#fun fact. the ruth drawing was done on my phone

[itsdefinitely]

one day i will draw a background

[artificialqueens]

Are You in Love With a Notion? (Diamond Chaney) - Ortega

summary: Ellie wakes up in the Lake District with a hangover, an engagement ring, and her best friend in her bed. It’s not quite Vegas, but it’s still a cataclysmic mess.

a/n: this one goes out to the anon that came to my inbox with the concept “diamond chaney but they impulsively get married one night and have to deal with the consequences later”. it was too good to just headcanon for so it’s now a fully-fledged fic. it’s complete and utter silly nonsense and it’s by no means the most groundbreaking writing in the world, but it is FUN! hope u all enjoy and pls enjoy my continued campaign for u all to board the diamond chaney clown bus xo

(do people still use snapchat? fuck knows, but i needed it for plot purposes. if u like u can pretend this is set in 2016.)

***

Ellie wakes up feeling like a bat has shat in her head.

It feels as if her pulse is contained entirely within her cranium given the way it’s throbbing, and every time she blinks it’s as if each of her eyelashes weigh twenty kilogrammes. She momentarily wonders where she is before the heavy cream drapes and the shiny glass-topped bedside table come into focus and she remembers she’s in the hotel room. A’whora had wanted to splash out for her birthday (“you only turn a quarter of a century old once, ladies!”) and no expense was spared since she’d got that promotion a few months back. She’d covered the difference for any of the girls who wouldn’t have been able to afford to go away and Ellie was thankful for her friend’s kindhearted and generous nature. After all, she’s not the kind of girl who would say no to a treat, and she’ll return the favour as soon as her salon takes off.

(And it will take off. She didn’t study business for nothing.)

But the room right now, even with its four-poster bed and the cosy sheets and the four soft pillows, is providing absolutely no respite from the fact that Ellie is hanging out of her arse. Throwing her arm over her eyes as she squeezes them shut, she gives a small, self-indulgent sob of anguish and suffering.

And as she rolls from her side onto her back, she becomes aware of the fact that she’s not alone in the bed.

The dread and fear that grips her heart reminds her of when she went on school camp in Primary 7 and had to jump into one of those freezing cold plunge pools.

She keeps her arm over her eyes for a few more seconds to allow herself to work up the mental stability she needs to face whoever’s at her side. Maybe it’s a dream. Maybe this has all been in her mind and in a moment she’s going to wake up hangover-free with her bed blissfully empty.

Ellie brings her arm down from her eyelids and, without knowing what possesses her (aside from the copious amounts of alcohol that remain in her bloodstream), bites down gently on her arm in lieu of pinching herself.

She can confirm she is still very much awake.

It’s not that a one-night-stand is beyond her; she would even go as far as to say that at one point both she and A’whora were infamous for it back at uni, and she’s admittedly glad that “Dirty Diamond” just isn’t as catchy as “A’whora” and therefore that particular nickname hasn’t stuck with her into adult life like it has for her friend. No, what she’s surprised at herself for is the fact she’s brought someone back at her big age. She hasn’t had a random hookup for a while now, and the fact she can’t remember it is even worse.

She presses the hand that’s under the duvet against her thigh and her heart almost gives out with relief at the fact she can feel clothes. She can’t have gone too far, then. This is okay. This is salvageable. As she runs her fingers over the hem of whatever the fuck she’s wearing, realisation slowly dawns on her that it’s her pink playsuit from the night before.

Ellie genuinely can’t tell if the situation is better because she’s not naked, or worse because she’s still in her clothes from last night.

Her pulse skyrockets again, however, as an arm gently thuds over her waist through the duvet and the person, whoever the hell they even are, snuggles into her side contentedly. Only…it all feels too weirdly familiar for Ellie’s liking. The body beside her, the closeness, even the rise and fall of the breathing is all that of someone she feels like she knows.

Lifting her arm off her eyes and to her forehead, opening them, and finally ripping the plaster off to see who’s by her side, Ellie doesn’t know whether to be relieved or slightly horrified.

A purple velvet jumpsuit with a belt to tie her in at the waist that’s coming undone. Black and purple painted nails. Endless waves of thick lilac hair that are fanned out in tendrils across the white pillowslip. An entire face of perfectly painted makeup that’s still clinging on from the night before.

It’s Lawrence. She’s waking up beside her best friend. This is fine. This is totally normal. They’ve shared a bed countless times before back at uni, and it’s not something Ellie’s ever been adverse to- quite the opposite in fact, she thinks, as her stomach does a flip.

Something still feels off, though.

And then, as Ellie brings her hand down from her forehead and something bumps against it, it hits her- physically and metaphorically- all at once.

The ring Lawrence always wears; her pride and joy, her grandmother’s ring. The one that looks like the heart of the ocean on her finger, a huge blue diamond surrounded by eight small platinum ones. The ring Lawrence guards with her life and would only take off if it was physically tasered off her. The ring that could single-handedly obliterate Lawrence’s entire student debt and probably Ellie’s too if she was feeling generous enough.

The ring- that ring- is currently sitting on the fourth finger of Ellie’s left hand. As if it’s an engagement ring.

“Lawrence,” Ellie says without thinking. Her voice is croaky and too-loud in the silence of the room, but Lawrence still takes a while to stir beside her. She pulls Ellie close with the arm that’s round her, nuzzles her face into her arm. Usually the feeling wouldn’t be an unwelcome one, but just now Ellie’s got bigger problems. She hisses again. “Lawrence, wake up.”

“I’m not shagging you, Ruth Davidson, you wee Tory,” Lawrence’s sleep-coated voice comes from beside her, and Ellie finally draws back, reaches behind her and takes the pillow out from under her head to thump her with.

“For fuck’s sake! Lawrence, wake up! We’re in the shit here!”

As Lawrence finally blinks slowly, Ellie watches her go through the seven stages of grief far more rapidly than she’s just done. She feels like an idiot for the way her heart dips in disappointment when Lawrence shuffles back from her and draws her arm away self-consciously. She mumbles, grumpy and tired. “Ellie, I’m not alive.”

“Yes you are, drama queen.”

“No I’m fucking not. I feel how Prince Philip looks,” she groans in despair, obviously as hungover as Ellie is. She screws her face up and rubs her eyes, in turn smearing her makeup over her cheekbones. “Why am I even here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we shagged,” Ellie says dryly, before holding the back of her hand up to Lawrence’s face. “Main question is, why the hell do I have this?”

Lawrence’s eyes grow wide in recognition before she groans and thumps her head back against the pillow. “How did you even…? Aw, I don’t know, Ellie, I’m too hungover to be mad about it. Just gies it back before you breathe and lose it or some shite.”

“But why is it…you know. Why is it here?” Ellie asks insistently, pressing her hand against her friend’s face in a deliberately annoying way. Lawrence grabs her wrist and forces it away from her face to get a proper look, and Ellie can see the cogs turn in her head before her face blanches at the implication.

Appearing to try and collect herself, Lawrence frowns, batting Ellie’s arm away. “You were probably getting hit on by some reprobate forty year old man in a suit so I’ll have let you pretend to be married to me. You should be honoured, really, it’s the closest you’ll get to perfection.”

“Piss off,” Ellie rolls her eyes as Lawrence gives a sleepy chuckle. She fiddles with the ring on her finger. It’s a little too small, and taking it off is proving difficult. Combined with the underlying stress of something still not being right, though, and it’s not enough to make Ellie’s dread dissipate.

“Can you remember any of last night?” she asks Lawrence, who’s scrabbling around on the bedside table for her phone.

“Nothing. You?”

“Neither,” Ellie rubs her temples with her fingers as if trying to massage the hangover out of her brain. No such luck.

“A’whora will be worse than us, then, won’t she? Because the last thing I remember is her and Tayce necking the prosecco at pres- oh, shit,” Lawrence has successfully retrieved her phone, and as she cuts herself off she’s frowning at it as if it’s committed a crime against her. “She’s calling just now, actually.”

Ellie already knows A’whora will be perfectly fresh and put together even before Lawrence swipes her phone across the screen to accept the facetime call, and so seeing her looking exactly that plus her girlfriend beside her looking the exact same just makes Ellie want to die even more.

A’whora’s smile is smug on her face as she smirks at them through the phone. “How are you two lovebirds doing this morning?”

Her words are like cold water down Ellie’s spine, and from the way Lawrence’s expression has changed too it seems she’s not the only one. She’s wondering what A’whora’s trying to imply with her joke and really, really hoping it’s just an innocent barb with no meaning behind it. Ellie can’t speak, but Lawrence gets there before her anyway. “What?”

“The married couple! The newlyweds! The babas!” Tayce jumps in, way too energetic and excited and making Ellie feel more hungover just looking at her.

Her words, though, aren’t helping her growing need to spew all over the hotel room floor. “What are you talking about?”

A’whora’s jaw drops open, and she barely conceals a laugh. “Oh my God. What do you remember?”

Ellie doesn’t want to give either of them the satisfaction of admitting that the answer’s nothing, but Lawrence is talking before she can get a chance. “Neither of us can remember anything. All I know is that I woke up in bed with this slut and she’s tried to steal my gran’s ring off me to…fuck knows, pretend she’s married to me. She wishes.”

“Lawrence,” Tayce starts, barely audible from giggling. “You two are married. You got married last night.”

What the fuck.

How can they be married? It’s not possible. Ellie tries to think but she can’t conjure up any clear thoughts. She feels the same smack of dread and fear that she felt when she went on that motorcycle rollercoaster at Flamingo Land two summers ago. Lawrence had been by her side then, too, her hand over Ellie’s white-knuckled one and reeling off ridiculous jokes to try and calm her down. She hates rollercoasters, and this one doesn’t seem like it’s going to be over anytime soon.

Lawrence doesn’t seem fazed. “You’re on the wind-up. Els, don’t give them the satisfaction, they’re taking the piss.”

“We’re not!” Tayce gasps, affronted, and A’whora is protesting adamantly too. “There was a wedding party in the bar last night and the pair of you kept moaning about how single you were and how you’d never find love.”

Lawrence narrows her eyes at her through the camera, offended. Ellie is inclined to feel the same.

“And the pair of you eventually decided you were just going to marry each other. Bimini mentioned they’re an ordained minister, so then you both insisted they married the pair of you in the hotel bar.”

“Get so far to fuck,” Lawrence snorts derisively, but it’s still not helping Ellie’s rising, terrified heart rate. “We’re meanty believe this, aye? Why in the fuck would I ever agree to marrying this wee cow, as if I would lower myself!?”

Ouch. Ellie scowls, screws her face up as she tears her eyes away from the screen and looks at Lawrence pointedly. “Thanks babes, love you too.”

“But you know what I mean!” Lawrence sort-of-not-really apologises. “Right, then, I’ll bite. If we got married, how did we get to the registry office? What registry office is open at eleven at night on a Saturday?”

A’whora shrugs all blasé. “There’s one in the hotel, we just went there. Caught it just before it closed, I think.”

Ellie narrows her eyes. She wants to believe it’s a joke, so she attempts to pick a hole in the story. “If we were that drunk, though, they wouldn’t have married us? Surely? I mean it’s not Vegas, A’whora, it’s the fucking Lake District.”

“Oh no, baby, the registrar said they get couples turning up drunk all the time! And obviously myself, A’whora and Bimini were much more sober than you, so we were the responsible adults. Or bridesmaids, I guess. We were that classy level of prosecco tipsy, you pair were on the vodka lemonades by eight last night,” Tayce explains.

As the story unfolds, Ellie feels more and more nauseous. She wants to crawl up into a ball like a dead woodlouse. Surely not. Surely not.

“Wedding dresses,” Lawrence says argumentatively. “We didn’t have wedding dresses. It would’ve been so obvious we were taking the piss.”

“Oh, neither of you would stop going on about how the colour scheme was pink and purple! Matching pink and purple playsuits! Which I see you’re still wearing, you absolute hounds,” Tayce wrinkles her nose in distaste.

Everything seems to be adding up to a ridiculously clear and yet blurry degree, and Ellie can’t in any way cope with the magnitude of the situation. She throws her arms over her face and curls up into the foetal position with a groan of self-pity. Through the duvet, she feels Lawrence whack her.

“Ellie, shut up! It’s so obviously a joke,” she insists, and Ellie can hear the roll of her eyes. A’whora and Tayce are cackling down the phone like two little Wizard of Oz witches and Ellie’s never identified more with Dorothy in her life.

“Well, believe us or don’t believe us, still doesn’t change the fact you got hitched,” A’whora says lightly. “I mean, you’ll have the marriage certificate to prove it. You had it last night, it’ll be in your room somewhere.”

Ellie pops her head out from under the duvet in horror. Her voice comes out as a horrified squeak. “Marriage certificate?”

A’whora shrugs. “Yeah! If you don’t believe us then maybe you’ll believe a piece of paper.”

“The marriage certificate that doesn’t exist. Aye, nae bother,” Lawrence says, still clearly disdainful of the story. “You coming to breakfast or what?”

“Oh, babe! Been there, done that! We got up at seven, showered, dressed, makeup, breakfast, and we’ve been out for a walk. Get on our level,” Tayce flicks her hair. Ellie fleetingly loathes her.

Lawrence rubs her forehead with her free hand, clearly headachey. “Well I’m starving, so I’m not hanging around to be wound up by the fuckin’ lesbian Prank Patrol any longer. Time’s check out?”

“You’ve got til half twelve. I got us a late one, figured we’d all need it.”

As Lawrence promises to see the other two later and hangs up, Ellie can’t speak. She’s still in shock at the potential truth from last night; that they actually got married. To each other. Over the years, Ellie’s invented made-up scenarios in her head that involve various things: telling Lawrence how she feels, kissing Lawrence, Lawrence asking her on a date. None of them have involved marriage. She’s never even thought to think that far ahead, but now it’s a reality it doesn’t seem like the Disney-princess dream she’s always expected it to be.

It actually feels sort of like a nightmare.

A thud from a pillow brings her back to reality. “Ellie!”

Ellie looks at her friend, who’s managed to crawl off the bed and is standing beside it, looking expectantly at her. Ellie blinks in bewilderment, rubs her eyes before she speaks. “What?”

“I’m gonna go shower and get changed and then we can go down to breakfast? I’ll come back and knock in about fifteen minutes?”

Ellie can’t believe she’s so calm. Sitting up in bed and feeling her head sting again, she looks pointedly at Lawrence. “You’re not in any way bothered about the story the girls just told us? The fact we might have got married?”

Lawrence snorts. “Oh, Ellie, please. You’re so gullible I swear to God someone could tell you Davina McCall’s the new Pope and you’d just nod and accept it.”

“But the marriage certificate, though? The ring? Which, by the way, won’t come off,” Ellie tugs on it again, trying not to panic when it doesn’t budge.

“There won’t be a marriage certificate! You said it, it’s the UK, it’s not Vegas. There’s a reason shotgun weddings aren’t a thing here. You honestly think we could just rock up to a registry office and get married?”

Ellie falls silent. She should feel reassured, but she doesn’t.

“I’m away to scrub the first ten layers of alcohol sweat out of my pores, awrite? You better be ready by the time I’m back.”

Lawrence leaves and Ellie is left on her own with her thoughts, which all seem to ricochet off her brain and pummel it to a husk, making her hangover worse. She still searches lazily for the fabled marriage certificate in between showering and getting ready, looking fruitlessly under discarded clothes on the floor and under furniture. Lawrence is right- she knows Lawrence is right- but there’s still a part of Ellie’s mind that’s niggling away with a what if on a loop.

By the time Lawrence knocks on her door again, Ellie is back not knowing what to think. She finds herself frantically babbling to her on the way down to the hotel restaurant in the lift, but her friend won’t entertain it.

“You’re too easy to prank. How can you believe them, it’s obviously a bam up!”

“Well, it could’ve happened! They brought it up before we even said we couldn’t remember anything, right? I mean, why else would you give me your ring? You barely trust me to hold your phone for two seconds to take a picture,” Ellie runs a hand through her hair, which she didn’t wash and is still in its big curls from the night before.

“Aye! Because you dropped it in the road when we went out for Jazz’s birthday!”

“That was two years ago! And I paid for the screen repairs!” Ellie cries in indignation, but the memory still makes her blush. She grows quiet again before her mind takes her back to the apparent events of last night. “The story makes sense.”

“The story does not make sense!” Lawrence sighs, agitated. “What proof do we have? You’re wearing my ring and our pals have told us the plot of a Hangover film? Honestly, hen, if we got married last night I’ll buy you an Uber back to Dundee.”

As they reach the dining room, the pair of them stop dead in the entranceway. Because there in the middle, almost as if it’s framed, is a table for two surrounded by inflatable red heart-shaped balloons, covered in red sparkly confetti, with champagne flutes and roses and polished silverware.

“What time’s my Uber booked for, then?” Ellie deadpans sarcastically. She doesn’t know why she’s making a joke. She isn’t in a joking mood. She’s nothing short of horrified.

“Calm down. That won’t be for us. A’whora said there was a wedding party last night, remember? It’ll be for them,” Lawrence reassures her, but Ellie doesn’t miss the distinct lack of self-assuredness to her voice that had been there before.

A waiter approaches them and asks for their name. Lawrence speaks (because Ellie can’t quite manage), and in return the waiter fixes them with a bright smile.

“Ladies, on behalf of us all at the Old England, we would like to wish you many congratulations and happiness on this most special occasion. Please, follow me,” he reels off before walking in the direction of the over-the-top, Valentine’s Day-style photoshoot set-up that is apparently where they’re having breakfast.

Ellie is going to be sick.

“You’ve got to be fucking joking,” Lawrence whispers all in one breath, before sleepwalking towards their table and sitting down with a tight smile of thanks to the eager waiter. As Ellie sits in the chair opposite, she notices the affectionate smiles from couples at other tables and feels her face flush with hot embarrassment. The waiter disappears with a promise to be back for their order soon, and the pair of them are left sitting in stunned silence.

“Lawrence,” Ellie says first. Her gaze is stuck on the table, shocked and stunned.

“Don’t,” Lawrence replies. When Ellie finally looks at her she’s sitting with her eyes squeezed shut, her face a picture of strained concentration.

“What are you doing? You look constipated.”

“I’m trying to wake up from this abject fucking nightmare,” Lawrence says through gritted teeth.

Even though Lawrence is right- it is a nightmare, it’s a bad, terrible dream- it doesn’t stop the way her words feel ever-so-slightly like a blow to the crush Ellie’s harboured for an embarrassingly long length of time. She can’t think about that, though. There are bigger issues at stake here. Like the fact they’re married.

“Do you believe me now? Why the hell would the hotel do all this if we didn’t get married in their registry office the night before?”

“It’ll be…” Lawrence begins, trying to explain it away then putting her head in her hands when she realises she’s at a loss. “Fuck, I don’t know. We need A’whora or Tayce down here to talk it through with us. Or Bimini. If it’s A’whora and Tayce’s prank then they might not be in on it.”

“They had to go back to London early for a shoot, remember? They’ll have already left,” Ellie reminds Lawrence, and her face falls in dismay.

The waiter returns holding a bottle of champagne and Ellie watches Lawrence turn over her flute with a little aggressive thud and doesn’t say when until the bubbles climb to the very top of the glass. They both order pastries, Ellie’s appetite completely gone and Lawrence’s appearing to be the same.

Ellie narrows her eyes at Lawrence as she watches her glug the bubbles down. “How the hell can you be drinking at a time like this? Are you not hungover?”

“I am hungover, yes. But I need to be drunk to deal with this situation. So I’m hoping this’ll at least take the edge off a bit,” she says dryly. Ellie rolls her eyes.

“Being drunk got us into this situation, it’s not gonna get us out of it,” she sighs helplessly, realising too late that she sounds too much like her Mum. Lawrence responds appropriately; shaking her head at her moodily and staring off into the distance as she keeps sipping from her glass.

Ellie cups her cheeks, thanks the waiter weakly as he puts down a tray of pastries in front of the two of them. She tries to go over the events of last night in her head but draws a blank every time. According to A’whora and Tayce they’ll have been at the bar, decided to get married…Bimini had married them, somehow and somewhere, and they’d gone to the registrar…then they’d presumably got even more drunk and had a dance, and then…

How had Lawrence ended up in her room? Unless they’d…no. They’d both still had their clothes on from the night before.

But that wouldn’t have stopped them making out.

“Oh, God,” Ellie groans, unable to hold in the regret and the constant pain of her headache. Lawrence shoots her a funny look. Ellie’s loath to explain herself. The idea that the first kiss she’s shared with Lawrence has been messy, drunk, and one she can’t even remember is one that makes her feel stupid amounts of disappointed, but she’s not exactly going to share that with her friend.

“Loz, what if we did something last night?”

“What, aside from get married?” Lawrence talks through a mouthful of croissant. Then, as realisation dawns, her chewing stops. “Oh.”

There’s an awkward silence as they both stare at each other.

“Nah,” Lawrence finally shrugs as she resumes eating. “Because we both still had our clothes from last night on when we woke up?”

“Yeah, but we still could’ve kissed,” Ellie pulls a face, the words feeling too awkward and childish as they come out of her mouth. Lawrence seems to hesitate for a second before smirking across the table at her.

“Aye right. As if I’d ever let you near enough to me for that to happen.”

“Rich from the girl who was wrapped around me when I woke up,” Ellie quirks an eyebrow at her, and it’s Lawrence’s turn to fall silent.

Breakfast doesn’t last long. Between their hangovers and the fact that they’re both trying to make sense of the whole crazy situation neither of them can eat much, and they’re dragging themselves back to their rooms before too long. They continue to discuss everything, purely because there’s not much else they can talk about when the prospect of them being married is hanging over their heads like the world’s heaviest cloud. This time, though, it’s Lawrence who’s doing most of the nervous talking.

“I’m sure it’s easily explained away. They probably just got our table confused with the wedding party’s from yesterday. That’ll be what it is. Just some big coincidence. There’s a reasonable explanation to it all. Have you got that fuckin’ ring off your finger yet?!”

“I’m working on it,” Ellie grumbles. The best she’s managed is getting it halfway to her first knuckle before realising it was cutting the blood circulation off even more and she could get it no higher, so she’d immediately pushed it back down again.

She hears herself huff with annoyance. All she wants to do is sleep but they have to somehow deal with this first, and it’s more inconvenient than she’d ever hoped her first marriage (her only marriage) would be. Thinking for a second, she gives a little gasp as she has an idea. “Why don’t we just go down to the registry office and ask?”

Lawrence stops walking, fixes Ellie with a look as if she’s sprouted another head. “Have you lost the bloody place?! You want to go up to the registrar and go, ‘sorry to bother you, but can you please tell us if we’re married or not?’ We’d get sectioned!”

Ellie thinks that, even though it sounds as if it’s the easiest course of action, Lawrence is probably right.

“Besides,” Lawrence continues. “If there’s the possibility that we did rock up three sheets to the wind last night, I don’t particularly wanty show my face there again.”

“Right,” Ellie agrees. She bites her lip as she reaches the door to her room and puts her key card in. Lawrence waits beside her, a mutual understanding that she’s coming in to continue the conversation.

Ellie supposes she’s her wife now, so it makes sense.

“Who could we phone to confirm it, then? The government?”

Lawrence pinches the bridge of her nose in exasperation. “Ellie, you did not just ask me if we could phone the gov-”

“Oh my fucking God.”

Ellie cuts Lawrence off without thinking, and upon seeing the inside of the room Lawrence is rendered speechless too. There’s more balloons, ones without weights that cover the ceiling over the bed. The bed itself and the floor surrounding it is covered in rose petals, and on top of the pristinely made duvet there’s a box of chocolates and two bathrobes origami-d into swans.

Lawrence is the first to march into the room. She snatches up a small note that’s sitting on top of the chocolate box, unfolds it and reads aloud. “Congratulations to the happy couple, we wish you both a long and happy marriage. From all the staff at the Old England hotel. Fuck me, this canny be real.”

Ellie lets the door swing shut, walks over to the bed and sits on its edge precariously. An idea occurs to her as she retrieves her phone from her pocket. “Here. Check your phone. Messages, photos. There might be clues.”

She doesn’t look up to see if Lawrence is nodding or not, but she assumes she’s following her suggestion. Ellie is busy with her camera roll (where there’s nothing, and the last photo is a terrible, blurry, unflattering selfie of her and Tayce) when Lawrence gives a hum of recognition.

“I got a snapchat from you at one in the morning.”

Ellie cranes her neck. “What does it say?”

Lawrence, oddly, is keeping the phone out of her view. She’s quiet before she brings the phone back into Ellie’s line of vision, and the picture, whatever it was, is gone. “Just a drunk selfie. Nothing that could give us any clues.”

The pair of them are quiet as Lawrence taps against her phone screen. Ellie reflects. They’ve been in the shit like this together before: when they were eighteen and both their phones died before Lawrence’s Mum could pick them up from T in the Park and they got yelled at the whole way home when she’d eventually found them both, when they’d been stopped by the police because Lawrence had carried a traffic cone through the City Centre and tried to put it on top of the existing one on the Duke of Wellington statue. But this is a whole different level of shit.

Through it all, though, Lawrence has always been there with a joke and a laugh and reassurance for Ellie that things are never as bad as they seem. She always has this panicky way of staying positive, delivering comforting words through a voice that’s shaky with her own anxiety. Ellie always helps her in return when she needs it, has done for years: she’s usually good at staying calm, she’s chatty and can talk Lawrence through anything, and she’ll always reach out to take her hand or be there with a hug and a reminder that as long as Lawrence has got her, she’s never on her own. They’ve always seemed to take turns being each others’ anchors, and their friendship is a weird sort of pendulum of support. Today, however, they’re both blindly stumbling through their own process of coming to terms with this situation, and Ellie supposes neither or them are being much of a help to each other. She wishes she could be more helpful, because she cares about her friend so much.

Too much for it to be explained away as a friendship.  

“What are you looking up?” Ellie asks as Lawrence lies back on the bed with a thud, eyes still glued to her phone. Craning her neck, Ellie can see she’s typed how to get divorced into Google.

“Why are there no ordained divorce lawyers?” Lawrence mutters under her breath. “We can get married in a hotel bar but we can’t get divorced in a hotel room? What kind of fucking bullshit is this?”

Ellie lies back too. It’s not lost on her how close together their heads are. “Why are you trying to get us divorced? We might not even be married. I still think we should phone up the government.”

“Nicola Sturgeon’s got bigger fish to fry, babes, there’s an election in May.”

“Not the government, obviously,” Ellie rolls her eyes, scrolls her own phone absent-mindedly. She’d look something up to try and help but she’s at a loss. “Like…the offices! The records of marriage and stuff. They’ll have a department for this sort of thing, won’t they?”

“Will we even be on the system if our marriage is less than twenty-four hours old?” Lawrence wonders out loud. “And if we got married here, would we be registered in England, then? Aw fuck, so many questions and not a single answer.”

Ellie frowns to herself as she thinks. “What if we do have to get divorced? Will we need a lawyer? I don’t have that kind of money, Lawrie, and neither do you.”

Lawrence hums in worried agreement, and Ellie presses her lips together. It’s weird dealing with all of this when there’s a crush at play. In amongst frantically trying to figure everything out and clarify it all, a tiny part of Ellie wonders…would it really be so bad to be married to Lawrence? There’s not really an excuse for them not to date now. It’s really the perfect way of ruining the friendship she’s been so worried about ruining for the past few years; it’s not awkward to say she has feelings for her literal wife, she supposes. But every time those thoughts rest in her brain for a few seconds, Ellie forces herself to chase them away- because really, hen, are you insane? The sheer scale of the situation isn’t lost on her, she knows they have to figure it out somehow and mop this mess up. But pretending would be nice, and safe, and far, far away from this alcohol-soaked bubble of horror she appears to have woken up in.

It’s out before she knows it, though. “What if we just stayed married? If we are. If we just stayed married until we could afford to get divorced?”

“Jesus Christ, Ellie,” Lawrence drops her phone onto the bed, covering her eyes with her hands in resigned exhaustion.

“No, think about it! There must be loads of benefits to getting married,” Ellie explains, feeling as if she has to justify the ridiculous thought now. “You get, um. I think you get extra money from the government?”

“The tories have never given out extra money. To anyone,” Lawrence glares at her.

(Ellie knows it’s not what she should be taking from this, but it occurs to her that the way Lawrence has done her eyeliner today makes her eyes look really pretty.)

“Oh! Here, it says you get tax breaks if you get married. It would be good to not have to pay council tax for a bit,” Ellie says, looking up from her phone where she’s just googled what are the benefits of getting married UK.

Lawrence pauses beside her. When she speaks, she sounds contemplative. “Well, you’d be taking my last name, because am I fuck taking yours.”

Ellie gives a choked noise of indignation. “Fuck off, I’ve got the best last name out of the two of us! Diamond?”

“It’s the last name of a porn star! I’m not living my daily life like that!”

“So you want me to go by Ellie Chaney? A name that rhymes? Like a character from Balamory?”

“You already dress like a fuckin’ character from a kids’ TV show, it wouldn’t be that far-fetched,” Lawrence starts giggling, and Ellie can only fix her with an unimpressed pout. “Nah, this wouldn’t work, Els. We’re already arguing and it’s only been one day. We couldn’t stay married. Besides, I’ve got fucking standards, you know? I could so do better than you.”

It’s silly, Ellie knows, but the last comment from Lawrence stings more than it should. It’s got nothing to do with the concept of the two of them actually being married, but more the fact that Lawrence has basically just rubbished any hopes that Ellie’s ever had of maybe-someday-oneday them breaking out of their little bubble of friendship and trying to be anything more. She’s always done it; that’s Lawrence’s way, to shit on Ellie, to gently bully her, but Ellie has always known there’s no malice behind it. Except today it all hits differently, it hits a sore spot that she’s too tired of trying to keep hidden.

“Sorry that being married to me is such a disgusting prospect,” Ellie snaps without realising, turning over on the bed and standing up so she doesn’t have to see Lawrence’s reaction to the comment she already regrets.

“When did I say that?” Lawrence fires back, and Ellie can tell she’s confused by her reaction.

“We need to find this fucking marriage certificate,” Ellie ignores her, opening the drawers of the bedside table even though she sort of knows it’s a futile endeavour since she’s already searched.

Lawrence pushes, though, never one to back down from a confrontation.  “Why are you suddenly raging at me, what am I meant to have done?”

“You don’t have to act like you got landed with the booby prize on a game show, Lawrence, I’m still your friend. There’s worse people to be stuck with,” Ellie continues as she crosses the room to look in the drawers of the dressing table, hating the way she sounds like a petulant child but being unable to help the way her words just seem to be coming out.

There’s a silence that hangs in the air like fog, and then Lawrence’s voice comes again. It’s softer, a comforting note to it that makes Ellie’s heart lift cruelly. “Ellie.”

Ellie opens the wardrobe doors, realising too late what a ridiculous place to look it is but committing to the idea anyway. She’s still way too hungover to cope with any of this, and the prospect of an argument with Lawrence, especially over this, isn’t one she’s able to face. Accepting she’s not going to find the certificate, she sighs and walks back over to the bed. As she sits on its edge and keeps her back to her friend she fiddles with the ring on her finger, and it finally, mercifully, slides off.

Lawrence’s voice is stripped of all its aggression and incredulity from before as she speaks again. This time she’s quiet and sincere. “Ellie. What’s this really about?”

Before Ellie can consider the gravity of the question or indeed contemplate how to word an answer, Lawrence’s phone vibrates against the bedcovers. Neither of them speak as she reaches up to grab it, but when A’whora’s name flashes up on screen again they share a look of weary exhaustion, neither of them wanting to face their friend’s smug expression.

A’whora’s smiling cheekily as Lawrence answers the call. “How’re the young lovers doing after their breakfast, then?”

Lawrence’s nostrils flare. “I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.”

“So all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, then. Just calling to see if you liked the wedding presents.”

Ellie feels like a crumbling sandcastle as she rolls onto her side next to Lawrence and looks at A’whora through the screen. “What?”

“The decorations at breakfast! The ones in your room! Just thought they’d really add to the atmosphere,” she smirks, unable to keep from laughing.

More confused than ever, Ellie frowns in bewilderment. “But that was from…the hotel did that?”

“No, I did that. I just phoned down and got them to set it up. They still had a bunch of wedding shit left over from that pair that got married last night. It wasn’t cheap, but it was worth it to give the pair of you the romantic equivalent of everyone singing happy birthday to you at a restaurant,” A’whora explains, still giggly.

Ellie and Lawrence are silent as they stare at their friend through the phone. A’whora seems perturbed, then narrows her eyes at them before she speaks again.

“You two didn’t actually…believe you got married, did you? I thought you knew it was a bullshit prank.”

Before she can register Lawrence’s reaction, Ellie’s mouth drops open in shock. She grabs the phone from Lawrence’s hands and yells at A’whora as if she’s in front of her and not in her own room down the corridor. “A’whora! I am going to fucking kill you!”

A’whora’s laugh comes through the phone like a crackly screech, and Ellie doesn’t miss the unimpressed look from Lawrence at having been unable to style out the fact they’d both been duped. Ellie can’t even let that bother her, though, because she’s too busy tripping over herself to retell to A’whora their rollercoaster of a thought process from this morning.

Lawrence shakes her head beside her, loath to admit she’d been fooled too. “I didn’t believe it for a second. She’s talking out her arse.”

Ellie cries out, affronted. “You were telling me I had to take your last name not even five minutes ago!”

A’whora has to wipe tears from her eyes by the time the pair of them have told her the whole story. “Oh my God, guys. This has been the best birthday present of the weekend. I actually think I’m gonna wee myself. Fuck!”

“I can’t believe you told us we got married and we just…believed you!”

“Well, no, you did get married,” A’whora says.

With this revelation, it crosses Ellie’s mind to lock herself in the hotel sauna until she’s cooked through. “What in the name of God-”

As she continues to speak though, A’whora clarifies. “Or at least, you said you both wanted to marry each other. That conversation did take place. Bimini started joking they were an ordained minister. They showed you their provisional drivers’ license and told you it was a minister’s license. You were both so drunk you believed it.”

“Christ in a wheelie bin,” Lawrence groans.

“But you’re not actually married married. It was just pretend. And hey! We had fun. You should do it for real some day,” A’whora cackles.

If she was in the room with her, Ellie would slap her.

They finish the call with the promise to be packed and ready to meet to check out at half twelve, and when Lawrence locks her phone the pair of them laugh softly about the idiots they’d both been. Ellie is glad A’whora phoned. The conversation that had been taking place prior had been about to go down a route she hadn’t wanted it to, and she’s glad there’s no reason for it to be brought up again. She can go back to keeping her crush on her friend a secret, never to be unearthed.

“I should probably go and start getting packed, then,” Lawrence says decisively, getting up from the bed and making to leave. Ellie remembers what she put on the bedside table, and reaches out to pick it up as she tells Lawrence to wait.

As Lawrence turns around, Ellie holds out her grandmother’s ring, feeling a little awkward as she does so. “Here. Since we’re not married anymore. It came off in the end.”

Lawrence looks a little sheepish as she accepts it with a soft thanks. She gives it a little smile, then shoots the same one at Ellie. “Thank fuck for that.”

There isn’t any malice to her words. If Ellie was being hopeful she’d maybe even say there was regret.

Lawrence leaves and she can’t shake the little niggling feeling of sadness that embeds itself under a synapse in her brain.

***

The cold air that comes with the beginning of Autumn is welcome to Ellie as she sits and waits on Tayce to bring the car round. She’s not quite fully recovered from her hangover, but packing, checking out and getting a can of Monster from a vending machine in the lobby has done wonders for her mood. There’s also the fact that she doesn’t have a potential marriage to consider, so that’s good. That’s a relief.

A crunch of gravel behind her makes her turn around, and seeing Lawrence wrapped up in her black hoodie makes Ellie feel mixed emotions. She feels silly for getting so caught up in the whole idea of them having been married, the way she’d panicked and immediately thought it was all real, taking A’whora and Tayce’s comments at face value. She’s embarrassed at how she’d taken it all so seriously, and most of all she’s embarrassed that Lawrence was there for every reaction.

“Hey,” she greets her, already feeling a blush grow on her face. “You recovered?”

“Just about, yeah,” Lawrence laughs softly. She gestures to the mango loco that’s in Ellie’s hand. “Can see you’re clearly feeling loads better.”

Ellie matches her laugh, raises the can up in a solo cheers. As she drops her arm again, she sighs a little.

“Listen, Lawrence, sorry about…this morning. Immediately panicking and getting so worked up and intense with it all. I was just hangy and emotional and I had the fear…you know what it’s like.”

“It’s no problem. Don’t worry,” Lawrence brushes her off. Her expression is troubled though, as if there’s something else she wants to say. The unspoken words are loud and stifling, and then Lawrence finally meets her gaze with a nervous one of her own. “Well, marriage didn’t really work for us. But…d’you think drinks would be better?”

Ellie’s heart is going to give out. She can’t cope with the events of the day at all. She can already feel her pulse speeding up with hope so she frowns at Lawrence slightly, clarifying like a child tugging the string of a balloon to bring it back to earth. “Drinks?”

“Yeah, like,” Lawrence shrugs, looks to the ground bashfully. “For a date. If you want.”

All at once it’s as if her blood has just suddenly exploded in her veins. It feels like Ellie is on some sort of other-worldly come-up as she blinks at her friend, her friend she’s had a crush on since fuck-even-knows-when, and is stunned into silence.

“The snapchat you sent me last night,” Lawrence continues, scrolling her phone and holding the screen out for Ellie to see. “I’ve felt like that too for a while now.”

Ellie is cringing as she reads the white text against the black screen- a screenshot of her message sent to Lawrence at one in the morning, which reads “so glad whe’re marrrued for rwal vc ive reallt luked you for ages and i quitr fancg u a lot acfually x"

“How did you even manage to read what that says,” Ellie screws her face up, failing to address the bigger picture.

Lawrence smiles, a little hint of a twinkle to her eyes that makes Ellie’s heart thump. “I knew what you meant.”

There’s a small pause where Ellie blushes and looks to the ground, handing Lawrence her phone back. Lawrence uses the silence to keep talking.

“I know I like to rip the piss sometimes, and I know I can take it too far. But today all of that was about…verbalising everything I thought you were feeling about me. Trying to reassure you that I wasn’t interested in you because I thought that’s what you wanted. Once I started I just…didn’t stop, I guess. Damage control, you know? I’m sorry, Ellie,” she reels off quietly. She’s not hiding behind any jokes and she’s not making fun of Ellie and she’s not making fun of herself. It’s honest and simple and raw and everything Ellie’s wanted.

She scuffs some gravel with her shoe. “You feel the same, then?”

Lawrence presses her lips together. Ellie can tell she’s nervous. “Yeah. I do.”

“I do? Is that some kind of sick joke?!” Ellie laughs, and as Lawrence joins in she suddenly hesitates. “Wait. This isn’t a joke, is it?”

“Well, I’ve had enough fucking pranks for one day and I’m pretty sure you have too.”

The pair of them share a laugh, and as Tayce’s car appears from round at the hotel car park, Ellie fixes Lawrence with a smile.

“Drinks sound good.”

Tayce and A’whora appear from the car and pop the boot open, and Lawrence and Ellie try and fail to bite back the smiles they’re shooting each other as they carry their suitcases over, a mutual agreement that they’ll talk more about their plans when they don’t have their nosy and shit-stirring friend and her equally nosy and shit-stirring girlfriend with them on their way to drop them off at the train station.

It’s not quite a shotgun wedding, and it’s not quite a marriage in Vegas. But a date and a drink with the friend she’s hidden her feelings from for too many years is a good place to start.

[wistfulcynic]

Across The Snowy Places (4 /5)

And finally it’s time for Thanksgiving dinner!  

SUMMARY: Desperate to avoid another disastrous setup, Emma Swan tells her sister-in-law Mary Margaret she doesn’t need a date for Thanksgiving dinner… because she’s dating her neighbour, Killian Jones. The neighbour she tries to avoid but can’t seem to get out of her head.

Killian has been captivated by Emma from the moment they met, and he’s thrilled at this opportunity to get closer to her. But when they are trapped in a freak snowstorm in a room with only one bed, can he finally take the chance he’s been longing for, or will his actions drive Emma away forever?

In other words: TROPES GALORE

On AO3 | Tumblr Ch1 | Ch2 | Ch3

For @thisonesatellite​​​ who is a genius with names and everything else despite being tired and frazzled.

@kmomof4​​​​​ @shireness-says​​​​​ @snidgetsafan​​​​​ @darkcolinodonorgasm​​​​ @snowbellewells​​​​​ @stahlop​​​​​ @mariakov81​​​​​ @courtorderedcake​​​​ @jonirobinson64​​​​ @tiganasummertree​​​​ @ohmightydevviepuu​​​​​ @shardminds​​​ @jennjenn615​​​ @superchocovian​​​

-

CHAPTER FOUR: FRIDAY 

When Emma comes slowly awake the next morning she’s warmer and more comfortable than she can ever remember being. She feels consciousness encroaching, urging her out of her cocoon, but she keeps her eyes firmly shut, resisting it. Though her mind is still hazy and unfocused she’s certain she doesn’t want to leave this cosy, comfy state she’s in, not yet. Not when walking would mean facing the day, a day in which she’s going to have to get back in her tiny car and drive on snowy roads with Killian, and … Killian!

Her eyes fly open and she’s suddenly very conscious of the reason she’s so warm. She’s positively wrapped around him, they’re wrapped around each other, legs entwined, with one of her arms tucked against her side and the other on Killian’s stomach, beneath his shirt. His hand is also on her bare skin, curled around the small of her back while the other is tangled in the ends of her hair. Her head is nestled on his chest while his cheek rests against her forehead. 

Emma freezes, unsure of what to do. If she tries to untangle herself she might wake him but if she doesn’t… well, he’ll have to wake up eventually.  

As if on cue his eyes flutter open and she’s momentarily caught up in the hazy, sleepy blue of them. He smiles. 

“Morning, love,” he says, in a voice rough with sleep. He’s still not fully awake, she realises, soon he’ll remember what happened yesterday and why they’re in bed together, and then they’ll both pull apart and this lovely moment will be lost. And she’s not ready for that to happen yet. 

Before she can think better of it she tilts her head up and lets her lips brush his. She keeps her eyes open, watching his as they widen in surprise then darken with unmistakable desire. She kisses him harder, parting her lips slightly and he makes a growling noise deep in his throat and sinks his hand into her hair, pulling her tightly to him and deepening the kiss. 

He’s an incredible kisser, thinks Emma wildly as his tongue strokes hers. Soft but firm and just wet enough... and then he rolls her onto her back and she can’t think at all. His hand slides beneath her shirt to cup her bare breast and she moans, letting her legs fall apart as he nestles between them. She can feel his cock thick and hard against her, rubbing her through the thin barrier of their underwear and she clutches at him, desperate to feel him even closer, to have his skin against hers. She tugs his shirt off and he does the same to hers, tossing it away and staring at her with heat in his eyes before diving back down to suck a nipple into his mouth. She grips his hair and digs her fingernails into his shoulder, wrapping her legs around him and grinding against his erection. 

He pulls his lips from her breast and takes her mouth again, deeper this time, hotter and wetter and everything more and it’s still not enough. Emma tugs his hair until he breaks the kiss. “Please,” she gasps. “Please.” 

“Anything,” he replies. “Anything you want, love.” 

“Want you.” 

“Oh, God,” he moans. “Emma.” 

“Please, Killian.” 

He kisses her again as his hand slides down her body and beneath her sodden panties. She’s never been so wet and ready in her life, and the first brush of his fingers against her clit she nearly comes. 

He’s not in much better shape, his eyes glassy and his breathing shallow as he strokes her. “Feels so good,” he murmurs. “Fuck... wanted this so long.” 

“Me too,” she gasps, and his eyes fly to meet hers, his thumb pressing against her clit and his fingers inside her and then the morning air is rent by the ring of a telephone. 

Emma wants to scream in frustration. She wants to scream in ecstasy, but she can see the haze begin to clear from Killian’s eyes as the shrill noise penetrates the sleep and the lust and he remembers where they are and why they’re here and panic settles on his features. 

He pulls his hand from between her legs and she whimpers in protest, but he’s too busy apologising to hear. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, scrambling from the bed. “I didn’t mean—I must have—bloody hell, I’m so sorry, Swan.” 

The phone begins to ring again and Emma snatches it from the bedside table. 

“What?” she snarls. 

“Emma?” Mary Margaret’s voice is far too cheery for so early in the morning, and tinged with surprise. “Is everything okay?” 

Emma squeezes her thighs together, feeling the empty ache between them, the still-tingling memory of Killian’s fingers stroking her and the wet squelch that’s embarrassing now that she’s alone in the cooling bed. She looks for Killian but he’s gone, the bathroom door shut tightly. She sighs. 

“Yeah, Mary Margaret, I’m okay. It’s just early.” 

“Yeah, sorry about that, I just wanted to let you know that the snow’s stopped and the news says the roads are clear, so you shouldn’t have any problem getting here.” 

“Okay. Just let me get a shower and some coffee and we’ll be on the road.” 

-

Killian slams his hands down on either side of the bathroom sink and barely restrains himself from punching the mirror. 

What the hell were you thinking? he berates himself. You call that taking it slow?

His hand shakes as he runs it through his hair, his blood still pounding, cock still hard and aching like a son of a bitch. He can smell Emma on his fingers and he groans, clenching his jaw as he turns on the small shower. He steps inside and leans against the wall, letting the spray wash over him and fighting for calm. 

What’s done is done, and he can’t change it. All he can do is beg her forgiveness and hope he hasn’t ruined everything. 

-

Killian emerges from the bathroom ten minutes later, his hair damp from his shower and dressed in his clothes from yesterday. His face is blank and his eyes unreadable. 

“Swan,” he begins, “I’m—” 

“It’s okay,” she interrupts, making a small, sharp motion with her hand. “Forget it.” 

“But—” 

“I said forget it, Killian! It never happened.” She risks a glance at him and could swear she sees hurt on his face, and a hint of relief. She looks away again. “I’m just going to shower and get dressed and then we should get going.” A thought strikes her. “If you’re still okay to go?” she asks. 

He hesitates for a moment, then nods. “I still want to go,” he replies. He sounds determined. 

“Okay, we’ll leave in half an hour.” She takes a deep breath, releases it slowly. “Would you mind seeing if Granny has any coffee?” she asks. 

He offers her a small smile. “Of course, love.” 

She returns it, and feels like they’ve found their tentative balance again. 

-

When Emma comes out of the bathroom washed and dressed, Killian is waiting for her, holding a steaming mug. She accepts it gratefully, inhaling the welcome aroma before taking a sip. 

“Granny didn’t have any cinnamon syrup,” Killian says. “But she sent you this.” He offers her a plate containing a large, sticky cinnamon roll. “She says she hopes that will make up for it.” 

Emma smiles. “It definitely does.”

The day is bright and sunny and the roads are clear, and they make good time to Mary Margaret and David’s. Emma’s quiet in the car at first but Killian, encouraged by her seeming willingness to put the morning’s events behind them, draws her out with some gentle teasing and fun facts about snowstorms that soon has her laughing, and almost before they know it Emma’s bug is pulling into the driveway of Ruth’s house, now David’s. 

They get out of the car and she shoots him a nervous look. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” she asks. “There are a lot of them. Just act natural. But also like my boyfriend! I mean—” 

Killian chuckles and puts his arm around her shoulders. “Relax, love,” he whispers in her ear, his breath ruffling the fine hairs at her temple. “I told you, acting like your boyfriend poses no difficulty for me.” 

He presses a soft kiss to her temple that sets her heart racing and she’s just about to remind him that the show hasn’t started yet when she notices Mary Margaret and David standing on the porch, she grinning from ear to ear and he with his arms crossed and wearing his protective big brother scowl. 

“You must be Mary Margaret,” says Killian with a charming smile, keeping his arm around Emma as he takes Mary Margaret’s hand and gives the back of it a light kiss. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.” 

“Oh,” says Mary Margaret. “Oh my.” 

David’s scowl deepens. Killian turns to him and Emma swears she catches a glint in his eye. “And David,” he says, offering his hand to the other man. David glares at it for a moment then takes it and gives it a brief shake. Emma can tell from Killian’s amused expression and slight wince that David squeezed his hand hard. 

“Please come in,” says Mary Margaret. “You must have made good time, the only other people here yet are Robin and Regina.” 

Killian’s arm tightens around Emma’s shoulders and they exchange a glance. “It looks like we arrived just in time,” he says. Mary Margaret gives him a searching look, then smiles. “You did,” she says. “Emma, could you come and help me out in the kitchen? Killian, you can go with David and he’ll get you something to drink.” 

“Do you like football?” David asks as he and Killian head for the den. 

“I do,” Killian replies. “Real football.” 

“Uh oh,” mutters Emma, but there’s nothing she can do as Mary Margaret is already pulling her towards the kitchen. 

“Emma Swan,” says Mary Margaret as the kitchen door slams behind them. She turns on Emma, one fist planted firmly on her hip, “Who is that man?” 

“What do you mean? That’s Killian, my—the guy I’m seeing.” 

“Your boyfriend.” 

Emma shrugs, firmly ignoring the now-familiar belly flutter. “Yeah I guess, if you want to label it,” she mutters.  

“And how is it that I’m only just hearing about him?” inquires Mary Margaret.

“Well, like I said we haven’t been together long—” 

“Long enough for you to tell him ‘all about’ me and apparently about Regina too!” 

“Well, yeah, he wanted to know about who would be here today.” Mary Margaret's stern stare remains unwavering and Emma struggles not to shuffle her feet. She feels genuinely confused and if she’s honest a bit annoyed. There’s no way Mary Margaret could have figured out they were faking it already, she thinks. Is there?

“What’s the big deal?” she demands. “So I told Killian some things about you and Regina, so what?” 

“The big deal,” says Mary Margaret, “is that I’m pretty sure you’ve never told any other guy that much about your family. Or anything about us at all.” Her face breaks into an enormous smile. “Killian must be really special,” she says softly, cupping Emma’s cheek in her hand then pulling her into an enormous hug. “I’m so pleased for you, sweetie,” she says. “And proud.” 

Emma winces. “Don’t get too excited yet, Mary Margaret, it’s still really early—” 

“I know, but I have a sense about these things,” says Mart Margaret, releasing Emma and tapping her finger against the side of her nose. 

“But—” 

“I won’t say any more.” Mary Margaret mimes locking her lips and throwing away the key. She’s spent too long in the company fourth graders, thinks Emma crossly. “Now, let’s get started on the cooking. I’m glad you’re here early, there’s loads to do. Oh and don’t worry, I’ve made David promise not to murder Killian, no matter what he says about football.” 

-

Killian is a huge hit at Thanksgiving dinner, so much that Emma is almost annoyed. Even David softens enough to pick up the bait Killian keeps tossing out about which type of football is better, leading to an argument it’s clear both of them greatly enjoy. 

He’s also a fantastic actor, at least in the role of ‘Emma’s boyfriend.’ He never misses an opportunity to touch her, hold her hand or drape his arm around her shoulders, stroke her arm or kiss her hair. Emma watches in growing horror as one by one her friends and family fall victim to his charms. Even Graham likes him. Even Regina.

“I have to say, Emma, I never thought you’d manage it,” she says, coming up behind where Emma is standing at the front window watching the fresh snow swirl in the wind. 

“Manage what?” 

“To find a man who could put up with you,” Regina sneers. 

“Well if you can do it anyone can,” Emma shoots back. Regina’s mouth quirks and she taps her wine glass against Emma’s. 

“Touché,” she says, and they both drink.

“In all seriousness, though,” Regina continues after a moment’s silence. “Killian’s one to hold on to. Robin loves him already and he’s an excellent judge of character. Don’t fuck things up with him.” 

“I’ll try not to,” says Emma weakly. 

“Good.” Regina gives her a small smile then turns to go. Emma returns her attention to the snow, losing herself in her thoughts until she senses another presence by her side. It’s Graham, sipping from a bottle of beer. 

“So,” he says. “Killian. Is it serious?” 

Emma shrugs. “It’s still really new...” she trails off, hoping Graham won’t press for details.  

“I get it.” He frowns. “Listen, Emma, I want you to know... I’ve always thought of you as the one that got away.” 

“You have?” 

“Yeah. I still wish sometimes that things could have worked out with us. Not that I expect anything by telling you this,” he adds hastily. “I know you’re not interested, and that’s okay. I just wanted to say that if it couldn’t be me I’m glad you found someone who cares about you as much as Killian does. You deserve that.” 

“Graham...” Emma doesn’t know what to say. 

“Let him make you happy, Emma.” Graham gives her a crooked grin and then Mary Margaret calls them all to dinner. 

The meal is gorgeous, juicy turkey and rich stuffing with gravy and potatoes and cranberry sauce, green beans and sweet potatoes all made from scratch by Mary Margaret, with Emma’s help. They eat until they can’t manage another bite, then stagger to sofas and armchairs to rest and digest until it’s time for pie.

Emma finds herself on the sofa next to Ruby, who is here not with Dorothy but with her new girlfriend, a beautiful but intimidating woman named Mulan. 

“Yeah, Dorothy went back to Kansas,” says Ruby. “She was never really happy here. One of those people who just prefers home.” 

“Don't we all prefer home?” replies Emma, thinking of Ruth. 

“Sure, but some of us make a home wherever we go, and others need home to be a specific place,” Ruby points out. “Dorothy was one of the second kind.” 

“Mmmm, you may be right.”  

“So what did you and Killian do yesterday?” Ruby asks. “Mulan’s cousin has a Chinese restaurant that was open even in the snow on a holiday so we were able to get something to eat. Good thing too, because we had nothing in the fridge. How’d you manage?” 

“Oh, we ended up staying at an inn off the highway,” says Emma. 

“Really? What inn was it?” 

“I can’t remember the name, Red Wolf something I think?” 

“Ah, Granny’s place! I thought it might be.” 

“Yeah, she was called Granny.” 

“No, I mean that’s my actual grandmother. Oh, that’s funny! I wonder if you saw the couple she was telling me about this morning.” 

“What couple?” 

“Oh apparently there were these two people who came in to get out of the snow. She said she’d never seen anyone so into each other as they were but then when they decided to stay overnight the guy asked for two rooms. So even though Granny still has two rooms available she tells the guy there’s only one and puts them in the one with the heater that only sometimes works. She said she figured they could use a little push, and...” she trails off as she catches sight of Emma’s face. “Whoa,” she says. “Hold up. That was you and Killian? You’re the cold room couple?” 

“Apparently,” says Emma through clenched teeth. 

“But why would you want two rooms?” Ruby looks genuinely baffled, then comprehension slowly begins to dawn. “Unless…” She sits up straight, eyes glinting. “Emma Swan there’s a story here and you are going to tell me what it is. Is Killian not really your boyfriend?” 

“Keep your voice down!” Emma hisses, sitting up herself and leaning close to Ruby. “If I tell you you have to swear you won’t say anything to Mary Margaret.” 

“I won’t.” 

“Swear it Ruby! I know what you two are like, you tell each other everything. But this is my secret, and I need it kept.” 

Ruby gives her a solemn nod. “I swear on Mulan’s sword,” she says. 

“That’s— wait, Mulan has a sword?” 

“Yeah, she fights with it and everything. Polishes it every night. Sometimes I think she loves that thing more than she loves me.” She frowns at Mulan, who is chatting with Robin and Killian on the other side of the room. “So is that a good enough swear for you?” 

“I guess,” says Emma. 

Ruby nods eagerly. “All right, then dish. What’s the deal with you and the hottie professor?” 

“There’s no deal, he’s just my neighbour.” 

“Oh come on,” Ruby scoffs. “Seriously?” 

“Yes, seriously! Mary Margaret was threatening to set me up again and you remember what happened the last time she did that.” 

“Ugh, yeah. Monkey-boy.” Ruby shudders. 

“Exactly. So the only way I could think of to stop her was to tell her I was already seeing someone. Then she asked me the guy’s name and the only one I could think of was Killian’s.” 

“The only one, huh?” Ruby’s voice is deadpan but her eyes are twinkling. 

“I was in a pinch!” Emma protests. “So then she insisted that I bring him to Thanksgiving and fortunately he agreed to play along.” 

“Oh yeah, very fortunate.” 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” 

“Oh come on, Emma, fortune had nothing to do with it. That man is very obviously crazy about you, he must have jumped at the chance.” 

“He’s not crazy about me,” says Emma quietly, trying not to think about the way Killian fled from her that morning, the horrified panic in his eyes when he realised what they’d been doing. “It’s just for show.” 

“Was it for show in the lobby of Granny’s inn?” asks Ruby. “Because she told me she’s never seen anyone so fascinated by another person as the two of you are with each other. And she knows what she’s talking about. It’s because of her that I found Mulan.” 

“No offence, Ruby, but you go through girlfriends, and boyfriends, like most people go through socks. How long have you and Mulan been together, exactly?” 

“Mulan is The One,” says Ruby solemnly. “Capital letters. And I know this precisely because I’ve been through so many Not The Ones. You, Emma, barely ever date so when your The One comes along you don’t have the sense to see it. But I do, and Granny does, and both of us are telling you that Killian is The One for you. And you for him.” 

Emma shakes her head but she can’t think of anything to say. All she can think is that she can’t stand for another person to be happy for her, or tell her sincerely how much they like Killian and how good the two of them are together. She’s had enough. 

She excuses herself and flees upstairs, away from everyone, into the comforting surroundings of her old bedroom. It’s a long time since she’s been here; she prefers not to stay the night ever since Ruth passed and Mary Margaret and David moved into the house. The house is their home now, and she can’t help feeling like a bit of an interloper. 

She paces around the room, restless and antsy, unable to get her friends’ words out of her head. Mary Margaret was one thing, but for Regina, Graham, and Ruby all to think that Killian was right for her, that was something else. If only one of them said something, even two, she could chalk it up to Killian’s convincing performance. But all three…

She sinks down onto the bed and lets her head fall into her hands, squirming when she feels an odd lump under the mattress, poking her backside. And then she remembers. She reaches under the mattress and pulls out a small, leather bound book. Her old journal from high school. She’d forgotten it was there. 

A smile breaks across her face as she flips through the pages. There’s so much in this little book she hasn’t thought about in forever. Ruth bought her journal soon after she moved in with them and encouraged her to write in it daily to help her make sense of all the difficult and confusing things she was feeling. Emma was skeptical at first but Ruth persisted, and eventually she came to realise that writing out her feelings actually did help. She wrote about the adoption and learning to be part of a family, about being new in school and struggling to make friends. About Graham, and how she tried so hard to want him and felt guilty when she didn’t. How she wondered if there was something wrong with her that made her unable to open herself up. Unable to love. She swallows past the lump in her throat and turns another page. A folded piece of paper falls out of the journal and onto the floor. Emma picks it up and gasps in recognition.

Gently she unfolds it. It’s a page torn from a magazine, she can’t even remember which one now. It was in the social worker’s office, the last social worker she saw before the adoption was finalised. She smooths out the page and begins to read the familiar words. 

It’s a poem by someone called J.L. Hook and as she reads it Emma finds it speaks to her as much now at nearly thirty as it did when she was nearly fifteen. It’s a poem about loss, about sadness, but most of all about hope. The loss of parents, the sadness of being left alone. The hope of finding a new family. Or that was young Emma’s interpretation at least. She blinks against the tears that well up in her eyes, but they roll down her cheeks regardless. 

“Swan?” She looks up to see Killian standing in the doorway. “Is everything all right, love?” he asks gently. “Why are you crying?” 

“It’s nothing,” she says, wiping at her cheeks. “Just an old thing I found.” 

“What old thing?” Killian asks, and when she gestures to the paper in her lap he holds out his hand. “May I?” 

She’s not sure she’s ready to share something so very personal with him, yet she finds herself nodding and handing him the poem. “It’s just something I tore from a magazine ages ago,” she says. “It just, I don’t know, resonated with me.” 

Killian smiles and starts to read. He can’t be more than a line or two in when the smile slips from his face and is replaced by an expression of shock and, oddly, embarrassment. 

“This resonated with you?” he says. His voice is gruff. 

“Yeah. I don’t know anything about the guy who wrote it, but whoever he is, he gets me. Teenage me, at least.” 

Killian clears his throat. His cheeks and ears are bright pink. 

Emma frowns. “What’s with you?” she asks, and then he rubs at that spot behind his ear and the penny drops. Killian’s a writer. Of poetry. Published under a different name. She gasps. “It’s you, isn’t it?” she cries. “You wrote this.” 

Killian swallows hard and gives a small nod. “Aye.” 

“But—” She shakes her head, trying to think. “That was fifteen years ago, you must have been just a kid!” 

“I was seventeen. It was just after Liam was killed. I was devastated, obviously, he was the only family I had left and we had always been so close. I was alone, completely alone in the world and I just felt so lost. It was a court-appointed grief counsellor, actually, who suggested I try writing my feelings, and, well, this is the result.” He shrugs. 

Emma stands and places her hand on his, over his fingers clenched so tightly on the page. “It’s a beautiful result,” she says softly. “It helped me so much.” 

“It did?” he whispers. 

“Yeah. I must have read it a hundred times. More. Every time I felt hopeless or alone I read it, and it comforted me. I thought, at least there’s someone who understands how I’m feeling, even if I don’t know who they are.” Gently she eases the page from his grip and lets it fall onto the bed then takes his hand again, linking their fingers and brushing her thumb across the back of his. She looks up to find him watching her with so many emotions in his eyes, and his hand trembles as he reaches up to brush the hair back from her face, his fingers curling around the back of her head as she steps closer. He leans in and she tilts her head up and—

“Hey you two, make out on your own time,” says David’s voice from the doorway, amused and ever so slightly menacing, sending them leaping apart. “Mary Margaret’s about to serve the pie.” 

As they follow David downstairs the tension between them is so thick Emma swears she could touch it, and when they arrive in the dining room and no one seems to notice it she’s actually surprised. Robin hails Killian and David goes to help dish out pie, and amidst the noise and confusion Emma slips away into the kitchen where she knows Mary Margaret keeps a bottle of whisky. Her thoughts are a jumbled mess, she’s buzzing with nerves and energy and frustrated arousal, and she’s so not hungry for pie. What she wants is a drink. 

Killian finds her an hour later sitting at the kitchen table staring intently into the bottom of a lowball glass. He frowns. “Are you okay, love?” 

“Fine,” she slurs. “I’m fine. Why wouldn’ I be fine?” 

“You’re not fine,” he retorts, “you appear in fact to be very drunk. How many drinks have you had?” 

“I was just goin’ to have one,” she replies, her forehead wrinkling. “But then I had another and it tasted so good I had a third. And tha’ was two drinks ago.” She giggles. 

Killian’s frown deepens. It’s getting late and the other guests are preparing to leave, but Emma’s in no fit state to drive. “Stay here, love,” he tells her, gently removing the glass from her hand and replacing the cap on the whisky bottle. “I’ll get Mary Margaret.” 

“She’s drunk?” Mary Margaret stares at him when he pulls her aside and apprises her of the situation. “How?” 

“Well, intoxication normally results from drinking a large quantity of alcohol,” Killian replies. “Which she appears to have done.” 

Mary Margaret rolls her eyes at his snark. “But why?” she persists. “What hap—” 

“Apologies, Mary Margaret, but the wherefores and whys aren’t really important now,” Killian interrupts. “The question is how the devil are we going to get home?” 

“Can you drive?” 

“I’m not sure. I’ve had a bit to drink myself and I haven’t driven much in the States, so I’m not sure attempting it in that yellow death trap on icy roads at night is the best idea.” 

“No, good point,” Mary Margaret agrees. “I mean, you’re welcome to stay the night here. Emma’s old room is free.” 

Killian sighs. Another night away from home with no proper pajamas or change of clothes is not really what he wants, but it appears to be the best solution. And at least there’s a comfortable looking armchair in Emma’s room, and a functioning radiator. 

“Thank you, Mary Margaret, we’d appreciate that,” he says, and returns to the kitchen to retrieve Emma.

She’s got her head resting on her arms when he arrives and at first he thinks she’s asleep, but when he lays his hand on her shoulder she looks up and gives him a dazzling, very drunken smile.  

“Come on, then, Swan, come with me,” he says, holding out his hand to help her up.  

“Wha? Where we goin’?” She bats his hand away and stands up, then immediately sways on her feet. He catches her before she can fall. 

“We’re going upstairs,” he informs her. 

“Whafor?” 

“Neither of us is in any state to drive home, so we’re spending the night here. Mary Margaret says we can have your old room.” 

“You din’ ask for two rooms, then?” 

“Of course not.” 

“Wouldn’ get them anyway,” she mutters, leaning heavily against Killian’s side as they go up the stairs. His arm is tight around her waist and before they’ve made it halfway up she’s forgotten where they’re going or why, or anything except how good he feels and how much she wants to touch him. She lays her head on his shoulder and his hand curls around her hip, and when the door closes behind them she tucks her face against his neck and wraps her arms around him. 

“Emma,” he says, “what are you doing?” 

“Snuggling,” she replies, the words muffled against his skin. “I like snuggling with you.” 

“Love—” 

“You’re so warm,” she continues, clinging to him, resisting his feeble attempts to detach her. “And you smell nice. And you kiss nice. You’re just nice. I didn’ expect you to be nice. I’ve said nice too much. Nice nice nice.” 

“Aye, the exact adjective every man longs to hear,” he quips. “Emma, please, you need to go to bed.” 

“With you,” she insists. “Snuggling.” 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I can sleep in the chair—” 

“No. Bed.” 

“Emma.” 

“Killian,” she says with mock severity, scrunching up her face and glaring at him. He chuckles then groans as she wraps herself around him again. She’s adorable when she’s drunk, and far too affectionate for his peace of mind. He feels strung on a hair-trigger, wound so tightly from their clinch this morning, from their near-kiss just hours ago, that his self-control is at its breaking point. He thinks about the feel of her mouth on his, how soft and wet she was beneath his fingers, and that tenuous thread of control begins to unravel. 

Firmly, almost forcefully, he pulls her off of him and guides her to the bed, where Mary Margaret has thoughtfully laid out some pajamas for both of them. He helps Emma take off her boots and with shaking fingers undoes the button and zip on her jeans, then leaves her to get undressed and put Mary Margaret’s pajamas on while he slips into the bathroom to put on David’s. 

When he returns Emma is dressed in the flannel pants and tank top, perched on the edge of the bed. She stands when he enters, too quickly, and sways on her feet. He darts forward to catch her and she falls onto his chest, grabbing his shoulders to steady herself. His breath stops as her breasts press against his chest, her nipples so hard he can feel them through the fabric of both their shirts. He looks down to find her staring at his mouth, her lips slightly parted. As he watches the tip of her tongue slides slowly along the lower one and the thread snaps. 

His arm comes around her waist, pulling her flush against him as he takes her lips in a frantic kiss. She moans and leans into it, wrapping her arms around his neck, her fingers sinking into his hair as she kisses him back, deep and desperate. She feels so damned good, so soft and warm and achingly sensual, and just everything he’s ever wanted in a woman, and he craves her with an intensity he’s never known before. He wants to worship her, to strip her bare and kiss every inch of her, then sink deep into her softness and make her scream in ecstasy. He’s never wanted anything more. 

But he can taste the whisky on her tongue and feel the lack of control in her movements, and a tiny voice in his head is screaming not like this. Not while she’s too drunk to make good decisions, not while he’s so sexually frustrated he can’t think straight. Not like this. 

Killian reaches deep into himself and grasps the frayed edges of that thread of control, yanks them together and ties a tight knot. He breaks the kiss, lets his forehead rest against Emma’s for the briefest moment, then pulls her arms from around his neck and steps back. 

She blinks at him, confused. “Killian?” she says, in a breathy, needy voice that nearly breaks him. “What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing. It’s just late, and we need our sleep.” 

“Sleep with me,” she says with a coy smile, hooking her fingers through the neckline of his t-shirt and trying to tug him closer. 

He catches her hand and squeezes it gently before releasing it. “I’ll sleep in the chair.” 

“No.” She grabs his hand back. “With me. Please, Killian.” 

“Emma…” 

“Please.” 

Her eyes are soft and wanting, and Killian lacks the strength to resist their entreaty. He’s so bloody tired of fighting his feelings for this woman. He swallows, closes his eyes and breathes deeply. “All right.” 

He lets her lead him by the hand to the bed and slides beneath the blankets with her, tucking her back against his front and holding her securely with his arm around her waist. She hums at the feel of his erection against her ass, wriggling into it until he stills her movements with his hand on her hip. 

“Ignore it,” he says. “Just go to sleep.” 

He strokes her hip soothingly, rhythmically, until her breathing evens out and deepens and he can tell she’s asleep. 

It’s a long time before he joins her. 

-

[yoolee]

Ye Massive Tag-back Post

I have been tagged in stuff. I am slow. Apologies for anyone tagged in this XD

5 facts about me that literally know one needs to know

(tagged by @saizoswifey​)

I get weirdly nervous in grocery checkout lines: I have no idea why. I don’t know if it’s like, the feeling of being trapped in a narrow space (if there’s someone behind you and ahead of you), or the like, awkward social chitchat that I am SUPER BAD AT or what but I get weird. I HAAAATE that the nearest grocery store to me does not have self check-out, and I put off grocery shopping to the last minute. I can improvise a speech in front of a crowd of hundreds, I can jump off high ladders, like, I’m not a naturally nervous person I swear I’m not. But grocery stores...

I once broke into an Irish autorepair shop: Sort of. It’s kind of a long story, but when I was a student in Cork like…8 years ago, they told me to stick to the flatlands and I took a wrong turn and got lost up in the hills and I kinda felt like these two guys who kind of showed up behind me were following me. I did the whole ‘take a couple of right turns’ and it went from two to four guys and I was getting more and more lost and just like NOOOOPE. And then there was trash can on fire and so I like, half-slid down a little cliff, and snuck through/over a chained shut fence and into what turned out to be a repair shop. There were three older guys sitting there eating pizza, and they just blinked at me so I burst out that hey, there was a trash can on fire (like that’s a reasonable reason to bust in, right?). They asked me if I was the one who set it on fire, I said no, they gave me pizza, we waited for the fire brigade. GOOD TIMES. That was the start of a super, super weird 72 hours.

I despise bananas in smoothies: DESPISE. They POLLUTE them, CONTAMINATING everything with awful, horrid, banana-ness. They are smoothie-ruiners. RUINERS. AWFUL, HORRIBLE, TERRIBAD INGREDIENTS OF EVIL. I like banana bread, and my mom’s banana cake, and can sometimes tolerate a banana-nut muffin, but they have no place in my strawberry-raspberry smoothies and they are intolerably smushy on their own. SHUDDER.

I have done a lot of super random jobs at least once: I’ve been a chemist, taught ballet to 6 year olds and figure skating to teens with special needs, charity auctioneer, corn shucker, lighting booth operator, teaching assistant, princess, storyteller, tutor, dining hall worker, medical transcriptionist, editor, corporate recruiter, automated tutorial/phone recording voice, corporate trainer, historical docent, term paper writer, contortionist, martial arts event coordinator, bookseller, video game voice, snake venom analyst (really that and perfumer were subsets of being a chemist, but, worth the callouts), there’s more but like, the list is long and random.

Last time I was in the airport a kid told me I was eating string cheese wrong. I told him that’s how string cheese is eaten on Mars. I recognize none of this make sense, it was 5 AM.

I’m gonna tag @han-pan​, @karalija​, @mylittlecornerofotome​ aaaand @jane-runs-fast​! No obligation >>;;;

2017 Creator Tag

(tagged by @dear-mrs-otome​ and @wonky-glass-ornament​)

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 favorite works you’ve created this year (fics, art, edits, etc!) and link them below (say why if you want) to reflect on the amazing things you’ve brought into the world in 2017. Tag as many writers/artists/etc as you want (fan or original!) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works. <3

Six Wins and Draw This mostly gets to be here because it had a bunch of characters I had never written before! It was fun to write just a quick few paragraphs (if that) for them. I’d like to do something like this again, because it was much easier than trying to force something standalone for a group I’m not as comfortable with the characterization on.

Compliments I really like fluff. I like communication, and silliness, and sweetness. @juniperotome​ helped tremendously with this piece, but it really turned out to be one of my favs. I actually prefer this to Burn Down, which was fun and which I do like and was the other contender for this slot, but when I put them side by side, I like this one.

THE WAFFLE COTTAGE CHRONICLES (there’s more) This had been rattling in my head since 2016, but I didn’t post this until January 2017. This was my first headcanon shoving ALL OF THE LORDS into a single story. I recognize that it is very American-mindset-centric, but the sheer satisfaction of brain-dumping the beast was cathartic.I wrote 5000+ words in bullet point form in One Single Sitting and just, it was fun. I still think this is hilarious, even if it has issues.

Lick Your Wounds I still have lingering problems with this piece. And there’s a sort of dual fact thing going on - it could be so much better, but it is also the best that I have done, imo. Those are both facts to me. At this point, it’s a very frustrating piece to deal with XD but even when I am not entirely happy with it, I am very happy and very very touched by the response it has gotten, and so it gets a place. #makepuppyhappy

Scraps UGH THIS FIFTH SLOT. I mean. There’s no question this goes to a Kai group piece. I love writing the Kai group, it’s the most comfortable and it comes the most easily. I don’t like writing modern aus but they just sort of vomit out with these characters in a very love-hate way (I love that they have the opportunity to be happy without the specter of history looming, that’s about it – it’s complicated to explain). 

IkeSen Tag

(tagged by @dear-mrs-otome​)

Top 3 Warlords in order: Sasuke Nobunaga Kenshin

Favorite Moment in the game so far OH MAN. HMM. I am going to be unoriginal and echo Mrs O – Nobunaga being a matchmaking troll is A+, but I do also love KEnshin and Shingen’s letter to Nobunaga in the ES where MC starts with them but falls in love with Nobu and they are basically like, be nice to her and let her come visit or DEATH TO YOU

Who has the best hair Masamune (Shingen & Hideyoshi have the worst /sigh)

Which voice do you like the most? MRS O I SWEAR I AM NOT COPYING but Kenshin/Mitsuhide are flat tied. Whispery and low, swoooon

Who do you think you are most compatible with? None of ‘em. I enjoy watching their romance unfold with story MC, but as actual self, there are zero combos that would work out favorably for both parties based on what I’ve seen so far.

Which warlord appeals to your aesthetics? Sasuke. Dude. Sasuke.  

Which warlord makes you the most frustrated? Hmmm! Tough to say. Maybe Kennyo? Only because it’s seems from what we’ve seen that he is very much going against himself for some reason, and it’s hurting him and that is silly. Don’t do that.

Who would you swear loyalty to, the Oda forces, the Uesugi-Takeda forces, or Third Party forces? NNNNNGH. Oda. If I HAD to. Only because there’s a stronger sense of long-term stability and history. But ideally, none of the above. I would be NEUTRAL TERRITORY opening up a little seamstress shop somewhere in the middle that also serves tea and everyone is welcome to come have snacks, tea and fittings but only if they don’t fight XD (or at least take it outside, and no one dies)

BONUS: Mrs O’s Q: If you had to tell one warlord what happened to them in your own original timeline, who would it be and why? Nobunaga. Because what happened to him can’t yet come to pass in his timeline, so it’s moot. He’s shown to accept knowledge with aplomb so I don’t think it would send him into an existential spiral. He could handle it.

My question for anyone who does this – Which lord would make the best roommate?

Music Tag

(tagged by @skullbygloy100​ @dear-mrs-otome​ @wonky-glass-ornament​)

I only have two ways of enjoying music – passively not even noticing what’s on in the background and actively listening to the same song for literal and actual hours on repeat

Passes by Helen Jane Long – I literally listen to this on repeat for hours. HOURS.

Blood // Water by grandson

Cows on the Hill by Jay Ungar

Nowhere to run by Boga

Todo Comienza En La Disco by Wisin ft. Yandel & Daddy Yankee 

Dusk Till Dawn  by Zayn ft. Sia – but basically, anything with Sia

Shark in the Water by VV Brown – this is my Yukkin song lolol

Waterbound by the Fretless ft. Ruth Moody

Wait for It by Leslie Odom Jr 

Clair de Lune by Debussy – performed by literally anyone

ANYONE WHO WANTS TO DO ANY OF THE THINGS just tag me <3 And those of you who tagged me - thank you thank you! This was fun

[phynxrizng]

Dandelions

How I Found Paganism:

The Origin Story of a Druid Priestess

July 4, 2017

by Melissa Hill

Religion was a method of exclusion. It was not fair. It was not kind. I learned this as a child. I felt it when I stayed overnight with my friends and ended up going to church on Sunday morning with them. When I had to stay awkwardly in my seat while all the good Catholics went to get their sacred snack. I didn’t know the code words or the songs, I was alone in a sea of people who knew the chorus. I was unclear about this Jesus guy.

They all said he was so great. I wasn’t so sure. I had read the Bible, or parts of it at least. As a young person, probably 11 or 12, I started with Genesis and then read all the books of the Bible that were named after women: Ruth and Esther. I can’t say as I was super impressed. Time went on and my best friend in High School was a Jewish girl.

Her family wasn’t very intense about their religion. They had a Hanukah bush and I learned to love the latkes that her mom made. My favorite lab partner was a Muslim girl who was shy about why she wore a hijab and so I learned not to ask because I didn’t want to upset her. I was just grateful that she was careful, competent, and was fair about sharing the fun tasks, unlike the boys in our AP chem class.

I decided I was not Christian. I refused to participate in a system that would send my friends to Hell because they were in a different religion club. Assigning someone to eternal torment because they had different songs and different handshakes seemed insane to me.

My boyfriend at the time was horrified. He wanted me to get in line and go to his cutsie poofy cloud land when I died. I told him I’d rather not.

So I entered into a time where I was agnostic. Because no matter how much I resisted their handshakes and their songs I was a deeply spiritual person. I knew there was spirit that resided within and throughout this world because I felt it. I interacted with it. As a young child there was no difference for me between the “unseen” and the “seen” worlds.

I remember speaking with the gnomes that lived under the pin oak in my backyard. I also remember learning to talk to the cardinals by mimicking their speech. Those were both real things for me. I had dreams of the future and knew things I couldn’t have known. My mother told me the story of how when I was a baby she always knew when a relative died because the night before I would cry incessantly and then she’d get a phone call from her mother the next day.

This was just my experience of the world. Going to school was an education in many ways. I found out I was too sensitive, too smart, too weird, too awkward. I did not fit in with my bird songs and stories of the witch woman who lived in my basement.

I learned to keep silent about my visions. I learned to choose my own path independently of the crowd. This was in the days before Silver Ravenwolf and Harry Potter. I sought for traces of understanding of my own experience. Narnia, Dune, The Secret Garden, the fairy tales of Anderson and Grimm all taught me bits of wisdom. It was a fiction book I read in college that finally led me to find my religion club.

I don’t even remember the name of it now. It was about people in modern North America who turned into these magical save the planet elf things. It mentioned two books: Starhawk’s Spiral Dance and Margo Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon.

I skipped my classes and took the bus to the bookstore the next day. I had to know if they were real books. They were real, as most of you reading this know.

MORE PAGAN ORIGIN STORIES AT PATHEOS PAGAN

How I Found Paganism by Voodoo Priestess Lilith Dorsey at Voodoo Universe My Paganism: Nature, Nurture, or Choice? by John Beckett at Under The Ancient Oaks How I Found Paganism When I Wasn’t Even Looking by Angus McMahan at Ask Angus Amen And a Couple of Women by Annwyn Avalon at The Water Witch. How I Found Paganism From a Kitchen Witch  by Rachel Patterson at Beneath the Moon The Many Phases of My Paganism by Bekah Evie Bel at Hearth Witch Down Under Finding Paganism by Jason Mankey at Raise the Horns

That rather silly story about people turning into elves changed my life completely. The words spoke to me of a religion club I could belong to. Some place where I was not insane, awkward, or going to Hell. A place where the things I had seen in fact had Names. Where the energy I had felt, the healing I had done, the spirits I had talked to were Real. My lived experience of life was validated by others who knew more than I did. I was ecstatic.

I read Cunningham during lectures on the physiology of the brain. I built an altar in my dorm room and took it down every time my parents visited. I saw a chalked invitation to “Green Spiral: MSU’s Eclectic Pagan Network” written on the university sidewalk. It took a great deal of bravery for me to go to that first meeting, but go I did. I began long journey that has never ended, that led to me meeting my husband, my vocation, my children, my life.

I am a priest, a spiritworker, a friend, a teacher, a writer, an artist, and an activist for the earth and Her folk. In a very real way paganism has shaped my entire existence. I found the place where I was willing to learn the songs and the secret handshake. A place where no one was excluded who wanted to be included. Where no one had to go to eternal damnation for being different. Where more than one way to the divine was encouraged. I found my home.

FILED UNDER: COMMUNITY TAGGED WITH: AUTHENTICITY, CHOICE, DRUIDRY, NATURE, ORIGIN STORY, PAGANISM, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, THEOLOGY «

Source found in, PatheosPagan/ DANDELIONLADY.COM

About Melissa Hill

Melissa Hill combines ancient lore, modern science, and the best that druidry has to offer to explore ritual design, sustainability, and spiritual artistry. She posts every other Wednesday.

REPOSTED BY, PHYNXRIZNG

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Play Quotes

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• A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn’t play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly. – Pablo Neruda • A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be. – Wayne Gretzky • A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class that child comes from. Do I want my child to play with them? – Katie Hopkins • A person might be able to play without being creative, but he sure can’t be creative without playing. – Kurt Hanks • All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. – William Shakespeare • All work and no play doesn’t just make Jill and Jack dull, it kills the potential of discovery, mastery, and openness to change and flexibility and it hinders innovation and invention. – Joline Godfrey • All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy – and Jill a wealthy widow. – Evan Esar • All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. – Stanley Kubrick • American writer 1803-1882 Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning. – Diane Ackerman • And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. – Khalil Gibran • And yet the artist will go on with his work without knowing in some way if any of his representations are sound or unsound. The artist knows nothing worth mentioning about the subjects he represents, and that art is a form of play, not to be taken seriously. – Plato • As a matter of fact, I rarely ever play myself. – Frank Langella • As a performer, you can’t just sit around waiting for the phone to ring. You have to write and develop projects for yourself, because casting people aren’t always going to see you the way you want to be seen. Write a one-person show, shoot a short film, do plays, whatever – activity breeds activity. No one’s interested in a stay-at-home actress. – Wendi McLendon-Covey

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Play+', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_play').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_play img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars. – Henry Van Dyke • Bobby Fischer started off each game with a great advantage: after the opening he had used less time than his opponent and thus had more time available later on. The major reason why he never had serious time pressure was that his rapid opening play simply left sufficient time for the middlegame. – Edmar Mednis • But I’d play on everything from pop records to a lot of the glam stuff to rock stuff to classical stuff. I used to get called to do all those things, it was great. – Rick Wakeman • Champions keep playing until they get it right. – Billie Jean King • Colin Morgan gives a stunning performance in Parked; he plays Merlin in the BBC TV show and he says the two characters are like night and day. Watch him. He’s got everything it takes to be top notch. – Colm Meaney

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought. – Albert Einstein • Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. – Peter Ustinov • Contemporary American psychiatrist It is a happy talent to know how to play. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form. – Stephen Nachmanovitch • Culture arises and unfolds in and as play… culture itself bears the character of play. – Johan Huizinga • Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays. – Friedrich Schiller • Darren Fletcher is the type of player who would walk over hot coals to play for his country, and he has done – Andy Gray • Deep meaning lies often in childish play. – Friedrich Schiller • Does it not appear to you versatility is the true and rare characteristic of that rare thing called genius-versatility and playfulness? In my mind they are both essential. – Mary Russell Mitford • Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you. – Charlie Parker • Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there. – Miles Davis • Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game. – Voltaire • For me right now I think being the world number one is a bigger deal than being the world champion because I think it shows better who plays the best chess. That sounds self-serving but I think it’s also right. – Magnus Carlsen • For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. • For Ripley I learned to play some songs on the piano, and I never really played them again. – Matt Damon • Generally the younger generation are not hard working. They will have to put in more effort to achieve results in tournaments. most of them can perform well but they cannot deliver when they play abroad. – Jahangir • God does not play dice. – Albert Einstein • He is not someone who went off to play in Europe and only a few Americans follow. He has the potential to be on magazine covers and more newspaper coverage. – Lamar Hunt • He that plays the king shall be welcome- his Majesty shall have tribute of me; the adventurous knight shall use his foil and target; the lover shall not sigh gratis; the humorous man shall end his part in peace; the clown shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickle o’ th’ sere; and the lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt fort. – William Shakespeare • Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain. – Edward de Bono • I believe that the artist’s feelings are in some way generative. And I suspect that much of the artist’s most productive emotion – not all of it but much of it – is felt in the course of playing around with form. – Carter Ratcliff • I can play songs that I hear from a movie and just play it a few times on the keyboard. I will hit all the notes on the keyboard until I find the right key, and then I will play the rest of the song. – Callan McAuliffe • I come to sing for the people, not for the government. God made the sunshine for everyone and made the moon for everyone. We have to follow his example so we have to play music for everyone too. We have a message, and in order for our message to reach the people, we have to play. – Ziggy Marley • I didn’t really play dress up when I was a kid, and I’m really T-shirt and jeans-y. – Ellen Page • I didn’t really want to be an actor when I was growing up – I wanted to be whatever I was reading about or seeing at the time. When I read The Firm I wanted to be a lawyer; when I saw Top Gun, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. So that’s why acting probably turned out to be a good thing for me because I get to be people for five minutes or 90 minutes. I’d be curious to see if I had the attention span to be like those guys on 30 Rock and play the same character season after season. – Jason Sudeikis • I don’t give a damn about any actors. What good will John Barrymore do you with the bases loaded and two down in a tight ball game. Either I get the money (more than Barrymore), or I don’t play! – Babe Ruth • I don’t have a favorite place to play. – Keren Ann • I don’t have to support Bibi, his government or any other conservative organization in order to come and play music in Israel, for people who want to come and listen to music. I think it’s b******t to ask me to boycott Israel and not America. It’s interesting that some people choose to pick on Israel and isolate her… I was invited to perform and that’s why I’ll perform, as long as the border is open and I’m welcomed. I’m just coming to play. – Anton Newcombe • I don’t think I’m very ambitious at all. But I seem to play people who have that quality. – Catherine Keener • I don’t wear bright orange clothes or leopard skin boots, but it was really good fun to play someone that does and have an excuse too! – Sally Hawkins • I guess the characters I play may be at the more destructive edge of the spectrum, more damaged or whatever, but I find a lot of female roles uninteresting. – Lili Taylor • I had this health teacher who kept me after class one time, saying, ‘You’re missing a lot of class.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but I’m doing this play.’ He said, ‘Community theatre is not going to take you anywhere. Maybe you should stay in school’ – Dane DeHaan • I like to be other people, not me. And when you’re on the red carpet, it’s like, ‘Here’s Tom Hardy.’ I don’t want to be me. That’s why I play other people. – Tom Hardy • I like to play smart, three-dimensional women. I also like to play roles where the women are a little crazy. I just have a feel for crazy people. – Lili Taylor • I love doing voiceover work. I started doing voiceover work when I had just dropped out of school, and the first few professional jobs I got were plays, but then I started making money doing voiceovers. – Justin Long • I love the game – and I hate the Russians because they’ve almost ruined it. They only risk the title when they have to, every three years. They play for draws with each other but play to win against the Western masters. Draws make for dull chess, wins make for fighting chess. – Bobby Fischer • I love to play bid whist as much as I love football. – Emmitt Smith • I love to play games. I really like football, and I also like to ride horses. – Mary-Kate Olsen • I must be absolutely clear about this. Britain cannot accept the present situation on the Budget. It is demonstrably unjust. It is politically indefensible: I cannot play Sister Bountiful to the Community while my own electorate are being asked to forego improvements in the fields of health, education, welfare and the rest. – Margaret Thatcher • I often tell my students that you can’t worry about the end of an improv scene because the end is not up to you. You just play as hard as you can until someone changes the scene. The scene has changedthe end is not up to us. – Mark Sutton • I play an 89-year-old man whose wife has Alzheimer’s in a movie called ‘Still.’ I play a World War II veteran, I acted with my son and it’s called ‘Memorial Day.’ – James Cromwell • I play bad golf for good charities like the LA Police. – Robert Stack • I play guitar and I love the Beatles and melodic music. – Stephen Dorff • I play guitar, piano, bass and percussion. – Teena Marie • I play the guitar. I taught myself how to play the guitar, which was a bad decision… because I didn’t know how to play it, so I was a shitty teacher. I would never have went to me. – Mitch Hedberg • I play with microbes. There are, of course, many rules to this play…but when you have acquired knowledge and experience it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something nobody has thought of. – Alexander Fleming • I play, like, 12 instruments. Guitar, piano, harmonica, African drums… I’m working on mastering the accordion. – Lucas Grabeel • I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things… I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind. – Leo Buscaglia • I think the media makes it tough to play in New York. There are so many papers and TV channels covering the Knicks and the expectations for the Knicks are so high. • I thought it was such a unique concept to play parents who happen to be super heroes and have a son who is going through puberty and starting high school. – Kelly Preston • I thought people would ask me really personal questions because I’ve shown more of myself, but it’s a comedy, and people understand that it’s a game we play. – Charlotte Gainsbourg • I was in lots of dodgy bands growing up and I always fancied myself in a band. But, you know, I was rubbish at writing music. So maybe one day I’ll play a rock star, or punk rocker. – Gemma Arterton • I wasn’t allowed to play in some universities in the United States and out of twenty-five concerts, twenty-three were canceled unless I would substitute my black bass player for my old white bass player, which I wouldn’t do. – Dave Brubeck • I’ll play Pretty Pretty Princess with you if you just let me watch a little bit of March Madness. – Matt Damon • I’d like to do plays, maybe a one man show. – Jean Reno • I’d like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie. – Bernadette Peters • If I only get to play Malaysian roles, there wouldn’t be very many roles for me to play. – Michelle Yeoh • If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. – William Shakespeare • If music be the food of love, play on. – William Shakespeare • If you can play the first ten or fifteen moves in just as many minutes, you can be in a state of bliss for the rest of the game. If, on the other hand, Bronstein thinks for forty minutes about his first move, then time trouble is inevitable. – Alexander Kotov • If you have the opportunity to play this game of life you need to appreciate every moment. a lot of people don’t appreciate the moment until it’s passed. – Kanye West • If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they’ll yawn too. – Malcolm Gladwell • If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play. – John Cleese • If your opponent is short (on time), play just as you played earlier in the game. If you are short keep calm, I repeat, don’t get flustered. Keep up the same neat writing of the moves, the same methodical examination of variations, but at a quicker rate. – Alexander Kotov • I’m not afraid to play my age. I never was. I’ve never been an ingenue. I like getting older. – Maria Bello • I’m sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity. – Diane Ackerman • In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm. Michael Ignatieff, a former professor at Harvard and contributing writer for the magazine, is a member of Canada’s Parliament and deputy leader of the Liberal Party. – Michael Ignatieff • In art, everyone who plays wins. – Robert Genn • In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. – Friedrich Nietzsche • In my early life my mother tried to create a nurturing environment in which my mind could play. Her big rule was “Never lose in your imagination.” She told me that thoughts were things and that I would become the thing I thought of most. This kind of empowerment is crucial to creative thinking. – Joey Reiman • In my sophomore year, a kid told me that the secret to getting women is to play really, really hard to get. I followed his advice, and I didn’t have so much as a date that year. – Greg Kinnear • In our play we reveal what kind of people we are. – Ovid • In the midst of wanton aggression, we still call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in its bodies and institutions – provisional or permanent. – David Ben-Gurion • It is better to play than do nothing. – Confucius • It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play – their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force – can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life. – Will Self • It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it. – Maya Angelou • It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. – Donald Woods Winnicott • It is my opinion that the 21st century will be the century of play, and the heteroglossic activity of artists in the 20th century has been the forecast. – Brian Sutton-Smith • It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them. – Leo Buscaglia • It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist’s numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body. – James Elkins • It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven’t done. – Judi Dench • It may be that other developers are finding that their games play better on one platform over the other, so they’re choosing to migrate to that platform. – Sid Meier • It seemed like the right time. You reach a point when you say to yourself, ‘Do I want to keep doing this?’ There are other things on my plate I want to do — I’ve been writing a play, I’ve been neglecting my standup. – Joy Behar • It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity. – Michel de Montaigne • It’s been liberating to be able to play someone who’s a bada– or promiscuous, because that’s the opposite of who I am … It’s like a drug. – Jessica Alba • Its impossible to go onto the Tardis set and not play with things and fiddle with dials. – Jenna Coleman • It’s the faster bands that made me want to play guitar, bands like The Jam. – Graham Coxon • I’ve always been attracted to women who are assertive and have confidence – qualities older women possess. They’ve been on the Earth a little longer. They’re more seasoned. They don’t play games. They know what they want, and they’re not afraid to tell you. – Taye Diggs • I’ve always wanted to play a role in inspiring people to be better, to live higher quality lives and to feel good about the way that they look and feel. – Apolo Ohno • Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don’t have to think about it too much. – Chris Barber • Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game. – Michael Jordan • Late in the third quarter the Cougars were behind 12-0. Duva had completed 5 out of 20 passes. Edwards looked at Gifford Nielsen. Giff had never done a thing, in practice or anywhere else, to give us confidence in him. . . . . . . the coach said later. He sent him into the game anyway. First play was a 19-yard completion. Second was a 6-yard run. He threw again on the third play to running back Dave Lowry who ran 37 yards for a touchdown. – LaVell Edwards • Learning is not child’s play; we cannot learn without pain. – Aristotle • Let’s not play games. I was suggesting – you’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. – Barack Obama • Life is a challenge, meet it! Life is a dream, realize it! Life is a game, play it! Life is love, enjoy it! – Sathya Sai Baba • Life is too short to play bad music – Bob Brozman • Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. – William Shakespeare • Looking at the championship-winning quarterbacks, Edwards remembered their particular talents: Gary Sheide: The image of Joe Namath. He even had Joe’s number. Had just a great feel and touch for the game. A great athlete who could play all the sports. He was more of a streak guy than any of them. He could miss two or three passes and then get hot and hit ten straight. He was the one who got it all started. – LaVell Edwards • Love is a game that two can play and both win. – Eva Gabor • Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it’s as if the audience—dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing—is part of the band. – Tom Piazza • Man does not cease to play because he grows old, he grows old because he ceases to play. – Drew Lachey • Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. – Heraclitus • Man’s most serious activity is play. – George Santayana • Men should learn to live with the same seriousness with which children play. – Friedrich Nietzsche • My 10 year old son likes it. He’s trying to play guitar and everything. He likes that kind of music. – Merle Haggard • My acting’s very understated. I think my sad and happy don’t play that differently onscreen. – Bret McKenzie • My family was never cultural in that we never went to see plays, my mum wasn’t very into films. – Gemma Arterton • Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood. – Paulo Coelho • Of course, money matters to everyone even if some don’t want to admit it. If I won the Race to Dubai, I look at that prize money and think it could pay off my new house or the range I’m building. I am privileged to play golf for a living – look around St Andrews, that’s my office. • One aspect of play is the importance of laughter, which has physiological and psychological benefits. Did you know that there are thousands of laughter clubs around the world? People get together and laugh for no reason at all! – Daniel H. Pink • One man in his time plays many parts. – William Shakespeare • One night I was in the players’ parking lot at the Fleet Center in my Celtics warm-ups about a half hour before a game, waiting for one of my dealers to come up from Fall River, because if I didn’t get my stuff I was too sick to even go through the pre-game layup line, never mind actually play in the game. – Chris Herren • One will only be free when one plays and one’s society will become a piece of art. – Herbert Marcuse • Paul Klee seems to handle colors and dreams as if they both came out of a box of children’s toys. He plays and dreams with whatever he finds. – Jean Helion • Play becomes joy, joy becomes work, work becomes play. – Johannes Itten • Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning…They have to play with what they know to be true in order to find out more, and then they can use what they learn in new forms of play. – Fred Rogers • Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience. – Johan Huizinga • Play is the exultation of the possible. – Martin Buber • Play is your route to mastery. – Sara Genn • Playful arising is authorized by both risk and trust in the process and in oneself. To be truly playful and improvisational one must not look for results. – Joshua L. Goldberg • Russia will occupy most of the good food lands of central Europe while we have the industrial portions. We must find some way of persuading Russia to play ball. – Henry L. Stimson • Self-interest speaks all manner of tongues and plays all manner of parts, even that of disinterestedness. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld • Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself. – Miles Davis • Sound is not simply what we hear or play, but equally a feeling in the body – Howard Snell • Surely all God’s people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. – John Muir • That’s what I love about acting, you get to find little pieces of yourself in every character you play. – Julianna Margulies • The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes. – Marshall McLuhan • The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One. – Stephen Nachmanovitch • The cherished dream of every chessplayer is to play a match with the World Champion. But here is the paradox: the closer you come to the realization of this goal, the less you think about it. – Mikhail Tal • The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. – Carl Jung • The creative mind plays with the object it loves. – Carl Jung • The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously. – Sigmund Freud • The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. – Carl Jung • The Eeyore Educational System sees childhood as a waste of time, a luxury that society cannot afford . . . Put children in school at the earliest age possible; load them down with homework; take away their time, their creativity, their play, their power; then plug them into machines. • The Holy Spirit, in the variety of his gifts, unites us and enables us to contribute to the building up of the Church in holiness. In this great work, each of us has a part to play; each of us, as a “living stone”, is needed for the growth and the beauty of God’s holy temple. Let us ask the Lord to help us to take an ever more active part in the Church’s life and mission, guided by the Holy Spirit and with Jesus as our cornerstone. – Pope Francis • The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both. – James A. Michener • The only time it dominates is during a solo, or when we play a low blues and I put figures in behind Eric’s vocals. There’s never any real problem fitting guitar and organ together. – Alan Price • The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression. – Brian Sutton-Smith • The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery. – Erik Erikson • The Play’s the Thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King. – William Shakespeare • The play’s the thing. – William Shakespeare • The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas. – George Bernard Shaw • The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play….We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play…it arises in and as play, and never leaves it. – Johan Huizinga • The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day. – Dr. Seuss • The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play. – Arnold J. Toynbee • The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything. – Friedrich Nietzsche • The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen, the feeling that whatever happens, it’s okay… you’re either free to play, or you’re not. – John Cleese • The world is open for play, that everything and everybody is mockable, in a wonderful way. – Robin Williams • There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. – J. Robert Oppenheimer • There are times when I love to play all kinds of complicated games in painting. But this is one case when I need to be fairly straightforward. I’ll just try to paint the man, his intelligence, his amiability and his stature, maybe paint him fairly close to humor and try to get it just right. – Nelson Shanks • There is for many a poverty of play. – Donald Woods Winnicott • There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form. – Anatole Broyard • There is work that is work and there is play that is play; there is play that is work and work that is play. And in only one of these lies happiness. – Gelett Burgess • There’s such a sense of theatre in getting glammed up; it’s like putting on a play or short film. – Felicity Jones • There’s that thing that can happen to you when you meet somebody and you don’t consider them extraordinary at all and then they do something like play the cello or write amazing poetry or sing and suddenly you look at them completely differently. – Yvonne Prinz • There’s very little to be said for learning a piece note by note, reading the rhythmic markings, practising the fingerings and following your instructor’s suggestions, if you haven’t any idea how the music will eventually sound and feel. If you learn a piece mechanically, you may have to ‘unlearn’ it before you can play it with expression and feeling. – Barry Green • They said I couldn’t play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York. – Roddy McDowall • This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. – Alan Watts • Those who’ll play with cats must expect to be scratched. – Miguel de Cervantes • To learn to play seriously is one of the great secrets of spiritual exploration. – Rachel Pollack • To start your life as a character of 120 years when you are in your late thirties, and then go back in time about 20 years later to play the same character who is your own age then, its very complicated, but very interesting. – Ian McDiarmid • To stimulate creativity one must develop childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition. – Albert Einstein • To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it! – Charlie Chaplin • Tony Vigorito has grown a cult following of thousands for one reason – his stuff is fun to read… It’s… filled with the freshness and the freewheeling independence that made his reputation… This book is the ‘work’ of one of the least pretentious and most enjoyable to read novelists at play in America today. – Kris Saknussemm • Usually most characters I play are quite realistic. – Virginie Ledoyen • Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture. – Italo Calvino • We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything than when we are playing – Charles E. Schaefer • We can’t all be Einstein (because we don’t all play the violin). At the very least, we need a sort of street-smart science: the ability to recognize evidence, gather it, assess it, and act on it. – Judith Stone • We could play them through the week, and then the weekend we could play the black joints. I learned to be very versatile and learned to love it. So it stays with me even up to now. – Little Milton • We don’t play slow and we don’t play fast, we play half fast – Louis Armstrong • We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. – George Bernard Shaw • We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters… that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules… and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square. – Michelle Obama • We live in a world of entertainment in full color with a lot of fast action, a world in which many children grow up thinking that if it isn’t fun, it is boring and not worthwhile. Even in family activities we need to strike a balance between play and work. – Joe J. Christensen • We often say that psi is like musical ability: it is widely distributed in the populate, and everyone has some ability and can participate to some extent – in the same way that the most nonmusical person can learn to play a little Mozart on the piano. On the other hand, there is no substitute for innate talent, and there is no substitute for practice. – Russell Targ • We tend to think of the Faustian man, the one who fabricates, manipulates, seduces and ends up destroying. But the new image will be man the creator, the artist, the player. – Jean Houston • Well, I am very happy that I was able to play a part in bringing music from the streets onto the radio and into modern culture, I worked very hard and always believed in the sounds I was creating. – Ice T • Well, I play Jews and parrots. Parrots are how I’ve branched out. – Gilbert Gottfried • Well, it’s a marvelous night for a Moondance With the stars up above in your eyes… And I’m trying to please to the calling Of your heart-strings that they play soft and low And all the night’s magic seems to whisper and hush And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush… One more Moondance with you in the moonlight On a magic night – Van Morrison • What if not just women, but both men and women, worked smart, more flexible schedules? What if the workplace itself was more fluid than the rigid and narrow ladder to success of the ideal worker? And what if both men and women became responsible for raising children and managing the home, sharing work, love, and play? Could everyone then live whole lives? – Brigid Schulte What we play is life. – Louis Armstrong • When I play from my mind I get in trouble. – Stevie Ray Vaughan • When I started off many years ago, I made a determination that there were certain roles I didn’t want to play. – Joe Morton • When I tour I’m going to countries to play music for people. My presence in a country is not an endorsement or a condemnation of that country’s policies. My presence in a country is an effort to connect with people through playing music. – Moby • When the band plays fast, you play slow; when the band plays slow, you play fast. – Miles Davis • When you play a match, it is statistically proven that players actually have the ball 3 minutes on average … So, the most important thing is: what do you do during those 87 minutes when you do not have the ball. That is what determines wether you’re a good player or not. – Johan Cruijff • When you play, play hard; when you work, don’t play at all. – Theodore Roosevelt • Whoever wants to understand much must play much. – Gottfried Benn • With passion pray. With passion make love. With passion eat and drink and dance and play. Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God? – Rumi • Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable. – Carl Jung • Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions. – Mark Twain • Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. – Mark Twain • Working with Sturges was like working with a guy who wanted to have a party all the time. He was very serious about his work, but in between shots, he was fun and we would play games. – Eddie Bracken • You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four. – Miles Davis • You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else. – Albert Einstein • You play to win, to get that World Series ring, All-Star games and whatever comes with it. – Nick Johnson • Your government has problems…my government has problems. I can’t be a judge. All I can do is be an ambassador of love. I’m a musician, not a soldier, and if I’m invited to a place in order to play and bring love, I’ll always accept the invitation. – Meshell Ndegeocello • Your money is like your willy, it only grows if you play with it – Len Goodman • You’ve achieved success in your field when you don’t know whether what you’re doing is work or play. – Warren Beatty

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[equitiesstocks]

Play Quotes

Official Website: Play Quotes

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• A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn’t play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly. – Pablo Neruda • A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be. – Wayne Gretzky • A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class that child comes from. Do I want my child to play with them? – Katie Hopkins • A person might be able to play without being creative, but he sure can’t be creative without playing. – Kurt Hanks • All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. – William Shakespeare • All work and no play doesn’t just make Jill and Jack dull, it kills the potential of discovery, mastery, and openness to change and flexibility and it hinders innovation and invention. – Joline Godfrey • All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy – and Jill a wealthy widow. – Evan Esar • All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. – Stanley Kubrick • American writer 1803-1882 Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning. – Diane Ackerman • And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. – Khalil Gibran • And yet the artist will go on with his work without knowing in some way if any of his representations are sound or unsound. The artist knows nothing worth mentioning about the subjects he represents, and that art is a form of play, not to be taken seriously. – Plato • As a matter of fact, I rarely ever play myself. – Frank Langella • As a performer, you can’t just sit around waiting for the phone to ring. You have to write and develop projects for yourself, because casting people aren’t always going to see you the way you want to be seen. Write a one-person show, shoot a short film, do plays, whatever – activity breeds activity. No one’s interested in a stay-at-home actress. – Wendi McLendon-Covey

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Play+', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_play').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_play img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars. – Henry Van Dyke • Bobby Fischer started off each game with a great advantage: after the opening he had used less time than his opponent and thus had more time available later on. The major reason why he never had serious time pressure was that his rapid opening play simply left sufficient time for the middlegame. – Edmar Mednis • But I’d play on everything from pop records to a lot of the glam stuff to rock stuff to classical stuff. I used to get called to do all those things, it was great. – Rick Wakeman • Champions keep playing until they get it right. – Billie Jean King • Colin Morgan gives a stunning performance in Parked; he plays Merlin in the BBC TV show and he says the two characters are like night and day. Watch him. He’s got everything it takes to be top notch. – Colm Meaney

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought. – Albert Einstein • Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. – Peter Ustinov • Contemporary American psychiatrist It is a happy talent to know how to play. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form. – Stephen Nachmanovitch • Culture arises and unfolds in and as play… culture itself bears the character of play. – Johan Huizinga • Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays. – Friedrich Schiller • Darren Fletcher is the type of player who would walk over hot coals to play for his country, and he has done – Andy Gray • Deep meaning lies often in childish play. – Friedrich Schiller • Does it not appear to you versatility is the true and rare characteristic of that rare thing called genius-versatility and playfulness? In my mind they are both essential. – Mary Russell Mitford • Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you. – Charlie Parker • Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there. – Miles Davis • Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game. – Voltaire • For me right now I think being the world number one is a bigger deal than being the world champion because I think it shows better who plays the best chess. That sounds self-serving but I think it’s also right. – Magnus Carlsen • For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. • For Ripley I learned to play some songs on the piano, and I never really played them again. – Matt Damon • Generally the younger generation are not hard working. They will have to put in more effort to achieve results in tournaments. most of them can perform well but they cannot deliver when they play abroad. – Jahangir • God does not play dice. – Albert Einstein • He is not someone who went off to play in Europe and only a few Americans follow. He has the potential to be on magazine covers and more newspaper coverage. – Lamar Hunt • He that plays the king shall be welcome- his Majesty shall have tribute of me; the adventurous knight shall use his foil and target; the lover shall not sigh gratis; the humorous man shall end his part in peace; the clown shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickle o’ th’ sere; and the lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt fort. – William Shakespeare • Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain. – Edward de Bono • I believe that the artist’s feelings are in some way generative. And I suspect that much of the artist’s most productive emotion – not all of it but much of it – is felt in the course of playing around with form. – Carter Ratcliff • I can play songs that I hear from a movie and just play it a few times on the keyboard. I will hit all the notes on the keyboard until I find the right key, and then I will play the rest of the song. – Callan McAuliffe • I come to sing for the people, not for the government. God made the sunshine for everyone and made the moon for everyone. We have to follow his example so we have to play music for everyone too. We have a message, and in order for our message to reach the people, we have to play. – Ziggy Marley • I didn’t really play dress up when I was a kid, and I’m really T-shirt and jeans-y. – Ellen Page • I didn’t really want to be an actor when I was growing up – I wanted to be whatever I was reading about or seeing at the time. When I read The Firm I wanted to be a lawyer; when I saw Top Gun, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. So that’s why acting probably turned out to be a good thing for me because I get to be people for five minutes or 90 minutes. I’d be curious to see if I had the attention span to be like those guys on 30 Rock and play the same character season after season. – Jason Sudeikis • I don’t give a damn about any actors. What good will John Barrymore do you with the bases loaded and two down in a tight ball game. Either I get the money (more than Barrymore), or I don’t play! – Babe Ruth • I don’t have a favorite place to play. – Keren Ann • I don’t have to support Bibi, his government or any other conservative organization in order to come and play music in Israel, for people who want to come and listen to music. I think it’s b******t to ask me to boycott Israel and not America. It’s interesting that some people choose to pick on Israel and isolate her… I was invited to perform and that’s why I’ll perform, as long as the border is open and I’m welcomed. I’m just coming to play. – Anton Newcombe • I don’t think I’m very ambitious at all. But I seem to play people who have that quality. – Catherine Keener • I don’t wear bright orange clothes or leopard skin boots, but it was really good fun to play someone that does and have an excuse too! – Sally Hawkins • I guess the characters I play may be at the more destructive edge of the spectrum, more damaged or whatever, but I find a lot of female roles uninteresting. – Lili Taylor • I had this health teacher who kept me after class one time, saying, ‘You’re missing a lot of class.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but I’m doing this play.’ He said, ‘Community theatre is not going to take you anywhere. Maybe you should stay in school’ – Dane DeHaan • I like to be other people, not me. And when you’re on the red carpet, it’s like, ‘Here’s Tom Hardy.’ I don’t want to be me. That’s why I play other people. – Tom Hardy • I like to play smart, three-dimensional women. I also like to play roles where the women are a little crazy. I just have a feel for crazy people. – Lili Taylor • I love doing voiceover work. I started doing voiceover work when I had just dropped out of school, and the first few professional jobs I got were plays, but then I started making money doing voiceovers. – Justin Long • I love the game – and I hate the Russians because they’ve almost ruined it. They only risk the title when they have to, every three years. They play for draws with each other but play to win against the Western masters. Draws make for dull chess, wins make for fighting chess. – Bobby Fischer • I love to play bid whist as much as I love football. – Emmitt Smith • I love to play games. I really like football, and I also like to ride horses. – Mary-Kate Olsen • I must be absolutely clear about this. Britain cannot accept the present situation on the Budget. It is demonstrably unjust. It is politically indefensible: I cannot play Sister Bountiful to the Community while my own electorate are being asked to forego improvements in the fields of health, education, welfare and the rest. – Margaret Thatcher • I often tell my students that you can’t worry about the end of an improv scene because the end is not up to you. You just play as hard as you can until someone changes the scene. The scene has changedthe end is not up to us. – Mark Sutton • I play an 89-year-old man whose wife has Alzheimer’s in a movie called ‘Still.’ I play a World War II veteran, I acted with my son and it’s called ‘Memorial Day.’ – James Cromwell • I play bad golf for good charities like the LA Police. – Robert Stack • I play guitar and I love the Beatles and melodic music. – Stephen Dorff • I play guitar, piano, bass and percussion. – Teena Marie • I play the guitar. I taught myself how to play the guitar, which was a bad decision… because I didn’t know how to play it, so I was a shitty teacher. I would never have went to me. – Mitch Hedberg • I play with microbes. There are, of course, many rules to this play…but when you have acquired knowledge and experience it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something nobody has thought of. – Alexander Fleming • I play, like, 12 instruments. Guitar, piano, harmonica, African drums… I’m working on mastering the accordion. – Lucas Grabeel • I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things… I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind. – Leo Buscaglia • I think the media makes it tough to play in New York. There are so many papers and TV channels covering the Knicks and the expectations for the Knicks are so high. • I thought it was such a unique concept to play parents who happen to be super heroes and have a son who is going through puberty and starting high school. – Kelly Preston • I thought people would ask me really personal questions because I’ve shown more of myself, but it’s a comedy, and people understand that it’s a game we play. – Charlotte Gainsbourg • I was in lots of dodgy bands growing up and I always fancied myself in a band. But, you know, I was rubbish at writing music. So maybe one day I’ll play a rock star, or punk rocker. – Gemma Arterton • I wasn’t allowed to play in some universities in the United States and out of twenty-five concerts, twenty-three were canceled unless I would substitute my black bass player for my old white bass player, which I wouldn’t do. – Dave Brubeck • I’ll play Pretty Pretty Princess with you if you just let me watch a little bit of March Madness. – Matt Damon • I’d like to do plays, maybe a one man show. – Jean Reno • I’d like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie. – Bernadette Peters • If I only get to play Malaysian roles, there wouldn’t be very many roles for me to play. – Michelle Yeoh • If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. – William Shakespeare • If music be the food of love, play on. – William Shakespeare • If you can play the first ten or fifteen moves in just as many minutes, you can be in a state of bliss for the rest of the game. If, on the other hand, Bronstein thinks for forty minutes about his first move, then time trouble is inevitable. – Alexander Kotov • If you have the opportunity to play this game of life you need to appreciate every moment. a lot of people don’t appreciate the moment until it’s passed. – Kanye West • If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they’ll yawn too. – Malcolm Gladwell • If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play. – John Cleese • If your opponent is short (on time), play just as you played earlier in the game. If you are short keep calm, I repeat, don’t get flustered. Keep up the same neat writing of the moves, the same methodical examination of variations, but at a quicker rate. – Alexander Kotov • I’m not afraid to play my age. I never was. I’ve never been an ingenue. I like getting older. – Maria Bello • I’m sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity. – Diane Ackerman • In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm. Michael Ignatieff, a former professor at Harvard and contributing writer for the magazine, is a member of Canada’s Parliament and deputy leader of the Liberal Party. – Michael Ignatieff • In art, everyone who plays wins. – Robert Genn • In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. – Friedrich Nietzsche • In my early life my mother tried to create a nurturing environment in which my mind could play. Her big rule was “Never lose in your imagination.” She told me that thoughts were things and that I would become the thing I thought of most. This kind of empowerment is crucial to creative thinking. – Joey Reiman • In my sophomore year, a kid told me that the secret to getting women is to play really, really hard to get. I followed his advice, and I didn’t have so much as a date that year. – Greg Kinnear • In our play we reveal what kind of people we are. – Ovid • In the midst of wanton aggression, we still call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to return to the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, with full and equal citizenship and due representation in its bodies and institutions – provisional or permanent. – David Ben-Gurion • It is better to play than do nothing. – Confucius • It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play – their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force – can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life. – Will Self • It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it. – Maya Angelou • It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. – Donald Woods Winnicott • It is my opinion that the 21st century will be the century of play, and the heteroglossic activity of artists in the 20th century has been the forecast. – Brian Sutton-Smith • It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them. – Leo Buscaglia • It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist’s numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body. – James Elkins • It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven’t done. – Judi Dench • It may be that other developers are finding that their games play better on one platform over the other, so they’re choosing to migrate to that platform. – Sid Meier • It seemed like the right time. You reach a point when you say to yourself, ‘Do I want to keep doing this?’ There are other things on my plate I want to do — I’ve been writing a play, I’ve been neglecting my standup. – Joy Behar • It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity. – Michel de Montaigne • It’s been liberating to be able to play someone who’s a bada– or promiscuous, because that’s the opposite of who I am … It’s like a drug. – Jessica Alba • Its impossible to go onto the Tardis set and not play with things and fiddle with dials. – Jenna Coleman • It’s the faster bands that made me want to play guitar, bands like The Jam. – Graham Coxon • I’ve always been attracted to women who are assertive and have confidence – qualities older women possess. They’ve been on the Earth a little longer. They’re more seasoned. They don’t play games. They know what they want, and they’re not afraid to tell you. – Taye Diggs • I’ve always wanted to play a role in inspiring people to be better, to live higher quality lives and to feel good about the way that they look and feel. – Apolo Ohno • Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don’t have to think about it too much. – Chris Barber • Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game. – Michael Jordan • Late in the third quarter the Cougars were behind 12-0. Duva had completed 5 out of 20 passes. Edwards looked at Gifford Nielsen. Giff had never done a thing, in practice or anywhere else, to give us confidence in him. . . . . . . the coach said later. He sent him into the game anyway. First play was a 19-yard completion. Second was a 6-yard run. He threw again on the third play to running back Dave Lowry who ran 37 yards for a touchdown. – LaVell Edwards • Learning is not child’s play; we cannot learn without pain. – Aristotle • Let’s not play games. I was suggesting – you’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. – Barack Obama • Life is a challenge, meet it! Life is a dream, realize it! Life is a game, play it! Life is love, enjoy it! – Sathya Sai Baba • Life is too short to play bad music – Bob Brozman • Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. – William Shakespeare • Looking at the championship-winning quarterbacks, Edwards remembered their particular talents: Gary Sheide: The image of Joe Namath. He even had Joe’s number. Had just a great feel and touch for the game. A great athlete who could play all the sports. He was more of a streak guy than any of them. He could miss two or three passes and then get hot and hit ten straight. He was the one who got it all started. – LaVell Edwards • Love is a game that two can play and both win. – Eva Gabor • Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it’s as if the audience—dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing—is part of the band. – Tom Piazza • Man does not cease to play because he grows old, he grows old because he ceases to play. – Drew Lachey • Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. – Heraclitus • Man’s most serious activity is play. – George Santayana • Men should learn to live with the same seriousness with which children play. – Friedrich Nietzsche • My 10 year old son likes it. He’s trying to play guitar and everything. He likes that kind of music. – Merle Haggard • My acting’s very understated. I think my sad and happy don’t play that differently onscreen. – Bret McKenzie • My family was never cultural in that we never went to see plays, my mum wasn’t very into films. – Gemma Arterton • Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood. – Paulo Coelho • Of course, money matters to everyone even if some don’t want to admit it. If I won the Race to Dubai, I look at that prize money and think it could pay off my new house or the range I’m building. I am privileged to play golf for a living – look around St Andrews, that’s my office. • One aspect of play is the importance of laughter, which has physiological and psychological benefits. Did you know that there are thousands of laughter clubs around the world? People get together and laugh for no reason at all! – Daniel H. Pink • One man in his time plays many parts. – William Shakespeare • One night I was in the players’ parking lot at the Fleet Center in my Celtics warm-ups about a half hour before a game, waiting for one of my dealers to come up from Fall River, because if I didn’t get my stuff I was too sick to even go through the pre-game layup line, never mind actually play in the game. – Chris Herren • One will only be free when one plays and one’s society will become a piece of art. – Herbert Marcuse • Paul Klee seems to handle colors and dreams as if they both came out of a box of children’s toys. He plays and dreams with whatever he finds. – Jean Helion • Play becomes joy, joy becomes work, work becomes play. – Johannes Itten • Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning…They have to play with what they know to be true in order to find out more, and then they can use what they learn in new forms of play. – Fred Rogers • Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience. – Johan Huizinga • Play is the exultation of the possible. – Martin Buber • Play is your route to mastery. – Sara Genn • Playful arising is authorized by both risk and trust in the process and in oneself. To be truly playful and improvisational one must not look for results. – Joshua L. Goldberg • Russia will occupy most of the good food lands of central Europe while we have the industrial portions. We must find some way of persuading Russia to play ball. – Henry L. Stimson • Self-interest speaks all manner of tongues and plays all manner of parts, even that of disinterestedness. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld • Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself. – Miles Davis • Sound is not simply what we hear or play, but equally a feeling in the body – Howard Snell • Surely all God’s people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. – John Muir • That’s what I love about acting, you get to find little pieces of yourself in every character you play. – Julianna Margulies • The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes. – Marshall McLuhan • The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One. – Stephen Nachmanovitch • The cherished dream of every chessplayer is to play a match with the World Champion. But here is the paradox: the closer you come to the realization of this goal, the less you think about it. – Mikhail Tal • The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. – Carl Jung • The creative mind plays with the object it loves. – Carl Jung • The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously. – Sigmund Freud • The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. – Carl Jung • The Eeyore Educational System sees childhood as a waste of time, a luxury that society cannot afford . . . Put children in school at the earliest age possible; load them down with homework; take away their time, their creativity, their play, their power; then plug them into machines. • The Holy Spirit, in the variety of his gifts, unites us and enables us to contribute to the building up of the Church in holiness. In this great work, each of us has a part to play; each of us, as a “living stone”, is needed for the growth and the beauty of God’s holy temple. Let us ask the Lord to help us to take an ever more active part in the Church’s life and mission, guided by the Holy Spirit and with Jesus as our cornerstone. – Pope Francis • The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both. – James A. Michener • The only time it dominates is during a solo, or when we play a low blues and I put figures in behind Eric’s vocals. There’s never any real problem fitting guitar and organ together. – Alan Price • The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression. – Brian Sutton-Smith • The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery. – Erik Erikson • The Play’s the Thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King. – William Shakespeare • The play’s the thing. – William Shakespeare • The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas. – George Bernard Shaw • The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play….We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play…it arises in and as play, and never leaves it. – Johan Huizinga • The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day. – Dr. Seuss • The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play. – Arnold J. Toynbee • The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything. – Friedrich Nietzsche • The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • The very essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen, the feeling that whatever happens, it’s okay… you’re either free to play, or you’re not. – John Cleese • The world is open for play, that everything and everybody is mockable, in a wonderful way. – Robin Williams • There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. – J. Robert Oppenheimer • There are times when I love to play all kinds of complicated games in painting. But this is one case when I need to be fairly straightforward. I’ll just try to paint the man, his intelligence, his amiability and his stature, maybe paint him fairly close to humor and try to get it just right. – Nelson Shanks • There is for many a poverty of play. – Donald Woods Winnicott • There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form. – Anatole Broyard • There is work that is work and there is play that is play; there is play that is work and work that is play. And in only one of these lies happiness. – Gelett Burgess • There’s such a sense of theatre in getting glammed up; it’s like putting on a play or short film. – Felicity Jones • There’s that thing that can happen to you when you meet somebody and you don’t consider them extraordinary at all and then they do something like play the cello or write amazing poetry or sing and suddenly you look at them completely differently. – Yvonne Prinz • There’s very little to be said for learning a piece note by note, reading the rhythmic markings, practising the fingerings and following your instructor’s suggestions, if you haven’t any idea how the music will eventually sound and feel. If you learn a piece mechanically, you may have to ‘unlearn’ it before you can play it with expression and feeling. – Barry Green • They said I couldn’t play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York. – Roddy McDowall • This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. – Alan Watts • Those who’ll play with cats must expect to be scratched. – Miguel de Cervantes • To learn to play seriously is one of the great secrets of spiritual exploration. – Rachel Pollack • To start your life as a character of 120 years when you are in your late thirties, and then go back in time about 20 years later to play the same character who is your own age then, its very complicated, but very interesting. – Ian McDiarmid • To stimulate creativity one must develop childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition. – Albert Einstein • To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it! – Charlie Chaplin • Tony Vigorito has grown a cult following of thousands for one reason – his stuff is fun to read… It’s… filled with the freshness and the freewheeling independence that made his reputation… This book is the ‘work’ of one of the least pretentious and most enjoyable to read novelists at play in America today. – Kris Saknussemm • Usually most characters I play are quite realistic. – Virginie Ledoyen • Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture. – Italo Calvino • We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything than when we are playing – Charles E. Schaefer • We can’t all be Einstein (because we don’t all play the violin). At the very least, we need a sort of street-smart science: the ability to recognize evidence, gather it, assess it, and act on it. – Judith Stone • We could play them through the week, and then the weekend we could play the black joints. I learned to be very versatile and learned to love it. So it stays with me even up to now. – Little Milton • We don’t play slow and we don’t play fast, we play half fast – Louis Armstrong • We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. – George Bernard Shaw • We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters… that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules… and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square. – Michelle Obama • We live in a world of entertainment in full color with a lot of fast action, a world in which many children grow up thinking that if it isn’t fun, it is boring and not worthwhile. Even in family activities we need to strike a balance between play and work. – Joe J. Christensen • We often say that psi is like musical ability: it is widely distributed in the populate, and everyone has some ability and can participate to some extent – in the same way that the most nonmusical person can learn to play a little Mozart on the piano. On the other hand, there is no substitute for innate talent, and there is no substitute for practice. – Russell Targ • We tend to think of the Faustian man, the one who fabricates, manipulates, seduces and ends up destroying. But the new image will be man the creator, the artist, the player. – Jean Houston • Well, I am very happy that I was able to play a part in bringing music from the streets onto the radio and into modern culture, I worked very hard and always believed in the sounds I was creating. – Ice T • Well, I play Jews and parrots. Parrots are how I’ve branched out. – Gilbert Gottfried • Well, it’s a marvelous night for a Moondance With the stars up above in your eyes… And I’m trying to please to the calling Of your heart-strings that they play soft and low And all the night’s magic seems to whisper and hush And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush… One more Moondance with you in the moonlight On a magic night – Van Morrison • What if not just women, but both men and women, worked smart, more flexible schedules? What if the workplace itself was more fluid than the rigid and narrow ladder to success of the ideal worker? And what if both men and women became responsible for raising children and managing the home, sharing work, love, and play? Could everyone then live whole lives? – Brigid Schulte What we play is life. – Louis Armstrong • When I play from my mind I get in trouble. – Stevie Ray Vaughan • When I started off many years ago, I made a determination that there were certain roles I didn’t want to play. – Joe Morton • When I tour I’m going to countries to play music for people. My presence in a country is not an endorsement or a condemnation of that country’s policies. My presence in a country is an effort to connect with people through playing music. – Moby • When the band plays fast, you play slow; when the band plays slow, you play fast. – Miles Davis • When you play a match, it is statistically proven that players actually have the ball 3 minutes on average … So, the most important thing is: what do you do during those 87 minutes when you do not have the ball. That is what determines wether you’re a good player or not. – Johan Cruijff • When you play, play hard; when you work, don’t play at all. – Theodore Roosevelt • Whoever wants to understand much must play much. – Gottfried Benn • With passion pray. With passion make love. With passion eat and drink and dance and play. Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God? – Rumi • Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable. – Carl Jung • Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions. – Mark Twain • Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. – Mark Twain • Working with Sturges was like working with a guy who wanted to have a party all the time. He was very serious about his work, but in between shots, he was fun and we would play games. – Eddie Bracken • You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four. – Miles Davis • You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else. – Albert Einstein • You play to win, to get that World Series ring, All-Star games and whatever comes with it. – Nick Johnson • Your government has problems…my government has problems. I can’t be a judge. All I can do is be an ambassador of love. I’m a musician, not a soldier, and if I’m invited to a place in order to play and bring love, I’ll always accept the invitation. – Meshell Ndegeocello • Your money is like your willy, it only grows if you play with it – Len Goodman • You’ve achieved success in your field when you don’t know whether what you’re doing is work or play. – Warren Beatty

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