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theanonwriter · 3 years ago

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from the dining room table: part one

an: hi all!! this is a new series im making! i know its new and your taking a chance on me but promise you wont be disappointed. i know tjis part is a little slow but it’ll speed up soon. also, be warned that more darker themes will be in this story, along with eventual smut.

word count: 2.2k

warnings: slight angst, foreshadowing to darker topics, kissing lmao, some fluff

pairing: fez x reader, maddy x reader (platonic), cassie x reader (platonic)

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fez, nine-thirty-eight pm:

been hearing sum shit that’s makin’ my heart hurt

ash tried callin’ you too but you not picking up

lmk if i can help you at all

i feel helpless rn with all this shit goin’ on

It had been four nights since Fez had opened the door that night. You’re still not sure why he did it, as you hadn’t talked in a year and a half. Thinking about the way you acted, the things you said, makes you want to smash your head against a wall. How could you be so stupid?

If this all played out a year ago, you wouldn’t have been embarrassed in the slightest. You and Fez had been friends since first grade, when he helped you convert between ounces and pounds. But things changed.

Thank God for Maddy and Cassie. Without them, you’re sure you would have been sent to some wilderness farm in Kansas. The girls had taken you in when you were at your lowest junior year, and the rest was history. Cassie had played soccer with you until sixth grade when she was cut from the school team, claiming she wasn't upset because now she could spend the new time skating. Thinking about the way you met makes you laugh now, because the thought of Cassie getting sweaty for any reason seems completely crazy. Lexi, Cassie's little sister, had been your study buddy and partner in scholastic crime for as long as you could remember. You never really had been the closest of friends, but you had a strict schedule of tutoring at six and book-talk and seven-thirty at the Howard house every Thursday. You’re glad you found them when you did.

“Bitch, since when did you live here?” Maddy asked, eyebrows raised as she shook her head in disbelief. The first time someone came over to your house was always the most anxiety-provoking, as you could tell automatically who was interested in your money and who was interested in you. “I don’t know? Always?” You asked back, nervousness lacing your tone. Maddy's head turned around fast, reading your face as you reddened under her gaze.

“Cool. Do you have like, juice or something? I’m so fucking thirsty and water would just not hit right now.” Her tone was cool, and it automatically soothed you. You knew she wouldn't care, but still, the whole situation frightened you. She marched over to the fridge and swiftly opened it, searching for juice. “Found it! And it’s the good stuff, no pulp. I fucking hate pulp.” Your dad had a job as a lawyer at a private practice, and your mom had been organizing closets ever since he hit it big. They have always been such good parents to you, showing you the way to treat people you love and people you hate more.

“You want a cup?” You questioned, your eyes narrowing as a smile spread over your face. “Bitch, I want three.”

And that's how you ended up here. Maddy was taking a quick shower and getting ready in your bathroom after babysitting Theo for a couple of hours. Charlie, a boy in your grade, was hosting a party that night and Maddy was adamant on dragging you there.

“And then Theo was all like, ‘Don’t leave Mads! Will you be back tomorrow?’ And I was all like ‘You couldn’t keep me away if you wanted to.’ I actually believe this boy is the most precious baby ever.”

She told a different variation of the same story every Friday night. You loved her though, so would never say anything. The way she spoke about Theo made you so happy, and seeing the joy on both of their faces when you came over to swim with them was the highlight of your days. Theo had been your neighbor since his family moved in a few months ago, and your sunny memories with him were laced with happy giggles and the smell of coconut sunscreen.

“That's great! Are you ready yet?” You yelled back, finishing your makeup and you looked yourself over in the mirror. It wasn’t your best work, but you still looked good as fuck. Exactly as you should. Purr.

“Almost! Can you get me some edge gel? Also, do we have mixers left?” Maddy asked, popping her head out of your bathroom door.

“Yes to the gel, no to mixers. Why?”

“Fuck, Cass said the parties out. Fucking idiot, all he’s been talking about for weeks yet can’t plan a fucking party.” Maddy groaned, rolling her eyes and getting back to her makeup.

In fear of making her take longer, you sprayed extra perfume on your neck, between your collarbone and neck making sure that when you walked by people knew it was you. Maddy storms out of your bathroom wearing a little pink dress and black heels. She picks up her keys and grabs her purse before turning around to look you in the eyes. “Get in the car bitch, we’re leaving.”

The ride to the party was loud and chaotic, making you genuinely smile for the first time in almost a week. Maddy had already nearly crashed into two cars, screaming at drivers and slapping the horn every time someone got a little too close. You made the mental note to never let her drive again.

As you drove some more, Maddy took a turn down a street that automatically filled you with dread. “Charlie's house isn’t down this road.” You expressed, fiddling with your seatbelt as she drove in the parking lot.

“Duh. I’m not stupid. I’m getting mixers. Remember?” She turned off the music but left the car on. As she turned to face you, she sighed and shut her eyes. “Look, I’m sorry. But this is the only place open for twenty miles. You coming or not?”

You reluctantly stepped out of the car, your feet narrowly missing each other as you stumbled to the front door of the gas station. You didn’t even drink that much before you got in the car, but being here heightened your senses and made you feel so out of your depth.

The bell jingles as you walk in, alerting the child at the front desk of your presence.

“The fuck are you doin’ here?” Ash asked, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Buying...stuff. Why?” You replied, following on Maddy’s heels as she led you through the store, holding one of your hands in her own.

“Why? ‘Cause we own this place. Where have you been? He’s been worried sick.” He snapped back, attempting to get your attention as Maddy placed your shit on the counter.

“She's been with me. Can you hurry, please? We’re in a rush to get to a party.” Maddy reciprocates, annoyance in her tone as he rings up your stuff slowly.

You watch Ash’s face turn from puzzlement to smugness. Why does he look like that all of a sudden? Did your awkwardness entertain him?

“Well, have fun. You might wanna limit the drinkin’ Y/N. You're already looking a little deer-legged.” He chirped, putting the bag on the counter and shoving the receipt into the paper bag.

“Have a great day! Cunt.” Maddy whispers under her breath. “Ready to go?”

You couldn’t lie, you were drunk as fuck. You had lost Maddy a while ago to dance with Cass, and your feet at this point were practically all blisters. You finally found tranquility in Cassie's arms, grinding on her as the music bumped in the speakers.

“I need to pee! I’ll be right back.” You slurred, kissing her on the cheek before running off in search of a bathroom. You felt so lightheaded, but your need to pee pushed you forward. Stumbling through the kitchen, you were met by a set of piercing blue eyes that you could never forget. Typical.

That’s what Ash was laughing about.

Automatically, he’s by your side. “Yo, you okay kid?” He asked, placing his drink down on the table to get to your side faster. “I’m fine.” You replied, pushing past people to get away faster. Being that close to him made you shy, still not ready to process the feelings that resurfaced because of that night.

“Hol’ up! I’m tryna talk to you.” He chases you into the hallway, matching your steps as he jogs next to you.

“Where we goin’?” He questions, looking side to side as he nods to people as they pass. “Somewhere quieter. Can’t do this here.” You answer, shaking the anxious feeling growing in your stomach as the situation dawns on you. He promised he wouldn't say anything.

As you enter a small room with just a desk and some bookshelves, you take a deep breath and plop in the desk chair. This must be Charlie's dad's office.

“Holy fuck, you can’t take a hint, can you?” You pester, narrowing your eyes and you look anywhere but Fez. “I obviously don’t want to talk.”

“I don’ really care.” He sits in the chair adjacent to you. You both sit in silence as you refuse to speak. You can hear him let out a breath, and the sound from the party downstairs leaks through the floorboards. Surprisingly, you don’t feel uncomfortable. You always feel safe around him.

“You see the karaoke machine?” He prods, nodding down the hall. You cock your head to the side, shaking your head as you go back to staring at the wall.

“That’s ‘ight. I’m not finna leave you.”

“Is that right?” You question, setting him up.

“Yeah?” He answers, brows furrowing as you laugh drily.

“You already did. Last year.” You gain the nerve to look him in the eyes.

He sighs. “That was different. Look, I'm not fightin' witchu. I just don’ wanna leave you alone right now.”

“God, I’m fine!” You complain. The babying from all your friends had to stop. It was driving you crazy. “I’ll talk about anything other than what you want to talk about.” You bite out.

“Uh..did you hear about that new girl?” He asks, pulling a blunt out of his shirt pocket and lighting it. He takes a few hits before offering it to you. Extending an olive branch. You take it.

He always has the good shit. You cough as you inhale deeply, feeling the world's problems get smaller as you relax back in your seat. As you go to take another hit, he snatches the blunt out of your hand.

“What the fuck? I wasn’t done.” You whine, giving him puppy dogs eyes and making grabby hands.

“Nah. You said you fine. You gettin’ treated like you fine.” He laughs, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth as his smile grows. "This, this is mine."

You slump your shoulders and roll your eyes. “Your brother was a dick to me today.”

“I heard. He said you wern’ too fond of him either. Yo friend? Maddy? Called him a cunt.” He looks you in the eyes. “You know he like twelve, right?”

“He was acting like a cunt.”

“Watch yo mouth. That’s family.” He replies. “I saw you doin’ real good in soccer this year.”

“Meh. Could be worse.” The weed has started to mix in your system as you and Fez are suddenly interrupted by a couple stumbling in and shutting the door behind them. You can hear them gasping and laughing, but they don't seem to care about you two.

“Yo. Occupied.” Fez says, shaking his head. You go to look at the faces-

“Maddy? Nate?”

They both step apart quickly as Nate wipes his mouth clean. Maddy looks at you sheepishly, smiling boldly and she grabs onto his bicep. When she looks at the boy in front of you, she loses her smile quickly.

“Is that Fezco? What the fuck are you doing?”

“Oh hell no. We’re leaving right now.” You answer, getting more and more aggravated as the conversation starts to turn on you. You stand quickly, grabbing her wrist and you storm down the hall.

“Wait, Y/N, I don’t want to leave yet! Me and Nate are-”

“You and Nate are toxic.” Maddy looks at you again, venom starting to show through her face. You’re both intoxicated, and this can't end well. You know what you have to do, but your morals stop you for a minute.

Screw this.

“Look Maddy, you wanted to be here. Not me. I can’t do this anymore. I'm so sick of being out. I wanna go home. Please?” You will your eyes to fill with tears, and with the strength of God they do. Her eyes widen and then her face morphs from irritation to pity.

“I’m sorry baby.” She wraps you up into a hug. Her nails scratch your back lightly, and you swear you could fall asleep in her arms. “Let's go home.”

You search the room one last time in search of Fez, but you can’t find him. You spend the rest of the night punching yourself for not saying goodbye.

As you wash your makeup off, your phone rings. The screen lights up and fills your bathroom. As you look at the phone and see his name, you swear your heart stops. Maybe he’s thinking about it too?

fez, two-thirteen am:

do they always follow whatchu say?

you, two-thirteen am:

no, barely ever. I’m having a bad week tho, remember?

fez, two-fourteen am:

i believe you. well, goodnight

it was real nice talking to you btw

we should do it again soon

when you sober or not crying

You leave it on read.

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thats all for now! see you soon! :)

#euphoria #euphoriafic #fez #fezco #fez x y/n #fez x reader #story #maddy and cassie #fez x you #new story alert

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fandomlurker · 4 years ago

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A Ponderous Rewatch: Jockey For Position

Now that we’re done with that long cameo, it’s time for our feature presentation for tonight, and it’s a doozy!:

We open with Pinky frantically running on a spinning globe while Brain stands above him on the…globe holder? I don’t know if that part has a name or not.

“[winded gasps] Can I stop now, Brain?”

“Not until I finish my demonstration.”

Brain, that’s just… Well I was about to say it was mean, but given that Pinky understands the details of his plans better when Brain demonstrates it or draws elaborate diagrams, maybe it’s for the best? I doubt Brain could make that large globe spin just by using his hands, and Pinky’s been seen a lot of times running on the mouse wheel in their cage so he’s gotta be pretty in shape. Still, it feels like Pinky’s been running for a lot longer than he needed to…

You know what? I change my mind. It is a bit mean, Brain.

“When I build my reverse geotropic arrestor, Pinky, and throw it from the North Pole like this…”

The word “geotropic” doesn’t quite sound right. I wonder…

…Okay, yeah, Brain’s getting worse at naming things.

“…In a matter of seconds the cable will become taut, gravity will cease, and everyone will fly off the face of the Earth!”

Oh my GOD, Brain. This has got to be the stupidest plan you have come up with yet! Nothing about this will work.

Well, there goes poor Pinky.

“Leaving us alone to assume control.”

It’s still “us”, huh? Noted.

Long Pinky.

“Egad, Brain, brilliant! Haha hehe heh—!”

Pinky, sweetheart, I know praising Brain is kind of your thing but this is one time I’m going to have to call you out on your bias because this is super not brilliant and I’m actually a little worried for Brain’s mental state.

“—Oh wait, no, no. What’s going to keep us from flying off the Earth?”

That’s one flaw of many, Pinky, but I guess it’s as good a start as any.

“We will duct tape ourselves to a tree.”

Because the tree will totally stay in the ground when the Earth abruptly stops spinning. Not that it will stop spinning, because none of this makes any sense.

Brain, did this idea come from, like, a dream you had or something? Is that why the plan is working on dream logic?

I know this is a comedy cartoon and this is all a joke but sometimes Brain’s plans are so fucking out-there I just have to roast him for it.

“Unfortunately we still need to raise money to buy a one billion ton magnet. But I have a solution!”

Oh boy, can’t wait to hear the solution to this one. It’s gonna be stellar if the whole plan today is anything to go by.

Oh nice, Brain’s the one sewing for a change! Usually this is Pinky’s area of expertise, but it’s always nice to see that Brain can do some classically domestic things too.

“Tomorrow is the running of the Kentucky Derby. Do you know what that is?”

Most of my knowledge on it comes from “My Brother, My Brother, and Me” goofs, so my mind keeps autocorrecting it to “Kenfucky Derby”, but go on.

“Umm… Oh! A very large hat?”

“Promise me something, Pinky. Never breed.”

“I’ll try.”

Well, that’s going to come back to haunt them.

“The Kentucky Derby is the biggest horse race of the year. There’s a one million dollar purse going to the jockey riding the winning horse.”

“And I am going to win that purse!”

Okay, first off: Pinky, are you just going to stand there and stare at Brain as he gets changed? Like, I understand they’re naked normally and this is the exact opposite of stripping but umm…

Secondly: Brain, did you really have to get that up close to tell Pinky this? You two are making this too easy for me.

“Zort, Brain! A million dollar purse?!? Ooooh!~ You’re going to need matching pumps and earrings for that!”

Pinky’s got his priorities in order.

“Focus, Pinky, focus!”

“Now watch.”

And now Brain’s ordering Pinky to watch him dress and I just…I have no words. This is all so suspect. Why do you two even need a dressing screen if you’re usually naked anyway? And it shouldn’t matter if anyone sees you get dressed unless this is some weird reverse nudity taboo you two have developed and if that’s the case, why are you allowing Pinky to watch? And if it’s for a dramatic reveal WHY ARE YOU ORDERING HIM TO WATCH YOU CHANGE???

This episode is already so goddamn wild.

I am really not sure how I feel about that pan-up of Brain when he’s thrust his pelvis forward. At least the outfit is cute, though.

“Narf! Oh, Brain, I get it! You’re a beautiful lawn ornament!”

“Beautiful”, huh? Also noted.

“Look at me, narf, I’m a pink flamingo! Ahahaheh!”

Oh LORD, Pinky, how are you—?!?

“I’m a cement deer! Ah hah!”

PINKY, STOP, YOU’RE SCARING ME! D:

“Oh, I’m one of the seven dwarves, Brain!”

That’s more acceptable but Pinky, sweetie, warn me if you’re going to nightmarishly shapeshift again, okay?!

I guess we can add that to the list of random abilities Pinky has.

“Stop it, Pinky, or I shall have to hurt you.”

You are much calmer about this than I would be if this happened in front of me, Brain.

“Oh. Right-o, Brain. Narf.”

“Now let us make haste, for we have much to do before the race begins.”

“Poit.”

So then we cut to Churchill Downs, and I can only assume another roadtrip adventure was had off-screen.

“First, Pinky, we must visit the stables.”

“Inside, we will find the winning horse.”

“Err… How are we gonna do that, Brain?”

“The racing form, Pinky.”

My bet’s on... [squints] hLUUNO the horse.

“By analysing the velocity-based pace line, mile turf win and bayer speed figures, we’ll find a grade one stakes claimer who’ll give us a key horse situation.”

“Key Horse Situation” would be a great band name. Also, whoops, little bit of an error on the name plaques, background artists.

What do your mouse eyes see, Pinky?

“Err, can’t we just ride the pretty one?”

SHE!

So here she is, one of the few characters debuting in the Animaniacs run that will matter to PatB lore going forward aside from our main duo.

A fun fact for you all: Phar Fignewton’s name is a triple reference joke. “Phar Lap” was a champion thoroughbred race horse in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Fig Newtons are small pastries filled with fig paste. Lastly, “Fahrvergnügen” was a slogan for Volkswagon starting in 1990. Translated, it means “driving enjoyment”.

Phar Fignewton makes a whinnying noise and ends it off with a goofy laugh.

Brain is not impressed.

“Heavens, they’re multiplying…”

Pinky is instantly smitten with her.

BONK!

“This is a business trip, Pinky!”

“Oh. Right. Sorry, Brain.”

“Here is our horse.”

“’Daddy’s Little Angel’…”

I guess it’s an ironic nickname.

“Pinky… Are you pondering what I’m pondering?”

“Whu… I think so, Brain, isn’t Regis Philbin already married?”

…

Now I’m wondering if Pinky is suggesting that one of them marry Regis or if he’s suggesting that Regis marries the horse. Either way, what the fuck?

Yeah, same.

“The race, Pinky. By combining the statistics and my low body weight, this horse cannot lose! The prize money will be ours!”

GAH! Brain, I’ve had enough minor heart attacks from this episode because of Pinky’s eldritch morphing ability, I don’t need another one of your bizarre close-ups to do the same!

“Now I must take the place of the real jockey.”

“Hello?”

“Is this the Jockey who’s going to ride ‘Daddy’s Little Angel’?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Ed Mcmahon from Publisher’s Smearing House. You’ve just won ten million dollars.”

Pinky delightedly and silently listening in and chuckling in the back is precious.

And honestly, Brain, I don’t know why you’re crouching here, but it’s also cute.

“I won ten million dollars… I WON TEN MILLION DOLLARS! I am outta here! Later!”

The mice are lucky that he’s so excited about winning all that money that he forgets to do basic things like ask when and how he’ll get the money.

“Louie! Louie!”

“Later!”

“Who’s gonna ride my horse? I mean, Louie is the smallest, lightest jockey in the entire world!”

Did you know that there’s a weight requirement for jockeys, but no height requirement?

“Not anymore!”

“[GASP]”

Whoops, I just noticed another error, though it’s minor: Brain’s jockey outfit throughout this scene is light tan and purple instead of the pea green and purple that it’s supposed to be.

“You’re a jockey?!”

“Actually, I am a mouse in the early stages of an elaborate scheme to take over the world.”

The more this happens, the more I’m starting to think that Brain does this shtick on purpose to emotionally and mentally disarm people who would otherwise suspect that he’s not human. The fact that it works shows you just how idiotic the human beings of this world are.

“Well, fine, we all need a hobby but…will you ride my horse?”

Oh, sir, I think it’s much more than a hobby at this point. If only you knew…

“I shall ride! And win!”

His design is a little odd here, but it’s still a good pose.

So Brain next has to be weighed to make sure he meets the requirements.

“Saddle: Seven pounds. Saddle and rider: Seven pounds 3 ounces.”

So if you can recall from the previous rewatch post, a house mouse on average weighs 19g, and a common wood mouse weighs 23g (it can be up for debate which type of mouse Brain is). Converting Brain’s 3 ounces of weight to grams would result in him weighing 85.0486g.

Brain does have a bit of a cute little potbelly thing going on, but he’s also consistently much smaller in height and width than the average adult mouse in the series. I think the incredible difference in weight is mostly coming from the heft of Brain’s, well, brain and skull…and the muscle mass packed into that tiny body to help keep him upright.

“A genetically perfect jockey! This is fantastic!”

Please don’t phrase it like that.

“…Let’s look into early retirement.”

That jockey on the left is going through some shit, man. He looks like how I feel after working an eight hour shift on the holidays.

And so we skip to the beginning of the race!

That poor, poor jockey…who changed colour schemes for some reason.

There’s Phar Fignewton with a jockey who honestly looks like he’s high.

And here’s our little mousey fella, who has somehow managed to make this aggressive horse obedient.

“Camptown race is five miles long, do-dah, do-dah.~”

He’s so happy he’s singing to himself! This is honestly so precious that I completely forgive him for not getting the lyrics correct.

Coincidentally, Daddy’s Little Angel is positioned next to Phar Fignewton.

“Ooh, isn’t this exciting, Brain?”

Uh oh.

“Pinky, what are you doing here? Your weight will disrupt my winning calculations!”

I don’t know if it’d be that off, Brain. The combined weight of two mice is still much less than that of a human jockey.

“But Brain, it’s too exciting! I—“

[TARGET LOCKED]

“Oooh! Heh. Hello.~”

I think I’m going to save my thoughts on this whole…thing until the end. Right now I will say, however, that I wasn’t quite expecting the tongue-hanging-out-of-gaping-mouth lovestruck/horny??? reaction.

“Pinky, the race is starting!”

Too late, Brain.

And we’re off!

Bye, Pinky.

“There’s baloney in our slacks…~”

Pfft.

So as the race goes on, we get to know a few more of the horses’ names: Isle of Yap (a nice callback to the first PatB short), Flamiel (which is apparently the WB writers’ favourite word?), and Leggo-my-Egoiste (a double reference to an old Eggo slogan and the name of a cologne).

The other jockeys are more than a little surprised by Brain and his steed taking the lead early in the race.

Phar Fignewton is trailing way behind.

Meanwhile, Pinky’s woken up from fainting, seeing the oncoming horses—

--and promptly freaks out and stumbles back down again.

“Victory, she waits for me! Oh, the do-dah-day!”

You really have to stop tempting fate like this, Brain.

Phar Fignewton’s very tired, but what’s this?

Is that…Pinky in harm’s way?

ThePowerOfLove.mp3

Determined and fueled by her inexplicable crush, Phar Fignewton starts gaining ground on the other horses.

Brain didn’t calculate for this!

…Oh! Hi, Warners! Looks like they’re cheering Phar on.

“Oh no! Yah! Yah! Yah!”

I didn’t think whips were allowed in races like the Kentucky Derby, but apparently they are. Their use was only restricted—not banned—in the summer of 2020, which is alarming to say the least.

On a different note, I know some of you folks are now jotting down the fact that Brain knows how to use a whip. I see you.

She makes the save!

And she also wins the race! Way to go, Phar Fignewton!

“In the words of the great Willie Shoemaker: ‘Nuts!’”

It was a good try, Brain, but honestly I’m glad you failed this time if only so that you wouldn’t embarrass yourself with your actual world domination plan’s failure later. Maybe take a couple nights off to rest up a bit and formulate plans that aren’t totally bonkers, hmm?

I might as well go ahead and talk about this now. I…am conflicted on this whole Phar Fignewton thing. It makes for a very strange one-off joke about Pinky instantly falling in love with a distaff counterpart of his that’s a horse for whatever reason…but the fact that she’s not a one-off character is baffling in and of itself. Like I’ve said before, she’s mentioned a couple of times going forward as being Pinky’s girlfriend, or as a bizarre joke at Pinky’s expense about him being in/having been in a relationship with a horse. There’s even a small running gag about Pinky’s reaction to people’s disgust about it: “People can be so intolerant!”. I don’t know if the joke is supposed to be one about racial segregation or a wink and nod to queer folks in the only way that the writers could get away with in a cartoon at the time (in a “see, Pinky’s down for a relationship with anyone, even outside of his species!” type of way).

Phar Fignewton herself is a sweetie but besides that she has no personality to speak of and we’re just meant to assume based on physical appearance that she is equivalent to Pinky. And like, she hasn’t been uplifted to human levels of intelligence and sapience like Pinky has because of Acme Labs, but she seems to be naturally sapient for some unknown reason and just simply unable to speak English.

On top of all this, the relationship is very shallow and the only reason we’re given as to why Pinky likes her is because he finds her pretty. It’s perfectly in character for Pinky to easily fall in love, as he does so with other animals a couple more times in the spin-offs, but it just feels weird that this is the one that sticks around purely to become a running gag that gets mentions that are sometimes literal years apart from one another.

And listen, I know the writers most likely made this a thing just because they thought it was a funny joke and a few of them managed to remember about Phar and would use Pinky dating her as a gag. I know this. But it doesn’t make it any less confusing and weird. I remember the jokes about Pinky and horses from way back when I first watched Animaniacs and the PatB spin-off when I was a kid and I never had any context for it because I don’t think I ever saw this specific episode. Coming back as an adult and seeing all these episodes in order and watching this one in particular and finding out the context is “Pinky thinks a horse is pretty and the horse and him are in love and long-distance dating now” is both underwhelming and leaves me with more questions than answers.

…Also, if my earlier theories on why the writers made this joke are correct, does this mean Phar Fignewton is metatextually a beard for Pinky?

I just don’t know, folks. You’re welcome to leave your thoughts on this in comments.

Let’s wrap this up.

So as we can see, Brain is, as usual, back to work on another plan that involves—

—a goddamn cannon, holy shit! What is he using the glue for? That’s a little ominous, given what’s been involved in this episode.

There’s a hammering noise in the background and we see Pinky putting up a photo of Phar Fignewton.

“Pinky, will you please stop that? I’m trying to concentrate on tomorrow night!”

Wow, you’re more irritable than usual, Brain. I didn’t think some delicate hammering would annoy you that much.

“Mwah!~”

…Despite my ramblings earlier, that’s very cute of you, Pinky. I’m sure you could’ve gotten a better photo, though.

“Why, Brain, what’re we gonna do tomorrow night?”

Try to take over the world, of course! Right, Brain?

“Guess.”

…

Umm, wow. That’s a first. You look like you’re absolutely enraged, Brain. All this over some hammering sounds?

This had me taken aback a bit when I watched it the first time, not gonna lie. We’ve seen Brain after a plan’s failure plenty of times before. He’s been frustrated, sure. Humiliated at times, or maybe he just sighs in resignation and walks off into the sunset. It always ends with him simply using these feelings to fuel the fire in him to do better tomorrow night.

This is the very first time we’ve seen him jumpy and irritated at the most minor of things and so angry that he literally refuses to participate normally in his and Pinky’s shared catchphrase. And this was for a plan that was just to fund the real plan! So why is this time any different?

Oh.

OH.

Okay, that’s… That makes a lot of sense, actually. Damn.

Hey, fanfic writers? Ya’ll ever use this as the very first time Brain experiences romantic jealousy? Let me know.

“Oh yeah, try to take over the world. Right.”

I think even Pinky’s put off by this development, if his hesitant and quiet finishing of the saying is anything to go by.

And that’s what we end off with.

All in all, this episode is a wild ride of strangeness in small moments and bizarre additions to lore and ends on the first subversion of the long-running closing gag of the series. It’s not exactly a great episode, but that ending is intriguing enough for one of the main purposes of this rewatch. In short, I’m just baffled.

Luckily the next episode is much better. Next time, the mice head on down to Tennessee to seek world domination via country music.

See you then!

#Pinky and the Brain #PatB #Jockey For Position

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desparikon · 3 years ago

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MacGyver fanfic misfire #7

Written for @pridewrite2021, pw15 Polyamory & pw alt3 Angst

Of course I had to do something for my absolute favorite MacGyver pairing, Bozer/Murdoc/Mac! I’m just sorry it had to be so heavy.

(Spoilers for 5x05) Mac's grief is breaking him down, and turning him into a different person. He’s an outsider in his own life.

Murdoc was going to die on this job.

Tonight had been too comfortable, too routine. Too quiet. Quiet was a luxury Mac would suffer, his life indebted at a price too expensive to be borne alone.

Yes, Murdoc was going to die on this job, and Mac would regret not spending their last evening together.

Even though Mac would’ve ruined it. That’s what his presence did anymore. Ruin other people’s good time, dampen their good spirits.

They never know what to say. He was unable to move on, broken beyond repair. Everything hurt, and he was exhausted, and life was colorless. It hurt to move, to breathe, to exist. His breaking point inched closer.

He got attached too quickly, gave too much, loved too deep, in a world that endlessly took. His love hadn’t protected Jack. And now he was gone. Forever. All eternity, to time’s end.

It was brutal, and unfair, and irrational.

Death didn’t need to steal when Mac was right! there! He’d gladly offer all of himself! More! Why wasn’t his love valuable enough to pay the debt?

The opportunity would never come again.

The Old Mac was gone. Dead. Like Jack. A part of himself had been ripped out; no going back. He had nothing to offer anymore, no brainpower, no energy, and no reliability, oscillating between distant and clingy, flat and short-tempered, cold and emotional.

The New Mac was ugly.

Manipulative. Volatile. Dangerous.

He didn’t understand why everyone still reached out, or tried to spend time with him. Why Bozer and Murdoc kept him? Their unconventional relationship would benefit, subtracting one. Didn’t they see their lives were better without him?

All his chances to re-earn trust, experience kindness, receive help? Wasted. Used up.

(He always longed for one more chance anyway.)

“Mac, you’ve barely eaten in days. I can make something, or we can order food, or ask Murdoc to pick some up on the way over. Anything. Please.”

“That’s OK, Boz, I’m not hungry. My stomach hurts, so I’m probably just coming down with something.”

His eyelids fluttered shut as Bozer’s fingers gently pushed his bangs to the side so he could feel Mac’s forehead for fever.

“I should really take you somewhere, get you checked out.”

Boz called his bluff.

It hurt to pull away.

“I’ll be fine.”

Why did they try so hard to reach him?

“Angus!”

He nearly cried, hearing Murdoc call his name with such concern, his strong arms catching Mac before he fell to the floor.

“Are you alright?”

Do Not bluff Murdoc.

“I’m just tired.”

Murdoc gently held his chin, slowly rubbing his thumb along Mac’s jaw.

“After all the energy drinks I’ve seen you pound back in the short time I’ve been here?”

He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t redeveloped a slight fear of Murdoc.

Why couldn’t they leave him alone?

“Pretty good for a first attempt.” Murdoc presented his origami shark.

“He’s cute!” Bozer took it, bobbing it, imitating swimming, “I think he’s missing something though.”

Murdoc paused before taking it back, and drawing angry eyebrows on its face. “Much better! Looks just like me!”

“I meant company.” He held up his own creations: a giraffe and a lion. “Look Mac, I made us!”

(Careful, careful! Don’t poison the household mood!)

(Did he smile back?)

Murdoc tapped his shark’s snoot to both figures’, earning cheerful eye rolls from both Cassian and Bozer.

“Big flirt.” Bozer put their figures down, into the growing paper zoo, before scooting closer, and snugging into Murdoc. He closed his eyes and bumped their foreheads together.

The affection between Murdoc and Bozer was one of the only things that still made Mac’s broken brain feel good. It wasn’t immune to their cuteness. Especially not when they did...

Murdoc’s palm found a particularly sensitive spot on Bozer’s chest, causing him to squirm, and press against Murdoc’s hand.

THAT.

Their Thing. Boz loved it. Something about warm, gentle pressure over his heart, and Murdoc being able to feel his heartbeat, and tingling, both relaxing and ticklish.

(Maybe Murdoc could try that on him?)

Selfish, thinking about diverting their attention from each other.

It wouldn’t matter after tonight, when Murdoc died.

Losing another loved one...Mac would simply have to leave.

Bozer would lose both partners in close succession, but he was strong. Stronger than Mac. He’d be fine. He’d still have Cassian, their friends, his family. He’d get the house. Absolute financial security, thanks to Murdoc.

Maybe he’d leave Phoenix to pursue creative endeavors. Or move closer to home, so Cassian could have the same positive influences Mac had been so lucky to have. Maybe--

Bozer’s phone chimed, the alarm resuming time and life’s passing.

“Gotta go catch your flight, huh?”

“’Fraid so.”

Mac escaped into the front hallway. The goodbyes. He hated them. How to explain what Murdoc meant to him, and summarize their entire history and relationship, while simultaneously apologizing and begging him to stay, all in one neat goodbye? Because with Murdoc, it always felt like they were unknowingly parting for the final time.

Working a more stable schedule meant Bozer stayed at Phoenix headquarters. He was safe there, and Mac could visit, on one of his better days. He never knew with Murdoc, and that’d been the point when they’d first gotten together; keep his criminal activities private, give Bozer and Mac a better chance if they were discovered.

No location. No details. Nothing but a faked, vaguely 9-5, job in a broad, monotonous field: stock market, real estate, business. The stability, and increased time with his dad, eased Cassian’s anxiety and separation issues, but the facade made Mac’s worse.

What had Murdoc done on any given day? Had he been careful to remain invisible? Had he taken a smaller, closer job? Had he made plans for a bigger, more dangerous job? Minor cuts and bruises were the only, albeit unreliable, hints.

“Take it easy these next few days, OK?”

Mac jumped, the startle, and careless suggestion, converting his anxieties to anger. Take it easy?! While Murdoc threw his life away, recklessly risking everything for nothing?!

“Mind your own business!” Mac snapped, Murdoc’s surprise pissing him off even more. “What! What’re you staring at?!”

At least arguing with Murdoc might keep him from leaving. Negative attention is still attention.

Murdoc didn’t take the bait. He sighed quietly, and went out, Mac following closely behind. The door clicking shut behind them signaled the monster’s release.

“Why do you keep doing this to us?! You don’t need the money! What is it about torturing people you just can’t give up, huh??” He didn’t give Murdoc a chance to respond. “Grow up, Murdoc! New hobby! You’re not the badass shadowy assassin anymore!”

“I—”

“Or maybe the real reason is because you don’t want to admit you’ve been domesticated. You’re a tamed Murdoc now!”

Mac regretted it before it’d finished leaving his mouth. Murdoc’s wild streak was one of the traits he most admired. Unapologetic, and self-confident, in ways he couldn’t be.

“I’m sorry!” Mac whispered, pulling his arms across himself, “I’m sorry! God, Murdoc, I swear, I didn’t mean it like that.”

He shied away as Murdoc attempted to physically comfort him. This isn’t how you treat loved ones.

He wished Murdoc would just put him down.

“What??”

Shit, had he said that aloud?

“No, no, it’s fine, I was joking!” He carefully avoided looking at Murdoc, not wanting him to see the few stray tears that’d fallen. “I just thought it’d be funny because that’s how we used to be, and you know what? I’m an asshole tonight. I’ll be better when you get back. I’ll make it up to you!”

Mac retreated inside, silently pleading Murdoc not to follow.

Please let Murdoc forget. Please don’t let him text Boz. Please don’t try to corner him in his own house--

”Mac?” Bozer called from the living room.

“Yeah, be there in a minute.” Mac’s shoulders slumped.

Three days to come up with a plan to fix this.

He needed to be alone.

#macgyver #mine

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anime-alyssa · 5 years ago

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baby girl (max lord x reader)

hey hey guess who’s a max lord fucker??

smut below cut. buy me a ko-fi if you can spare it - pls i ran out of money i dont get paid for another week

also on ao3.

He worked so hard, day in and day out he was working nonstop. There were many nights when you would go to bed alone and wake up alone, the only sign of him being around the crumpled up sheets in the bed next to you, the faint smell of his cologne lingering in the air of the bedroom. The closet would be askew and clothes would be out of place in his wake after getting dressed that morning. His breakfast plate would be in the sink, half a pot of coffee still left just for you. These were all signs that he had actually made it home to you even though you didn’t see him.

That was becoming your norm. You’d get up after him, clean up what he left after you got yourself ready in the prettiest of designer outfits Max bought for you. Designer dresses, shirts, skirts, jumpers, rompers, shoes, bags, and sunglasses. Gucci, Hermes, Louis, you had it all from Max. If you saw it in a store or in a catalog and you looked at it or mentioned that you liked it, it was on your doorstep the next day. You dripped in diamonds every day - the finest of cuts and the largest of rocks. You slept on silk sheets every night, the finest of colors. He bought you anything you wanted and made your life look picture perfect - made you look like the epitome of happiness. And for the most part, you were.

But you wanted to see him more. And he knew that. So, today he promised he would work from home and that at around 7:00 pm, he would spend the rest of his night with you. Making up for lost time. You went out and got yourself a special little black bra, put it on under the white semi-see-through sundress you wore today and decided to opt out of anything down under, thankful that the skirt of the dress was not see through but did have a slit up the side that went up to your hip. Anyone can see it through the dress up top, so you weren’t planning on leaving the house today.

Max would get jealous; he didn’t like it when other people looked at you when you dressed sexy. He said it was for his eyes only - that only he got to see you dripping in the laces and silks that he bought for you, all the diamonds and the pearls to go with it. You had no problem accepting these gifts - at first you did, insisting you could work for your own. But he was very insistent, said you deserved to be showered with all the luxury that money could buy.

He was insistent on locking you down as his, dating you for a total of 2 months before marrying you. It was the wedding of your dreams, a custom Versace gown that you designed in the loviest, most lavish villa Max found in the French countryside. It was perfect. You built your home from the ground up, letting you take the reins on the designing and just singing the check at the end of it all. Truly, you were given whatever you wanted from Max Lord.

Fluffing your hair in the mirror, you sighed as you finished applying your bright red lipstick to complete your look. It was just about lunch time, he would be coming out soon to eat. You hoped. Your diamond earrings glistened in the light as you tightened the cloth belt around your waist, cinching your dress tighter to your body. The material flowed around you as you walked away, light and airy as your bare feet padded on the marble flooring.

Approaching the office you noticed the door was open, and the room was silent. Was he even in there? Usually he was on the phone with at least someone, yelling about something that you didn’t know nor ask about. You glanced in as you were walking by and saw him sitting at his desk, hunched over some paperwork busy. Deciding to not bother him you walked by him -

“Come back here.” he called for you just as you passed by the last opened double door. You turned on your heel, walking into the doorway. He had just been looking down - but he didn’t miss you walking by. His eyes roamed over you as you approached his desk, soaking in your appearance, memorizing it. Rounding the side of his desk, going behind it to stand next to him, his gaze followed you.

“Yes?” you asked, innocence dripping off your tongue as you spoke. Max gave you a smirk as his hands planted themselves on your hips, dragging you closer to him. He let one hand roam free, trailing it up your ribcage, thumb sliding over your breast as he hit it, leaving it there.

“Stunning, baby girl.” he said, nestling his head into your hair, breathing in your scent as he held you close. You could hear his staggered breathing on your ear and decided to take one of your hands, laying it flat on his chest. He dressed ‘down’ today, opting for just a dress shirt and a pair of dress pants. He still looked his normal self, hair slicked back and put together to perfection. Presentable as a boss, even though the only one seeing him would be you.

“Just for you.” you said back to him with a smile. He hummed in response, lips drifting over your cheek as his thumb started circling your breast again over your dress. “Brand new.” you breathed out, feeling your body start to slowly heat up.

“I thought I was the one who did the spoiling here?” he said lowly, pulling his face out of your hair to look back at you. You recognized that look in his eyes - one you hadn’t seem in weeks. Lust. He wanted you, making you blush seeing that your little see-through trick worked.

“Even you need a surprise, sometimes.” you said to him, pressing a kiss against his lips.

“I’m the luckiest man in the world, baby girl. Buying beautiful lace just for me…” Max leaned you back against his desk, back flat against all his papers and wrapped your legs around his waist, leaning over your body as he brought his lips down to your throat, kissing up it and finally reaching your lips. “I think I’m hungry for lunch…” he said against your lips, causing you to moan and your cunt to clench in between your legs.

With that one of his hands traveled to your exposed thigh from the slit of your dress, traveling inward to your thigh, breath catching when he realized you were bare under the dress. He said nothing but let out a soft grunt as he quickly flung your legs over his shoulders, moving your dress out of his way as his mouth found your heat. Moaning as you felt his breath along your core, you grabbed onto the fabric of your dress as he placed kissed just above your nub on the skin around it, teasing you.

In a split second he decided to forego the teasing and sank his tongue into your dripping pussy. You cried out, his tongue working fast on your cunt, eating you up for his lunch as his fingers started to come into play and started to pump into you. Moaning again your body started to feel like flames were burning against your skin, sweat forming on your body as he ate you out on his desk. He made quick work of you, fingers furiously pounding into you and mouth sucking on your nub enough to make you scream out his name as you came around him. Your body trembled and you arched against the desk, thighs tightening around his head that kept going down on you, dragging every last inch of your orgasm out of you and lapping up every ounce of your juices that came out of you.

Eventually he pulled away from you, licking his fingers clean and wiping his mouth off with lips tongue. Max helped you sit back up again, coming face to face with you and planting a tender kiss onto your lips.

“Delicious, my love.” he said to you tenderly, pushing your hair out of your face as he kissed you again. “I’ll be done in a few hours. We’ll go to dinner and then come back when I’m done.” he said to you. Nodding, he kissed you again as he walked you to the door of his office, giving you one last peck before shutting the door. You walked back to the master, going into the bathroom to clean yourself up and figure out what to do until after dinner.

——

True to his word, Max only worked until about 5 and then took you out to dinner. Rooftop reservations, private look of the city lit up and your favorite wine, as much as you wanted. He was a pull out all the stops kind of guy and tonight, it showed. The food was delicious, the view was incredible, and the time with your husband was unmatched. He drove you both there and back in his Porsche convertible, and the moment you were back in the privacy of your home, the intimate space of your bedroom, he was all over you.

Max’s hands were sliding up your ribcage again, pulling you flesh to him. Snaking your arms around his neck, you brought his lips to meet yours, causing him to grunt when his erection bumped into your thigh. Smirking on his lips, one of your hands travelled down to his waist, unclasping his belt and undoing his pants. He took the liberty of taking his cock out of his pants, your hand gently grabbing it after it was freed. A dark look took over his face, lust back in his eyes as one his hands cupped your cheek.

“Go down and suck Daddy’s cock, baby girl.” he said to you. You nodded as you sank to your knees slowly, not breaking eye contact with him until you were level with his cock. Still having him in your hand, you placed the tip into your mouth, precum dripping out of it and drifting your tongue over it. Max let out a grunt above you, hand tangling into your hair as you started to bob on his cock, taking as much of him in as you could with every movement. “Y-yes, that’s it, baby girl. Fuck - suck Daddy’s cock…” he moaned.

His hips started to buck after a few minutes, eager to get himself off. You let him start to slowly fuck into your mouth and before you knew it he was holding you steady as he fucked into your mouth. Curses were dripping from his mouth and he was almost going in too deep and hitting your gag reflex, but he never did. One of your hands steadied itself on your thigh as the other went and gently started fondling at his balls.

“Fuck - keep doing that - baby girl, I’m gonna - shit -” Max scrambled, moaning your name as he came, spitting ropes down the back of your throat as your tongue swirled his tip, hand squeezing at his tightened balls as his high overtook his body, trembling as his back hit the post of your bed, dragging you with him still on his cock. He panted above you as you popped off him, standing in front of him as he regained his composure.

Your hands went to your dress. You had changed from earlier into something different - a red, flowy sleeveless dress, made out of the same material from earlier, but less see through which allowed you to completely go commando underneath. Slowly you discarded it, revealing your nakedness to him, the cool air hitting you all at once. You heard Max let slip ‘fuck’ under his breath as you stepped out of your shoes next, glancing to see his cock getting hard again at the sight of you naked in front of him.

Max’s mind caught up to his dick, and he threw himself on you yet again, mouth immediately taking one of your nipples into it as you tried to get your hands on his shirt, fumbling with the buttons until eventually it was off. He shrugged the shirt off quickly, putting his hands on your breasts as his mouth moved to your neck. You continued to try and remove his clothes, yanking his pants off his body. He stepped out of them as he picked you up and threw you back down onto the mattress, cock rubbing against your entrance as he adjusted his positioning above you.

“What do you want Daddy to do to you, baby girl?” he rumbled in your ear, voice sending shivers down your spine as his cock teased your dripping folds, a low moan coming out of his mouth.

“Fuck me, Daddy - please.” you pleaded him, feeling a heat in between your legs that only he could extinguish. He smirked as he turned you around, stomach now on the bed as he brought your hips up to meet his. Without any warning after that, he thrust into you, making you cry out his name.

He moaned at first contact, the tightness of your cunt against him erotic. With every thrust he sunk into you more and more until he was inside of you completely, filling you to the brim. Once he was there, there was no holding back - he began to destroy you from behind, pounding into you at a pace he’s never thrusted before.

“Pussy so fucking tight for Daddy, baby. Best pussy a man could ask for - fuck.” he moaned out behind you, grabbing your hair and yanking your head back to be in control of you. You cried out as his grip on your hip tightened, only leaving you to give a hard smack on your ass, making you clench up at the sensation.

“F-f-fuck - more Daddy - harder-r…” you spilled out of your mouth, causing him to groan as he picked up his pace, cock hitting your g-spot with every thrust, heat beginning to encompass your body again as an orgasm threatened to take over all too soon. He gave your ass another smack, cunt clenching around his cock again as your body began to tremble. Pleased with the reaction he smacked you again, again and again until you were a crying mess below him, moaning loud enough to satisfy him and trembling enough where he was satisfied, cock beginning to twitch inside of you as he neared a release.

“Make that pussy cream on my cock, baby. Come on - fuck - I’m gonna - gonna come soon.” he moaned to you, bringing your body up to meet his a little bit so he could started tugging on your breasts and playing with your nipples, trying to stimulate you extra towards your release. You cried as you felt it creeping up on you, your body shaking and sweating against Max in preparation to be sent over. He pounded into you harder, balls hitting the back of your ass as he dragged you against his hips, hitting you deeper than ever before. He brought one hand back up to your ass. “Come for daddy.” he demanded, slapping your ass again.

“M-more Max - fuck!” you cried, as he swatted you one last time to send you over, screaming and crying his name as your cunt clenched around his cock still pounding into you, hand still swatting at your ass making sounds spill out of your mouth that were euphoric. “M-m-max, fuck, don’t s-s-to - ugh!” you tried to form sentences but your orgasm was taking over you completely, body shaking as he held you up, fucking into you trying to chase his own high.

“Gon-gonna come - fuck baby girl…” he moaned as you felt his cock twitch inside of you, cunt still convulsing around him as he spilled his seed in you, high taking over his body as he fought to keep you both up. His fingers found their way to your nub, fucking your nub to keep you screaming, cunt beginning cream around him and drip onto the sheets below as his mouth found your neck, beginning to suck on the skin as he moaned, riding out his high as he kept bucking his hips into you.

You both rode out your highs together for a while before he slid out of you, a mixture of both your cum spilling out of you as he flopped next to you on the bed. You were still panting, legs sore, cunt sore, when he pulled you under the sheets. He got up and walked away, heading into the bathroom. You heard the water running and he came back out, wet wash cloth in hand to clean you up. He left it on the table next to him as he crawled under the sheets with you, draping his arm around your stomach.

“I think I’m going to work from home more often.” he said to you, hand tracing lines over your cheekbone. You hummed in response, looking at him and searching his eyes. He was serious - he was looking at you with a softness that you hadn’t seen in a while. Maybe since your wedding day half a year ago? You were unsure the last time you had seen him grow soft for you.

“I’d like that.” you said to him quietly.

“And back to going out on Friday nights. Like we used to. I’m sorry I haven’t been here. We’ll change that.” he said, crawling on top of you slowly to kiss you before laying back down, bringing your back into his chest. “I love you, baby girl.”

#myshit #max lord x reader #maxwell lord x reader

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thebaconsandwichofregret · 5 years ago

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Happy False Value Day everyone!!!

As many of you know Ben Aaronovitch used to work for Waterstone’s, a bookshop chain in the UK, and because he’s quite proud of having worked there (and they are proud of having once employed him, no seriously, every time I even look at one of his books in one of their shops a member of staff spontaneously appears to tell me “He used to work here you know!” If I had a pound for every time I’d heard that I could afford to buy the Folly) he gives Waterstone’s a special exclusive short story in the first run of every new Rivers of London book.

Obviously this is great for those of us who are UK fans.

It’s less great for those of you who are international fans. However in the spirit of International Magical Cooperation I managed to get my hands on my copy ever so slightly early and so I have here for your reading pleasure, the exclusive short story from False Value - A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Please note that this story contains mentions of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

By Ben Aaronovitch

You know that song by The Kinks? Not that one. The other one. No, not that one either. Yeah, that one- ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’. You wouldn’t believe it to look at me now, but that song’s about me.

These days my daughter does her best to keep me looking respectable, and I haven’t the heart to tell her that I’d much rather wear my nice comfortable corduroy trousers, with braces, and leave my shirt untucked. But back in the sixties I was the dedicated follower of fashion. And it’s true that they sought me here and they sought me there but, as Ray Davies knew perfectly well, that was probably because of the drug dealing. What can I say? Clothes aren’t cheap.

I was a middleman buying wholesale and supplying a network of dealers, mostly in and around the King’s Road. I rarely sold retail, although I did have a number of select clients. And of course nothing lubricates a soirée like a bowl full of alpha-methylphenethylamine. It was all going swimmingly until some little shit from Islington stiffed me on a payment and I found myself coming up ten grand short. And, believe me, ten grand in 1967 was a lot of money. You could buy a house in Notting Hill for less than that - not that anyone wanted to, not in those days.

Now, I’ll admit that as an entrepreneur working in such a volatile industry, I probably should have ensured that I had a cash reserve stashed away against such an eventuality. Mistakes were definitely made. But in my defence, not only had I just discovered the joys of blow, I was also distracted by my infatuation with Lilith.

Now, I’ve always cheerfully swung both ways and, to be honest, I’ve always been more attracted by the cut of someone’s trousers than what was held therein. But when I met Lilith it was if all the cash registers rung out in celebration. She was so like a man in some ways and so like a woman in others. I’d love to say that it was the best of both worlds, but looking back it was a disaster in every respect. Although a completely exhilarating disaster, like a roller coaster to an unknown destination. I tried explaining what she was like to Ray Davies and that beardy writer who ran that sci-fi magazine, but they both got her completely wrong.

So there I was, suddenly ten grand down to people whose names you’re better off not knowing - let’s just call them the Deplorables and leave it at that. If I tell you that their nicknames were Cutter, Lead Pipe and Gnasher, that should give you a flavour of their character. You could call Cutter the brains behind the gang but that would be risking an overstatement. Organised crime in the good old days required little in the way of actual brains and relied much more on a calculated defiance of the social niceties vis-à-vis psychotic violence. Terrify your rivals, bully your customers, and hand out a bung to the local constabulary and you were away.

And it goes without saying that aesthetically they were a dead loss.

The Deplorables had a straightforward approach to those that owed them money which I will leave to your imagination - suffice only to say that it involved a sledgehammer and, of all things, a marlinspike.

But I had no intention of losing my knees, so I had arranged a couple of new deals that would net me a sufficient profit to cover both what I owed the Deplorables and the same again to appease them sufficiently to save my poor knees from a fate worse than polyester.

I know some of you are thinking that polyester was hip and groovy back in the Swinging Sixties, but trust me when I say that it was an abomination from the start - whatever the elegance of its long chain polymers.

In order to keep body and wardrobe together while I waited for these deals to come to fruition I decanted, along with Lilith and my faithful sidekick Merton, to a squat in Wandsworth just off the Earlsfield High Street. Now, I normally shun the transpontine reaches of the capital. But my thinking was sound. With my reputation as a flower of Chelsea and the King’s Road, I reckoned that nobody - least of all the dim members of the Deplorables - would think to look for me across the river.

‘No fucking way,’ said Lilith when she first saw it, ‘am I living in this shithole.’

Squats come in many flavours. But political, religious or student, they are almost always shitholes. However, I could see this one had potential and Nigel, God bless his woolen Woolworths socks, had at least kept it clean.

But not particularly tidy.

Outwardly Nigel was definitely one of the children of Aquarius. Inside he had the soul of an accountant, but alas none of the facility with numbers.

According to Nigel, who could be dull about this sort of thing, the building we were squatting in had been built in the eighteenth century as an inn that specialised in serving the trade along the river Wandle. This was news to me, because I had assumed the rank channel immediately behind the house was a canal.

‘There used to be factories up and down the Wandle,’ he told me despite my best efforts to stop him, ‘all connected up with barges. And this is where the wartermen used to get their drinks in.’

With the collapse of that trade it was converted into a grad town house, a status it retained for a hundred years or so before providing slum housing for the unwashed multitude. Occasionally on its hundred-year odyssey it would surface into the light of respectable society before descending once more into the depths of squalor.

Which is where yours truly arrived to bring a touch of colour and a modicum of good taste to the old place.

Looking back, I believe that might have been the start of the whole ghastly business.

Now the thing about the drug trade is that it overlaps with the general smuggling industry. As a result a man with the right contacts can acquire much in the way of valuable cloth - Egyptian cotton and the like - without troubling the good people of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. Then such an individual might use his reputation for fashion to sell on said items to the East End rag trade at less than wholesale, cash under the table, no questions asked and no invoices raised. Not as lucrative as a suitcase full of horse, but safer and more dependable.

Cloth, even expensive cloth, takes up considerably more room even than Mary Jane, so the fact that the old building had a beer cellar capacious enough to store the stock was the other reason I’d chosen it as a bolt-hole. Merton and I pressed Nigel into service to help us carry the bales, wrapped in tarpaulin for protection, down to the cellar, which proved to be mercifully dry and cool.

It was surprisingly cool - you could have used it as a pantry.

‘That’s because of the river,’ Nigel explained. ‘It’s just the other side of that wall.’

I touched the wall and was surprised to find it cool but bone dry.

‘They know how to build houses in those days,’ said Nigel.

Once we’d moved the good in, it was time to deal with the ever simmering domestic crisis that was life with Lilith. In the latest instalment of the drama, she had ejected Nigel from the master bedroom and claimed it as her own. This was less of a distraction than it might be because Nigel, like nearly all men, was clearly smitten with Lilith and acquiesced with surprisingly good grace.

And so we settled in companionably enough, especially when Lilith and Nigel discovered a common in the works of Jack Kerouac. I could see that at some point I would be bedding down with Merton for a night or two. I won’t lie and say that I didn’t find Lilith’s peccadillos upsetting but Merton, bless his acrylic Y-fronts offers compensation in his own rough manner.

Things started to go wrong the night of the storm and consequent flood. And while our decision to drop acid and commune with the thunder- Nigel’s idea, by the way - probably wasn’t to blame, it certainly didn’t help.

I don’t normally do hallucinogenics as they often disappoint. You go up expecting Yellow Submarine and get a lot of irritating visual distraction instead. My colour sense is quite keen enough, thank you, without having a pair of purple velvet bell-bottoms start to shine like a neon sign.

The master bedroom - now Lilith’s domain - contained, of all things, a king-size four-poster bed that was missing its curtains. But since I’d arrived, it at least had matching cotton sheets in a tasteful orange and green fleurs-de-lis pattern. They matched the old wallpaper with its geometric tan and orange florets that still showed the retangular ghosts of long vanished photographs and paintings.

At some point - Nigel had said the 1930s - the owners had installed an aluminium-framed picture window that ran almost the length of the room and looked out over the canal, or more importantly, up into the boiling clouds of the oncoming storm.

Lilith started on the bed with all three of us, but I can’t take anything seriously when heading up on LSD, least of all sex. So I quickly disengaged and chose to sit on the end of the bed and watch the storm. I doubt the others were troubled by my absence.

I watched the storm come in over the rooftops of South London with lightning flashing in my eyes and that glorious sense of joy that only comes from something psychoactive interacting with your neurones. I lost myself in that storm and, in it, I thought I sensed the roar of the god of joy, whose acolytes dance naked on the hilltops and rip the goats apart.

But the mind is fickle and darts from thought to thought and I became fascinated by the patterns the raindrops traced down the window glass. Then the play of light and shadow drew me to the walls, where I found myself pulling at the torn edge of the wallpaper. Like most squats, damp had gotten into the room at some point in the past and the top layer peeled away to reveal another layer below - a vertical floral design in red, purple and green on a pale background. Carefully I stripped a couple of square feet away. And while behind me Lilith howled obscenities in the throes of her passion, I started on the next layer. This revealed a faded leaf design in silver and turquoise. The colours pulled at me and I realised that if I could just find the original surface I might open a portal to another dimension - one of style and colour and exquisite taste.

But I had to be patient. Clawing the walls would disrupt the delicate lines of cosmic energy that flowed along the pinstripes of the layer of blue linen-finish paper. Delicately, I peeled a loose corner until I uncovered a beautiful mustard yellow bird that glowed with an inner light. Gently and meticulously I revealed more. A trellis design overgrown with olive and brown brambles sporting red flowers and crimson birds. I knew it at once as a classic design from ‘the Firm’, the company founded by William Morris to bring back craftsmanship to a world turned grey and smoky by the Industrial Revolution.

I was ready for a hallucination then, and willed my mind into the pattern in front of me, but nothing happened. The wallpaper shone out of the hole in the wall, the light shifting like sunlight through a real trellis, real birds, but that achingly rational part of my brain stayed aloof. Chemistry, it said, it’s all chemistry.

At some point Nigel escaped the bed and fled whimpering into the cupboard and closed the door behind himself.

The trellis and its mustard-coloured birds mocked me from the walls,

‘I think we’re sinking,’ said Merton, for what I realised was the third or fourth time.

I was still coming down and it took concentration to focus on Merton, who was stark naked and pacing up and down at the foot of the bed. Lilith was sprawled face down, arms and legs spread like a starfish to occupy as much space as possible. There was no sign of Nigel, and in my elevated state I seriously gave consideration to the thought that Lilith had devoured him following coitus.

Merton rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, as if testing his footing.

‘Definitely sinking,’ he said, and ran out of the door.

I flailed about a bit until I found a packet of Lilith’s Embassy Filters and a box of Swan Vestas, managed to not light the filter on the second attempt and dragged in a grateful lungful. A burst of head-clearing nicotine helped chase away the last of the lysergic acid diethylamide and I was just trying to determine whether I’d hallucinated a naked Merton when he reappeared.

‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ he said. ‘We’re not sinking but we’re definitely flooding.’

The cellar was divided into two parts. The stairs led down to the smaller part of it, essentially a wide corridor which used to house, so Nigel insisted on telling me, the coal chute - now bricked up. A big metal reinforced door opened into the larger part of the cellar - the part with over ten grand’s worth of fabric stored in it. The door was closed but the corridor part was two inches deep in filthy water.

‘Don’t open the door!’ called Nigel from the top of the stairs.

I had no intention of leaving the dry section of the stairs, let alone risking the cuffs of my maroon corduroy flares in what looked to me like sewage overflow. Merton, who’d been trying to force the door open, now splashed back as if stung. For a man who I’d once seen cheerfully batter a traffic warden for awarding him a ticket, it was odd how he never argued with Nigel - not about practical things to do with the house anyway.

Nigel, resplendent in a genuine Indian cloth kaftan - or so he claimed - passed me and stepped gingerly into the water. Reaching the door, he rapped sharply with his knuckles just above the waterline, then he methodically rapped up the door until he reached head height. After a few experimental raps to confirm, he turned to me and told me I was deader than a moleskin waistcoat.

‘The whole room’s flooded,’ he said. ‘Probably not a good idea to open this door.’

I sat down on the stairs and put my head in my hands. I did a mental inventory of what I’d stored and how it had been packed. It was bad, but if we could pump out the room half of it could be salvaged - especially the silks, since the individual rolls had been wrapped in polythene.

Thank God for Hans von Pechmann, I thought, and got to my feet.

‘We need to drain the room,’ I said. ‘Nigel, get a pump and enough hose to run it back out to the river.’

Nigel nodded.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, and practically skipped up the stairs.

‘Put some clothes on before you go out!’ I called after him.

I told Merton that when we had the pump and the hose, he would have to cut a suitable hole in the door - near the top.

‘Will you need tools?’ I asked.

Merton eyed up the door.

‘I have what I need in my bedroom,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea.’

It took Nigel the best part of the day to source the suitable equipment. In the meantime, I sent Merton out to the local phone box to see if I couldn’t rustle up another life- and kneecap-saving transaction. Ideally, I should have been making the calls myself but I didn’t dare show my face on the street - it’s a well-known face, even in South London. I spent the time cataloguing my wardrobe, alas much reduced by my exile, ironing that which needed ironing and casting away those items that had fallen out of style since my last purge.

Some things never go out of style - some things, thank God, will never come back. Let us hope that the lime-green acrylic aquiline button-down cardigan is one of them. I really don’t know what I was thinking when I bought it.

Apart from a spectacularly noisy toilet break, Lilith stayed blissfully asleep in the main bedroom until teatime and then vanished into the bathroom for the next two hours.

Once Nigel had returned with the pump and the hose, Merton used his hammer and chisel to cut a rough hole, six inches across, near the top of the door. Nigel had brought down the cream-coloured hostess trolley and mounted the pump on that to keep it out of the water. Once it was rigged we ran a hosepipe up the stair, down the hall, across the kitchen and poked it out the back window. Merton stayed to supervise the outflow while I returned to the top of the stairs and gave Nigel the nod.

It looked ramshackle and was, indeed, held together with string and gaffer tape. But like most things that Nigel built, especially his improvised hookahs, it was perfectly adequate. The pump puttered into life, the pipe going through the hole in the door stiffened, there was a gurgling sound and I followed the passage of the water upstairs and into the kitchen. There, an arc of water shot from the hose and into the river beyond.

‘How long until it’s pumped out?’ I asked.

‘A couple of days,’ said Nigel.

When I objected, he pointed out that it was a small-bore hosepipe, that the cellar was large and that we didn’t know how the river water was getting in.

Some things you can’t control, I suppose, such as Lilith - who I found sitting in the kitchen in a loose yellow kimono, drinking brandy and letting her assets hang out.

‘It smells different in here’ she said.

I pointed out that the window was open to allow egress of the hosepipe and was thus allowing fresh air, to which Lilith was generally unaccustomed, to enter the room. Lilith grunted and said she was going out that evening to meet some friends in Soho.

I tried to talk her out of it but she insisted, and there was no stopping Lilith when she was set on something.

‘What if the Deplorables see you?’ I asked.

‘Darling,’ said Lilith, throwing an orange ostrich feather boa around her neck, ‘the Deplorables never frequent the places I do and in any case - I’m invisible.’

I was making another calming cup of tea when I realised that Lilith had been right. The kitchen smelt fresh and, oddly, sun dappled - of you thought sun dappled was a smell. I went to the open window and took a deep breath. Not normally something I’d recommend given the foetid nature of the Wandle - which still looked more like a canal to me - behind the house. The air was fresh and another thing I noticed was that the water shooting out of the hosepipe was clear. I pulled the pipe in a bit and had a closer look and then an experimental tate - just the tip of the tongue, you understand. It was plain, clean water. Perhaps, I thought, the cellar had been flooded by a burst mains pipe. If so, then there was a chance that much of my stock might survive relatively intact.

I also noticed that the house had a small back garden, or rather a side garden, an overgrown patch of weeds and brambles that filled a roughly triangular space between next door’s garden wall, the river and the side of the kitchen. I replaced the hose and went looking for the door that led to the garden. I’m not a horticulturalist myself, but to a man in my position, knowing there’s a back door - for egress in extremis - is always a comfort.

It took three days to drain the cellar, which passed as quickly as two quarters of Lebanese cannabis resin could make it. Now I’ve never been one to get the munchies, but Nigel could consume an astonishing amount of fish and chips, and poor Merton was forced to make several supply runs. On the morning of the fourth day, Nigel declared that we could force the door and I went to fetch Merton.

Who was nowhere to be found.

His room was as he always left it, the bed made with military precision and knife-edge creases. Merton was a thoroughly institutionalised boy, but what institution - the navy, prison, the Foreign Legion - I’d never thought to ask. His clothes, though dull, were hung or folded with the same admirable care. His tool case was missing but the canvas bag containing his baseball bat, bayonet and the long wooden stick with the stainless steel barbs that I didn’t want to know the purpose of, was tucked into the wardrobe next to his two spare pairs of Doc Martens boots.

I returned to the basement corridor, which Nigel had mercifully mopped clean once the muddy water had soaked away. Nigel was standing by the door to the cellar, stock-still and staring at something on the floor.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

Nigel pointed mutely at a battered blue metal toolbox sitting by the door. Its top was open and its trays expanded to reveal its rows of neatly arrayed tools and boxes of screws and nails.

‘He must have gone inside,’ said Nigel. His voice dropped to an urgent whisper. ‘Inside there!’

Since I had no idea why Nigel was so agitated, I reached out and pushed the door open. It opened a fraction and then pushed back - as if someone was leaning against the other side.

‘Merton,’ I said, ‘stop fucking about and let me in.’

I shoved harder and the door opened a crack and out poured a weird sweet smell like cooked milk. And with it a sense of outraged dignity which so surprised me that I jumped back from the door, which slammed shut.

‘Is he in there?’ asked Nigel.

‘Must be,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.

Neither of us could match Merton - because that’s who it had to be - for physical might. I mean, I employed him precisely because he could intimidate your average creditor just by breaking wind. So we trooped upstairs for a cup of tea and some pharmaceutical reinforcement.

‘Got any more black beauties?’ asked Nigel, who never could separate his biphetamines from his common or garden amphetamines. I swear, you try to educate people but there are limits. I gave him a couple of ludes, and given the day we’d had so far, took a couple myself. Lilith returned fabulously drunk at two in the morning, and we all piled into bed and didn’t get up until the next afternoon.

The door to the cellar remained closed and Merton’s tool case was still where he’d left it. I tried the door, but it was stuck fast with no give at all. I even tried knocking it down, like they do in films, but all I did was bruise my shoulder.

If Merton was in there, he wasn’t coming out until he was good and ready. And since I wasn’t getting in, I had to accept that I wouldn’t be realising any value from my stock of fabrics any time soon. Still, I’d already written down their value and put other deals in motion to generate cash flow - another drug deal, as it happens. A stack of Happy Bus LSD out of Rotterdam. A little bit riskier than my normal deals, but needs must, as they say.

Without Merton, I was forced to rely on Nigel to go out and make the necessary phone calls. Unlike Merton, who followed instructions without question, I had to explain everything to him as if he were in a spy movie with Michael Caine. Once he had the gist, he darted out the front door wearing an RAF surplus greatcoat. As I watched him go from the upstairs window, I realised that his hair had grown long enough to reach between his shoulder blades and wondered why I hadn’t noticed.

The next couple of days went past with no sign of Merton, and I only managed to keep anxiety at bay with the help of my dwindling supply of cannabis resin and long punishing nights with Lilith.

The door to the cellar remained closed.

When I had nerved myself up to go look, I noticed that something had been jammed into the cracks around the edge of the door - as if it had oozed out from inside the cellar in liquid form and then set on contact with air. I took a set of pliers from Merton’s tool case and worried a fragment out. It’s a long time since I’ve prepared a slide in earnest, but while I didn’t have a microscope I did have a jeweller’s glass I keep for checking crystal shape. Under magnification the fragment revealed itself to be a tangle of threads - blue cotton, my good Egyptian cotton at a guess. I picked at the tangle with a pair of tweezers and a strange notion struck me - that the threads weren’t tangled randomly, that there was a pattern to the knots.

I could imagine a circumstance where the pressure of water could both shred the original weave of a cloth and then tangle the threads. I could even imagine water pressure forcing the threads around the edge of the door, but it seemed unlikely. Before I discovered fashion and pharmaceuticals I did a degree in chemistry. Started a degree, to be precise - I stopped paying attention in the second year. But I always thought of myself as rational even when under the influence.

If I’d known what I know now, I would have run screaming from the house and taken my chances with the Deplorables. But I lived in a much smaller world in those days.

Although large enough for my Rotterdam connection to agree to a deal. Not only that, but it seemed my credit was good enough for me to procure a sample shipment on good faith. With the profit from that sale I could finance a larger shipment and thus dig myself out of my financial predicament and quit the squat - and it’s creepy basement.

The only catch being that I would have to provide my own mule to bring the sample in. Normally you don’t use your friends as mules, not even friends of friends. What you really want is a gullible person who’s been talked into it by someone you only know through business. I knew a guy who could meet a girl at a party and have her on a plane to Ankara the next day. He made a living recruiting mules and didn’t mind some wastage at all - right up to the point someone’s mother gave him both barrels of her husband’s grousing shotgun. The police never caught her and only Merton and I turned up for the funeral.

It wasn’t hard to persuade Lilith to fly to Rotterdam - especially first class - and the beauty was that wherever she touched down, she paid for herself. Or to be strictly accurate, other people took care of her needs for her. The downside, of course, was that you had to allow her time to party - in this case, at least a week. You’d think that without Lilith sharing the high thread cotton sheets of the four-poster bed I’d be getting more sleep, but I found myself spending most of every night staring at the underside of the bed’s canopy.

It didn’t help that I had to ration the Quaaludes - I needed them to keep Nigel functioning.

‘There’s something in the cellar,’ he said, and refused to go down into the basement.

I, on the other hand, found myself increasingly drawn to the cellar door. Especially when it started to flower.

It started with a spray of cotton around the door frame, overlapping triangular leaves of white and navy-blue cotton that stuck to the bricks of the wall as if they’d been glued in place. I took a sample and found that instead of regular weave, the cloth was formed by the intertwining of threads in a complex pattern. Some of the threads amongst the white and blue were a bright scarlet and spread through the fabric in a branching pattern like streams into a river basin. Or, more disturbingly, like capillaries branching out from a vein.

I did make an attempt, cautiously, to scrape one of the ‘leaves’ off the wall with a trowel I found in Merton’s tool case. But even as I pushed the blade under the edge of the cloth I felt such a wave of disinterest - I cannot describe it more clearly than that- that I found myself halfway up the basement stairs before I realised what had happened.

The next day the cotton leaves had spread out at least another six inches and surrounding the door were tongues of crimson and yellow orgaza. Individual threads had begun to colonise the door proper - curling into swirling patterns like ivy climbing a wall. I spent an indeterminate amount of time with my back to the opposite wall, staring at the pattern to see if I could spot them moving.

I wondered what it meant. Perhaps Nigel was right, and the Age of Aquarius was upon us and we had entered a time of miracles.

When I was upstairs I tried to put the cellar out of my mind and concentrate on plans for the future. I had fallen into drug dealing almost by accident and had always found it an easy and convenient way to keep myself in the sartorial fashion I aspired to. But if my run-in with the deplorables was an indication of the future, then perhaps it was time to pack it in. A boutique of my own instead, one in which I could serve both as owner-manager and inspiration. Before the merest thought of doing actual work, no matter how supervisory, had filled me with disgust but now … now it seemed attractive.

I didn’t trust these feelings.

I needed out of the squat. I needed to be strutting down the King’s Road or Carnaby Street. I wanted back out into the world, where I could be as dazzling and as splendid as the first acolyte of the goddess of fashion.

But you need working kneecaps to strut your stuff. And so I stayed where I was.

By the third day the door was completely obscured behind a tapestry of red, black and gold thread, and wings of cotton spread out across the walls and ceiling. The organza had likewise spread and a third wave of pink and yellow damask now framed the doorway. By the sixth day the entire corridor was curtained in swathes of multicoloured fabric, so that it seemed a tunnel to a draper’s wonderland.

I no longer dared leave the safety of the foot of the stairs and yet I still found myself walking down them three times a day to look. The urge to walk into its warm comforting embrace was terrifying.

On the seventh day, Lilith failed to return. I started to seriously worry on the eighth; on the ninth, I fell into such a despair that no amount of near pharmaceutical-grade Drinamyl amphetamines could lift me from it. On the tenth, a postcard arrived with four jaunty pictures of a tram stop, a fountain, a town square, a gigantic statue of a man holding up the sky and Groeten uit Rotterdam written across the front.

On the back Lilith sent me love and kisses, explained that she’d met a splendid sailor or three and would be staying on in the Netherlands for a bit, but not to worry because she’d found a perfectly wonderful Spaniard to courier my product back to London. Thoughtfully she’d written the travel and contact details of the Spanish courier on the postcard - in plain English.

With a heavy heart I sent Nigel out to pick up the package and when he failed to return I was not surprised.

We live in a universe constantly assailed by the forces of entropy. Nothing good, pure or beautiful can stand up to the relentless regression towards the mean, the dull and the shabby. A minority have always striven to be a beacon in the gloom, a constant source of inspiration to those around them. Some worked through the medium of paint, or music, or literature, but I have sought to make myself the living embodiment of style and culture.

God knows it hasn’t been easy.

But a man should always know when he’s been beaten. That morning, as I sat in the kitchen, futilely waiting for Nigel to return, I realised that that time, for me, was nigh. I went upstairs, stripped myself down to my underwear - not nylon and not frilly, thank you, Ray - and after taking a deep breath to steel myself, donned a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a matching moleskin shirt. A pair of Hush Puppies and one of Merton’s donkey jackets completed my transformation. I looked in the mirror - I was unrecognisable.

Stuffing the last of my cash reserves in my pockets, I headed for the front door. I paused by the basement only long enough to ensure it was closed. From behind it came a noise that might have been a giant breathing, or water flowing, or shuttles running back and forth across lines of thread.

I shuddered and walked boldly out into the sunlight.

My plan was simple. Take the train to Holyhead, the ferry to Dublin and then, via a few contacts I still had, to America and freedom.

I didn’t even get as far as Garratt Lane before I ran straight into Cutter. I tried to braout but somehow he recognized me instantly and called out my name.

I turned, ran back to the squat, slammed the door behind me and went for the back door. There I could escape via the garden, over the wall and run for Wimbledon Park station.

But Lead Pipe was waiting in the kitchen, with a cup of tea on the go and the Daily Mirror open to the back pages.

‘About time,’ he rumbled when he saw me.

Three guesses where I went next.

I was down the stairs and into the basement corridor before I even noticed that the walls had grown a fringe that glowed with a soft golden light. I was prepared to throw myself frantically at the cellar door but I found it open. I ran inside with no brighter plan than to barricade myself inside and hope the Deplorables grew bored.

Inside the cellar was a riot of colour. The walls were arrayed with purple organza and burgundy charmeuse, while sprays of a brilliant blue habotai framed cascades of fabric woven in a dozen colours - scarlet, yellow and green - into tangles of vines, leaves and flowers. Globes of light hung suspended from golden threads in each corner, illuminating a bundle of gold and black embroidered silk suspended from tendrils of lace - like a cocoon from a spider-s web.

Around me was a giant’s breathing and the warp and weft of a loom gigantic enough to weave the stars themselves. I could no more have stopped myself from grasping that bundle than I could have stopped myself breathing.

The bundle was warm and squirming in my arms. I unwrapped a layer of gauzy chiffon, gazed down on my fate and was lost.

‘Oi,’ said a voice from behind me.

I turned to find myself confronting the sartorial disaster that were the Deplorables en masse. I won’t describe their appearance on the off chance that children may one day read this account.

‘Can I help you gentlemen?’ I asked, because politeness is always stylish.

‘Yeah,’ said Cutter. ‘You can give us the ten grand you owe us.’

‘Plus interest,’ said Lead Pipe.

‘Plus interest,’ said Cutter.

‘I’m rather afraid I haven’t got it,’ I said.

‘That’s a shame,’ said Cutter, and he turned to Lead Pipe. ‘Isn’t that a shame?’

‘It’s definitely a shame,’ said Lead Pipe.

The bundle in my arms squirmed a bit and made happy gurgling noises.

‘Since the money is not forthcoming, I’m afraid we’ll be forced to take measures,’ said Cutter. He looked once more to Lead Pipe. ‘Is your sledgehammer ready?’

By way of reply, Lead Pipe held up his sledgehammer and I couldn’t help but notice that there were brown stains on the long wooden handle.

‘And Gnasher,’ said Cutter. ‘Do you have a marlinspike about your person?”

Gnasher grunted and held up a pointed lump of metal that I can only presume, in my ignorance of all things nautical, was a marlinspike.

Cutter turned back to me and smiled nastily.

‘I’d say that you should take this like a man,’ said Cutter. ‘But that would be a waste of time.’

Never mind his rudeness, I had more pressing concerns.

‘Shush,’ I said. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’

Cutter’s face suffused to a fine shade of puce and he opened his mouth to continue his ranting, so I twitched aside the fine damask sheet to reveal my daughter nestled in her bundle of silk and high-thread Egyptian cotton.

Her beautiful brown face broke into a charming smile and, opening her chubby arms in a benediction, she laughed - a sound like water tumbling over stones.

Cutter gave me an astonished look and whispered.

‘Is this your…?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered back. ‘Her name is Wanda.’

‘But,’ said Cutter, ‘you can’t keep her here.’

‘She likes it here,’ I said indignantly.

‘It’s a dump,’ said Lead Pipe in a low rumble. ‘It’s not fit for human habitation.’

‘He’s right,’ said Cutter. ‘There’s damp and mould and the kitchen is a disgrace.’

‘And there’s no nursery,’ rumbled Lead Pipe.

‘And the garden is a jungle,’ said Gnasher. ‘Totally unsuitable.’

‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I can’t attend to any of these details if you break my legs.’

‘Obviously, we have to deal with the immediate shortcomings of the house before we return to the matter of breaking your legs,’ said Cutter. ‘Don’t we boys?’

‘I know a couple of builders,’ said Gnasher. ‘And Lead Pipe has green fingers. Ain’t that right?’

Lead Pipe cracked knuckles the size of walnuts. ‘That’s true,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘You should see his allotment,’ said Cutter. ‘He has compost heaps you wouldn’t believe.’

I thought of the rumours of what exactly happened to people who crossed the Deplorables and I decided that I actually did believe in those heaps.

‘About my legs,’ I said but Cutter wasn’t listening.

‘And there’s the roof,’ he said, and the others nodded.

‘About my legs,’ I said louder and then wished I hadn’t, because the trio were jerked out of their dreams of home improvement and focused on yours truly in a somewhat disconcerting manner.

‘What about them?’ asked Cutter, taking a step towards me.

‘I thought we might reach a more mutually beneficial arrangement,’ I said.

‘What kind of beneficial arrangement did you have in mind?’ he said.

‘There’s the matter of the way you dress,’ I said.

Cutter pushed his face towards mine.

‘What’s wrong with the way we dress?’ he said. ‘It’s practical.’

‘Stain resistant,’ said Lead Pipe.

‘Yes, but,’ I said, ‘it could be so much more.’

And Wanda laughed again and this time behind the chuckling stream was the crisp snap of fabric shears and the whistling hum of the shuttle as it plays back and forth across the thread.

‘But first,’ said Cutter, waving a blunt finger in my face, ‘we have to sort out the playroom.’

And that was that. I gave up the pharmaceutical trade and opened a boutique instead. Cutter and his boys were my first customers, and while they never stopped being an unsavoury gang of foul-mouthed thugs, at least when they broke legs they were well dressed doing it.

Merton, it turned out, had fled the squat the day we pumped out the water and, being in need of some security, assaulted a police officer so that he could spend a couple of nice peaceful years at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Lilith visited him regularly, and after he got out they ran an animal sanctuary just outside Abergavenny until their deaths, within three months of each other, in 2009. Nigel is still alive and taught cybernetics at Imperial College until his retirement a couple of years ago.

My daughter and I never got around to giving the boutique a name. It was always just ‘the shop’ and given that we never advertised it’s a wonder that we stay in business. We’re always at the cutting edge of fashion. We were out of flares while the Bay City Rollers were still number one and stocking bondage trousers before John Lyndon had dyed his hair. We’ve moved the shop a couple of times and, while we’re hard to find, we’re always close to the river.

So if you want to know what the herd are going to be wearing next spring, and if you can find us and are prepared to pay the price, you too can join the ranks of the stylish, the à la mode, and truly become a dedicated follower of fashion.

END

#rivers of london #ben aaronovitch #false value spoilers #false value #a dedicated follower of fashion #rol spoilers #rol short stories

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sunmoonandeddie · 5 years ago

Text

(FAKE) BOYFRIEND DOES MY MAKEUP CHALLENGE BECAUSE I GOT DUMPED

pairing: steve rogers x reader

word count: 4,029

summary: If there’s one thing you hate more than anything, it’s disappointing your viewers. But it’s looking like you might have to, since after your breakup with fellow YouTuber Thor Odinson, you have no one to film a highly requested Boyfriend Does My Makeup Challenge video. That is, until your best friend, Natasha, steps in.

warnings: swearing

masterlist

a/n: Let me know what you think!

“Nat, what the fuck am I going to do?” You asked with a groan, flopping back onto your bed. Your typically immaculate bedroom was in a state of disarray. Clothing was littered all over the floor, your bed hadn’t been made in days. Hell, you couldn’t remember when you last showered, let alone cleaned your room.

“First things first, you’re going to shower,” the redhead said, her nose scrunching up as she sat behind you on the bed. “Because—and I say this with so much in my heart—you reek.”

You huffed, glaring up at her. “I’ve been having a rough time.”

“I know,” she said, though that didn’t stop her from pulling you off the bed and pushing you towards the bathroom. She even went as far as starting the water for you and setting two towels on the toilet for you to grab. “I thought that it was mutual,” she said, having to almost shout over the roar of the water as she pulled herself up to sit on the sink counter.

You frowned at the wall as you lathered the shampoo into your hair. “It… was. But I don’t know…,” you said, “We were together for almost two years. I thought… I thought he was the love of my life. I guess it just hurts to be wrong.”

And that’s truly what the root of it was. You and Thor had been together for a little over a year and a half and it had easily been the best relationship of your life.

But that was clearly over.

You leaned your forehead against the wall, letting the hot water just run over you. “It probably says something that I’m mostly upset about not being able to give my viewers that Boyfriend Does My Makeup video, huh?”

Natasha barked out a laugh, a smile tugging at her lips. She knew you’d be okay after she got you out of your filth. Cleaning your room could come later. First thing after your shower was to get you out of the house. “At least it was mutual and he didn’t, like, cheat on you or anything.”

You scrubbed at your skin with a loofah, letting your conditioner sit in your hair. “We both know that Thor would never cheat on anyone. He can’t keep a secret to save his life, and he’d feel too bad.”

“You’ve got a point,” she said, picking up her phone as it dinged with a notification. “Hey, is it okay if we stop by Sam’s before going grocery shopping?”

“I don’t care,” you said, finishing washing up. You hadn’t been to her boyfriend’s house, but you’d known him since the two of them got together two years before. Every time you’d seen him, it was usually at Natasha’s house. “I thought he filmed on Wednesdays?”

“He does, but he left his favorite pair of tennis shoes at my place.”

Fitness gurus and their fucking tennis shoes.

You finally got out of the shower and brushed your teeth, pulling on fresh clothes for the first time in days. And yeah, it was a hoodie and a pair of leggings, but it still counted.

“No makeup?” Nat asked quietly, and you bit your lip, frowning. The thought of stepping into your filming room was too much at the moment, and that’s where you kept all your makeup.

Part of being a beauty guru and all.

Her hand went to your cheek, pinching it softly before heading for the front door. “Well, you know you look stunning no matter what.”

You let out a weak laugh. “Even when I’m crying?”

“Even when you’re crying.”

Your phone went off when you were almost to Sam’s, and you had to restrain yourself from throwing it out the window.

“Do you still have notifications on for him?” Natasha asked, looking at you with huge green eyes from the driver’s side.

“Um… No?” You hid your phone screen from her the best you could.

She reached over, grasping at it even though she was the one driving. “Hand me your phone.”

“What?! Nat, you’re driving!”

“Give me the phone!”

“No!” You were seriously considering rolling down the window when she snatched it from your hands.

She held onto it until she pulled into Sam’s driveway, reading, “@thorodinson tweeted: ‘New Video Posted: Life Update.’” She turned to you, saying, “Oh, come on. That doesn’t mean it’s about—”

You rolled your eyes, hitting the video and opening it. Your ex’s god-like face popped up on the screen, and he looked a little worse for wear.

“Hello, uh, everyone,” Thor said, rubbing his hands on his jeans. “So, uh… If you haven’t watched my last video, my girlfriend and I decided to end things. I know this’ll come as a shock to everyone—”

Natasha shut off the video, grumbling as she grabbed Sam’s tennis shoes from the backseat, “Okay, okay. But you two are the ones who decided to upload a breakup video together, à la Liza and David.”

“It’s not like we hate each other,” you said as the two of you finally got out of the car. You stared up at the house, eyes widening as you shoved your hands in the pocket of your hoodie. It was easily one of the biggest houses you’d ever seen. “We were good friends before we started dating, and even if it takes us a while, we’ll get back to that eventually. At least, I hope so.”

“That’s a tall order, Bambi.”

“Well, good thing he’s six foot four or whatever.”

She gave you the look that you called the Romanoff Stare, before slipping her key into the front door. “Sam? Baby? I’m here!” She called out, leading you inside.

“Sometimes I forget how much money Sam has,” you said as you looked around the front foyer. It was absolutely stunning, with gorgeous marble flooring and dark mahogany furniture. There was a grand staircase leading from the center of the room up to the second floor.

“It’s not just him,” she reminded you, leading you further inside. “His friends Steve and Bucky live with him, too.”

“Yeah, the… the Fitness Bros, right?” To be completely honest, you hadn’t ever seen any of the groups’ videos. It wasn’t exactly your thing, though you had seen Sam’s vlogs when Natasha was in them.

She bit her lip as she went quiet, clearly listening for where the residents of the house were. After a long moment, a grin spread over her lips. “Technically, they’re ShieldFitness, but they have that rivalry going on with the Science Bros, so yeah. The Fitness Bros. Steve and Bucky are chill. You’d like them.” She waved you along, leading you downstairs. As the door opened, you could hear music blasting and the sound of weights being lifted and dropped and lifted again. “Boys! I’m here!”

When you got to the bottom of the stairs, you froze.

The entire basement had been converted into a state-of-the-art gym.

“Holy shit,” you said, taking it all in. You hadn’t been to a gym in years, not since… Well.

“Hey, baby!”

You looked up just in time to see an extremely sweaty Sam Wilson bound over to Natasha and pull her into a passionate kiss. “Hey, Sam. Nice to see you, too.”

The man in question smirked as he pulled away from the kiss. “Hey, Bambi.” His face fell as he saw the state you were in. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine,” you said with a shrug, pulling out your phone. You could at least pretend to be okay if you kept your nose on your screen.

Natasha shook her head at Sam, mouthing, “She’s not.”

The two other men in the gym hadn’t yet noticed that they had visitors. That, or they were just deciding to ignore the two of you. You were okay with either option, if you were being honest. You hated meeting new people when you didn’t have makeup on, as horrible and insecure as it sounded. It was just… makeup was your thing. You didn’t leave the house without it ninety percent of the time.

You felt your heart sink as you saw the texts your manager had sent you.

Maria Hill: You need to find a video to replace the Boyfriend Does My Makeup one ASAP.

Maria Hill: People are extremely upset about you and Odinson breaking up.

Maria Hill: And I know that you’re upset, and this is going to sound like it’s in poor taste, but your breakup won’t keep people entertained for long. #thambibreakup already stopped trending a few days ago.

“Bambi? You good?”

Rubbing your eyes, you passed the phone to Natasha without another word. Your head was pounding from the effort it took not to cry.

She hummed as she stared down at the phone, though she looked up in surprise as she heard more weights crashing to the ground.

Across the gym, a blond that you vaguely remembered from some of Sam’s vlogs—Steve?—was doing deadlifts. He wiped his brow as he finished his last rep, smiling bashfully down at the ground as the brunet—Bucky, if your memory was right—rushed over.

“You’re steadily dead lifting three hundred pounds, man,” he said, fist bumping the other.

And it was like a light bulb went off in Natasha’s head. “Steve! Get over here!”

Sam eyed his girlfriend suspiciously. “What are you up to?”

“I’m fixing Bambi’s problem, and getting Steve out of the house and the gym,” she said under her breath, before turning to where the man was jogging towards the three of you, the brunet following close behind.

“Hey, Nat, what’s up?” He asked, grabbing his water bottle and chugging down half of it.

You tucked your phone into your hoodie pocket, figuring it’d be rude to be on it when you were getting introduced to new people.

“Steve, this is my best friend, Bambi,” she said, pushing you towards him. “Bambi, this is Steve.”

“Hi. Nice to meet you,” you said, smiling sheepishly as you held your hand out for him to shake. Despite the way you presented on your YouTube channel, you were actually rather shy. Meeting new people was nerve wracking and exhausting, to say the least.

“The pleasure’s all mine,” he said, shaking your hand firmly. It surprised you a little when he clasped his free hand over it, squeezing softly as his startling blue eyes met yours.

Your cheeks went red as he realized he’d been shaking your hand for a few moments longer than what was probably considered normal, and he dropped it quickly, rubbing the back of his neck.

“And I’m Bucky,” the brunet said, inserting himself into the conversation. He was grinning, knowing that he had interrupted what one might consider a moment.

“Hi, Bucky, I’m Bambi,” you said with a giggle, your cheeks going red as he shot you a playful wink.

Natasha rolled her eyes at his antics before turning back to the blond. “So, Steve, how would you feel about doing Bambi’s makeup?”

“What?!” You whirled on Natasha, eyes widening.

His brows furrowed as his eyes darted back and forth between the two of you. “I mean… I’m not opposed. What for?”

“Bambi was going to film a Boyfriend Does My Makeup video with Thor Odinson before they broke up last week, and she’s worried about disappointing her viewers while her manager is on her ass about putting out more content.”

“Look, it’s ridiculous,” you said, shaking your head rapidly. “You don’t have—”

“I’d love to.”

“—to do it just because—” You broke off, blinking at him slowly. “Wait… What?”

Steve shrugged, a small smile tugging at his lips. “I’d love to be in your video. I don’t know anything about makeup, but I’ll do my best.”

You couldn’t help but grin. “It kind of makes it better if you don’t know anything.” For just a second, you forgot about all the shit surrounding your breakup as you stared into his eyes.

“Name a time and a place, sugar.”

The next morning, you rushed around your house, desperately trying to make sure there was no sign of your post-breakup-sadness left. You’d spent the night before cleaning your room and scrubbing down the kitchen. There’d been dishes piled up from the past week, covered in whatever you’d managed to make in your stupor after getting through the first few days with zero appetite.

You had just finished setting up your filming room when you heard the knock on your front door. “Coming!” You shouted, bounding down the stairs. Your socked feet slid against the hardwood floor, and you took a deep breath before throwing open the door, revealing Steve. “Hey!”

“Hey, yourself,” he said, before holding up a takeout bag. “I got us lunch. Natasha mentioned that you were dying to try that new sushi place on forty-second, so I figured…”

“You didn’t have to do that,” you said, shock written all over your face. He was already filming a video for your channel as a favor. Not to mention, on such short notice. Hell, you’d never done a collaboration without more than three days’ notice, let alone less than twenty-four hours.

He stepped inside as you led him through, up to the makeup room.

“We can eat while we do the video,” you said, flicking on the light for your filming room. It was a little dimmer than most normal ceiling lights, but you kept it that way since you just used a ring light for your videos anyway. “This is where the magic happens.”

“This is… amazing,” he said with a bit of a laugh as he took in your whole set up. “This is way nicer than the stuff we use on our channels.”

You shrugged, your cheeks going a little red as you sat down on the bench in front of your vanity. “Yeah, but I’m sure your equipment can handle a lot more roughhousing, since it’s used in a gym and everything.”

Steve hummed in response, the trance not breaking for another few seconds.

When he finally took his seat next to you, you let out a long huff of air. “Do we just want to wing it?” You asked, biting your lip.

“Whatever you want, sugar,” he said, his warm smile reassuring you.

After a final nod for confirmation, you grabbed the little remote for your camera and hit the record button. After a second, the little red light appeared and you grinned, immediately jumping into your YouTuber personality. “Hello, gorgeous, and welcome to my channel!” You knew that your subscribers would be able to tell that you were a little bit off, but then again, practically the entire YouTube community knew about the breakup by now. “So, as you can probably tell by the title of this video, we’re going to be doing the Boyfriend Does My Makeup Challenge. But…” You trailed off, motioning to Steve. “This isn’t the usual tall, blond, hunk of a man you’re used to seeing. This is Steve Rogers, A.K.A. one-third of the channel ShieldFitness.”

“Hello!” He said, his blue eyes twinkling. He was kind of mesmerized by just how many products were in front of him, and he could see several makeup towers against the wall, out of view, that definitely held much, much more.

“Steve has so graciously agreed to do this video after Natasha guilt tripped him, because I got dumped,” you said, grinning as Steve barked out a laugh. He clearly hadn’t been expecting how blunt you were going to be with the situation. Your gaze softened a little as you took in the sight of him laughing, his hand clapping over his chest as his nose scrunched up.

He was… quite beautiful.

“So, what do you say we jump right in?”

Steve nodded, letting out one last, breathless chuckle as he tried to regain his composure. “Alright, uh… I have no idea what I’m doing, so we’ll see how this goes.” He stared at the products on your desk for what felt like forever.

“I haven’t put on any products at all. This is my face fresh from the shower.” You suddenly remembered that he had picked you up lunch, and you grabbed the bag. “While you do that, I’m going to unpack some of this food.” While he tried to decide where to start, you continued to talk to the camera, setting take out containers no the vanity, “Can we just talk about how amazing this man is? He almost gets blackmailed into doing this video, and he still brings me food without me asking.”

“Uh… We start with this stuff, right?” He asked, holding up a bottle of lotion. “Natasha puts… something like this on her face before makeup, I think.”

Lotion.

You shrugged, trying not to make a face. “This is all on you, buddy.”

God, you hoped he didn’t put actual lotion on your face.

Helplessly, you watched as he squirted a little bit out onto his fingers, before turning to you. “May I?” He asked, waiting until you nodded to start gently rubbing it into your skin.

The fact that he’d put lotion on your face instead of moisturizer meant that you were going to have to wash your face immediately after, no matter how the makeup turned out. If you left it on for too long, there was no way your face wasn’t going to break out.

“You’re grimacing,” he said with a groan, pursing his lower lip as he finished rubbing the lotion into your face. “I already messed it up, didn’t I?”

“No, no,” you giggled, shaking your head. “Keep going.”

After a moment’s hesitation, he turned back to the neatly organized products. “Uh… Well, this says primer, so that means it has to go first, right?” He frowned, realizing he wasn’t going to get an answer from you and he wasn’t allowed to use his phone.

It was kind of killing you that he was using his fingers for everything so far.

“Can you at least tell me the order you do things in?” He asked, looking a little overwhelmed. “Because my ex did her makeup face, eyebrows, eyes, lips. But Natasha does it eyebrows, eyes, face, lips when she does it at our house.”

“I do it how Natasha does it.” You took the momentary break to snatch a takeout container marked ‘spider roll’ and a pair of chopsticks.

He nodded, scanning the vanity until he found what he must’ve been looking for. “Okay, eyebrows.” He held up a little Anastasia Dipbrow, and you could’ve wept with happiness at his choice.

There was hope for him, yet.

Steve took a moment to dig through your brushes, before picking out a Morphe M124 brush—a firm shadow brush definitely not meant for eyebrows. “So, how’d you get the name ‘Bambi?’” He asked as he leaned in close, carefully bringing the brush to your brows. His breath smelled of mint gum, and his hand was a pleasant warmth against your face.

“Because Nat says I’m the clumsiest person she’s ever met,” you said with a short laugh, trying your best not to mess him up. “She said that I remaindered her of a newborn fawn. We actually became friends because I tripped and spilled queso all over her when we were in college, and then sat with her in the laundry room for two hours.

You had no idea what happened with eyeshadow, since he made you close your eyes during the entirety of it. And you were surprised with how well he managed to put on mascara.

“I use this thing, right? And… what’s it called?... I bounce it or something,” he said, brows furrowing as he stared at one of your many Beauty Blenders. He picked out a foundation from the eighteen you had sitting on the vanity, and he carefully began to drag it across your skin.

Dry. He was dragging your dry Beauty Blender across your face.

“I don’t like that you’re biting your lip,” he muttered, though there was an embarrassed smile on his lips.

“Why not?” You laughed.

“It makes me nervous because I know I’m doing something wrong,” he said, his blue eyes flickering up to meet yours for just a second before he quickly looked away again, his cheeks tinging pink.

“You’re doing… fantastic,” you reassured him, though the both of you knew it was only half-true at best.

He shot you a look, and your heart fluttered a little in your chest.

Steve went quiet for a few moments, before asking, “So what happened between you and Thor?” After a second, he quickly added, “You don’t have to tell me. And I don’t know if you like doing jump cuts in your editing or if you even want people to know what happened and—”

“Steve, it’s fine,” you said, effectively cutting him off. You took in a deep breath. “Uh… Well… We just kind of grew apart, I guess. We both want different things from life and, hell, his move out to L.A. just kind of showed us how much it wasn’t working anymore. We’ll always be friends, and I’ll always love him, but… I don’t know. It’s more of a family kind of love now, if that makes sense?”

“It makes total sense.”

“And it was no one’s fault. Truly.” You closed your eyes as you spotted him grab your translucent powder. Usually you used it to bake your face, but he just did an all over dusting. “What we had was really, really good, and I’ve never had anything bad to say about him.” You paused. “Except that sometimes he forgot to put the seat down and I’d fall into the toilet at three in the morning.”

He barked out a laugh, shaking his head in amusement. You could feel him putting on what you hoped was blush and contour, but you had no way to tell without opening your eyes, and you were just enjoying having someone do your makeup for once and not the other way around.

“Okay,” he said after smearing what you prayed was lipstick. “I think I’m done.”

“Alright, let’s see what you’ve done,” you said, pulling out a hand mirror. You’d put the mirror you usually kept in the center of the ring light beneath the vanity, in order to keep yourself from peeking. Your eyes widened as you took in your face, your hand slapping over your mouth.

Your foundation was a little bit thin, with how he’d dragged it across your skin and foregone concealer. Your eyebrows were a good shape, though they were extremely blocked out. Your eyes were alright. He’d gone simple, only using a shimmery pink eye shadow on the lid. But, once again, he hadn’t used concealer to set a base. It didn’t look bad, just not as good as it could’ve gone. There was even a little bit of gold in the corner of your eyes. Your mascara was only covering about half of your lashes, and he hadn’t done your bottom ones, but that was probably out of fear, and you wouldn’t fault him that. Your contour was a little heavy, and your blush almost nonexistent. Your lipstick was… acceptable.

“Ta da,” he said, trailing off as he waited for your reaction.

A laugh bubbled from your lips as you touched your face. “This isn’t the best I’ve seen, but it definitely isn’t the worst,” you said.

“You know what,” he mused, a triumphant grin on his face. “I’ll take it.”

Later that night, after you spent three hours editing everything and posted the video, your phone dinged.

Maria Hill: The Boyfriend Does My Makeup Challenge video was brilliant. No one can shut up about how cute it is.

You hesitated for a moment before muttering, “Fuck it,” and shooting a text off to Steve.

Bambi: Everyone loves the video :)

It took less than two minutes to receive a response.

Steve Rogers: That’s great! Let me know if you ever want to do another video! Goodnight, sugar :)

Bambi: Goodnight, Steve :)

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