#genuinely don’t think it’s my fault that they don’t understand design doesn’t easily match to html. like sorry dog but i can’f

[aikuse]

this is my first day off all year so far and let me tell you if i didn’t have to go back to work next week i wouldn’t. i’d go AWOL and quit right now and play ghost of tsushima all day lmfao

[justanotherpersonsuniverse]

Ok here's the next entry in what I think I'm going to refer to as the "hero's Burden AU." I'm going to try and divide the idea into sections to help me organize my thoughts and help make things easier to digest. But two notes first before I begin: 1) this idea is free for anyone to use if they feel like it. While I like to think I'd be able to sit down and write this fully one day, my life is too chaotic right now to commit to it and I'd like to see what people think about it even if it's little ideas. 2) this is mostly for you cap, feel free to let me know if I'm spamming the inbox too much or like overhearing or something. I don't want to bother anyone becuase I'm rambling or posting where I shouldn't or something. I know you'll probably think it's fine but you know *shrugs* anxiety...

Okay on to the actual topic which is I want to start with the villains and what their motivations are as well as how they'll actually be antagonizing Paris.

To begin here's each members motivations as well as their miraculous match. First is Gabriel who lost Emile to a tragic accident and kind of disillusioned himself with reality in his grief. He's become obsessed with the idea that he can change anything for the better and he turns to the miraculous and the spell book (I'll expand on this further down) to do so. His miraculous is the fox. Part of this is becuase his experience as a designer makes him much more able to create illusions of how he wants reality to look like. This is kind of the other part of his choice in that he kind of looses himself in the falsehood of his vision. He can't accept the loss he's experienced becuase he's GOING TO fix things. Emile is never gone, just out of reach in his mind.

Nathalie shares a motivation with Gabriel but leans more on how focused she is on the discord it's caused in those she cares about. She misses Emile a lot but she's more worried about how far gone Gabriel is and how that's affecting Adrien in the progress. She considers them her family too and she'll to anything to give them back that stability and peace, hence the choice to weild the ladybug. Her fault is that I. Her pursuit is in bringing back the order that existed before rather than adapting to change.

Gorilla gets a lot of back story here. Essentially Gorilla was always known for protecting people. He used to be a decorated officer on the force with a wonderful daughter waiting for him at home. Unfortunately a criminal manages to pin a murder on him and not only gets the Gorilla sent to prison, but his only daughter gets put into the foster system. He spends years inside with only the thought of seeing his daughter again holding him together. Unfortunately even though he gets out a few years early do to good behavior (he became practically mute inside.) he finds out that he can't regain custody of his daughter as she's already been adopted by another family. Eventually he ends up working for the Argestes since they're the only ones willing to look over his record. When they eventually offer him the turtle with the promise that he can both get his daughter and protect everyone he cares about, he joins their cause. He has less fault with his miraculous and it's more about who she's choosing to punish/protect.

Next I'm thinking Ms. Medeleiev (wow that's a tough one to remember the spelling). She gets an expanded back story too in that she's a former renown scientist with a huge focus on the environment. She sees the damage done to the earth and she sees the very real doomsday clock that will happen if things aren't taken seriously. One day she used her research to challange a massive company responsible for a horrific amount of pollution but instead the company somehow managed to forge documents to completely shatter her reputation. Becoming a science teacher was the best she could do after that. The villain team see her as someone willing to do what must be done to "save the world" and so, while she stubbornly hates the fact that magic is somehow real and is desperate to break it down into a science she can understand, she joins them. Her miraculous is the black cat so that she can show the world what kind of destruction is waiting for them if the world doesn't wise up. Her fault is that she used chaos and destruction for fear when, in truth, death and chaos are the tools meant to pave the way for the new.

Now finally it's the Bee which is kind of where I ran out of steam. I've been trying to think of others that i would be willing to turn to the more darkside but still have some shred of morals. Instead I decided to go with someone who could probably follow a more traditional villain mindset and likely serve as a corrupting influence to the villain team since honestly the idea is that these are people who are trying to do good but in like the worst way possible. They kind of need that push to stop them from questioning themselves and keep them on their path. Someone to show that despite redemption and redeeming qualities being very important topics in this potential AU, that some people are honestly genuinely selfish and are likely driven more by fear than any real positive desire. That's why I went with Audrey for the Bee. She's someone that the villains think is easily manipulated but instead is slowly corrupting them. Audrey is driven by a deep fear of time itself. Aging, decay, and loss of legacy are what drive her. She wants a world where beauty is eternal and so is she. That's how her use of the bee is twisted. Freezing everything eternally with no chance for change or growth becuse there's fear that those changes won't be for the better.

Okay this is getting long but we're almost there. The last part is an explanation of how they go about their plans and how they can stay a threat despite having static miraculous. Remember the spell book? That's the key to their plan. The miraculous make them strong but the spell book is what let's them take action. Gabriel in his studying of the spell book has discovered that he can actually cast powerfull spells if he uses pages of the book itself as the power sources since its filled with leftover magic from past guardians. So essentially he figured out what he wants to do, rips a page of the book out and fills it with desired spell and so begins the plan. The heroes, in order to save the day, have to capture the page itself since it needs to be at the center of whatever its doing. Capturing the page and breaking the spell also reverts the world back to the way it was before it was cast. So over time the more pages they use, the less spells they can cast, and the more pages the heroes can collect, and thus the heroes start learning more and more from the information they gather. (also to make sure things aren't too easy for the heroes, the pages loose their magic after the spell so while the heroes learn more about magic and the miraculous from the pages they collect, they can't just turn around and start casting their own spells.)

Okay heres the final part. I want to end this segment with an example of what one of their plans/spells would do. As a spinoff of stormy weather, Ms. Medeleiev would use a spell to cast a super storm in the city as an example of the kind of damage global warming can have on the weather and that that if the world wants to prevent this disaster from happening then the heroes must turn over their miraculous.

That's it for the villains. Feel free to let me know what you think.

————

YOOOOO DUDE THATS DOPE I LOVE THE AMOUNT OF CHARACTER YOU THREW INTO THEM THATS AWESOME

I can imagine like this haunting image of like, Gabriel miraging an illusion of Emilie just to talk to because he’s so lonely and disillusioned that’s so cool dude

[papers4me]

fellow fruba friend here! What are your expectations on what each of the four main characters will achieve or gain at the end?

hi fellow furuba friend! by the main four, I suppose you mean yuki, kyo , tohru & shigure! All the traumatized characters in furuba deserve all the best & everything good given to them. They are all genuinely broken souls & I love them all. However, not everybody will actually be given everything for realistic reasons.

(1)-I’ll start with the easiest: Yuki. Yuki’s wish was stated so early in SE01, ep12 & ever since things have been moving so straight forward towards his goal: discovering his own self, finding friends who accept him w/o a mask & finding love. As Se02 is heavily focused on him, he got all that & more. it is very clear that the writer has decided that Yuki is the character that will get everything:

He opened his lid, faced akito & his fears & started laughing more.

He is shedding his mask & the prince persona.

He realized his familial feelings to tohru.

He accepts & supports tohru/kyo as couple & doesn’t feel envy/sadness.

He faced his mother calmly & decided his future. Altho he doesn’t need her any more, it is clear that he is civil with her & doesn’t blame her. She thinks of him as a tool that helps her glows & I’m sure she views his success as part of her & in the future, she’ll proudly say that’s my son if he was brought as a topic in any social gathering. My point is, given yuki’s stance to forgive the past, he won’t cut ties with her.

He completely forgiven his brother & is proud of him publicly.

He got a friend who is a mix of the two person yuki envies the most : kyo & aya. Also, kakeru is very designed to fit yuki in every way, so even if yuki never got anymore friends, kakeru is the one for life.

Altho yuki’s story could still be good without romantic love in canon as it can be hinted as sth he’ll get once he’s in college, he is getting a romantic love now with someone who doesn’t pity him nor admires him, sees the real him. Someone whom yuki can be a “tohru” to her & “support” her & be a “kyo” to her in the same way he’s been observing kyo & envying him for being the only one to see the real tohru. Yuki will be the only one to see the real machi.

What more can I say...What more can the writer give yuki.. I’ve been thinking hard... but I duno...perhaps sth to do with kyo & their views of each other.

I’ll leave number #10 open cuz I’m sure there’s more the writer will give him..but I duno regarding which character...um... shigure? The writer has been impersonating yuki so much in Se02 & giving us direct lessons thro his voice as much as I wish she tones it down as this disrupts the flow of a story, making yuki speaks on behalf of other characters whose voice has been blocked, it also doesn’t trust the viewers/readers to “learn the lesson” without directly given to them. So I’m positive 100% there will be more yuki telling us learned lessons us especially after critical moments similar to some of SE02 big eps.

(2)-Kyo: Kyo is always given one ep of inner thoughts per season. However, each ep is big & so influential for both his character development & the story’s plot as a whole. His thoughts were essentially blocked at first for mystery reasons due to his involvement with kyoko but ever since Se02, ep9 it was exposed that he knows her, it’s now blocked for building the “climax” reasons. However, the writer is skilled in writing kyo as a character that is easily read, someone who doesn’t know how to act, so you can decipher his feelings from his actions. I don’t mind him not giving inner thoughts if his actions can replace that & communicate his feelingsto the viewers  which is so well-done with kyo but badly done with tohru,(but more on tohru later). what I expect for kyo... it is hard to say!!! It depends on how the writer will solve kyoko’s damned “ I won’t forgive you” words!!! Cuz i see this as one of the most difficult plot twists & obstacles. Kyo’s issues are different from yuki. It isn’t abt self discovery, warmth, or finding friendship or love. It is abt having a right to live, guilt & believing that he isn’t harmful, kyo knows that there are few ppl who loves him but to him these few ppl are the most important ppl in the world, he doesn’t want to hurt them. His life experiences has taught him that his loved ones always end up dying in his place. he carries immense guilt & self-loath. So what to expect... i duno.. Moreover, kyo being the opposite of yuki, so I don’t think he’ll be given everything even if he, just like yuki, deserves everything good. There are things in kyo’s life that cannot be fixed.

Kyo will for sure open his lid, but it will be ugly cuz he’ll have to confess abt his mom’s suicide & him witnessing/being involved in kyoko’s death. He’ll have to tell tohru kyoko’s devastating words & her last painful moments. I duno what to expect beside pain!!!!

“forgiveness/ or lack of ” is kyo’s theme!! will tohru forgive him?? I duno! I find it hard to believe tohru-my-mom-is-my-idol” will do that unless sth changes. But It really doesn’t matter if tohru does or doesn’t, cuz kyo himself will NEVER forgive himself!! There’s comfort in being punished. ppl with genuine hearts & conscious, don’t like escaping punishment for their wrong deeds. If kyo believes truly that he’s at fault somehow, he’ll want to be punished.  

Kyo has stated that “ I won’t take anything away from you anymore” thinking abt tohru. He has given up on her cuz he believes he took her mom from her. His thought process is very realistic & his actions are very logical & matches his trauma, so I don’t know where this will lead to.. I know the writer won’t be cruel with him more than his story already is, but it is so complicated!!!! He can’t accept tohru’s love!! she shouldn’t!!

Unlike yuki’s mother, kyo’s father refuses anything regarding kyo & doesn’t even consider him human. He pushes forward for his imprisonment. I don’t see the writer giving kyo’s father the tiny redemption moment she gave yuki’s mom. Nothing will make kyo’s dad be proud of kyo as he considers kyo to be the cause of all his misfortune. Kyo’s dad is the person kyo shouldn’t & mustn't become. However, kyo got another father who truly loves him & is already proud of him. I love that the writer didn’t cut off kyo’s attachment to his bio dad simply caz he got shisho. Kyo’s dad is a huge reason of why kyo is traumatized. it is not the curse itself. it is the toxic broken home. Every toxic thought in kyo’s mind is imprinted there since early age intentionally by his dad & unintentionally by his mom. So how do I expect kyo will overcome his mom’s gohst & his dad’s demon? I duno too! T_T. ..XD.

his mom & kyoko are dead. If kyo believes he’s the reason...how he’ll ask forgiveness?? I love the theme of dealing with broken things that can’t be fixed. The writer will forever be one of my best authors if she convinced me that she can handle such tough theme.

I feel like I’m repeating I duno a lot, but yeah kyo’s story could go so many directions!!!! but I have trust that wherever it goes, it will be as satisfying as yuki’s. The writer has chosen to put kyo’s behind for epic climatic showdown, it will be thrilling, painful, dramatic & so satisfying. kyo will not be furuba’s tragic ending, the writer showed she prefers ’s optimistic & positive paths despite the trauma. Besides, kyo is tied to tohru, no way such kind soul will be crushed twice by losing her mom & her first love.

(3)-Tohru: The female protagonist with everything individual & personal abt her pushed until Se03 with the most minor foreshadowing & the most trivial symbolism. lol..She doesn’t have eps of inner thoughts abt her own issues like yuki & she doesn’t have big influential eps abt her like kyo... what did she have so I can predict: (a) the nightmare which tells us tohru is still grieving her mom’s loss & (b) the little flashbacks where it shows sth bad traumatized her when she was a baby & it involves her mom locking her? or sth. (c) tohru telling rin that she has things she can’t give up. I don’t have predictions for tohru. I have wishes. I want her to want things for herself. screw the curse, the sohma’s issues, the mom-tohru, the savior-tohru, the supporting-tohru. All that is typical tropes done many times already. Give me a unique female protag who can be kind, but is hurt by her own kindness, someone so altruistic & realizes that I can choose my self first!!! it is okay to be first for once!! Give me someone who even after showing the world I’m okay & optimistic is NOT okay & optimistic but is actually scared & lonely despite all the love surrounding her by the ppl she “saved”. a female protag pursuing her OWN happiness shrewdly but kindly in the most epic combination! This is the tohru I want. how she’ll decide to forgive kyo? I duno. I’ll cheer if she did & I’ll cheer if she didn’t. both situations suit tohru’s mindset.

(4)-Shigure:big giant I duno...lol.. I need to understand this dude first!! He’s the most intriguing. 

[danganronpedits-archived]

Hello! Could I please have a kin matchup with characters from DR1, SDR2, DRV3 and BNHA? Thank you! I am a very mixed person. When I'm out talking to people in public it's very obvious that I have nothing to say and that I don't want to be there. I'm a complete hopeless romantic and can catch romantic feelings quite easily. I'm a lot more talkative when I talk to people online and I always laugh at the dumbest things. I love the color pink and lovecore in general. I'm also quite insecure- haha

you can absolutely have a matchup!! hehe,, you sound really neat, i’d like to talk with you myself anon... only if you’re okay with that of course!! your kin matchup can be found under the cut, thank you for requesting!! i’m sorry that it took a bit for me to write this one,,

oh, also... i want to clarify something before we start. i was originally going to make peko pekoyama your second dr kin assignment, and i still agree with that. it’s just that writing out the explanation was rather energy sapping,,, it’s not your fault at all, but i hope you understand!!! i can definitely add it on if you’d like though, anon!

-mod tsu (mikan shift)

first off, from danganronpa: goodbye despair, i match you with...

hajime hinata!

this matchup contains spoilers for super danganronpa 2! please proceed with caution, if it’s not too much trouble! i was kind of torn between him and himiko, actually...! but i think you’re a bit closer to hajime! i think that hajime is... very mixed. there are times when he can come off as cynical or even cold, and times when he’s very genuine and determined. these sides of him don’t clash together, but rather make up him as a whole... and i think you’re a little similar, anon! maybe you have traits that don’t really seem like they fit together... but you make them work! i think that unless hajime is close to others, he can struggle to fit into the conversation at times. this is especially clear at the beginning of sdr2, when everyone is just relaxing on the beach, not really seeing them randomly being there as a big deal- but hajime is more hesitant and concerned about their circumstances... plus, this is especially clear in despair arc around the ultimates. he’s very much taken aback by the main course students as well as staff, and... during those scenes it doesn’t exactly seem like he dislikes the interaction. however, it does seem like he’s uncomfortable,, maybe you can relate to that haha. you also seem a little serious, anon! not to assume that you don’t have a sense of humour... but there may be times when you take a joke too seriously. um, if that’s true,, there’s no shame in that haha.. in general... your typing just had a really similar vibe to him, though it may be closer with the hajime at the end of sdr2! i know that’s a bit of a weird, intuition-based point, but... the two of you seem a little awkward, but you have good intentions and it seems like both of you are... rather motivated people. at least, when it comes to the things you really want,, i admire that !! in hajime’s specific case, you may feel a little jealous of people who can do things outside of your comfort zone really easily,, for example i don’t think hajime is very insecure in his ability to study- but people like peko or fuyuhiko, who have talents that are rather niche, i think he would kind of be in awe of how... not normal they are. and you just kind of... strike me in a similar way! sorry if this doesn’t make much sense haha.

while we’re not super sure on how much hajime gets crushes on other people... we can speculate in a way? other characters like monokuma and nagito have compared him to a tsundere, and he’s specifically said to be romantically inexperienced. i don’t think this inherently means he doesn’t have crushes on other people,, it’s implied that he’s interested in chiaki, as well as komahina being... um, a popular ship. a lot of hajime’s feelings about the sdr2 cast are left up to interpretation, and he can technically have feelings for all of them in the bonus mode. at least, that’s how i interpret it,, point is i think that he can have many crushes.. depending on how you see him, haha. sorry that it’s not too conclusive but, in general, i think that while he may be a little uncomfortable with it, hajime may also be a sort of ‘hopeless romantic’ in that... if he sees it as being the best for his friends, he’d also be willing to play a matchmaker !! i think that hajime, without the border of being face-to-face, would be a lot more willing to talk online. in a chatroom, i think he would be more prone to rambling on about something. hehe.. i kind of see him as someone who can accidentally send essays when he texts. i’m just guessing.. but maybe you do that too. hehe, it’s um... maybe a little too literal of me, but i think hajime does laugh at... absurd situations. it’s nice how in a lighter conversation with fuyuhiko, the two are able to just... laugh and have a good time together. i bring this up because... it’s because those smiles are from fuyuhiko suggesting that hajime’s the ultimate counselor. i like their banter a lot, and maybe there are silly inside jokes like this between you and your friends too !! um, lastly.. while i don’t know exactly what your insecurities are, i think that hajime is rather insecure..! he’s visibly upset about the fact that he doesn’t have a talent, and i’d say his seriousness partially comes from this. he does strongly dream of talent, and he puts a strong emphasis on being busy and studying ingame- i’d say that this can make up his seriousness in a way? like, he takes things very seriously in order to learn from them the most. ah, but back to insecurities!! hajime does see himself as inferior to main course students like chiaki and even chisa,, and whenever other people point out his talentless-ness, it is a very sore spot for him. he gets somewhat defensive, and mostly doesn’t know how to react... you may kind of short-circuit like this too, whenever someone hits a sore spot for you..!

and lastly, from boku no hero academia, i match you with...

mashirao ojiro!

okay, so...! i realise that he’s kind of a minor character, so we don’t know much about him. however, from what we do know, i think he suits you well! like always, you had a similar kind of vibe to him in your ask. he would definitely be the type to use proper grammar in my eyes... and the two of you just have similar word choice imo!! second off, mashirao is kind of... mixed or in the middle, in terms of personality. he seems to get along with denki, a guy who’s definitely up there in eccentricity. maybe your friend group is rather versatile... like hajime, the two seem to be able to get along with many kinds of people. more specifically, they’re able to handle the oddities and ‘quirks’(haha. funny bnha joke) of their other classmates/friends. ah, but that’s off topic! so sorry .. i think that mashirao does kind of struggle in conversation, as he tends to not really like the spotlight, and other students describe him as sheepish or bashful. i think that despite his calm demeanor, he would shy away from conversations, especially ones where he has to play a large part- and i think that’s the most important part of him not really ‘liking’ to have in-person talks with other people. the two of you may be able to hold up something one-on-one, with one of your friends... but with a group of people, you’d just blend into the background. maybe that ‘mixed’-ness can make you feel like you don’t have much to say, too... i don’t think he really tries to hide this/can hide this either, like you. i think that the two of you are generally friendly and trustworthy, and maybe you both have plenty of loose acquaintances, the way that mashirao is on generally good terms with all of his classmates. i think that it’s easy for people to have a high view of you, but maybe not know you too closely or deeply. you seem generally nice!!!

...please excuse this second half being really short. like hajime, we don’t really know his status on crushes,, but i honestly headcanon him as bi due to him having... ‘softer’ friendships with other people, if that makes sense? not that that inherently means attraction... i just think that he could be very interested in and enjoy other people, leading to crushing of varying intensity. he kind of has a pink... vibe to him if that makes sense? ghgghgh we’re not sure about what colours he likes, but he seems to have a lot of lighter ones in his overall design and outfits... maybe a baby pink would fall under that! i think he would also be a lot more talkative online. um, my explanation for this is very similar to hajime’s. he may not feel such a strong need to be polite or accommodating through a screen! though i think he still would be out of respect. mashirao also seems like the type to find the more strange antics of his classmates funny... once again, he seems rather close to denki, and is described as a “straight man”(like, composed or deadpan in contrast to their more eccentric partner). maybe you’re also the type to go along, but have a more level head as things get ~weird~. lastly, like hajime, mashirao does seem rather insecure. he doesn’t really get why he got into UA with a quirk “like his”. he’s rather humble and doesn’t like to accept results he feels like he doesn’t deserve. in fact, he even dropped out of the sports festival because he felt as though he didn’t properly earn his placement in it. maybe you’d be more or less active in voicing this than he is, but the two of you generally have underestimating your own abilities in common. at least, that’s what i gathered, haha.

-

you all know what time it is, hehe... from dr, you also remind me very strongly of peko pekoyama, and somewhat of mukuro ikusaba, himiko yumeno, mahiru koizumi, toko fukawa, and kazuichi souda. from bnha you also remind me somewhat strongly of fumikage tokoyami, ibara shiozaki, and kyoka jirou, as well as lightly of toru hagakure and shoto todoroki !!

i hope this helped you out anon!! thank you again for requesting,, if you need anything about this changed or edited please let me know!! i’m happy to edit this, it’s not a bother at all... getting requests kind of makes my day, hehe..

[ofniko]

troye sivan. demiboy. he/them. ／ nicolas “niko” goldwater just pulled up blasting coming of age by foster the people— that song is so them! you know, for a twenty-one year old social media influencer/fashion guru, i’ve heard they’re really -mercurial, but that they make up for it by being so +gregarious. if i had to choose three things to describe them, i’d probably say a shiny pink vinyl skirt with pristine nails to match, designer shopping bags weighing down twiggy arms, and margaritas with extra sugar around the rim. here’s to hoping they don’t cause too much trouble!

hello friends ! i’m lainie, she/her, cst, and i talk about stephen king too much :/ im!! so excited to introduce u to niko my fashion baby and to get to know all of ur amazing outstanding totally unique never been done before muses !! under the cut u can find a very lazy intro with some summarized points and i’d promise a real bio later but lich rally who am i kidding lmao anyway i have a p full day but ill be around for plotting n stuff so come smash a heart and ill slide up in ur dms or hmu in my ims or on discord (starslut#0877) whichever works best for you MWAH

background/history

niko grew up right here on the upper east side, born and bred into the life of new york’s elite and while his attitude doesn’t entirely reflect the sort of pretentiousness we get when we think gossip girl, he definitely exudes an air of wealth and privilege and of having a limited view of what the world is really like outside of his trust fund bubble

for all his ostentation and lack of control when it comes to the wealth at his fingertips, he’s always maintained a very genuine humbleness and sense of humility that, while not always strong, is definitely there. it can be seen in his passion for helping people through what he does--his greatest thrill in life is to know he’s helped people find themselves through fashion and self care

his dad is a wall street trader and entrepreneur and they’re new(ish) money. he got wealthy very young so niko grew up knowing nothing but a life of luxury. his mom is a socialite, and his relationship with them is about what you’d expect. they love him, he’s their child, but they don’t take a huge amount of interest in his life. their blasé attitude toward him was highlighted most in his mind when he came out to them at 15 and they just......didn’t really have a reaction. weren’t upset, weren’t really surprised, but weren’t necessarily proud or happy for him either

when he came out a couple years later to them as non-binary it wasn’t much different, only in that they didn’t really get what he was saying whereas “gay” was something they could understand

he did two years of school at nyu and dropped out because he simply wasn’t enjoying it and was making enough money through instagram and youtube and brand promotions that it felt like a no-brainer decision

again, his parents weren’t happy about it, but they didn’t fight him over it, either

his following is growing exponentially and he’s just released a line of scents and perfumes that, on top of the revenue from everything else, makes it so he hardly needs his trust fund anymore

personality

gregarious and extraverted sometimes to a fault, niko can easily get on the nerves of people who don’t have the energy to keep up. he’s like a child who never quite grew out of adolescence, and with that boundless energy also comes a selfishness he’s usually unaware of. it can be very difficult for niko to be conscious of the way his actions affect other people and ends up hurting those close to him that way

in that same vein, when he does realize what he’s done, he’s more often than not consumed with guilt over it and will go to great lengths to try and resolve the issue

not that he always does a good job

he sleeps around a lot mostly because he enjoys it, but partly because he doesn’t know how to have a relationship. the lingering adolescence makes it so he doesn’t have the necessary awareness of another person’s needs to be in a stable relationship and he manages to a large degree to convince himself he doesn’t care and prefers being single anyway

fashion is his favorite thing in the world and though he doesn’t wear a lot of makeup on the daily, he definitely dabbles and has a lot of fun experimenting

catch him exploring the city and taking pictures, partying, clubbing, brunching, and shopping on the regs and if he’s in a Mood, you can usually tell bc he goes on shopping binges and fusses to an extreme degree over his appearance

also he he dyes his hair platinum blond

and his pronouns are flexible! he usually uses he/him referring to himself but genuinely doesn’t care whatever people feel like using

connection ideas

gal and gay pals :’) for fashion and shopping and instagram photoshoots

also a best friend ride or die pleaSE and thank u

i need enemies and angst and drama so give me everyone who hates niko/thinks he’s a fake bitch/can’t stand him

high school connections are cute so maybe someone he didn’t get along w back then and does now/vice versa where they were rly close and something turned them against each other and now it’s world war 3

COLLABS ?? youtubers/influencers/instagrammers he’s worked with or regularly collaborates with

a parental figure/figures :( since he doesn’t have much of a relationship w his real parents

umm!!!! someone who like they DONT get along usually and everyone knows they’re weird frenemies but they VIBE SO HARD when theyre drunk and partying

one (1) ex who lasted maybe like 3-4 months and it didn’t work out either bc they cheated on niko (would love this angst) OR bc niko was too flaky for them and they couldn’t handle the way niko doesn’t rly understand intimacy

someone who can challenge!! that!! and it’s freaking niko out bc he’s starting to catch Feels but doesn’t know what to do w it/doesn’t know if they feel the same way

casual hookups/one night stands/maybe a hookup or two from back in high school and they’re either on good terms and just friends now or like....it’s angsty maybe!!!!!!!!!

[tuwasduwillst]

Shadowbringers (pt 4/end)

This just has spoilers for everything, basically. :U I finished it and don’t feel like splitting stuff up because I have over 1k screenshots to go through...

Katana-bearing Centurion: Besides, there is but one hand that can make me whole again. My enemy... my friend...

He probably just says “friend” there in Japanese, but I don’t have my whole game switched, so I don’t get to know for sure. Good to know you’re still being weird, Zenos.

Don’t you smirk at me like that, mister.

Here’s Urianger being handsome, as usual

I hated fighting this old dude as Thancred.

1) I still can’t believe he can easily take out the WoL like he did

2) Stop making me be sword dudes!!

3) I get why they wanted people to see the dialogue here, but it was so slooooow and I died once near the end and had to do it all over again and ughhh, just go away

Ryne looks cute with her new hair and eyes, at least. :) Thancred is still a bad dad, but at least he’s doing better now... I guess.

Also, Urianger’s reaction to finding out that Thancred was paying attention to some of his talks about pixies was really good, haha.

...I wanna listen to Urianger give a pixie lecture...

Wow

This was something the game threw together when I asked it to pick recommended gear. It’s... some kind of look.

The Exarch/G’raha Tia is a qt. Y’know, I figured it was probably G’raha Tia, but I didn’t remember him being so short... and the lack of cat ears also made me doubt myself, haha.

I’m really glad I did the Crystal Tower stuff, though, because otherwise I’d... well, I’d still think that G’raha Tia/the Exarch is cute and like him a lot, but it wouldn’t have had the same impact.

I took a bunch of screenshots of Mikh’a. :U

& Emet-Selch, ofc

that one old dude: If you would pass me, you must endure all that I have learned on the battlefield... For I am a weapon forged in the fires of war!

~*oooh, I’m so scared of you and your tiny amount of health left*~

My MP doesn’t even have a dent in it, really. This is why I had such a hard time believing this dude could take out the WoL!! Even the first time we fought, I had tons of MP available to me and could’ve made a full recovery from being brought down to 1 HP. (...well, I have Benediction which is kind of cheating, but still.)

At least this was the last time I had to deal with him. He’s probably the worst thing about the expansion, which I guess I can deal with since the rest of it was so good.

Lots of really pretty screenshot opportunities in this expansion. c:

Mt. Gulg is something I thought was common to a bunch of FF games for some reason, but apparently it was in the original Final Fantasy, FFIX, and some random spin-off games. Weird.

How did Mikh’a hear him talking from that far away??

Emet-Selch has such a good design and you can tell that a lot of work was put into him. The expressions he makes, the way he stands and walks--it’s all unique to him and it makes him stand out a lot.

Even after everything that happened in the expansion, I’m really fond of him. They made the right move in having him kind of forge a more personal relationship with you/the WoL, because if he hadn’t been obnoxious in the background throughout most of the expansion it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as interesting/good as it ended up being.

I obviously chose to say that they were all Alphinaud’s assistants. :P

This little scene was so cute... lali-hos for everyone...

Crystal Exarch: Ugh! I would thank you not to shoot me!

I’m sorryyyyyy ; ~; You were there and I wanted to see what would happen!!!

Crystal Exarch: Ah heh... It may interest you to know that Mikh’a is a great hero in the land whence he hails. Some would say the greatest.

This little venture made me feel like I’d suddenly gotten married and adopted a child

(Which I’d be totally fine with, tbh.)

I loved this thing, actually!! I got to heal G’raha Tia, he healed me, we both healed our new tiny dwarf child, it was great.

c:

I’m still using the Mogrod. I’m never going to stop using it. Give me another thing that has a flower and swirly rainbows all over and maybe I’ll switch weapons, but until then? No.

...unless there’s, like... a really, really pretty plant weapon, especially if it matches Mikh’a’s outfit... but I don’t think there is.

I got to put my bubble on them. :D

He’s so cuuuuuute. And Mikh’a clearly agrees with my thoughts on him, considering the expression on his face when he looks at him.

One of the reasons I keep Mikh’a wearing the WHM gear is because I really like the contrast I get--a lot of the major characters wear black, so it looks nice when they stand next to each other. :D

Katana-bearing Centurion: The whereabouts of my one true friend, however--they interest me greatly. I but hope the beasts of this “First” are providing him proper sport.

Zenos is so funny to me. He just pops up like “did someone mention my friend” while his dad and Elidibus are having a serious conversation.

Innocence has beautiful hair and if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I’d never believe that he was Vauthry.

You can kind of see @tarifu in this screenshot! :D

You can definitely see her here--wait... why is half the party wearing dwarf beard outfits...

This is probably weird to say, but I genuinely like when characters I play in games like this suffer/are in pain. Not, like... constantly. I just like it when NPCs get to express concern and you aren’t some kind of unbreakable hero 24/7. >_>

Obviously I was going to say his name, who wouldn’t.

This made me cry!! I thought he was dead. :C

But thankfully Emet-Selch didn’t want him dead, so he did not die.

...why’d he even need a gun? Has he always had a gun?

I wish I could just float off into the sky after ruining everything and being a big jerk

sad kitty

I died when I came here with Jack and Mari because I didn’t realize I was being targeted by the boss until it was too late. :,)

I got to practice using my shield, though!! I’m not used to having one so I’m not super great at remembering it exists and using it; the tether thing is a good visual for “this specific person is going to be damaged soon and a shield would be Good”. ...unless everyone’s bunched up and I can’t tell who has it until it’s too late, I guess.

I know I’m level 80 now, but there’s still a lot I haven’t done and I’m still trying to figure out what the best way to do things is sometimes... I still need to mess with my hotbars and stuff, actually. I think I might switch some things around more than I already have, because some useful things aren’t as easy to use as they could/should be and I’ve been wanting to mess around with stuff for a while. The Trust dungeons should be a really good opportunity to test new configurations! Or the squad dungeons, I guess. :/a

I’m still not Ardbert’s biggest fan, but I don’t dislike him.

Poor Urianger, getting stuck with the role of the only other person to know the Exarch’s plans. :(

& then everyone died going to the bottom of the sea and the game ended

I got to help put dwarf helmets on sineaters :U

I also remembered that I have fancy wings now, wheee

I got a nice new outfit after doing my last Healer role quest! :D I like it a lot~ The whites are brighter than the last outfit, and the bit in back accommodates his tail much better than the corset did.

I might play around with mixing and matching some pieces once I get newer stuff, but for now this is what I’ve got! c:

...and I refuse to wear the hat. 100%. I’m not making Mikh’a look like a weird nun. :|

Amaurot was really good, even if being there mostly just made me sad. >_> The not-people were so cute and nice, though...

Big

The WoL hanging out on this giant bench is so cute.

I liked getting to talk to Emet-Selch’s friend. c: Well... kind of, anyway. Since it’s not really his friend...

tiny

Emet-Selch: I have broken bread with you, fought with you, grown ill, grown old! Sired children and yes, welcomed death’s sweet embrace.

I still don’t 100% understand how Ascians work, but I guess it’s canon that Emet-Selch fucks :/a

I regret typing that, I think, but it is apparently true

i think your fireplace has something wrong with it

Really though, this dungeon was excellent.

Alisaie decided that she wanted to LB right as one of the bosses was doing one of those “hide behind a rock Or You Will Die” things so she died & I accidentally walked right off the edge near the end of the last boss fight (oops), but other than that things went okay!

D:

ardbert could you please clean your axe somehow before you point it at me like that. tia

This was a really neat moment :U

I’m not calling Emet-Selch Hades ever. Sorry, Emet-Selch.

I was kind of afraid to do this trial and almost waited until someone would be able to do it with me, but it really wasn’t that bad in the end!

...except for when I died five times to the same attack... orz It was that arm-sweeping one, too, so it’s not like it’s not obvious that it’s coming. My problem was that I kept getting Raised in bad places right before it happened, so he basically just kept smacking me down over and over again.

(Which was partially my fault, because I should’ve waited to accept the Raise until I knew it was safe to be alive, but... I don’t like leaving the other healer alone and I don’t want to just be lying there uselessly if I can avoid it.)

Fortunately(?) the party wiped due to something completely unrelated (a failed mechanic I had nothing to do with) and I didn’t die at all the second time around! So at least there was that.

I liked this bit in the dark. c:

I also liked when I got trapped in the bubble and didn’t have to do anything. Thanks, Emet-Selch!

Genuinely though, it was a nice little chance for me to calm the hell down because my anxiety was getting real bad before/during this fight. >_>

Poor dude. :c Obviously he’s responsible for some absolutely terrible things and I’m not going to try to deny that or anything, but he’s lived for so long and he’s had to deal with the loss of basically everyone he ever cared about for that whole time. He recreated that entire city and all of its people, that’s how much he cared.

Still no excuse for basically trying to kill all of the people he didn’t consider “real”! But also still sad, IMO.

This made me go “awww” out loud and start to tear up, haha...

I didn’t want to leave him ; ~;

Estinien said a full sentence here about how these guards were dead, too (in a way that implied he assumed that’s what they’d find), and the localization translated it as “hmph”. Kind of a weird choice there, but okay.

Zenos basically went Full Yandere since he killed his father just because he could potentially get in the way of his thing with the WoL, so... that’s something that’s going to have to be dealt with at some point.

I’m interested in seeing how things go, but I’m also a wee bit concerned that other people might get caught up in whatever this obsession is. I don’t want anyone to get hurt or killed because of Zenos’s yandere tendencies. :(

Elidibus is being Boring on the moon.

But who cares about that! I got to lead a Girl Scout meeting for my level 80 WHM quest.

Oh! Almost forgot about the story I got to tell the girls: “The tale of a man who crossed time and space to save the world... and me.”

I think the second one is about (original) Minfilia, maybe? :/a I wanted to tell them about G’raha Tia, though.

Aaaand that’s all I’ve done! \o/ I unlocked a new dungeon and I know there’s more than one post-80 dungeon, so I’ll probably check those out when I get a chance... but I finished the main stuff.

Which is kinda weird, because now I’m done again, haha... but I’ve got plenty of stuff to do before the next new stuff comes out. Especially since I discovered that Vamo alla Flamenco is the “dancer’s theme”, apparently. Need to dance ASAP >:O

[rheawindsor]

rhea and calder

* // TOVA ELIZABETH CALDERDÖTTIR.

“   they were the vibrancy of the midnight city streets                              that NEVER seemed to settle. “

name:

(   TOVA   )   —   an old norse name meaning “beautiful thor; good” / named for their paternal grandfather

(   ELIZABETH   )   —   a named derived from the ancient greek elisabet, meaning “my god is an oath” / named for their maternal grandmother 

(   CALDERDÖTTIR   )   —   meaning “daughter of calder”

birthdate:

(   october 12th, libra  ♎  )   —   social, diplomatic, balanced, responsible, altruistic, intelligent.

gender:

tova identifies as genderfluid, and tends to go by either she/her or they/them pronouns 

appearance:

(   HAIR   )   —   dark brown ( almost black ), tova’s hair is close to waist length and forever tied in a straight french plait in an attempt to try and take control of it. 

(   EYES   )   —   extremely dark brown

(   HEIGHT   )   —   five foot seven inches, and highly likely to grow a couple more before she stops

personality:

(   + SOCIAL   )   —   tova thrives in group settings. they feed off the energy in a crowded room and match it x10, and never really struggle with finding what to say or working out what to do. they're likable, they find a topic that everyone can enjoy and make everyone feel listened to and comfortable, and in the same way that most people love to be around them, tova loves to be around people, too. their happy place is somewhere thy're able to talk to lots of new people and have lots of new conversations, and if a day goes by where they haven't had much social interaction, they don't really feel right ( kinda like a sim when they haven't talked to another sim in days ). 

(   - FLIGHTY   )   —   they’re the best at coming up with plans, or ideas - but when it comes to the actual follow through, they can be very here or there. tova isn’t great at sticking to something. they’ll put their all into it for a while, dedicating all of their time, and focus, to doing whatever it is they’ve put their mind to - but always without fail they’ll grow tired of what’s become the same old, same old, and drop their newest project or plan in favor of an even newer one. that’s not to say they NEVER follow through - on the rare occasions that they do, their accomplishments are always incredible - but they do tend to pick up and drop different things at a speed that gives everyone whiplash. 

(   + HONEST   )   —   tova has always been extremely honest, and the kinda kid that just... couldn't lie. it was great in one sense - rhea never had to worry about them lying about where they were going, or who'd broke a certain vase, or whatever - but it definitely made it hard in situations like when they told their first grade teacher it was their mom's fault they were two hours late for school, because she had slept in, and they were sometimes too tactless for their own good, but... ultimately, tova's honesty has only ever done good by her. as they've gotten older they've gotten better at knowing when to say something and when to fib, so they're a good friend to have - trustworthy with your secrets, but honest when you need it. 

(   - EXCESSIVE   )   —   the downside of always being as full of life and ready to go as tova is, is that they've often been too much for other people. too energetic, too talkative, too loud, too blunt - the list goes on. though they never had trouble making acquaintences, for a really long time it was difficult for them to make close friends because of the fact that their peers eventually ended up worn out by them. as a teen, this was understandably difficult for them - rhea and calder both reassured them that it wasn't a bad thing, but it's the sort of thing that plays on your mind, regardless. as an adult, though, they've learned to appreciate themselves - and the sort of person scared away by their personality isn't the sort of person they even want to grow close to. they've got a circle of really good friends, now, a lot of them just like tova - and while it's still something they recognize does them no favors in some ways, it's also something they accept. 

special talents:

(   FLIGHT  )   —    after having two sons that developed pretty offensive powers while still quite young ( read as: odin was a baby when his vibration control kicked in, and calder jr wasn’t much older when he started showing signs of thunder manipulation ), it was almost a relief to calder and rhea when tova didn’t immediately present with anything destructive. they got exactly two years, five months and ten days of peace with the new baby, before one day rhea turned around in the middle of making lunch when she heard tova giggling, to find them hovering over the table, having floated right out of the childs seat they had for them to sit in. cue the dropping of the sauce pan, the scooping of tova out of the air, and a frantic call to calder - who found the whole thing hilarious. when they were really young their power was cause for concern for both their parents, just in case they lost control or something and fell, but as they got older and learned more about the rising and falling and zooming forwards and taking sharp u-turns, that initial worry sort of melted away. flights a pretty straight forward power, all considered, so where o and calder jr gave their parents something to be wary and ever concerned over, neither rhea nor calder feel as if they have to worry about tova. 

who they like better:

(   CALDER  )   —   tova always has and always will think the world of their dad. he's still not the easiest to talk to, but they totally understand what it's like for him sometimes when he says the wrong thing or doesn't know how to react to something because they can kinda be like that, too, and even though he's sometimes almost mute, he's always been willing to sit and listen to them talk about their latest obsession, or supportive of their latest endeavor - even if they don't finish it, like most things. he's also never mollycoddled them, like their mom had the tendency to do. he was happy to teach them self defense, or let them join in when he was playing soccer with o or calder jr, and he never treated them any differently because of them being perceived as more feminine ( especially after they let their parents know they didn't fully identify with their assigned gender ) - and they've appreciated that their entire life. he's always been a little distant compared to rhea's almost smothering approach to parenting, but he's protective over his kids and wanted the best for each them, and tova knows if they ever need him, he'll be there. he's not perfect - but no parent is, and tova accepts her dad, faults and all. 

who they take after most:

(   CALDER / RHEA / NEITHER   )   —   without it being kinda a cop out, i really see both rhea and calder in tova, with enough differences that they're also their own person, too. they've got rhea's tendency to be a bit of a handful, but they've also got calder's tendency to be ( sometimes painfully ) honest - and then, like both of them, they often say or do the wrong thing without meaning to. they're very social, though, and very open. instead of getting stuck in their own head i think they're more likely to share and get it off their chest, and i don't think they have the same tendency to let things bother them for very long. tova's very much their own person, but also a nice little mix of the two. 

personal headcanon(s):

like their brothers, tova was pretty competitive, always striving to get ahead and be the best. it's just something that happens when you're descended from actual gods and half of your family is just that impressive - there's always a feeling of needing to compare to everyone else, even if genuinely no one expects that of you. they always wanted to show they could play sports just as well as o, or that they were just as brave and willing to try new experiences as calder jr - it took them a long while to realize that they could be themselves and be enough, and that everyone was allowed to be good at their own things, without everyone else needing to be up to par too. they focused more on sports and academics when they were in high school, joining double the amount of teams and clubs that their brothers had because of their tendency to get bored so quickly, only stopping to take a breath and evaluate what they wanted from life when it was time to go to college. it took a lifetime - but it was only when they stood still for a little while and stopped trying to live up to perceived expectations that they realized their passions didn't lie in the same places as o's, or calder jr's, and that they were far more into the arts and culture than they were anything else. they attended wdu and completed an art studies course, spending a year abroad in florence, and another in amsterdam. when they put their mind to things, they were an incredible artist, but their interest lay mostly in exhibitions and designing them - it's the perfect job for them, because every month there's something new and exciting, and they never have the chance to get bored.  

this will come as perhaps the greatest shock - but tova has never really liked animals. small dogs are yappy, big ones make her nervous, cats are arrogant, rats are gross, bunnies easily replaced, etc, etc. calder wouldn't let rhea disown them, but the first few christmas' were tense. some of the damage done to their relationship was mended after they got a fishtank and filled it with cherry barbs and tiger pleco, but they're on thin ice.

tova taught their granddad thor how to use his iphone, and is the reason that he's now on snapchat ( as "thestrongestavenger" ). everyone has them to thank for the many dog filter pics he sends out.

they married a museum curator from prague named zuzana in a very small ( family only ) beach service in their mid-twenties, the first of calder and rhea's children to do so. they live together in paris with tova’s fish and zuzana’s maltese boo ( the only dog they’ll tolerate ) and spend every second holiday with tova’s family ( though they often spend weekends back home ). 

face claim:

natasha liu bordizzo

ft. @thorxson

[gldngrl7]

KaramelFic: A Favor Among Friends (3/4)

Author’s Note:

Word of warning:  Whatever you do, DO NOT think about Charlie Puth’s “See You Again” while reading this fic.  It came on the radio when I was writing the back half of the Morgon-Ral scene and I’m still working my way through the bottle of wine I used to cope with the emotional breakdown.

@anaveragegirl15: hold on tight to your feels.

Also, things get a little more hot and heavy in this chapter.  I’d rate it an M, but not fully Explicit.  I talk about body parts so this is your last chance to back out!

Constructive comments and pure love are always appreciated – flames are destroyed with my freeze breath.

Many, many thanks to the following for the comments on Chapter 2:

@pwettypwita, @coolalmostincident, @highwaytothe7hells, @debnamskara, @anaveragegirl15

To all the rest: Thanks for reading/liking.  On with the show.

A Favor Among Friends

Chapter: 3/4

Rating: M/NC-17/Explicit (for chapters 3&4)

A blowout always makes her feel pretty, leaving her hair flowing about her shoulders, silky and smooth to the touch.  And after the day Supergirl had, Kara desperately needed it.  Flying from crime scene to crime scene wreaks havoc on her golden locks, leaving them tough to run a brush through (tough on the brush) if she isn’t careful to groom throughout the day.  Yet another reason her hair goes immediately into an up-do or a ponytail as soon as she returns to being a reporter.

Back in her apartment, Kara paces in front of her closet, debating what to wear. In her fantasies she’s always imagined herself wearing lingerie, something that would knock her partner’s socks off, but questions whether that’s appropriate when the whole exercise is just a means to an end.  She finally decides on something somewhere in the middle of the work clothes she’s currently wearing and the deep purple corset with matching string bikini she has buried in the back of her closet.  She’d purchased the ensemble last year at a friend’s lingerie party, but it remains in the pretty black box, still encased in the protective plastic.

Filled with a sense of satisfaction, she chooses a pajama set Eliza gifted her with last Christmas.  Muted aqua, it’s a simple spaghetti strap satin tunic that drapes to just above her knees, paired with a matching robe that ties at the waist.  The front of the robe is embroidered with designs resembling bamboo shoots, evoking the simple beauty of the Asian sensibility.  She considers footwear and discards the idea because her slippers make her look dowdy.  Barefoot is better, she decides, like she’s projecting a confidence and comfort in her own home that she really isn’t feeling.  Plus, Alex worked so hard to get her toes just right.

Though it has no physiological effect on her body, she uncorks a bottle of wine and pours a glass.  Kara learned a few years ago that, if she allowed it, she could find the act of imbibing alcoholic beverages relaxing.  Alex calls it a psychosomatic reaction.  She worries that she doesn’t feel sexy or aroused at all.  She should feel aroused, right? A handsome man with a ridiculously affecting smile is on his way over to her place right this minute to relieve her of her virginity.  There should be some twinge of arousal, one would think.

Kara pours herself a second generous glass of Peach Moscato (What? She likes the way it tastes!!), then tips her glass back, enjoying the way the sweetly flavored bubbles dance on her tongue.

 Mon-El. She sighs when she remembers the first time she saw him.  Tearing off the hatch of his (stolen) Kryptonian pod and looking down at his serenely sleeping, preposterously handsome face (and that was before she’d seen him smile!), she’d been terrified and overjoyed at the same time.  Another Kryptonian?  Perhaps there were others floating amongst the stars!

It had taken days for the Earth’s yellow sun to work its magic on him.  And work its magic it did.  Awakening from his stasis in the DEO infirmary to find her sitting at his bedside, he had grabbed her throat and thrown her across the room.  After tearing through the DEO, he’d jumped from the top floor and disappeared into the night.  It was only after finally tracking him down to find him sending a distress call to his home world that they discovered he wasn’t Kryptonian after all, but rather from Daxam.  Krypton and Daxam, two planets in the same solar system, had a long bloody history of cultural and moral differences.  Kara freely admits this information did much to color her view of him from that point on; it had very nearly ended their friendship before it had begun.

But is it a friendship, really?  She wonders, perhaps not quite idly.  Sometimes she catches him looking at her with a certain look in his eyes, and an expression that turns her insides to molten lava.  Even before the delirious kiss, Kara had caught herself looking at him too, when she knew his thoughts were otherwise occupied.  She’d seen the reticence that comes from losing your whole world and finding yourself on a new one, but also the hope that springs when you realize you might be able to get a piece of it back.  And though he denies the desire to be a hero, she recalls the way he begged her not to solar flare when they were being held hostage by Cadmus.  The raw fear in his voice still rings in her ears. He cares for her, but only because in some ways, she’s his last connection to Daxam.

He doesn’t even remember kissing her, and she tries to tell herself that it doesn’t hurt just a little to be so easily forgotten, even if he had been running a temperature of 114 degrees at the time.  Just as she had tried to convince herself that she hadn’t felt a spark of red hot fire when his lips touched hers; hadn’t felt a timid hope kindle within her breast like a baby bird poking its beak through its shell for the first time.

She’d meant to keep an ear out, but the wine and her thoughts do an admirable job of distracting her, so she startles a bit when there’s a knock on the door. She listens for a moment before setting down her glass on the kitchen counter.  His heart is racing, she realizes with a smile.

He’s just as nervous as she is, muttering under his breath, and she wonders if she should be nervous about that.

****

 It takes everything within him not to speed to her apartment.  After signing out of the DEO, with instructions to return no later than 6 AM, he heads uptown to Kara’s home.  He could be there in less than a minute, but thinks that perhaps a nice long stroll would be in order.  He needs some time to think things through.

“So you know what you’re going to say?” Ral interrupts his thoughts.

“I think I can handle this, thanks,” Mon-El snaps.

“No need to get testy, I’m only trying to help.  Stick to the plan.”

“It’s not much of a plan,” Mon-El taunts.

“What can I say?  You’re not giving me much to work with here.  If you were willing to tell her you love her, I could come up with something to really knock her pants off.”

“Socks,” he corrects, shoving his hands into his pants pockets.  “I think it’s socks.”

“Not tonight, it’s not,” Ral leers a little, in a manner much more consistent with Mon-El’s behavior back in the day.  He is not amused.  “So, earlier…you did what I told you to do, right?”

“Yes,” Mon-El growls unhappily.

“You’ll thank me later.  Remember ‘control’ is the watchword.”

“’Control’ is the watchword,” he echoes the catchphrase drilled into them during their training.  Masturbation was frowned upon on Daxam, unless part of a fantasy or wish fulfillment scenario.  Why pleasure oneself when there were so many partners, both male and female, willing and eager to seek pleasure with you?  It was long ago deemed a selfish act in their culture.  But just an hour ago Mon-El had been in the shower, jerking at his cock like he was twelve years old again, trying to figure out how to make the damn thing obey his commands.  But he isn’t about to admit to Ral that he does feel better, more relaxed, as a result. He is still embarrassed that he’d done it in the first place.  How badly he’d needed to.

“I’m not sure you understand how different it’s going to be,” Ral frets. “It could catch you off guard and you could spin out of control and that would be bad.”

Mon-El chuckles.  “Now you’re starting to sound like her.  Don’t be such a worrier.  I think I know my way around a woman.  A few hundred women, if memory serves.  I’m not spinning anywhere.”

“But this will be different,” Ral warns.  “When you’re with someone you genuinely care about, it’s not just about giving and receiving pleasure.  Something much deeper is exchanged.

“Like what?”

“It’s…impossible to explain.”

“You’re no help.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault you never wanted to talk about this when I was alive.”

“I know,” Mon-El says with a wince.  “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, look!” Ral shouts, pointing Mon-El in a direction across the street. “We should bring her flowers.”  

On the corner of the street up ahead is a bodega with a buckets of flowers placed outside.  Mon-El recalls from the many ‘rom-coms’ he’s viewed that flowers are a common theme in the courting of Earth women and decides that Ral is probably right on this one too. He crosses the street and approaches the bodega, a man out front replenishing the supply of fruit behind the flowers.  Mon-El studies the buckets, searching for flowers that seem most like Kara.  He finds them in multi-colored pastel petals that are delicate to the touch and dark yellow centers that remind him of Kara’s golden curls.

“Excuse me?” he asks the man a few feet away.  He’s heavy set and wears a dirty white apron, but greets him with a friendly smile.  “What are these called?”

“Forget-me-nots,” the man replies in a thick accent Mon-El can’t hope to place. “Would you like a bundle?  $5.99,” he says.  “End of the day price.”

“Forget-me-nots!” Ral rejoices.  “Perfect. I think it sends just the right message.”

Mon-El ignores Ral and reaches into his back pocket for his wallet, withdrawing a ten-dollar bill and handing it to the shop owner.  It’s the last of his currency, so he waits as the man disappears into the bodega to retrieve his change.  Mon-El sighs; he doesn’t receive his next stipend from the DEO for another week. He needs to find a job – for real this time.

“What about the bar?” Ral asks.

“What about it?”  The bar that started all of this.  The bar where he was exposed to the Kryptonian virus that made him so sick he lost his mind and kissed Kara.

“It’s opening back up in a few weeks and I hear they’re looking for employees. It could be great, brother.  You can learn an important skill, and keep your eyes open and ears to the ground for information to give to Supergirl.  You can help keep her safe.”

“It’s not a bad idea actually,” he replies, just as the man steps through the door to bring him his change.  He looks around in order to ascertain to whom Mon-El is speaking, confused to see no one. “Just…talking to myself,” Mon-El covers, badly.  “It’s a habit I’m trying to break.”

“For your lady?” the man asks, nodding his head towards the bundle of pink and blue flowers as he hands Mon-El the change.

“Yes,” Mon-El replies.  “I mean…I hope so…someday.”

“There is a story,” the man says, “about how they got their name.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“A knight courting his lady, took her on a stroll along a beautiful stream, with flowers all along its banks.  Wishing to see her smile, he bent over to pick the flowers for her, but his suit of armor was so heavy, he tipped over into the water.  Before the current and the weight of his armor could pull him under, he threw his lady the flowers and bid her to ‘forget me not’. So…forget-me-nots.”

Mon-El’s heart sinks.  Another tragic romance?  He thinks about asking for another bouquet to replace the heartbreaking flower bundle of death, but the shop owner is so enamored by the story, he doesn’t have the heart.  Kara always seems to place a high premium on people’s feelings, so instead he swallows and says, “That’s…great.  Have a good night.” He waves before turning and walking away.

“Good luck with your lady,” the man calls after him.  “Here’s to ‘someday’!”

“Word of advice,” Ral interjects.  “Do not tell her that story.”

“Way ahead of you, brother.”

“Besides, it’s not really romantic unless the lady throws herself in after him.”

Mon-El stops in his tracks, struck by a sudden and horrible thought.  He gasps, forced to swallow the pit that’s formed behind the back of his tongue.  “You went back for someone!” he understands, at last.  It’s as if the knowledge has been there all along, but he’s only just now allowing himself to see it.  Mon-El’s revelation is answered only with notable silence from Ral.  “That’s why you put me in pod and left.  You went back for someone.”

“I knew I was going to be okay,” Ral answers softly.  “But first I needed to make sure you were going to be too.”

“You stupid bastard.”  His fist clamps around the stems of the forget-me-not, his whole body surging with anger and grief.  “I wasn’t worth it.”

“Well, we’re never going to agree with each other on that topic, so I’m going to just say this.  I found what I was looking for; to ask for more would have been greedy.”

“You tried to tell me and I didn’t listen.  You must have.”

“We decided to keep it a secret for a while.”

“Because of me?”

Ral shrugs.  “Latching was going to change everything, and I guess…I wanted a little more time. That’s on me.  I made that choice, and I never regretted it, not for a moment. In the end it made no difference anyway.”

“You should have told me.  I thought we had no secrets from each other.”

Ral laughs, tilting his head back the way he always did and letting the sound rip with abandon.  “We didn’t, don’t you see?” he says, at last.  “You saw the signs…knew something was different.  You knew me so well.  I couldn’t have asked for a better brother-in-arms.”  Mon-El can almost—almost—feel Ral’s hand on his shoulder. “Would we be having this conversation if you hadn’t known?  Somewhere…deep down?”

“I guess not.”

“You listened with your heart, brother, and that’s what mattered.  You should do more of that.  Something tells me…it won’t steer you wrong.”

‘What if I can’t?” Mon-El wonders.  He feels as though he’s stepping off a ledge into a void without solid ground. Shaping a new self for this new life that’s been thrust upon him, unwanted and unexpected – which somehow makes it seem all the more preordained.  “What if I don’t know how?”

“That’s what you have me for, my friend.  I found my perfect match; now let me help you find yours.”

When he looks up, Mon-El is standing in front of Kara’s building.  It’s an old stone warehouse converted into loft and apartment space, but it stands before him like a stalwart sentry.  He paces in front of the stoop and checks his watch. Despite the long walk he’s a little early and worries about appearing too eager.  Just as he’s about to ring the buzzer for entry, a woman steps out of the door dragging her yappy dog on a leash behind her.

Mon-El holds the door for her and slips inside the building when she’s gone, using his super-speed to reach the secondary security door just before it clicks shut.  He foregoes the elevator and takes the stairs to the top floor at normal speed, each flight ratcheting his heart rate until it feels though it’s going to beat right out of his chest.

“Just relax, my friend.  Remember…‘Control is the—“

“’Control is the watchword’. I remember.”  Mon-El reaches the landing on her floor and approaches the door. Bright light spills out from underneath, illuminating his stylish wingtips.  His clenched fist hovers over the door as he wills himself to knock, but his hand refuses to cooperate.

“Remember the plan.”

“Okay, now you’re just being annoying.”

“Would you like me to go?”

“That’d be great.  I’ve got this.”

“Well, if you need me…you know where I am.”

“That I do.”

Ral looks at Mon-El and then at his fist hovering over the door, and then back at Mon-El, one eyebrow comically skewed upwards.  “Here let me help you with that.”  He takes control of Mon-El’s fist, knocking it twice against the wooden surface.  “You’re welcome,” he says, a sly, mischievous smile on his face.

“Take a hike, Ral.”

 “Just being a good wing-man“

“Get out!”

“Copy that.”

“Hey, Ral?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

Ral shrugs, using deceptively blasé body language.  “Hey…Bonds of Val-Or, right?”

Mon-El exhales a shaky breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding and drops his head to his chest as if in prayer.  “Always.”

“Now go get her.”

There’s a subtle sensation of withdrawal and Mon-El stands all alone in the Kara’s corridor. A shadow moves through the light beneath the door and he can hear the unlatching of multiple locks, before the door swings slowly open.

His mouth goes dry when he sees her, back lit and beautiful, and he wishes that he hadn’t been quite so hasty about sending Ral away.  Taking in the sight of her, in a state of undress he’s never before witnessed, Mon-El is momentarily struck dumb, his mouth opening and closing before words of greeting can issue forth.

 ****

 She tightens the belt of her satin robe almost to the point of breaking it before padding across the hardwood floor to the door.  With one last steadying breath, she turns the knob to find him standing in her corridor holding a bouquet of flowers while running his fingers through his hair, as though making a last minute effort to groom his already tidy appearance.

“Were you talking to someone?” she asks.  “I thought I heard talking.”

Mon-El blanches, chagrined.  “Must have been the neighbor across the hall.”  He points his thumb at the neighbor’s door.

“That must be it.” She dons her most pleasant and pacifying smile; the one she uses with hostage-takers.  “He’s always talking to football games, like that makes a difference.”  She plays it off to spare him the embarrassment, but she’s convinced he was talking to himself.

“Yeah,” he scoffs, nervously.  “Stupid.”

“You brought flowers,” Kara points out, hoping for a conversation starter.  Her voice rasps, her mouth gone abruptly dry at the sight of him.  Looking like he just stepped out of an Ivy League men’s clothing catalogue, he’s wearing a surprisingly red pair of neatly pressed chinos paired with a white Oxford button up with a blue and red plaid tie.  Over the shirt and tie is a thick button up sweater made of fine dark blue wool; only the middle two buttons are buttoned.

“Yeah,” he snaps to, as though waking from a good dream and hands her the flowers. “According to the courting rituals of this country, it’s customary to offer a transitory gift of some kind when beginning a courtship.  As best as I’m able to glean, the flowers will be dead in a few days and therefore symbolize a less than permanent arrangement.  Unlike diamonds,” he informs her confidently.  “Which are apparently forever.”

“Come in.  The flowers are…lovely,” she compliments. The stems have seen better days, she notes, as though they’ve been tightly gripped in his hands.  “I’ll just put them in a vase.”

“They’re called Forget-Me-Nots, I’m told.  They made me think of you.”  He starts to say something about how unforgettable she is, but stops himself, cringing at his own cheesiness.  

‘It’s okay to be cheesy,’ Ral pops in.

Not accustomed to wooing women, Mon-El finds himself a little out of his depth. Back home, women were the ones usually trying to woo him. Kara’s already halfway to the kitchen and filling up a vase, while Mon-El closes the door behind him, and latches the locks.  

“Would you like a glass of wine?” she offers, nodding her head toward the bottle.

“Alcoholic beverages from Earth don’t affect us,” he points out.  Mon-El lifts the bottle, tilting it toward the light and finding it more than half gone.

“I’ve had two glasses already,” she confesses, sheepishly.

“But why?”

“I like the way it tastes.  Sweet and tangy.”

“Sounds delicious.”

“Would you like to try it?” she offers again, reaching for the empty glass she pulled out for him earlier

He reaches for the goblet on the counter, but stops when Ral interrupts him. “Don’t you dare take that glass,” his friend hisses.  “You don’t need it.”

Mon-El pulls back his hand and takes a deep breath, clearing his throat.  “I think I will have a taste,” he replies, his voice dropping in register as his eyes zero in on her lips.  He steps toward her, placing a hand on her jaw before slipping it under her ear until he’s cupping her head, his thumb stroking her cheek.

Her lungs hitch in her chest and his lips descend upon hers before she has a chance to recover.  It’s like the kiss in the infirmary all over again.  Her insides melt as though her bones have lost all of their considerable tensile strength and she’s afraid if the kiss goes further, her legs will be unable to hold her.  Of their own accord, her hands find his shoulders and hold on tight.  As though reading her mind, Mon-El’s other arm snakes around her waist to offer support, and even though she knows her feet are firmly on the ground, she feels like she’s floating.

The tip of his tongue on her lower lip tenderly demands entrance and she obliges without a hint of resistance, opening her mouth to his gentle invasion.  It is a masterful seduction by mouth, his tongue promising more and more, but never more than she wants, and not one bit less than what she needs.  He tastes her, and finding her to his liking, feasts upon her mouth, lips and tongue as though seated at the finest court banquet.

By the time he pulls away, her mouth, of its own free will, chases after him for one last fleeting kiss.  So intent on what she was feeling, she had forgotten to catalogue the flavor of him. The taste on her tongue now begs for more.  She sighs, her eyes closed, clearly affected by this technique.

“You’re right,” he whispers, his breath shallow and fast, his forehead resting against hers.  He is no less affected by their kiss than she appears.  At one point during the kiss, her hand had made its way to the center of his chest, where she can now feel his heart racing beneath her fingertips. “Sweet and tangy.  Mostly sweet.  Even better than I remember.”

“What?” she asks, leaning away from him.  Mon-El’s arm tightens its grip to keep her body against his, so she can’t go too far.  She capitulates easily, relaxing in his arms.

“I lied before,” he confesses looking straight into her cornflower blue eyes. “About not remembering the kiss. I remember.  There’s no way I could forget.”  He keeps his eyes on her face, searching for some signs of anger or betrayal.

“Then why—“ Her forehead crinkles, like it always does when she’s disappointed in him.

“You were embarrassed,” he admits, reluctantly releasing her from his embrace to give her some distance.  He shrugs his shoulders as he continues to explain.  “I didn’t want you to be embarrassed.  What’s more, I didn’t want to be the source of your embarrassment.  You had that look on your face like you were going to let me down easy. And you wanted to ‘talk’ about it.  You shouldn’t have to talk after a kiss, Kara.  The kiss should say everything that needs saying.”

“And did your kiss…say everything?”

“Yes,” he confesses.  “But I was willing to let it go, if that was all it was ever going to be, Kara.”

“But…I don’t understand.”

“But…then you asked me to do this favor for you and I didn’t want to enter into this agreement without there being honesty between us.  I think you deserve that much.”

“You do?”

“And more, Kara, so much more.  Maybe more than I can ever give you.”  He wonders if he can ever be a man worthy of her.  Wonders if just being near him will taint everything that’s good and pure about her – everything for which he’s already fallen so deeply.

His lips turn down into a frown, as though disappointed by something.  “Wait,” she breathes.  “Are you…backing out?”

“No.” He chuckles, the laugh bearing a distinct melancholic ring to it and adds, “I’m not sure I’m man enough to do that.”

Something in his voice grabs her attention.  There’s been something about him lately, since the Cadmus released the Medusa virus, maybe even before then, that has her wondering just how wrong she was about him in the beginning.  She takes a harder look at him, seeing beyond the flashy fashion style meant to draw her in, to perceive something deeper in him.  The slight downwards turn to his normally smiling mouth and the haunted look in his eyes.

“Mon-El?  Are you okay? You seem….” She trails off before she can say the word ‘sad’ out loud.  Because in her mind, Mon-El is supposed to be thoroughly unserious until it matters.  ‘Sad’ is not a word she associates with him.

“Fine,” he replies.  He smiles a second later, but the display of mirth doesn’t extend to his eyes. “Just…missing old friends.”

“Oh,” she deflates.  It’s so easy to forget that he’s lost everything he ever knew and has every right to still be curled in the fetal position in a cell at the DEO.  But he chooses to get up every day, to breath in and out, to learn the ways of this world, and to keep moving forward.  It’s a feat that brings a burst of admiration to her chest as she gazes at him.  This beautiful, strong man, whose strength has nothing to do with lifting cars or leaping from the tops of buildings.

Kara takes him in her arms and tucks her face into his warm and welcoming neck, curved as though her head was always meant to rest there.  “I’m so sorry,” she whispers.

He breathes her in, as though tasting air for the first time after being buried underground for an eternity.  Mon-El’s arms hang motionless from his shoulders as he allows her to just hold him. He didn’t know until this moment, how much he just needed to be held.  She is sunlight and all that is good and he will never be worthy of her. But all he can do is keep trying and vow to never stop.

After a long moment, her hand glides down and slips into his, palms together, their fingers intertwining.  He could stand like this all night and ask nothing more from her.  But he made her a promise, and he couldn’t bear to disappoint her again.  Loath to release her hand, Mon-El wraps his other arm around her waist and pulls her so close, until there’s no space between them.  

“Like I said,” he begins, softly, disinclined to break the spell between them. “I think you deserve honesty, so before we go any further tonight, I think it’s best if I tell you that…I’m throwing my hat into the ring.”

“You are?”

“That’s the correct phrase, right?  Throwing the hat?”

“Yes,” she chuckles into his neck, sending a shiver racing down his spine. “I’m familiar with the phrase.”

“So you’ve heard it a lot?”

“It’s a common enough idiom.  But you’re the first guy who’s actually said those words to me.”

“I am?” he asks, hopefully.  

Kara nods.  “There are no other hats in the ring.  I’m not sure there’s even a ring.”

“Are you sure you don’t need those glasses of yours?”

“What do you mean?”  Habitually, she reaches up to press the glasses she isn’t wearing against the bridge of her nose, forgetting that she left them on her bathroom counter. Already, he misses the feel of her fingers tangled with his, so instead he sinks his now empty hand into her silky hair, gently massaging her scalp.  Her knees wobble like cheap cardboard and she locks them to keep them from folding beneath her.

“They all want you, Kara.  James, Winn, that guy from Earth-Prime – I read the after-action report.”

“Heatwave?”

“Yes!”

“Eww. He just liked calling me ‘Skirt’. He’s like a Mangovian, only slightly less evolved.”

Mon-El laughs at her joke, picturing the yellow-skinned Mangovian, with its prickly spine, three eyes and paws made for crushing rock.  “Probably Barry, too,” he adds, for good measure.

“He has a girlfriend.”

“Good.”

“You’re…jealous?”  She’s struck by how thrilled she is by the possibility of his jealousy.  That he wants her – wants to be with her – wants to fight for her.

Mon-El wonders how it might have gone if only he’d answered to the affirmative when she’d questioned him that day back in quarantine.  Might it have been easier if he had simply said ‘yes’ when she asked if he wanted to mate with her?  Would that have planted a seed, or would she have run from him?

“Yes. Are you happy?” he replies, pulling her tighter to him to punctuate his assertion.  Finally, he gives her the honesty he couldn’t give her before, the honesty that he has promised her.  “So, I’m also going to say this.  I’m going to do whatever it takes to win your heart, Kara.  I’m going to find a way to be the man you want me to be starting tonight, by being the man you need me to be.  I’m going to be the first man you take to your bed, and then, when you’re satisfied, I hope…you’re going to know you want me to be the last.”

Deep inside she knows that her heart is already halfway his, and if the feel of his mouth on hers or the way she fits against his body are any indications, then she is destined for a fight if she wants to keep any part of it for herself. No one had ever been this candid or honest with her before, and she finds it undeniably disarming.  Kara is pretty certain that no amount of ‘Into the Fire’ is going to keep her heart invincible from the man who stands before her.

“Mon-El?”

“Yes?’

“Maybe the next thing you say…you should say with a kiss.”

Answering her invitation with superhuman speed, Mon-El cups her face with both hands as their lips meet, his thumbs brushing over her ears.  He sips on her lower lip before moving on to take the upper lip between his.  He pulls back and then takes her mouth again and again, each time attacking with a new weapon or tactic.  First with lips, then with tongue and finally, with teeth.  His kisses tell her that he dreams of this, lying alone in his cot at night he’s imagined a thousand ways to kiss her and these are but a few.

With each kiss the temperature rises within her.  The satin robe and nightgown, which earlier had felt silky and ephemeral against her skin, now feels as an unwanted burden upon her. Millions of nerve endings in her flesh awaken and they seem angry to have been kept sleeping for so very long. Nothing, no other kiss or touch, has ever made her feel like this.  Her breasts are heavy with want, her nipples singing out for a soothing balm.  Kara attempts to alleviate the ache by pressing her chest harder against his, but her breasts are less than appeased.

Her arms wrap around his neck, knees buckling slightly until her hips cant into his.  Were he a human man, the strength of her grip would have bones bending beneath the pressure, but he merely gasps at the electric contact of her hips against his, her chest against his.  He splays a hand along her middle back and presses her entire body flush against his, encouraging her own grip to tighten.

“Too hard?” she tears her lips away from his to ask.  Almost immediately she wants to own his mouth again, but must wait for him to answer.

He shakes his head at her inquiry, unable to look at anything but her kiss-swollen lips.  “Not hard enough.  Don’t be afraid of hurting me,” he counsels.  “I don’t mind a little pain, especially when it’s paired with pleasure.”  Smirking suggestively for good measure, Mon-El is thoroughly charmed when Kara giggles and then blushes like the virgin she is. “But we can explore that another time. If you want.”

Kara brushes aside his implication that there will more of this, whatever this is, and chooses to devote thought to it at another time.  Because all she can process reliably right now is her sense of touch. She is wearing too many clothes, and if that is true for her than it is surely true for him.  Her fingers yearn to touch his skin, but she’s hampered by the thick cardigan he wears.  Of their own volition it seems, her fingers reach for the two leather-encased buttons and manages to free them without destroying the sweater.  His lips and tongue still exploring her mouth, he shakes off the sweater without a thought, dropping it on the floor at their feet.

Next, a single finger is sliding under the Windsor knot of his plaid tie and tugging it loose incrementally until at last it unravels, leaving two long ends hanging around either side of his neck.  A second later the tie joins his sweater on the floor.  Mon-El’s mouth releases hers, and she doesn’t want him to stop kissing her, not for a second, but at the same time she wants more and she doesn’t know how to reconcile the two concepts.

“Why are you stopping?” she queries, her eyes frantically search for his, but find them otherwise focused.  Glancing down, Kara finds Mon-El’s fingers toying with the tie of her robe and she wonders why he’s hesitating.  Her lungs, it seems, have expanded this night, feeling like a bottomless well of capacity, yet only able to accept fuel in small, shallow increments.

“I once told you that I was placing myself in your hands, Kara.  Will you now place yourself in mine?” he asks, lifting his slate-gray eyes to meet hers.  For the first time in his life, he is unsure of his next step and what it might mean, and perhaps more importantly where it might lead.  Mon-El knows that he has never felt about anyone the way he feels about the breathtaking woman before him.  

“Yes,” she answers, without a blink, her gaze holding his.  Kara is struck by the uncertainty she sees in the depths of his gray eyes.  When he tugs the end of the bow, the satin tie of her robe puts up little argument against his assault, and the feel of silky material gliding across her skin as it drifts to the floor inflames her skin even further.  

Her nipples jut proudly beneath the fine satin, a visible sign of the state of her arousal, through the thin material of her nightgown she blushes in response to his appreciative gaze.  Noticing her embarrassment, Mon-El goes back to what works, capturing her lips with his for a moment before shifting his attention to the pulse point on the slender column of her neck.

And…oh…she never knew her neck was so sensitive.  She gasps for air, her hands seizing the powerful grouping of muscles at his shoulder blades as his hot breath bathes the delicate skin of her neck.  He places gentle kisses down the long column of flesh, the tip of his tongue just grazing the skin.  Her head drops back to allow easier access and she’s surprised to find his hand cupping the base of her skull to provide support.

Blood rushes ruthlessly to the organ between his legs, awakening a hungry beast that’s been delayed far too long already from seeking its fundamental objective. “Tell me what you want,” he says between kisses, his own breath shallow.  “Tell me what your body wants, Kara.  Don’t be afraid.”  He is desperate to hear the words come from her mouth.  Not because he needs such guidance, but because a woman willing to verbalize her desires is far easier to tease and to please.  

“I don’t…ahhh…Mon-El,” she breathes, unable to articulate what she wants. Unsure about saying these things out loud.  His lips and tongue ravishing her neck, and the tingling, unfurling warmth they cause make it nearly impossible to think in terms of words and speaking.

Mon-El cups her face in both hands and angles her dreamy gaze to meet his. Kara’s vision is blurred by arousal and it takes a moment for her vision to clear.  “Kara,” he sighs her name like making a wish.  “You mustn’t be afraid,” he instructs her.  As though to demonstrate, his hands travel down her side to her hips before sliding around to her ass.  Mon-El squeezes the ample cheeks and presses her into his noticeable arousal.  She squeaks delightfully in response.  “You must never be afraid to demand that your desires be met.  Pleasure is your right.”

“Daxamite hedonist,” she teases softly, though her accusation bears no bite.  Her words remind him of the first few weeks of their acquaintance, when their cultural prejudices built a wall between them. They’ve come so far since then, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Kryptonian prude,” he answers back with a slow, sweet smile that has her stomach flipping over.  She licks her lips, completely unaware of the enticement that provides him.

His eyes are nearly black with arousal now, and when Kara shifts her hips, she can feel his erection surge back in response.  Mon-El groans and tightens his grips on her backside until her heels lift off the floor and she’s standing on the balls of her feet, held up only by his hands.  He dips his mouth to her collarbone, sucking lightly on a patch of skin there.

“I want…I want,” she licks her lips again, finding her mouth suddenly devoid of lubrication.

“You want…?” he urges.

“I want you to be wearing fewer clothes,” she admits.

“Good,” he nods.  He smiles, a smug announcement of victory for getting her to vocalize what she wants. “Perhaps we should take this someplace more comfortable,” he suggests, releasing his hold on her and allowing her to drop down to floor.  

Kara slips her hand into his and leads him into the bedroom.

TBC 

[phooll123]

Inside Google’s plan to make the whole web as fast as AMP

In a blog post today, Google is announcing that it’s formally embarking on a project to convince the group in charge of web standards to adopt technology inspired by its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework. In theory, it would mean that virtually any webpage could gain the same benefits as AMP: near-instantaneous loading, distribution on multiple platforms, and (critically) more prominent placement on Google properties.

This sounds impenetrably dense and boring, but please don’t click away yet! This is important, a little tricky to understand, and critical to how the web and Google interact in the future. In many ways, Google’s success or failure in this endeavor will play a major role in shaping how the web works on your phone.

If you’re unfamiliar, AMP is Google’s attempt to make webpages as fast and portable as other “instant articles” (like what you might read on Facebook or Apple News). The idea is that when you click a link on those other platforms, you don’t have to wait for the article to load because it’s already preloaded in an app. AMP’s goal is to bring the same performance to the web itself.

Google walked right into the center of a thicket

By creating AMP, Google blithely walked right into the center of a thicket comprised of developers concerned about the future of the web. Publishers are worried about ceding too much control of their distribution to gigantic tech companies, and all of the above are worried that Google is not so much a steward of the web but rather its nefarious puppet master.

All that angst has metastasized in the past few months, with a widely circulated open letter to Google asking it to fix AMP, more Medium blog posts than can be read in a week, Twitter screeds, and arguments in the comments of AMP’s own GitHub code repository. And that’s only the stuff coming from web developers. (I keep a folder of bookmarks I call “AMPhole” to try to keep up, and that hole gets deeper nearly every day.)

The whole situation is slightly frustrating to David Besbris, VP of search engineering at Google. Earlier this week, I went to Mountain View to talk with Besbris and Malte Ubl, engineering lead for AMP. “This is honestly a fairly altruistic project from our perspective,” says Besbris.

”It wasn’t like we invented AMP because we wanted to control everything, like people assume,” he says. Instead, he argues, go back and look at how dire the state of the mobile web was a few years ago, before AMP’s inception. It sucked — in fact, Nilay Patel published a story on this very website titled “The mobile web sucks” in 2015. He was right. Apple and Facebook dealt with that problem by creating proprietary formats and then convinced publishers to distribute their news in those formats on their platforms. As Nilay wrote:

Taken together, Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles are the saddest refutation of the open web revolution possible: they are incompatible proprietary publishing systems entirely under the control of huge corporations, neither of which particularly understands publishing or media.

Besbris saw things the same way: “The trend in the industry at the time was the simple way of solving these problems, where you guaranteed that you could control the experience … but that comes at the cost of the web.” So Google’s solution was AMP, a framework that was designed to make the web as good as those platforms so that the web would actually have a shot at competing with Apple and Facebook.

For all its faults, AMP is a very clever piece of engineering

Making webpages instant and portable required a very clever — and very kludgey— hack.

The hack involved a combination of existing web technologies (like iFrames), stringent standards on webpages themselves (so they’d be guaranteed to load fast), and — critically — a different kind of infrastructure for how webpages get from a publisher’s server to your phone. These kludges are often the things that you see people complain about when they complain about AMP. iFrames have weird scrolling behavior, URLs don’t match, and AMP results often look anemic when compared to full webpages. (Fixes for all of those issues either exist or have been proposed.)

Despite all those problems, here’s what is impressive about AMP: when you publish a webpage, it can be served from any caching server. But that’s not what really makes it fast; what truly makes a difference is that it can load nearly instantly because it’s already been preloaded in the background. And yet, despite that preloading, you don’t count as a visitor and the publisher doesn’t get to set any cookies or do any tracking until you click. And you can trust that the cached, instantly loaded page that’s sitting inside Google search or Twitter is faithful to its canonical source, even if that source was updated after it was first published.

“We need a vehicle to actually figure it out.”

”Back at the beginning, it was pretty much assumed that the web couldn’t do any of this,” Besbris says. Ubl and his team came up with that combination of technologies that made it possible, but it required technology that isn’t really built into the web right now. So Google faced a choice: take the time to try to convince the web standards body to adopt it and browser makers to support it or just go ahead and put it out in the world as a mostly Google-backed project on Google’s own products, primarily search.

”We need a vehicle to actually figure it out. You can’t just know it without trying stuff,” Besbris argues. Google had to prove that the web could be as good as Instant Articles. More importantly, it had to get as good quickly — before people abandoned it for a million different custom apps and article formats. Besbris says Google couldn’t wait for the committees that help craft web standards to get it done. “If you start by trying everything through the standards process, we would still be talking about it,” he argues.

Whether or not AMP counts as “the web” is actually one of the points of contention — though as you’d expect, Besbris and Ubl believe strongly that it is, and they make a compelling case for it. Accelerated Mobile Pages, they contend, do not need to use Google’s servers or serve Google ads; they can be published and distributed completely independently of Google.

Regardless of what Google’s engineers think, outside of Mountain View, AMP is associated much more strongly with Google than it is with the web — even though it’s been adopted by Bing, Twitter, Baidu, and others. Part of the problem is that AMP was Google’s reaction to Facebook and Apple, so it fell into the easy thought bucket of “proprietary article formats.” But most of it is that Google is huge and has pushed AMP in a big way with its biggest product: search. Publishers that support AMP show up in Google’s top stories carousel, which means a flood of traffic. It’s a huge incentive to support AMP.

And so, finally, we are ready to talk about today’s blog post by Ubl. You need all that backstory to understand the following, a seemingly simple sentence that explains what Google is doing:

Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more fast-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this like the Top Stories carousel.

What Google is proposing is not to turn the entire web into AMP, but rather to take some of the ideas behind the clever hacks that made AMP work, clean them up, and then make them a universal standard that has nothing to do with Google. That way, nearly any webpage could be distributed as easily and loaded as quickly as ones that are supported by AMP.

Google is not blind: it knows that other companies aren’t likely to up and adopt AMP as a universal solution to fixing the web. Although Ubl will happily tout how many non-Googlers contribute to AMP code, at the end of the day, he works at Google and is the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) on the AMP project. The new standards — many of which are already in development — seem like they would be genuinely good for the web. But just as importantly, they’re genuinely more likely to get adopted by competing companies if they’re seen as fundamental new web technologies and not just a Google project.

Google thinks AMP can show the way to a faster, less annoying mobile web

”Our intention has always been to take AMP — get the good bits and the lessons that we’ve learned from building AMP — into the standards track,” says Besbris.

This new format doesn’t have a name yet — Google is obviously reticent to propose one — but whatever it is, it’s likely to encompass a mélange of proposed technologies. Ubl got deep into the weeds of some of these with me, but I’ll spare you and instead just point to the links in his blog post:

Google’s goal is to extend support in features like the Top Stories carousel to AMP-like content that (1) meets a set of performance and user experience criteria and (2) implements a set of new web standards. Some of the proposed standards in the critical path are Feature Policy, Web Packaging, iframe promotion, Performance Timeline, and Paint Timing.

The next steps are going to probably involve a process that, at my most optimistic, I would guess will take months — more likely it will be years. Various standards bodies have to hash out proposals, try them out, and agree to them. And it’s not just the W3C body that standardizes the web, either. The Web Packaging technology that allows webpages to work offline and be redistributed may actually need to be agreed upon by another body.

And after all that, the companies that make web browsers and apps need to implement it all. When I dared Ubl to guess at what the timeline for all this might be, he described what he expected the process might look like for quite awhile before admitting, “in that respect, no, no timeline.”

Meanwhile, Google is absolutely going to continue to develop AMP and promote its use. But to speed along the standard process, it’s offering the same carrot that originally supercharged AMP’s growth: prime placement on Google’s own properties. Google is promising that any webpage that matches the performance of an AMP page will get the exact same treatment in Google search.

Google isn’t able to provide a “punchlist” of features it is going to require before a page can get the same treatment as AMP — at least not yet. It took this long for the team behind AMP to figure out that the technology behind it could be universalized (or, if you prefer, de-Googlized), so it’s going to work with the rest of the web community to actually do it before it makes any firm decisions about what is going to get special treatment in search. Google has some ideas — including performance benchmarks for pages and support for instant-loading web packages — but won’t commit to a firm list just yet.

It will take some time before these new web standards are finalized

Once these standards are agreed upon and implemented, any page that conforms to them could appear in the Top Stories carousel, the Google news feed on Android, and even get the same little blue lightning bolt badge that appears next to AMP-supported results in search. These pages will not be guaranteed better placement in search results, however — just as AMP doesn’t guarantee search placement today. “The things you need to do in order to rank well in search will continue to be there and we will continue to not tell you what they are,” Besbris jokes.

I don’t think that Ubl’s post today is going to wash away the bad feelings that many have about AMP. There’s just too much wrapped up in it. AMP has served as a vessel for worries about Google’s power over the web, the dicey future of news publishing, and whatever general angst we all feel about the sorry state of most mobile webpages. Most of these concerns have been fair, but there hasn’t been enough momentum for a more open alternative. With this move, Google seems to be trying to create one.

Here’s how Besbris sums up today’s news:

The intention here is to be better about communicating our intent. We’ve always wanted to [make the technology behind AMP a web standard] and always said this, but not very clearly. … We just want to communicate very clearly that AMP is not anything other than trying to make the web better. The lessons learned from AMP are being put into the standard bodies so we can have other frameworks implement the same stuff too.

The discussion about AMP since its inception has been confusing and contentious. That’s usually the way with web standards. But I think that the stakes with AMP feel higher than previous battles because of a growing understanding that we can’t take the existence of the open web for granted anymore. It could very well fade away. It has to be maintained and, more than that, improved.

That’s not to say that everybody should just trust Google completely to have the open web’s best interests at heart. The company certainly benefits more than its competitors from a strong and vibrant web and is so influential over the web that it sometimes looks like domination. Google could stand to be a little more cognizant of those realities when it talks about the web.

As we start wrapping up our discussion about AMP, Besbris repeats one of my questions back at me: “Have we just been idiots around communicating this stuff?”

”Yes,” he answers.

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