#eye find john's black dog funny

[silver-stake-through-the-heart]

@shallowseeker @angelsdean

Sam inherited John's drawing skills

– Sam in 3x05 – John Winchester's Journal

– a black dog in John Winchester's Journal

Meanwhile, Dean in the Men of Letters Bestiary

[madelynraemunson]

— along for the ride ☆

🐃 the tag team (co-writers): @joshlmbrt @swiss-mrs @mediocredreams 🩶

eddie x fem!reader

a/n: reading flight of icarus and finding out eddie is from tennessee REALLY husked my corn 🤠 also, this may or may not have been inspired by the bull fight scene in hoard

cw: daydream p in v sex, riding, eddie gets a hard on watching reader ride, innuendos, play on words

Stamina. Strength. Strategy. Safety. The Four Important S’s when it comes to bull-riding. 

‘Support’ is your unofficial fifth. You’ve generated quite the following after showcasing your riding skills at Whisky Jim’s every Saturday night, the ooohs and aaahs of your spectators filling the air as the spotlight drenches your cute… calculated… perspiring body. 

Bull-riding at the dive bar every weekend has become a favorite hobby of yours. It’s a perfect outlet for all the stress, the rough-and-tough of it all perfectly counterbalancing your slow-as-snails, but somehow busy and draining 9 to 5. Riding gave you something to look forward to.

“Look at her go,” an onlooker coos in admiration. “She’s got life by the goddamn horns.”

You toss your head back, glossy lips parted in excitement as the crowd’s appreciative hoots and whistles filled the air.  You could get used to this. You have gotten used to this.

Even with the world at your feet, things were starting to get boring again. And you are constantly craving something wild, something new. Something or someone that will make like the bull by sweeping you off your feet and taking you out for a spin.

Someone like Eddie Munson, perhaps.

Eddie isn’t sure what drew him… here out of all places. But something about the rowdiness compels him as he climbs out of his van, Halen and into the bar, boots scuffing the hard wooden floor. But the flight-risk metalhead is determined to find out, itching for adventure as he saunters with feigned confidence into the southern saloon. 

He flags down the closest bartender, a country heartthrob of a man with black hair and blue eyes. The Casanaova places a coaster down in front of him as Eddie steps up to the plate. “What’ll ya be havin’?”

“Anything local,” Eddie replies, more of a question, unsure of what exactly is available. “Anything hoppy.”

“Bottle or Tap?” the man follows up after a curt nod, mindlessly running a hand over his thick mustache.

“Tap. Pint, please.”  

The bartender gives another nod before disappearing to fulfill Eddie’s request. Meanwhile, the outcast takes this short window of time to look up and down the bar at the different patrons. 

All from different walks of life. But all here for presumably the same reason.Whisky Jim’s is decently packed, but for the most part, the crowd is congregated either in booths, at tables, or in the middle of the floor.

A glass is placed onto the coaster. The same deep country twang effectively regains Eddie’s attention.

“Wanna start a tab, brother?” The older man asks with a polite grin, eyes crinkling up at the sides as he does. 

Eddie offers a polite smile in return.

“Uh, sure. Thanks.” 

The bartender studies him intently this time, crossing his arms over his broad chest.

“First timer?”

 Eddie clears his throat uneasily, kicking at the peanut casings at his feet to avoid contact with the John Wayne of a man that was in front of him.

“Obvious?” 

The man cackles at Eddie, the slight patronization of the old-timer’s demeanor making him want to evaporate. But the amused blue eyes and downturned smile indicates it’s all in good fun, much like his uncle Wayne who always liked giving him a hard time whenever he made himself too small. 

“Son, you couldn’t stick out further if you were a dog’s balls.” 

A fellow bartender laughs at the man’s remark. Then Eddie joins in. It was pretty funny. 

“You just don’t really look like the kind to be into square dancin’, is all,” the bartender remarks as he narrows his eyes at Eddie. Eddie shrugs and takes a sip of his beer, slightly wincing as the first sip hits him.

“Well, you’re not wrong. Just thought I’d explore a bit outside of my usual.” 

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Eddie.”

“Greg.” The bartender gives him his hand to shake. “You from around here or you comin’ from outta town?” 

“Hawkins.” 

“Not too far from home then. And it seems you came on a good night.” 

And as if on cue, the crowd towards the middle of the building erupts in cheers. Eddie briefly glances over his shoulder in the general direction before turning back to Greg with a curious head tilt.

“What’s happening?” 

Greg nods his head over in the direction of the crowd.

“Bull Ridin’ Night.”

Your thighs are wrapped around the firm leather seat as you’re whisked around in one fluid motion. You turn to give your rapt audience a wink. The crowd eats up your presence, evident by the adorn kisses they blow your way. You buy into the theatrics, pretending to catch them before putting them in your back pocket for later. It only riles the audience up more.

“They bring that thing out on Saturdays,” Greg explains. “Between the Karaoke Nights and the Hoedowns, Bull Ridin’ is one of the most popular.”

 Eddie tries another glance in that direction, but due to the crowd, he doesn’t have the best view of who is actually riding.

 “You gon’ give it a try?”

 Eddie’s head whips back around to the older man to find a teasing smirk on his face. Eddie shakes his head.

“I… don’t think so.” He chuckles. “I’m not the most balanced or coordinated person.” He admits that with a grimace and another sip of his Hawkins Pale Ale. 

“I’m just teasin’ ya, boy. HEY!” Greg whistles at the bartender next to him. “Who’s up there now?” 

 The coworker throws a quick glance over their shoulder before replying. There’s a bashful smirk when they reply, 

“Who do you think?” 

The crowd erupts again, cheers and whistles alike. Who else gets this kind of crowd engagement? No one else other than you, of course. 

“Looks like my girl is up there breakin’ hearts again.” Greg lets out a soft laugh. 

Eddie gulps as his breathing shallows. A girl? Up there? On that thing?

Eddie, once again, nearly strains his neck trying to get a glimpse of the rider. When he fails, Eddie turns back to the bar, downing the final quarter of his pint, before looking back at Greg.

“Fetch me a bottle for the road, yeah?”

 Greg issues him a chuckle, grabbing the empty glass and handing him a bottle version of that very ale, while Eddie sets off on his curiosity journey to the middle of the floor.

“Boys will be boys.” Greg’s female coworker remarks with sassy pursed lips.

Eddie closes in on the crowd,  slipping through the few empty spaces between the onlookers with half-assed ‘Excuse me’s. Though no one was paying him any mind. And when he settles by the barrier, just a mere two rows behind, he finally gets the perfect view of you.

Eddie couldn’t fight the grin that spread across his face at the sight of you working the crowd. He watches as you give a practiced flick of your hips to get the crowd going and the enticing jiggle of your breasts under your tight shirt. Drew in Eddie’s eyes like a laser beam. The thin material was stretched taut, giving a hint of the perfect tits underneath as you arched your lower back and thrust your chest forward to keep your balance. 

“Christ,” he exhales sharply, in awe of your natural performance, the boisterous, unpredictable gravity of the machine whirling you around as you wrestle to hold on. 

His eyes drink in the sight of the soft, rounded curve of your ass that peeked out of the bottom of your faded Daisy Duke’s as you lean forward to steady yourself in the saddle.

WHOOSH!

The bull jerks sideways and you flex your thighs and circle your hips in the saddle to keep yourself astride. The plush skin of your upper thighs press tightly against the seat and your upper body sways in rhythm with the bull’s movement. 

You were born to ride.

“That’s how you do it, Indiana!” a spectator hoots in adoration as you cling on for dear life. “That’s how you do it!”

You give a deep roll of your hips to meet the thrust of the machine, causing Eddie to run the tip of his tongue along his bottom lip before sucking in a shaky breath. Your hips… the way they roll… is almost hypnotic, and Eddie’s brown doe eyes can’t help but linger on the sliver of skin that peeks out, black, intricate swirls of cyber-sigilism that tease him slightly. 

Fuck.

“God, she’s so pretty…” he thinks to himself. “And she knows how to ride.”

Eddie’s eyes trail to the white of your knuckles, his own fingers gripping the bottle of his beer when his eyes slide up your arm and land on your face.

The front of his pants start to feel uncomfortably tight. Eddie adjusts himself as discreetly as he could, but even the soft brush of his fingers against the strained denim causes  him to hiss under his breath.

“Ride it, cowgirl!” an audience’s comment centers Eddie once again. “LET ‘EM KNOW!”

The way you matched the bull’s gyrations and anticipated its every move made him weak in the knees, and as he watched you swirl your hips in the saddle like a modern day Annie Oakley he couldn’t help but wish it was him straddled between your shapely thighs instead. 

As Eddie stood there watching, the dull roar of the crowd faded into the background. At that moment it was just you and him. 

In his mind he’s already lassoed you to his bed; and you’re sat astride him like a cowgirl in your saddle, hands splayed on his chest for balance as you lowered yourself onto his throbbing cock. And you’d bite down on your plush lower lip and let out a soft moan as you sank down onto him slowly, taking your time and adjusting to his size. 

“Oh, Eddie,” he could almost hear you purring. “It’s so big.”

And he’d chuckle with false modesty and rub a hand tenderly along your thigh as if to soothe the delicious stretch of his thick girth.Then once you adjusted, you’d move, meeting each unpredictable roll of his hips with your own as you mastered the rhythm of your very own long-haired bucking bronco.

And he’d be gripping you tight with each deep thrust, pistoning, plowing himself into you while watching his cock disappear into your slick pussy over and over with each forceful snap of his hips. And with every strained mewl he milks out of you he’d press you down by the hips and drill into you further, your weak cunt just about ready to tap out on top of him. This handsome bull’s sure a challenge, you’d be thinking to yourself. Eddie is a ride you wouldn’t be able to survive.

———

The crowd disperses when the show is over. Eddie stands a bit straighter when you finally leave the middle of the floor, eyes darting towards the plush smirk that your soft lips create. If it’s even possible, he thinks you look even more heavenly. He’s sure you don’t even realize what you’re doing to him. 

Little does he know that for you, he’s taken that same effect. You’ve grown so accustomed to everyone here that a new face has captured your attention. And you felt him staring at you, with a gaze so impassioned that you just about almost lost your footing up there. But you pulled it off real well, attempting to shake off the redirection in the form of a dramatic bounce of your tits.

It perplexes you. A man making you that nervous? Up until late, it’s become rather unheard of. You want to know this man and see for yourself what his energy is all about.

Eddie finds himself fixing his appearance when he notices your legs striding over, clearing his throat as his palm slides over the stubble that he had been trying to grow. 

“You know it’s kinda rude to stare the way that you do,” you remark.

“How so?” Eddie challenges. “Everyone else is doing it. What makes me different from everybody?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” you smile at him.

Eddie shifts his weight onto the counter, bringing the bottle up to his lips, taking another gulp. His eyes dart everywhere -- the metal buckle of your belt, the skin that was shiny with dried sweat, your hands that tap at the sticky countertop of the bar, the way your lips wrap around the tip of your bottle and the liquid that slips out and down your chin that he greedily wanted to tongue away. 

“Funny,” you observe. “I’m here every Saturday and I’ve never once seen your face.”

He thinks he’s looking over at an angel, really, heart beating faster when he realizes it’s him that you’d made an effort to come up to. Made an effort to get to know.

“Interesting that you saw me.”

“I see everything from up there. And you’re a newcomer, I can tell. Sticking out like a sore thumb in the best way.”

You invite him into your energy, closing up the distance between the two of you with a graceful stride in his direction.

“You were amazing,” Eddie says to you. “Really know how to put on a show, cowgirl.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eddie insists. “Spotlight loves you. Killer crowd engagement as well.”

“You a performer too?”

“Depends who’s asking.”

“Mmm, I don’t know…” you sigh dreamily. “Just a fellow performer lookin’ for some tips and pointers.”

Not much needs to be said to know that you two ache for each other, judging by how the intimate dive bar grows non-existent for as long as you two are captured in the forcefield of each other. Eddie thinks that there would be absolutely nothing better than giving you some pointers, his hand leaving the bottle, some of the liquid sloshing around the precipitating glass, heart pounding in his ears as he nods quickly. One rowdy night wouldn’t hurt anybody, he thinks to himself. And it’s very apparent that, the stunner that is you, wants take him for a spin.

“So what do you say, cowboy?” you cock an eyebrow at him. “Why don’t we ride off into the sunset, just you and me?”

dividers by: @animatedglittergraphics-n-more @saradika @mikeykuns

[johnwickb1tsch]

bittersweet ~ a yandere!John Wick x fem!reader sunshine/grump coffee shop AU... Part 21 all chapters

WARNING: NSFW, SEXUAL CONTENT, YANDERE SH!T. Plz take care. I luv u all. 😘

-You toss and turn, of course, utterly unable to sleep.

Your body does not get the memo that it’s a bad idea to fuck a man like John Wick, who is a killer who is holding you prisoner, and refuses to simmer down. You are uncomfortably swollen between your legs, your pussy aching with frustration, and in the wee hours of the morning you are certain you are about to lose your goddamn fucking mind.

 How is he really going to fucking know?

This is the stupid little thought that plays through your tired brain as you writhe beneath the covers, running hands up over your torso, pretending they are his.

Imagining his touch tweaking the sensitive tips of your nipples, his fingers buried inside you, seeking that sensitive place that drives you wild.

Yours are too soft, too small, not long enough or thick enough by half.

You try to trick yourself that it’s his unrelenting touch circling your clit, furious in his claiming of your pleasure as his own…

It’s not enough by half, and the release that washes over you is a paltry consolation at best, a weak pleasure that you know is a sad facsimile of the real thing. Still, you can’t stop yourself from sighing his name, and how has he mind-fucked you so royally in such a short amount of time?

It pisses you off, and in a last act of defiance for the night you flip off the camera high in the corner.

He’s probably not watching anyway. He’s probably asleep, snug in his bed with Dog, the bastard.

Feeling sad and not really sated at all, you curl into a ball and try to finally get some rest. It’s lonely in this big bed all by yourself, and by the time sleep finally claims you your pillow is damp with tears.

-When finally you wake in the morning, you are cold. The covers are down around your waist, and your shoulders ache, your arms at an odd angle out in front of you.

You never sleep like this.

There’s something on your wrists.

You open your eyes, blinking away the blur of sleep. Your vision focuses on something red.

A very neat line of shibari style knots encircles your wrists and half your forearms. They would have been beautiful, in a different setting. Like, not on your body, without your consent.

They’re not so tight to cut off your circulation, but they’re not exactly comfortable either. You strain against the silk rope, and find you can’t budge them.

You are so fucked.

“I warned you.”

John is sitting in the chair in the corner, watching you. He’s wearing all black again, a button down and slacks this time. Looking his best for you, or does he have somewhere to be? It’s not something you would have paid attention to before, but this morning, you can’t help but fixate on the fact that he’s wearing a leather belt.

Because you’re an idiot, you snipe anyway, “Wow, looks like someone earned his merit badge in macramé.”

He just smirks at you, the beautiful bastard.

“I’ve got more than a badge, honey.”

“Very funny. Untie me.”

“You’ll have to earn it, bad girl.”

Your heart skitters around in your chest as you wonder what that means.

He goes on, “Did you really think I wouldn’t see you last night?”

“Guess I assumed you’d be sleeping. It was way past your bedtime.”

He scoffs at the old man dig, leaning forward on his knees, fixing you with that hawkish gaze. “I found out I only sleep well with you in my arms, darling. Wouldn’t that have been nice last night?”

Yes, it would have. However, you just frown at him.

“So, was it worth it?” he pushes.

You sigh, half tempted to tell him how utterly unsatisfying your little session of self-indulgence had been. Rather than answer him, you look at the knots again. They really are beautiful. It makes you think of the book binding shop you’d visited in Florence, and the complicated stitches and knots they used to affix the signatures of pages together.

This man likes binding all kinds of things, it seems.

“Are you hungry?”

Only then do you notice that he has a plate of breakfast foods on the little table beside him. Eggs, toast, and bacon. A little plastic cup that might be water or juice. Your tummy answers with a rumble. Dog did eat your dinner last night, and John never offered you a replacement sandwich. At the time you’d been too worked up about…everything, to care.  

“Maybe.”

He huffs a little laugh at you. “Come here.” He pats his knee, and you realize he wants you to sit on his lap—so he can feed you. A little growl in the back of your throat escapes you, and it only makes his smirk widen.

“God, you’re adorable when you’re angry.”

“I’m not hungry,” you grouse.

You are starving, and you both know it.

“Come. Here.”

There’s that chilling tone of voice again. It does not fail to fill your veins with ice, your heart skipping a beat before skittering irregularly in your chest. You’ve come to understand that it means playtime is over.

You are so fucked.

It is awkward, getting out of the bed with your wrists tied like this. You almost fall on your face, your foot getting tangled in the sheet. From John’s forbidding expression, you don’t think he would have caught you from hitting the floor this time.

You are still only dressed in the thin nightie, and the air is cold on your skin. Your nipples tighten, forming sharp peaks beneath the fabric, the silk lending agonizing friction that makes you want to press your thighs to relieve some of the sudden ache between them.

Last night so did not help you with this problem, and John’s eyes fixating on them does not help either, and you wonder if you’ll be in trouble when you stain his neat looking pants leg with your slick after sitting on him.

“Come here,” he says again, his tone much gentler this time.

Defeated, you shuffle forward, letting him guide you to perch on his knee with a hand on your hip. You barely manage to suppress a shudder as possessively his hand slides just under your skirt, resting on the warm pillow of your thigh. His long fingers are so close to your center, but he makes no move, letting you stew in it.

Bastard.

Only then do you turn to look at him, finding his gaze fixed on your face. “Good morning.”

When you say nothing in return he lifts one eyebrow, and you swear, this man will be the death of you out of frustration alone.

“Good morning,” you finally return, hating the meek timbre of your tone.

“Do you like scrambled eggs?” You nod, and he scoops up a forkful. You notice the fork is plastic, and you wonder if its for your safety, or for his.

He’s clearly never seen Hot Tub Time Machine.

“I would have taken you to breakfast in Venice, but someone had to run away.”

“Well, someone was an insufferable prig the night before,” you return primly, wondering what punishment this will earn you, unable to stop yourself from saying it anyway. He actually smirks at this, though his grip tightens a bit in warning on your thigh. Not enough to hurt, but oh.

You are definitely leaving a wet spot on his trousers, and you hate yourself a little more for it.

You finish your breakfast bite by bite like the good girl you’re apparently not. It was good, if not the weirdest seating arrangement you’ve ever endured. You tremble inside, as you wonder what he has in mind for you next, now that your energy is up and you are trussed like a holiday goose for his pleasure.

You couldn’t be more surprised, than when he deposits you on the bed, kisses your cheek, and bids you, “Have a nice day, sweetie.”

“Wait!” you exclaim, whirling as he is already halfway to the door, swinging his suit jacket about his broad shoulders. “Where are you going?”

“Out.”

You hate it, that hearing this fills you with panic. “Are you coming back?”

“Do you want me to come back?” There is a dangerous glitter in those dark eyes, and you know that is a question loaded with fourteen in the clip and one in the chamber.

You decide on, “I want you to untie me.” Holding up your wrists as exhibit A.

He shrugs a little, and you know that was not the answer he wanted. “Maybe later.” Then he sweeps out of the room, leaving you staring dumbfounded at the door where he’d just been. The man is like a fucking ghost.  

“Bastard!”

You hope he hears you, but you suspect the epithet falls on deaf ears.

-Your first order of business, of course, is trying to undo these beautiful fucking knots. Unfortunately for you, they are tight, and secure, and John was smart enough to make the finishing hitch with the end tails on the opposite side of your wrist where you cannot easily reach them with your teeth.

Sonofabitch.

If he’d left you Dog for company you could have enlisted the pooch’s formidable chompers, perhaps, but no dice on that one.

Fine.

You sit under the covers for a while, because you’re cold. You try to read, but it is infuriatingly difficult to turn the pages of a book and read comfortably with your hands like this.

You are certain lunch time comes and goes, without a peep out of John.

Did he actually leave you?

You hate it, how the thought makes a trill of panic vibrate in your chest.

Fine. It’s fucking fine.

He thinks he can break you with alone time? You? You are the Queen of Introversion. You can go for days without human interaction, happily, so long as you have a sketchbook or a book. Bring it on, Mr. Wick.

He left you the water cup with the straw, and boy is that an adventure to refill in the bathroom when you’re thirsty.

Going pee without making a mess is no small feat either.

You pace the room, just to get some exercise. You look out the window, watching the birds in the trees.

You laugh to yourself, banging your head against the bulletproof glass. How funny, that you’d once fancied yourself Jane Eyre, when it turned out you were destined to be Mad Bertha locked up in the attic by Rochester all along.  

You hate to admit it, but by the time the sun is starting to set behind the trees you are going stir crazy with wondering where the fuck he is.

It’s definitely not because you miss him.

It’s just…these fucking ropes, of course. It’s not those burning dark eyes, or those large sure hands, or that sturdy long body he likes to press to yours. It’s not that the silence of the room feels empty without his deep voice, even if he’s using it to taunt you.

It is late by the time you hear the locks on the door whir, and you have been sitting in your nest in bed feeling listless and way too sorry for yourself. You are half out of your mind with boredom, and your shoulders and elbows ache at the joints from the restraints at your wrist. You try not to show it, but you are ready to climb up the fucking walls.

Like he might have some inkling of this, John pays you a knowing smile, assuming his seat with the confidence of a king in his throne room. He snaps and pats his thigh, no words this time, expecting you to obey.

Someday, you are going to make him pay for this.

But now…there’s nothing for it but to play his twisted game.

He’s prepared some kind of stir-fry tonight, with vegetables, beef, and rice. You are starving by now, and it smells heavenly.

Again, the food is good, simple but filling. He feeds you forkful by forkful with a careful tenderness that could make you weep. Your time with John is like a game of Russian Roulette. Spin the wheel, which John shall you receive this minute?

It’s easy to hate Mean John. Insufferable Ass Hat John, could drive you to murder. But Sweet John? You would do anything, for Sweet John, and you’re afraid he knows it too.

It’s only been a day, really. Is that right? A day? And already, you feel yourself slipping into the mould he’s fashioned for you.

Perhaps in a knee-jerk attempt to counter this, you ask, “Did you used to play this game with Helen?”

He freezes with the fork halfway to your lips, his hand underneath your skirt with his dead wife’s name in your mouth.  

You meant to throw him off, but as far as you can tell, all it earns you is a scoff. “No.”

“Why not?”

He actually seems to consider your question, toying with the food again, re-loading the fork with a different bite. “I was never afraid she would leave me. Funny, how that worked out.”

You feel like he’s handed you an important piece of information. Emboldened by his quietness, you dare push, “And…what do you think she’d think, about what you’re doing to me now?”

“I’d say she lost her vote, when she left me.” The indifference is gone; this is delivered with a stinging bitterness, and you realize he blames her for leaving him. There’s a clue in this too, and you feel like the solution to all this is an illusive thing hovering just barely out of your grasp. If you can find just the right words, push just the right buttons…maybe you can bring him back to sanity?

“She never would have left you on purpose, John. She got sick. You’ve got to forgive her.”

And accept you can’t control everyone around you. Then preferably, untie me! motherfucker.

The only indication he gives that you’ve upset him is the tightening of his fingers digging into your thigh. You’re going to have bruises, but if he’s actually processing what you’re saying, it’s a price you’ll gladly pay.

He just continues to push the medley of food around on the plate, shaking his head in silence. Disappointed in his nonreaction to your question, you sullenly accept the next bite.

Three seconds later, your mouth is on fire.

You squeal with panic, leaning for the plate to spit it out. But John’s big hand clamps over your mouth, a hard glint in his eyes, and you know you’re going to have to swallow it. It takes three tries, but you manage, tears streaming from the corner of your eyes.

You can do moderately spicy food, but that was just fucking diabolical.

“What the fuck?” you hiss between coughs.

“I knew you’d have something smart to say tonight.”

You try to reach for the water cup with its stupid little straw and your stupidly bound-together hands, but John sets it out of reach. “Oh my god, please?”

He speaks calmly, as though the lining of your mouth is not being eaten away like you took a bite of rice laced with battery acid. “You keep speaking about Helen like you knew her. I suggest you cut it out. Unless you would like all your meals seasoned like this.”

You blow a long breath of air over your tongue. It only sort of helps.

Mother. Fucker.

You glare daggers, but for now, you’re wise enough (broken enough?) to keep your epithets to yourself.

He sits back in the chair to regard you, tossing the fork into what’s left on the plate. You’re still hungry, but you’ll be damned if you eat anymore from that dish. You flinch as he reaches for you, though he is not cruel as he grips your hair at the base of your head. Just…exacting, and he guides you to perch on the edge of the chair between his legs, your bare ass fitted against his crotch.

It feels good as he starts to braid your hair, a jarring contrast to the pain still simmering in your mouth. You whimper a little, despite yourself, arching into him behind you. You didn’t even mean to, really, but it wins you a low groan that fills you with forbidden warmth.

This is so fucked.

Nothing you’ve experienced in your life has prepared you for handling this.

When he finishes he wraps the new handle of your plaited hair in his fist, pulling you back against his chest. He is warm, and solid, and you fail royally as you try not to enjoy this contact. It’s ridiculous, but all you really want is for him to hold you.

He speaks against the shell of your ear, his other hand lightly encircling your throat. “I’ll never let you leave me.”

Your heart drums frantically in your chest; he means business. You can just tell, there is an unyielding hardness in his tone that somehow wasn’t quite there before. You thought you could reason with this man, but maybe you were wrong, or maybe you only succeeded in pushing his sanity the other way, further into the red.

Maybe there’s nothing left to reason with, and that is the thing that finally, truly scares you.

“Maybe you need something else to fill up that sassy mouth.”

With his improvised handle he guides you down to sit between his splayed legs. Your eyes are drawn to the newly erected tent in his pants, that formidable bulge that should be the stuff of your nightmares, but still inspires a maddening longing inside you.

Why do you have to feel so empty, when he’s near?

Frustrated by the unfairness of it all, you glare daggers up at him. You know what he’s angling to extort out of you, of course. It makes you sad, but not for the reason he might have expected. It makes you sad, because you would have rubbed your knees raw sucking him off, if he’d just asked you nicely.

“Thanks, but I’m full.”

He snorts at that. “Yeah? Someone doesn’t want her hands untied that badly.”

Now, that is something you want, and maybe you’re willing to play with that on the table. You’ve never thought of yourself as someone who is easily led, but he is good at manipulating you. It makes you wonder if any of it was ever real, or if this is just a game he’s been playing with you from day one.

The thought makes you sigh, and you rest your cheek on his lean thigh, closing your eyes.

He looks down at you like you’re a puzzle he’s not quite sure how to solve.

Welcome to the club, Mr. Wick.

“Were you planning this all along?” you ask. “When you were so sweet to me? Am I that fucking stupid that I didn’t see this coming?” Obviously, from the clothes in the closet, he’d hoped you’d come stay with him at some point, but all the rest? It feels spontaneous, like the way something hard can suddenly crack with too much pressure. But then again, maybe just because it took you by such fucking surprise.

He strokes your hair, and that gentle touch just makes it worse somehow. You feel the sting of tears in the corners of your eyes, because that gentleness is all you wanted from him. The ironic part is that he wouldn’t have had to do any of this shit, just to keep you.

You do not love easily, but once you do…it is a total, and all-consuming thing.

“I don’t know,” he answers begrudgingly. “I just…couldn’t let you leave me.”

You think about how he’d been an orphan. He’d lost his parents. He’d lost his wife. He’d lost his dog. He’d gone on a rampage and slaughtered an entire Russian Bratva…for the loss of a dog.

In perspective you guess he’d actually behaved rather tamely, at the threat of losing you. This man does nothing by halves, and the only thing John Wick fears, it seems, is losing those he loves.

Is that what he’d meant, when he said his love was a curse?

It doesn’t excuse it, but there is a key somewhere in that, you reason. A key to freedom, or the gates of Hell, you’re not really sure.

You do your best to blink away your tears. Maybe it’s stupid, because you’re not half as tough as he is, but you don’t really want him to see you cry.

He lets you sit like that for as long as you want, stroking your hair. It’s almost sweet, and it gives you time to collect yourself.

Someday, he’s going to figure out it’s best not to give you a chance to plot your next move. It occurs to you that maybe you have one last card to play.

You sit up slowly on your knees between his legs, and you can feel the intensity of his gaze weighing upon your skin. You reach for his belt, brushing his erection through his pants, his manhood twitching in anticipation. For just a second, he allows himself to close his eyes.  

Maybe you have power too. You just have to figure out how to use it here, and maybe not lose you mind over how thick and wonderful he just felt beneath your hand. That unhelpful pulsing between your legs casts its vote. You try to unobtrusively squeeze your thighs for some relief, but you fear this man sees everything.  

Good for you, that your voice sounds almost steady. “I have to say, you’re a brave man, Mr. Wick.”

It is not easy to work the buckle of his belt with your hands bound like this, but somehow you manage, even pulling it from its loops. You fight the urge to throw the damn thing across the room, but settle for resting it at his feet.

“How do you figure?”

“Well...” You flip open the top button of his pants, your fingers shaking slightly. “If we are engaging in that time-honored exchange of a favor for a blowjob... and you just essentially carpet bombed my mouth with napalm...wow, you do like to live dangerously.”

He sits still as a statue for a good few moments, weighing what you’re telling him, gauging if the capsaicin would transfer through your saliva to what is arguably the most sensitive area of his body. You’re 98 percent certain they would, and a part of you hopes he’ll opt to try it even after you warn him.

It would make for a neat little slice of revenge.

But then, what you really want is out of these ropes, and you hope your honesty will win you some points with him.

In the end he catches your hands, as you are awkwardly trying to work his zipper.

“Maybe we'll skip that for now.”

“You sure? Where’s your sense of adventure?”

He narrows his eyes down at you, and you wonder if you’re inventing it, or is there a glimmer of amusement in his dark eyes?

“In my other pants.” 

In the end he pulls you back up into his lap with a grumble.

You suspect you’ve only delayed the inevitable, but you feel some satisfaction for your little coup.

“I’ll be back,” he tells you, (threatens you?), depositing you on the bed, gathering the dishes and sweeping out of the room. You have a feeling this interaction was not half as satisfying as he’d hoped it would be.

Well, good.

Bastard.

-When he returns, he brings you a cup of milk. Though most of the pain from the chilis has already subsided by now, you accept it for the calorie count if anything.

“Are you alright?” he asks with a hand on your cheek, looking you over appraisingly.

Thinking this might be your best moment, you lift your bound hands with a pitiful pout, blinking your eyelashes innocently.

“Will you untie me now?” you ask in your sweetest tone, words loaded with contrition.  

“You think you’ve earned it?” he asks, and you sense this is a perilous path you’re approaching.

“I’ve been good.”

“Hmm.”

“Come on. I mouthed off. You punished me. You had your fun. And rather than give in to my initial vindictive impulses, I saved you from a very uncomfortable evening. It’s the least you can do.”

He actually chuckles at this, stroking your cheek with his thumb. He seems softened by your bright little tirade, but then this man’s mood can change on a dime.

“And, it’s starting to hurt,” you add.

It’s not a lie, and it seems that is the thing that makes him pause.

“You don’t like my knot work?”

Your heart lodges in your throat, and you know you must proceed with caution, or you’ll be wearing this shit for a week at least.

“Your knots are very fine, Mr. Wick.”

Your captor practically purrs at hearing that, a low rumbling sound from deep in his chest, his hand burying in your hair. It sends a tingling thrill all across your scalp.

You’ve come to reluctantly love his fixation with grabbing your mane.

You really are losing your mind.

“I’ll make you a deal, kitten.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll untie you…if you will take a bath with me.” His tone is the low rumble of a jungle cat, and your heart leaps into your throat. You knew this was coming, eventually. Maybe you just didn’t expect it tonight.

Looking back, you’re not sure why.

“NowI get to see you?”

You are still puzzling over the way he’d outright prevented you from undressing him, in Venice. It was almost like he’d been afraid, and you don’t understand at all. He’s fucking gorgeous, and you’re pretty sure he knows it. So…why?

“I told you, you weren’t ready then.”

You suspect the real answer is that he wasn’t ready, but for once, you don’t contradict him.

He runs a finger down the line of his neat knots that are starting to bite into your flesh. It’s starting to affect the feeling in your fingers, and you know that can’t be good.

“So? What do you say?”

You crane your neck to look up at him, drinking in the lines of his handsome face, his straight nose and proud lips, and the delicately drawn sweep of his eyes. Even with the shadow of a black eye, courtesy of you, he’s still the most handsome man you’ve ever seen. You shouldn’t want him, after everything he’s done to you. You shouldn’t, but you feel yourself inevitably drawn to him, like the moon pulls the tide.

You feel like you’re signing a piece of your soul away to the devil on the dotted line, when at last you nod.

He puts a hand to his ear with a smirk. “What was that?”

Your groan comes out like a growl.

“You have a deal, Mr. Wick, sir.”

His low rumble of approval gives you chills, and when he turns your face up to kiss you sweetly you utterly melt beneath his hands, jarred by the contrast from earlier, but not questioning it. You bask in the press of his soft lips, greedy for his tenderness, hoping stupidly that this is the way things will be from now on. Then you yelp with surprise as suddenly he scoops you up with his hands on your thighs, carrying you into the bathroom.  

[baohanhanesel]

Pirate Crew TF141 Brainrot

Their ship had been sailing high and low, searching for anything that would put a good penny in their pockets. Being pirates had started to become harder each day thanks to Shepherd and his damn seals. Soap found them funny, really. To think they could hunt down the most prized pirate crew of their time with the American navy ships. Funny, truly.

Crew 141 didn't take any of their shit, they had their priorities straight with one hell of a captain to follow. 

Captain John Price was a man to die for, as much as he was a man admired by many, most of his actions weren't actually to be admired… He was a man of few words but he never lacked professionalism. As much as professionalism a pirate could muster anyways. If you were with him, you'd have a warm plate at the end of the day and a trusted leader to follow. Maybe some rum and on your lucky day the occasional whiskey. Who knows. Price was a pirate respected by men and more. He was someone you'd give up everything just to catch up with. And the captain, being himself, never helped with that part. Dangerous situation calling for some down time? He never waited. If you are left behind, you are left behind. That's the way of the pirate world. The only mercy is ruthlessness.

His first crew had been a young boy in his golden age. Ready and quick to jump into action whenever it was deemed necessary. He was reckless, and a rebel in nature. Even with his captain that is John Price, he often ended up voicing any concern out loud. His courage and those soft honey eyes… He was a master manipulator, and the captain often let it slide. He didn't know any man in this world that would be able to say no to that man's persuasion. Kyle was an important asset.

Moving into their next recruit; The Ghost. Now, there were many rumors about the man turned monster. No one had seen his face behind that black cloth mask with the skull in front of it. The bone often made everyone recoil, even the other crews in the ship. Price never exactly told anyone anything about the Ghost, people just started coming up with stories. How The Ghost had been living in the underworld till their ship took him in. Or how The Ghost had been the son of Ares ( which would explain the body and scars) and that was why he was alive. Or how he was a monster made by men, just waiting for his chance to betray the captain and take his place. Price was cruel, but Ghost? He was far worse than him. 

So imagine people's surprise when this sun of a man pokes his head behind that brute's shoulder with the brightest smile one can see. John Mactavish; nicknamed “Soap” by his peers because of his slippery past. Literally, he had been on the run from the navy for a long time till Price took him in. No man managed to catch the man. He was an easy-going guy yet not without his own issues… He was just as reckless as Kyle but unlike him Soap's was uncontrolled. He often ended up bursting and scheming. He wore his heart on his sleeves and spoke nothing short of it. Everyone in the ship knew that Mactavish was an uncontrolled and feral dog. He did have a bite to him and often times people avoided the smiling guy, not being charmed by his pretty talk. But what everyone on the ship also did know was Mactavish was only loyal to the Ghost. 

So take it from here, these guys have been trusting each other and moving forward with the hopes of finding good treasure. Or else, they'd probably be better off surrendering to that old hag’s dog and giving him another bone. 

“There is no hope here too, captain.” Kyle sighed, sliding down the dock and jumping down the stairs swiftly. He pushed the binoculars to Soap's chest. The mohawked guy took it with a dramatic grunt. 

“If there ain't no hope why am ah gettin’ sent out aye?” 

Price could do nothing but to pinch the bridge of his nose, next to him Ghost only snorted. “You know he got a point, captain.” 

Price wished he had gotten paid to tolerate these guys sometimes. But then when he raised his head, he got a glimpse of Soap's proud smile and heard Gaz's soft snicker. And suddenly it all seemed payment enough to see the youngsters alive and kicking.

“Let's sail to the south.” The captain declared, his voice leaving no room for argument. “Take a look around there before we go to the dock.” 

“You got it, cap.” Gaz saluted with his pirate hat and climbed the stairs again, getting his hand on the wheel and making a sharp turn.

“Just so ye ken ca’tain. If we cannae find anything, we are sellin’ Gaz.” 

Ghost snickered.

“I don't know Mactavish, prostituting my favorite crew doesn't sound pretty nice to me.” Price sighed.

“Who said anything about prostitution, captain? He got some valuable eyes, does he not?” Ghost, ever the comedian, chuckled darkly.

Soap joined in on the soft laugh, far too genuine for Price's comfort.

“There is no staying in the same room with you muppets...” The captain all but did a tactical retreat, grabbing his hat and making his way down his room under the big flag of their ship.

Despite all the jokes and laughter, that Price didn't partake in, they were actually royally fucked if they couldn't find any treasure to take back.

[unholytemple]

thinking about late s1 samdean when they reunite with john. (tw child abuse and violence)

it’s funny how easily they fall into the same routines. they’re back hunting together again, dean plays the part of john’s well trained lap dog, and sam is once again the outlet for john’s anger.

sam’s still just as bitchy and argumentative as he was when he was a kid, and maybe it’s the disrespect or maybe it’s the fact that he has his mother’s eyes, but john can’t stand it.

john starts hitting sam again like he did when he was a kid. dean doesn’t notice at first, but when sam has an inexplicable black eye, he finds out. and he’s pissed. dean tells sam to wait in the car while he chews out their father for hitting sam. john gets a separate motel room that night.

later, sam asks dean why now, after all this time, he decides to stand up to their father.

“you’re a grown man, sammy. dad shouldn’t be hittin’ you anymore”

sam still doesn’t understand why dean would talk back to their father over something so insignificant. not until he catches dean staring at the blue bruise on sam’s face.

sam moves from his bed to join dean on his. sam’s got that faux-innocent little brother act going and he knows dean will melt for it.

“you don’t want dad to hurt me.” dean nods, confused. “you don’t want dad to hurt me because you’re the only one who gets to do that”

sam’s close to dean. far too close, and he’s getting closer. he wants dean to see every broken blood vessel in his bruise. he wants him to see the scrape from dad’s wedding ring.

“sam-”

“you raised me. it’s your right to put your hands on me. not dad’s.”

weather dean realized this was why he was angry at john for hitting sam or not, sam was right. only dean gets to hurt sammy. not some deadbeat old man who they had to chase across the country just to get his attention.

“why don’t you show daddy who i really belong to?”

dean tried, really, but john didn’t care. he looked at sam’s mauled face with disgust.

“you’re a grown man, sam. you’re too old to be picking fights with your brother.”

now all sam has is a broken nose, split lip, a yellowing bruise over his eye, and more daddy issues than a lifetime of therapy could fix. good thing he has his big brother to take care of him

[raina-at]

Familiar

This is very vaguely based on my fic Zing and You'll Miss It, but all you need to know is that Sherlock is a vampire, John is a human and magic exists.

--------

“This is a tiny bit humiliating,” John mutters, picking up the black cat rubbing its body against his legs.

He deposits the cat on his shoulder and moves further into the building. 

All witches have familiars, John, the cat purrs into his ear, sounding amused.

“I bet most of them aren’t actually vampire boyfriends, though,” John murmurs, looking around the crowded room full of dark-clad witches with their various familiars. He sees cats, dogs, snakes, crows, even a few large, hairy spiders.

Seeing as you are not actually a witch either, I don’t see why we’re having this conversation. 

John huffs an exasperated sigh when Cat Sherlock settles his claws into John’s shoulder to hold on, but concedes that he has a point. He grabs a glass of wine from a nearby tray and holds it up for Cat Sherlock to sniff. “Is this going to poison me?” he asks quietly.

I told you before, witches are human, and so is their food.  It’s why I needed you to get in here in the first place, Cat Sherlock purrs, and John has to bite down on a snicker because he’s never seen a cat roll his eyes before.

“So basically I’m your carrier.”

Cat Sherlock makes a movement that might be considered a shrug. You have other qualities, Sherlock purrs into his ear suggestively.

John squirms as Cat Sherlock’s wet nose touches the shell of his ear. “Can you not do this while you’re a cat? Makes me feel slightly pervy.”

You’re no fun at all.

John is about to respond when someone touches his arm. He turns around and comes face to face with a slight blonde witch in an alluring black dress. She gives him a charming smile and gestures at Cat Sherlock. “You talk to your cat too, I see.”

John smiles his most charming smile and shrugs. “You know how it is. Sometimes when he looks at me, I can almost imagine he’s intelligent - ow.” 

John glares at Cat Sherlock, who looks entirely innocent as he pointedly retracts his claws out of John’s shoulder.

The witch giggles and holds out her hand. “Oh, I know what you mean. I’m Pamela.”

John shakes her offered hand. “John. New here, actually.”

Pamela smiles and puts a hand on John’s arm, moving a bit closer. “I can show you around,” she says with a friendly, insinuating smile. “Not a lot of male witches here, bit of a breath of fresh air, honestly.”

Cat Sherlock narrows his eyes and hisses at her aggressively. Tell her to get her hands off you.

“Now, now,” John says, removing Cat Sherlock, who’s still hissing and spitting, from his shoulder. “None of that, or I’ll have you neutered.”

Low blow, Cat Sherlock hisses. Not funny at all.

“Why don’t you go have a look around, while I talk to Pamela here?” John asks, giving Sherlock a significant look. They’re not here for fun, after all. They’re here to find a missing cursed necklace.

Cat Sherlock gives him another hiss, and flicks his tail aggressively.  As long as blondie here keeps her hands to herself.

John rolls his eyes and sets Cat Sherlock down to the ground. Cat Sherlock glares at Pamela one more time, then vanishes into the crowd.

Pamela smiles indulgently. “He’s very cute.”

“He is,” John says, grinning, because he’s sure Sherlock can still hear them. “He just doesn’t want to admit it.”

Pamela laughs.

John decides that this is as good a place as any to start the investigation. He gestures over the waiter with the hors d’oevres. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Tell me, Pamela, do you come here often?”

*-*

An hour later, John is surrounded by several witches, who are all a bit tipsy, and some of whom are getting a bit too personal with John. 

One witch has her hand on John’s chest as she’s talking, and John would really like for her to stop touching him, but she’s giving him valuable information about their suspect, a witch named Esther. 

“She used to live up on the first floor, you know,” the handsy witch is whispering in his ear while stroking his chest. “Her old room is still unoccupied- ow!”

The witch flinches back and John looks down when he hears a loud hissing and growling.

Cat Sherlock is glaring daggers at the witch while he hisses at her threateningly.

“Your cat bit me!” the witch howls in outrage.

“Sorry,” John says, giving the witch a charming smile. “Never have been able to teach him any manners.” He takes his still hissing and growling cat-shaped boyfriend by the scruff and moves in the direction of the stairs. “If you’re quite done with the dramatics, I think I figured out where our lost necklace is,” he whispers.

Cat Sherlock stops struggling and glares at him. Unhand me at once!

John sets him down on the floor and crouches down. “Can we go finish this case now please?”

Cat Sherlock’s tail flicks in indignation, but he indicates the stairs. You’re going to have to carry me. My legs are short.

John sighs and puts a now pliant Cat Sherlock on his shoulder again. “You’re enjoying this way too much.”

Cat Sherlock says nothing, but the way he looks at John and licks his paw is answer enough.

*-*

“Stop it,” John hisses. 

It’s not that hard, John. Insert the pick, and feel for the pins, Sherlock instructs, watching John work as he’s perched on his shoulder. 

“I know. It’s really difficult to concentrate with you sticking your claws into my back. I feel like an oversized pin cushion.”

Cat Sherlock heaves a sigh and jumps to the floor. We’d be done with this already if you hadn’t spent all night flirting with everything that moves.

“Oi, I didn’t flirt with anyone. They flirted with me.”

Didn’t see you complaining.

“I was interrogating- Oh, finally!”

The door opens with a satisfying click, and John pushes the door open.

They search the room quickly and efficiently and find the stolen necklace within minutes. 

John breathes a sigh of relief as he puts the cursed object into the containment pouch Mrs Hudson provided them with. His relief turns quickly into horror as he hears a voice from the door. “Here you are, you naughty boy. I’d wondered where you’d gone.”

The handsy witch from downstairs seems to have followed him and is just closing the door to the room, blocking his way outside. She stalks towards him and backs him against the wall, putting a hand on his chest. “Oh, you’re so yummy,” she whispers.

“That does it,” a decidedly human voice says from the mouth of the black cat on the floor. There’s a sort of giant poofing sound, and Sherlock Holmes emerges from his cat body, eyes glowing red and fangs out, in full indignant glory. “Hands off,” he hisses, still sounding astonishingly cat-like. 

The witch screams and flees, and John takes one look at his bristling boyfriend and starts laughing.

“I’m glad you find this funny,” Sherlock grumbles.

John, still giggling, fists a hand in Sherlock’s ridiculous coat and pulls him closer. “I never noticed how catlike you are when you’re all hissy,” he says. “It’s admittedly sort of hot.”

“Sort of?” Sherlock asks, eyebrows raised in indignation.

John presses a kiss to Sherlock’s lips. “Very,” he murmurs, nosing his way up Sherlock’s throat. “Wanna go home and bite me a little?”

Sherlock makes a show of considering, but the possessive grip he has on John tells another story. Finally, he sighs and says, long-suffering but with a wicked grin, “Yeah, all right.”

-----

This was a deep cut into Raina lore, lol. But fun! Catlock!

I've started a collection of these ficlets on AO3 here and already added it to @calaisreno's collection.

Tags under the cut as always. Please let me know if you want to be tagged or untagged.

@jrow @peanitbear @keirgreeneyes @lisbeth-kk @jolieblack @totallysilvergirl @catlock-holmes @victorianpining @helloliriels @meetinginsamarra @discordantwords @givemesherbet-blog-blog

[stardustqueenbooks]

John Price x wife reader- Mrs Price?

John Price x wife reader part one

Series Masterlist:

Description: Taskforce 141 find out something new about their Captain

AN: short but a start to the series

(y/n)= your name, (h/c)= your hair colour, (f/h/s)= your favourite hairstyle, (e/c)= your eye colour

Taskforce 141 didn’t really know much about each other. They know Ghost is from Manchester, they know Soap got his name because he was good at “cleaning house”, they know that Gaz is quiet and shy, and they know Price had been in the military since he was 16. The group only knew the basics and what they needed to know about each other which was very little that’s why it was such a big shock to Soap when he saw the glinting of a golden band wrapped around his captains left ring finger.

Soap had never really paid that much attention to his captain’s hands, but he was sure he had never seen the ring before, Soap remembered seeing a ring on Price’s dog tags once, but he put it to the back of his mind as he never saw the ring again but now that he was looking at it, he had to ask.

“Captain, what’s that?” the Scottish man asked looking over the table at the man who had just finished his briefing with the team, every pair of eyes there turned to look at Soap as he stared at their captain’s hand. Price looked down at his hand and then back at the Sergeant, “it’s a wedding ring Soap, do they not have them in Scotland?”

The flippant reply would have been funny if Soap and the rest of the soldier’s stood in the room weren’t shocked at the revelation that their Captain was married. “Wedding?” the Scotsman asked, his eyes wide in shock and as he looked around at the others, he could see they were shocked as well. Price sighed loudly and nodded, “yes Soap.”

Price knew that he hadn’t told any of the taskforce he was married but he had presumed they had seen his ring before and has just never asked him about it but now that Soap had asked he realised that they actually just didn’t know. Price sighed, “did you guys not know I was married?” He asked looking at the members of his task force with his eyebrow raised in a questioning manor. Soap shook his head, he then glanced at the men next to him making sure they didn’t know either and it wasn’t just him, “no cap, we didn’t” he answered.

“You didn’t tell them about me?” A voice asked from the door making everyone inside the room jump. Standing there with a smirk on her face was a woman dressed in a RAF flight suit, her (h/c) hair was pulled back into a (f/h/s), big black sunglasses covered her eyes and her dog tags dangled outside of the suit with a golden ring that matched Price’s hung with them. The woman ripped her sunglasses from her face quickly and her (e/c) eyes stared at the captain, “I don’t know if I should be offended or not?” Price rolled his eyes as the woman spoke and turned his attention to the group. The captain swung his arm in the direction of the woman who he introduced to the team, “this is our pilot, she’s gonna drop us off and pick us up,” he paused for a moment singing heavily, “and she’s my wife, (y/n)”

Soap’s head snapped from the woman to price and then back to the woman with his mouth hung open, “your gonna catch flies if your mouths open any longer,” the woman laughed looking towards the Scottish man as she made her way over to her husband. Gaz’s eyes watched the woman and smiled, “so, your mrs Price?” He asked. The pilot laughed and nodded, “most people call me butterfly but Lieutenant Price will do as well.”

[midnightnautilus]

Wilbur Cross/Wilford Warfstache Fic

Summary: Wilbur Cross finds an anomaly in the Black and White.

Funny little crossover I thought I’d post!

Amongst all the errands and cavorting around Wilbur Cross had to do these days, there were times where he could just stretch his legs and take a break. More than he could say then the hours of the job he used to have, anyways.

Go figure, he thought, grinning to himself as he pulled out a lawn chair with a flat back from the void and propped it up in the ground of the Black. Wilbur took off his jacket and put his arms behind his head as he laid down. The thrum of energies that coursed through the void were nice background noise, and he’d even gotten used to the screaming and wailing.

Maybe he could rile up one of those Sniggles enough to go get him a brewski, make themselves useful.

“Damien?”

Wilbur blinked. That voice was new. He craned his neck up, his spine popping as it did so. Wandering through the void was someone he’d never seen before, which he didn’t particularly care for. Nowadays with the help of the Lord in Black, Ol’ Wiley could usually smell a timeline and their baggage on a person.

Still, must have just been a cult member of some poor bastard that wandered into a summoning circle. He certainly had the looks of one of Nibbly’s disciples, dressed from head to toe in glitzy, glittery pink. Even his mustache was tinged a bright bubblegum.

A far cry from a hooded figure, but it takes all kinds to make a reality.

The figure squinted at Wilbur with puzzlement. “Wait just a tick…you’re not Damien. Suppose he wouldn’t be just lying around, anyways.”

Wilbur couldn’t suppress a laugh. He hopped up to his feet to more closely examine the fresh meat. “Well now, aren’t you a big stretch of taffy! I don’t think I’ve met a ‘Damien’, but tell me…do you know where you are?”

This was usually the part where the victim stuck in the Black would realize their scenario and break down, but this guy just shrugged and ignored his last sentence. “Ah, well…he’s around here someplace, that rascal. Might see you later…or earlier…it all depends…”

“Oh no sunshine, you’re not getting away that easily.” Wilbur wasn���t sure what this guy’s MO was, but he wanted to find out before the guy disintegrated. He grabbed one of his suspenders as he walked away, which stretched for about 10 feet before he stopped.

That did it. The mustached man turned around. Annoyed, he yanked the suspender out of his hand.

“Hey! Hands off the merchandise, pally! I’ve gotta be camera ready in 2 hours! Or…two days?” The guy seemed as addled about time as a Spankoffski, muttering to himself about minutes and months. “In any case, it’s common courtesy!”

Wilbur leaned on a non-existent counter, staring down this man like a humorous display in a fashion show. “Pretty big talk from a guy who looks like he just stepped out of a discotheque.”

The man strolled up with a wry smile, apparently alright with the ribbing. “Well, aren’t YOU the clever canary, Mr. uh…”

He peered over to what Wilbur thought was his bare neck.

“Hey, doll, my eyes are up here…and my goods are a little lower,” Wilbur interrupted, hoping to at least get a night out of whatever this encounter was.

“Mmm…uh…John Macnamara? In the military, I see! I used to know…someone in the military, can’t exactly remember which—“

“Wh—-no!” Wilbur’s eyes darted down to find a dog tag around his neck. A remnant of a man he no longer was. How did that get there? He swore he threw it away.

He yanked it off his neck causing the chain to break and threw it behind his back. “My name’s Wiley, if ya must know. And you better ask all your questions now,” he growled defensively before regaining his composure. “before you bite the dust.”

“MhMMMMMM!” The man’s eyes glinted with mischief before getting out a sparkly pen and notepad from…somewhere. “Seems like a bit of a BREAKUP then, eh?” He questioned Wilbur with the air of a teenage gossip. “Some sort of estrangement happen with that little jewelry? Perhaps a—”

As he tried to zone out any of what this mush mouthed weirdo was saying, he looked at the pad of paper. Much too big to fit in a pocket. He rolled his eyes. Of course this fucker had the gift. He’d probably be dead by now if he didn’t. Whoop dee doo.

“Funnily enough, I’m also a Wil— Wilford Warfstache, at your service! You may have heard of my show and this pathos piece just might—“

Wilbur had enough of this guy. He yanked him up by his collar and narrowed his eyes, speaking in a low hissing whisper.

“Listen up, jellybean. Gift or no gift, unless you pledge your soul, you’re gonna DIE HERE. Which sounds better? Being at the mercy of a god…or becoming one?”

His eyes narrowed and glinted a bright green, his menace lacing his usual jovial tone.

Wilford blinked and responded almost admonishingly. “Now what did we say about the merchandise? Jesus, I’m gonna have ta get this PRESSED—“

Without warning, Wilbur sliced through the air with a shining obsidian-colored blade, scratching across the man’s clothes.

Wilford fell to the ground. He groaned with frustration before whipping out a Magnum pistol and firing three shots before Wilbur could blink.

The bullets didn’t hit - the Black made sure of that - but they knocked Wilbur flat on his back with shock, making him out of breath he didn’t know he had.

Wilford cringed at the sight of his destroyed shirt and sighed. “To think, I was gonna have you on for an interview.”

He strolled away, calling out, “Well, I’ll be seeing you, Wilson!” before disappearing completely.

Wilbur got up to his feet and looked around. “It’s Wil—“ But the man was nowhere to be seen.

Where in the fresh hell was that guy?

Had he died already?

And where the hell did he get a gun?

[roylustang]

Okay here’s a fun summary of my weekend in which I did not sleep

Saturday 3am: wake up

4am: drive to race venue

5am: Evan starts the race, I go back to my car and sleep for 3 more hours. I never really fell fully asleep but it did feel very rejuvenating so I’m fine with it.

8:30am - 8:30pm: Evan’s sister and I crew Evan for the first 50 miles of the race and watch the other races unfold. Lin Chen, who I first heard about in a podcast hardly a week ago wins the 100k race outright. She’s gonna get top 10 in western states later this month EASY—this was a training run for her. Actually first and second place in the 100k overall were women which is awesome. I eat spaghetti with my hands. Among many other things. A gopher pokes his head out of his little gopher hole for a little bit, he’s cute. An hour later a 3+ foot long gopher snake slithers through our tent, which Evan’s sister is terrified of. Someone saw a bear on course. Actually the guy who saw the bear was talking about it to someone on the phone while I was eating rice by my car. I get my shit together to pace Evan.

8:30pm: The sun has set but there’s still a little bit of light out and I set out to run with Evan for the next 38.5 miles (~62 kilometers). I’m fucking pumped. We have both severely underestimated the course.

9:30pm: we set up Pig Farm Hill, which is very steep and decorated with little plastic pigs (like rubber ducks). I’m still pumped and I feel prepared bc I just ran 34,000ft/10,000m+ of elevation last month.

11pm: we go up the second steep, long climb of the course. I will later conclude climbing is much easier at night simply for the fact you cannot see how much farther you have left to go. There’s also funny signs that say shit like “you’re not there yet! :(“ and “John 3:16” which is apparently a meme making fun of Christian white girls. There’s also direct action propaganda that says “Make [name of race] a Western States qualifier” bc the race director for western states is running the race.

Sunday 12am: Evan and I are on a road section of the course. It’s pitch black outside, obviously, no moon, but we have headlamps. I look up into the cliff face and see something very reflective. I pray it is a course marker up a switchback but I know in my heart it is not. It’s a pair of eyes watching us. Evan turns his headlamp up brighter and it is in fact a juvenile mountain lion. We attempt to be loud but it seems unfazed. We back away slowly watching it the entire time until it is out of sight, checking back into the void behind us occasionally just in case.

1am: I am plagued by the reflective eyes of creatures in the forest for the remainder of the night. The second pair of eyes we see I immediately think “jackal”, and I’ll find out later Evan also thinks this even though that doesn’t make sense because we’re in California. Upon further research later we conclude it is a bobcat. There is also a deer, very close. All of these creatures are watching us as we pass through like they think we can’t see them. But all we can see are their eyes and it’s fucking terrifying. Also if I didn’t know bullfrogs sounded like that I’d be sprinting. And we hear a gunshot somewhere in the distance (some coyotes attacked some dogs somewhere, we’ll find out later)

1:30am: we’re almost done with the 13.5 mile loop, and I eat absolute shit on some rocks. Both my knees are bruised, one is skinned to shit (I was wearing a compression sleeve on the other) as is one of my hands, but I’m bleeding in three places. Also, because I tripped on a slight downhill, the force of my fall flipped me onto my side, almost my back, so I also have bruises and scrapes on my arm and shoulder which I won’t realize for another 12 hours. I’m kind of amazed I didn’t scrape my face on the ground. All of this stings like a motherfucker but I get up quick and we run back to tent city. Also I am spared some bc the part of my knee I scraped did not cross over the part of the knee I scraped when I ate shit the week previous. All of this still stings even now on Monday bc scabs are trying to form on very bendable parts of my body.

2am: we set out on the 11.5 mile loop. We’re trying to finish the first (for me) 25 miles before the sun rises so we don’t have to climb up Pig Farm Hill again in the heat of the day. I change into a long sleeve sun shirt bc it’s getting cold and it might protect my hands if I fall again.

2am-3am: we do the Creek Crossings. All of them are complete shit. Some of them are more the ponds, but the only thing there is to cross them are thin wooden boards that aren’t attached to anything. It’s pretty pointless. Our feet are soaked and covered in mud. This section of the course is otherwise much flatter but this fucking sucks so I’m not doing this one again. I’d much rather climb another like 3,000 feet than deal with this shit. Otherwise this section is rather uneventful. Evan and I are both pretty tired though so we’re not really talking anymore.

5:30am: we make it back to tent city just as daylight breaks. We completed our first goal. Evan takes some time at tent city. I’m very slowly eating a palm-sized, 300 calorie PB&J some aid station volunteers gave us, but I know my guts are turning. Also my calf feels really weird. I eat about half of it and stick the other half completely unwrapped in my pack. Fuck it.

I should also mention the entire time Evan and I are peeing like crazy. Like every other mile. We always pee together to conserve time. At some point I feel like all the water I’m drinking is only being used to make me pee.

5:45am: we leave to do the 13.5 mile loop again for the last time. I poop like 5 times. I can’t really eat anything anymore (without pooping) but we’re also not really running anymore either, so I’m not worried bc I’m good at fat oxidization. I say I’m not going to eat anymore but I do anyway bc the allure of capri suns and sour candy at the aid stations compel me. Those things surprisingly don’t make me poop.

7am: we make it to the top of Pig Farm Hill again. Evan sits down to take off his shirt bc it’s starting to get warm. As he does so, a group of trail runners/hikers and their husky come up the trail. I’m so ecstatic I don’t ask to pet their dog and just do it because I need the morale boost. Evan gets his shirt on and is immediately licked all over his face. This is great.

8am: I am starting to fall behind as a pacer bc Evan is a fucking beast on the climbs and at this point I have only gone this far one other time in my life. My quads are trashed. I’m also going slightly insane with sleep deprivation bc I haven’t slept in at least 24 hours. I am talking half to Evan half to myself about just really stupid shit i don’t even really remember.

8:30am: we’re back on the switchback climb which sucks now because I can see it. Evan takes a break and I pick a 3 foot tall dandelion and hold it over my head like a balloon for morale. I do that for like a mile before the stem flops over and then I put it in my pack instead. The seeds are slowly being blown away as we go and I’m emotionally attached to it now in my sleep deprivation. It seems sad but I convince myself it’s a good thing bc this dandelions seeds are literally being spread over miles. It’s arguably the most successful dandelion that’s ever existed.

10am: I squat down to pee at mile 37 and pull a muscle in my quad when I stand back up bc they’re so thrashed. Men have it so easy. Regardless, we make it back to tent city with no problem on my end and now Evan is surely going to finish, he just has to do the 11.5 mile loop one more time. And I’m done pacing.

After that, I get some ice for my quad and take an ibuprofen and try not to move. My leg didn’t really hurt the last mile back but now it really hurts to bend or straighten it completely and even the slightest downhill is a pain. Miraculously it feels completely fine today, but it is tender to the touch and I can’t stretch it. I immediately become less insane upon sitting down for like 20 minutes. Evan’s sister loves the fact that one of our tent neighbors DNF’ed. He signed up for the hundred miler despite having only ever run a half marathon because his girlfriend does them and “if she can do it then so can he”. He drops at mile 30. She wins the race. We’re all cackling.

3:30pm: Evan finishes the race and we fuck around (re: rest) for little bit before packing up the tent and shit. I’m driven back to my car which is only like 1/3rd of a mile away bc ouch.

5pm: we go to dinner bc we obviously need food. I’ve burned 6,000 calories. I ran with Evan for 14 hours. That’s the longest I’ve ever run time-wise. All of these stats indicate to my body that I’ve just completed a 100 kilometer effort despite only going 62 kilometers (with 6,300 feet of elevation). And also it feels like it, though my legs don’t hurt as much as the first time I ran 100km (#experience).

7:30pm: we drop Evans sister off at the airport. I am having an out of body experience in the passenger seat and fall asleep for 10 minutes. The sun is setting again and I’m losing my mind.

9:30pm: we get back to the motel and blessedly pass the fuck out for the next 12 hours, tired, sore, and beaten, but victorious for the first time in almost a year. Trauma has finally been resolved. Hallelujah.

[agentcable]

Supernatural Season 2 Ep. 8 "Crossroad Blues"

Two successful professionals die after claiming to be haunted. Sam and Dean investigate the local drive-in bar and discover it sits on a site where a demon makes people's dream come true in exchange for their souls. Dean calls on the demon to exorcise it, but is shocked when it tells him about John's death and offers him his father.

If you want to watch the series for yourself, stop reading! This post contains spoilers to the storyline.

The episode starts in a dark bar in 1938. A bluesman plays guitar and smokes a cigarette. He look at a young woman in the audience. He hears growling outside and stops. When he stops playing, the growling stops. He kept playing, but the growling came back every few seconds. Each time, he stopped. He sees a big shadow run by the window. He drops his cigarette and runs out the door with his guitar. The bluesman runs down a dark road, dropping his guitar.

He runs home and locks the door. The chair doesn't hold as the breaks open, and Sadie and two other guys rush in to find the bluesman having a seizure. Sadie tries to help him, but the bluesman says "Black dogs."

Sam tells Dean he's in the Feds' database. Dean laughs. He seems happy. Sam says it's not funny and makes the job harder. They have to be more careful. The database doesn't have anything on Sam yet.

Sam tells Dean that architect Sean Boyden fell from his condo roof. He called animal control two days ago, saying he saw vicious black dogs. The dogs were never found. He didn't show up for work and died two days later. Sam says there are black dogs that appear after death. Some say they're spirits, others say they're omens of death.

Sam and Dean pose as writers for Architectural Digest and talk with Sean's partner. They learn he lived a charmed life. Ten years ago, he couldn't design at all. He worked at Lloyds as a bartender. Overnight, he became a genius designer. He designed some of the most ingenious buildings anyone had ever seen.

The boys go to animal control for more info. Dean talks to Karley. She says they've received 19 calls. She gives them Silvia Pearlman's address. She was the most recent person to report seeing black dogs. Karley gives Dean her Myspace address. Sam thinks Dean is funny for thinking Myspace is a porn site.

Sam and Dean speak with Sylvia's maid. Sylvie disappeared two days ago after seeing black dogs. She was a young surgeon at the hospital. She got the job ten years ago. Dean sees a photo of Sylvia and her friends at a bar. He turns it over and reads "Lloyd's bar 1996".

Sylvia is pacing and shivering in a motel room. The motel manager knocks. She says they need to leave or pay. She takes cash from her purse. She sees a demon's face in the manager's face. She hands him the money and shuts the door.

Sam and Dean go to the bar. Dean sees yarrow flowers planted in weeds, used for rituals. They find it odd that two people suddenly became successful at a crossroad ten years ago. Dean digs a hole at the crossroad and finds an old metal box. They open it and find graveyard dirt, a black cat bone, and other hoodoo items used for summoning demons. Dean remembers that crossroads are where pacts are made. These people aren't just summoning the demon: they're making deals with it. Sam says they're seeing hellhounds, not black dogs.

The door rattles. Sylvia is hiding behind the bed, crying. When the banging stops, Sylvia slowly gets up, but is trampled back to the ground as the hellhound breaks through the glass window and tears her to shreds.

In 1930, Robert Johnson's "Crossroad Blues" plays in the background. Robert puts his picture in the box with the other hoodoo items and buries it in the center of the croassroad. He turns around and says "Holy..." Robert says the demon he wants to be the best bluesman ever. She kisses him and grants his wish. She's gone when he opens his eyes.

Sam and Dean are talking about the hunt. Dean says this case is like the Robert Johnson Legend, abut selling your soul at the crossroads. Dean says Robert Johnson died choking on his own blood. He was hallucinating and saying "big blag dogs." Sam says they need to find out if more people made deals with this demon. Dean thinks they should forget about this case because they can make their own deals. Sam says they shouldn't leave these people to die. Dean agrees to keep looking for the demon.

Sam and Dean go to George Darrow's door and see a line of pepper outside. The door opens, and the boys ask about the demonic deal he made ten years ago. Darrow gives them five minutes. He says the stuff outside is goofer dust, used to protect against demons.

They don't get much out of him. He doesn't want their help. He says, that sometimes you have to sit in your own mess. He just wants to finish a painting. He gives them the name of Evan Hudson, who made a deal with the demon.

Evan hears barking outside. He looks out the window but sees nothing. His wife comes in to say goodbye before she leaves for the weekend. He hugs her and says he loves her, then leaves. Her face morphs into the Crossroads Demon.

Sam and Dean go to Evan's house to help him. Evan slams the door on the boys and runs into his study. Sam and Dean break in and go into the study. After they say they aren't demons, they ask what he asked for. Evan says his wife was dying of cancer and he begged the demon to save her.

Dean tells Sam to keep the hellhounds away from Evan with goofer dust. He's going to the crossroads to summon the demon. Sam thinks it's a bad idea because Dean's acting weird. Sam thinks Dean thinks their dad made a demonic deal to save his life and that he should stay with him. Dean heads for the crossroads.

Dean puts his picture in the box with the other items and buries it. He turns around and the demon is happy to see him. She knows about him and the deal their dad made. Dean says they should talk in his car. She agrees.

Meanwhile, at Evan's house, Sam puts goofer dust around Evan and tells him to stay inside it.

Dean tells the demon to release Evan from his contract as they walk to the Impala. She says she can't break a binding contract. She sees a devil's trap under the car as she gets in.

The demon will bring John back as he was and Dean will live ten more years with him. Dean tricks her into another trap and starts an exorcism. As Dean starts chanting in Latin, the hellhound gets into Evan's study and moves closer to the circle. Dean keeps chanting as the hellhound slowly eats the goofer dust. The demon agrees to let Evan out of the trap if Dean lets the demon out of the trap. She kisses him to seal the bond. Dean lets her out of the trap. She says Dean should've brought John back. The demon leaves the girl's body.

Dean doesn't know how he'll live now he knows about their dad's death. He thinks their dad should've died fighting, not bargaining. Sam reminds Dean of all the people their dad saved and how they've saved others too. This is their dad's legacy and they must finish what he started.

----------

For more behind the scenes, follow up here:

Podcast "Supernatural - Then and Now" hosted by Rob Benedict and Richard Speight Jr.

[petty-crush]

Notes on the New Bev Horror a thon 2024

-/—

Before the night started, I meet a woman who had been to every iteration of this annual Halloween marathon. Her joy was still that of someone first entering a new world. I second that emotion.

////-//-

This was an especially strong and highly competitive collection

1-Out of the Dark (Michael Schroeder 1988)

2-The Four Skulls of Johnathon Drake (Edward L Cahn 1959)

3-The Rift (Juan Piquer Simon 1990)

4-Rituals (Peter Carter 1977)

5-The Breed (Nicholas Mastandrea 2006)

6-Eyes of a Stranger (Ken Wiederhorn 1981)

-//-/—-

All of these films were first time watches. All of them had an audience giddy with anticipation.

-/-//—-

“Out of the Dark” left a furious impact, a rip roaring opening film.

The cast for this film is pretty incredible: Divine, Karen Black, Paul Bartel, Tab Hunter, Geoffrey Lewis, Bud Cort, Tracey Walker and so forth.

Each of the names got big cheers.

The late 80s horror era can be ether highly saccharine or wonderfully sleazy. Definitely the latter here.

A masked killer in a clown mask stalks girls from a phone sex (oh, pardon me, phone fantasy) company.

Murder at 4 dollars a minute.

The kills are quite good, but the film largely wins with moments of character interactions.

Karen Black has a nice scene with her on screen child daughter, sympathetically but honestly telling her that “daddy isn’t here because sometimes people need to go away”. It’s rather charming.

She has a more reserved, no nonsense but still caring attitude towards her work daughters.

Paul Bartel has great fun fussing with a wig as he tries to scope out why someone is trying to stay all night in a sex motel.

Divine’s moment (and sly fake mustache) is short but cutting, noting that his rival cop “couldn’t find his pecker in his pocket”.

I think this is the largest role, certainly the most action packed, I’ve seen for actor Tracey Walker. His moments of snooping while trying to avoid bullshit are delightful.

I really can’t think of anything I didn’t like about this film. It is a middleweight class, but does everything with verve. A fun party.

-///—/—/-

Equally lovely was “The Rift”, and while “Dark” was cult actors enlivening potentially stock characters with their outward charm, this film has R Lee Ermey fleshing out his acting range, clinically dissecting his character and his chain of command relation with his other actors.

This film is not above noting his ultra famous role in “Full Metal Jacket”: someone does indeed repeat the notion of a golf ball going through a garden house.

[an aside; reels 2 and 3 were originally switched. The film was restarted with a correct running order, but not before a few minutes into the third reel. Thus, the unusual sight of seeing that line murder the audience the first time, and then smirking appreciation the second time]

Helping smooth the reference is the deft timing by actor John Toles Bey as officer Skeets. This is the rare (intentionally meant) comedy character that is truly funny, as opposed to fucking annoying.

Bey somehow manages to make lines like “you’re my kind of white boy” and moments such as using magnifying glasses to stare at an ample female ass charming in their ornery way.

I like a good underwater film, especially in a submarine, and even more so when shooting a squad of penis shaped monsters. Win win win.

What exactly they are researching under the sea is a mystery, but actor Ray Wise has good moments of misdirecting weasel ness.

-///-/—////—-

This is first time in several years where the film did not end on a mid 90s and beyond (later 2000s these last few years) film. Instead it was the second to last.

“The Breed” has the amusing goal of making teens scared of and battling genetically altered dogs.

Now, I can see why a casual cinema goer may have recoiled at this idea and its execution. People generally don’t like thinking dogs will harm humans and they really don’t like seeing dogs get killed.

However, this is a horror film, and this is a screening for mega hyped cinema enthusiasts, so of course all the canine deaths and attacks were met with wild applause.

Another case of an audience at the right place ramping it up.

Speaking of, that arrow in the leg scene..ouch!

Michelle Rodriguez is the most accomplished actor here, although the most dramatic meat is between two in character brothers and how they learn to trust each other despite seeing the sibling as a fuck up.

Rodriguez is the current lover of one and the former of another, to really drive home the awkwardness.

I gleefully admit, seeing two rabid dogs chilling on the airplane wing then diving in the water to murder the male lead is pretty funny. Has a “oh, are we on camera now?!?” vibe.

-/-/——///——

The black and white classic horror spot was “Four Skulls” this year, and it hit that spot firmly if not vividly.

The finger prints that are shaped like tiny skulls result had the audience giggling.

What a strange notion to have a white head sewn onto an Indian body. Brown…chest? (As opposed to brown face).

-/-/——

I’m really torn on “Rituals”. On one hand it clearly had the best acting of the night(by Hal Holbrook & Lawrence Dane), at other times it greatly meandered, not helped by the outdoor night photography being too dark to see at times.

I had a pretty good chuckle at a character thinking his life is over because he’s “38, drunk and my last boyfriend who wasn’t in an asylum was five years ago”.

Who considers 38 old, the middle schoolers who will never watch this film?

-/———///——-/—

“Eyes of a Stranger” is also an example of a good film at maybe not the best place.

It’s a slow burn that really explodes at the end, but putting it last doesn’t do it any favors. The first five films felt of a unity, but this has an ever so soft aroma of stapled to the rest.

It’s my only real critique of the night, albeit in hindsight.

“Breed” wasn’t a better film but it was snappier paced, and a worthier stinger to end the night on.

-///-///—-

An interlude

It occurs to me now how each half of the marathon had two similar bookends separated by a palette change.

“Skulls” was a leisure 50s ride sandwiched between two goofy and highly entertaining late 80s/early 90s schlock fests.

Meanwhile, “Breed” was a teen romp n stomp between two very deep dive atmospheric moody tales from the late 70s/early 80s.

Amusing.

-/-////——-/

Anywho, back to “Eyes”.

It actually really surprised me that it’s from the beginning of the decade of greed. I would have guessed 1973 at most before knowing the true answer.

It certainly doesn’t feel like a film that was post John Carpenter’s “Halloween” and its codification of the slasher genre. Very “let’s heat up the ‘Psycho’ leftovers one more time with salt” vibe.

There is a child character that is dealing with lack of seeing and hearing after a traumatic rape. She’s not an object of pity (clearly her big sister character is more shamed than her) and this is a fine line confidently walked by a young Jennifer Jason Leigh.

She really had the stuff even at an early age. What a casting coup.

The fact that the main killer looks like Peter griffin from “family guy” doesn’t even matter. It’s all expertly and grisly directed.

The aforementioned big sister character feels like she really let her younger sibling down by her being abducted by a stranger in a car. This is a good dramatic angle for her to relentlessly pursue this murderer far beyond the normal. It’s personal and aided by guilt.

The scenes of her clinging to the balcony of an apartment, hoping dually she won’t get caught or fall to her death, are excellent.

But the real fireworks come at the end. The killer taunts the blind n deaf girl in her apartment (rented with her sis but she’s out) by moving knives, plates, and other objects she knows she just put there.

There is no sound during this sequence, only eerily silence.

The kid catches on, runs around the apartment, is chased into master bedroom, and hit repeatedly. The shock is almost overwhelming.

And then she starts to see.

Fuzzy at first, shapes and colors come into play (we see from her POV) then she hits her 2nd attacker and wanders to the dresser where the gun is.

She shoots him.

Her clothes torn, her breath short, she wanders into the bathroom and starts to see more.

For the first time, she sees her teenage self

The camera lingers on her. It is a generally moving scene.

The killer lunges from off camera.

Finally the big sister returns. Grabs the gun. Shoots in the head. Crying. Stops at the young girl talking for the first time in years. A tender embrace.

Emotionally devastating, and richly rewarding after wandering with the film at a post midnight hour.

It all comes together.

-///——//—-

On the way out of the theatre I received my “I survived the whole night” gift; a sweet patch to sew on.

With or without it, the memories from tonight will remain. The sharp sense of triumphant joy and oooing outlines of shock.

Like any festival, of any art, it varies from year to year. But the accumulated effect, the greatest highs, remain.

I actually, overall, liked this one better than last year. And that was also a good one.

Like the woman who has seen all these nights of horror mystery, I add it to the deep treasures of my experiences. I am open to new things, and I am rewarded for that.

Can’t ask for anything more satisfying.

[theshakespeareproject]

Thoughts on King Henry the Sixth Part I

Usually I will break these down further into the Acts, but for now, I wanted to talk about this one in one big chunk. Mainly because I didn’t start taking notes in the beginning. 

Each night I curled up in my reading chair that wouldn’t be out of place in my grandfather’s home, and read with my reading lamp and usually my dog curled up between my legs being his adorable self. I had this big thick volume cracked open on the left armrest because that was closest to the light and cast the least amount of shadows. I usually tried to have a mug, coffee, hot cocoa, or tea, in that order (sorry everyone, I like coffee better). 

To begin with: I had no idea what was being said almost the entire time. Shocker, I know. I tried my best to avoid glazing over but ocasnaionaly it happened and when I tried to find the spot where my eyes just started scanning instead of processing, I couldn’t. So if I missed something, I’m sorry, I’ll catch it on the reread.

Something that jumped out to me immediately, is I don’t think King Henry, the titular character, even showed up until Act III of V. For the most part, especially early in the story, the cast was made up of Earl’s all named after town’s that are in New England, I assume they’re probably in actual England as well but it is way funnier to imagine the Earl of Warwick going home to Warwick, Rhode Island and having to say “Wicked” constantly. 

Joan of Arc - is a character!? She is almost the antagonist but also I find her extremely sympathetic because, well, it’s Joan of Arc. Also, I pictured her as Vanessa Hudgeson’s the whole time, thanks Drunk History, she was one of two characters that stood out to me. 

As I was reading, I noticed two things about how I read these lines in my head. Without fail, I would read one line as speeding up and the one after as slowing down, and repeated this almost the entire time. I don’t think this was the actual rhythm that it’s meant to be read in but it’s what I defaulted to. The other, is that if I tried to picture someone reading the line, it was usually a man in his mid 30s, set against a black backdrop on a wooden proscenium stage, with like an angle of looking up at him from a slight bit left of house center. The man was lit from a top light, and his face was always blurred, and he always yelled his lines very angrily, still in that fast then slow rhythm. If anyone knows why my brain uncreatively placed these characters, please let me know.

Midway through Act IV, Talbot and his son begin speaking in rhyming couplets. I was looking for it before, I may have missed it, but this was the iambic pentameter I was expecting would be their the whole time, I think. Iambic pentameter was one of the things I remember my high school teacher from junior year telling me about, and it stood out as a cool writing technique, but also very stressful, I can never tell what syllable is supposed to be stressed. 

I’d like to talk about John Talbot, I feel like he very suddenly appeared, all of a sudden got really emotional, spoke in rhyme, and then died. Who was he? Why did he die so suddenly? When will he get his own spin off prequel?

France is a very important part of this story about a King of England. More than half the story is set there. The France part was vastly more interesting, why did we need any of this story set in England.

The War of the Roses was important, in some way. At one point many of the Earl’s and noble fellows pick between the red and the white rose. There’s a line about picking a white rose but pricking their thumb and turning the rose blood red. It’s interesting, but I’m going to need more historical context in the future when I do a reread. Most of my knowledge for the War of the Roses is due to A Song of Ice and Fire using it for inspiration (No, I did not watch The Tudors so no, none of my knowledge comes from there).

There’s a scene in Act V, maybe it wasn’t supposed to be funny, but I found it funny. Where Earl of Suffolk and Lady Margaret are talking, and after every line the other says to them, they have, like, a snarky one liner they say in an aside to the audience.

If you don’t know what the aside is, anytime Fleabag said something directly to the camera or made eyecontact, that’s an aside. It’s a breaking of the forth wall to explain info to the audience. It happens a lot in these plays. 

“Prehaps I need to be rescued by the French; And then I need not crave his courtesy.” Said by Margaret to the audience, line of the play for me. I too would love to be rescued from the British by the French. 

The sequence of Joan of Arc (she’s not called “of Arc” but it’s what I know about her so I’m going to keep using it for convenience sakes) being potentially gaslite by Shepherd, where he claims to be her father. I don’t know if he actually is, I don’t think he is, because he told them to burn her because she refused to recognize him. I don’t know if that’s sexism or an admission that he lied, either way, really uncomfortable scene.

This is followed by Joan of Arc claiming to be pregnant and then going through multiple potential baby daddies. If there is a historical basis for this, I will take back my complaint, but this felt like an attempt to villainize someone else’s hero, not cool Shakespeare.

Now, nearing the end of the story, I need to mention the Earl of Suffolk, the only Earl that stood out. And it really only happened in the final Act. He goes to France to “woo” Margaret and then gets her to agree to come back to England to marry King Henry. At first, I thought he was just that cool of a guy. Put’s on the riz and gets the girl for his homie. Nope. He does give an impassioned speech to convince others to let the King marry for love, but it’s a trap! In the last line of the play, Suffolk is revealed to be a secret villain. He is the Littlefinger! Yes, that’s right, there are two sequels to this play, we are getting MCUed way back in 1591! Picture it:

The Earl of Suffolk will return in King Henry the Sixth Part II

[ceilidho]

first of all....reverse babytrapping......when i find you, lev....

second of all, this:

On his way out, Ghost utters a heated congratulations to him, and John can see his gaze is absent. Turned inward, mind whirring. Reeling. He can hear the gears grind from where he stands, and if the ink-black madness in his lieutenant’s drifting, pensive eyes means much of anything, then John sends a silent hail mary to whatever unlucky person was misfortune enough to unleash the muzzle on that particular dog. 

my head went kuh-thunk. now that's all im gonna think about for the next several days lmaooo what a brilliant little nugget in this gorgeous fic.......i want to know so much more about whatever the fuck is going on with this guy......

i love love love this story not only because, as always, the language you use is so evocative and labyrinthine and gorgeous, but also because if you strip away all that language, i am positively tickled by these two trying to babytrap the other and sort of knowing the other is going along for the ride but plotting their little nefarious schemes anyway. it's such a weird funny little undercurrent lmaooo

another hit ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 

when your need grows teeth | John Price x f!Reader

John's the type of man to lock his jaws around what's his, preferring instead to ruin things, puncture it full of holes, and litter it with scars, rather than let it go. It starts when you ask him to pick up your birth control—like dangling a piece of bloody meat in front of a starving dog.  Of course he's going to take a bite.  He thinks you ought to have known this by now. 

SMUT 18+ | gratuitous smut; HEAVY breeding kink, breeding; Dom!John Price; p-in-v sex, unsafe sex; rough sex; mentions of spanking; mutual manipulation; this is roughly 10k of John Plotting and fucking you; John is: unhinged, obsessive, possessive, and Scheming. mentions of birth control tampering but nothing is followed through. No. He’s going to knock you up the old-fashioned way—by making you beg for it.

AO3 MIRROR

John has always had this desire—this awful, instinctual drive in the back of his head to knock someone up. Get them fat, swollen with his child. His. 

And maybe that's the crux of it. Possession. To have something of the most rooted kind. To irrevocably change someone—their anatomy, their body, the chemistry in their brain, their status in life from them (single no dependents) to mother (mother of his child), their very atoms—and create life from the combined parts. 

It's this almost fantastical beast, this unreachable dream for him. 

It's his Shangri-la. His castle in Spain. 

He's not under any disillusionment that this idea of fatherhood, of parenthood, is slightly skewed. That most men who want children don't feel this overwhelmingly greedy desire to fundamentally alter someone in such an irreversible way. It's not quite ownership, but it's the same ilk. A bastardised, unwanted child of it. 

And it's not just this idea of claimation—to forever be the father of their child, even if neither of them stays together; a piece of him will always be there, parasitic, no matter what—but something deeper. Something a bit less—egregious. 

This is, and always has been, about yearning. 

John's the type of man to lock his jaws around what's his, preferring instead to ruin things, puncture it full of holes, and litter it with scars, rather than to let it go. 

Marriage, he finds, is breakable. Divorce, separation. He's always on his worst behaviour in the initial stages of dating, so it's never something he has to entertain since no one ever sticks around long enough for it to be on the table, much less the menu, but the idea of it—of signing papers, of hashing out the split, of being known as ex-husband—leaves a bitter tang between his teeth. It won't do. He needs permanence. Perpetuity. 

Nothing says forever quite like a child, does it? 

And sure—he’s aware that countermeasures exist: custody orders, sole custody, shared; allotted visitations; divisional lines in this new age that keep the parents from ever interacting—but while you can get divorced, you can't unmake a child, can you?

The child would never write him out, either. 

Where deadbeats exist, it's important to note that their counterparts do, too. The ones like him who will gouge their eyes out of their skulls before they ever let what happened to them growing up trickle down and impact their child, polluting the pool. 

Simply put: John Price knows he'd be the best dad there is because he's stubborn that way. 

It helps, he supposes, that he really only has so much love to give out to the world, and greedily, he stashed the entirety of it away in a box to give to his would-be wife and their child. An overwhelming deluge that promises happiness should it ever be unlocked. Pandora's box, perhaps—down to the very essence because if John Price were to ever love someone, then it's probably in their best interest to run from it, this gaping, needy chasm. 

Not that it would ever be a possibility, of course—he’s much too good at compartmentalisation, in taking out his anger, his viciousness, on the ugly world he drenches himself in, the one his hands have a tangible cause and effect principle in place that will forever feed that starving beast inside of him.

Ergo—he’s a staunch supporter of the theory: happy wife, happy life. Though where those men think in a box stuffed full of emotional intimacy, flowers, chocolate, maintaining love, all-consuming and enduring, he takes it to extremes that would have them cowering a little bit. Maybe a lot.  

But that's fine. He only has to make sure his family is happy. No one else matters, save a select few who have a seat at his table during Sunday dinners. 

The rest, though? Spare parts. 

(The ice-cold resolve in those two words is apodictic, brass bound, and he's sure if his higher-ups knew about it, well—

His chest candy would be a hole in the ground. Put the rabid dog down before it has a chance to bite.)

But that all-consuming, devouring, obsessive love he has to give, that begs to be let free, is the reason why it's so tightly leashed. Locked up in a box. Untouchable. Inaccessible. 

It's why he isn't married. 

Ghost once asked him why the women he dated were older. Much older. Menopausal (always). And he'd said something to the effect of it being his type. Older women who wouldn't cower away from the acrid burn of him, who wouldn't hurt their delicate little hands on his gritty surface. 

But the real reason is because he knows better. 

He's a starving dog, and it's just bad form to dangle a piece of meat in front of it. Especially when the hand holding it is his own. 

Don't bite the hand that feeds you, and all. 

(The keen look in Ghost's eyes told him that, perhaps, the man already knew the reason when he asked, and was just satiating himself with kinship—the dark, awful look on Simon's ugly mug after the dredging the underbelly of Price’s rotten, mouldering mudfloor of things unsaid spoke volumes. 

They'd both nodded. Content, then. And promptly ordered a shot of whisky to drown the salivation, the hunger, from clogging their throats. Killing the urge to bite.

A pair of packless, stray dogs.)

But then he found you, and all his careful planning, all his distance, blew up in his face. 

It's always been on his mind since then. Lingering in his periphery—this fevered, tantalising vision of you, round and swollen with his child. 

It's unattainable, of course. A fantasy. 

Though, this—you throwing up in the washroom of his penthouse, undoubtedly knocked up by his machinations—is probably because he kept that desire too close to where he hides his questionable mortality, the one that allows him to throw innocent people to their deaths, and send mothers and fathers to an early grave just so he can rip his fists apart on their bastard offspring in his own brand of catharsis that always bites back when they grow up, hankering for revenge. 

He's always been good at snatching dreams out of the air, clenching them tight in his fists. Taming chimerical wants, whims, until they were docile, domesticated. Making realities out of fiction. 

And really—he’s just not a good man.

He thought you'd have known this by now.

He remembers the first time he growled the words into your ear as he came, your cunt clenching around him like a vice. Desperate for it, he teased after, fingers fucking into your sloppy, leaking hole. Pushing his spend back into you. Half-drunk on the taste of you still clinging to his beard, but mostly just mesmerised by the sight of you—pretty pussy all ruined, swollen from the vicious, hateful pounding he gave it, and dipping with his cum like a faucet. 

(It pissed him off—still does, really—when you waste it like this.)

Gonna fill you up, he snarled, low and wrecked. Gonna make it take—

It was a fantasy. Still is. But the way it took root in the garden of your bedroom, like it belonged—native flora, he thinks, a touch mad with it—had something ugly, oil slick, rearing up from that untouchable place in his head. 

He could really blame you for it—and does. The way your ankles locked tight around his thighs, hands reaching, grabbing at his waist, clawing at his asscheeks to press him in deeper, deeper still, as he came inside of you, cock lodged right against your plug, had that untameable beast cocking its head in consideration after you danced too close to it, waking it from his long, restful slumber. 

You wanted it. Ached for it. He could feel it in the way your walls tightened around him, practically starving for it. Your pretty, glossy eyes rolling back into your head. Drool running down your chin. A litany of pleas spilled from your kiss-bruised lips, begging him for it. Please, John. Please. Please—

Who was he to deny you? 

Even if you made a big, flustered show of waving it off—not something I've ever imagined for myself, you know? and–and your lifestyle, what you do—is something like that even possible for us?—he saw how it curled around your shoulders, dipping its silver tongue into your ear. Germinating. 

He let it. Encouraged it. 

“Something to talk about later,” he indulged, reaching over for a cigar just to smother the urge to breed you stupid. To tie you to his bedposts and keep you full until your belly was swelling with more than just the absurd volume of his seed he pumped inside of you. 

And, oh—

The uneasy smile on your face reeked of disappointment. 

Fuck. Fuck—

John went to the washroom after that, heart pounding out of his chest, and jabbed the lit end of his cigar into his thigh to kill the fever in his veins. To rewrite the desperate, ugly howling in his head with pain instead. 

It worked. Works—

Until you came to him, all watery-eyed and worried, and told him to please, please stop falling asleep with a lit cigar because you think you might just go mad if you lost him to a cigarette fire. And doesn't he see how silly it is, these burns look so bad, John, and I worry—

His teeth ached. He smiled, but it felt like a grimace. A dog holding back the instinct to bare its teeth. 

“Sure, love,” he'd said, and started taking out his anger on your cunt instead, fucking you deep, and stupid. Getting you all cockdrunk, and hungry for the dream that spoiled so badly in the back of his head, he's sure a proper man would call it a nightmare. “Anything you want.”

(Brassbound. Apodictic. You know that, he knows you know that, so imagine his surprise when you come to him, all soft and tender, and ask him to pick up your birth control as if he hadn't spent the better part of two years grumbling every fucking time you took it and wasn't on the verge of tossing the damn bottle out the window, and fucking you until it took—

But—you do know that, don't you? 

Well, then. Whatever his lady wants, right? Right.)

“Can you stop by the pharmacy on your way home tonight?”

He hums, fiddling with the belt of his slacks in front of the mirror. “Sure, love. You feelin’ sick?” 

“No,” you murmur, sliding behind him on your way to the washroom, wearing nothing but a towel tucked under your arms. “I need my refill. For birth control.” 

His hands still. A gnarled, rotted tendril curls over the edge of the cesspool, murky, ink black water splashing all over the place. “Oh, yeah? Still taking that, hm?”

You fluster. Hands waving, chock full of nervous, emotive energy you can't seem to shake off. “Well—yes. I mean, obviously.”

And he'd leave it there, let the spillage dry on the hot pavement, if you hadn't glanced back at him, all damp keenness, slightly skittish, and asked, feather-soft and utterly fragile, “right?” 

Right? A question, he notes. Not a statement. 

He licks his teeth. Tastes something rancid in the gaps. 

“Mm. I suppose so.” He leaves it vague, but drenches it in the heavy weight of his disappointment. Anchors dragging it down. You flit around the space like a house-locked bird, slamming into the walls and ceiling as you try—blind and panicked—to find an escape. Any escape. 

He finds the whole thing utterly charming. Especially when you realise he pitched himself in front of the only exit, thick, heavy hands curled around his belt, cock outlined against his slacks, already thickened, drooling in his pants. 

There's gasp—wet, and sharp—as you take him in. The liquid of his eyes as his want bleeds out of his skull. The flush on his cheeks, the twitch of his cock at the mere mention of you not taking your silly little pills. 

John lets it sit for a moment, taking in greedy lungfuls of your unease as you glance everywhere but at him, as if looking in his direction, breathing in this toxic miasma will give you a contact high. Infectious. Gnarled. 

The little seed that started germinating blooms. 

He fights back the urge to grin, all teeth. Madness staining them black. 

“It's—it’s on—” and fuck, he's never seen you so unsure before, this nervous. You handle him like a wrangler, wrassling his brutish dominance until it's putty in your hands, splitting his head into pieces and galvanising the madness inside until it's scripture for you to peek at whenever you need guidance, insight into him, his essence, his being. 

Your dyadic has always been built on permeance. 

John doesn't think there's a single person alive who understands him as much as you do. The only person who seems content to gorge yourself on his rotted marrow like it was a delicacy. 

Seeing you like this rents his resolve in two. 

“It's the pharmacy near the, uh, the school. The kindergarten.” 

He chokes on a groan, and thinks he tears something in his throat with the strain of keeping it down. There's blood, ash, in the back of his throat.

“Alright, love. I'll pick it up.” 

You smell it, and shiver. 

It's giving meat to a starving dog, and saying, dog, don't take a bite. 

And so, of course he does. 

John picks up your prescription, tossing it in the passenger seat like it personally offended him. And it has. Does. It's what's standing in the way between what he wants, what he craves, and there's a distinct thrum of irritation welling inside of him. One that started when he had to bark out your name at the counter earlier, and the pharmacist looked at him, and calmly, kindly, explained what it was he was picking up. 

Make sure she takes them once a day. Preferably at the same time. This brand of oral contraceptive can be taken with or without food—

Fuck off, he thought—thinks, even now, glowering into the tinted window of the pharmacy. 

He grips the steering wheel tight until his scarred knuckles bleach white under the strain, and sits in the parking lot, staring, unseeingly, at the shops. Pensive. Thoughtful. It gnarls over his expression until he's the picture of that grizzly-like intensity you often accuse him of. All furrowed brows and a pinched, angry twist to his lips. 

There's a series of complex equations running laps in his head. He's no stranger to this process, needing to make life or death decisions in less time it takes someone to snap their fingers, or tentatively stammer out his title. 

This one is more linear than the rest. One plus one, so to speak. But the weight of it is profound. Heavier, even, than deciding between the success of his mission and the life of an innocent bystander. 

(But he thinks he's just selfish like that.)

In his head, he debates the ethics of replacing all of these silly little tablets that stand in his way with sugar pills. 

It would be the quickest path to the end, but the risk-reward ratio ebbs and flows the more he considers things without the miasmic influence of that abomination throwing itself at the walls of its enclosure, howling in an endless cacophony of do it, do itdoit—

A better man wouldn't even have such a temptation. He supposes that's what you deserve, but he already had this particular crisis a few months after he met you, and realised that the things he wanted to do to you would undoubtedly put him on a list. Slapped so hard with a restraining order, his ears would still be buzzing. 

That something about you made his jowls twinge, and his teeth ache, and no amount of stay away from her, Price; she deserves better than you was going to keep his dirty hands from curling around your throat, leaving soot-stains on your skin in the shape of his fingerprints. Brandishing ownership in burst blood vessels; a pretty collar for you to wear because as much as you like to pretend otherwise—

You're a dog just like him. 

In any case, he's the best choice for you. The only one who'd burn the world just to keep you warm, and that's what you really need. Protection. 

And fuck—you toy with that particular urge that has always been etched in fine lines within the walls of bones; dipping your fingers into it, and spreading it over the apples of your cheek. Everything about you prickles along his hindbrain. Renders him from a modern man with modern ideals to an animal who can only speak in growls, snarls; pure primalism, all instinct. 

You're made for each other down to the bone. He's sure he could split your head apart and find that your cranial sutures are perfectly mirrored. Made in the same image: you were grown from his missing rib, and he always meant to be cradled in the brackets of your thighs. 

So, crisis of worthiness aside—because there are none, not anymore—he plots. Plans. Schemes. But his machinations keep catching on the soft fibrils of your wants. 

John doesn't know what he'd do if you changed your mind. 

(Or, rather, he does but that's another madness to unravel with his personal therapist.)

It's with this—the slight brandishing of his uncertainty in your certainty—that he gives up the idea, pocketing it for a later date, and drives home, back to you. 

He doesn't toss the bag on the counter, but sets it up perfectly, placing it as close to the edge where the bin sits under it. All it would take is a breath of wind for it to fall into the trash. 

That doesn't happen, though. You stare at the white, crinkled package for a moment as he sips on his tea, quietly contemplative. With your expression hidden from him, he has no idea what might be going through that pretty head of yours. Disappointment, he can only hope. And then you're reaching for it, fingers gripping the bag tightly in your fist. He hears the paper crumble. It sparks something inside his chest. A bloom of hope that you might just throw it out. Toss it in the bin—

You turn to him instead, knuckles white. 

“Thanks,” you say, and the matter is dropped. 

He goes to tuck that want back where it escaped, leaving slick trails of putrefying rot behind, but—

John peeks in the vanity later that evening, but where he expects to see the little rectangular package sitting in its usual spot between his aftershave and the mouthwash, he finds nothing. Just an empty spot on the ledge, spotlit by the lack of dust. A clean square of white paint, undisturbed. 

His jaw twinges. He wonders if you're hiding it from him, keeping it safe from his machinations, but then he finds it shoved in the drawer with his shaving kit, and the box of condoms he bought when you'd first started dating (for show, naturally—John had no intentions of using them and learned persuasion was your Achilles heel; that and you tended to get a little glossy-eyed whenever he growled filth in your ear, the smell of your cunt heavy on his breath). 

The package is crinkled like you squeezed it tight in your little fist before you tossed it in. 

You're always meticulous in the way you put things in their places. Even the junk drawer is organised, all neat. 

This speaks volumes, but he's not quite sure what it says. They are still here, though. Accessible. One is missing from the pack. It dampens his mood. 

He picks up his toothbrush, and runs through those calculations again to see how he can convince you to skip the one you're meant to take tomorrow. And the next day, and the next, and the next—

He stays awake as you sleep beside him, looking into how many days you can miss before your brand of birth control stops being effective. 

Seven pills in a row. 

He files it away, lost in thought. 

The next morning, he leaves his phone open on the bedside table with the article pulled up. He kisses you awake before he leaves to shower, humming something soft under his breath. 

When he returns, he finds you sitting up in bed with your knees drawn to your chest. There's something pensive about the look on your face. Paper soft, as though it would all blow away at a mere whisper. 

You regard him almost cooly but something raw, fractured splits over the ravine. A waterfall of midnight black sludge rains down. 

(He wonders if it tastes of the same rot, the same madness, as the basin of the untouched recesses of his head—)

“I'm working late tonight,” you murmur after a measured beat, and he can't place your tone. “Maybe we can watch a movie when I get home.” 

John nods, and your eyes drop, scaling down his bare, broad chest as he breathes in the flint staining the air. Your gaze is white-hot when it bludgeons into him, feverish. 

It doesn't take much beckoning at all to have him crawling toward you, towel ripped from his hips and thrown somewhere in the aether. 

As he steals the madness from your tongue, his eyes flicker to the phone still sitting on the table. It looks perfectly untouched. The screen is off. 

That, too, he files away. 

John comes to the succinct conclusion that the only means he has in his arsenal to get what he wants—legally, and somewhat morally, anyway—is persuasion. 

There's no recourse if he can water that burgeoning plant inside of you, make it seem like this is something you want, too. A family. With him. 

(Only him.)

He knows that you see things quite similarly to him. Wherein love is desire. Desire is hunger. And there's nothing more profound to you than to eat the person you love alive. Consumption of every part—the good, the beautiful, the bad, the ugly, and the rotted: skin, fat, muscles, blood, and bones. All of it. 

So, even if somewhere down the road you think you hate him for this, it'll be fine. He'll just consume that, too. 

John Price is a tenacious man. Stubborn. 

(Bullish, he hears around the barracks. Fuckin’ stubborn prick, too.)

It helps that this line of work is perfectly suited for such a peremptory drive to the finish line, no matter the cost. Utilitarian to a fault, despite his rather recalcitrant disposition. It's how he gets his way more often than not. Brutish dominance. Loutish suppression. 

But a near reckless, suicidal loyalty that attracts the sort of beasts this line of work needs. 

But that's work, not this. Not trying to convince you, his sugar-sweet (and viciously diabolical) lover, to bear the burden of giving him a family because society says it's uncouth (and illegal, morally reprehensible, villainous) for him to chain you to his bed to keep the darker parts of himself that want to rip into anyone who had the pleasure—pleasure that no longer belongs to them—of looking at you. 

That's all for him. 

(Nasty old bastard.) 

And, of course, because he's ready. Everything clicks. Locks into place. There's no one else out there for him. 

Really, though—it's your fault for prodding that beast in the first place. For letting inside your house, your bed. For thinking it could be tamed. And so. You should accept responsibility for it. 

(Nasty, nasty—)

But just as much as you know him, he knows you. You'll give him a litany of reasons why this shouldn't happen, and none of them will be because this isn't what you want. It'll be filled with reasons why you think he doesn't. 

And that simply won't do. 

So, he plots. Plans. 

The thing is. No one ever taught him how to hold things in his hands without crushing it. 

He doesn't think he can be delicate. Gentle. There's no way to gently nudge you into this. No. 

He'll convince you to yield the same way a tsunami convinces a house to move out of the way. 

Buried to the hilt in your cunt, he growls gospels into your ear about this beautiful Shangri-la, this sprawling castle he has in Spain until you're clenching down around him tight, conditioning your body to come at the thought of swelling with his child. About letting his seed take root, letting him knock you up. 

It's a crass image that he spits into your head—fuck you until it takes, love; breed this pretty cunt every day until you're fat and swollen—serves as the positive reinforcement to his classical conditioning. He'll turn you into one of Pavlov's mutts, salivating at the sound of him groaning into your ear as he fills your pussy up to the brim. He'll reshape you, change your wants until you only come around his cock when he's spitting his release against the plug of your womb. 

And when you make to get up, letting all his spend slip from your sloppy cunt to take your pill, he pulls you closer under the guise of wanting to feel your body on his, murmuring diabolical compromises he has no intention of letting you see through. 

“Later,” he rasps, pulling you closer. His mouth slots across your temple. “Just take it later, sweetheart. Later.”

“But—”

“It’ll be fine.” 

And, as if you'd been waiting for that reassurance, you melt into his hands, wet putty. 

(you take the bloody pill later, and he adds that to his mental calendar, adjusting the maths. He supposes he’ll just have to try harder next time.)

John's desire for you is overwhelming, all-encompassing, and he schemes around his wandering hands, bullying into your messy cunt only moments before your alarm is meant to go off, reminding you to take your pill, reinforcing that irritating little wall that keeps his come from reaching your womb. 

It goes off, but he hardly hears it over the roaring in his ears, the sweet, sweet litany of moans that slip out, staining the pillow with your pleasure. He just keeps fucking you through it, growling mindlessly into your ears about how badly he wants to come inside of you. His warnings, threats, about how close he is intertwining with your desperate begging for him to come, come inside me, John is the most beautiful harmonisation he'd ever heard, and it sews itself into his marrow, polluting the ugliness inside with a new, fresh hell for him to torture himself with. That delicious pleasure-pain that drives him mad—

He fills you up, palm pressed taut to your lower belly as he spits his virile release deep into your cunt. He can feel the heavy outline of his cock against your skin, stuffed full of him, and it's this—the way he moulds your body around him, cock visible through your flesh—that makes his eyes roll back into his head. Makes the urge to fuck, to breed, to claim bludgeon into him, shattering reason, logic. He wants to change you, irrevocably. Forever. To mar you with his touch, his essence. 

“Mine,” he chokes out, ugly and raw. It's a mangled mess in his throat. A threat. “All fucking mine, aren't you, love? All mine—”

His words seem to throw you into another climax, cunt clenching greedily down around him as he softens inside of you, plugging you up. You liked that, he notes, purs. The notion brands itself across his resolve, reshaping it into something that would make anyone else recoil in fear, disgust. 

But you preen at this creature that bares its fangs at you, snaps wicked teeth against your jugular. Fingers threading through its hair, shushing it, soothing it, as you pull it back into your embrace, head tucked against your chest. You lull it into complacency with the heavy thud of your heart, your sweet, earthy scent. 

What a pair, he thinks, and clamps his hands around your wrist when you murmur something about taking your pill now. Need to take it before it gets too late, John—

He makes his move, distracts you with his mouth, his tongue. 

“Just take it after,” he murmurs into your pussy, thighs bracketing around his head. His hands pull your waist down, pressing you harder against his mouth. “Later, love. It'll be fine—”

“But, John—”

The protest dies, turns to ash, when he grunts, sealing his lips around your clit, bullying it with the rasping press of tongue until you're arching your back, riding his face. Thoughts of your silly pill are gone, swallowed by him as you gush, drenching his mouth in your slick. 

And after, when you make to get up again, he pulls you close instead, voice curling around you like smoke when he tells you to take it after. 

“No, love. Stay in bed with me,” he peppers kisses to your cheek, your jaw, chin, sweetening his words, and folds you into the tight embrace of his arms. “Take it in the morning. It'll be fine to miss a day.”

You level him with something that shadows the ravines in your gaze with pure, unadulterated scepticism, but as he scouts the canyons, the valleys, the pretty craters that make up the composite of your eyes, he finds no discernible trace of wariness, uncertainty. The terse line in his shoulders ease. 

But while fossicking around he unearths something else. Something a bit more enigmatic, calculative, than doubt. Equivocal, slippery, it runs from him when he tries to give chase, tucking itself back into the harsh tenebrous that shades the landscape. 

He hums, wanting to ask, but you sigh in quasi-acquiescence, and burrow deeper into his embrace. 

“Fine,” you huff, but he tastes a purring sense of satisfaction in the air. “I'll take it tomorrow instead.” 

“Good girl.” The praise slips out, low and gritty, perfumed with his heavy greed. 

You shiver against him. The hitch in your throat is quiet in the bedroom, but to him, it sounds like a gunshot. 

John keeps meticulous track of the empty pill slots, and notes with a sticky, resinous sense of glee that the numbers are becoming muddled, skewed. Later becomes tomorrow, and your soft acquiesce has days skipped. Missed. 

You can't double up, you huff to him, mournfully slinking into the bed. It's nearly one in the morning. Technically, a brand new day. I absolutely have to take it tomorrow, John. Make sure you remind me—

There's something pointed in your tone. Something oil-slick. He nods, bites back a grin. 

“Sure,” he pulls you close, breathes in the sweet, loamy scent of you—sweat and sex and the lingering remnants of your perfume, your soap—and lets it stain his lungs. “I can do that.” 

You say nothing at all when he doesn't bring it up until well past midnight the next day, offering little more than an exasperated groan, and a huffy roll of your eyes, as if this was just a missed dinner with friends and not a life-changing misstep. 

(The beast purrs. He places his hand over his chest, and feels the rumble under his skin.)

“Need to be more responsible than this, John,” you say, squirming in his hold to try and rush to the washroom to take that pesky little pill. 

“Sorry, love,” he offers, and means none of it. Clings tighter to you. “Got a bit carried away today, is all.” 

“It's not your fault—” something curls out from a dark crevasse when you look at him. “I've been so—off lately, you know? Must be the new batch. Maybe I should call my doctor.” 

He stills. Body tensing, coiling. John tries to speak, but the words are ash on his tongue. He clears his throat. 

“Could stop taking it.” 

It crackles in the air. Hangs heavy like a stormcloud. 

You blink, stunned. But it's artificial, hollow. Pulled from a wicker basket where you keep all your different skins. 

“You mean—what? Stop it all together—?”

You flit in the space once more, but it's less of an injured bird searching for an escape, he realises suddenly, and more of—

A boomslang. 

One rearing up, searching for the perfect place to strike. 

Wishful thinking, though, because you're flustered and skittish once more, a small prey animal he isn't sure what he wants to do the most—sink his teeth into you, tear you into pieces, and devour you whole, or hide you away from the world. 

“I can look for something else in the meantime,” you sound shy, hesitant, and it prickles across his skin. “But we'd need to be careful, you know. Otherwise you might actually get me pregnant.”

He tries to swallow his groan. Chokes on it instead. 

“Sure, sure—” he hacks into his palm. “Of course, love. We'll be safe. I'll pull out—”

Naturally, he doesn't. Makes no effort to even try despite promising you he is. 

“Not my fault your pussy won't let go of me, love,” he grumbles, hand cupping your weeping sex in his palm. The heat of you is searing. Blistering. He thinks he could happily melt inside of it for the rest of his life, and leans down to whisper his devotion into your come-slicked folds, the bitter tang of you, of him, admixing on his tongue. An elixir he could drown in. 

You huff at him after, all glossy-eyed and sex-drunk, and tell him to please try harder, John, I'll have to get plan b tomorrow—

You don't, but the threat of it, the possibility, lingers in the back of his mind, souring his thoughts. 

Next time, and I'll have to, John, you say, featherlight, lips pressed against the head of his cock. A warning, a goddamn tease—

His voice is strained, pinched. “Of course, love,” and he guides your mouth back to his cock, letting the matter fall into pieces when you suck on the sensitive head, tongue licking, coy and kittenish, over his frenulum. 

It's only later, when watches you swallow down his come, that the beast slinks out of the shadows, pocketing the fragments. 

You're off birth control—barely any scheming words of whispered concern needed—but the idea of you taking a little pill to wipe away his efforts has him pulling back. Recalibrating his plans. 

He decides on a different route to the same end. 

Damnation at your own hand. 

John, for his credit, does begin to pull out after that—albeit, with a great deal of agonised reluctance—and instead comes all over your pretty face. 

With thick ropes of his pearlescent spend dripping down the apples of your heated cheeks, he doesn't think he's ever seen a sight more beautiful than this. 

And one with more opportunity.

Slowly, he swipes at it with his thumb and then promptly brings it down, hard, on your clit. You flinch, mewling at the overstimulation, and the threat he brings so close to your raw, unprotected sex. It's dangerous. This thin line he dances along could snap at any moment. Could rain hellfire and fury over his broad shoulders, unmake all the progress he'd steadily built up. 

He walks the precipice, anyway. He pulls his hand away, and brings two fingers up to curve over your cheeks. His thumb, stained with your slick and his come, slides across your bottom lip. 

The pout you give him—all wet-eyed lachrymose—has his spent cock twitching against his sticky thigh. “Fuck, love. Gonna send me to an early grave if you keep starin’ at me like that.” 

“You're cracked,” you slur around his thumb. In retaliation, he digs it into your tongue, and preens—full of nasty, gnarled satisfaction—when your eyes flutter, rolling into the back of your head at the taste. 

With this brief distraction, he drops his come-stained fingers to your mound, and rubs along the swollen rim of your hole. Just touching, pressing. A tease, a whisper. 

You tense. “John—” it's muffled around his thumb, and he isn't sure if it's a warning or a plea. 

He pushes the tips in, barely to the first knuckle, and just pets around your rim. 

It's a battle of wills, now. “No more than this,” he promises, and the undercurrent of his threat rents the air. Makes you bristle. 

You always loved a challenge—especially coming from him. 

“Just the tip?” You tease, spittle running down your chin. Your eyes are dark—midnight skies, ink black—and he's struck by the afterimage of himself in those pools. Made in the same image. 

He grunts, slides into the first knuckle, and scissors them apart. 

“John—” it's breathless. Your teeth spear his thumb, tight around his bone. He wants nothing more than to have you bite down hard, scar his bones with the gnawed meteors of your desire. Your desperation. “Fuck—please—”

You give in so prettily, and he barely has a moment to think about how quick it's been when you angle your hips, hand falling to grip his wrist tight as you slide down his fingers, all the way to the last knuckle. 

You clench around him like a vice. A pretty bow. He fucks you with his fingers, meeting your shallow thrusts with ones of his own, slamming viciously into your pussy as he coos adorations into your ear. 

With his other hand, he reaches down and fists himself over your bare mound, pressing the tip against your clit where it weeps prespend over your flesh. His thumb sweeps across what spills out, dragging it back down to your sopping hole, pushing it inside. 

It's probably not enough to reach your womb, to get you pregnant, but he clings to that tantalising fantasy as he drills his fingers into you until you come, breathlessly begging him to fuck you harder, to fill you up—

He isn't even fucking you with his cock, and you still beg him for it. 

John pushes the tip into your slit, fingers still buried deep inside of your throbbing pussy, and groans with the force of his release. It makes him dizzy, almost nauseous with it, filling his head with nothing but the sweet, wounded sound of your moans filling the room, and the wet squelch of his fingers pulling out of you. 

When he catches the threads of cognisance in his fingers once more, he leans back on his haunches, chest heaving, and brands the messy sight of your pussy fluttering, clenching around nothing, as his spend drips down your slit, over your hole, and pools in the sheets below. 

He's not sure if heaven exists, but he knows the sight of you, breathless and whimpering on his bed, is the closest a man like him will ever come to seeing it. 

The push-pull of this little game stretches on. 

Price likes to see just how far he toe the line before you're whimpering into the sheets, telling him don't, John, don't come inside me, I'm not anything, John—and he's ripping himself away from the tight clutch of your wet, hot cunt, and coming all over you.

The illicit tease of barely pulling out in time, and then scooping up the mess he makes on your face, your breasts, your belly, your ass, lower back, thighs, and spooning it into your pussy until it's a fixture in your bedroom ritual. 

And maybe it's the threat of it all, of playing such a dangerous game, seems to cudgel under his skin the most, ripping apart the thin veneer of that man he once pretended to be—righteous and good—shedding it off with each hiccupped gasp you make when he presses his come-slicked fingers inside of you, murmuring guttural words of affection in the shape of impish mockery (want it bad, don't you, sweet thing; so fuckin’ greedy for it, love—). 

He likes it the most when he can fuck you stupid on his fingers. Cockdrunk, and come-starved (because you are, of course; he hasn't come inside of your cunt in weeks, and doesn't miss the mournfully pitiful whines you give when he pulls out, depriving you of the pleasure of feeling him come inside you), you're too blissed out, swimming in pleasure, to think about what he's doing. 

In fact, he doesn't really give you much of a chance to think at all. 

The next few weeks are filled with him fucking you each night brutally, viciously, snarling low in your ear about how bad he wants to come in you, stuff you full, and then keep you plugged up all night with his cock that it takes, and then pulling out right before, committing the sight of your betrayed expression to memory where it'll sit like a trophy when you finally break. 

You make an appointment with your gynaecologist, and circle the date on his calendar. 

John notes it down. Tucks it away. 

And then he amps up the pressure.

John's fingers root behind your knees, pushing your thighs apart as he settles between them. His gaze drills into your bare cunt, slick and wet, and so ready for him. Eager for it. 

He'd counted the days, and knows that if there's ever the absolute worst time to have unprotected sex, to come inside of you, is now. 

Which, of course, means he has to. The clause in that is ironclad. Apodictic. 

“Bit dangerous,” he rasps, and lifts your leg up, resting your ankle on his shoulder. You fluster beneath him, panting and pretty, and fuck—he’s not pulling out of your pussy tonight at all. “Should I pull out?” 

It's a tease. A test. 

He reaches down as he says the words, gripping his cock and bringing it down against your wet heat. The bare, blunt head of his cocks slaps against your clit, and you arch, keening. Nails bite into the thick muscles of his biceps, and he leans into the sharp sting. Letting it ground him. Centre him. 

This will be your cacoëthes. 

He's been depriving you for weeks, and John knows that you're wanting for it. Desperate. The little twitches your hips give, as if begging him to fill you up, are proof enough of how much you want this. 

This. The dream he dripped into your ears, hot oil congealing over your frontal lobe; infectious and thick. You can try to chisel it off, but the pollution is already damning. Ruining. 

You want this. He wears the axiom like armour. 

And you beg for it—eyes shaded in gut wrenchingly beautiful lachrymose—and John snuffles closer, inching the weeping head of his cock into your tight, warm heat. 

The sight of splitting you open is something he never grows tired of. Something that, without fail, makes his balls ache. His chest thrum. Blood turns to ichor. To wine. He's drunk on the contrast made between you—a garish chiaroscuro of your pretty pussy, soft and sickly sweet—almost nauseatingly so—swallowing down the fat, girthy length of his cock. The thick streams of veins running along the flushed, heavy shaft against your puffy, soft folds is almost hideous. Sinful. He can't equate it to anything else except corruption. The horrific beast sullying the princess. 

And fuck—

The thought alone makes him throb. 

He's sullied you plenty, he reckons, and yet you always look so sweet. Especially now, when your rim is stretched taut around the thick of him, pussy squeezing, clenching around him in a vice, as if you weren't sure to push him out or pull him deeper. 

John decides for you. Opting instead to push your knees down to your chest, nearly brushing your ears, and follows with the bulk of his body until he feels your breath rush out of your lungs. You struggle for a moment, gasping wetly into his ear as his weight—every bearish pound of it—rests on you in the perfect mating press. Your bite into his biceps, keening prettily into his ear as he bullies the full length of his cock into you. Spears you open. Splits you apart. 

He can feel you gush around him, drenching his groin and thighs with your slick. 

Like this—chest to chest, forced to breathe in the same air, the same madness—he likes to just stare at you, taking in the heat simmering under your skin, the sweat beading along your temple, the pinch in your brow as you struggle to adjust to the sheer width of him cudgelling you open. A battering ram you're forced to make room for. 

He takes it all in, each flicker of emotion, each heaving gasp. Burns it into his memory. Lets it soften the iron around his heart. Keeps it there, nestled in the cradle of his limited love, held aloft by indelicate, bearish hands. This sweet thing. 

He can't wait to ruin it. 

If these weeks leading up to this were lovemaking, fucking, then this, this, is mating. Animalistic. Primal. He pushes in as deep as he can, until the tip kisses the ripened seal of your womb, and grinds his hips cruelly into the cradle of your thighs. 

Your nails leave bloodied indents in his flesh. A scar he'll proudly bear the mark of. A tattoo of the time when he turned you into something new. 

His balls are soaked. The sheets, too. He mocks you for it, a rasping growl lodged deep in his throat, taunting you about how fucking wet you are for him. How badly you need it. 

“Gotta plug you up, hm?” He grunts, and sets a pace that serves only to accentuate the sloppy, messy squelch of your cunt. 

His cock pistoning into you, alternating between deep, full thrusts that knock the air from your lungs, and heavy, slow plunges meant to badger the blunt head of his cock against your walls. 

You seem to like it best when he shifts his weight between each thigh, content to just grind into you. Make you feel every inch of him. You cling to him, yowling in his ear about how good it feels, how much you love this, love his cock—

The thick bed of wry, umber curls on his chest, stomach, and groin grow slick with sweat from the intensity of it all, from the shared heat. Pressed tight against you, he feels every quiver. Every flinch. Each moan is made known in a slight reverberation across his skin before he hears it. 

Drenched in sweat, glued to you as he fucks you into the mattress, John feels very much like the beast making a house out of a twisted whim in his head. Feverish, sick, he drives into you with the single minded goal of filling that home up with three. Then four. Five—

As many as you'll let him.

And he almost loses himself to that thought alone. Dancing sugar plums that make his balls tighten. He stems the flood by pulling out of you, letting his heavy cock slap against your sticky, soaked cunt as he heaves into your hairline, sucking in the heady loam, the humus, of your scent. 

The whimper you make when he pulls out of you sounds like a wounded animal, and the noise tickles across his hindbrain. His jaw aches. He bites down on a snarl as you thrash against him, mindless with the need to have him inside of you. It brings a nasty, vicious curl to the ends of his mouth, and he doesn't even bother trying to tamper it down. John lifts his head and lets you see his foaming muzzle, drooling with thick globes of saliva. 

“Stay still,” he growls, low and dangerous. It's as much of a warning as it is a command, and the way you react, tensing, coiling tight—the flash of unease. Shock. And then the need. Achy, heavy. He feels it against his jugular when you shiver, moaning his name into the space between you where it reeks of desperation. 

To soften the submissive tremble in your jaw—and maybe to temper down the challenging talons sharpening in your gaze—he nuzzles his cheek against yours, peppers wet kisses to your skin. He licks across your jaw, bites down on your flesh. 

He tastes salt and sin on your skin. 

(His eyes roll so far back into his skull he thinks he might get lost.)

“Gonna cum on your pretty cunt if you don't stop squirming, love.” 

And John loves you most for your waspish intelligence—the ire smouldering in your throat. The way you bite back just as hard, never afraid to bear teeth when he snarls. He doesn't think he could ever love someone too soft—not without tearing them to pieces. To shreds. 

But you wear plush, tender conchoidal skin over jagged, rough obsidian. He'll ruin himself if he ever tries to rip you apart. 

Like this, though—you melt. 

All that keen, vicious intelligence snuffed out. His scheming Cleopatra tamed on his cock. 

Your heels dig into the back of his thighs, urging him closer to your sex. “Come on, John, just fuck me, fuck me already—”

(Tamed, though, perhaps being a misnomer.)

He huffs into your neck. “Impatient little quean.”

It gets him a sharp bite to the tip of his ear, and the floor roars so loudly in his veins, he gets dizzy from it. 

“Fuck—”

He's pressing back into you again, into your warm, tight heat, and it's nirvana kissing his nerves. Liquifying his spine. He rolls into you with a weighted groan, buried to the hilt once more. 

But even with the respite, he knows he won't last. 

John needs you fucked stupid, docile and soft just for him, and sets out to do just that. Pounding into you with a spiteful twist of his hips that he knows will leave you a little sore, and tender tomorrow. But the idea of spreading your puffy, achy folds apart and soothing the slight hurt with his tongue for hours until you're sobbing into the cushions quells any hesitation that rears, begging him to slow down. 

Go easy on your pretty cunt.

(As if.)

John batters into you until your eyes glaze over, and your chin, cheeks, smear with drool. Until the challenge in midnight black melts into submission. Docile, and malleable. Perfect for him to mould. Shape. 

Reshape.

He glues to you, touch starved and tactile, and basks in the liquid heat that blooms from deep within you. 

“Gonna cum soon,” he snarls, broken by the heave in his chest as he fucks into you, starved. “Gotta pull out, love—”

You're gripping him tighter, anchoring him to your body. You haven't come yet. Something he dangles in front of you like a threat. 

He watches the slow crawl of realisation crest over your messy face, and thinks he falls just a little bit more in love with you at the sight of your little pout. 

Loves, even more, the way it breaks apart when he pounds into you harder, viciously, watching drool dribble off your chin, and reason leak from your ears—

“Please, John—” the sound of your whimpering has him grunting, head dizzy with the saccharine sweet taste of it on his tongue. “Please, please—come inside me. I–I want you to–to fill me up—”

“Yeah?” He taunts, mean and breathless. “Want me to come inside your sloppy cunt? Dangerous, ain't it? Jus’ might take, sweet thing. Is that what you want?”

You're howling a litany of sin into his ear, desperation drenches each clamour of his name, each orison uttered, begging him to come, to fill you up, and then—

“Fuck—I want it so bad—” his head is filled with static. Whitenoise. “Want it to take, John—”

He comes inside of you, cock pulsing so hard it feels like a sob. Filling you up. Wishing on all the stars that it takes—

As a reward for your good behaviour, he spreads you out over the sheets, and growls his approval into your sopping pussy, drenching himself with the taste, the smell, of you, promising to wear it like a perfume so everyone knows how good you are for him. Him, alone. 

(His, his, his—)

When you come, you nearly smother him, and he thinks he sees a glimpse of nirvana in baby soft yellow before he's pulled back by your shaking hands brushing the hair off his sweat-slicked forehead. 

“Are you okay, John—”

He rolls you under him, fucking into your drenched pussy like a man starved. That tantalising vision glues itself to his hindbrain, so close he can scent the fresh dew of fresh milk, and warm bread in his nose. Feel the bump of your stomach. 

He's almost angry about it, about being ripped away from that dream, and takes his aggression out on your sloppy, leaking cunt. The way his come trickles out, staining the mattress below and the back of your thighs has him growling darkly into your nape. 

“Keep it in,” he snarls, words sharpened on the whetstone of his need. “Keep it all inside, love.” 

“Ah, John, John—” something falls from your split-slicked lips, and his fingers bite into your hips. Punishment for the slurred backtalk. 

“I'll spank your ass if any of it leaks out—”

It does. Of course it does. 

He bends you over his knee, and slaps his broad, rough palm over each cheek ten times before deliriously shoving two thick fingers into your sloppy cunt, stuffing his come back inside your tender, swollen hole, rough and mean, as you howl, squirming in his lap about how you promise you'll be good next time, John, please—I'll keep it all in, I swear, I—

“You fuckin’ better, love.” He groans, and thinks about cumming on your messy face, all slick with sweat, and drool, but decides against it. A waste, he thinks, and leans over you to shove the thick, twisting length of his angry cock inside you to the hilt just spit his release against your seal once more. 

“That was…” You're still panting against his chest, eyes dazed, and body laxed. Melted wax over his chest. “Intense,” you settle on after a beat. 

There's a hiccup in your breath when he hums, chest rumbling with the sound. 

“Mm, but you liked it, didn't you?”

Of course you did. Of course. The evidence of it is drying, tacky and slick, on his groin, his thighs. 

You burrow into his side, peeking at him from over the thick bed of wry curls that clot over his chest. “You're fucking me like you haven't in years, John. Makes me wonder if you have an agenda.”

He considers your words. The weight of them. Wonders just how much you've clued into, but huffs when he catches the same look in your eyes as the one reflected in his own.

Cheeky little—

“Can't I just want to fuck you? Not everything has to be about schemes, love.” 

The oil of his lies, the sticky resin of his evasion makes you huff into his skin.

In all his meticulous planning, he'd picked up several books on this particular topic, and scoured every available, reputable, site he could find. John knows what to look out for by now, and keeps a keen eye on you—one that very quickly dips into obsessiveness, but you're kind enough to call it overbearing. 

Jesus Christ, John, why are you asking me how many times I pissed today? 

He just needs to wait things out. 

But rather irritatingly, he's called away overseas for the next week. 

Ah, well. He'll have to try harder next time. 

He arrives in Heathrow mid-morning, and follows Laswell into the office. There's a mountain of reports to fill out—things that, rather irritatingly, require his signature—and resolves to spend the rest of the day hunched over at his desk, even though there's an itch in the back of his skull demanding he go home. 

It is always like this, though—both the post-mission ritual of banal paperwork that seems almost comical considering what he'd just done, and the undeniable urge to flee back into the sanctuary of your shared home. 

His bones ache for it. 

Laswell huffs when he lingers by the exit, and he swallows a groan. 

While he was away, you'd been silent. Moreso than usual. 

Where he'd have expected an update on what was going on—the mundanity of your life that he clings to when the beast in his head whets its talons a little too sharp, digs into a little too deep—you’ve gone silent. Not radio. Not completely. But the information you give is sparse. Cagey.

You don't tell him about the visit to the gynaecologist, offering nothing but a quiet hum into the receiver, all blase and nonchalant, and a simple, equivocal: “good.” 

He tucks it away, lets the matter drop. 

If he timed things correctly—barring your impish prevarication aside—then something will begin to show soon. You would have mentioned something. Some nominal change to your physical well-being, but when pried, pressed, you huff. 

“I'm good, John. When are you coming home, anyway?”

He raps his knuckles on his desk, still smarting from the punches he'd thrown recklessly this past week, too keyed up to let his anger simmer instead of boil, and thinks. About you. About this. 

A week isn't a lot of time—he’s been called away for months in the past—but this feels like it's lingering. Time stretched and distorted. Elongated. And a part of him feels chipped, fractured after touchdown. 

It wasn't as if this particular assignment was any more, or less, dangerous than the ones he went on before. If anything, it was comparatively mild. Muted. He honed into his training, and did his goddamn job. And yet—

Yet. 

You lived in the spaces he occupied. The air he breathed. The water he drank. 

He brought you with him, something he's never, ever, done before. Perched pretty on his shoulder, he heard your voice in his head with every step he took, every radio call. 

But it was hallucinatory. Chimerical. You weren't there, you were here, but the problem lies in the lack of a divide that usually bifurcates the world into two fractions: his job and you.

It eats at him. 

He brought you where he's never taken anyone before. Never let them in. 

His thoughts were asunder. Pulled in all directions, but the centre was always you. His compass pointing north. He wants you. Needs you. His whole being has been recalibrated with the needle aimed toward you. 

An alert on his phone shakes him from his reverie. 

He reaches for it, slides his hand across the lockbar. The notification pops up. A message from his bank. 

His card—the one he gave you, the one you've used all of once to buy a chocolate bar when he gruffly, surely, complained about you not spending his money—has been used. 

Curious now, he opens his app, eyes scanning the threadbare purchases—all mostly interest fees and service charges, bar one. It was recently used at a drugstore for under twenty dollars. 

He doesn't know what this means, what you're playing at. He makes to text you, but he gets an email next. 

Thank you for your purchase; here is your e-receipt. 

His heart does something strange in his chest. Turns in on itself. Goes all askew. 

Not only are you using his card, you're using his account, too. He clicks it, eyes scanning through the purchases (only two), and blinks. 

A card, and—

His want takes the shape of a hand, presses against his jugular. 

—a pregnancy test. 

He knew when he started this game that this was, of course, the inevitable outcome, but having it here, right in front of him—in that sneaky, noncommittal way you always do things; behind his back, and in the dark, like you enjoy watching him try and sniff out the truth—has his belly knotting up. Churning. 

A pregnancy test. 

Fuck—

(and out of all the ways to tell him, you cheeky little—)

He's up out of his chair before he's even aware that he's standing. 

“Laswell,” he gets out, and can't be sure how his voice is so measured when his head is being shredded into pieces. “I'm out for the rest of the day. This whole bloody week, too—”

“Something bad happen?” 

His hands shake when he pulls his jacket on, slips his car keys into his hands. “No. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm going to be a father. A bloody dad—”

It's on that sentiment when his voice breaks. Shatters. He clears his throat, blinks furiously. Fuck. Fuck. It's happening—

Shangri-la sits in his fist, taking the shape of an e-mailed receipt. 

In his periphery, he sees Simon's head come up. Watching him. Measured. 

Laswell, too, eyes him with a degree of wariness. He supposes to them this means the end of everything. 

She breathes in. “Tuscany would be my choice.”

“Oh?” He tears his eyes away from the screen, gracing her with a steady, unflinching look. “Was thinking something a bit more local. Liverpool.”

It gets a scoff, one full of disgust. “She'll divorce you within the year.” 

“I'm having a baby, Laswell. Not getting married.”

“Oh, no?” It's a challenge. “I seem to recall something about someone being a proper gentleman, or was that just the lie you told your unofficial missus?”

“We'll get married. That's not up for debate—” an intern makes an alarmed face, like perhaps it ought to be. Had he not been holding nirvana in his hand, he might be a bit more cautious with his madness. Too bloody bad. “Wherever she wants—Tuscany, Udaipur, fucking Siberia. I don't care. What I’m a bit more concerned with is my expectant wife.” 

“Soon-to-be,” she volleys, just because she knows it's the sort of thing that will itch under his skin. 

“Already is, Laswell.” He gripes, flat. “Or damn near close to it.” 

“If she knows what's good for her, she'll say no.”

“Lucky me, then, that she doesn't.” 

Lucky him, indeed. 

On his way out, Ghost utters a heated congratulations to him, and John can see his gaze is absent. Turned inward, mind whirring. Reeling. He can hear the gears grind from where he stands, and if the ink-black madness in his lieutenant’s drifting, pensive eyes means much of anything, then John sends a silent hail mary to whatever unlucky person was misfortune enough to unleash the muzzle on that particular dog. 

Well. It's not really his problem. Until it is. Until it becomes one. But since it's not something that'll impact him in the next five minutes, he tucks it away. “Thanks.” 

He doesn't linger. Doesn't, really, even remember the ride home, head buzzing with thoughts that keep twisting around themselves, driving him mental. Things like, is it real? what if you were joking. what you weren't? 

Oh, fuck—

You better not be. 

But you wouldn't. You're conniving and wily, but you're not cruel. 

This is happening, then. 

You've been playing house with matches inside of a tinderbox. He shouldn't be surprised when it all goes up in flames, in smoke, but as he walks through the door, and glimpses the pregnancy test perched innocently on the counter beside a card—congrats, daddy (and the caricature of a man in a pinstripe suit nearly makes him gag)—he feels all the maligned pieces inside of crack. 

It shifts—

You walk out, hand cupped protectively over your lower belly. Eyes gleaming like a wild cat crouched low in the tussocks surrounding the savannah, watching him an eager sense of anticipation, excitement, and just the slightest edge of what he can only imagine the unfortunate mate of a black widow sees before it's consumed. Spare parts. 

It thrums inside of him. Ignites this wicker basket he calls a heart until it's cinder. Ash. Soot. He breathes it in. Tastes you on his tongue. 

John doesn't have the words. Can't think beyond the steady brag of his burning heart. 

His. His.

—and then it all falls into place. 

Yours.

He dotes on you with an almost unhinged devotion, murmuring stilted, gruff words of muted affection into the shallow bump on your belly. Ones that you, politely, pretend not to hear. 

A new bedtime ritual, one he adheres to with an almost obsessive need. 

Until it becomes too much. 

“Go and get my prenatal vitamins from the washroom, please. I just need five minutes without you smothering me, you stupid bear of a man.”

“You love it,” he grumbles, but acquiesces, giving your small, barely there bump a pat. “I'll be back soon.”

“Oh, no… please take your time.” 

Despite the prickle in your tongue, your eyes are soft. Warm. Melting him just a little more. 

John pulls away, and doesn't even pretend the reluctance to be apart is feigned. 

“It's in the drawer,” you call, voice stretched. Echoing. “Next to your shaving cream.” 

He pulls the drawer open, scanning the contents briefly, before finding the purple bottle in the back. Why you chose here of all places to put the bloody things—

His knuckles knock against the old box of condoms, tipping it over. There's a strange rattle as it falls, and his brows furrow at the noise. 

Curiously, he reaches for it. Shakes it as he picks it up. The same sounds spill out. He pops the flap of the box open, peering inside, and—

A gruff chuckle crackles in his throat. 

Inside the old box of condoms—the ones he never bothered to throw out, or use—is an accumulation of all the pills you'd meant to take. 

His jowls ache. He rubs at his jaw with his hand, and feels the skittish patter of his heart thudding out of his skin. Madness in his veins. 

John closes the drawer with his knee, and then tosses the box of condoms in the bin, leaving it for you to find later when you're inevitably wracked by another wave of morning sickness. A little shred of vindication for this little game you made him play. 

Though he supposes turn-about is fair play, and the number of pills in the box is less than the months he spent scheming for this vision of his.  

In the back of his heat, the beast purrs.

“Do we need to play these games again for the next one,” he rasps. “Or can I just fuck you until it takes.” 

You blink at him, wide and owlish. Full of faux innocence as you coax the beast out of hiding. “I don't know what you're talking about, John.” 

More games, then. He thinks he might crack open your ribcage and rest his weary head on the frantic beat of your heart. 

“Mm, don't know what I'd do without you,” he says, guns aching. He reaches for the pack of gum (no smoking around the baby or you'd toss him off the balcony), and pops a spearmint into his mouth. “Might live longer, I reckon, but—”

Your elbow digs into his side. “You sure about that?”

He just kisses your crown in response, and places his heavy, scarred hand over the curve of your belly. The beast inside purrs, content for now. Satiated. 

When he looks into your midnight eyes, he finds your own beast slumbering away. 

A match made in a tinderbox, he guesses, and kisses you until you're dizzy. His very own Shangri-la sitting pretty inside his bed, nestled in the castle in Spain you helped him build.

Will help him fill. 

[back-and-totheleft]

“Come on, that’s such a canard, you know that,” Oliver Stone said. “ ‘The Greatest Generation?’ That was the biggest publishing hoax of all. It’s to sell books.” This seemingly sacrosanct term was coined by Tom Brokaw for his 1998 book of the same title, in which he recounted the lives of ordinary, World War II-era Americans. “I was in Vietnam with the Greatest Generation. They were master sergeants, generals, colonels. They had arrogance beyond belief. The hubris that allowed Henry Kissinger to say North Vietnam is a fourth-rate power we will break. The hubris of that!”

We were discussing Stone’s latest project, a 10-part Showtime series and a 750-page companion volume called “The Untold History of the United States,” which begins with World War I and ends with the first Obama administration. It’s an Oliver Stone version of a History Channel documentary, one guaranteed to raise the ires of both left and right and where all roads lead to Vietnam. From where Stone sits, World War II begot the cold war, which landed us in Vietnam, a manifestation of American imperialism, which led inexorably to our current battle in Afghanistan. We have, Stone says, been sold a fairy tale masquerading as history, and it is so blinding it may ultimately undo us. “You have to understand what it was like to be a Roman empire and to find some barbarian tribe riding into Rome in 476 A.D.,” Stone said. “It’s quite a shock. And that’s what will happen to us unless we change our attitude about what our role in the world is. Every story out of most newspapers is ‘the Americans think this, the administration thinks this.’ It’s always about our controlling the pieces on the chessboard. I think what the Arabs have shown us is that we don’t control the chess pieces. And this is a shock to many people. But it’s definitely in ‘The Greatest Generation.’ And it’s in Spielberg’s World War II film, and it’s in Ridley Scott’s ‘Black Hawk Down.’ These are wonderful-looking films, but the message is perverted.”

It was a late September morning, and Stone was sitting on the terrace of his hotel suite in San Sebastián, Spain, where his latest film, “Savages,” was being screened as part of the city’s 60-year-old film festival. The sun was peeking through some late-morning clouds, glinting off the river below, and Stone shielded his eyes with a pair of sunglasses that could have been part of Kevin Costner’s wardrobe in “JFK.” At a news conference he gave the day before, he suggested that the former Spanish president José María Aznar should be tried at The Hague on war-crimes charges for his participation in Bush’s Coalition of the Willing during the Iraq War. The remark presumably only enhanced his status in San Sebastián, where he was presented with the Donostia, the festival’s lifetime achievement award. Before the premiere of “Savages,” Stone walked the red carpet with John Travolta and Benicio Del Toro, waiting, a bit impatiently, as Travolta, Bill Clinton-like, shook the hand of every fan reaching out to him from behind the barriers, kissed old ladies and posed for innumerable cellphone pictures; Stone shook some hands, too, but demurred when asked to kiss a small dog. “Allergies,” he explained, pointing to his nose.

“Savages,” based on a popular 2010 novel by Don Winslow about a couple of boutique marijuana growers who are drawn into battle with a brutal Mexican drug cartel, covers terrain that is near to Stone’s heart. To promote the film, he appeared on the cover of High Times, puffing on a thick joint. I mentioned to Stone that the reporter who interviewed him for Playboy in 1987 later wrote that the drunkest he’d ever gotten was with Stone, in Southampton, where Stone was filming the beach house scene in “Wall Street.” The reporter remembers several bottles of bourbon, and then little else until he woke the next morning, soaking wet. He’d passed out on the hotel lawn and was roused when the sprinklers started up. Stone chuckled. “That is funny,” he said. “Because we’ve all had moments on lawns where we passed out. One time I was in the Bel-Air Hotel. I woke up in the bushes, and I couldn’t find my way back. And my new wife was waiting. It was kind of a honeymoon. I remember stumbling in and her face when she saw me.” Was the look on her face one of horror? I asked. “Well, it was like she was in for something with the marriage here,” he said. This was his first wife, Najwa Sarkis, he clarified (he has been married to Sun-jung Jung, his third wife, since 1996).

But Stone isn’t a kid anymore. He’s 66, sometimes wears hearing aids and can’t shake off hangovers the way he used to. (“Two vodkas or two tequilas and a few glasses of wine, that’s the edge for me,” he said.) It has been more than 25 years since his greatest critical and commercial success, “Platoon,” an autobiographical retelling of his Vietnam experience, which won best director and best picture and harvested almost $150 million at the domestic box office. And now he’s at the age where he’s considering his legacy. “A lot of people when they get older they write autobiographies or memoirs,” he said. “But my priority would be to ask, What did the times I lived through mean? And did I understand them?”

Stone modeled his new series on the landmark 1973-74 ITV series “The World at War,” which, at 26 episodes, is considered as exhaustive and authoritative a study of World War II as could be offered on television. Stone’s “Untold History” jams almost 75 years of American history into just 10 hours, so that may kill the exhaustive angle, but Stone is certainly hoping for the authoritative bit. “This,” he pronounced, “is truly the meaning of these events.”

Spend any time with Stone, and you’ll soon discover that he lacks what you might call the deliberation gene, whatever prevents us from saying things that will get us in trouble, lose us friendships, even jobs. Years ago, a producer on “Nixon” related that when he first introduced Stone to his mother, Stone declared, “You look Chinese.” (She was not.) At dinner, I watched Stone jokingly tell two female Spanish film executives that he missed the days when attractive Spanish women, with little economic opportunity at home, served as maids in wealthy French households. The day we met, I mentioned that my family would be leaving Brooklyn for Connecticut, where we don’t know a soul. “But, really, what’s the worst thing that could happen?” I said, offering the kind of throwaway phrase used to move from one topic to the next. Well, Stone postulated, quite earnestly, you could end up going through an acrimonious divorce and then be forced to wage an expensive battle over custody of your children.

Stone often comes to understand, too late, the consequences of his words. In Spain, he talked openly about the furor that ensued when, in 2010, a British journalist asked him why people were so fixated on memorializing the Holocaust, considering, as he told her, that “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians” than he did to the Jews and that the Russians lost “25, 30 million” in the war. It was, Stone claimed, because of what he called “the Jewish domination of the media” and Israel’s “powerful lobby in Washington.” As TheWrap.com reported, this did not go over well with some in Hollywood, notably with the entertainment magnate Haim Saban, a promi­nent supporter of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, who personally lobbied the president of CBS, Leslie Moonves, to kill the series on Showtime (owned by CBS). Soon after, Stone apologized to the Anti-Defamation League, retracting his claim that Israel and the pro-Israel lobby were to blame for America’s “flawed foreign policy.” “Of course that’s not true, and I apologize that my inappropriately glib remark has played into that negative stereotype,” his statement read. In Spain, I asked if he stood by this abject apology. “I don’t know about the word ‘abject,’ ” he said. “I did use the wrong word, and I had to apologize because I should not have used the word ‘Jewish.’ That was the only thing that’s frankly wrong in that statement. I was upset at the time about Israel and their control, their seeming control over American foreign policy. It’s clear that Jews do not dominate the media. Rupert Murdoch, Clear Channel, Christians dominate much of the right wing. But certainly Aipac has an undue influence. They were very much militating for the war in Iraq. They got it.”

A few days after returning from Europe, Stone sent me a long e-mail, clarifying a few of the more inflammatory things he’d said. He also requested that I not call CBS to inquire about the seeming retraction of his retraction, concerned that Showtime might flinch and pull his as-yet unbroadcast “Untold History” series. “Feel free to write about it, but why go now and wave a red flag in front of bulls?” he wrote. It had happened before. In 2003, HBO was set to broadcast his first Fidel Castro documentary, “Comandante,” in which Stone showed the Cuban leader speed-walking around his office, mooning over Brigitte Bardot and basking in the love of ebullient Cubans. When Castro executed three hijackers of a ferry to the United States and imprisoned more than 70 political dissidents, HBO pulled the program two weeks before airtime. “I was heartbroken,” Stone said.

Considering his occasional disregard of others’ feelings, Stone is surprisingly sensitive about his work. “He’s always experienced self-doubt because he’s so often trying to break the rules,” says Edward R. Pressman, who produced four of Stone’s movies, including “Wall Street.” In Spain, Stone mentioned “Heaven and Earth” (1993), his third film about Vietnam, which, I admitted, I hadn’t seen. “No one has seen it,” he lamented. “It was my biggest financial failure. But I don’t regret it. It was an amazingly beautiful movie, and I hope you see it one day.” Sure I would, I told him. “Will you?” he said.

When I returned home, I received a package from Stone’s Ixtlan production company that, in addition to “Heaven and Earth,” included his three Castro documentaries, as well as a 3-hour-34-minute version of his epic “Alexander.” He can’t stand the 2-hour-55-minute theatrical edit he made for Warner Brothers. “It was really a two-part roadshow movie,” he said. “If I had had the confidence I would have made it that.”

A few weeks later, he looked genuinely pained when I needled him about the Connecticut divorce comment he made in Spain. When he met my wife, he took her hands in his and told her, apologetically, “I love Connecticut.”

Last month, on the afternoon before the premiere of three episodes of “Untold History” at the New York Film Festival, Stone and Peter Kuznick were bickering in a conference room at Stone’s publicity firm. Kuznick is the history professor at the American University in Washington who helped write the Showtime series and, even Stone admits, most of the book. At 64, Kuznick is Stone’s contemporary, and the two men in their identical outfits of black jackets and pressed blue oxford shirts might suggest some sort of cosmic parity if their personal backgrounds weren’t so dissimilar. Whereas Kuznick was raised by left-leaning, politically active Jews and joined the N.A.A.C.P. at age 12, Stone’s political evolution has been a gradual but radical departure from his upbringing in the Upper East Side household of Louis Stone, a stockbroker and Eisenhower Republican, who instilled in his son an almost-paralyzing fear of Russia’s global military and economic ascendancy. “I remember crying, practically, and saying why aren’t we doing anything?” Stone said. He infuriated his father by dropping out of Yale after his first year (George W. Bush was in his freshman class) and later joined the Army and served in the infantry in Vietnam. Not long before enlisting, he tried, unsuccessfully, to sell a novel, an event he has said left him in a suicidal mood. He wanted to make his military experience as difficult as possible. “I insisted on the infantry, and I insisted on Vietnam because I didn’t want to end up going to Germany,” he said. “And I got that, which was good for me, because it woke me up.”

In a very small way, the challenges of objectively documenting history are made manifest when you ask Stone and Kuznick how they came to work together on “Untold History.” Kuznick was a huge Oliver Stone fan, so much so that in 1996, he started teaching a course called Oliver Stone’s America, which attracted, in its very first year, a visit from the only guy he considered an indispensable guest lecturer. Over dinner that evening, Kuznick regaled him with his take on Henry Wallace, vice president during F.D.R.’s third term, whom Kuznick considers a brilliant progressive and an unsung hero. During the 1944 Democratic convention, thanks to some conservative power players, Wallace, instead of being renominated for vice president, was at the last moment tossed aside for Harry Truman, a senator of limited experience who was only briefed that the United States was building the atomic bomb after Roosevelt died. If Wallace rather than Truman had become president, Kuznick told Stone, the United States might not have dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and the cold war might never have started.

Stone commissioned Kuznick to write a treatment. Kuznick, convinced that he’d been ushered into the movie business, got himself a William Morris agent, who lobbied for Kuznick to write the script. But the screenplay suffered the same fate as several of Stone’s pet projects — the C.I.A.-hunting-Bin-Laden project, the Manuel Noriega project, the My Lai project. That is, it died. And this is where Kuznick and Stone’s versions of history diverge.

Stone: “It was a great idea. I’d never heard the story, and I wanted to do a ’40s kind of movie. It was perfect. And he [expletive] up the screenplay.”

Kuznick: “Don’t believe that, because Oliver told a mutual friend of ours who told me, ‘Oliver said it’s a work of genius, I’m dying to make it.’ ” Stone: “Nooo!”

Kuznick: “Well, you did. You forgot.”

A decade later, Stone told Kuznick he wanted his help on a 90-minute documentary about Wallace, Truman and the birth of the atom bomb. Soon after, the 90-minute documentary morphed, Kuznick was never sure how, into a 10-hour Showtime series that he was on the hook to write and research. Both men make the four years it took to put together the series sound about as much fun as the siege of Leningrad. Stone missed his deadline by two full years, and his foreign distributor almost ditched the project. It was one of the many bumps that didn’t go unfelt by Kuznick. “Oliver is always good about sharing the pressure,” Kuznick told me. “Whatever pressure Oliver is feeling, I would get a double dose of.” As we talked, Kuznick’s cellphone rang. It was Stone, who was about to be interviewed for the Carson Daly show and needed stats on how much the United States committed to pay the U.S.S.R. in reparations after World War II, and how much, per year, the United States spends in Afghanistan per Al Qaeda member who actually resides in Afghanistan.

Kuznick is not the first expert Stone has relied on in making his films. “JFK” was based on “On the Trail of the Assassins,” by Jim Garrison, a former Orleans Parish district attorney who, in 1969, unsuccessfully prosecuted Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, for conspiring to kill the president. Kevin Costner played Garrison as an Atticus Finch type fighting an ingrained power structure, though Garrison is dismissed by many mainstream historians as a con man. In researching “JFK,” Stone also relied on L. Fletcher Prouty, a former Air Force colonel who, before becoming disillusioned with government, was chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy administration. Prouty never actually met Garrison except in Stone’s film, where he is Donald Sutherland’s Colonel X, who lays it all out for the D.A. in the shadow of the Washington Monument — how the military deliberately underprotected the president in Dallas, how defense contractors, big oil and bankers conspired with the military to make sure the president died because he didn’t intend to go to war in Vietnam. Costner is a kind of stand-in for Stone, soberly shaking his head as X says: “Does that sound like a bunch of coincidences to you, Mr. Garrison? Not for one moment.”

In advance of the film’s release, Stone pronounced “JFK” “a history lesson.” Prouty, however, who died in 2001, turned out to be extremely problematic. He had many theories in addition to his theories on Kennedy, including that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had foreknowledge of the Jonestown Massacre and that greedy oil barons invented the fiction that oil is made of decomposed fossils. And it was Prouty, Stone said, who turned him on to “The Report From Iron Mountain,” a 1967 document ostensibly written by a secret panel of military planners. The document is a favorite among conspiracy theorists, who, like Prouty, seem unaware that in 1972 the satirist Leonard Lewin admitted he wrote it. “I’ve acknowledged when I’ve made mistakes,” Stone said of the movie now. “There were a few mistakes, but nothing that changes the big story.”

It has been more than 20 years since Stone made “JFK,” a film that he now says should be looked at not as history but as a dramatized version of it — “the spirit of the truth.” “It’s called dramatic license,” Stone said about his approach in “JFK.” “It’s a noble tradition. The Greeks did it, Homer did it, Shakespeare did it.” Increased historical rigor may explain why his portrayal of Nixon’s life was deemed judicious by comparison, and even why, to the great chagrin of his liberal fans, “W.” was judged a sympathetic portrayal of Bush. (“It’s empathy,” he said, clearly irritated by that take. “It’s not sympathy. I repeat, I did not like George Bush, nor did I like Richard Nixon.”) This time, perhaps, having a bona fide tenured professor on his side will silence his many critics.

The screening of “Untold History” during the New York Film Festival early last month suggested that he might have a hit. At the end of the third hour, the crowd roared its approval. The cheers got only louder when Stone sauntered onstage for a postscreening panel discussion. “So much of what I saw today is what we try to do at The Nation,” said Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher and editor of the left’s beloved 147-year-old weekly. “To challenge the orthodoxy, challenge the conformity of our history and to speak truth to power.” Jonathan Schell, a journalist who also writes for The Nation, concurred.

Stone didn’t seem particularly riveted by the conversation at first, leaning back in his chair, gripping the bridge of his nose as if he had a sinus headache and sometimes closing his eyes so that, owing to his bushy Brezhnev eyebrows, he looked like a Russian premier lying in state. Just when the panel started to feel like a wonky meeting of Park Slope Food Coop members, the historian Douglas Brinkley stirred things up. Even though Brinkley provided the authors a nice blurb, calling the book “a brave revisionist study which shatters many foreign policy myths,” he had a few bones to pick with the project. Brinkley, who has written several notable histories, said he thought the series had gone too far in demonizing Truman. “Truman is one of the most popular presidents in American history, and he’s popular for doing a bunch of things,” he said. Brinkley mentioned how Truman presided over the end of World War II, racially integrated American troops, helped create the state of Israel and airlifted supplies into Soviet-blockaded West Berlin. “The only opening you’re giving him is that he was a naïf,” Brinkley said. This perked Stone right up. He shook his head. “If he’d done something noble, believe me, we’re not looking to cut it out,” Stone said, earning him a round of applause. “I just don’t see any nobleness.”

But Brinkley has a point. If the only thing you ever learned about Truman was from “Untold History,” you might conclude he was a virulent racist, mentally unfit for office and suffering from a gender confusion that led to mass murder. “He was bullied by other boys who called him ‘Four Eyes’ and ‘sissy’ and chased him home after school,” Stone narrates. “When he arrived home, trembling, his mother would comfort him by telling him not to worry because he was meant to be a girl anyway.” This, the series implies, might explain why Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japan — not to end the war but to flex his muscles and intimidate Stalin, as he himself had been intimidated as a boy.

While Stone glancingly acknowledges Stalin’s mass murder of his own people, Stalin, compared with Truman, still comes off as heroic, as an honest negotiator who, following F.D.R.’s death, was faced at every turn with Truman’s diplomatic perfidy. (Stalin promised that after he defeated Germany, he’d invade Japan, but Truman dropped the bomb anyway.) Stone also sees America’s role in the war as exaggerated. “The Soviets were regularly battling more than 200 German divisions. . . . The Americans and the British fighting in the Mediterranean rarely confronted more than 10,” Stone narrates.

If Truman represents the black hat of “The Untold History,” the white hats belong to those whose promise was unfulfilled — F.D.R., who died before he could make peace in Europe and Asia humanely, and Kennedy, cut down before he could stem aggression toward Communist elements in Southeast Asia. (The cold war, the series posits, was mostly a product of American paranoia and imperialist ambitions. Stalin was essentially pulled onto the dance floor by the United States, and Russia’s continued domination of Eastern Europe mainly a defensive response to our nuclear program and the establishment of American military bases throughout Europe.) The biggest hero of all, though, is the man who inspired the whole project: Henry Wallace. In the series, Wallace is treated to reverent orchestral music when his face appears on-screen, intercut at times with clips from “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” “Wallace stuck out like a sore thumb on Capitol Hill,” Stone narrates. “He studied Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. . . . He liked to spend evenings reading or throwing boomerangs on the Potomac.”

Onstage, Kuznick said that he and Stone wanted to highlight pivotal moments in history when better decisions could have been made. “We actually came very close to having a very different kind of history,” he said. “We want to give people the ability to think in a utopian fashion again.” I asked Stone what would have happened had Wallace, not Truman, become president. “There would not have been this cold war,” he said. “There would have been the continuation of the Roosevelt-Stalin working out of things. Vietnam wouldn’t have happened.”

While to his fans Stone’s alternate histories are provocative, his detractors see them as grossly irresponsible cherry-picking. The conservative historian and CUNY emeritus professor Ronald Radosh said he found himself wanting to do harm to his television while watching the first four episodes, which he reviewed for the right-wing Weekly Standard. Radosh had been blogging skeptically about the Stone project since its announcement in 2010, but now that he’d actually seen it, he said, it was the historian rather than the conservative in him who was most offended. “Historians can have different interpretations, but based on evidence,” he said. “What these other guys do is manipulate evidence and ignore evidence that does not fit their predetermined thesis, and that’s why they’re wrong.” According to Radosh, Stone and Kuznick’s take on the United States’ role in the cold war mirrors the argument in “We Can Be Friends,” a book published in 1952 by Carl Marzani, who was convicted of concealing his affiliation to the Communist Party when he joined the O.S.S., the precursor to the C.I.A. “This Stone-Kuznick film could have been put out in 1955 as Soviet propaganda,” Radosh said. “They use all the old stuff.”

Radosh, who grew up as a Red Diaper baby in Washington Heights and only later turned to the right, thinks of himself as intimately familiar with the “old stuff.” But fearing he might be dismissed as partisan, he insisted I reach out to Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who, owing to his strident defense of Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings and to his 2006 Rolling Stone cover article on George W. Bush, “The Worst President in History?” is regarded as decidedly left-leaning. When I spoke to him, Wilentz said: “You can’t get two historians more unlike each other than me and Ronnie Radosh. But we can agree about this. It’s ridiculous.” Wilentz was in the middle of writing a review of Stone’s book. “Always beware of books that describe themselves as the untold history of anything, because it’s usually been told before,” he said. “It sets up this thing that there is some sort of mysterious force suppressing the true facts, right? Glenn Beck does this all the time. It’s the same thing here, except this is basically a very standard left-wing, C.P., fellow traveler, Wallace-ite vision of what happened in 1945-46.” It’s not, Wilentz continued, that the questions raised aren’t worth raising. “Is there a legitimate argument to be made about the origins of our nuclear diplomacy or the decision to build the H-bomb?” he said. “Of course there is. But it’s so overloaded with ideological distortion that this question doesn’t get raised in an intelligent way. And once a question gets raised in an unintelligent way, then you are off in cloud-cuckoo land.”

But for some, Stone’s work, though flawed, does succeed in reorienting our perspective. “What Stone makes you rethink, which is very valuable, is why later in life did Truman have to take on such a macho posture?” Brinkley said after the screening. “I would think you’d be a little bit concerned about wiping out a civilian population and being the only president to use nuclear weapons.” Brinkley was referring to a clip Stone included from a 1958 interview Truman did with Edward R. Murrow, in which he was asked if the bomb was really necessary. Truman answered, chillingly: “We had this powerful new weapon. I had no qualms about using it.”

“Untold History” wants to present itself as the whole truth and nothing but. Yet Stone has always fared best as a provocateur. “JFK” may not be particularly good history, but so many people believed his film to be a document of the actual conspiracy, and so many others dismissed it as hooey, that Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992, which precipitated the release of millions of pages of documents. We would never discover that L.B.J. had a hand in the killing — as Colonel X’s monologue in the movie would have us believe — but we did find out that L.B.J. thought preposterous the Warren Commission’s “magic bullet” explanation for how one bullet could have passed through the bodies of Kennedy and John Connally only to emerge pristine. And all the talk of forged autopsy records, which to many seemed like cloud-cuckoo land, didn’t seem so crazy after documents revealed that the pathologist who performed the J.F.K. autopsy had burned his original notes and replaced them with an edited version. This is unimpeachably good history that is directly attributable to Oliver Stone’s not being a great historian.

On Nov. 10, two days before the premiere of “Untold History” on Showtime, Kuznick was onstage at the 92nd Street Y, crowing a bit about the project’s reception. (He hadn’t yet heard the excoriating opinions of Wilentz and others.) “It’s interesting to see the early reviews,” Kuznick said. “They’re all glowing, really. I mean, nobody’s challenging anything we’re saying, either our facts or our interpretations.” Stone, sitting next to him, gestured with his hands, as if to calm him down. “Well, it’s early,” Stone said.

-Andrew Goldman, "Oliver Stone Rewrites History...Again," The New York Times, Nov. 25 2012

[onp4012]

Pick a Card: Keywords To Your Future Marriage

Choose a Metallica album picture in order to find out some small bits of random information I get about your future marriage.

Feel free to suggest PAC ideas in the inbox

Please like and reblog 〽️

©onenormalperson4012

masterlist

Pile 1

Queen of Cups, The Hierophant, Strength

Zoo, cups of tea drank in the park, church, religion, tradition, folklore, you watching them sleeping, blunt energy, victory, infinity, nephews(?), water slides, shower, bath, leaf, Monster drinks, blue t-shirt, a girl’s laugh, waist lift, sun, dancing, a lot of pop music, Spanish, 70s music, “you’re the one that I want” by Olivia Newton-John and John Trevolta, blue eyes, “Christian Woman” by Type O Negative, Ed Sheeran, Guitar, beach, lake, cold rain, maternal energy.

You will most likely have a beautiful family.

—————————————————

Pile 2

8 of Pentacles, 7 of Swords, Justice

Work, coworker, pranks, law, lawyer, sword fight, fencing, mask, doctor, colosseum, Roman Empire, history, Latin, theatre, Greek, Middle Eastern food, Middle Ages, wood, fire, Libra, air, deep stares into each other’s eyes, curly hair, short people, father looking at sports game, tiptoeing, stealing each other’s food for no reason, smiling under each other’s breaths, a lot of history fr, Vatican, “Ayy Ladies” by Travis Porter, “Bubblegum Bitch” by Marina and the Diamonds, clubbing together, forever young

What a nice pile, you also seem young.

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Pile 3

Page of Wands, Knight of Cups, 8 of Pentacles

Traveling, dancing, drinking wine late in the night, Tango lol, Argentina, gecko, sand, animals, kids, red, orange, yellow, opposites, magnet, poles, matching colours, big height difference, North, Eagle, Albania, Alexander, Macedonia, peeking at each other, chill smile, red face, weed(?), “hahaha” with a male calm voice, tired, sex, sports, “Culo” by Pitbull lol, “Informer” by Snow, 4 years age gap, funny accent, sunglasses, meetings, running late, running, “oh fuck”, “I really really really really really really like you”

Are you guys that wild? If not, chose another pile.

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Pile 4

Ace of Wands, 4 of Wands, 10 of Wands

“Fire” by BTS, alcohol, tequila, crying because of stress, disappointment, getting back together after 2-3 months of arguing, Maldives, microorganisms (?), science, “fuck you/off”, “never mind, forgive me please”, toxic, married too young, too much childishness, lion cereals, moving around, very guarded partners, early pregnancy, autumn, alone, teeth clenching, Aries, anger, divorce, “move”, “Heart Attack” by Demi Lovato, running, jogging, sports, instant connection, remarrying the same person, arguments.

Don’t marry young, I beg you. Especially if you know you’re childish or if you have Saturn in 7th house or in retrograde.

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Pile 5

Ace of Pentacles, 2 of Wands, 9 of Swords

Money, wealthy life, happy, traveling together, singing together, “Grande Amore” by Il Volo, nightmares, paranoia, washing the dishes together, cleaning, cooking, piano, opera, offering help, one working from home, one is more confident than the other one, traditional, earth, Taurus, King of Pentacles, loyalty, true love, Ludovico Einaudi, Italy, brown vibe, earth, family, “I’m so happy”, “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities, “Little Talks”(live) by Of Monsters and Men

Do you like classical music? This marriage has a very classy vibe to it.

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Pile 6

10 of Pentacles, The Magician, 2 of Swords

A very beautiful family, a lot of manifesting, steady partners, old souls, a lot of support from both families, stars, cities, one or two children, living with parents, 90s music, France, Germany, Greenland, Singapore, garden, skiing, buying things for each other, a black dog(possibly a shepherd) and an orange dog, visiting relatives, kids, a man with a deep-raspy voice, country music, “Pricaj mi o Ljubavi” by Davoli, warm nights, red dress, falling asleep in each other’s arms, a brunette child, countryside.

This pile seems to have a very beautiful marriage. You seem to be made for each other.

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Pile 7

Page of Cups, 4 of Cups, 6 of Cups

Love messages, doves, fish, fishing, gift giving, romance, a very romantic relationship, soulmates, some sort of unfairness between the partners, one wants to give it all while the other one is not the type to want to accept that all, swimming together, flowers, chocolate, blue, “I’m so happy I met you”, “We are soulmates for sure”, “Denis”(?), calm, chillness, biking, love letters, Cupid, “Colors” by Halsey.

The most romantic pile until now. You have the potential to stay married ‘till death separates you.

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Not everyone gets a happy marriage, some people make mistakes and they lose their senses when they’re in love. I’m not willing to bring some of you down with those keywords. Remember that we are in charge of our own lives and we need to be careful who we chose to marry.

I hope it resonated and I’ll be continuing to do pick a card readings and I’ll see you next time. Bye bye

[flyboytracy]

What are the ten most common injuries treated by the long suffering doctors on Tracy Island?

Hoo boy. I bet Virgil and Grandma have seen some things over the years.

These are in no particular order, but in at number ten. There's a lot of healthy young people on that island and I bet they've got healthy appetites to match. If Scott's been on a solo mission and brings pizza back for the fam, it's every operative for themselves. Snooze and you're left with the olive pizza, gross.

10. Cheese burns on roof of mouth.

A phrase often heard on Tracy Island is "Maybe you should wait until Scott or Virgil get home." If that statement is followed by "No way, bro, what's the worst that could happen?" then the results will probably be:

09. Hand impaled by glass or other foreign object.

The hangars beneath the island are full of every high tech tool a fella could ever put on his Christmas list, but sometimes Virgil likes to do things the old fashioned way. It's soothing after long and muddy missions.

08. Bruised thumbs.

They lost contact with two of her boys for a couple of hours. It wasn't their fault, but Grandma had to find something to distract herself with until John could get them back.

07. Food poisoning.

Scott's really tall, okay? And he's surrounded by people half his height. Sometimes he feels like one of those HUGE dogs that grew up with like, cats.

06. Contusions on forehead.

Somebody liberated Kayo's leftovers from the fridge again. She put chillis in it this time.

05. Chest pains. Cold sweats. Hallucinations.

Every now and then Scott has a panic and worries he's not doing enough to replace their dad. He starts waking his younger brothers in the middle of the night to run contingency scenarios and with sun rise comes a five mile jog around the island.

04. Sprained ankles [one unexplained black eye]

The boys might've grown up with a celebrity dad but that wouldn't make them immune when they meet their own idols (KIP HARRIS!)

03. Bruised pride [you can't actually die from it, drama llama]

Some days, International Rescue are so busy that operatives have to complete solo missions. John swears he dispatches the most suitable operative for each mission but somehow Scott gets Francois Lemaire quite often. Even when someone else is closer.

02. Stress headaches

John's home for a weekend!

01. Bruises, splinters, bashed funny bones [fuck this he's going back to space]