suddenly she’s terrified by herself. She’s going to get someone killed. Well, she can do that somewhere else.

Tai left to father Yang, alone. Raven in the thick of her PPD, making a name for herself across Anima. Nodding until her head hurts when she’s sober and her mind is drawn home. Yes, she made the right choice.

And then the lift of that awful fog. Just as she’s earned the title of ‘Bandit Queen’ it feels worse than meaningless. What the fuck is she doing? Where’s Tai, where’s Yang? Stumbling through that portal. She left them without a damn thing, what was she expecting? They look happy together. She won’t ruin that for them, not again. She staggers back through the portal, heart still rotting in that old home.

Years and years and years passing, letting this new wound scab and scar but it still stings, the worst mistake she’ll ever pay for. Every night, tired eyes to the tent roof, wondering what the look on Tai’s face would be if she cut a path to him right now. She twists, he turns, they grasp at nothing and laugh at jokes half-remembered in the dark. He misses the person he used to be. She doesn’t. She wishes she’d been better.

My favourite thing about Raven x Taiyang is all the shit I made up about them. As for the music!

Going in chronological order of the progression of the relationship, I love to imagine Perfect Pair as a mood for Raven and Tai in their prime. A love unconditional, trusting the other to hold their heart in their hands without breaking it. This followed by the super-sentimental Herz über Kopf (Heart over Head), Raven fighting all the torturous insecurities she has about her right to this life. Two optimistic songs, followed by the steel chair of Tek It to the face, Tai trying to shrug off the betrayal, Raven more than faintly ashamed. This to be emphasised by Out of My League, as a song from her perspective after it finally, really hits her what she’s done. And conclude with Show Me How, a song I reckon perfectly encapsulates the sense of lost love that is radiated by these absolutely miserable, mourning, yearning people. 😊

[dreamersscape]

Favorite Joan of Arcadia Moments (3/?)

[qqueenofhades]

The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

[shihalyfie]

@rustyrick2022 replied to your post “I’ve noticed that some of the dub writers have...”:

Yeah, it's a shame if you ask me, but the dub could have ultimately turned out a lot worse, and despite some elements just being eye-rolling for me as an adult, I still think it's servicable.

​Pretty much. I do think it’s a serious problem that the Digimon fanbase will just outright dismiss the idea the dub changes matter for anything just because it was “fair for its day” -- just because it was comparatively closer to the original next to other dubs of its time doesn’t mean those changes weren’t significant at all -- but at the same time, the fact it wasn’t nearly as aggressive as other contemporary dubs is actually true.

Not even for the reasons most people cite. The usual go-to standbys for claiming “the Digimon dub didn’t change that much” are:

"They gave the kids 'nicknames' instead of changing their names fully”: This only applies to Adventure, and in practice the “nicknames” were pretty much exclusively used in the series and merch, with their “full names” never to be seen past the first episode (and when “Izzy”, a nickname based on a character’s surname, is used by the kid’s own parents, it’s clear that “retained names” is really not the case in practice at all). You’d have a better case talking about the high percentage of retained names in Tamers and Frontier (but those were around the time of the Disney switch, so...). In addition, while “name changes” are an easy low hanging fruit when it comes to talking about localization, they actually say very little about how much the series changed on the whole. Data Squad turned “Noguchi Ikuto” into “Keenan Crier”, and yet is probably one of the closer dubs to the original Japanese source material.

"They left the setting in Japan”: ...but they also took out 95% of the cultural context that came with it, and basically the only reason they even were willing to admit the Japanese setting was because the Odaiba arc in Adventure involving so many real-life locations pushed them into a corner. Before then, they turned Hikarigaoka into Highton View Terrace, and they tried very hard to avoid the word “Odaiba” even after that.

However, it is true that if you looked at the other dubs from the infamous 4Kids and such at the time, you’d be looking at things like entirely cut or shifted episodes, cut arcs, heavy changes to the plot itself, and so on and so forth. As far as Digimon’s American English early dubbing went:

No episodes were cut (not even one!). The majority of footage cuts/edits are relegated to little things like impact frames, cigarettes and alcohol, toilet humor, and other fairly minor things. Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t actually think Citramon is that big of a deal. (The part where they danced around Kurata planting a bomb on Relena might be more important, but even then that’s nowhere near cutting a full episode.)

With one exception, all character deaths were treated as deaths and not covered up, and the impact said deaths had on the characters around them was thus treated accordingly. (I'm absolutely not in the camp who calls for bloodshed for the sake of it, but I think we can agree that there are a lot of plot points revolving around characters’ deaths and grief over them that would be very seriously damaged if said deaths were cut.)

Even at its most extreme moments of inserting jokes during mental breakdowns, it still let the important drama scenes stand to some degree. Too many things weren’t even willing to do that.

As much as I think the Digimon fanbase downplays the amount of characterization changes that happened in dubbing way too much, it’s also true that you’d see this much and more in other contemporary series -- it’s just that Seki-produced Digimon being so incredibly character-centric, along with Adventure and 02 having ridiculously single-line-dependent writing styles, made even small changes have more of an impact than probably anyone expected. (To be honest, I’m willing to give the dub writing team benefit of the doubt that they didn’t think the changes they were making would be enough to bite them in the rear later as much as they did. You can actually see an attempt to back down on the changes in the latter half of 02, presumably because they realized how bad things were going to get if they didn’t stop going off the rails with Daisuke.) Also, I have a hot take in that the American English dub take on Ken is arguably more accurate to his original character than the way a lot of fans talk about him in Japanese...

Even if they were often insensitive about it, the dub writers for Digimon did actually like working on it and are still happy to talk about it, which is significant because you would not believe how many dub writers back then seriously despised the very material they were working on and wrote it with the attitude of it being as shallow as they saw it as. It’s a low bar, but at least our Digimon dub writers seem to have respected the series on some level.

The Movie is a total mishmash, but it’s hardly the only mishmash dub product in existence (Robotech, anyone?), and it’s also not like anime theatrical movies would often make it to localization at all -- especially when we were lucky enough to still get some of the other movies too!

The voice acting is actually really good! I wondered if this was maybe just my bias, but no, Digimon really was blessed with a good cast and good voice direction compared to a lot of dubs that are painful to watch even with good scripts.

All of these really feel like low bars/the bare minimum in retrospect, and I don’t think they should be above criticism for these. But that really was what dubs were like back then! I’m not going to hold back in any criticisms or complaints I have about it, and I’m still going to call out the fandom myth of it being a dub that “didn’t change much”, but there’s only so much I can get worked up over something from 20 years ago that was in line with an entire ongoing industry problem. It could have been worse. It could have been a dub that completely stepped all over the characters and really did make it into a soulless toy advertisement, but it still did most of its job of touching kids’ hearts and conveying the important messages and give us something to talk about all these years later. And I mean, I took 02′s message of not getting too hung up on the past we can’t change instead of prioritizing what to do going forward very much to heart, so that’s how I feel about it now.

[russiandoll-from-brooklyn]

Just Once - Part 2

Title: Just Once - Part 2

Some of y'all were asking for Part 2 of Just Once so here ya go! This picks up right after the first story.

Pairing: Tony Stark x fem!reader

Summary: Grief and loneliness got the best of you last night. Your friendship with Tony was too precious to risk, and now all you want to do is move on. But what happens when the other party doesn't want to forget?

Warnings: smut, language, (technically) cheating, friends to lovers, mentions of past canon trauma, oral (f receiving), protected sex

Word Count: 5.1k

[Starts out sweet and all about tony x reader friendship, then turns into steamy Tony smut. Table sex, included. 😳]

---

Thump, thump, thump.

Your feet hit the pavement rhythmically as you jog your normal morning route. It’s a misty Seattle morning, and the world is still quiet. The sun is rising sleepily, beginning to bathe the world in gold. All is well.

Except. It isn’t.

You turn the block corner, and your apartment comes into sight. You take a glance down at your watch.

42 minutes.

That’s how long ago you had quietly slipped out of your apartment for your morning run. That’s how long it had been since your eyes shot open and you remembered the events of last night, rushing into your mind, all at once like a tsunami. You had turned your head to find Tony still asleep beside you in the bed. One leg sticking out of the messy sheets and his face buried in the pillow. Your pillow.

You had stared at him in disbelief, half-expecting him to disintegrate into a fleeting figment of your imagination. You had rubbed your eyes, trying to clear the haze.

Nope. Still there.

You silently curse yourself and your stupidity (see: weakness in the face of sexual temptation) for the 50th time this morning as you approach the brick building. Perhaps, when you reenter your apartment, Tony will be gone, and this will all have just been a bad trip — or something of the like.

Before you even open the door, the smell of frying bacon reaches your nose. You step inside and are greeted by a peculiar sight.

Tony Stark, clad in nothing but a pair of dark jeans, is buzzing about your small kitchenette. Simultaneously, there are eggs being flipped over-easy on the stovetop, orange juice being procured from the open fridge, bacon sizzling happily in a pan, and toast being buttered. You stand in amazement for a few seconds, processing the scene before you. The wonderful aroma of the all-American breakfast makes you mouth water.

“Y/N! Hey!” Tony exclaims when he sees you.

You slide onto a stool at the bar top, overlooking the controlled chaos unfolding in the kitchen area. Tony truly has remarkable skill when it comes to multitasking. You guess, all that time in the suit, operating about twenty computing systems at once, was good practice.

“Wow. Breakfast?” you remark, raising an eyebrow. “Since when do you cook?”

He scoffs, shooting you a brief smile before turning away to rapidly crack some black pepper onto the eggs.

“Cooking is easy. People think it’s a skill, but really it’s just planning, timing it out. It’s like assembling anything else. You just do the parts in order, trying not to break any yolks.”

You roll your eyes sarcastically at the classic “Tony” response.

Suddenly, all the components come crashing together, and Tony is setting down two perfectly assembled breakfast plates on the bar top — complete with a glass of orange juice for each of you. It looks delicious; it’s been way too long since you had a proper breakfast. Meaning, a breakfast that wasn’t cereal, a protein bar, or a bowl of sad, pale, scrambled eggs. You thank Tony as he pulls up the other stool to sit across from you.

“Dig in,” he says cheerfully, raising his fork. “Good run this morning?”

You nod, taking a big gulp of orange juice.

“Yeah, I heard you leaving,” Tony continues mindlessly. “Kind of weird waking up to an empty bed after a night like that. I finally know what it feels like to be on the other side, I guess.”

You nearly spit out your bite of toast. And just like that, reality comes crashing back down to earth. For a brief moment, it had felt like things could possibly come out normal on the other side. You and Tony could go back to being perfectly normal best friends.

How ignorant.

“What?” you remark incredulously.

You’re on the verge of laughter, partially out of amusement but mostly out of bewildered embarrassment.

Tony gives you his award-winning “I’m innocent!” raised-eyebrow expression. You suddenly become acutely aware of the situation. Tony Stark is sitting in your kitchen, shirtless, serving you breakfast. After you spent a far-from-platonic night rolling around your sheets together. You want to slap yourself.

“I’m talking about the incredible sex we had last night. And then, you leaving me alone before sunrise,” Tony explains casually, pushing your buttons further. “That's usually my play.”

He looks up at you, expecting a playful quip in return. Instead, you just slowly set down the fork you had been gripping.

“Tony,” you begin, seriously and calmly. “Let’s not talk about it. It was one night, and it won’t happen again. It was just once. We gave into the moment, but we shouldn’t-“

“The moment?” Tony suddenly blurts out, interrupting you. You purse your lips, surprised by the new and unexpected edge of anger in his voice. “God. Y/N. The moment, huh? You’re really just going to shrink it down to that. Just a moment.”

You stare at him, confused. Tony’s big brown eyes hold yours with an intensity. It's amazing how fast his sarcastic, playful tone can morph into ferocity. You want to look away, break his gaze, but you can’t. This whole thing was a mistake.

“It was fun,” you finally say. “But it was just a fuck. We were lonely.”

“You know, Y/N. You’re so damn smart,” Tony replies, leaning back a bit in his seat. “So, why do you always try and kid yourself? It bothers me. I know -- that you know -- that this wasn’t just a fuck.”

Your mind races through a million different responses.

Then, what was it?

What do you mean?

Why are you acting like this?

I'm not kidding myself.

But something tells you, deep down, that there's nothing you can say that won't lead to something you don't want to hear.

So, instead, you angrily snatch up your glass of orange juice, rising from your seat at the bar. You grit your teeth at Tony one more time before turning your back and striding toward to your study. You feel your cheeks burning hot.

The study is a second living room-sized space where you keep all your projects. Early sunlight is now streaming in through the large windows, falsely giving the impression of a peaceful Saturday morning. The large wooden table tops are littered with wires, microchips, and other electronic parts. When you first met the Avengers year ago, you and Tony butted heads over your shared expertise in technology and robotics. After much bickering and trying to outdo each other, you eventually accepted one another's intelligence and bonded over your shared field.

You look to the floor of your large study to see the air mattress you had set up there prior to Tony's arrival yesterday, obviously still pristine. You squeeze your eyes shut. Your apartment is absolutely dripping with reminders of last night's events. The empty whiskey glasses, still sitting on the side table in the living room. The couch pillows crumpled from the weight of your bodies, hungrily crashing together above them. You don't even want to think about your bedroom, where you're sure Tony's missing shirt is strewn on the ground.

You push the thoughts out of your your mind, pulling up a seat at your work table. You start to fiddle with a new lightweight shoulder pauldron you're currently designing. You can feel yourself going into 'shut-out' mode, trying your hardest to focus all your attention on the metal in your hands. This was all too much. This was all wrong.

When you hear footsteps behind you, entering the study, you ignore it. Tony quietly traverses the floor, coming to pull up a chair on the other side of the work table. He silently watches you working the wires into place. You don't look up. You don't have to see his expression to know the contemplative expression undoubtably painted on his face. You also don't have to look at him to know he's pondering more than just your work.

"You know, aluminum-titantium alloy won't hold up after a few heavy hits," Tony comments, nodding to the armor piece.

"I'm gonna chromatize it," you reply dryly, not looking up from your hands.

"I wouldn't bother. You can't just give everything a shiny coat to hold it together. If the problem is underneath, that is."

Fuck Tony and his fucking metaphors.

You growl angrily, throwing the pauldron down in frustration. You sit back in your seat and cross your arms, finally meeting your friend's eyes.

"Ok, fine," you say matter-of-factly. "Let's talk about it. It was good. It was really fucking good. And we both needed it. But that's it. I'm willing to leave it at that and forget about it if you are."

Tony rubs his beard in his palm, seemingly mulling over your words. His brown eyes don't leave yours. The warm sunlight coming in through the window behind him paints yellow patches on his bare shoulders, bathing him in gold. You take a mental picture of him, sitting there in his thoughts. A brief, intrusive thought passes through your mind, threatening that this could be the last time you see him. You immediately banish the notion. This friendship means too much to you. Not even a fuck-up as big as this one could make you want to toss it away. You hope Tony agrees.

"Help me understand where your head's at, Y/N," Tony finally replies. "What is your biggest concern right now? Wait, listen, I know there's a lot of reasons why last night was bad. But I want to know what you're thinking."

You sigh, uncrossing your arms. As much as Tony's 'list-and-analyze' reaction to crisis could be annoying, in some ways, it comforted you. Tony is impulsive, yes, but those who know him best also know his calculative nature: the mental risk assessments, the contingency plans labelled through Z. Always searching for the route that will hurt everyone the least. Always.

You consider his question carefully. Again, there's a million answers: the risk of ruining your friendship, the potential awkwardness, Pepper -- oh, god, Pepper --, the pain and grief you've both been through in the past few years. You close your eyes and pick one.

"You're one of the only people left that I trust. One of my only friends. Complexity doesn't often end well."

"You're right," Tony admits. "But aren't you the one who asked, 'is it wrong to not want to be alone'?"

You scoff loudly, angered by his using your words against you. However, that bitterness melts away into nothing when you see the heart-wrenching expression on Tony's face. His lips are pursed, and his eyes are searching yours desperately. Tony rarely shows outward weakness, but right now, the man before you isn't Iron Man. The man before you is broken. Someone who has tried everything to hold it -- his sanity, his relationship, his life -- together, to save the people he loves, to be strong. Someone who failed at that. Someone who truly felt alone.

You rest your chin in your palms and sigh, the weight falling over you as well.

Finally, you speak.

"Isn't it awful -- and strange -- how it can feel like a lifetime ago and just yesterday at the exact same time?"

Tony nods sadly at your observation. Of course, you were talking about the snap. About Thanos.

"You're right. About everything," he remarks. "Sometimes, it just gets too much. The...”

Loneliness. You finish his sentence in your head.

“Me too.”

“You should know though,” Tony continues. “I would never stop being your friend. No matter how complex things are. This — what we’ve been through — could never change, Y/N.”

There it is.

Some situations feel like you're running in circles; you're spiraling downwards and everything you say only makes matters worse and worse. It feels like sinking in quicksand with no way out. In every one of those situations, there's a key -- that one sentence, that one idea, that effortlessly clears the fog. This was it. Tony is going to be here, always. Everything is going to be alright.

You straighten up a bit in your seat. You let out a long sigh and give Tony a small smile.

"I know," you assure your friend. "Sometimes I forget everything that's happened. How complicated it's been before. How we made it out."

Tony laughs, and you're relived.

"How could you forget? It's been a wild ride."

The two of you grin at each other. You take a sip of your orange juice, which you had forgotten about and was now lukewarm.

"OK, happy?" you inquire with a playful tone. "Base material fixed. No need for shiny coats of anything. We're solid now."

Tony lets out a hearty chuckle at the stupid analogy. Suddenly, he stands, circling the work table until he's right in front of you. You suck in a breath of oxygen. From your seated position, your head only comes up to his abs. Bare abs, that is. You tilt your face upwards to meet his eyes.

"Y/N," he says gently. “Stand up.”

Confused, you rise to your feet. Before you can open your mouth to say anything else, Tony’s lean and muscular arms are wrapped around you. He pulls you into his chest, embracing you in his warmth. His grip is firm, as if he’s afraid you might run away. You soften into the hug, wrapping your arms around his back. You feel safe.

After a few moments, Tony releases you. However, he doesn’t move away, and the two of you are still nearly chest-to-chest. You peer up at him, and your friend’s warm toffee eyes meet yours.

“Wow, a Tony Stark hug?” you remark sarcastically. “I should play the lotto today.”

Tony chuckles under his breath. Despite your joking, it was true that Tony rarely gives hugs. He just isn’t the touchy-feely type — according to himself. Somehow this gesture, right now, meant everything. A hug was the most intimate thing Tony could have given you. It was a seal, a mark saying ‘I meant every word I just said.’

Tony is still standing directly in front of you, so close there’s only a magazine’s width between you. He’s so near that you can feel the warmth of his steady breathing, and the slight radiating heat from the arc reactor in his chest. Suddenly, you feel that familiar tug in your stomach. A rush of blood downwards...

“Tony-“

“Do you want me?” Tony cuts you off. His voice is low, gentle.

You suck in a breath of air at his words. Despite his directness, there's a detectable edge of nervousness in his tone. You smile internally at knowing you have this effect on Mr. Playboy. The slight uncertainty in Tony's voice also tells you that it's true: this is different. Last night was not just a mindless fuck. This is an understanding, wrapped around a mutual care that runs so deep that it burns.

You don’t even try to convince yourself that you don’t want Tony. Every ounce of your being is screaming to close the gap between you. You can still hear the scientist-logic-brain in you resisting, but your heart feels at ease. You and Tony. A concept that felt like the forbidden fruit itself just ten minutes ago now looked more like an oasis. And oasis that was maybe alright to take a drink from every once in a while.

You snake one hand upward to hold his cheek. Tony pushes gently into your palm.

It's you who leans in first. When your lips collide, it's soft. He presses himself into you, a delicate sigh escaping. You pull back just enough to whisper a breathy "I want you."

And oh, god do you want him.

“Then, have me,” Tony whispers back, gently.

You nearly visibly shiver. Any trace of hesitation is gone from his voice now. His words are demanding, but his tone is more of a plea.

“Do you want to go the bedroom?”

“No,” Tony replies immediately. He’s breathless. “Right here.”

You immediately feel wetness drop into your panties. Tony’s eyes have grow darker, as they bear down at you. The intensity makes your legs feel weak. You need him. He needs you.

In a moment of boldness, you bring your hands down to the hemline of your shirt. You lift the garment up and over your head, placing it on the work table beside you. Tony’s eyes wander to your red sports bra and your now-stiffened nipples showing through the sleek fabric.

In the next breath, Tony is suddenly kissing you again, his lips against yours in a desperate hunger. He brings his large, roughly calloused hands to your waist. He firmly grips your body, making you feel tiny in his hold. You let a small moan escape your lips.

Still holding you in his grasp, Tony starts to walk you backwards until your backside is pressed against the edge of your large work table. Tony’s hips press forward into you, making you gasp with excitement. You fingertips tangle in his hair, just wanting more and more and more...

In an effortless movement, Tony lifts your sports bra over your head. He throws the red fabric to the side, neither of you caring where it lands. Tony breaks away from your lips, starting to kiss down your cheek, jaw, and then finally giving attention to the delicate skin on your neck. Again, he’s careful not to nip or suck too hard to leave marks. The light scratching of his facial hair contrasts with the soft wetness of Tony’s lips, making you throw your head back in pleasure.

He continues to attend to your neck and jaw as one of his jean-clad thighs moves to fall between your legs. You let out a deep groan as Tony begins to rub and and roll his knee forward, stimulating your clothed core. His movements are like a wave, every forward crest bringing you a tiny bit of that friction your body wants so, so much. You’re in awe of the control Tony has over his movements and the effortless pleasure he’s capable of giving. You can’t help but find his experience and expertise sexy.

“Y/N,” Tony breathes against your neck. “Say it again. Please. Say you want me.”

It occurs to you that, aside from last night, Tony hasn’t felt wanted in a long time. Like, truly wanted. A pang of sadness fills your heart.

“Tony. I want you,” you declare, making sure the conviction in your voice shines through. You don’t have to try. You desire him more than anything right now. “I want you. I want this.”

With your words, Tony moans deeply into your jawline and begins to move his leg between yours more vigorously. Your fingertips trace over his bare back muscles. You trail your hands upward, into the nape of his neck, massaging his scalp. Everything about his beautiful form fits perfectly in your hands.

Tony continues moving downwards, soon finding your right nipple in his mouth. You arch your back, letting a loud moan escape your lips. He works your nipple expertly, rolling it and playing at it with his tongue. He alternates to your other nipple, his thumb replacing where his mouth just left. He lightly strokes the hard, spit-slick bud, and the combination of coolness and friction is heaven.

Tony stands back up, and a second later, his hands are at the elastic band of your running shorts. His eyes meet yours for a moment, silently asking for your permission. You nod a bit too eagerly, and Tony cracks a small, teasing smile. You scoff and lightly slap his shoulder, returning the smile.

Tony pulls your shorts down in one swift motion, leaving you in just your underwear. Next thing you know, Tony’s arms are around your waist. You let out a soft, surprised squeal as he lifts you effortlessly to sit on the edge of the work table behind you. Slightly elevated now, you come to about the same height as Tony.

“Hey,” you protest playfully. “Be careful. There’s important stuff here.”

Tony reaches behind you to clear the area, moving your half-finished projects and parts to the side.

“My apologies, Ms. Y/L/N,” he replies with a huge grin. “Got a bit carried away.”

You pull him into another deep kiss. He growls with pleasure when you nip at his bottom lip. Tony is now standing between your knees, his torso pressing gently into your panty-covered pussy. You can feel his erection through his jeans, straining against his clothes. After seeing Tony’s length for the first time last night, the mental image of his cock — just a few millimeters away from your core — is enough to make you drool. You wrap your legs around him, pulling him in harder against you. He moans into your mouth, and you feel the vibrations as your tongues tangle together.

You feel Tony’s body leaning forward, slowly coaxing you to lay down on the table. Now fully on your back, Tony’s above you, taking in the sight of your body.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re the most magnificent creature on Earth?”

“No,” you reply with a smirk. “But now, knowing how many other planets are out there in the galaxy, just being Miss Earth doesn’t seem like a huge deal.”

Tony laughs, smiling with his teeth. You find the crinkles that form on the outer corners of his eyes utterly endearing.

“Well, you’re still one out of four-and-three-quarters billion,” he jests back. “Not too shabby. It’s all about the little victories.”

You giggle. The pleasant thought passes through your mind that despite the current situation, everything does feel strangely normal. Tony is still Tony; you’re still you. The banter between you and your friend is still comfortable and easy. Your relationship, although maybe morphing into something more nuanced, remains unmoved.

You’re so caught up in your inner thoughts, that you don’t register Tony kneeling to the ground between your legs. You gasp when you feel his warm mouth over your still-clothed pussy. The combined wetness of his mouth and your core easily soaks through the fabric of your panties, making it cling to your skin. Tony runs his tongue over your folds, through the saturated cloth. You groan with pleasure, the small of your back arching off of the table. You grip Tony’s dark hair, needing something to hold onto.

The sensation of Tony’s lips and tongue through your thin panties is completely unique, and fuck, does it drive you wild.

After a few minutes, Tony’s hands reach up to hook in the waist of your panties. He removes your final garment, leaving you fully bare. His mouth immediately returns to your pussy. His tongue circles your clit, before running downwards through your lips, and then back up again. He alternates this pattern with gentle sucks on your clit.

“Oh, Tony. Shit,” you manage to call out. “That feels so good.”

He hums hungrily into you, pleasuring you to a level that no previous lovers have ever come close to. Tony’s large, rough hands wander upwards. One palm gentle grips your breast, while the other comes under your waist to hold the small of your back.

You raise your head slightly to glance down at Tony. The sight is pornographic. His face is buried in your cunt, head bobbing. The shape of his shoulder muscles, and his strong back. His tan skin, all bathed in golden sunlight.

Pleasuring you. On his knees.

It’s like a painting. Beautiful and erotic.

“Tony. I need you,” you gasp out, suddenly overcome with neediness. “Inside me. Fuck, I want you.”

Those magic words, again. I want you. The effect they have on Tony is instantaneous. Without hesitation, Tony is on his feet. He swiftly unbuttons his jeans and pulls down the zipper. His pants fall down to his ankles where he kicks them off. To your surprise his naked cock springs free. A glistening pearl of precum is formed at the tip.

“Wow, commando, huh?” you tease, gently biting at your bottom lip. “You were so confident you were going to get lucky again today?”

“Of course not. I just like to let it breath sometimes,” Tony remarks. “You wouldn’t get it. It’s a man thing.”

You scoff and roll your eyes sarcastically. Lovable idiot.

“Top drawer?” Tony asks, referring to the location of the condoms.

“On the left.”

Tony hurries out of the room and returns a second later with a condom from your bedroom. Stepping closer between your knees, he gives his cock a few pumps in his fist. You can feel your heart quickening with anticipation. Your pussy is nearly pulsing, needing to be stretched and filled.

Tony rips open the shiny wrapper and rolls the condom down onto his length. You scoot slightly closer to the edge of the table as his hands travel to grip your thighs. You moan deeply as Tony rubs the head of his cock over your slit, spreading your moisture.

“Are you ready?” Tony asks, eyes dark with desire.

“Mmhmm,” you hum. “Make me feel good.”

With that, Tony starts slowly pushing into your dripping pussy. You groan as your walls accommodate to his girth. It’s amazing that you took him just last night, and he’s already capable of stretching you like this again. Tony throws his head back, hissing in pleasure as he bottoms out, his pubic mound flush against yours.

He starts pumping gently. The way Tony’s hips roll forward in fluid motions makes you want to scream with pleasure. His hands are gripping your thighs tightly, fingertips digging into the soft flesh.

Tony’s pace quickens, and soon the room is filled with sounds of wetness, skin slipping on skin, and the moans leaving both your throats. One of Tony’s hands moves to your pussy. His thumb rubs tight circles on your clit making you see stars behind your eyes. The extra stimulation almost immediately starts tightening the orgasmic coil in your stomach. Tony seems to know the exact speed to move his cock and thumb to turn you into a whimpering mess beneath him.

“Oh, more,” you groan, your pleasure growing. “Tony Stark. Yes, oh, please.”

“Come for me, Y/N,” Tony growls almost primally. “Wanna feel you squeezing around my cock.”

Tony’s filthy demands go straight to your pussy. You love the feeling of being under him, sprawled out on the table, completely naked for him to fuck. And the dirty talk is the cherry on top.

The pleasure in your abdomen continues to rise until you’re on the edge of ecstasy. With one last thrust, your orgasm washes over you. You scream Tony’s name into the room, not caring who hears. Pulses of pleasure rip through your entire body, even making your feet tingle. When you come down, the convulsions slowing, your head feels fuzzy and bubbly.

Not even a moment later, you feel Tony lifting your legs higher. Still inside you, he straightens them, bringing your ankles to rest on his shoulders. The new sensation is instantly nirvana. He starts pumping into you, and the head of his cock rubs your G-spot on every thrust. Penetrative sex had never felt this good for you.

“You feel so fucking amazing, Y/N,” Tony manages to says between moans. “I’m not gonna last much longer.”

The feeling of your pussy being pounded in this angle has your eyes rolling back into your skull. All your thoughts seem to leave your head. The only thing you can focus on is the immense pleasure. The sound of Tony’s balls slapping against you wetly with every stroke combined with his desperate moans fill your ears.

Tony’s thrusts start to become more jagged, needy. His moans slowly transform more into whimpers as he continues to fuck into you. Suddenly, Tony comes with a series of loud groans, his eyes shut tight. You feel his dick pulsating inside you as he orgasms. He thrusts a few more times, riding out the last waves.

He gently slides out of you, his hands coming down the tabletop next to your waist to steady himself. Both of you are breathing heavily, your bodies radiating with the afterglow of pleasure.

Silently, Tony helps you to stand before sweeping you up easily in his arms. You lean into his chest as he carries you to the bedroom. Tony lays you down carefully on the cool mattress before hurrying to the bathroom. He returns a moment later with a warm washcloth.

After cleaning yourselves up, Tony crawls into the refreshing sheets beside you. He slips one arm under your neck, and you cuddle in closer to his body. The warmth and smoothness of his skin is so, so welcoming. In the strangest way, it feels natural.

“I didn’t think it was possible to top last night,” you finally say, chuckling.

“Me neither,” Tony replies. “I guess we just have good chemistry.”

“Who would’ve thought?” You laugh and drape an arm over his chest. “Hey, question.”

“Ask away.”

“Why did you cook all that stuff earlier? Like the eggs, toast, the whole nine yards. It was sort of...”

“Out of character?” Tony finishes your sentence.

You nod. Tony takes a deep breath, exhaling loudly.

“Honestly, when I woke up, and you were gone, I was freaking out a little bit. I wanted to talk about last night, but you weren’t there, and I just didn’t know what you were thinking. If you were having serious regrets, or if you were angry, or upset with me. Or if you were thinking our whole friendship was burned to the ground.

“I just needed to do something. Anything. Busy my hands, distract my mind. Sorry that I kind of raided your kitchen.”

You turn to peer up at him, letting out a soft laugh. His chocolate eyes meet yours, and you give him a kind smile, endeared by his typical, hyper ramblings.

“I’m sorry I left,” you start. “I was freaking out a little, too. I guess that’s always been a difference between us. I always try to run from the unknown, while you just want to plow straight through it.”

Tony smiles warmly and blinks his gorgeous, thick black eyelashes at you.

“It’s why we make a good pair. Balance. Yin and yang. Ya’ know.”

You both chuckle, content in one another’s arms. You open your mouth to reply, but you’re cut off by a loud growl from your stomach. Tony bursts into laughter.

“Your fault for barely touching breakfast,” Tony remarks playfully. “Which — not to toot my own horn — was quite artfully made.”

“I guess I could settle for a bowl of lowly cereal as punishment,” you reply with mock sadness.

Tony chuckles and shakes his head. He starts to rise from the bed, then offers his hand for you to follow.

“C’mon, I’ll make you some more eggs.”

[plus-size-reader]

Personal

Peter Hayes x Plus size!reader

Word Count: 1846 words

Warnings: none

Summary: The reader learns that she is in Peter’s fear landscape

—————————————————————————————————

You didn’t know much about the other initiates' fear landscapes until today, when you were going to be going through your final simulations in front of everyone else.

It was designed that way.

Sharing your deepest fears was far from anything done at Dauntless, mostly because it was much too personal, but this was the one exception. This was how you got into Dauntless, how you proved yourself, and you were willing to do whatever it took.

Even if you might not have chosen to share with them had you given a choice. You were pretty reserved to begin with, doing your best to just get through this without drawing too much attention to yourself.

You wanted to be Dauntless, but that didn’t mean you wanted everyone in the compound to know everything about you. Thankfully though, of all the fear landscapes that had been displayed today, yours was far from the most memorable.

At least, for you.

The ceremony was over now, and you were pretty confident that you had done well. The process was a relatively simple one, as uncomfortable as it could be, and it was over before you had really processed what was going on.

You were lucky.

Most of your fears were standard, shared with others in your troupe, but even the ones that weren’t super common didn’t raise any red flags.

For you, the most shocking thing of all was getting to see everyone else’s fears and the things that they hated more than anything else. You didn’t get really personal with any of them in all your time here, so it was interesting to see.

There was just something about seeing someone actively interacting with their greatest fears that told you more about them than any words ever could. In that moment, all they were thinking about was getting out, and that made them impulsive.

It was real.

There was no need to save face in a do or die situation like that.

Though, that didn’t exactly answer all the questions you had that words may have helped to clarify. After all, less than an hour ago, Peter was hooked up to that monitor, the screen showing his deepest, darkest fears without fail.

To start, it seemed like his landscape was going to be just like everyone else’s, which you had to admit you were a little disappointed by. For whatever reason, you had a special interest in Peter’s landscape, because for the life of you, you just couldn’t figure him out.

From one moment to the next, talking to him could be like talking to two different people. He was guarded and hard to read, but having come from Candor, that only reminded you of home.

His standoffish and rude personality didn’t put you off in the least, because when you stopped to think about it, that was just how people acted where you came from. It was normal for you, just like it was normal for him.

However, you never would have thought Peter cared for you at all. As much as you enjoyed his refreshing company and attitude, you doubted he gave your existence much thought at all, he certainly didn’t act like he did.

As best you could tell, he found you just as inconsequential as everyone else here, like it didn’t matter if you stayed or not.

Though, you did have to rethink that as soon as you heard a familiar voice on the screen in front of you. Just thinking about it, you felt a familiar flip in your stomach from that moment, when you looked up to see yourself there.

Initially, you assumed that you must have been mistaken, that it wasn’t you in his landscape at all, but there was really no way to deny it.

The girl there was you, laying on the concrete floor of the pit, clearly bleeding from some kind of wound though you weren’t exactly sure what had happened. All you knew was that something had happened and you were hurt, bad.

...And Peter was panicking.

Even when he was sitting, in the center of the room, you could tell that he was in some kind of distress. He was practically dripping sweat, the muscles in his jaw tense as he took a second to survey the sight in front of him.

It was clear that he’d been here before.

You weren’t sure when something like this would have become part of his fear landscape but the way he dealt with it made it obvious he knew what he needed to do. You weren’t doing well, and there was nothing he could do to change that.

He had to let you go.

The landscape had closed out with Peter turning his back and leaving the room, where presumably, you would die. In all honesty, it was hard to watch in the moment but now that it had passed, you were confused.

Peter had never even given the impression that he enjoyed your company, led alone the fact that he actively worried about something happening to you. It didn’t make any sense, but you couldn’t exactly go get answered.

You weren’t sure how he would react.

It wasn’t like you could just walk up to him and demand answers for what he’d done there, could you? That was something a Candor would do, sure, but you weren’t Candor anymore. This wasn’t as cut and dry as it would have been before.

He didn’t owe you an explanation, you knew that, but the more you sat here, the more your head was spinning, coming up with all these outlandish explanations for what you were doing there.

Maybe it was a mistake? Maybe it just happened to be you but had never been before? Maybe it wasn’t you at all.

You liked to think that you would recognize yourself if you saw your face on a screen, but in that moment, you were still rattled from your own freak landscape so it could have just been a misunderstanding.

Couldn’t it?

Choosing to believe that would have brought you the most comfort, but the actions of the other initiates told you that wasn’t an option. They had been staring at you since this morning, talking in hushed whispers about it.

You knew they had to be.

Besides, even if you hadn’t been so perceptive to the truth, Molly had all but told you that was the case when you passed her.

Eventually, you decided that the only choice you had was to get answers from him. You couldn’t just let everyone else talk about you without even knowing what was going on yourself. If nothing else, you could find out what Peter was thinking.

At the very least, you would be able to put any rumors to rest and move on.

He had to have something to say for himself.

~

You weren’t entirely sure how you were going to lead up to this conversation with Peter, but the nuances didn’t matter all that much . Worst case, he would tell you that what had happened was none of your business and you would know where you stood.

The last thing on your mind was hurting his feelings or offending him, which was why as soon as you sat down beside him in the dormitory space, you didn’t bother explaining yourself.

Instead, you sat down right next to him on his cot, “What was that all about this morning? Why was I in your fear landscape?” you questioned, not bothering to soften the rough tone in your voice as you waited for him to speak.

It was bleak, sure, and not polished in the least but that was one of the things you enjoyed most about knowing Peter came from Candor as well. You didn’t have to worry about refining your approach like you did now that you were in Dauntless.

He was used to that way of speaking.

Still, he wasn’t exactly thrilled to have to have this conversation. After all, he had been doing well enough at keeping his feelings for you under wraps, but that whole thing at the ceremony was going to make that a little harder.

How was he supposed to deny it? Obviously he cared for you enough that the threat of something happening to you had become something he actively feared.

That didn’t really happen with people you just knew.

“I don’t know. You think I have any control over what happens in those?” he shrugged, hoping that he could keep up the plausible deniability thing for long enough that you would just get up and go back to whatever it was you were doing.

It was harsh, much more aggressive than he meant for it to come out, but similarly to how he paid your mannerisms no mind, you didn’t even blink an eye.

“Come on Peter, I know you know better than that” you hummed, taunting him a little now that you were here. Clearly, he was going to try and make you feel like you had no right to be here but that was very wrong.

You knew as well as he did that he had full control over the things he cared about and the things that worried him. Somehow, you had made it on to that list, you knew that for sure, all you were asking him was how or why?

He knew why you were there, he just didn’t want to tell you.

“What does it matter? You saw how it ended for you, it’s far from romantic” he grumbled, turning to look at you with an almost incriminating look in his eyes. 

He was doing his best to figure out how he could get out of this without going too far, but it didn’t seem to be going that way.

Trying to keep it up wasn’t getting him anywhere.

The idea that it should have been romantic was funny to you, considering the fact that it was a fear landscape in the first place, but you got what he was talking about. It wasn’t like you could draw any connections based on what happened.

However, you knew that the fact it was you in that scene meant something. It could have been anyone dying on the floor, but it wasn’t, it was you.

“Admitting you have a crush on me isn’t going to kill you” you prompted finally, taking a stab in the dark after all the beating around the bush he was doing. You didn’t want to say anything about him, not directly, but you knew the truth.

He felt the same way for you as you did for him.

“Maybe not, but I would have liked to do it in a way that didn’t involve you bleeding out” he shrugged, a small smile creeping on to his lips.

This wasn’t how Peter saw this whole thing happening between you but he figured that it was better late than never. At least now, you knew just how desperate he was to always have you by his side.

[dovechim]

lonely hearts club (m)

➾ 11k

➾ summary: jeon jeongguk has annoying little brother energy™. you know this deep in your bones. wedding after wedding, you keep running into him at the goddamn singles’ table, and he just won’t leave you alone. until you start to wonder... is he your ticket out of the lonely hearts club? 

tdlr: enemies to lovers

➾ warnings: hate sex, public sex (in a photobooth lmao), impregnation role play, oral (f receiving), jk has intensely annoying energy, it gets unbearably cheesy towards the end

➾ a/n: wow, addie is back???? finally??? gosh, even I can’t believe it. please enjoy, and thank you for waiting :)

The first few times, it was lovely. Watching your friends find their partners and get married in holy matrimony, their faces filled with bliss as they walk down the aisle together towards their happily ever after. You tell yourself that you are truly happy for them, and you are. But you can’t deny that deep seated feeling of envy buried within you, and the sense of dread every time you receive a new wedding invitation.

Why’d all of your friends have to be so good at getting their shit together?

Which then begs the question, what are you actually doing here?

Other than celebrating your friend’s wedding, obviously. You crane your neck to look around the large, luxurious ballroom for any sign of Kim Seokjin and his husband, and you think you spot them at one of the tables up front.

You scan the attendees at your table surreptitiously. It goes without saying that anyone can see that this is the singles’ table, it’s obvious enough by the way no one talks to each other and how the host has made the painstaking arrangement to alternate the genders. You have no idea where this tradition of a singles’ table came from, and why you’re relegated to it at every single wedding you attend.

You sniff in indignation as you take a sip at the flat soda in your glass. For all they know, you could have a secret celebrity boyfriend hidden away somewhere. The both of you have decided to keep your relationship under wraps so as not to risk the wrath of the public, so that’s why you can’t bring him to events like this. There. Let that be your saving grace.

It’s embarrassing to be at the singles’ table at a wedding, even more embarrassing when you realise that the faces at the table come and go, all except for yours. In fact, you spot a few familiar faces integrated into other tables, drinking and laughing happily with their significant others by their sides, while you remain a permanent resident of the singles’ table.

This is your fifth wedding in as many months; and at this rate it seems like you’ll never graduate from the singles’ table.

A sudden movement interrupts your moment of drowning in self-pity, and you glance to the side only to realise that the empty seat beside you has been filled. All night long the empty seat had been mocking you, reminding you of what could have been a lovely night in with a few bottles of soju and some chicken, but now it presents you with a new contender to the singles’ table.

And God damn, you can feel the women at the table perk up at his presence, some of them shooting you envious looks because you happen to be seated next to him. The girl on his other side seems to be swooning already, but you staunchly refuse to react. Refuse to even look at his side profile.

Two singles matching up at the singles’ table is practically every host’s wet dream. So much so that you refuse to let it happen. No matter how good looking he is, you won’t let yourself stoop so low.

Are you bitter? Yes.

But are you willing to admit it? Most definitely not.

“No way- Jeon Jeongguk?” The gentleman on your other side stands with his arms spread in what can only be the bro code. “What are you doing here? God damn- I never thought the day would come when I meet Jeon Jeongguk at the singles’ table!”

Wait, why does that name sound so familiar? You can hear the smirk in the newcomer’s voice as he stands as well, and the two men embrace each other in a manner that involves a lot of back slapping and chest bumping.

It’s only then that you unwillingly catch a glance of his face, and immediately an unwanted thought occupies the front of your mind persistently. He is most definitely, without a doubt, the most eligible single man at your table right now.

Jeon Jeongguk looks like the kind of man who is aware that eyes are on him at any given moment and milks every single second of it to show off. His broad shoulders are the first thing that catch your attention, he fills out the jacket of his dark blue suit just right, and yet the tapering of his torso into an impossibly slim waist has you questioning if he’s even real. You stop yourself from going any lower.

His face is a whole other matter, a cocky smirk pasted onto his face, charming doe eyes that lock right onto yours as he sits back down.

“Well, for my first foray into the singles’ club, I can’t say I’m disappointed,” he lowers his voice so that only you can hear it.

Scandalized at how he’s already prepositioning you within minutes of meeting, you make the mistake of turning to face him, witnessing how he adjusts his suit jacket as he makes himself comfortable in his seat, spreading his muscled thighs under the banquet table.

“For someone who’s sole hobby is the gym, I’m surprised your vocabulary range is better than a five-year old’s,” you shoot back at him, immediately annoyed by his very existence itself.

“So you admit you think my body is nice?” He raises an eyebrow and leans into your personal space, causing you to cross your legs and angle your body away from him in response. “You aren’t wrong there, but I could give you a much better idea of what’s under these clothes.”

Your hand tightens around your glass, getting ready to swing your entire body and drench his stupid good looking face with flat, lukewarm soda, but a loud burst of laughter ruins what could have been a perfect moment of humiliation.

“Ah, _______! Jeongguk! I see you two have met!” Kim Seokjin, approaches with Kim Namjoon on his arm, and the two of them look like they are glowing with happiness. “It’s about time, I can’t believe you guys are finally here!”

Finally? What is he on about?

You stand and Seokjin gives you a warm hug, a kiss on the cheek and you immediately feel slightly better, and more than slightly guilty at almost having caused a scene at one of your closest friend’s wedding. Namjoon greets you with a bright smile as well, holding out his arms and embracing you tightly.

Having always been the more sensitive of the couple, Namjoon holds you at arm’s length for a moment. “You alright there?” Namjoon’s gaze wanders over to the table behind you, and it’s like an epiphany strikes him. “God, I’m sorry! I wanted to put you at the table with my parents, seeing as you’re already like a daughter to them, but Jin wanted you to have another chance at…”

“Love,” you grimace as you complete his sentence for him. “I’m used to it by now.”

Namjoon looks like he’s about to say something else, but then Seokjin gets your attention, his arm slung around Jeon Jeongguk’s neck.

“______, as I was saying, I can’t believe you guys only met now. Jeon Jeongguk, meet _____. The sole reason why I managed to graduate from university on time. And ______, meet Jeon Jeongguk, the reason why I almost couldn’t graduate on time.”

Jeongguk snickers and elbows his hyung in the ribs, and you stare in shock at their camaraderie. Seokjin takes in your frozen expression and gestures wildly to get his point across.

“Hello? Remember Jeon Jeongguk?” Seokjin waves his hand in front of your face. “He basically lived in our dorm for a year without even attending our school because he wanted to see what university was like. You always complained about him leaving his cereal bowls in the sink!”

No fucking way. That snot faced brat became… this?

“How you doing, _____?” Jeongguk has the audacity to wink at you. “I see you’ve grown up a little.”

You eye him up and down in shock. From what you remember, Jeon Jeongguk was a scrawny little kid who shadowed Seokjin everywhere, to classes and even to the washroom. He was just a wide-eyed high schooler who worshipped both Seokjin and Namjoon back then, and cowered at your very presence.

“I see you haven’t,” you reply coolly, inwardly praising yourself for thinking of a comeback that quickly. You will not let this stupid brat intimidate you with his looks. Just because he grew up a little and got some muscles doesn’t mean he isn’t the same person who begged to carry your books to class for you.

You remember how he basically lived as a parasite in your dorm that year, irritating the hell out of you with his messy living habits, puppy dog eyes and basically taking turns to follow you everywhere you go. Now the memories are coming back, and so are the teasing laughter from your friends who thought he was your cute little younger brother and doted on him every chance they got, not aware that he’s actually the devil incarnate.

“You guys are getting along right?” Seokjin grins from ear to ear, likely already more than tipsy. “My two bestest friends, and my husband, all in the same place. This calls for a toast!”

“We’re getting along amazingly, aren’t we, ______?” Jeongguk says with a sickening grin as he passes you a champagne flute. “In fact, she was just complimenting me on my workout routine, and I was about to tell her that I’d be more than glad to incorporate her into my home workout too-“

“Toast to the happy couple!” You immediately cut him off, feeling your cheeks burn at his insinuation, raising your glass and avoiding Jeongguk’s gaze. “Congratulations Mr Kims!”

The happy couple moves off, and in your wealth of experience, you know that the night is coming to an end, and so is the event that you dread. You start to gather your things just as everyone starts to rise from their seats to gather in the middle of the ballroom, where a space has been cleared out. Instead of making your way with the crowd, however, you go the opposite direction, ready to make the practiced and unnoticed slip away out into the night.

But this time, a hand on your wrist stops you. It’s Jeon Jeongguk, a slight frown on his handsome features.

“Hey, where are you going? They’re about to do the bouquet toss.”

You pry your arm out of his grasp. “I know.”

And without a single glance back, you slip out of the back entrance of the ballroom, unnoticed by all except one.

*

The next time you see Jeon Jeongguk, it’s at Kim Taehyung’s wedding.

It’s a lovely wedding, a little abstract for your tastes, but totally Taehyung’s style. Expensive paintings worth more than your entire lifetime’s earnings adorn the ballroom, the menu is Italian cuisine, and the wine is exquisite. Him and his blushing bride are gorgeous, the night is perfect, were it not for one tiny little…

“Nice dress, bet it’d look nicer on the floor of my bedroom, though,” Jeongguk eyes your navy blue halter dress that shows off your shoulders.

The two of you are once again reunited at the singles’ table, and the fact that he’s seated right next to you has you in a foul mood.

“Why don’t you just slither off back to whichever hole you came from?” You hiss at him, finishing your third glass of wine for the night. “I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing you again.”

“And leave you all sad and alone at this miserable singles’ table?” Jeongguk grins. “I don’t think so. In fact, I can’t imagine how you managed to survive all these weddings without me. Why do you even hate me that much?”

What a question indeed. There are a million and one reasons as to why you hate Jeon Jeongguk, number one being his cocky personality, number two being his unfair glow up, while you’re still stuck looking pretty much the same as you did back in the first year of uni, if not more tired and world-weary.

“Oh, I managed alright,” you say through gritted teeth. “Not that I’m curious or anything, and I’d hate to give off the impression that I care even one iota about your existence-“

“Don’t worry, you can ask anything about me and I’d be more than happy to indulge,” Jeongguk says with a maddening smile.

“… why don’t you just get a girlfriend and graduate from this sad little island of singles? It’s not like you don’t have a ton of girls falling at your feet everywhere you go,” you roll your eyes as you witness the girl on the other side of him leaning over so far to show off her cleavage that she nearly falls off her seat. “It should be so easy for you.”

“Why would I do that when it’s more fun to stay here and annoy you instead?” He grins, topping up your wine glass, and that’s the only reason why you hesitate from smacking him on the head. His arm lingers on the back of your chair in a manner far too intimate for your liking, but if you were to smack him it would mean you have to touch him, and that’s a definite no-no.

Today he’s wearing a crisp white dress shirt with the top three buttons undone, showing a hint of his toned chest. His jacket features a dark grey floral print that matches nicely with the abstract, artsy theme of the whole wedding.

You’re saved from having to reply when it’s time for the couple to cut the cake. In true Taehyung fashion, he smears a dab of wedding cake on his bride’s cheek, causing her to gasp in shock and everyone around them to coo in adoration. Photographers are snapping away, capturing the perfect moment.

“I’d want to get married on my birthday too,” Jeongguk remarks off handedly beside you as the applause dies down. “You know it’s Taehyung’s birthday today, right?”

“Of course I do, what kind of friend would I be?” You roll your eyes at him. “And in response to your other statement: I don’t care.”

But Jeongguk continues as if you haven’t said a word. “I bet they’ll be spending lots of time in their birthday suits tonight.”

“Ew!” You can’t help but react as you turn and smack his arm. Just the thought of imagining Taehyung, your best friend since childhood, naked and doing… those things…

Jeongguk grins salaciously. “First contact: success.”

Still trying to stave off all the unwelcome images of Taehyung, you frown at him in confusion. “What?”

“It’s a rule I personally go by. No matter how interested I am in a girl, I always keep my physical boundaries until she breaks the touch barrier by initiating physical contact with me first.”

Hmm, who’d have thought the bastard would have a sense of morals?

“Well, you’re completely wrong because I’m not interested in you at all,” you turn your head away from him. “And if you think that one touch from a girl entitles you to do all kinds of lewd things, then you’re sorely mistaken on what it means to be a gentleman.”

“Who said anything about lewd?” He leans in, and you smell the sweetness of the tiramisu on his breath that is oh so tantalizing. “I think you’re the one who brought it up first.”

Snagged, you reach for your wine glass to take another chug, hoping that it might explain away the redness on your cheeks.

“You know, most people become more relaxed the more they drink, however with you I think it’s the opposite.” Jeongguk comments, swirling his wine in his glass casually as he studies your side profile.

You can’t help but get a little flustered at his attention. You can see the envious gazes of the other women at the singles’ table, and once again you are reminded of how very eligible Jeon Jeongguk is, especially amongst the rest of the males at the table.

“What would a guy like me have to do for company for his lonely heart?” Jeongguk turns his sparkling doe eyes on you, and at the same time, the lights in the ballroom dim as Taehyung directs everyone’s attention towards the ceiling.

While everyone looks up at the now bedazzled ballroom ceiling, amazed by the projection of multicoloured galaxies and shooting stars, you find yourself unable to look away from Jeon Jeongguk.

Then, while the lights are still off and everyone’s attention elsewhere, he leans in closer until you can feel his breath on your cheek. When you don’t make a move to push him away, Jeon Jeongguk places a hand on your chin and coaxes you those last few inches towards his lips, and you find that you don’t exactly hate the feeling of kissing this obnoxious brat.

His lips are soft, and the kiss is more demure than you’d expected it to be, judging from his fondness for dirty jokes and double entendres. You taste a slight bitterness from the coffee powder in the tiramisu on his tongue. He takes it slow, exploring every inch of your mouth with his, and it’s obvious that he enjoys kissing.

Jeongguk draws away just before the lights come back on. Suddenly feeling very exposed, you jerk away from him in a panic, just as the emcee calls everyone together for the bouquet toss and hightail your way out of the ballroom.

* “Why do you always leave before the bouquet toss?”  

“God, you have such annoying little brother energy,” you sigh, taking your eyes off Jung Hoseok’s grinning face as he dances and sings on stage, with his bride standing off to the side.

“Do you still think of me like that?” Jeon Jeongguk looks a little taken aback at this statement, though he recovers quickly. “My sources tell me that we aren’t far apart enough in age for you to be calling me that.”

“I don’t know who your sources are, but they’re wrong,” you shoot back at him. “Wait, are you stalking me now?”

“I hardly think asking around constitutes stalking,” Jeongguk says defensively. “And is that all you think of me? An annoying little brother?”

“What else could you be to me?” You cover a yawn with one hand as one of Jung Hoseok’s relatives comes on stage to make a speech.

“I highly doubt you kiss your younger brother like that,” Jeongguk smirks, one hand brushing your hair off your shoulder to expose your collarbone. “Unless…”

“I don’t,” you hiss at him, half annoyed at him, and half at yourself for letting him wind you up like this again. “You’re like… an annoying little punk who thinks he’s a man.”

To avoid any further conversation with him, you get up and head for one of the photobooths hired for the occasion, fully intending on getting a photo to prove that you’d been here, say your congratulations to the happy couple, and get out of here as soon as possible.

Jung Hoseok has chosen an outdoor wedding, and the venue is nothing short of spectacular. It’s a starry night, Shakespearean theme, and the décor is absolutely gorgeous. Having attended ballroom weddings for the past few months, this is most certainly a breath of fresh air, but you’re a little worried about how you’re going to get out of here, seeing as it’s quite literally a field in the middle of nowhere.

You’d better leave after this photo and try and call an Uber outside.

However, much to your consternation, Jeon Jeongguk follows you into an empty photobooth, planting himself right next to you on the tiny little loveseat, with his solid thigh against yours. He draws the curtains shut, and since the photobooth is automatically set to go off on a timer, it means that the two of you are currently very much alone in a confined space.

Inwardly you curse Jung Hoseok for having even the photobooths built for two.

“What are you doing? Get your own photobooth!” You growl at him.

“Not until you tell me why you’re running away from me,” he persists, crowding you on the small seat so that you’re nearly on top of him.

From this close up, you feel your resolve weakening, he might be a jerk but he’s a damn good looking one.

“I can feel you want me.” Jeongguk says with his lips pressed against your ear. “Don’t fucking deny it.”

Oh fuck it. It might be the folly of those earlier shots at the bar that makes you grab his collar and pull him into you, your lips crashing together in a clash of tongue and teeth. Unlike last time, the kiss is anything but gentle, and your touches are anything but demure as the two of you grope each other like animals in the small confined space.

“I fucking hate your cocky little mouth,” you hiss at him, biting down hard on his lower lip and eliciting a delicious little whine from the back of his throat.

Jeongguk responds by grabbing your waist and pushing you onto the seat, just as he swivels to end up on his knees. He’s tall enough so that he’s able to kiss down your neck, sucking and leaving behind bruises on the way.

“mhm… show you what this cocky little mouth can do,” his muffled voice sounds more like a threat, growing bigger by the minute as he kisses his way down your throat, to your collarbone as he pulls down the sweetheart neckline of your dress to mark the top of your breasts with his lips and teeth.

There is a moment of hesitation as his fingers pause at the top of your glittery black dress, just shy of exposing your bra. You answer his unasked question for him by pushing it down yourself. Once your breasts are exposed to his reverent gaze, he doesn’t waste any time in cupping them with his large hands, rolling your nipples expertly with both hands, pinching it every so often to make you wince.

“I hate your stupid, gorgeous hands,” you gasp at a particularly hard pinch. “And I hate your fingers.”

It’s those very fingers that are currently travelling up your bare thighs, your dress having ridden up from sitting down. You can feel the cool metal of his rings on your heated skin. Jeongguk doesn’t respond to your declarations of hate for him, instead he’s far too interested in exploring what lies between your thighs, in finding out whether the noises you make are the same as what he’s been imagining all these nights with just his hand for company.

You hate how he leaves you feeling, desperate for his touch and just to feel him everywhere. Hate how exposed he makes you feel, dress and bra pushed down inside a photobooth in the middle of a wedding.

“Could someone with little brother energy make you feel like this?”

With a surge of strength you hadn’t expected, Jeon Jeongguk pulls you to the edge of your seat so that your thighs are draped on his shoulders, legs spread to his liking. He has a front row view of how your panties are already soaked. Pushing the saturated material to the side, his tongue explores your folds eagerly, lapping up every drop of you and teasing the hell out of your clit.

It’s all you can do to keep silent, other than cursing him and his stupid mouth over and over again as he eats you out. His fingers dig bruises into your inner thighs as his lips start to suckle at the most sensitive part of your body, tongue flicking in and out. This for sure isn’t his first rodeo, for he adds his fingers into the mix deftly. You can feel yourself completely drenching his face, and a part of you would be embarrassed had you not already thrown your pride away when you first let Jeon Jeongguk kiss you with that filthy mouth.

“Oh my god,” your arms flail out in search of something to anchor yourself with and find purchase on his hair. Taking pleasure in messing up his perfectly styled hair, you urge him not to stop, both with desperate tugs on his silky black locks, and egging him on with every insult you can think of. “Don’t fucking stop, I swear to God…”

“Like my cocky mouth that much?” Jeongguk grins as he takes a breather, resorting to his slim fingers as he glides them in and out of your drenched cunt. “How about my fingers? Or my cock?”

“Shut up and make me cum,” you dig your nails into his scalp, making him wince a little. “Your fingers are probably the only part of you that doesn’t disappoint.”

His eyes darken just a smidge before he re-doubles his efforts, flattening his tongue against your clit and licking until you are near tears. With a final thrust of his fingers inside you, he sends you over the edge, relishing how you tighten deliciously around him as your body tenses in orgasm.

Jeon Jeongguk lazily thrusts his fingers in and out to help you ride out your high, pulling out to lick your essence from his fingers when you push him away.

“Well, doesn’t seem like you hated that,” he grins in a self-satisfied way that immediately irks you once more.

You close your legs and pull your dress to cover yourself, ignoring the fact that your thighs are still shaking from that orgasm. “I guess you aren’t that bad at going down on someone, which is a blessing considering that disappointment you’re packing in your pants.”

The dark gaze that you caught a glimpse of earlier comes back into view again, and just as your standing up, straightening your dress and gathering your wits about you, Jeon Jeongguk slides his arm around your waist, pulling you against his body in with a sudden movement.

“Does this feel disappointing to you?”

You can feel him pressed up against you, the considerable bulge right against the swell of your backside has your words caught in your throat, and you can’t bring yourself to refute his claim.

Jeongguk gives a low chuckle that sends shivers down your spine. “Didn’t think so. But don’t worry. I won’t fuck you here. Only good girls deserve my cock.”

He finally pulls away, and the space in between the two of you allows you to breathe and get your senses back once more. Throwing a disinterested glance over your shoulder, you bend over to collect the pictures that have dropped into the little slot on the machine, well aware of his eyes jumping from the curve of your ass just exposed to your chest still marked with the imprint of his lips.

You toss him one strip of the pictures, along with a parting shot.

“Who said I wanted to be your good girl?”

*

If you thought that weddings were bad, that was because you hadn’t experienced baby showers yet.

It hadn’t even been more than a month since you attended Kim Taehyung’s wedding, but the baby shower cum announcement invitation shows up in your mail anyway. You highly suspect that this wasn’t the result of their wedding night, but you all knew that Taehyung was the most eager out of all of you to start a family.

Right, back to why baby showers are even worse than weddings.

There isn’t even a hint of a singles’ table here at baby showers. Everyone here is happily married at least, some of them are pregnant, but either way they are more taken than your sad, single self.

“_____! So glad you could come!” Taehyung approaches you with what looks like a diaper stuck onto the front of his suit. “Ah, sorry about this, I was playing pin the diaper on the diarrhea…”

It’s all you can do to stop yourself from grimacing as you intercept his full-on bear hug with a side embrace instead. You can see Namjoon and Seokjin off to one side, laughing and proudly showing off scan pictures of their surrogate baby. Jung Hoseok and his wife are grinning happily just behind them, tanned and blissful having just returned from their honeymoon trip, and judging from the way that his wife has one hand protectively on her lower belly…

“Did you manage to get a drink yet?” Taehyung grins, an arm around his suddenly very pregnant wife. You have no idea how she managed to appear svelte and slim at her wedding just a few months ago.

“Ah, no, I was wondering if there was anything… stronger,” you grin weakly, holding up a glass of orange juice.

“No there isn’t,” Taehyung says with an embarrassed frown, reaching to scratch his neck. “I thought since this would be mostly couples who were kind of starting a family themselves…”

You force a smile onto your face at the confirmation that there isn’t a single drop of alcohol at this god forsaken baby shower. Surely the rules don’t apply to Namjoon and Seokjin??

“It’s fine,” you wave away Taehyung’s embarrassment. “Congratulations, by the way! Do we know if it’s a girl or boy yet?”

“Not yet,” Taehyung’s wife giggles, exchanging a look with her husband. “We want it to be a secret.”

You smile awkwardly as husband and wife exchange a loving kiss, but glance at your watch to see how much time has passed. Off handedly your thoughts suddenly stray to one Jeon Jeongguk, and you wonder if he’s here.

You have to say that having him present at one of these events really makes them a lot more tolerable, and you are feeling the effects of his absence, especially so without alcohol. It’s not that you like him, god forbid, but it’s just… he’s become somewhat like your partner in crime at events like this. He may be annoying, but his stupid jokes and handsome face helps pass the time quicker.

You suddenly find yourself wishing Jeon Jeongguk were here.

“Miss me?”

And the devil speaks. You whirl around to find Jeon Jeongguk dressed down in a pair of ripped black jeans and a white shirt with a casual blazer thrown over, hair grown out a lot longer than the last time you saw him. It frames his face in slight waves, giving him a far more carefree look than the last time you saw him, sharply dressed in a suit with his hair pushed back off his face. He looks even more annoying with his long, unkempt hair like this, and you have a great urge to just tangle your fingers in it and pull till he cries.

“No,” you say just to spite him. By now, Taehyung and his wife have wandered off to another group, so you feel safe enough to say your next words. “This party was a bore. Just looking for a semblance of intelligent life.”

“And alas, I come when called,” Jeongguk smirks at his double entendre, placing a hand on the small of your back to lead you to a small corner of the garden party. His touch sends shivers down your spine, brings your mind back to the last thing you did with him.

“I’m afraid I’m still looking,” you retort without any real heat in your voice. Bickering with him has become normal now, it’s comfortable with him like this.

Jeongguk feigns being stabbed in the heart, then takes a swig of his drink. Judging from his reaction, that is most certainly not plain soda, and you grab his hand, bringing his glass to your lips for a taste.

Definitely not soda.

“Where’d you get this from?” You hiss, feeling like a druggie on withdrawal.

Jeongguk shrugs. “Brought my own. Y’know, since this is supposed to be a baby shower and all, I cam prepared. You’d obviously come expecting virgin drinks.” He takes out a cleverly concealed flask from his blazer.

You help yourself by uncapping it and tipping it into your half full drink, sighing when you take a sip and the alcohol burns on the way down. Jeongguk watches you with an amused smirk, thinking how there isn’t any other girl who gets him just like you do.

“What?” You catch him staring at you, finishing your drink with one more gulp.

“I was thinking…” Jeongguk starts with a slow drawl.

“Oh wow, that’s a first for you-“

“… why haven’t you jumped me yet? You and I both know I’m the most eligible man at the singles’ table. Being here only strengthens my argument, I’m the most eligible single man here.” Jeongguk is enjoying riling you up, likes watching you spit insults at him and exchange banter like there’s no tomorrow. Just for good measure, he throws in a last jab. “Judging by your age too, I don’t think you have much time if you want to pop out at least three of my children.”

For a moment your eyes narrow in your annoyance. “I have plenty of time left, thank you very much. I’m still on the right side of 25-“

“-not for much longer,” Jeongguk helpfully throws in, gleefully delighting in the way you glare daggers at him.

“- and who said I want three of your children?” You cross your arms, stopping just short of stamping your foot. “Maybe I’ll go and be Namjoon and Seokjin’s surrogate!”

“Be my guest, I’d very much like to see how you look when you’re swollen and pregnant,” Jeongguk lowers his voice as he crowds your body with his, and you realise how much taller and broader he is. “Preferably if the baby is mine too.”

“W-why’d I want a baby who’ll grow up to be as insufferable as you?” You know your comeback is weak, but you find your mental faculties really at a limit especially when he’s this close. “He’d have the mentality of a five-year-old for his entire life.”

Jeongguk gently takes your empty glass from your hand and sets it down on a nearby server’s tray. Taking your hand, he leads you into Taehyung’s house, where much of it is empty as compared to the garden party outside.

“He’ll at least be as handsome as me,” Jeongguk offers with a hopeful grin, closing the door behind him to ensure no one accidentally wanders in. “So, do I still have that annoying little brother energy after what happened last time?”

At this point you’ve gone too far with him to straight up deny it. “Fine,” you admit. “You might be half decent at oral. But my theory that you have small dick energy still stands. You’re just a little brat who thinks with his dick and is used to girls dropping their panties for him-“

“I seem to recall you spreading your legs for me just as easily,” he hums as he traces a finger down your covered thighs, slightly displeased at your choice to wear a longer dress today.

“You’re just asking for it, aren’t you,” Jeongguk tsks under his breath, his tattooed fingers coming to rest on the front buttons of your modest midi dress. “Pretending to be all demure and modest like a good girl when in actual fact you’re a slut who lets random men eat her out in photobooths.”

“You’re not just any random-“ the words slip from your mouth before you realise it, and Jeongguk looks up sharply at you.

“What was that, babygirl?”

You cover up your own slip by bursting into slightly exaggerated laughter at his pet name of choice. “Babygirl? Oh my god. You’re the kind of guy who likes to be called ‘daddy’ in bed, aren’t you?”

Feeling slightly attacked, Jeon Jeongguk’s sky high confidence dips a little, and you spot the tell-tale signs of his eyes widening in shock, giving you a glimpse of his younger, more vulnerable side.

“Wh-what’s wrong with ‘daddy’? It’s a classic.”

“Only for those who actually fit the bill,” you say, placing your hand on his cheek and trying your best to ignore the sharpness of his jawline. “For your information, I only use ‘daddy’ when it comes to real men. Not stupid young punks like you.”

His eyes flicker with anger, jaw clenching even tighter so that a muscle jumps in his cheek, and the sight of it sets off a thrill in your lower belly, your heart racing in your chest, and it makes you feel even bolder.

He attempts to take back control of the situation by grabbing your waist with both hands, pushing you up against the wall and supporting your entire weight as if it’s nothing. Jeon Jeongguk obviously likes to show off his strength, and while you are indeed impressed, it’s not like you’ll ever show it, not unless you want to stroke his already inflated ego.

You loop your arms around his neck to keep your balance, feeling his hands on your ass and thighs and his bulge right against your centre. Taking advantage of your proximity, you lean in to suck right under his ear, leaving behind a red mark.

“’Daddy’ is only for men with big dick energy,” you whisper, breath hot against his neck. You draw back to take in his reaction, and he does that thing with his tongue against his cheek that tells you he’s really pissed off.

“Shut up,” he growls, one hand on the front of your dress as he tears the buttons open, exposing your bra in one movement. “I’ll fucking show you what ‘Daddy’ is.”

Another rip and your bra falls open, exposing your breasts to him as he harshly bites and marks you, enough to replace the fading marks from last time. While doing this he also grinds into you, letting you feel how hard he is through his jeans.

“I’m gonna fuck you right up against this wall, with all our friends just outside,” Jeongguk breathes into your neck, taking one hand off your ass to push your dress up. “Gonna rip your panties off so you’ll have to go home with no underwear like the whore you are.”

“Do it, if it makes you feel more like a man,” you urge him on, and that bastard really does rip your underwear, tucking it into his pocket for later like the pervert he is.

He ignores your jibes at him to push your body weight against the wall with his own, one hand supporting you as he slides two fingers against your core to find out how wet you are. They come away soaking, and it boosts his confidence further as he licks his fingers.

“Could anyone but a man make you this wet? Even without touching you?” He smirks, using one of his thighs of steel to support you better as he starts to stroke your clit with his thumb, plunging his fingers into your tight cunt to stretch you out.

“Still so fucking tight for me, creaming all over my fingers like a dirty girl,” his words are getting filthier and filthier the more you egg him on, and you are indeed coming all over his fingers embarrassingly quick. You bite into his shoulder to conceal your moans, and he hisses a few curses under his breath.

“You’ll be calling me Daddy by the time I’m through with you,” Jeongguk casts you a dark look as he struggles with the zipper on his jeans with one hand.

You throw your head back with a laugh. “Go ahead, baby boy.”

The nickname only infuriates him more, and he spanks your clit once, making you dig your fingernails into his arms. Already overstimulated from the first orgasm, Jeongguk doesn’t let up as he continues to rub your clit until you weaken in his arms, only then does he feel like he’s got the upper hand once more.

You have to say that you’re impressed with his strength so far and you help him out by unbuckling his belt, tossing it to the side and lowering the zipper on his jeans. He pushes it, along with his underwear, down to his knees, and while he’s doing that you take the opportunity to push his shirt up, exposing his rock hard abs that make you want to grind against them.

“Like what you see?” Jeongguk is smirking, he knows all his hours at the gym pays off well.

“I’ve seen better,” you say with a sniff, but you’re lying and the both of you know that from the way you can’t keep your hands off his chest and abs.

Jeongguk pushes his underwear off, and his cock slaps against his belly, the head an angry red and fully erect. At the first sight of it, you’re tongue tied. While some men are blessed in girth and some in length but not both, he seems to have the best of both worlds, and his entire length spans almost three quarters of your forearm.

“Cat got your tongue, baby?” He presses a suckling kiss against your collarbone, pushing his sticky cock against your inner thighs.

He’s left with a satisfied smirk when you really do have nothing to say, instead reaching down to stroke him. The feeling of your small hand on his cock makes him swear under his breath, sweat dripping off his forehead as he thrusts forward into your grasp involuntarily.

“Have protection?” You remember at the last minute, placing a hand on his abdomen to stop him from thrusting into you bare.

“I got a vasectomy,” Jeongguk answers, and you nearly choke on your saliva.

“Wha- whe- I-“

“I knew it! You want to have my babies,” Jeongguk snickers at your reaction, but not for long when you grip him tighter and he groans. “I’m kidding. Don’t worry, I’m as fertile as a bull in the china shop.”

“That’s not how the saying goes- you know what, just shut up and tell me if you have any condoms. You’re a lot more attractive when you aren’t talking.”

“In my blazer pocket,” he answers, and you reach for it, finding a foil packet and tearing it open, rolling it over his cock.

You note how the packet says extra-large, and in your mind, you can already imagine his cocky little self walking up to the pharmacy and fucking asking for the extra larges even though there is stock on the shelf.

Jeon Jeongguk is just that kind of cocky little bastard.

“Big dicks aren’t everything, Jeon,” you say at last, guiding him towards your centre. “Not if you cum after the first three strokes.”

“I’ll fucking show you what stamina is,” Jeongguk growls as he surges forward into that delicious, warm heat, your pussy tightening around him despite having been stretched out earlier. You cry out against his shoulder as he fucks into you, having mercy enough to give you shallow thrusts at first before building up to sheath his whole length into you.

“Haven’t cum yet? I’m surprised,” you mock him, tightening your core around him and feeling his steady rhythm falter.

“Fuck you,” he grits his teeth, using the power in his thighs to fuck up into you.

“That’s what I’m trying to do, but you’re gonna cum too soon aren’t you,” you coo at him, petting his cheek and babying him, all of which you know by now he absolutely hates. “Cute little Jungkookie’s all grown up.”

“Don’t fucking call me cute when I’m pounding my cock inside you,” Jeongguk leans forward to bite your lower lip in a harsh, punishing kiss, effectively shutting you up as he pistons his cock in and out at an unforgiveable pace.

Since you came once already, you thought your second orgasm would be way far off, but you’re proven wrong especially when Jeongguk buries his cock deep, limiting his thrusts so that he’s just grinding his cock against you, his pelvic bone rubbing against your clit just right. He then shifts so that his arms slide under both your thighs, opening you up even more for him as he fucks you against the wall with his incredible strength, and you feel yourself tightening around him again.

When he smirks against your neck you realized you must have called out his name when you came. But in this position you can’t do much other than wrap your arms around his neck as he gives you the pounding of your life.

“Ready to call me daddy yet?” Jeongguk pants against your neck, leaving his cock buried so deep that he can feel your cervix.

“No fucking way,” you refuse to relent.

“Then how ‘bout you make me a daddy instead?” He proposes, pulling out suddenly to the tip and slamming back in, making you whine his name again. “That’s right baby girl, I saw all your envious looks at all the couples out there.”

“Wha-? I…”

“Don’t fucking deny it. You’d look so much better swollen and pregnant than all of those women out there. You know you want to, especially when I started teasing you about getting too old. You want a baby, you want mybaby fucked into you.”

You don’t know what kind of roleplay this is, but all you know is that you get even wetter around his cock, and all you want is for him to fuck you against this wall until you forget your own name and you can’t walk tomorrow.

“Fuck… keep going. Tell- tell me more,” you pant against his neck for more as Jeongguk starts fucking his cock into your pussy once more, every thrust ending so deep that it taps your womb.

“Gonna fuck a baby into you at our friend’s baby shower,” Jeongguk grips your thighs hard. “You want that? Hm? Then next it will be our turn to have a baby shower. Though I think we’ll have it before our wedding, where everyone will see you round and swollen with my baby.”

“Wh-who fucking said I wanted to marry you-?” You can barely get your words out of your mouth as you dig your fingernails into his shoulders. There’s something about how primal his thrusts feel when he talks about fucking a baby into you, and you want more.

“I can give you a baby right now and then you’ll have one more reason to marry a cocky little bastard like me,” Jeongguk smirks against your neck as he lets one of your legs drop to rub your clit, and you squeeze around him again, crying out into his neck.

Your thighs are quivering, cunt clenching around his still pounding cock as Jeongguk grunts. You feel his cock twitching, and even though all of this is make believe- the condom wrapper on the floor reassuring you… you wouldn’t exactly hate it if it were all real. Being with Jeon Jeongguk… doesn’t sound that bad after all.

Feeling him close to his orgasm, you wrap your arms around him tighter, legs around his waist as you feel his desperation soar.

“Give it to me. Your baby, I want it,” you whisper against his cheek, not knowing how much of it is just for the heat of the moment, and how much of it isn’t. All you know is you love his reaction to your words, the way his thrusts stutter in rhythm and he lets out a deep groan.

He moans your name in the most beautiful way as he spills his load, continuing to thrust to ride out his orgasm, his hips pinning you against the wall as his hands encircle your waist.

The both of you remain like that for a moment, his harsh breaths against your neck as you find yourself stroking his back and leaning your cheek against his broad shoulders. Gingerly, Jeongguk puts you down so that your feet are once more touching firm ground, and he slips out of you in the process.

It’s slightly awkward now that everything is over, and Jeongguk turns away, pulling the used condom off his softening cock. While his back is turned, you start to straighten your clothing, realizing that the bastard has really ripped all your underwear and even your dress too.

Cursing him loudly enough so that he hears it too, you stuff your now useless bra into your bag, trying the best you can to button your light blue lace midi dress back together again and failing miserably. You cross your arms as you glare at his broad back, until Jeongguk feels the weight of your glare and turns around.

He disposes of the used condom in the trash, and has the gall to check you out, particularly lingering on your half exposed chest.

“Quite a number you did on my arms… this’ll last for a while definitely-“

“You fucking ripped my dress! How the hell am I supposed to get out of here?”

Jeongguk can’t keep that stupid smile off his face as he shrugs out of his blazer, coming towards you and draping it across your shoulders so that it covers you adequately. Despite being pissed off at him, you can’t help but notice how much bigger he is- his shoulders stretch as he assures his blazer is securely on you and the concentration furrows his brow as he buttons it up.

“There. Like that. I think you look much better, to be honest.” He takes a step back, smirking in satisfaction before he turns you around with one arm around your shoulders. “Look. I am a gentleman. I’ll even walk you out so that we can call a cab together.”

“Are you crazy?” You shrug his arm off violently. “We can’t go out like this together! Everyone will know we just fucked!”

“Well, we just did…” Jeongguk has a stupid grin on his face as he states the obvious, and it makes you want to smack him.

“You stay in here for five minutes then come out. Look like you just came in here to piss or something,” you shove his chest in an attempt to get him to stay, trying to ignore how firm his pecs feel under your touch, and how he barely even moves.

Jeongguk has an amused smile on his face as he watches you arrange your hair, check your makeup for any smudges before gingerly stepping outside, all while oblivious to that fact that you wearing his blazer is the biggest telltale of all.

Truly, he’s never met a girl like you.

*

Jeon Jeongguk’s goal is to get you to stay for the bouquet toss just this one time.

More specifically, he wants to find out why you always leave before it happens. Personally, it’s his favourite part, aside from the free flow booze and food and cake. He particularly likes seeing the women’s faces when they spot him, and then see how desperate they are to catch the bouquet later on especially when he’s in the crowd.

But today he’s more interested in seeing one particular person’s face when the bouquet goes sailing through the air.

Jeongguk rubs his hands together in glee with a devious smile on his face, peeking around the corner to find his best friend Eun Woo and his bride at the center stage, taking pictures with guests.

“Bro! So glad you came!” Eun Woo greets him with a wide grin that reaches his eyes, spreading his arms wide to embrace Jeongguk.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Jeongguk grins back, slapping his friend on the back a few times before pulling away. “You remembered my request, right?”

Eun Woo clasps Jeongguk’s hand cordially. “Of course man. Just point her out to me and we’re good to go.”

Jeongguk steps back to let Eun Woo go back to his bride and entertaining his guests, all the while keeping a close eye on the door. You hadn’t showed up for the wedding ceremony nor the dinner that followed, and Jeongguk knows from sources that you’d been invited to this wedding too. He fidgets anxiously, wondering when, or if, you’ll show up.

After what seems like forever, you slip in quietly, alone as always, wearing that same light blue midi dress that he had the pleasure of ripping off your body.

You weave through the crowd in order to get to the front, wanting to get it over and done as quickly as possible. When you catch a glimpse of Cha Eun Woo dressed to the nines, smiling and laughing with his bride, you feel a small little pang in your chest, considering that you had a crush on him once.

In fact, that was the main reason why you decided to only show up at the end. When you received the invitation, it wasn’t like you were shocked or anything because you knew the two of them had been dating for a while, but the same old blues just crept up on you, and you don’t think you can bring yourself to sit through another wedding and watch another couple find their happy ending, when all you wanted was to find it yourself.

So here you are, forcing a smile on your face as Eun Woo springs to his feet once he sees you, engulfing you into a hug for old times’ sake.

“I almost thought you weren’t coming,” he says with a pout, and your heart almost melts.

Eun Woo just has this way of speaking that makes anyone feel incredibly important to him. It’s the way his voice softens to an intimate tone and his eyes focus on you entirely. He holds you at an arm’s length to really look at you.

“Long time no see,” you laugh, extricating yourself from his embrace, all too aware of his bride standing beside him looking a little out of place. “Congratulations, brat. I’m so happy for you.”

Eun Woo grins, a heart-achingly handsome smile directed just at you, and damn if it doesn’t make you feel special even when you’re here attending his fucking wedding. Your moment of regret is interrupted by a slight shove to your back that puts some distance between you and Eun Woo, and you turn your head in annoyance to see who it could possibly be.

Jeon Jeongguk sure knows how to ruin a moment, for he steps in between you and Eun Woo, bro hugging him generally making a lot of noise. Before you can quickly slip back into the crowd, however, Jeongguk grabs your arm, tucking it into the crook of his elbow.

“Did you meet ______ yet?” Jeongguk says, winding an arm around your shoulders tight to stop you from escaping. Slippery little minx you are.

Eun Woo hesitates for a second, and some kind of unspoken communication goes on between the two men, and you roll your eyes, wanting to just leave now that you’ve shown your face.

“______?” He says your name with such surprise in his voice, and his eyes widen, as if seeing you for the first time, taking in Jeongguk’s arm around you. Then he coughs awkwardly and tries to play it off smoothly. “Dude, we go way back since uni, my partner in crime when it comes to project work,” Eun Woo shoots you a fond little grin, and you feel your heart flip.

Jeongguk catches this little interaction and frowns.  “Wait, you guys… know each other that well?”

“Yeah. We even-“ you cut yourself off, realizing that this isn’t the best time to bring it up.

“Oh, you can say it, Eun Woo told me and it’s all cool,” his bride grins, casually looping an arm around her husband. “I know you guys used to date for a while.”

You can feel Jeongguk’s grip tightening slightly around your shoulders. “Um… wow. Okay. That was… uh, unexpected.”

You shoot him a sharp glance, wondering why he’s being so weird and saying such weird things and trying to figure out if he’s trying to be funny and embarrass the both of you. But Jeon Jeongguk seems genuinely flustered, the tips of his ears growing red.

“Anyway, uh, congrats you two,” you clear your throat and give them a slightly subdued smile. “Wishing you guys happiness always.”

Eun Woo reaches out to grasp your hand, squeezing it tightly. “Thanks, ______. I really appreciate it. You guys, stay till the end of the event, ‘kay? We have something really special planned.”

The two of them are soon dragged away by another group of friends, leaving you and Jeon Jeongguk alone in the crowd of strangers.

“Okay, what was that?” Jeongguk demands, folding his arms across his chest.

You’re still staring somewhat wistfully as Eun Woo and his wife as they wrap their arms around each other. “What? It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? You were practically making love eyes towards him!” Jeongguk points out indignantly.

You roll your eyes and start to head for the refreshment table, figuring you should at least get something to eat and drink while here. “It’s all in the past. We used to date for a while, that’s it. Maybe there’s still some lingering feelings for him. Maybe I’m feeling a little bitter while attending my crush’s wedding. What’s it to you?”

Picking up a flute of champagne, you down it in one gulp, feeling much better once the alcohol hits your system.

Feeling the urge to outdo his best friend, Jeongguk steals a chocolate covered strawberry off your plate and pops it into his mouth, making sure his lips wrap around the strawberry. He sucks it for a moment, making eye contact with you to capture your attention before he bites it off, closing his eyes as the sweetness bursts on his tongue. Jeongguk has to make you forget about your long lost crush.

“Stop it!” You hiss at him, at the way he licks his chocolate covered fingers obscenely.

“What?” Jeongguk shoots back, eyes wide and innocent. “I’m not doing anything!”

It’s ironic, the way practically everyone here is dressed for a black tie event, and here Jeon Jeongguk is, bow tie and suit, licking chocolate off his fingers like a five year old. But strangely, rather than irritate you, it’s kind of… endearing.

You like how he’s not afraid to make a fool out of himself even at events where everyone seems to be doing their best to pretend they’re sophisticated adults. He makes boring, stuffy old events like this more fun, and you realise… you want him in your life.

“You’re an idiot,” you say without any real heat in your voice, a smile tugging at the corners of your lips.

“I see you’re wearing the same dress,” Jeongguk comments with a glance down your body, and you fold your arms protectively.

“Yes, because washing machines are a thing,” you roll your eyes at him. “Sorry I don’t earn enough to debut with a spanking new dress every time one of our friends decide to get hitched.”

“God, you’re so defensive,” Jeongguk attempts to pry one of your arms loose. “I was just thinking that perhaps I didn’t do a good enough job of tearing off your body. How’d you even get it to be in one piece again?” Jeongguk watches the way red blooms across your cheeks. “So, am I still little brother energy?”

Judging from the way the cocky little bastard grins, he already knows the answer, but he just wants to hear you say it.

“No… but you’re far from daddy,” you add the last bit just to stop his ego from inflating so much that he can’t walk out the door later. Doing him a favour, really. You take your plate of cakes and pastries and find a seat somewhere in the ballroom, in a nice and secluded corner where no one will notice you stuffing your face.

Jeon Jeongguk follows you, grabbing more glasses of champagne along the way and handing them to you once you’re seated. “You said you had feelings for Eun Woo.”

“Yeah. Key word, had,” you clarify. “Past tense.”

“And me?” Jeongguk holds his breath in anticipation. “Do you… have feelings for me?”

You let the plate rest in your lap for a moment, considering how to best word your emotions. As much as you want to deny it and say he’s just an annoying little punk… it’s gone too far for you to do that. “I guess… yeah. I do. Don’t get me wrong though, you’re still annoying as fuck and you irritate the hell out of me sometimes, but I guess somewhere along the way… I stopped minding it so much and even started to miss it when you weren’t there to annoy me. It’s not just because we fucked or anything like that, but… having you beside me at all those weddings made me see how happy everyone around me was, only because… you kind of made me happy to begin with. Attending all those weddings by myself and seeing everyone get their happily ever after… I was kind of lonely, but now I’m not anymore.”

Embarrassed at your sudden show of emotions, you glance away, nearly spilling your glass in the process, but Jeongguk saves you by taking it away from you. An insatiable grin is on his face. “So… you’re saying I make you happy by annoying you?”

“And your dick is pretty nice too,” you grumble under your breath, in an attempt to distract him from how raw your emotions are feeling.

“I know,” Jeongguk steals a monster bite of your cake without asking. In the midst of his chews he sneaks a kiss on your cheek so that he leaves some cream behind. “I like annoying you too. I want to keep annoying you for the rest of my life.”

Just when you’re about to smack him for being so cheesy and disgusting, a voice comes over the speakers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our lovely bride and groom will now be preparing for the bouquet toss and the garter throw. If you would kindly gather, please.”

Jeongguk takes your plate and puts it aside before grabbing your hand securely in his, but there’s no need to, because you’re not going anywhere without him at your side. There was a time where you would have rather died than witness the bouquet toss, see the bundle of flowers being thrown into the air and hoping against hope that you’ll be lucky enough to catch it… but this time, with Jeon Jeongguk by your side, all you feel is warm and content, like you’ll be happy as long as he’s with you.

Jeongguk guides the both of you to a prime spot at the front, where you see Eun Woo’s bride seated in a chair, and Eun Woo on his knees before her. Realising you’re about to witness what’s called a garter toss, your eyes widen in shock when you see Eun Woo dive under his bride’s skirt. The crowd reacts with giggles and wolf whistles as Eun Woo seems to struggle a little, but a few minutes later he emerges, hair ruffled, but victorious with a lacy band between his teeth.

“We’re so gonna do that at our wedding,” Jeongguk murmurs under his breath with a squeeze of your hand.

“Getting a little ahead of yourself hmm? I never said I’d marry you,” you reply with a half-smile.

Eun Woo stands up, holding his wife’s garter high in one hand before he extends his other hand towards her, and together they turn their backs to face the crowd. You can see his wife’s beautiful bouquet of pastel peonies, tiger lilies and baby’s breath, held over her head.

The crowd is holding their breath with anticipation, and you can feel the people around you jostle slightly in their eagerness. You see Eun Woo lean down to whisper something to his wife, and she giggles, nodding in return before casting a glance backwards at the crowd behind her.

Eun Woo does the same, and his eyes lock onto yours before shifting slightly to beside you. Then he turns his back, and with a count of one, two and three, husband and wife toss their respective items high into the air.

For the first time, you see the bouquet sailing in the air towards you, and it’s as if everything is in slow motion. The crowd around you disappears, miraculously no one is pushing or shoving against you, and… could it be? The silk wrapped bouquet looks like it’s actually going to… this is impossible. The chances are so slim, there are so many people here…

And yet, your arms move of their own accord, the bouquet lands in your grasp, and you smell the sweetness of the flowers immediately as the sheer size of the entire silk wrapped bundle blocks your vision entirely.

Then, time unfreezes and sound filters back in. People around you are cheering and clapping, they’ve given you some space now. You start to shy at the attention, lowering the bouquet and half-panicking over what Jeon Jeongguk will think- will he take this as a sign that you’re a psycho who wants to marry him even though it’s this soon? What if he’s scared off by this?

But as you lower your bouquet, you realise that Jeon Jeongguk isn’t empty handed either, he’s holding a lacy garment in his hand, grinning from ear to ear with that annoying little smirk of his that tells you this went exactly as he planned.

Welcome to the lonely hearts club: table for two, please.

[sylverstorms]

Cassandra x Maiden ----Anonymity Ch. 8

Ch.1      Ch.2      Ch.3      Ch.4      Ch.5      Ch.6      Ch.7

It has come to a point where you can’t even pretend to yourself that you don’t care for her.

All the time you spend with Cassandra every evening has made certain feelings impossible to deny, though you are too scared to name them all.

You don’t name the smile you can’t contain when she excitedly pulls you to the armory to show you her collection of blades –and explains, in a very animated fashion, about the optimal use for each one. You don’t want to know what the stutter in your heartbeat means, every time she genuinely laughs, pale neck thrown back, nose slightly scrunched and all. 

And it’s not just Cassandra you grow a tad closer to.  

Bela comes to you whenever the two of them have argued and goes ‘Tell my sister’ this or that. Daniela is apparently not allowed within a twenty meter radius of you, but she approaches to poke and prod at you whenever she wants to annoy Cassandra. She never manages to do either, because the middle sister always swoops in, fuming, dragging her away by the hood of her robes like a kitten.

Lady Dimitrescu is the only one as distant as the day you first saw her –and it’s probably for the better. You don’t see her much, anyway, not with how Cassandra takes you to empty castle wings to have you all to herself.

Tonight is different.

After dinner, Bela leaves with her mother and you go to help the other maids present clean the table. But your lover steps in the way and grabs your elbow, instead, hurriedly pulling you along.

“Do not tell me you’re seriously thinking to make me wait longer.” she says.

Of course, you promised to watch a movie you found on your phone with her and she’s been buzzing with impatience since.

That is, until a certain redhead blocks your way. 

“Daniela, move.” Cassandra huffs. 

“What are you doing? Take me with you.” the younger sister replies, brimming with childlike curiosity. 

“No. Go bother Bela.” A shooing motion is made. 

“Bela’s no fun. I wanna come with you and Alexia.” she drops your name so casually it’s startling.

“Wait give me a moment to think about it –moment over. No.” Cassandra states, fast.

But Daniela shoots forward and grabs your arm like a koala. Your eyes go wide at the same time as Cassandra’s, for different reasons.

The brunette immediately grips her sister’s robes, none-too-gently. “Don’t touch her, she’s mine!”

“If you don’t take me along I’m telling mother where you found that music player and phone!” Daniela answers, her hold enough to cut off your blood flow.

You send Cassandra a pleading look before they break your arms with how they’re tugging at you.

“On one condition.” the elder sister holds a finger up to her sibling’s face. “You sit next to me and you don’t move around.”

“…she’s warm, though.” Daniela says, all but pouting. “Mother says sharing is caring~”

“Find your own human.” Cassandra growls out as the three of you make your way to the main hall and the couch adjacent to the fireplace there.

“You and Bela have gotten the prettier ones!”

“You snooze, you lose.”

Cassandra quite literally pins you to the arm of the couch with her body, to keep Daniela as far away from you as possible. Even as the movie starts, you can feel her sulking by your neck for not being able to touch you the way she wants.

You are not as focused on the movie as you are cute way she plays with your hand throughout its duration.

-

-

It’s getting harder and harder to remind yourself of what they are.

Especially when, ten minutes after the credits have rolled, Daniela is still crying over the death of the protagonist. Even Bela comes to the hall and asks Cassandra what she did to her.

By the time she’s done dealing with her sisters, your lover comes to you sporting a headache.

“We’re leaving this wing right now.” Cassandra says and that is about all the warning you get.

The next second you feel a rush of air and your stomach leaping to where your heart is supposed to be; Your eyes only make out a blur and an augur of black flies.

When she comes to a halt you crash into Cassandra’s side with a gasp. Your arm aches from the pull. The world spins for ten solid seconds.

She laughs by your ear. Low and satisfied as it is at your disorientation –it reminds you of drinking wine by a fire in the heart of winter— you can’t help but bask in the timbre of her voice so close.

“Ugh, why is it so cold in here?” she complains in that same quiet tone you love.

It is very cold compared to the more lived in parts of the castle, but your body is warm enough from your sustained proximity and the rush of adrenaline she always causes in you.

“Oh, well, I can bear it for a little while if it means we won’t be interrupted.” Cassandra trails off and lifts your chin with a chilled finger.

Your lips meet and slide together in a practiced tango. Her manicured nails run over your throat and shoulders, making you shiver for reasons that have nothing to do with the temperature.

Both of you are starting to get really into it when Cassandra walks you back into the nearest wall. It happens to be a window, covered by a flimsy curtain. You have half a mind to realize it’s probably been forgotten slightly ajar, judging from the frost that graces your shoulder, but you have more important matters to focus on, like the brush of her tongue over your bottom lip.

Until Cassandra braces her bare hand over the unseen opening, to box you in like she usually does.

And-

She shrieks.

She jerks away so powerfully her back crash-lands into the painting on the far wall, knocking it down with its frame broken. You’re left there still and mute, watching in frozen horror as her face distorts into pure, raw anguish.

“Shut it!” Cassandra screams at you. “Shut it now, now!”

Your nerves suddenly kick into overdrive and you pull the window closed like your life depends on it.

What just… happened...?

In slow, cautious steps, you approach her. She’s clutching her hand like a wounded animal, baring its teeth to hide its vulnerability. It is the first time you see her like this. Void of control, bent over in hurt. Gasping.

Something in your chest breaks.

You look at her hand, to find her pale skin nearly crystallized, grey and breaking apart —like cheap china, like weak porcelain— into flies that drop to the floor, faintly twitching.

You thought… you thought they could just control the insects. That dissipating into swarms was just a trick allowed by their mutation. But now you realize, the flies are her body.

All this time trapped under the looming terror of the daughters… and escape was as easy as opening a window on them.

“Cassandra…?” you ask in a wavering voice when the initial burst of rage leaves her form.

She looks up at you, torn, when you hear the heavy sound of heels rapidly approaching.

“Cassandra?!” a different voice calls, this time, deep and authoritative. When Lady Dimitrescu rounds the corner in her immense height, your instincts scream to run.

But one look at Cassandra makes you stay.

Alcina halts for a moment to take in the scene. Then her lips curl downwards and bladed claws extend from her gloves, easily half your body in length. 

Oh my… God…

“What did you do to my daughter?!” she demands and advances on you, but Cassandra gets in front of you before she can truly threaten your life.

“I brought her here, mother. It’s my fault.” she hurries to explain.

Alcina stares at you like she wants to crush you underfoot… but then softens, somewhat, at the look her daughter is giving her.

“Come with me. Now.” She says in a stern motherly tone that leaves no room for objections.

You clutch Cassandra’s uninjured hand, silently asking if she’ll be alright. She turns, looks at you for a moment, then nudges your head with hers.

“...I’ll see you later, Alexia.”

But, as it turns out... “later” is subjective.

 -

-

 In Alcina’s Private Chambers…

It is not often that Cassandra is reprimanded by herself. 

She has never before been the only one at fault. She’s used to having her sisters beside her while Alcina scolds the three of them… except this time they’re outside the closed door and she is there to face their mother’s ire alone.

She can’t stay still under that yellowish-grey, narrowed gaze. Her fingers fidget with the edge of her robes’ sleeve to keep occupied, while Alcina takes that deep, calming breath she knows heralds no good things. Ever.

“Cassandra. Do you understand the severity of the situation?”

“Yes, mother.” She keeps her gaze downcast.

“Even if the maid didn’t harm you on purpose, she now knows your weakness. Yours and your sisters’. You were careless to allow this.” Cassandra feels anxiety rise up from the pit of her stomach and threaten to swallow her whole at that tone.

“I know, mother. Forgive me.” she replies quietly.

She wants to say that Alexia won’t use this knowledge against any of them, but she cannot bring herself to lie to Alcina. Because the truth is, Cassandra doesn’t know for a fact that she will not.

Why was that window open? Why?!

“You didn’t let me fix your mistake. I assume that means you will do it yourself?” her mother asks and Cassandra’s gaze snaps up.

What…?

At first, the temptation to chain Alexia up and watch as her blood drained from her lithe body had been sweet and strong. But now, at the thought of killing her –losing her— in whichever way, Cassandra is sick to her stomach. It is strange, because she feels like she is hyperventilating when she isn’t breathing at all and the world has tilted and—

Please don’t.

“Since when did you ever hesitate to kill, Cassandra?”

“…If.. that is what you ask of me…” she replies but she doesn’t sound like herself at all, not even to her own ears.

“How can I ask that of you and break your heart?” Alcina throws her arms up in exasperation. “I should have stopped this months ago but I thought it a fleeting fancy. I never imagined you would end up so attached.”

“I’m- I’m not-” she tries to protest, but her mother is having none of it.

“You’re not? You’re with her every day and she barely sports scratches anymore. Your eyes follow her everywhere when she’s in the same room. You instinctively lean closer whenever she comes over to refill your wine. Do you think I do not notice?” Of course. Of course she noticed.

Cassandra swallows, silent.

The memory of laying, too weak to move a single finger, on her deathbed along with Bela and Daniela pierces through Cassandra’s brain like a bullet. Her hand gives a violent spasm and flies break off to buzz frantically around her as she drops her forehead into her palm.

She’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown and it’s just so difficult without her sisters there. They’ve always been together, since the very beginning.

They were born together, learned to control their powers together, they died together-

Alcina is on one knee in front of her the next millisecond, stroking her hair and gathering her into her arms.

“Shh, calm down, my love.” she coos. “I’m sorry to be so harsh on you. I only want the best for you three.”

Cassandra doesn’t talk because she can’t, because she cannot wrap her head around what that flash inside her brain was.

“Oh, my Cassandra. I will not harm the maid if it will harm you, too.”

She waits for the eventual ‘but’.

“But I cannot let this dalliance continue any longer.”

It’s probably for the best. Her mother knows best. It is true, after all, that she has not been acting like herself, lately. So, yes, this decision is for her own good.

But.

Cassandra’s heart has the same reaction upon hearing it as being exposed to sub-zero winter air.

[tteokdoroki]

broken beauty | k.bakugou

⇝ pairing: katsuki bakugou x fem!reader.

⇝ word count: 2.1K

⇝ rating: for everyone.

⇝ genre: pro hero!au, model!au, angst.

⇝ summary: katsuki bakugou had never given you a reason to feel insecure, but when the distance between your worlds finally dawns on you, you feel yourself begin to break.

⇝ warning(s): please read ! heavy angst, no happy ending, mentions of insecurity, self doubt, emotional distress and bakugou cursing again.

⇝ author’s note(s): hello everyone, i hope you’re all doing well and keeping safe during this time, this one-shot is a request from @yourlocalbabybird​​​ !!! i hope the angst is heavy enough for you heh, i tried my best so i hope you enjoy. thank you for all the love on my blog. also i tried a new banner style which i like a lot :(

with everything going on recently i’ve found this carrd to help us all stay educated and mindful of others <3

⇝ masterlist | requests

bakugou had never given you a reason to feel insecure.

through your entire relationship, all you’d ever received from him was love— while it might not have been through grandest if gestures and shouting it from the rooftops, he showed you through lingering touches, soft kisses— dates on the rooftop and under the sunrise with hazy eyes and linked fingers. you were his world and he was yours, no relationship you’d ever had, felt as tight and secure as the one yourself and katsuki shared.

but that didn’t mean, you didn’t feel insecure by your own accord.

‘it’s just a modelling gig, nothing more, nothing less.’ is what you have to remind yourself while you sit behind the scenes on the set of bakugou’s latest shoot. your boyfriend is not a model per say, but fashion designers love a pro hero with good looks and a popular rank amongst the people; not only does it boost their brand but it’s often a good PR move on behalf of the heroes. a win win situation for all, including your boyfriend. bakugou is hot, you know that, he knows it and god so does the rest of japan— so it’s only natural that the top brands would want him splayed out on the cover of next month’s vogue magazine.

you’re proud of him, really, with your boyfriend right on track to become the next number two— you’re happy that he’s got the chance to experience an opportunity like this...but you can’t help but watch with burning eyes and a strained heart as he poses for the camera with her. ochako uraraka is no more of a model than your precious katsuki; but she is also sweet,  gorgeous and a pro hero like himself. and unlike you, they had known each other since high school, being on the same hero course and all— but being a hero wasn’t an option for you, growing up quirkless you had forced you to choose a quieter route in life and whereby you opened up your own little cafe, so it was by chance that you’d even met your boyfriend.

everything was by chance. meeting bakugou, falling for bakugou, loving bakugou. but the world would never know of you, having a quirkless girlfriend could severely damage your lover’s reputation and rank on the charts— so of course, ochako would have been the next best choice to replace you by his side on the cover.

at the time, when plans for the shoot had first been revealed, you had been okay with it. bakugou had made sure of that, he would never do anything you weren’t comfortable with or that exceeded the bounds of your relationship, and the fairytale theme certainly didn’t bother you back then. but now; upon seeing the shirtless dragon king and barley clothed princess set up they had going for the two, you fee bile rise up in your throat and uncomfortable churning in your stomach— a sense of jealousy directing itself at the girl who had her hands all over your boyfriend, merely for the purpose of a photoshoot.

you hate the way they look at each other, as if they belong together— ‘it’s just acting.’ you tell yourself as bakugou lifts the brunette into his arms behind the camera, her dainty fingers splayed out against the caramel of his chest and the look in her eyes writes words of love. you shouldn’t be mad, upset or angry. it’s just his job, but you can’t help but feel that maybe bakugou would be better off with her instead of you.

ochako and bakugou, yn and bakugou. your mind had made itself up, it knew which one sounded better—the one where you weren’t included. the two would make sense together, both stunning pro heroes on the way to becoming the top, while you were just an ordinary girl with an ordinary life. clutching at your chest, you give bakugou a weak smile while he waves to you between pictures, blinking away tears you didn’t realise had formed.

“okay,” the shoot director claps, fixing the cape drapes neatly across the blonde’s shoulders. “i want you guys to look at each other; like you’re about to kiss— can you do that? and it’ll be the last shot for the day.”

your heartbeat stops in its tracks while blood rushes through your ears, the sound tuning everything out but that of katsuki’s voice. “i think we can do that.” is all you manage to make out before you jump to your feet and make a dash for the bathroom. you can no longer take being in a room with them both, the insecurities in your mind eating you alive.

you don’t bother to look back when you hear bakugou call your name, you don’t think you can handle seeing them together for a moment more.

“yn, baby...are you in here?”

chewing on your bottom lip, you do your best not to make a sound as the door to the bathrooms slams open so hard it almost hits the next wall. you knew it’d only be a matter of time before bakugou started searching for you, but then again you’d only been hidden away in the toilet cubicle for about fifteen minutes.

without a response, katsuki starts to check each cubicle next— growing more and more desperate by the second. you know he hates seeing you sad, it lifts your heart, only just, to know that the cares but the way you feel can’t be helped and couldn’t be for the longest time. you paw at your cheeks where tears have seared a pathway down them, trying to cover up any evidence of your emotions as your boyfriend approaches your cubicle.

the explosive blonde stops right outside of yours, his boots appearing in your view just underneath the door. “yn, i know you’re in there,” he mumbles simply after attempting to push open the door, voice so quiet you would have missed him if you weren’t hyper aware of his presence. it’s locked, of course. “come out and let’s talk, yeah?” 

“can’t,” you whisper, moving to hug your knees whilst sitting on the toilet seat, as if that’s going to hide you away from the world.

“baby is this about the last shot? i swear i wasn’t thinking about what the director said— just wanted to get us home, you’ve been waiting for me all fuckin’ day...”

you hear bakugou sigh and lean against the door, an attempt to gather his feelings and words before talking again. you hate that you’re so insecure, at no fault of bakugou’s but simply because of your nature— you hate that the way you think could cause such a rift between yourself and the man you love. that’s why you had to do this.

but your lips move before your mind can catch up, whispering the questions that plague your thoughts and make you feel sick to the stomach. “would you have done it? kissed ochako for the shoot if i hadn’t been there?” the raging green of jealousy and fear swirl in the depths of your head, practically swallowing you whole throughout katsuki’s silence. was she prettier than you? did he like her too?

“fuck no... baby, god no—where is all of this coming from?”

you ignore his question and answer with another. “then, are you attracted to her?”

“not in the way that i am to you, yn there’s no one fucking else for me except for you. shit. will you tell me what’s going on now? let me in.” katsuki practically begs through the closed door, you can tell he’s leaning against it from how close he sounds. deep down, you know that everything you say hurts the blonde just as much as it hurts you— you don’t want him to be in pain alone and yet you’re not quite ready to face him. so instead, you slip to the floor and hold your hand out from underneath the door, waiting for your lover to take it. it’s not long before your palm is engulfed by a familiar hold and sense of warmth, and you almost smile at how quickly the pro is to grab your hand. “please come out, honey bear. tell me what you’re feeling. is it ‘cause of the shoot?”

you shake your head once before realising he can’t see you and squeeze his hand instead— milking the silence for a moment more, in order to think. to think about how you’re going to tell your charming,  wonderful, amazing boyfriend that you can’t be his girlfriend anymore. that you’re from two separate worlds, in which his beats you down and makes you feel so insecure that you can’t stand back up without his help. how do you tell him without blaming him? how do you try without hurting him? “it wasn’t the shoot, katsu...” you start, that your voice trembles from the get go. it was never about the shoot. “katsu... you know i love you right?”

“of course, i love you too.” i hope you do.

“then, please understand...” i’m sorry.

“understand what, yn?” that i can’t stay.

“please understand why i can’t be with you anymore.” you breathe, leaning back against the cubicle wall as the sob that’s been building up in your chest finally breaks free.

for a second, you think bakugou will yank his hand away, tell you that he’s relieved and leave you there heart broken but to your surprise; he grabs onto you tighter— pressing himself against the cubicle even more as if he could phase right through and pull you into his arms. “you want to leave me—?” the explosive hero asks more so to himself than to you and you hate to imagine the pained confusion that now sits heavily in his vermillion eyes. “yn, please wait—“

“katsuki,” you cut him off with a heavy sigh and watery eyes, every fibre in your being is telling you not to do this— but for the sake of both you and your lover, you really have no choice. you need to get better, you want to start feeling good about yourself again but to do that you need to let go of him and your relationship so you have room to grow. “baby, i just want you to know that you’ve never done anything to make me insecure about this relationship or about myself; but when it does happen— when i do get insecure...i feel myself begining to break...” you turn your head to press it against the door; feeling bakugou’s warmth radiate through it. “we’re from two different worlds, katsu; and i simply don’t have a place in yours... you’re a pro hero and i’m the quirkless bland girlfriend who can’t be seen with you because of who you are—“

this time, the blonde interjects— slamming his fist against the door so hard that it makes you jump. “then...then fuckin’ be seen with me, i don’t give a crap about what my publicist says. not when you feel like that about yourself,” you see bakugou’s resolve crumbing even when you physically can’t. you don’t know what hurts more. “i need you here, with me, please—“

another squeeze to your hand, another silent plea. “katsuki, i’m so tired of looking down on myself too, i don’t want to feel bad because of the worlds we’re in and who we are but...” you falter as you hear you boyfriend finally crack through the shaky breaths he exhales on the other side. “but, i need to get better, for me, for both of us...i have to let us go.”

silence crackles through the air in the bathroom, heavy with pain unlike the usual comfortable ones you share together— where nothing else matters on the world aside from the love you have together. prying your hand from bakugou’s death grip, you stand up to wipe at your tears stained cheeks and sore eyes before unlocking the door to your cubicle. the blonde sits on the floor opposite you, still in the outfit the stylists had spent ages dressing him in hours before. only this time he’s there with a dark storm cloud sitting heavily over his precious heart.

vermillion eyes find yours, tired and broken beyond belief and you figure that you probably look the same. but still, bakugou smiles and opens his arms out for to ease your way into. “you’ll come back to me, right?” he almost whimpers when you finally relax into his chest, clinging onto his arms as if he’ll disappear. you know he understands, he doesn’t want to see you suffer anymore.

“i always will.”

you don’t know how long you spend holding each other from that moment on, in a quietness that speaks volumes of goodbyes and i love yous. all you know, is that your heart will always belong to katsuki bakugou long after this day; a broken beauty and all.

some more helpful links about recent events:

educate yourself carrd

issues going on in the world carrd

blm carrd

[ptersparkers]

pogue v. kook

summary: after an unexpected event that leaves you in shambles, topper thorton, rafe cameron, and kelce prove to be unliekly friends. 

warnings: typos, probably. 

notes: i had this idea and posted it, to which i got some good feedback, and then @anonymous0writer​ entertained all of my ideas so i thought why not have her write some of it. i’ve also made an option to be removed from my taglist. it’s getting quite long and there will be no hard feelings if you want to be removed. 

this is my gif. please credit if using. 

You were not a Kook. 

Not by blood, anyway. Kiara and Sarah had roped you in on the “Kook lifestyle” over the years with sleepovers and other shenanigans, and despite being the only one out of the trio who was a Pogue, it never felt like you were disparaged. Upon meeting them for the first time at fifteen when you moved to the Outer Banks, you knew that these girls would be the type of people you’d want to keep around for a while. Now that all of you were about to embark on the next chapter of your lives, it seemed like the perfect summer to relax before leaving for college.

You were aware, mostly because of JJ, the attitude Pogues held towards the residents on the other side of the island. Then came Sarah dating Topper, Rafe’s insistence on annoying the absolute hell out of all of you, and Kelce’s back and forth attitude when he was with his friends versus when he was alone. It was tiring and even you had to admit life would’ve been better if you were ignorant towards the “Kook vs. Pogue” debacle. You were a Pogue through and through. 

When JJ asked you to be his girlfriend eight months ago, you felt like things were falling into place and your life was running how it should be. You two had been the first to break the sacred rule that John B. seemed to be the only one to reinforce and none of the other Pogues had any objections about your relationship as you two had been pining after one another for what seemed like an eternity. 

But a month ago was when you felt a sudden change. It was unspoken, subtle, and hard to pinpoint. JJ became less available and wasn’t as forthcoming as he usually was. You could tell he became more reserved and it looked as if he had to force himself to sit next to you on the HMS Pogue or greet you with a kiss when you arrived at the Chateau. Your mind immediately went to his home life and you decided not to ask any questions, knowing JJ would much rather deal with it on his own and come to you if he needed anything. 

However, seeing all of the Pogues laugh at the far left table on the outdoor patio at The Wreck had put the first seed of doubt in your mind. JJ was sitting next to Kiara while John B. and Sarah were in front of them, Pope on the end, laughing loudly that you were sure the other beachgoers were able to hear them from the other end. You had been walking aimlessly, wanting to breath the scent of salt air and walked the short path you usually took when you wanted to clear your mind when you stumbled upon the Pogues hanging out with one another, seemingly without inviting you. You tried not to think about it too much. 

By this time, you noticed the sudden change in JJ’s mood and attitude. When you were around, he barely spoke and averted his gaze whenever you tried to reach out for him. His muscles would tense when you’d lean on his chest or grab his hand but you noticed he had no issue letting Pope jump on his back as a joke or hold his hand out for Kiara when she stepped off of the boat. 

The hurt in your chest grew every time you’d put your hypothesis -- you being the only person he shied away from -- to the test, it left you with internal pain as you realized JJ was talking to you less. He didn’t come over as often as he used to nor did he volunteer to walk you home like he always did. JJ almost never kissed you in public, opting to kiss your cheek instead or give you a loose hug as a way of saying hello or goodbye. But when you sat the other Pogues interacting with JJ, it was business as usual. You thought about talking to the others about what you’d been noticing, but every time you saw them around JJ, it was a reminder that they were friends long before you moved onto the island three years prior. 

You knew it wasn’t your place to talk to them about the issues you were having, and you knew you were most likely blowing this feeling out of proportion. You rationalized by telling yourself what you had been noticing was nothing but your mind playing tricks on you and it wasn’t like the Pogues were ignoring you in full. The lost touches JJ failed to make up, the eyes that dropped to the floor when you entered, the hushed tones when you spoke up felt like it happened more often as you started to overthink. It left you feeling hollow inside as if there was a vacuum of space that wasn’t able to be filled no matter how many times you tried to distract yourself. 

The feeling of uneasiness in your stomach first began when you and the rest of the Pogues were lounging in the living room of the Chateau one evening. You were on the couch with JJ, you were on one side while he was on the other side when, usually, you’d be perched on his chest. Your stomach sank as JJ laughed, eyes lighting up in the way you loved, when Kiara started dancing, hips swaying to the soft beat of music pumping from her phone. As soon as your blonde haired boyfriend practically leaped up once the girl gestured for him to join her, you felt your body disconnect. Almost as if you were watching the whole scene play out from outside your body. 

There you were, sitting on the couch, frozen and Kiara danced with your boyfriend when you struggled to get him to acknowledge you. You watched silently as Kiara moved her hips while JJ’s fingertips grazed the material of her shirt as he brought her closer, dancing along to the invisible steps Kiara set in place. It was like they’d been practicing for days, learning each other’s moves before they were even made. His body moved gracefully with hers, easy and free. You weren’t sure what hurt more, seeing JJ dance with Kiara the way he used to with you or your friends encouraging their antics and not questioning why they were so close.

Your throat closed up and it became hard to swallow as your heart gave a little ache. The feeling in your gut worsened when JJ moved naturally with Kiara because when he returned to you, he was stiff and tense under your desperate touch. His eyes wouldn’t light up with joy as they settled on you, if they did at all. However, they did as he spun Kiara around, her curls bouncing as his toothy grin emerged, lighting up the Chateau. The familiar smile did nothing to soothe your bad feeling. 

No matter how much you yearned for your familiar JJ back and the ease of hanging out with the Pogues, you didn’t move. Your fingers didn’t twitch and your eyes didn’t water as you watched the Pogues slowly join the dancing pair, the four a picturesque scene painted before your eyes, and you hated it. You hated the way they’d been slipping through your fingers and easing you out of their life so easily. You hated knowing they were just fine as friends before you entered the picture and that they wouldn’t bat an eye if you left. As the increasingly negative thoughts jumbled in your head, rising to a symphony of noise, you only saw red. The tears burning the back of your eyes stung, but you refused to cry in front of them. But there was no way you were going to stay, feeling hopeless as you watched your boyfriend and friends slip away. 

Pushing yourself up from the couch roughly, you stood, anger seizing your veins. “I’m leaving.” You stated, the words choppy and lined with barbed wire. 

The Pogues stopped, halting in their easy movements as they watched you leave in a hurry, steps thudding against the wooden porch and then crunching against the gravel as you fled. John B. looked at JJ with a glance but the blond shrugged and watched the door after you left, not bothering to walk out to ask why you had left so abruptly. 

Though that was the last time you set foot in the Chateau for the rest of the week, the sick feeling sitting dormant in your gut worsened. As much as you missed your friends -- when they wanted you around -- you refused to go back to the place you felt like you lost them. 

But in a cruel twist of fate, you were forced to as you had forgotten your board at John B’s. You begrudgingly headed back with a sigh. As you walked down the worn path of John B.’s drive way, intending to just grab the surfboard and leave, you had the sickening feeling that the wave was about to break. The wave had been building all this time, and now, as you arrived at the door of the Chateau, the ripped screen door flapping softly in the breeze as your hand was poised to open it, you knew it was gonna crash. 

With a sudden rush of bravery or stupidity, you pushed open the door of the Chateau, expecting the Pogues to be on the couch talking or eating. But they weren’t there. No one except the last two people you wanted to see. 

JJ and Kiara. JJ with his hands on Kiara’s hips as she sat on his lap, tongue down his throat. Kissing. JJ and Kiara kissing.

You stood on the threshold of the doorway and dropped your metal keys on the wooden floor, causing Kiara and JJ to look at you abruptly. Her eyes widened as she jumped off of JJ’s lap and pushed him away, JJ doing the same as you tried to pick your keys up without looking at either of them. Your hair kept getting in the way as you tried to hold back your tears, not wanting them to see your reaction when you picked up your house keys and turned around. 

“Wait!” JJ called out for you. You turned around for a brief moment and watched as he ran after you with Kiara in tow, standing awkwardly at the door frame with her hands crossed over her chest. She avoided your gaze as you looked back and forth between two people you thought were your friends.

“Are you serious?” you asked softly, your voice breaking in the process. JJ winced when he heard you speak. 

“Y/N,” he breathed, but he couldn’t find an excuse in his brain that was worthy enough.  

“With her?” you asked, finding it harder to fight back the tears. 

“Hey,” JJ said, a little edge in his voice that told you all you needed to know. “That’s your best friend.”

“No, she’s not,” you said. “Neither of you are my friends.” 

“Don’t walk away,” JJ pleaded as you turned around. He jumped forward to reach for your arm, pulling you back gently to ask for your forgiveness, but you knew he was only sorry because he got caught. 

“We’re done, JJ,” you said, pointing between the both of you. You turned towards Kiara and motioned the same. “We are not friends.” 

“Y/N,” Kiara said, her voice breaking the same as yours had done a mere moment ago when her guilt settled in. “I swear we didn’t mean for this to happen.” 

“But it did happen,” you replied. “You were making out with my boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, and you feel guilty because I caught you doing it.”

“Don’t throw away our friendship,” JJ pleaded with erratic breaths. He could feel his chest compress as if someone had been throwing continuous punches without letting him take a breather. “We can fix this. We can fix us.” 

“As far as I’m concerned,” you began, throat tight, but you had to get the words out, “you threw away our friendship the minute you decided to cheat on me.” You turned towards Kiara. “How could you do this?” 

Kiara looked at you with glossy eyes and you recalled all the times you would’ve dropped everything to comfort her and dry her teary eyes, but now you couldn’t be bothered to give her a tissue. You scoffed and chose not to spare either one of them a glance as you turned away, your heart beating in your chest, running to the clearing above the beachside. 

You sat on a patch of rock overlooking the ocean below you with your knees to your chest, water droplets splashing on your kneecaps from tears you were trying to hold back. The sound of the birds chirping above you and the water roaring below you weren’t enough to drown the negative thoughts swimming in your head and you were left with a bitter, empty feeling as you wished to be one of the beachgoers who enjoyed the sunny day. 

“Mind if I sit?” a voice asked from behind you. You turned around after wiping your nose and underneath your eyes with the back of your hand and saw Topper Thorton standing, looking down at you with an expression you couldn’t read. 

“If you’re here to make fun of me,” you said, trying to make it seem like you hadn’t been crying a few minutes prior to his arrival, “I’m not really in the mood.” 

Topper shook his head and sat next to you, leaving adequate space between the both of you. When he realized you weren’t objecting or told him to go away, he mimicked your stance and pulled his knees to his chest as he looked at where your gaze was. Topper could hear your quiet breaths as you tried to calm yourself down and he tried not to look at the dark circles beneath your eyes. In truth, the boy hadn’t found any reason to find you annoying or hate you completely, but it wasn’t hard to put you into the group he never got along with. You tried to ignore his presence, finding that, for once, he was not being as annoying as he was when he was with Rafe and Kelce.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Topper asked awkwardly. You laughed ironically, wiped your eyes, and looked at him with an incredulous expression. 

“Why do you care? I don’t want to be the subject of whatever you and your friends laugh about.” 

Topper shook his head and he knew he had no reason to be mad at what you said. He knew how he and his friends were. There was no denying how brutal they could be as they teased your friends, that much Topper knew. But he couldn’t stop himself from following you when he saw you run past him hastily, disappearing into the bushes. Topper’s curiosity got the better of him and he couldn’t explain the heartbreak he felt in his chest for you when he saw your usually bright and chirpy demeanor crumble into a teary-eyes ball on the warm rock below him.

“I’m not gonna make fun of you,” he said softly, turning his head to look at you. You stared ahead and wiped your eyes once again, not knowing how to respond. “I know what you think of me and I know you have no reason to trust what I’m saying, but I just want to know if you’re okay.” 

You stole a glance at Topper and saw he was looking at you already. His shoulders were relaxed and his attention seemed to be completely devoted to you, which was an odd thought to come across. You’d never spoken to Topper without Kelce or Rafe beside him, nor did you have any pleasant conversations with the boy who claimed to care for your wellbeing. Topper made no effort to comment on your unruly appearance, or the fact that your eyes continuously leaked with tears you desperately tried to hide, but part of you didn't care. He was the first person in a while to ask if you were doing okay.

“No,” you said, your voice breaking. Topper’s heart softened. “I, uh, I just walked in on JJ and Kiara kissing.” Topper’s eyes widened. He may not have enjoyed his time around the Pogues, but even he knew how infatuated the two of you were with each other. 

“What?” he asked, surprised. You laughed in self pity and shook your head, wiping your eyes once more.

“I never thought he’d cheat on me,” you replied. “He always talked about wanting to tell the truth and being loyal to his friends but he couldn’t extend that decency to me.” 

Topper knew this feeling all too well. While his relationship with Sarah might’ve sprouted because of their parents’ expectations, he grew to like the girl more and more as each day passed and he felt as if Sarah felt the same. It wasn’t until a year prior that he learned about her infidelity, with John B. no less, and he felt as if his world was coming to a complete stop. The girl he was infatuated with had no problem running into the arms of someone he didn’t get along with, and Topper was sure his distaste for Pogues increased because of that. 

“I know how you feel,” he said quietly. He averted your gaze when you looked at him in favor of looking at the ocean. “When Sarah cheated on me with John B., I just came to terms that I probably loved her.” 

“It sucks, doesn’t it?” you asked rhetorically. Topper let out a breath. 

“It does,” he said. “Deep down I know it’s wrong, but John B’s the reason I don’t like Pogues anymore.” 

“C’mon, Topper. Did you ever like Pogues?” you joked. Upon hearing your voice sound less accusatory and more playful, Topper allowed himself to laugh. “Do you know why it’s frustrating, to me at least, when Kooks mess with Pogues?” 

“No, I don’t,” Topper said genuinely. 

“It’s because people make fun of us for what we were born with,” you explained. “I didn’t ask to be born to a family that has to work to live. It’s hard to live comfortably knowing people who have a lot of money make fun of me because I don’t. It’s not anybody’s fault for what they were born into. It just hurts a little.” 

The boy, naive in his own right, felt oddly at peace with your confession. Internally, he knew he was privileged and saw the way Rafe would boast about his expenses and privileges, and he knew neither him nor Kelce would be as vocal about it as Rafe was. Still, his friends encouraged the unruly behaviour towards the Pogues and he never second guessed it. But hearing your confession, especially when you were trying to make your voice steady and catch your breath from previously crying, made him think about all the times he’d wanted to tell Rafe to leave the Pogues alone. 

“I’m sorry,” Topper apologized sincerely. “For whatever it’s worth.” 

You smiled, the corners of your mouth curving into a small smile that didn’t go unnoticed by Topper. He bit his cheek, trying not to show how proud he was of himself for brightening your mood, even if it was by a short stretch. The both of you let a comfortable silence settle in, the sound of laughter below you while the sky remained bright and sunny. 

“Hey,” Topper began, looking at you. You turn towards him and he sees that you aren’t crying anymore. “Do you want to, I don’t know, hang out sometime?”

“Topper, if this is your way of asking me out--”

“No!” he said abruptly, clearing his throat. “I just mean that, if you want a friend, I’m here for you.” 

“Really?” you asked. 

“Yeah,” he said softly. “I mean it. No games, nothing.” 

“Thanks,” you said, moving your hair behind your ear. Topper pulled out his phone and asked you to put your phone number in his contacts, sending you a text message to make sure you had his number. You were aware of the risk you were taking, and how you might end up being the laughing stock of the Figure Eight residents, but at this moment, you didn’t care.

It’d been a little less than a week since you fled the Chateau and Topper had found you on the rock. And since then, you felt happier. No more friends pushing you out of their life or cheating boyfriends. While you would’ve never thought you’d be friends with Kooks, especially the likes of Rafe Cameron, you liked it. You had to say you almost liked them better. The boys were outrageous in the best way and after you got used to being with them, it felt so easy to slip into old habits of trusting people with your delicate feelings. 

When Topper had initially introduced you to Kelce and Topper, Kelce was less reluctant to “initiate” you into their friend group compared to Rafe. The boy, ignorant in his own right, wasn’t afraid of hiding his distaste for you because you were a Pogue. 

“Rafe, you never have anything important to say so I suggest you think before you speak or shut up altogether.” 

Rafe shut his mouth when you spoke as you eyed him down. Kelce and Topper were laughing behind you as Rafe’s cheeks turned red with a blush, embarrassed to have been caught being called out. Begrudgingly, Rafe welcomed you onto his boat and spent the next four hours getting to know you and decided that he was wrong about the kind of person you were. With a little time and convincing, Rafe had promised to never mess with the Pogues or make fun of them for being one, and you found yourself considering Rafe as one of your best friends just as he considered you the same.  

The sun was beating on your back, the water sliding down your skin cooling you off as you returned from a dip in Rafe’s pool. You hum, leaning back in your pool side chair, the cold glass of lemonade spiked with whatever alcohol Kelce got his hands on pressed against your cheek as you tried to battle the heat. 

“You good there, Princess?” Rafe called out from across the pool as he emerged from the sliding glass doors with a newly opened beer in his hand. 

“It’s too hot,” you complained. 

“No shit, Sherlock,” Kelce said, laughing as he jumped into the pool. 

“Show off,” you muttered at his near perfect dive. 

“Okay, be honest,” Topper piped, looking at you while tipping his beer in your direction. “I’m pretty sure the Pogues think we all have a thing for you, so, if you had to fuck someone, who would it be?” 

“Is that even a question? Rafe, in a heartbeat.” 

“Don’t mind if I do,” Rafe said, sliding his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose to wink at you, 

“Please don’t fuck in front of me,” Topper said, sighing as he closed his eyes. 

“Why would you say that?” you said coyly, enjoying his reaction. “We’d never.” 

“She’s too smart for her own good,” Kelce said, joining the three of you by the pool chairs. 

“Not to be too cheesy, or anything,” you began. 

“Uh-oh,” said Rafe. “She’s about to get cheesy.”

“Shut up, idiot,” you muttered. “As I was saying.”

“As you were saying,” Kelce repeated. You gave him the finger. 

“As I was saying,” you repeated, “I know all of you know what happened between me and the Pogues and I’m really happy that I found you guys as friends. I never feel pressured to do anything when I’m with you guys and I appreciate that you let me have a life outside of this friendship.” 

“Pogues are bitches,” Rafe said. You gave him a look. “For what they did to you.”

“And you didn’t deserve to be cheated on,” Topper said. You pouted, putting your hands over your heart as you rested your head on his shoulder. 

“Guys, I'm going to cry,” you teased, pretending to wipe tears from underneath your eyes. 

The rest of the afternoon was spent by the pool before moving to Rafe’s living room to watch an endless amount of movies, forgetting that the world outside existed. 

The beach wasn’t as busy as usual despite the warm weather. You and the three boys decided to head to the water after they agreed to learn how to surf upon your insistence and neither of them could deny your kind smile when your lips pouted and your eyes widened. 

“Okay, that’s enough,” Kelce said, falling on his beach towel after trying his hand at surfing. You walked behind him, laughing as you watched his body lay limp on the towel. Rafe and Topper had given up not too long ago, opting to sit on the sand and dry, tanning in the sun while taking videos of Kelce trying to surf for the first time. Your skin felt cool from the ocean water and you motioned for Topper to hand you your water bottle. Rafe squinted as he watched you gulp from the spout, his sunglasses perched on the bridge of his nose. 

“How are you so fucking good at surfing?” he asked. 

“Been doing it since I could swim,” you said with a shrug, tossing the water bottle in your tote bag. 

“Damn,” Kelce muttered. 

“Is that JJ?” Topper asked nonchalantly, looking in the distance. You turned to where his gaze was and tensed your jaw when you saw JJ, accompanied by your former friends, kicking a soccer ball not too far from where you and the Kooks sat. 

“I don’t want to think about it or talk to them,” you said, groaning as you situated yourself on your beach towel. You brought your knees to your chest and put your sunglasses on, trying to make yourself seem smaller than you were. 

“It’s okay,” Rafe said. “We can fight them if you want us to.”

“No,” you interjected, knowing Rafe was kidding, but you knew he’d do it if you asked. “You don’t need to do that. We’re all adults here.”

“Except Rafe,” said Kelce. You chuckled, your mind temporarily distracted from the Pogues. 

You caught Kiara’s eye and turned around before she could say or do anything else, opting to keep yourself busy by straightening your beach towel. Topper and Kelce tried to distract themselves by talking to one another and Rafe, knowing how you felt about your former friends, glared at them from behind his sunglasses. 

“Are you serious?” you heard JJ say from a distance. You looked up and saw him scoff as he dropped his beach towel on the floor and walked to you, seeing you surrounded by three of his least favorite people. “You’re hanging out with Kooks now?” 

“What’s it to you?” Rafe asked nonchalantly with a hint of annoyance. JJ looked beside you, where Rafe was sitting, and scoffed. 

“You let him speak for you now?” 

“I don’t need to explain anything to you,” you replied calmly. 

“So you decided to go ‘full kook’ and abandon your friends and, what, are you and Rafe fucking?” 

You looked at him from where you sat and gave him an incredulous look, standing up from where you sat and faced him. You crossed your arms across your chest as you thought how ironic it was for him to be complaining about the company you kept when you caught him cheating on you not too long ago. 

“You don’t get to ask me that when you cheated on me with Kiara,” you said aloud, gesturing at the other three Pogues walked tentatively towards the both of you, careful to keep their distance as you spoke.

“And you chose to be friends with them?” JJ asked. 

“Listen,” you said. “All of you have been friends way longer than I’ve been friends with you and for the past few months, all of you have been acting like I’m not even there.” 

“We didn’t--”

“You did, JJ,” you said, snapping your fingers in front of his face to acquire his attention. “You pulled away from me with no explanation and got annoyed every time I would ask if you were okay. You never bothered to call or text me anymore and ignored me whenever we were together, JJ.” 

“So you’re ditching your friends for some Kooks?” John B. asked. 

“I haven’t felt like I was one of your friends and every time I wanted to talk about it, all of you shut me out. I know you’ve all been hanging out without me and I’m pretty sure you guys knew JJ and Kiara were messing with each other too.” 

“But we’re your friends,” Pope pleaded. He looked back and forth between you and the boys who were sitting next to you. 

“Well now she’s found other friends,” Kelce spoke. “Maybe she’s allowed to have other friends.” 

“Not with dipshits like you,” JJ spat. 

“I’m allowed to have other friends,” you said. “With you guys, I felt like I couldn’t be friends with anyone else because all we did was hang out with each other. I never felt like I could do anything if it wasn’t with any of you.”

“Y/N,” Kiara began, “we didn’t--”

“You don’t get to talk to me and beg for my friendship,” you directed at Kiara. “You don’t get to tell me what a good friend is when you were fucking around with JJ behind my back. You kissed my boyfriend. It’s always about ‘family’ with all of you until you feel like something’s threatening that. All of you are so dependent on each other that you can’t accept when somebody wants to have a life of their own. None of you have been my friend for the past few months and, quite frankly, I’m done being treated like a rag doll.”

“And the Kooks are better?” JJ asked. 

“They make me feel included,” you said. “I don’t feel like I have to choose. I can be my own person when I’m with them and none of them made me feel ashamed for wanting a life without them. So, yeah, the Kooks are better.” 

Even the four teenagers standing in front of you had to admit they enjoyed how the three boys stopped messing with them like the previous summer and they hadn’t pieced it together until they saw you sitting with them at the beach. 

“Neither of you,” you said, pointing between Kiara and JJ, “get to tell me how to feel. You made your beds, now lay in it.” 

Hastily, you picked up your beach towel and paid no mind to the four pairs of eyes watching you leave. Topper, who noticed you neglected to pick up your bag, grabbed it for you as he beckoned for the other two boys to do the same. Neither Topper, Rafe, nor Kelce spared the Pogues another glance and, for once, it wasn’t because of their status; it was because they made you feel less than you were.  

“You know we love you, right?” Topper asked, bumping your shoulder with his. 

“I’m glad someone does,” you mumbled, rubbing your temple. 

You left the beach without another word and sat in the passenger seat of Rafe’s car, not bothering to look at your former friends as you drove away. But you felt a newfound sense of peace as you sat in the passenger seat, watching as Rafe queued a playlist, Kelce giving you a gentle smile, and Topper patting your shoulder as a silence gesture of telling you he was proud of you. All would be okay.

***

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[thehomothings]

Analysis of Kite's conflicting moralities, relationship with death, and the toll reincarnation may take on one's psyche

So, today I decided to compile all the thoughts I have had about Kite's interesting worldview since the first time I saw him into one post, mostly for my own sake, really. If you're familiar with the few posts I've made, you know it's gonna be a mess, but hopefully a comprehensible mess.

A heads up, this is going to be spoiler-heavy, and very much deal with subjects of death and dying as a whole. Also, some of these conclusions are drawn from my own experiences and close brushes with death, I'm not going to go into much detail but it might get personal and definitely dark. I'm not even sure if I can call this a meta-analysis, and I'm obviously no expert, so mayhaps take all of this with a grain of salt.

Been getting into drawing lately, and during the more simple and mindless part of the painstaking process of dotting every single star in this, I let my thoughts wander through the latest part of the fic I'm writing, and I got a better grasp on what exactly made Kite such an elusive character to me.

I'm not quite sure why I got so attached to Kite. Perhaps it was the air of tragedy surrounding him, how despite his sordid past he remained still open and gentle even if outlined by a healthy dose of cynicism.

But sometimes, I think it's the fact that he is so paradoxical. He's brave, yet fears death to such a degree that creates a whole Nen ability around it, is a pacifist yet will not hesitate to spill blood for his own sake or someone else's. Despite the many ultimatums and warnings of 'I will not protect you', he gave his arm and then his life to save Gon and Killua. He approaches each hunt and battle with a clear plan of action in mind, but his Hatsu takes the form of a roulette that gives him random weapons which are never what he wants, but what he seems to need for that exact situation, which he cannot dispel without using. When he draws a weapon, the decision is locked in and his or his opponent's fate is sealed. That's why each time he dubbs his weapon a bad roll. Every time he has to gamble, he sees himself as having run out of luck. When it comes to having to choose between himself and somebody else...well, there had never been a choice. In fact his aversion to using it may feed into its sheer power that we, unfortunately, saw too little of.

Let's go over his very first appearance when he saves Gon from the mother Foxbear.

It's not hard to see the strain searching for Ging has put on him; he's rash, prone to anger and punching a child for daring to get into trouble. In his mind, he's failing at his most important task, has not yet earned the right to call himself a hunter despite being in possession of his very own hunter license.

After killing the mother Foxbear and raging about having done so, he says this interesting line:

So yes, he finds killing for any reason rather irksome as most would do, yet I think something deeper caused him to absolutely lose it in this scene:

He had not been aware of Gon's identity, and despite being an animal lover and a naturalist, he made a choice to save the human instead of allowing nature to run its course. In fact, he says: 'No beast that harms a human must be allowed to live.'

How does one weight one life against another? How is the worth of it determined? The value of life... an impossible choice he's faced with and a choice which he seems to regret to some degree.

The Foxbear cub.

Here, he's speaking from experience, a tangible loss he has felt himself, and a hard and bitter life he does not want to impose on the cub.

His backstory is exclusive to the 2011 anime adaptation but there are hints alluding to it in the manga, for example, the fact that he does not seem to know his birthplace, or:

The choice of words is chilling.

Reading between the lines, one could draw the conclusion that he is an orphan. Something supporting this hypothesis is how he visibly deflates after Gon tells him his parents have (presumably) died.

So we see he is willing to go against his own moral code of not killing as to not doom another living being to the life he led, a lonely, hopeless existence that could barely be called one. He saw it best to put down the cub rather than leave it to die a painful, slow death.

The reason Kite himself isn't as cynical and cold-hearted as one would be after witnessing cruelty in its rawest form is those small crumbs of human kindness which he may have found in Ging.

It was not only a chance at an honorable life being Ging's apprentice gave him, but it also 'saved' him from being broken and twisted into what he hated and worst of all, death.

If we take that one minute of backstory as canon to his character-which I find myself inclined to do- these quirks of his make much more sense. He lived on the run. He lived on the knife's edge between giving up or pushing forwards. He lived as so a wrong move could be the difference between survival and the end.

Between rock and a hard place creates a mentality of black and white, absolute good or extreme evil, this or that. Except in reality, it's much harder than that. Deciding who to save and who to strike down is a heavy burden to bear.

It's almost easy to see how struggling to keep surviving could lend itself to a crippling fear of death and subsequently developing a Nen ability which once more goes against his own moral code in order to give himself a second chance...yet something about it strikes me as unlikely when I look at it this way.

Living life knowing it could end at any moment has the opposite effect, at least for me it did. One comes to accept that it is fleeting and while not eager to let it go, when death eventually and inevitably does come, there is no fighting it.

Especially when there is no hope that tomorrow will be a better day than this one.

Frequent near-death experiences numb one's fear in a way, even if it drives them to take precautions that render it unlikely to happen again and results in c-PTSD, but still, it does. It sparks a certain nihilistic view of 'if it all can end so easily, then what's the point of it all?'

Unless there are things to live for, a sure promise of a better future, and Ging gave Kite that. When he faced the threat of losing his second chance at life:

Really, what else could lead someone to develop the ability of 'the hell I'm going to die like this'?

I think a separate event, an even more brutal near-death experience that almost cost him his life as the hunter he so strived to be set him off to develop the secret roll of Crazy Slots, what I call Roll No.0, Ars moriendi. Unlike other weapons, it cannot come up in random and is directly summoned by him, or better said, summon by his overwhelming will to keep going and hopelessness of fighting a losing battle. I don't believe roll No.3 was the weapon that allowed him to reincarnate. I've named that one Wand of Fortune, a sort of armor instead of an offensive weapon since I find it hard to believe Kite, a Conjurer, would not focus on defences as well, and I will go into both mechanisms of these weapons hopefully in his backstory.

Despite knowing this battle to be a pointless one and being acutely aware of his soon to be demise, he did not immediately draw Ars moriendi, no, he stayed back and fought for the sake of the boys, kept Neferpitou occupied until they could reach safety. We can see evidence of this in the aftermath of the battle that seemed to have gone on until dawn, a torn apart landscape only signaling a fraction of the devastation that was Kite's power unleashed. It still wasn't enough.

In the anime sub I watched, when Gon apologizes to Ging about Kite's death, Ging said a sentence that infuriated me, because it belittled the utter suffering of the NGL trio.

"He would not die in your place." (No screenshot, sorry)

And I remember practically shouting at the screen, screaming 'how could you possibly say that? Of course he did. He absolutely did die in their place. How could you not know your own apprentice? Why-'

It was only last night that it hit me why Ging would say that.

Once upon a time, maybe Kite would not have given his life for anybody under any circumstances, even if he had a way out of it all. He would still need to die to come back to life.

His Thanatophobia could be attributed to the (possibly untreated) PTSD of the near-death experience in his later life, being so certain of dying that finding himself alive afterwards drove him to never want to go through that again. He quieted his fear by creating a sort of a loophole, that even if he lost the battle he would remain. Ging remembered that, but as evidence shows, something changed. Maybe he healed a bit, perhaps growing up dulled his fear to a certain degree, but eventually when it came down to his life or another's, he didn't choose himself.

Now, I can hear you saying 'but he didn't die, so what are you going on about??' And so I reply: Yes, he is alive, but he did die. He experienced that painful, horrible moment of staring death in the eyes and thinking 'This is it, this is the end', went through the actual process of having his soul removed from his body. And that moment stretches into infinity, ten lifetimes condensed into the mere seconds before oblivion.

Dying isn't so hard if one stays dead.

It's not so easy to open one's eyes and find oneself alive again after that, no matter how much that is the heart's desire. It's difficult, nigh-impossible to reconcile with life and walk amongst the living when everything had been so final, when death had been accepted to its fullest.

So Kite awakens, the twin of Meruem and back from the dead, his mind and identity both intact and fractured. In that he is Kite is no mistaking, yet he is not the same gentle pacifist whose first reaction upon sensing a monster's aura was to shield two kids from it at the cost of his arm.

I don't think many of you are familiar with Zoroastrian ideology, but Togashi is known for loving his religious imagery, and it's not only Christianism he derives inspiration from (evidence of which can be seen all over Kite's character and resurrection).

In Zurvanism-a branch of Zoroastrianism- there is talk of the twin spirits: Ahura Mazda -epitome of all that is good- and Ahriman -epitome of all that is evil-, the parent god Zurvin decides that the firstborn may rule in order to bring "heaven, hell, and everything in between."

Upon becoming aware of this fact, Ahriman forcibly tears through the womb to emerge first. Sounding familiar yet?

Zurvan relents to this turn of events only on one condition: Ahriman is given kingship for 9000 years, and then Ahura Mazda may rule for eternity.

Meruem ruled for 40 days, his death leaving the throne vacant for ant Kite, wearing a dead girl's face and seeming to be brewing some nefarious plan. No more is there any sign of that unrelenting pacifism and the sanctity of life he held so high, losing his own may have only served to show him how meaningless the pain and suffering he went through had been, dying only to be reborn as a member of the species that killed him. It may be that he has no desire to rule over the remaining Chimera ants or create an army of his own-

Yet I dread to think what a broken mind possessing limitless power might do to the world.

And that's it. If you made it this far, thank you for reading! If you found it interesting, stay tuned, as I think a lot and I will make it your problem.

[smoochkooks]

—chapter four: white lies

this is a part of my an ode to a broken heart drabble series.

pairing: jeon jungkook/reader

genre: unrequited love, best friends to (?), heavy angst, future smut

word count: 1.5k

summary: it came easy to you to lie. but with every untold truth, you were hurting more on the inside.

previous || next

one year and 6 months ago

April was exceptionally moody that year.  

Every day you woke up to either heavy rainfall or a beautiful, cloudless sky. Alternatively, it could also snow for a couple of hours just to have it all vanish once the sun reappeared. As much as you loved Spring, you hated the capricious weather with passion.  

It was a normal, peaceful, Saturday afternoon. Saturday meant no classes to attend, no work to do on the side. It was just you in your small, cozy apartment, tucked underneath the blanket and binge-watching Attack On Titan.  

You were never an anime enthusiast per se, but you happened to befriend a doe-eyed weeb all those years ago. Your current occupation was just a part of the aftermath. It wasn’t like Jungkook was obsessed, not at all. He was actually far from it. Now, at the tender age of twenty-three, his old hobby was like a relapse. His love for anime was coming in waves every once in a while, gradually transforming into a two-months-long hyperfixation and then, it was nothing. And the cicle continued.

He was currently in the stage of re-watching Attack On Titan, hence why you had been forced to finally give the damned anime a try as well. Hell, he was even coming over tonight to have a marathon with you.

(He’d said that season three, his favourite, you had to watch alongside him.)

You: eren's annoying little shit  

Jungkook: told you so

You: but levi? damn I’d sell my soul for him  

Jungkook: for a 5’2 emotionally unavailable man?  

You: yep. that’s my type

It was far from truth. As much as you liked Captain Levi, he wasn’t Jungkook. You are my type, you wanted to write instead. There hadn’t been a man in my life who managed to even come close to you. But, as always, you kept those confessions to yourself.  

Right when you were about to play another episode, your phone buzzed again.  

Jungkook: I have a weird question  

You: I’m used to that  

You: shoot your shot.  

Jungkook: what’s your finger size?  

Confused, you read his last message once again. That was indeed a weird fucking question to ask, you thought. You had never really been a fan of rings. You only owed one - a gift from your grandmother she gave you for your sixteenth birthday. Rummaging thorough your drawer, you found it in a separate, black case.  

It still fit just right, so you took a ruler, measured the size and googled the results.  

You: it’s 7.5 I guess

You: why do you ask tho?  

Jungkook: I need you to go somewhere with me before our marathon if that’s okay

You: you didn’t answer my question  

You: but okay. what time?

Jungkook: ill pick you up at 5pm  

Jungkook: you’ll see  

Maybe it was for the better he hadn’t told you where he was taking you. If you had know, you would have backed away last minute. Come up with so lame excuse, blame it all on a headache or period cramps.

If you had known Jungkook was taking you to pick up an engagement ring for Soojin, you would have never come with him.  

When you parked in front of one of the most high-ranking jewellery stores dowtown, the solemnity of the situation hit you like a whiplash. You took a deep, shuddering breath. Jungkook was thinking about marrying Soojin. Jungkook was going to propose to her, soon. He was ready to spent the rest of his life with her. 

Jeon Jungkook, the love of your life, was about to slip out of your reach for good. 

You couldn’t cry. Not in front of him. You clenched your fists so tight the knuckles turned white.  

“I figured out you could help me,” Jungkook said, breaking the silence and unbuckled his seatbelt. “I checked Soojin's finger size once when she was showering and then I found out that your’s the same and well, you’re a girl so you obviously know more about jewellery than me and–”

“Jungkook,” you cut him off with a dry chuckle. You didn’t want him to speak. You didn’t want to see him. You wanted to jumped off his car and ran away from that place as far as possible. “You don’t have to explain yourself. I get it.”  

You smiled at him with reassurance. It was actually hilarious, how you mastered the art of feigning your real feelings when you were with him. It came easy to you to lie but with every untold truth, you were hurting more on the inside.  

“I’m here, so you don’t have to worry about chosing something horrible.”  

He grinned and you noticed a dust of pink covering the apples his cheeks. It was hard, so fucking hard seeing him happy because that was all you ever wanted and yet it pained you not to be the main source of it. Jungkook was twenty-three and already so in love he wanted to get married. You were going to see him in a black tux, a prince charming waiting in front of the altar for his princess.  

It ached. Why did it ache to see him happy?

The lady who worked at the jewellery store greeted you politely with a bow. “What can I do for you?” she asked.  

“We are looking for engagement rings.” Jungkook answered.

You could tell she was a bit astounded but her professional smile never faltered when she responded with, “Oh, that’s still quite unusual to see the couple chosing an engagement ring together.”  

You were about to protest but then, Jungkook did something you would never expect him to do.  

He grasped your hand.

(It was warm. His touch was soothing. Comforting. Then why did it hurt so bad?)  

“My girlfriend wants to chose the ring herself but she doesn’t know when she will get it.”  

To make matters worse, he sent you a wink. The store’s clerk cooed at the scene and clasped a hand over her chest. For her it was yet another day at work, yet another pair of adults who had decided to get marry.  

“You make a really beautiful couple.” she said. 

Even Jungkook’s hand squeezing yours couldn’t ease the sting you felt hearing her speak those words to you. You smiled lightly for good measure. She then pointed at the display and gave you some time and space too look at the options.

Your whole face felt hot. Jungkook was still holding your hand, still playing the role of a perfect boyfriend. He didn’t seem to notice what kind of effect it had on you. He didn’t know how fast your heart was beating, how warm his touch felt on your skin. It was all just a silly joke to him.

He leaned closer to you, so the store's clerk couldn’t hear him. His breath tickled your skin. “You’re blushing.” he whispered.  

“Shut up.”  

He chuckled and let go of your hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.”  

(No matter how much it hurt you on the inside, you already missed his touch.)

“It’s okay. Let’s chose my damned ring, shall we?” you proposed, mustering a nonchalant tone.  

Dodging uneasiness with humor always worked out, it seemed.

You felt odd and out of place standing next to him and staring at all those glimmering jewels. In the corner of the eye you saw the lady who worked there glancing at you from time to time and that was when you remembered you were supposed to act like a soon-to-be fiancée. 

“They’re all pretty.” you said to Jungkook. 

“Which one you like the most then?”  

You didn’t have to think long about the answer. The ring with an emerald stone caught your eye from the beginning. It was different than the others, definitely not a standard choice for engagement but something about its peculiarity made you want it to have it shinning on your finger one day.  

Except, you weren’t here for yourself. Jungkook wasn’t your boyfriend. You were helping him chose a ring for Soojin. And you knew exactly what she would like.  

So you pointed at the number thirty-two. A sparkling, white-gold ring with an oval-shaped diamond.  

Jungkook let out a hum. “It’s really pretty, yeah. Excuse me,” he called. “My girlfriend would like to try out this one.”  

You ignored the phantom pain you felt as you put the ring on. You flexed your fingers and just for a moment, you pretended it wasn’t a farce your best friend came up with. The diamond shone brightly just like the glimmers of happiness in Jungkook's eyes. He didn’t have to worry about Soojin's answer. He knew it would be thousand times yes.

You were good at pretending. After all, you had been practicing the art of it almost your entire life.  

So you drove with Jungkook to your apartment and listened to him babbling about his newest project at work. You made snacks, sat in front of your TV and spent the next couple of hours watching Attack On Titan. You cursed him for spoiling you a few bits of the show and Jungkook, like the petty Virgo he was, reminded you how you accidentally revealed him Little Women's ending because you had read the book years before.

As you laughed and bickered with him, you still remembered about the crimson box tucked in the pocket of his leather jacket, but you didn’t allow yourself to break. Not yet.  

It was only when Jungkook fell asleep around 1am that you stepped into the shower and let the tears flow.  

And a week later, when the dreaded became real–

Jungkook: she said yes!!!

A white lie was told to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.

You: I’m so happy for you, Jungkook!  

After all, the best you could do was give up your happiness for the sake of his own.

[my-mt-heart]

TWD 11x08 “For Blood” Review

Welp. This episode wraps out part 1 of the final season which can be summarized in two words. Nothing happens. So many are understandably upset that Daryl and Carol have not spoken one word to each other nor seemed to even be connected emotionally, and I know that might raise fear about what it means for their story going forward. Maybe Angela Kang doesn’t care about their relationship as much as we thought. Maybe they’ll be put on the back burner for the rest of the season. Maybe they won’t go canon after all. Well, babes. For what it’s worth, I personally don’t think this block is a reflection of what’s in store for Caryl. Why? For one thing, their story is not the only one that suffered. 

Practically no part of the story in eight whole episodes, with the exception of Connie’s and Kelly’s reunion, saw any movement. Carol is mainly a plot device. Maggie and Negan rehash the same argument over and over again. Eugene, Ezekiel, Princess, and Yumiko have not accomplished anything substantial at the Commonwealth. Alexandria is really no more or less broken than it was at the top of the season. Our people started off with no food, and they still have no food. Pope and the Reapers came in hot with their ninja skills and religious cult mentality, and have since done nothing. And now Pope is dead. As for Leah, oh, I will get to that. Don’t you worry. 

My point is, I think we can all agree part 1 was too slow, lacked connective tissue, and was just, well, not good. I apologize in advance if my review feels more like a long rant at certain points, but like I said, I’m here to give my honest opinion. Before I do, I want to clarify that 1) I’m aware there are still two more episodes to go of the Reaper arc, which could make all the difference. I really hope that it does. And 2) Just because I have a bone to pick, it does NOT mean my stance and expectations for Caryl have wavered. I am still very confident about where all of this is leading. It’s just taking a lot longer than we’d like to build up to it. As is typical of this show, it’s only a matter of time before we finally turn a corner. 

Though it isn’t surprising at this point, it still pains me that Carol hardly gets any screen time in this episode. I understand she had a big, complicated arc last season. I understand her arc this season is to try to make amends, absolve her guilt, and prove to Daryl that she belongs with TF.  BUT. That does NOT have to mean her role gets completely shrunken down to someone with her tail tucked between her legs who’s just going to stand off to the side while other supporting characters, guest stars, and unpopular villains get more story. Carol could’ve been pulling badass Terminus moves at the Meridian, but instead she’s rounding up horses and boarding up windows? It’s ridiculous, and a waste of her potential. Again, I say this without knowing what’s to come in part 2. 

It takes an extremely talented actress to shine in small moments, and as we all know, Melissa McBride is one of those actresses. I maintain that a conversation between Carol and Connie would go a long way to help both women find some peace of mind, but their quick little exchange in the kitchen still manages to do me in. The surprise and relief on Carol’s face when Connie says, “I wanna go with Carol,” is so powerful and beautiful. My heart soars, you guys. 

Also, for the first time in forever, Carol has a brief interaction with Judith, who like Connie, wants to go out in the storm to help her. Carol tells her she needs her to stay inside to “help the other kids feel less afraid,” and Judith lives up to her word, being there for Gracie when she doesn’t want Aaron to leave. It’s clear that Judith really looks up to her Aunt Carol as well as her Uncle Daryl. We definitely need more scenes between them. Please and thank you. 

Though it’s always nice to hear Judith talk about Michonne, to me these moments are becoming a bit stale. The sentiment is repetitive. Judith is sad her mom isn’t around, and then one of the adults tells her it’s okay. In this episode, it’s Virgil, who it turns out is still alive and kicking. For how much longer, I’m not sure, because it seems like he’s already served a lot of his purpose. He saved Connie, who very sweetly rubs his arm in one shot, and now he tells Judith everything he knows about Michonne’s whereabouts which is essentially nada. I don’t necessarily want him to die, but he is high on my list of death predictions. Speaking of death, Judith and Gracie are 99.9% NOT going to die in the flooded basement, so it feels like a real waste to leave on that note. Just saying. 

Rosita is a total badass. She’s another female character who’s been unfairly sidelined lately, so I’m glad she gets to slay some walkers. Meanwhile, Maggie, Negan, Gabriel, and Elijah are leading a whole herd of walkers on the Meridian, which is very cool, but at the same time, I still find it hard to believe Negan of all people would be the one to teach them after only spending a few days with the whisperers. Remind me again why he’s needed at all on this adventure aside from forcing tension between him and Maggie, who seems to know her way around very well?  At least we’re spared their bickering this time. Sorry, not sorry. I do think it’s kind of cute the way Negan helps Elijah when they get injured from the explosion. I don’t know. Can’t explain. 

Now. I have a funny feeling that a lot of people are going to take the Daryl and Leah scenes at face value, so let’s discuss those. Yes, Daryl tells Leah he thinks about what would have happened if they had just stayed at the cabin. Yes, he does confess that Maggie and co. are his family, and he does make an effort to get Leah to come with him. But before you get discouraged, I want to reiterate a couple things.  First, Daryl is being strategic again. He sees Leah getting ready to blow Maggie and co. up, so if there’s ever a time to try to make a final appeal, it has to be now and it has to be good. Second, as I said last week, the purpose of Daryl’s arc so far is to challenge his character  to not let a dark past consume him again, and for someone who still bases his self-worth on “never leaving anyone behind” (this quote from the SDCC trailer actually doesn’t come up at all), moments of confusion are bound to happen. I think it’s okay that they do. 

It is no coincidence that the cabin, aka a reference to the past, adds fuel to the conversation, and I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the language used is very reminiscent of events that transpire between Daryl and Carol. At one point Leah says, “It’s hard to watch someone you care about change when they’re hurting other people you care about too.” She’s talking about Pope I believe, and while  Daryl surely applies the sentiment to her, knowing she’s trying to hurt Maggie and the others, it also makes me think back to his arc throughout season 10 where he tries to protect Carol from that very thing, begging her to “come back with him.” Side note: There’s a big difference between Daryl telling Leah she “could” come with him (insert shrug emoji) and Daryl telling Carol she’s “gotta” come back with him, throwing a desperate “please” at the end. One is extending an olive branch, the other is a necessity for his livelihood. It stands to reason that Daryl, feeling like he failed Carol during the whole Alpha debacle, sees an opportunity to make amends through Leah, and it probably helps that Leah looks a lot like Carol. It is a FAR cry from loving Leah, and if you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the showrunner. This is a direct quote from Angela Kang on the Episode Insider [full version here]: 

The thing we wanted to show with this story is that Daryl and Leah in a lot of ways have exactly the same attitude. They may have once had a romantic relationship, but they’re never going to choose each other over the people that they have loved and fought for because they simply cannot really trust each other. There’s sort of a toxicity at the base of that relationship, and so when Daryl tells Leah [about his family], it is absolutely a gamble. He doesn’t know what the outcome is going to be. What he has seen of her in the more recent episodes is that there is that core to her that still believes in things that are not just what the Reapers believe. I think he sees that there is still a good person in there, somebody who is still emotionally affected by pain and suffering, who cares about other people, who is protective, and Daryl doesn’t really have the heart to try to kill her right there, and so the best thing he could do is to try to bring her in on it. In his mind, he thinks ‘either she’s going to help me or she doesn’t. Either way, there’s going to be a battle here, but I feel like at this moment in time, I might be able to gain more by telling her what’s going on than by not telling her.’ 

Need I say more? The relationship was always doomed, friends. Daryl’s efforts to help Leah were always doomed, and if that final shot of her glaring menacingly over the wall while launching explosives at our group is any indication, get ready. She’s going to be the big villain for the remainder of the arc, which I still believe will span over episodes 9 and 10. We’re almost over the hump. The worst is over. The chance for redemption has come and gone. 

While I’m not concerned about the deeper meaning behind Daryl’s and Leah’s scenes in this episode, I do still take issue with the way Daryl blows his cover. There was an opportunity to really build up the stakes and suspense, catching all characters off guard at once. For example, by discovering the knife or by capturing Carol or both, and instead the writers went with the lowest hanging fruit. Sure, there is still a chance for one of these situations to occur (not that I was ever confident about the knife), but the impact isn’t going to hit nearly as hard. It’s really unfortunate.  

As for the overall value of the Daryl and Leah arc? I don’t know how to say this without sounding condescending so I’m just going to say it. An important rule of thumb for writing? If you’re going to introduce a storyline you damn well know is controversial, you better work your ass off to earn it. As I’ve stated before, I don’t think Leah’s character or even just the idea of a former love interest for Daryl was ever necessary, but I do think it could’ve been earned. The only way to do that is to use Daryl’s past love life to inform his present love life, and so far that has not happened. There are subtle hints, but a lot is missing. For example, while I absolutely don’t need explicit sex/love scenes between them, I do want the show to stay true to a character who’s been portrayed to have intimacy issues. I want to see the payoff of highlighting a bracelet that Leah wears on her left hand just like Carol, and losing an adopted son just like Carol. I’m reserving judgement until I see the arc play out in its entirety, but it’s worth flagging. 

All that aside, I was fairly accurate about the order of emotional beats we would see, which is just to say tracking these kinds of things can prove very useful. The same exercise can work on Caryl too. Literally the only remaining step is for them to confront each other and try to set things right. It’s just a matter of when the show decides it’s the appropriate time as opposed to letting it happen naturally. You would think this fiasco with Leah would give Daryl some perspective on his relationship with Carol , but I guess we’ll see. Sometimes it seems like  the only thing the writers can think to do to avoid blowing their load too soon is to simply keep Daryl and Carol away from each other. For the record, this is a terrible approach. It is what it is though. Here’s hoping 11B will be worth the long hiatus.

11x01 “Acheron Part 1″ Review

11x02 “Acheron Part 2″ Review

11x03 “Hunted” Review

11x04 “Rendition” Review

11x05 “Out of the Ashes” Review

11x06 “On the Inside” Review

11x07 “Promises Broken” Review