#i always love a good punk/nerd prompt

[darcymariaphoster]

would it be too predictable for me to suggest punk den x nerd nor? lol. no pressure if this isnt enough of a prompt!! 💕

Sorry for the long wait, but I hope you enjoy!

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Lukas can still hear his grandmother admonish him with a “Don’t stare; it’s rude” as he glances quickly back down at the novel he’s trying to read. 

After a few hours of studying indoors, he’s decided that a change of scenery is in order and headed outside. For the past few months, as the weather has started warming up, Lukas has taken to going out into the courtyard of the university to take breaks. His favorite thing is that the campus is across from a strip of older stores-- his favorite used bookstore, an antique store, a record and vintage music shop, and a coffee shop on the corner that he could spend an entire paycheck on weekly. But it’s also where Mathias seems to like to spend his leisure time, outside of the vintage music shop with his friends. 

Maybe it’s because of his strict upbringing, but there’s something so attractive about the stupid way he does his hair, all the piercings in his face that glint in the sun, and the tattoos that he shows off through the summer months. They’ve sort of known each other, or at least of each other, since grade school. One of the many “benefits” of living in the same city for his whole life, he supposes. It’s just that they’ve never quite made it to being “friends” in all the time that they knew each other. They’d been partners in some projects in school several times, they had mutual friends, and they’d bumped into each other at different parties over the years. 

But once graduation hit, they’d drifted even more. Their friend groups had gotten more distant, and while Lukas had decided to go to college, Mathias hadn’t. From what Lukas had managed to ascertain over the past couple of years, Mathias had taken off to travel for a while -- old friends that he seemed to keep in loose contact with saying that he’d been in Spain, Scotland, the Czech Republic, and Brazil at different points. It seems that his being back is more recent, and it’s definitely made the view better for Lukas. A persistent crush that just won’t go away.

This time, it seems that Lukas’s staring was definitely noticed, as he can hear the heavy footsteps of boots approach him. He resists looking up until he hears a voice above him say, “I don’t think I have a single memory of you without a book in front of your face.”

Damn. Lukas scowls up at Mathias, tapping the pages of the book in mock irritation. It’s hard to keep himself from blushing at the idea of Mathias having memories of them that he thinks on any sort of often. “Too cool for school still, I see?” 

Mathias snorts as he sits across from him, folding his hands onto the table. “Never found anything that interested me.” He pauses and, in a more thoughtful tone, adds, “Not academically, that is.” He emphasizes his words by looking Lukas over, taking his time until Lukas can’t suppress the blush that paints the tips of his ears. 

Lukas rolls his eyes and picks his book up, propping it in front of his face to block the view of Mathias’s amused smirk. “You’re so full of it.” But he doesn’t mind Mathias’s flirting, despite any of his weak protests. “Then maybe you weren’t looking hard enough.”

Resting his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, Mathias makes a thoughtful humming sound and Lukas peeks over the top of his book at him. His nose piercing glints in the sun as he wrinkles his nose. “Nah, I looked pretty far and wide. I’m pretty confident that academics aren’t really my thing.” He smiles at him, and it’s the sweetest thing to see from a guy with half a dozen piercings in his face. “You know… You’re more than welcome to try and change my mind.” 

Lukas would very much like to ignore some of the implications in that suggestion, but he finds himself lowering his book to study him. “When was the last time you read a proper book?”

“When was the last time you listened to some good music?” Mathias’s smile grows and he reminds him a bit of an imp. “I’m sensing a trade in the works. Maybe a date.” Closing the book and setting it on the table, Lukas pushes it towards Mathias who raises his eyes in surprise as he really gets a good look at his face. “Oh, you got brave. Little nerd Lukas got a new piercing, hm? Looks good on you.”

He’s referring to the little nose piercing that he’d gotten last year, in some feeble attempt to “improve” his image. Lukas feels as though he’d never outgrown his high school look, which had primarily been made up of clothes that his grandparents had picked out for him. He’s been trying to work on his own style, but he keeps feeling like he’s falling a bit short, not exactly sure where to start. So he started with a new piercing, inspired by the only person whose style was any sort of inspiring. Not that he’s going to tell him that. Mathias absolutely does not need an ego boost. “If you can get more than three chapters into this, you can ask me out.”

Mathias picks up the book and flips it over to read the back, his eyebrows furrowing a bit. “This sounds pretty dry. You read this for fun?” When Lukas gives him a sort of soft sound of affirmation, he shrugs and points at him with the book. “I’ll be back tomorrow -- same time, same place. Dress up a bit. I have a place in mind for dinner.” Grinning mischievously, Mathias stands and flips open the book as he walks away. “Always nice to see you, Luka.”

Taking that as his cue that his break is over, Lukas takes his glasses off to rub his face with one hand before replacing them and standing. He grabs his bag and beelines back into the building to go hide in the library until his next class. If Mathias is serious, the view might have just gotten exponentially better.

[eyesofshinigami]

3, 2, 1, Fight!

Rating: General Audiences

Tags: Meet Ugly, Steve and Dustin are brothers, pre-relationship

Written for the STWG daily drabble prompt: not a meet cute but a meet ugly

This is not at all how Steve pictured his Saturday going. He could be anywhere, instead, he’s standing in a comic book shop, fighting over a toy with another grown man who looks like he’s going to beat Steve over the head with it.

“Let go!” the guy yells, trying to tug the action figure out of Steve’s hands

“No, you let go!” Steve yells back, yanking it back. He has to give the guy props, though. He’s just as relentless as Steve is.

The guy sputters, an attractive shade of pink coloring his cheeks as his curly hair falls in his face. Wait, what? “Fuck off, why are you even here? Don’t you belong in a gym or something?”

Steve scoffs, still yanking. “Does it matter why I’m here? Just let go already!”

Dustin had been asking for this action figure for months now, talking about it and showing Steve newspaper clippings and TV commercials. Steve, being the good big brother he is, promised their mom that he would do his best to get it for him for his upcoming birthday. He’d be damned if he was going to let some punk, albeit a very attractive punk, take it away from him. Why did they only put three out on the shelf anyway?

They play tug of war for another few minutes, until the bewildered clerk, who had been watching their exchange, finally butts in and says, “Uh, I think I might have another one in the back? Can you wait here?”

They both nod, neither of them letting go of the toy. “I wish he would have said that in the first place,” Steve grouses, watching the clerk disappear behind a door. “Why they only put out a couple of copies of a toy I will never understand.”

It’s Hot Guy’s turn to sputter. “Toy? TOY? This, sir, is the limited edition statue of Kas the Betrayer that Wizard of the Coast put out to celebrate the anniversary of his DnD release! Not that you would care about any of that, you troglodyte.”

Steve has no idea what any of that means. “Oh, so that’s why Dustin wanted it. Makes sense now. He loves that guy.”

“Wait, it’s not for you?”

“Uh, no? It’s for my kid brother’s birthday. He loves that Dorks and Dragons game and he ran a Kas… uh… campaign? Last year? It was his first time. Kas is kind of a big deal to him.”

The other guy starts to look a little contemplative, but that’s when the clerk appears with another, much less rankled looking box. Steve immediately lets the one in his hands go and takes that one instead. “Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”

The clerk shrugs and heads back behind the counter. Meanwhile, Hot Guy tugs his hair in front of his face. “Uh, look. I’m sorry I said such shitty things over a toy. It’s just, Kas is kind of a big deal to me too. You could have just said.”

Steve waves him off. “No worries, I get it. But now we both have one.” He pauses and considers a second. It’s worth a shot. “You could make it up to me over lunch in the food court.”

Hot Guy’s eyes go wide. “Are you serious?”

Okay, wow. “Well, I was, but you can just say no, you don’t have to-“

“No, no, no!” Hot Guy says, waving his arms around, nearly dropping the box he fought so hard for. “No, I’d like that. Eddie,” he says, holding out a hand. That pretty pink flush is back. Steve kind of wants to see how far it goes down.

“Steve. Now let’s go, before any more wayward nerds decide they want to fight us over these.”

Eddie, dork that he is, bows and motions towards the cash register, “By your leave, my prince.”

Steve rolls his eyes. He always did like the nerdy ones.

[5sosfanfictioncatalogue]

Nerdy!5SOS Masterlist

7 Minutes In Heaven (ao3) - xdistorted_cliffordx luke/ashton T, 54k

Summary: "Who wants to play?"

Ashton is a very dedicated party-goer, being at one each weekend. It's literally his life, he thinks. Though, when he's invited to one particular party, they decide to change it up a bit and play party games after a few hours and everyone is well buzzed. Ashton's never been big into party games, but he figures why not? They're rated R games, so they're bound to be fun.

Luke hates parties. He hates spending his free time socializing, period. He would rather spend a Saturday night on the couch, watching Criminal Minds and stuffing his face with pizza. But one night, his friend forces him to go to a party. Obviously, he hates it, especially when the party games come out. He's forced to play them and he doesn't really like anyone he's going to have to play against. Luke just wants to go home before all this supposed 'fun' starts.

Little do both boys know, that one certain game is going to bring them both together and may even change Luke's usual routine of not partying or Ashton's obsession with partying.

do the things that you'd only read about (ao3) - heartbreakgirl michael/luke N/R, 5k

Summary: When he looks over, Michael's eyes are open and he's grinning from ear to ear.

“I love you.”

He smiles shyly, eyes rolling fondly. “I love you too, Michael.”

or, book worm Luke & bad boy Michael

fight so dirty but your love's so sweet (ao3) - softirwin luke/ashton, michael/calum T, 11k

Summary: Luke hates a good ninety-five percent of his job.

A solid thirty percent of that comes from the fact that he works as a receptionist at a hotel, which he thinks is possibly the most thankless job humanity could possibly have created. A further ten comes from the fact that his desk is right next to the kitchen, meaning mouth-watering smells are constantly wafting under his nose, and Luke’s not allowed to eat on shift.

Fifty-five percent of it, though, is Ashton.  

-

written for the prompt 'lashton bad boy'

Have Faith In This Fragile World (ao3) - SilentlyFighting michael/calum, luke/ashton N/R, 19k

Summary: Michael Clifford is well known in his school, not for being popular, far from it, he is the nerd. The goody-two-shoes hasn't had the best past but his peers do not know this and a couple of the football team decide that he is their next target. A mysterious group of boys make an appearance, saving him multiple times, and when Michael runs out of money to buy food, they even find ways to get him food.

The boys do not scare him that much but they certainly catch his attention. Michael learns the names of two of the boys but the leader is set to keep his identity a secret. But, when Michael has another run in with the football team and they use him as bait, will the boys identity reveal itself?

Here's what he told me (ao3) - ShyyyVictoria luke/ashton, michael/calum G, 1k

Summary: All Luke's aloud to do is study. Ashton changes that.

i just wanna be bad enough for you (ao3) - metallicmoons michael/ashton M, 2k

Summary: just a typical adorable nerd!ashton and punk!michael fic because those are honestly my favourite.

kiss me better (ao3) - waywardaussies luke/ashton T, 1k

Summary: luke hates seeing his boyfriend hurt.

Polariod (ao3) - FxckHood luke/calum G, 1k

Summary: Calum used to take photos of beautiful things around him to later look and admire them. When he meets Luke , he decides to take photos of him instead.

Room 247 (ao3) - fivesecondsofaus luke/ashton M, 1k

Summary: Luke and Ashton are new dorm room mates and Luke can't keep his hands off the nerdy boy.

take my hand, take my whole life too (ao3) - booksteaandcake calum/ashton G, 2k

Summary: calum always turns up to ashton's drunk and they always end up having sex. it's nice but it also kind of hurts when they are insanely in love and don't even talk about it.

Tattoos. (ao3) - papi_chulo luke/michael G, 280

Summary: punk!Michael takes his boyfriend nerd!Luke with him to get his new tattoo, a tattoo dedicated to Luke.

teenage televised taping of love (ao3) - fffearless luke/ashton T, 10k

Summary: It's dumb for Luke to get excited that Ashton would say something like that to him when he's about a million percent sure he's only into girls and this means nothing for his hopeless crush but he can't help the surge of butterflies tickling his stomach with the flap of their wings.

(Or the one where Luke likes Ashton then lots of things happen then he hates him then he likes him again anyway)

The Nerd and The Jock (ao3) - Shirosaki (orphan_account) michael/luke G, 407

Summary: The blonde knew it was impossible for him to date Michael, like, this is Michael Clifford he was talking about. The number one jock in his school, did bad things, broke stuff in school, spray painted on the hallways, on the side of the building, embarrassed plenty of teachers. There was no way that Michael Clifford would ever want to date Luke Hemmings, the boy who was the nerd of his grade, always got A's and never went lower than a 98%.

Tutor (ao3) - onceuponatime michael/luke E, 11k

Summary: “And you agreed to do it because?” Ashton says, rubbing his apple on his sweater before taking a bite. His chemistry textbook lies open on the grass in front of him but his eyes are too busy looking over to the football field, where Calum is currently engrossed in a game. When he sees Ashton looking, he smiles and waves, and Ashton’s face turns bright red. Luke chuckles.

“Cause I need the money. And it looks good on college applications.” Luke lays down on the grass, putting his head in Ashton’s lap. “Yeah, but it’s him. He’s failed every test this year.”

Luke tutors Michael in math.

Wrong Way (ao3) - boomercal calum/ashton E, 9k

Summary: Two high schoolers who won't admit they think the other is cute and some well-intentioned friends means that while Ashton's looking for Calum on the Hockey field, Calum's looking for Ashton at the library; what's to be done when you're pretty sure that cute guy in your English class is avoiding you?

you make me feel like a million bucks (ao3) - michaels luke/ashton G, 3k

Summary: anything is more fun than picking up trash for community service, even making out with the person who got you there in the first place.

[fortressofserenity]

Notes on other characters

John Zelensky

Other than the name being taken from a Ukrainian president, I don’t think there are any portrayals of Goth guys in the media that aren’t stereotypical, aren’t played up for their weirdness and don’t sexualise them much either. In the sense where when you have Goth girls, they are played up for their weirdness and are often made into love interests for non-Goths. This is what leads us to the sexualisation of Goth girls by many nerds, not that sexualising Goth guys would be any better. But that despite many women going for the brooding, tall, dark and handsome type that a good number of Goth guys would easily fit into, the male equivalent to the Buxom Goth Girl meme doesn’t exist.

The closest would be women wanting a nerdy husband or boyfriend, even if they could always get their tall, dark and handsome fix from Goth guys if they’re open to them. I highly suspect that despite the persistence of the tall, dark and handsome man fix, the Goth fashion sense seems too severe for other women’s liking. John Zelensky tends to dress in black even as a superhero/police officer, he listens to Goth and punk bands a lot and even plays in one when he has the time for it. In all honesty, I actually listened to 1980s Goth bands like Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees and eventually the Clash and the Ramones.

It’s also nice to have a male Jewish character that’s more Joey Ramone than South Park’s Kyle Schwartz, if you get my catch since it seems Jewish rockers don’t get represented much in fiction despite the Clash’s Mick Jones being well-known enough to get any media mention. His mother was Jewish and his father was Welsh, prompting my father to say something like ‘jewels, keeper of the family jewels’. Then we have Perry Farrell from Jane’s Addiction who was even in a Goth band called Psicom, despite their prominence in music that Jewish musicians, let alone a Jewish punker or a Jewish goth are pretty underrepresented in fiction.

Somebody on Reddit pointed out that since television programmes are often interrupted by adverts that many writers and producers resort to stock characters instead, which would explain why Jewish punk rockers and goths are this underrepresented in fiction. Despite the fact that there are at least either three or two books about Jewish punk rockers, in the world of fiction you’re far likelier to encounter another Kyle Schwartz than a Joey Ramone, a Mick Jones or a Perry Farrell. It’s something that I don’t see often in fiction, let alone have a character that’s clearly based on any Jewish rock musician. There are attempts at kicking back the stereotype.

But I suppose a Jewish Goth or a Jewish punk is the last frontier in fiction, if because we don’t see these characters that much, let alone outside of Israeli fiction and media since these kinds of characters likely do exist there. John Zelensky, if he does make an official appearance in any published video game and comic, would become the first of his kind because other than fictionalised portrayals of the Ramones there isn’t a single Jewish punk rocker in fiction that I know of. There isn’t a single male Jewish goth character in fiction either, Felicity Smoak could count but the preponderance of female Goths even in live action points out to a fetishisation.

Especially as pointed out by Kai Decadence that there’s a tendency for straight male writers and the like to fetishise Goth women, made more evident by that they don’t have an accompanying male counterpart. There’s not a lot of male Goth characters that I can think of, let alone one who’s even an adult in a live action programme. I also think the way the characters are written are done by somebody who’s not into Goth music, which is central to the Goth subculture even if you needn’t to be knee deep there to enjoy that music, but it’s not hard to see the way female Goths are portrayed as if they’re there for non-Goths. Meanwhile this doesn’t happen much to their male counterparts, it does feel really fetishy if it was just Goth girls who’re the love interests of non-Goths.

So to remedy this John’s girlfriend is another Goth-punk named Nur binti Mamat, she owns a record shop that he frequents and she also goes to his concerts or gigs when she has the time to. She’s very supportive of his veganism, even though she’s not as strict as he is as she enjoys eating cheese. But they share similar attitudes to animal welfare enough to be this compatible in value as well as in interest, I have written a story featuring a Goth and his similar minded buddies. It becomes telling that whenever writers depict Goth girls, they never become love interests of a Goth guy that this really is fetishising in a way than if they bothered giving them Goth boyfriends.

I even said before that Goth guys might fit the tall, dark and handsome meme pretty well, not to mention they have none of the toxic masculinity that infests nerd spaces that they’d actually be more attractive this way. As what somebody said in a Goth subreddit that Goth guys are free to get something off their chests when they feel like it, that Goth girls are allowed to have those hard feelings without being called out for it are way less toxic than the petty name-calling a number of male geeks do whenever there’s a gender-nonconforming character around. Like how some geek guys call any effeminate or feminist guy ‘soyboy’ is telling.

The fact that geek circles are marred by misogynistic movements like Gamergate and Comicsgate should make Goth guys more appealing to women this way, since they really are in touch with their feminine side in a way a number of geek guys aren’t. It’s not a surprise that geek circles revolve around super-macho male cartoon characters, that it’s enough to alienate women who aren’t into this sort of thing. But sadly it doesn’t go as it should have, especially if you have women suspicious of the way geek culture portrays female characters. Goth circles don’t look so bad anymore in this light really.

Hector Yang

Initially he was going to manipulate volcanism but I felt this was too destructive for him to pull off, let alone as a cop-superhero that I have to swap it for heat manipulation the way Jojo’s Jobin Higashikata does. Interestingly enough, Hirohiko Araki who wrote and drew the Jojo stories admits he doesn’t want to write about anything involving fire as he finds it too destructive. It’s not that light and heat are any less destructive, but I feel one could get a lot more from either one of them than one would with fire. I actually came up with the character named Carl Agbayani whose stand Moonchild manipulates the five Daoist elements.

The only real difference is that light replaces fire in here, which means he could make either himself or something invisible, create glares to light his way in the dark and blind somebody with and make lasers to destroy stuff with. If my understanding is true, then Araki also knows there’s not much one can do with fire either. Perhaps that’s why he went with mere heat when it comes to Jobin Higashikata, it may not be as showy as fire is but it does lend itself to odd applications. Especially where Jobin has the ability to raise body temperatures to the point of giving Yasuho Hirose a nosebleed and could have burst somebody else’s eyeballs this way.

In Yang’s case he could even store heat in metal objects enough to make them untouchable to those who’re going to use them to attack or kill somebody with, make something melt without causing smoke and so on. I guess this was also true for another character named Lauren Pennington, she’s the one who appeared in the Wildcats comics and initially had the ability to simply raise temperatures. But it eventually it became outright fire, if because it’s a lot showier and easier to illustrate. In this story and game, the real pyrokinetic is Mamadou Mbodj and he himself doesn’t work in law enforcement so he’s just a cook. The one white-haired character whose powers actually have more to do with heat, or rather fire in her case, is Touhou Project’s Fujiwara. She has white-blond hair and wears a white blouse with red trousers, and her power is pyrokinesis. Go figure, since it’s tiring seeing another pyrokinetic redhead around.

Not to mention that he differs from Lady Death in that he’s not only pale, but also has vision problems like he’s really nearsighted, doesn’t like bright glares and reads large-print or reader-friendly texts. That’s more in line with those who actually have albinism where they’re not just pale, but also have difficulty seeing. They’re not totally blind as much as it’s got to do with the way their bodies turned out to be, so much so that at times they’d risk getting really bad sunburns or even cancer if left untreated. One might wonder why Lady Death never bothered wearing more modestly, if she risks being ashamed of how sunburnt her body would get if exposed to the sun for long.

It’s something not a lot of cartoonists put into thought when creating characters with albinism, especially the more severe versions of it and it’s not unlike how some cartoonists create human characters with dwarfism, without knowing that if they keep illustrating gags where they could reach something high without hurting themselves real badly because those are literally out of reach for them. It’s as if their condition’s just for show and not something they actually have, along with the disabilities that accompany those. That’s one way of knowing that they’re written by somebody who’s able-bodied, they generally don’t have that experience first or secondhand.

That’s why they’re written and portrayed the way they are, they’re not somebody who either has albinism or dwarfism. But more of an able-bodied person’s idea of them, not their lived experiences and reality which is why Lady Death doesn’t get sunburns despite being so pale. There are instances where there are realistic portrayals of those with albinism, but I feel this is outweighed by a sheer number of those that get it right in some way or another. Not to mention it’s possible for East Asians to have blond hair, fair skin and blue eyes due to a milder form of albinism (i.e. permits a degree of pigmentation or melanin), so this is why Hector Yang’s the way he is.

While Usagi Tsukino and Naruto may not be intended to have albinism, the way they are written and named are things only a Japanese person would come up with (as what somebody else pointed out). They’d turn out real differently if they were created by somebody who’s not Japanese, which tells you about the cultural milieus these characters were conceived in. Even if you have cartoon characters who don’t know look East Asian (the way westerners would see them as), they are East Asian culturally when those tics show up. It seems the way non-East Asians imagine East Asians as don’t immediately nor consistently apply to the way East Asians see themselves as, which shows in the way the latter create comics featuring themselves.

So Hector Yang belongs to the latter category in a way where he practises filial piety, eats with chopsticks, is afraid of the number 4 and gives money in red envelopes every Lunar New Year despite being unusually pale for an East Asian (due to albinism). I could get not wanting to have a white-passing character but the way the Japanese still manage to characterise white-looking anime characters as Japanese makes more sense if or when you immerse yourselves in Japanese culture, so Usagi Tsukino and Naruto Uzumaki are still Japanese in other regards despite appearances to the contrary. Somebody who’s French will never get ninjas as deeply as the Japanese do because it’s not ingrained in their culture.

That’s one way of knowing that even if Naruto is blond and blue-eyed, there’s still a part of him and the stories he appear in that owes a lot to Japanese culture. Same goes for Sailor Moon if it weren’t for the presence of Shintoism, since one of her friends is a shrine maiden. Somebody who’s brought up outside of that culture will not get this well, they’re not going to depict this as well. It wouldn’t matter if Hector Yang has white-blond hair, pale skin and blue eyes because he’s still Chinese culturally speaking, so he’s closer to Naruto Uzumaki in some way. Likewise Marvel’s Thor may take cues from Nordic mythology, but due to being written by Americans for so long that its relationship with Scandinavian cultures would be this intangible.

Especially when somebody pointed out that his relationship with his brother is more like the one in the Bible and more specifically the Old Testament than it does with Norse mythology proper, so it seems it’s one thing to look Scandinavian or white but it’s another to be of another culture altogether. If looking the part doesn’t always count, then the actual cultural philosophy and practises matter more in what makes something Japanese/American/Swedish/whatever nationality one could come up with. Not to mention that Hector Yang’s parents are Chinese immigrants, just as Maurice Lu’s father is a Chinese immigrant himself.

Fabrice Tientcheu

When it comes to African characters in western superhero comics, they rarely if ever come from actual African countries and rarer still if western superhero comics writers get those countries and cultures right. Storm being the rare character from western superhero comics to come from an actual African country (Kenya) and even then the writers often botch this, this is why she never speaks a lick of Swahili (let alone Luo or Gikuyu) and celebrates Boxing Day every 26 December. (Ghanaians also do this too as I heard on the radio before, well online at that.) There are monoglot Kenyans but even then I don’t get actual Kenyan vibes from her.

In the world of DC and Marvel, superheroes from actual Central African countries like Cameroon and Democratic Republic of Congo are either super rare or practically nonexistent. It’s easier to come up with a Wakandan than have a character come from Cameroon, though this is changing for the better to some extent. Disney (Marvel’s owner) has recently released the miniseries Iwaju, which is set in a futuristic Nigeria. It’s even got Nigerian talent behind the scenes that there’s going to be a Nigerianness that would be lost if it didn’t have any Nigerian talent on board. So it helps to have real representation behind the scenes as well, really.

Either that or any real appreciation for such countries and cultures like those, like I said there aren’t a lot of DC and Marvel characters who actually come from real African countries. If they did then they’d constitute a really small minority, I don’t think there’s a single DC/Marvel character hailing from Zambia or Namibia though it’d be cool if they did. There’s one Nigerian mutant in Marvel comics and her codename is Tempest, though sadly I feel there are only two Marvel characters that I know of who both come from real African countries. It’s easier to exoticise Africa than to portray it and its countries and peoples as they really are, so that’s why countries like Wakanda exist in Marvel.

Even when it’s now possible to access to any African media online these days, where you could stream African bands and musicians as well as African radio stations, download African-made texts for free in some way and head over to African blogs and news websites for more information and so on. To the point where I feel some of the people who write and depict these characters don’t engage with any African culture that much, if because they themselves don’t immerse in it in some way. Well any African culture in some manner, finally due to the Internet but it’s something not a lot of writers bother. Even when they’re tasked with writing African characters themselves, their lack of engagement and involvement likely leads to characters who seem African but also aren’t really quite either.

Then we get to that he owns a cat himself whose name is David, but then again he’s based on Jojo’s Trish Una and not only has the same power as she does (in a way as she has a stand) but that her stand’s based on a cat. Its name is Spice Girl so his cat is named after the footballer whom which one Spice Girl married, funnily enough his own girl’s named Patricia ‘Trish’ Kyenge and she owns a cat named Victoria. He doesn’t own dogs because his own father’s afraid of them, there’s one Cameroonian celebrity who admits to being afraid of dogs and there are Cameroonians who aren’t fond of dogs themselves. There are Africans who do own and keep cats, just like their western counterparts.

That’s not to say there aren’t any black cat owners out there in fiction, but I feel outside of any African literature that possibly exists and features them, they don’t appear much in western fiction or at least in any western fiction that I can think of. Talk about serious underrepresentation for black cat owners, since it’s something I don’t recall seeing much in fiction in any way. Or East Asian dog owners outside of East Asian media for another matter, though I suppose it’s got to do with the whole ‘dog eater’ stereotype. It’s not that there aren’t any East Asians who eat dog meat, but it’s increasingly not that common anymore.

Also there could’ve been East Asians who don’t eat dogs at all due to cultural and religious prohibitions, be they Buddhist or Muslim as it would’ve been before. Admittedly I’m getting off-topic here but you should get my catch in the sorts of people who get underrepresented, like if not all black people like dogs then they too deserve representation especially in media outside of African countries. As for black people, I feel it’s easy to fall back on treating them as fellow westerners not just due to the underrepresentation of actual Africans in the media but also how the prototypical black person in the west is oftentimes an African American.

It’s not that African Americans are any less black but they’re more westernised than Africans are, so much so they’re even compared to white people and it becomes telling in the way they’re raised. Many Africans are largely raised with other Africans, immerse themselves in African culture and media a lot and don’t venture out of African countries that much either. Many African Americans are coterminous with white Americans, so they encounter and are influenced by white people more often than it is with the average African. When it comes to cultural values and stuff, scientifically speaking the vast majority of Africans would fall under African-Islamic and African Americans would veer towards Latin American.

Trust me I’ve taken a quiz based on the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map, something that depicts the relationship of countries to one another due to cultural affinities. I suspect many Africans would eaisly fall under African-Islamic since both sub-Saharan African countries and Middle Eastern countries not only have high levels of religiosity (relative to western countries), but also sharing similar stances on things like LGBT for instance and it’s mistrust in their case. Actually the Arabic and Islamic influences on sub-Saharan cultures were more evident before, especially prior to western colonialism where it manifests itself in Arabic script used by African communities, food and stuff.

So Fabrice Tientchieu is not particularly that westernised, having just arrived in Canada as an immigrant. He came there in search of a bigger salary, more job opportunities and so on, not to mention he tends to socialise with other African immigrants like Alvin Boateng from time to time. It’s not that Cameroonians and other sub-Saharan Africans aren’t westernised at all, but that they’re less westernised than many African Americans are and somebody else pointed out in a forum that they’re also practically separated from white westerners far longer than the latter, so it’s easier for them to hold onto their cultures as they are and keep them largely intact. That’s why they still speak Igbo, Yoruba, Nufi and the like. It’s something most white westerners don’t immediately get.

Maurice Lu

As I said before about Fabrice Tientchieu, there’s a tendency to treat black people as fellow westerners if it weren’t for the prototypical black person in western media being an African American. Regardless of the possibly deep differences between Africans and African Americans in other facets, not necessarily to elevate one over the other but that Africans and especially those that never left Africa may not completely relate to African Americans that well. As for East Asian characters and those of East Asian descent, there’s an unfortunate tendency to other them a lot that kind of dehumanises them in a way.

It’s like that in some western animal welfare circles and the like where outside of German language media (from my experience), there’s a tendency to shame East Asians for eating dogs and stuff. As if animal cruelty is unique to them and them alone, regardless of how dog poisoning’s a problem in Germany and Switzerland. Regardless if some dog owners in those countries have been grieved if their own dogs get shot by hunters, to the point where Germans would easily give East Asians a run for their money when it comes to dog abuse.

So this is likely why outside of East Asian media, there’s not a lot of fictionalised portrayals of East Asian dog owners. This has everything to do with the dog eater stereotype that makes it harder to treat East Asian as people, let alone those who may care for and like dogs unironically. Or for another cats and even then not all East Asians, especially the Vietnamese, eat cats themselves. While Maurice Lu isn’t Vietnamese, he’s actually a Filipino of part Chinese descent, but he could risk running into that stereotype if he’s not written carefully.

He cares for cats and dogs because one of his relatives is a sailor who cared for cats back in the Philippines, he also keeps dogs for guarding and hunting vermin since this is what else East Asians do with dogs. There really is room for East Asians using dogs for pest control as it is in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines to some extent as well as China historically speaking. For a while in China, prior to the coming of cats there, people used dogs for pest control. Since Maurice grew up with dogs and still has them, he’s less suspicious of having them around than it would be for Fabrice because his own father’s afraid of them.

While it’s not that common, there are instances of western women getting into romantic, sexual and marital relationships with East Asian men. There’s this report of Brazilian prostitutes preferring the company of Filipino sailors, Australian women seeking out and marrying Indonesian men, Ukrainian women marrying Chinese men and Chinese men fathering out of wedlock children in Ghana and Uganda that they’re practically far from sexless in some sense. Maurice’s own girlfriend and would-be wife is Jemima Szary, he tends to be really supportive and protective of her. He’ll do anything to keep her out of harm and it shows, he really loves her a lot and she in return.

That’s not to say there aren’t any depictions of Asian men in interracial relationships, let alone with white women so the only one I could name would be The Pitiful Human-Lizard’s relationship with Barb. As opposed to Lady Shiva’s relationship with David Cain, Sha Shan with Flash Thompson, Jade Nguyen with Roy Harper and Linda Park with Wally West. So it’s nice to see another western depiction of an East Asian man in a relationship with a white woman, such portrayals do exist in East Asian media but not very often in western media. Even if there are instances of white women who actually and actively seek out Balinese male prostitutes, other than Australia’s Rhonda and Ketut adverts it’s not something I see in American comic books. I even think DC’s Patty Spivot would be the one woman who’d actively seek out a Balinese gigolo, as strange as it sounds but there are white women who are into that sort of man. And more recently you have white women going after Korean men due to K-Dramas and K-Pop.

While fetishising East Asian men wouldn’t be any better either, but on the other hand East Asian men being into relationships with white women is pretty underrepresented in western media. Regardless if there are cases of white and black women marrying East Asian men, it’s not something I see often in western comic books even if it’s a thing in the real world. Let alone where the East Asian man is a gigolo as it would be in Indonesia, there are white women who even date and marry these men. Francis Manapul is even married to a white woman himself, so if Maurice marries Jemima it would be no different this way too.

Then we get to that dragons in Chinese thought aren’t just associated with snakes, but also weather and water contrary to the western link between them and fire. Outside of Chinese media and the like, the firebreathing dragon is a persistent meme in western media and it shows even with ostensibly Asian characters like those in Jake Long: American Dragon and Avatar The Last Airbender, which all point out to a western understanding of the creature. Maurice Lu wears a black shirt with a dragon print and he himself manipulates weather, this is closer to the Chinese conception and understanding of dragons.

Not to mention his own uncle is a sailor, which again hints at the Chinese dragon’s watery association. While water is considered a yin element in Chinese thought, it’s not necessarily and consistently feminine since the trigram for water is the same for middle son and dragons are seen as a masculine animal, despite their watery association. Conversely speaking, while fire is a yang element its trigram is the same as the one for middle daughter. Yin refers to something that’s dark, passive and feminine while yang is the opposite but the elements associated with those aren’t consistently feminine and masculine.

Especially when it comes to Bagua that fire’s linked to middle daughters and water’s linked to middle sons as even numbered trigrams are considered feminine and odd numbered trigrams are considered masculine, so earth is feminine because its trigram consists of even numbers even though the element itself is half yin, half yang. Wood is new yang but wind is associated with it and it’s feminine due to an even-numbered trigram, thunder is also associated with wood but is masculine because of an odd-numbered trigram. Let’s not forget that the wind trigram also represents the firstborn daughter, just as the thunder trigram represents the firstborn son.

At the back of Maurice Lu’s beizi lies the trigram for thunder, the trigram that dragons are associated with. Then we get to the four celestial beasts, where the blue dragon’s associated with wood and the east. So assigning the dragon to the thunder trigram would be no different in some sense, though it’s also got to do with the dragon’s meteorological association. Apparently this is the year of the wood dragon, Maurice Lu’s associated with dragons in some way. But it’s more to do with the Chinese dragon’s association with water and weather that it’s reflected in him in various ways.

Let’s not forget that I came up with the forerunners to both Jean-Louis Lumiere and Maurice Lu in 2016, so they’re easily chronologically the oldest characters for this story if it does come into fruition in video game form. So I find myself remembering them again and refining them, they’ll be refined further if it ever officially becomes a game that they get included in. Also Maurice Lu was going to be an aristocrat who’s pure Chinese, given the dragon’s association with royalty in China. So that’s one way of knowing how his characterisation underwent changes over time, he also went by the name of Mauricio Locsin before. There was also going to be an Ethiopian character who’s associated with cats in some way, but he didn’t really make it to form.

So this leaves both Maurice Lu and Jean-Louis Lumiere as the oldest characters to be recalled and refined in the presented day.

[youmistme]

Red Like You. Red For You. (teaser)

prompt: Taehyung loves to draw nose bleeds ;)

☞ Pairing: Yandere nerd! Taehyung X Cheerleader! OC (Valentine Red) 

☞ this is just a TEASER!

☞ TW: dark themes, mention of blood-like substance, yandere. DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT!

☞ Blurb: Taehyung’s favorite colour is red. He loves red, red like the blood that drips from your bruised nose to the supple and soft flesh of your lips and lastly falling to your chin. He’ll caress your chin with a sneer. Amusement floats in his eyes as his grip on your chin tightens. He adores it when the blood leaking from your nose drips down to your lips, especially when he smears it all over your face. Your pretty face painted red. Red like love. Red like lust. Red like you. 

He loves Valentine Red. 

♡ disclaimer: this is a work of fiction, does not represent the artist in it and their behaviour!Do not repost or plagiarize my work! You’re an untalented weak imbecile if you do so :)

from the eyes of Valentine Red.

I’d always wondered how the status quo in our school really affected the pupils in it. From the emo-punk kids who sat near the school backyard listening to rock music or the art students who carried a sharpened graphite 2B pencil near their ear and drew on any possible surface which could retain pencil marks. The status quo never changed, the emo kids stayed emo, athlete jocks stayed the same (meaning head in the clouds, muscle pigs), the popular trios were just as posh as their parents wealthy black cards were. 

Of course, I was also part of the said status quo, I’d say even though I did not fit in the stereotypical bubblegum-pink-sugary cheerleader persona, i was close by. The nerds were as one would guess, nerdy. Shy, quiet and reserved. 

It was also a bit unsusal for us of different friendgroups to make acquaintances with people of other friend groups. That didn’t stop me from befriending Kim Taehyung. 

He was an unusually quiet, nerdy guy who sat beside me in calculus class. His round black rimmed glasses sat far away from the bridge of his nose and close to the tip of it as he lost himself in solving yet another equation. Although, he, for an unknown reason ditched his nerdy group of friends to sit beside me all this semester, I didn’t mind. He was soft-spoken, a deep but gentle curve to his words as he spoke in heavy english. His oversized sweaters were a few sizes too big to be considered fashionable but he managed to look adorable in them. His hair was matted, choppy bangs that covered the front of his eyes, yet he refused to trim them short. Pretty lean himself, standing a good 176 cm for a seventeen year old. 

I’d see his shadow tower over mine every time we walked back from calculus to our next class, he didn’t sit beside me then. He’d simply follow me inside the class and sit far away. 

He was never late to class, his clothes were always neat and ironed unlike his hair. 

He had an interesting juxtaposition, a neat and tidy topper student with messy hair who stuttered whenever he spoke. Without batting an eye I could tell it was him who’d sit beside me, the lingering smell of iron mixed with an oversaturation of pine wood cologne was a giver. It was an odd combination. No matter how much he’d put on that heavenly pine wood, the metallic smell beneath his clothes found their way to me. 

I never asked him about it. 

His face was always glistening, like he’d come from an intense workout every morning and after lunch too. I’d lean in closer to examine his face and the pungent smell of iron hit me again. I notice his nose was always red, like he’d constantly rub it to the point it bled. 

I never asked him about it. 

I once caught him aggressively rubbing something off of his hands before art class, his skin was a vermilion red. He said it was paint. I smiled and nodded, not before taking note of the same metallic pine-wood smell. The sleeves of his white sweater was awfully muddy, red paint chipped off from the ends. I never asked him about it. 

I never asked him why he gave me an intense look when i cut my hand accidentally, use his sweater to wipe it off and never clean it. Why he didn’t interact with me outside of calc. Class or why that paint he had on his clothes often looked so strikingly similar to blood. 

Red blood like the colour of my lips, red blood like his wrists. Red blood like my name, red blood like the game he played. 

Fic release : early may ‘22

Taglist; if you want to be added to the taglist, Ask me, DM me, Comment! 

A/N: after a month over due, it’s finally here, Loves. Don’t you want Tae to love you and paint you red? He’ll make you the prettiest thing he’s ever seen. He just loves Red on red. 

@youmistme

[phanfictioncatalogue]

History/Math/Science Geek Masterlist

Beauty And The Geek - amazingdanielhowell

Summary: Dan and Phil are both fairly popular but in different clicks and the school ships them.

Chemistry (ao3) - howelllesters

Summary: Based on this prompt, ‘sporty!dan is lab partners with computergeek!phil and magic happens.’

Color Me Shades of Smitten (ao3) - andedan

Summary: High school au in which Dan is an introspective poet, and Phil is a quiet math geek. One day their paths cross, and their lives both change for good.

crayons and constellations (ao3) - howelllesters

Summary: “I’m the shy, quiet art major in our painting class and you’re the insane math major who’s always raving on about how the universe is full of dimensions that 3D can’t capture and how beautiful that is" AU. Or, the one where Phil takes Dan stargazing, and shows him the beauty in not knowing.

DBC - full-dark-no-starss

Summary: It’s 1995 and five kids are stuck in detention the night of year eleven prom. There’s the bad boy; Dan, with his battered leather jacket, bad attitude and lame crush on Phil, the hot-headed geek who hates him. Then there’s Emma; the strange red-head with no voice, Louise, the pretty rich girl and Joe, the guy who’s captain of every sport in the school, but his only interest is drama.

How to make a star (ao3) - okasennascribe

Summary: Space is amazing, there are planets, galaxies, and stars made out of pop cans?

In The Area (ao3) - Elleberquist6

Summary: Excerpt: Dan admired him for a moment, running a hand down his milky thigh before paying him the compliment he was due, “You’re a marvelous specimen of humanity.”

“You too,” Phil whispered, but then said louder, “I can tell that you’re a testament to your kind, too.”

Dan noticed where Phil’s eyes kept flicking and he laughed. “Want something?”

Phil’s cheeks got pink and he was having trouble maintaining eye contact, but he said, “Um, well, are you ready? To study me I mean…”

Pastel Princess - analphancones

Summary: Phil is at a loss for what to give Dan for Christmas. He doesn’t have the money he wishes he did to give Dan the best Christmas gift ever. Dan is a poetry geek, a pastel boy with a passion for being a teen poet. Phil is a punk with no clue how to write, but for Christmas Phil gives it a shot and writes Dan a love poem. In return Dan does the same and in way of a gift, they recite their love poems to each other while having sweet, slow, and romantic sex on Christmas eve.

Science Projects And Bullies (ao3) - Angel_Of_Darkness1

Summary: Dan Howell is one of the popular kids who is invited out to parties all the time and is every ones friend. Phil Lester is one of the losers who is hated by everyone and beaten up everyday by Dan and his friends.. So when Phil finds out that he has a science project, and his partner is the one and only Dan Howell, you can only imagine why he is so absolutely terrified and done with life.

Teach Me How To Kiss (ao3) - cityscaped

Summary: Dan is a typical notorious bad boy smoker who couldn’t give a shit about anything. Phil is a quiet librarian nerd who spends too much of his time in an abandoned tower in school. After rumours were spread that Dan had slept with many girls, and his two friends finding about it, Dan’s dirty little secret is exposed. Dan has no idea how to kiss. And what does he do? He gets kissing lessons from Phil.

That Damn Project (ao3) - developerdaniel

Summary: "I love you," Phil purred softly before he slowly pushed into Dan, taking his sweet time to ensure he didn't hurt his boyfriend. He let out soft grunts and moans as he used all of his willpower to not buck right into the younger boy, but his tight slick heat was almost too much around his cock and he knew he wasn't going to last as long as he usually could.

~*~*~ aka: the sequel to Class Partners that literally no one asked for featuring punk!virgin!bottom!Dan giving all of himself to geek!top!Phil with lots of fluff and some p great love making.

The Partner Project - fakecouple

Summary: The AU in which Phil is the nerd, and Dan is the rebellious bad boy with witty quips.

You're As Cute as 3.142 (ao3) - phanetixs

Summary: “Dan, sweet sweet Dan. All the girls in our class are mad about Phil Lester with his blue eyes and cheekbones and what is he doing about it? Dan, all he’s doing is staring at you,” Louise raises an eyebrow whilst saying this and Dan’s mind becomes increasingly fuzzy in connecting the dots.

or, the story of Dan & Phil, Math rivals, who are secretly into each other.

[zedecksiew]

Sentimental thoughts about the OSR

OSR -- Old School Renaissance? Revival? A style of making and playing games, where the focus is on the experience of shared imagined space, not narrative plots or arcs.

A style fostered by a community.

That community was ugly. Many alt-right-leaning white dudes. It sheltered abusers, like Zak S -- a person who, to my shame, I'd been a fan of.

That community was good. Many key figures were queer / trans. More so (to my impression) than any other RPG community (even other indie groups). Non-white folks, like me.

The popular TTRPG eye remembers the OSR for its ugliness, not its inclusivity. Probably because the assholes were loud. And because the non-white / cis / het-ness of folks was rarely advertised as a community selling-point: "Look at how diverse we are!"

The latter aspect made me feel welcomed. My work -- entirely informed by my SEA context, as it's always been -- got attention based on its merit, not its topicality.

+

The OSR as I joined it was based on blogs, and on G+. When G+ was shut down, the community had a diaspora.

You hear about BOSR (British OSR), or NOSR / NuSR. You used to hear about SWORDDREAM? I think FKR (the Free Kriegsspiel Revival) is an offshoot of the old community? There are a million Discord channels. Questing Beast, on Youtube.

The blogs are still going strong.

I can't keep track of all the places folks have ended up. I do feel bad about that -- that I'm less community-oriented, that I work more in isolation, now. I squat Twitter mostly. Twitter is not a good place for a creative community.

But it is what it is.

+

An article Ewan Wilson was writing about the OSR got spiked at Polygon. I was one of the folks he emailed questions to.

Ewan's questions prompted this bout of sentimentality, I guess?

Here are bits from email I wrote him, in reply:

+

The OSR scene began on blogs? That's certainly how I discovered it. I can actually remember the specific post that hooked me:

Patrick Stuart / False Machine, reading James C Scott's "The Art Of Not Being Governed" -- a history of the Zomia region of mainland Southeast Asia, a place of fluid cultures and peoples that have traditionally resisted the settled states surrounding it -- riffing on the historical information in Scott's book, spinning them into RPG campaign ideas.

+

A facet of the OSR scene is its willingness to use popular rulesets as a shared language.

Dungeons & Dragons (tm) not as a WOTC corporate property, but D&D as a community vernacular. (And D&D is just one example.)

Folks like Emmy Allen and Luka Rejec have talked about this quite eloquently, I think?

I think the OSR prioritises making stuff for games rather than crafting the bestest, most elegantly-designed game possible. If you are stuck arguing about which language works best for poetry, you'll never get to the point where you actually start making and sharing verse.

+

I associate the OSR style with possibility, too. I'm not sure why.

Mainstream WOTC D&D is trapped in a self-referential loop, recycling its own Forgotten Realms-adjacent tropes. Then you have the vast forest of licensed RPGs: "Alien: The RPG", "Avatar: The RPG"; "[Insert Popular Nerd IP Here]: The RPG".

Many indie-RPG communities prize genre-emulation -- here's a game where you can mimic the narrative shape of a slasher film; an urban-fantasy novel; Legend of Zelda.

Not that there is anything wrong with this. But if emulation is where you start and end you doom RPGs to a secondary role -- forever in the shadow of other arts.

For sure the OSR has its pop-culture and games-media touchstones; the scene loves to riff on metal album covers and Dark Souls a lot.

But I'd argue that -- relative to other RPG subcommunities, in my experience -- OSR creators are willing to push further down the rabbit-holes of their particular obsessions more often.

So, yes: Dark Souls and metal music. But also references weirder, personal, and as-yet-untapped: Zomia, punk zines, walks in backyard forests, Birkenhead folklore, the Permian Period, Moebius, East Malaysian myth --

Composted together to the point they become game things utterly unlike anything else, and the stories / experiences you can have in those game things you can have nowhere else.

+

The blogs are still going strong.

Today I was reading this series of posts, a theory-based critique at D&D, the OSR, and games design in general:

"the goal of what we call "old-school play" is not to create a story but to traverse a fantastic space guided by desire, such that any story which emerges is incidental and retrospective (much like stories that emerge from 'real life'). edwards prescribes that the goal of play is to create a story, elevates this prescription into a truth about play as such, and then claims that players who do not play with this aim actually fail to meet this aim because they are mentally damaged. perhaps this can be remedied by playing the correct game, or maybe not, but regardless the implication is that by playing the correct game, one can avoid brain damage.

my take is to not let salespeople convince you that you must buy their products to be politically or mentally correct, and on the flip side do not entitle yourself to the enjoyment of other people."

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4. All four are worth reading.

Today I was also reading the very first OSR blogpost I ever read, about Zomia. It is still as good as it was, six years ago:

"The Lisu, aside from insisting that they kill assertive chiefs, have a radically abbreviated oral history. "Lisu forgetting, Jonsson claims, "is as active as Lua and Mien remembrance." he implies that the Lisu chose to have virtually no history and that the effect of this choice was to "leave no space for the active role of supra-household structures, such as villages or village clusters in ritual life, social organizations, or the mobilisation of peoples attention, labour or resources."

18 Radically forgetting tribes. How far can you push that? Ancestor free tribes, then further away, one-year tribes, then in the reaches of the deeps, the one-day, impossible even to understand as they remember only for one day.

Patrick's blog turned 10 this week.

The blogs are still going strong.

[bethansfandoms]

Anonymous prompt from Instagram: “Sirius starts wearing eyeliner or any kind of makeup and Remus loves it so one day he asks for Sirius to put some on him and there's tension and they end up kissing and get together.”

The first time Sirius Black wore eyeliner, he waltzed into the boy’s dormitory, sat on his bed, pulled out his charms essay, and acted like it was nothing.

For a moment, Remus really thought it was nothing. James and Peter had both greeted him as he walked into the room and didn’t even mention it, whereas Remus found himself sitting there at a loss for words and with the inability to keep his eyes off of him.

“You alright, Moony?” Sirius asked. It was only at that point that Remus realised he hadn’t actually stopped staring at him since he’d walked into the dormitory.

“You, uh, you have eyeliner on.”

James and Peter both stopped what they were doing and looked up. “Oh yeah,” Peter acknowledged. Then, he got back to work.

“Did you do it yourself?”James asked casually. 

“Walked in on the girls doing makeup in the common room and they said I should put some eyeliner on. Marlene said it made my eyes pop.”

James chuckled, “Looks good, Pads.” He easily turned his eyes back to his essay; Remus had to all but tear his gaze away and pretend to write about human transfiguration, when all he could actually think about was Sirius and his eyes.

It wasn’t exactly a new revelation to Remus that he had a little bit of a crush on Sirius. Looking back, it had always sort of been there, really, it had just passed off as admiration and friendship for a long while. He’d been pretty good at hiding it, too, as he was determined not to let his feelings ruin their friendship. Sirius with eyeliner was pushing him to his breaking point though, apparently.

Sirius had started doing his own eyeliner instead of getting the girls to do it after a while. Remus would always try very hard not to stare as Sirius delicately brought the pencil along his eyelid. He would also usually cave in and hope Sirius was too preoccupied focusing to notice Remus looking at his reflection.

“Isn’t there a spell for that?” Remus asked one evening when Sirius had caught his eye in the mirror.

“Lily reckons there is,” Sirius replied, carefully lining his bottom eyelid, “but it’s very hit and miss. You have to be more careful casting it than you do doing it the muggle way.”

Remus hummed and went back to watching, using the conversation as an excuse to do so.

“Stop looking at me,” Sirius laughed, “‘s distracting.” Remus chuckled lightly and returned to his book, eyes not taking in any of the words. “Remus?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for being cool about it.”

“About what?”

Sirius took his hand away from his face and turned around to face him properly. “I just... I know some people think me wearing this stuff is weird and I don’t really care what they think. I do care what you think, though, and you’ve been really good about it.”

Remus let his book fall to his lap. “Of course, Sirius. Girls wear it, why shouldn’t you, right? Muggle rock artists wears it too. Male ones, I mean.”

Sirius laughed, “True, true. You don’t think... it looks stupid. Do you?”

“I think you look good, Sirius,” he replied. “The eyeliner, I mean. It, uh, it looks good.”

“I reckon it’d suit you, you know.” Sirius said, finishing his other eye before walking over to sit on the edge of Remus’ bed.

“Very funny.”

“I mean it. You have this whole book nerd thing going on, I think you’d look punk.”

Remus scoffed, “Punk?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I think you’d look hot then.”

Remus felt himself flush slightly. ‘Hot’ wasn’t a friend word. Unless you were James Potter, of course, who jokingly said it to everyone. Sirius hadn’t sounded like he was joking though.

“Go on then.”

Sirius’ face lit up. “Really?”

Remus shrugged and put his book on the bedside table. “Sure. Just this once, though. Don’t tell James and Pete either, they’d make me wear it for them.”

“Deal. Do you want me to do it?”

“Uh, yeah. I probably can’t do it myself.”

Sirius smiled and scooted along the bed until he was sat cross legged in front of Remus.

If Remus had realised how embarrassingly intimate this would be, he either would’ve reconsidered his agreement or suggested it sooner. Sirius had cupped his face with his right hand to hold him still and had the eyeliner pencil held in his left.

“Look up for me.” Sirius burst out laughing as Remus hesitantly tipped his head back. “No, keep your head still, just look up with you eyes.”

Remus sighed and let himself relax, looking up to the ceiling as Sirius slowly traced his bottom eyelid.

“Remus, eyes up.” Remus hadn’t even noticed he’d started watching Sirius until he’d said it. He returned back to looking at the ceiling. “Your natural eyelashes are insane,” Sirius muttered.

“What?”

“Merlin, Remus, keep your eyes up or I’ll accidentally stab you with this thing,” Sirius said, lips parting slightly as he leant back in. Remus quickly looked up again.

They remained in silence for a moment after that. At some point, Sirius had begun tracing his thumb back and forth across Remus’ cheek, only a little bit, and Remus hoped Sirius’ hand couldn’t feel the pulse point on his neck speed up.

“Okay, all done.” Sirius sat back slightly, his hand still on Remus’ face as he studied him. Remus felt like he’d combust under his stare.

“So... how stupid do I look?”

“Not at all. I was right, you look hot.”

Remus smiled and looked away. “Thanks,” he mumbled.

Sirius’ eyes were clearly still looking at the eyeliner as a small smile formed on his lips.

“What?” Remus asked, a little breathlessly as a result of the proximity.

“Nothing. I reckon you pull this off better than me, you know?”

“I doubt that.” Remus had answered too quickly to really think about what he was saying. “I, uh... I meant...” he trailed off.

“You’re beautiful. Have I ever told you that?” Sirius was smiling shyly and his voice was barely audible anymore.

“No.” Remus replied, breath hitching as he cautiously reached his hand up to rest on the one on his face.

Sirius leant closer into the already minimal space between them, resting their foreheads together but giving Remus the chance to pull away.

When Remus did no such thing, he kissed him. Remus moved his hands to fist in the fabric of Sirius’ shirt in an attempt to pull him impossibly closer and Sirius kept his hand cupping Remus’ face.

Sirius pulled away after a moment, breathing heavily as he looked at him, “I really meant it when I said you looked hot with eyeliner on.”

Remus leant forward and kissed him again. “Yeah, well, you do too.”

[anothertimdrakestan]

Just Hold Me Tonight - Tim Drake x Reader

Words: 1.1k

Requested? Yes! From a lovely anon!

“Hello! I saw your post about PTSD and it’s really heart warming. I suffer from anxiety and I get really panicky. Could you do 9 and 21 for the reader with Tim where it’s a rough night, I don’t know if you have experience with anxiety but I love your writing so I thought I’d request it. Thanks! ” (9. can you just hold me tonight? 21. please stop crying baby)

LINK TO PROMPTS  -> REQUESTS ARE STILL OPEN!

Hello angel, this request absolutely made my day. I try to be really open but it is hard, I have PTSD, anxiety and ADHD but I believe they make me stronger not weaker. I’ve had my fair share of panic attacks so I decided to do one of those because I think Tim would be really comforting. I really hope you enjoy and that this gives you a piece of my perspective and experience with mental health <3.

TW FOR MENTIONS OF TRAUMA AND LIGHT DESCRIPTIONS

It was nights like this you hated living in Gotham. You’d taken an apartment in the best area in Gotham as to avoid the noise. Not anything in specific, the noise. Gunshots, screaming, and anything else that goes bump in the night. The night you told Tim broke his heart. After a wonderful evening together he invited you to swing with him through the streets, he promised to perch you on a building so you could watch him live out his passion. But you knew you couldn’t do it, not yet, maybe not ever. So you sat him down, and explained, not too much, because the details are painful, but enough. You were enough. And Tim wouldn’t let you forget it. “Y/N, love, it means a lot that you told me, I’m sorry.” you noticed how angry Tim looked, after hearing your story his hands were shaking and it was your turn to comfort him. You reminded him he was so young, he couldn’t have saved you and that you were a strong, independent woman. 

And to your delight, nothing changed. Tim didn’t treat you like a piece of broken glass that would fracture in his hands because you were strong, and he loved you for it. But some nights you really did just need his presence, because he reminded you of what was good in the world. When fear crept in, and everything seemed out to find and hurt you Tim was there, sometimes he came in the Red Robin suit, you loved the way the reds and shadows danced around his body, he was the embodiment of a hero, your hero. You knew his exact routine for taking off the suit. Utility belt, cape, shoes, exterior suit, body armor, new shirt on, pants, put on new shorts, and finally the mask. Back when he wore the condom hat you’d giggle at his mask-hair but the domino mask was your personal favorite. You could tell the relief he got in peeling it off, and the first thing his eyes met was you. 

You were usually curled up in the corner of your bed, you always kept it in the corner of your room because the walls reminded you that you were alive. You’d make yourself as small as possible, and reach for your phone. Shooting Tim the alert message asking that if he was free you wouldn’t mind his company. And that was all he needed. He’d come through your window, unlocking it with a key you’d placed on it so only he could get in. He’d start pulling off the suit if he was wearing it, and begin scanning the room for you. Tim always started with soft words and tonight was no different.

“Hey love, how’s it going tonight? Real fancy seeing you here!” you could feel a smile grace your lips but the buzzing didn’t stop. Giving him a small nod to come forward you shifted, letting him plop down in the bed next to you. “Oh babe are you crying? No, please, I’m here.” you let him scoop you up and pull you in close, feeling his hands swipe tears away from your cheeks. You didn’t talk yet, not ready to open up your heart. “Please stop crying baby I’m here, I’m right here Y/N, it’s okay.” Tim’s voice was filled with nothing but love and adoration, and you felt the tendrils of fear sneak back. 

“Hey Timmy” you whispered, your hands were still shaking but Tim held them, his warmth spreading to you. “Mhm so how’s your night going?” you loved his humor, poking his chest. “I think you know goof” he feigned innocence, the hand you’d let go was swirling patterns on your back while he held you. “Soooo want me to tell you about patrol?” you nodded, stories of his heroism always made you feel better.

“So tonight I’m with Damian, Bruce just started letting us fly solo but the punk likes to give me a hard time because Bruce always says I’m in charge. So I decided tonight to give him a lil fright. We’re out about halfway through a slow patrol. So as he’s swinging through the buildings I turned around. Kid flipped out it was hilarious. Saying something about my ‘incompetent ass falling mid grapple’ but then I didn’t come back and he genuinely got scared! Like the kid has feelings it was almost heartening except that he’s a demon. Ah! There we go, my favorite girl giving that award winning smile” you blushed, Tim still made you feel butterflies with his horrible pickup lines and dorky smiles, and you loved it.

“I know Damian has feelings, he loves his pets! And I think he really likes me.” your voice was growing stronger, fingers now playing with his hair. “Little D loves you Y/N. Imagine being so unlucky that your family loves your wife more than you. It’s sooo hard on me” you groaned, trying to hold back another smile. Tim always called you his wife or Y/N Drake-Wayne, he said why wait for the officials he knew you were his person. “Yes that’s gotta be really hard Timbers I’m so sorry” you tried to fake pout and he scrunched his nose at you. 

And just like that, the storm had dissipated. Now it was just you and Tim, no large nasty grim reaper standing in the other corner of your room. Just your dork boyfriend who was trying to teach you phrases in elvish so he could tell you that you were sexy in front of Bruce. “So you wanna get up? Movie night? Take out?” your hand fell to his cheek, pulling him in for the first kiss of the night. “How about you just hold me tonight?” and he kissed you back, “absolutely love” and he winked at you.

“Y/N, love, if it were up to me I’d be holding you for the rest of my life”

“That’s nice Timmy but say it in elvish”

“Mel, im anír- na gar- cin an anand” 

“Oh my god it was a joke you nerd” Tim grinned like an idiot and leaned in to kiss your nose. “I’m your nerd angel!”

“Dork.”

[housewarningparty]

Thanks for recommending Gideon the Ninth! It was so good! Do you have a book rec tag I could check out? :)

honestly i should, huh? i’ve read more books than probably ever before this year and i’ve talked about ‘em intermittently, but not with a consistent tag. i’ll recommend some right now, though, with a healthy dose of recency bias!

sf/f

the priory of the orange tree by samantha shannon - a truly epic fantasy novel with one of the most beautiful, satisfying f/f romances i’ve ever read. the novel takes account nearly everything i hate about fantasy as a genre (overwhelmingly straight, white, and male centric, bland medieval European settings, tired tropes) and subverts them. incredible world-building, diverse fantasy cultures, really cool arthrurian legend influence. one of my favorite books i’ve ever read tbh.

gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir - which you’ve read, obviously, but for posterity’s sake i’m keeping it here! sci-fi + murder mystery + gothic horror. genuinely funny while still having a super strong emotional core and more than enough gnarly necromantic to satisfy the horror nerd in me. makes use of some of my favorite tropes in fiction, namely the slowburn childhood enemies to reluctant allies to friends to ??? progression between gideon and harrow. absolutely frothing at the mouth for a sequel.

the broken earth trilogy by nk jemisin - really the first book that helped me realize i don’t hate fantasy, i just hate the mainstream ‘medieval europe but with magic’ version of fantasy that dominates the genre. EXTREMELY cool worldbuilding. i’ve definitely described it as like, a GOOD version of what the mage-vs-templar conflict in dragon age could have been, with a storyline particularly reminiscent of “what if someone got Anders right?”

this is how you lose the time war by amal el-mohtar and max gladstone - i’m not usually big on epistolary novels, but this one really worked for me. spy vs spy but it’s gay and takes place between time traveling agents of two opposing sides of a war. the letter writing format really plays to el-mohtar’s strengths as a poet, the unfolding love story is weird and beautiful. it’s a really quick read, too, if you’re short on time or attention.

empress of forever  by max gladstone - i just finished this one this week! if you’re in the mood for a space opera, look no further. imagine if steve jobs was an asian lesbian and also like not a shitty person. this is where you start with vivian liao. you get the classic putting-the-band-together arc with beings from all across the universe, your romances and enemies-turned-friends and uneasy alliances all over the place. really satisfying character development and some extremely cool twists along the way. it’s just a fun good time.

the luminous dead by caitlin starling - this one rides the line of horror so it’s closest to that part of the list. it reminds me of the most inventive low budget horror/sci-fi films i’ve loved in the best way possible because it makes use of the barest narrative resources. it’s a book that takes place in one primary setting, featuring interactions between two characters that only meet each other face-to-face for the briefest period. the tension between the two characters is the most compelling part of the story, with competing and increasingly unreliable narratives and an eerie backdrop to ratchet things up even higher. the author described it as “queer trust kink” at one point which is, uh, super apt actually and totally my jam. the relationship at the center of the book is complicated to say the least, outright combative at points, but super compelling. plus there’s lost of gnarly sci-fi spelunking if you like stories about people wandering around in caves.

horror

the ballad of black tom by victor lavalle - we all agree that while lovecraft introduced/popularized some cool elements into horror and kind of defined what cosmic horror would come to mean, he was a racist sack of shit. which is why my favorite type of ‘lovecraftian horror’ is the type that openly challenges his abhorrent views. the ballad of black tom is a retelling of the horror at redhook that flips the narrative by centering the action around a black protagonist. 

lovecraft country by matt ruff - more of what i just described. again, lovecraftian themes centered around black protagonists. this one’s especially cool because it’s a series of interconnected short stories following related characters. it’s getting a tv adaptation i believe, but the book is definitely not to be missed

rolling in the deep / into the drowning deep by mira grant - mermaids are real and they’re the ultimate deep sea predators! that’s really the whole premise. if for some reason that’s not enough for you, let me add this: diverse cast, a romance between a bi woman who’s not afraid to use the word and an autistic lesbian, really cool speculative science tangents about mermaid biology and myth. 

the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson - it’s halloween month so i’m thinking about hill house again. one of the greatest american ghost stories ever written. especially worth the read if you follow it up w the 1964 film adaptation (the haunting) and then the 2018 netflix series.

the hunger by alma katsu - i’ve always been fascinated by the donner party even though we now know the popular narrative is largely falsehoods. still, this highly fictionalized version of events scratched an itch for me and ended up surprising me with its resistance from the most expected and toxic racist tropes associated with donner party myth.

wounds / north american lake monsters by nathan ballingrud - nathan ballingrud is my favorite horror writer of all time. one of my favorite writers period regardless of genre. in ballingrud’s work the horror is right in front of you. you can look directly at it, it’s right there. but what permeates it, what draws your attention instead, what makes it hurt is the brutally honest emotional core of everything surrounding the horror. the human tragedy that’s’ reflected by the more fantastic horror elements is the heart of his work. it’s always deeply, profoundly moving for me. both of these collections are technically short stories, but they’re in the horror section of the recs because delineations are totally arbitrary and made solely at my discretion. 

short stories

her body and other parties by carmen maria machado - tbh i almost put this in w horror but there’s enough weird fiction here for me to be willing to straddle the line. it was really refreshing to read horror that centered queer women’s perspectives. the stories in this collection are really diverse and super powerful. there’s an incredible weird fiction piece that’s like prompt-based law and order svu micro fiction (go with me here) that ends up going to some incredible places. there’s the husband stitch, a story that devastated me in ways i’m still unraveling. the final story reminded me of a more contemporary haunting of hill house in the best way possible. machado is a writer i’m really excited about.

vampires in the lemon grove by karen russell - my friend zach recommended this to me when we were swapping book recs earlier this year and i went wild for it! mostly weird fiction, but i’m not really interested in getting hung up on genres. i don’t know what to say about this really other than i really loved it and it got me excited about reading in a way i haven’t been in a while. 

the tenth of december by george saunders - i really like saunders’ work and i feel like the tenth of december is a great place to start reading him. quirky without being cloying, weird without being unrelatable.

misc

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid - there’s something really compelling to me about the glamour of old hollywood. this story is framed as a young journalist interviewing a famously reclusive former starlet at the end of her life. the story of how evelyn hugo goes from being the dirt-poor daughter of cuban immigrants to one of the biggest names in hollywood to an old woman facing the end of her life alone is by turns beautiful, inspiring, infuriating and desperately sad. by far the heart of the book is in evelyn finally coming out as bisexual, detailing her decades-long on/off relationship with celia st. james, another actress. evelyn’s life was turbulent, fraught with abuse and the kind of exploitation you can expect from the hollywood machine, but the story is compelling and engaging and i loved reading it.

smoke gets in your eyes by caitlin doughty - a memoir by caitlin doughty, the woman behind the popular ‘ask a mortician’ youtube series. it was a super insightful look into the american death industry and its many flaws as well as an interesting, often moving look at the human relationship with death through the eyes of someone touched by it early and deeply.

love and rockets by los bros hernandez (jaime and gilbert and mario) - this was a big alt comic in the 80s with some series within running on and off through the present. i’m not current, but this book was so important for me as a kid. in particular the locas series, which centered around two queer latina girls coming up in the punk scene in a fictional california town. the beginning starts of a little sci-fi-ish but over time becomes more concerned with slice-of-life personal dramas. 

[5sosfanfictioncatalogue]

Opposites Attract Masterlist

"Ah, sorry Doll." (ao3) - cliff0rd michael/luke T, 4k

Summary: Luke is a shy, quiet boy who works in a small Café and Bad boy Mikey just loves seeing him blush.

Arthurian Romances (ao3) - therjolras michael/ashton T, 4k

Summary: Ashton's in a bit of a tangle when he's rescued by a purple-haired knight-in-leather-jacket.

do the things that you'd only read about (ao3) - heartbreakgirl michael/luke N/R, 5k

Summary: When he looks over, Michael's eyes are open and he's grinning from ear to ear.

“I love you.”

He smiles shyly, eyes rolling fondly. “I love you too, Michael.”

or, book worm Luke & bad boy Michael

fight so dirty but your love's so sweet (ao3) - softirwin luke/ashton, michael/calum T, 11k

Summary: Luke hates a good ninety-five percent of his job.

A solid thirty percent of that comes from the fact that he works as a receptionist at a hotel, which he thinks is possibly the most thankless job humanity could possibly have created. A further ten comes from the fact that his desk is right next to the kitchen, meaning mouth-watering smells are constantly wafting under his nose, and Luke’s not allowed to eat on shift.

Fifty-five percent of it, though, is Ashton.  

-

written for the prompt 'lashton bad boy'

Have Faith In This Fragile World (ao3) - SilentlyFighting michael/calum, luke/ashton N/R, 19k

Summary: Michael Clifford is well known in his school, not for being popular, far from it, he is the nerd. The goody-two-shoes hasn't had the best past but his peers do not know this and a couple of the football team decide that he is their next target. A mysterious group of boys make an appearance, saving him multiple times, and when Michael runs out of money to buy food, they even find ways to get him food.

The boys do not scare him that much but they certainly catch his attention. Michael learns the names of two of the boys but the leader is set to keep his identity a secret. But, when Michael has another run in with the football team and they use him as bait, will the boys identity reveal itself?

i just wanna be bad enough for you (ao3) - metallicmoons michael/ashton M, 2k

Summary: just a typical adorable nerd!ashton and punk!michael fic because those are honestly my favourite.

My Cobain Shirt (ao3) - unconditionalcalum michael/calum, luke/ashton T, 14k

Summary: Michael's heart skipped a beat. Did he, Calum fucking Hood, just talk to him, Michael? Michael managed to smile at him quickly before the tanned boy walked away, already talking to someone else.

It never happened before. Until this moment, Michael wasn't even sure Calum knew he existed. But apparently, he did.

* * *

Or: the one where the shy boy with the bright hair (Michael) has a hopeless crush on the popular soccer-player-with-a-scholarship (Calum).

Shameless (ao3) - HeartnArrow luke/ashton N/R, 39k

Summary: Luke is captain of the hockey team, one of the most popular guys in school along with calum hood, came out as gay last year. ashton is a nerd who gets straight a’s and has yet to have his first kiss at the age of 17. michael is his best friend who isn't really a nerd but has known ashton since preschool. ashton has always watched luke from afar, admiring him at the hockey games and in the hallways. he’s had a crush on him since freshman year but luke doesn't even know his name. or Luke was looking for a fuck buddy while Ashton was looking for love.

snap backs and tattoos (ao3) - crankgameplays michael/calum N/R, 3k

Summary: Calum Hood is 16, almost 17, when hes warned to stay away from Michael Clifford. His dad catches a gaze of him from the kitchen window and hes got a new tattoo that's wrapped around his pale arm and there's tufts of pink hair peeking out from his snap back and oh my fucking god is that a fucking eyebrow piercing. Calum has died and gone to heaven. Or hell. Maybes hes being a little dramatic. Whatever. But his dad turns to him and he goes,

"Calum, I want you to stay away from that Clifford boy," pointing a finger in the direction of his son. "Hes no good." And Calum nods and mumbles, yes dad, and walks to his room and that's that.

But really. No one ever listens to their dads.

We're like noughts and crosses (ao3) - emptygoldss michael/calum G, 1k

Summary: it’s like Michael’s made of glass and Calum turns him to sand.

Wrong Way (ao3) - boomercal calum/ashton E, 9k

Summary: Two high schoolers who won't admit they think the other is cute and some well-intentioned friends means that while Ashton's looking for Calum on the Hockey field, Calum's looking for Ashton at the library; what's to be done when you're pretty sure that cute guy in your English class is avoiding you?

[latin-dr-robotnik]

Hey, thanks @beevean for tagging me! <3

name: Sebastian

gender: Male

star signs: ☀️ Leo ⬆️ Pisces 🌜 (I thought I was LIbra Moon but last year a friend told me to check and I think it said Leo Moon...? idk I’ll check again someday)

height: 1.70m

time: 15:45

birthday: August 2nd

favorite bands: NTVG, LFC, Sumo, Gorillaz, Daft Punk... idk too many to name, I’m also very on and off with Ska-P.

favorite solo artists: You know me, I’m a very big Funk Fiction nerd, but apart from him I’m mostly a “I dig some of their songs” guy, with examples like Stevie Wonder. Still waiting on Kavinsky’s new record, though.

song stuck in my head: Ilegal (remember yesterday’s post? well, it’s official, it is legal. A pretty historic moment), Never Fade Away (heard it gets even more emotional at the end of the game, I’m still far from reaching it) and since I started writing this, Crimen Sollicitationis (such a fucked up song, it’s great.)

last movie: Last night there was a random indie movie on TV while I was cooking, don’t know its name, I only got the ending, where it seemed to be like a POV of two people going on a date to a bar and the weirdness of the moment (I agree, heck, even dating my best friend feels weird lol.)

last show: Rompan Todo (the mini-series I was talking about.)

when did i create this blog: I think March 2018.

what do i post: Sonic, Sonic music, Sonic shipping, Sonic opinions--SUDDENLY MULTIFANDOM. Politics, then back to Sonic.

last thing i googled: “sonic lost world juice archipelago” lol

other blogs: Seaside Hill Paradise, and the older Tumblr blog that got nuked when I swapped to this one.

do i get asks: The Sonic drought affected my asks, until last year I used to get a healthy amount of asks about shipping and/or prompts, this year? Not so much.

why i chose this url: I always say this, but I’m awful at (user)names (I was actually considering changing all my names to only one, but I already forgot it lol)

following: 65 (always looking to follow more, but there were cases this year where I actually did not want to interact with a good chunk of people.)

followers: 286 (hey, thank you! No, not you, pornbots, gtfo.)

average hours of sleep: After Christmas I was clocking like 12 hours lol now I’m back to 8 actually.

lucky number: 3...?

instruments: Guitar, I wonder if I could be a good drummer tho.

what i’m wearing: green shorts and a dark blue shirt (summer, yayyyy!)

dream job: Anything that can let me to talk non-stop about History and get paid for it lol

dream trip: pre-covid I would’ve said maybe somewhere in Spain or Italy, now in covid times and with a second wave coming mid-summer, even the closest beach seems like a dream trip.

favorite food: Pizza.

nationality: 🇦🇷

favorite song: Right now? Doin’ My Best. All time? probably Canción para Naufragios.

last book i read: Last thing I read are the Sonic (comic)books haha, I’m looking forward to read a new book that can get just as controversial as the Sonic comics (but I’d take that book over engaging in more fandom shit) in the coming weeks.

top three fictional universes i’d like to live in: Sonic, the Stardew Valley world where land access in a lovely rural community is a non-issue, and probably Kipo’s world now that the series is over.

Now, I should tag people here... eh, I don’t feel like it today. Be my guest if you want, though.

[slutinacan]

Black Sheep

envy adams x fem!reader

Warnings: kinda suggestive, not too heavy. (Sorry) ((kinda out of character for my kind of blog (((uwu horny sideblog))) but i just felt like writing this idk)). Swearing. A droplet of angst in the beginning but iT DOESN'T LAST TOO LONG I PROMISE.

Prompt: You've seemed to make it away from the heaviness of the group's troubles with Ramona's evil exes, and in an angered fit after getting in a brief argument with Scott due to his sheer recklessness, allowing not only himself to be put in danger, but everyone around him, you clasp Wallace's hand and race downtown to a local venue in high annoyance, only wanting to get away and enjoy the night away from all of this havoc in a flood of rock bands. Of course, everything starts out fine, as it always does, but as soon as an unexpected guest performer arrives onstage, you begin to receive more attention than expected.

Note: I'm aware that there is a shit ton of magical realism in this entire franchise, especially in the movie seeing as it was derived from a very vibrant comic series, so I'll try to incorporate as much of that in it as I can, promise. I'm not very good with magical realism/fantasy yet but I'll give it my all! Enjoy!

---

"You know what, Pilgrim? Fuck you." You let out an angry breath after his previous remark, tears flooding into your eyes.

You stood with nothing but sad anger running through your system, watching his face slowly cloud down into regret at his words, the room physically deflated at the broken atmosphere.

"I get that you want to be happy, and I am in full support of that, I just want you to be happy, Scott. But, when it comes at the cost of the people who want nothing but the best for you? Your friends? The people who have had it up to here with your shit but have always loved you too much to ever mind it because that's what pals are fucking for? You're too reckless. You always have been. Keep your head screwed on right for once and fucking look at what is in front of you, Pilgrim. Wake up." You ranted with a huff, fist clenched tight.

Scott made a move to step forward and take your hand, his own eyes teary, but you pulled back. Making a move for the door you grabbed your keys, and coat, without even taking the time to listen to his pleas. Your insides were boiling hot with rage but the exterior of your body stung cold with bitten ice that practically chilled the room below average temperature.

"Wallace. You want a ride or not, nerd." You asked, stepping outside and already finding yourself halfway to your car already as the wind kicking beneath your feet only accentuated your angry swiftness through the bitten evening.

With that, Wallace sprung up from his seat, grabbing his jacket, house key, and scarf. Ramona let out a quiet scoff of disbelief towards the brown haired boy, seeing as he was actually following you. Though, he gave nothing but a shrug to the group with a small, apologetic, look in return; then, he was out the door after sending one knowing look to Scott that said it all: When we get back, you're fixing this. All you, guy.

---

"Tickets please." The front attendee asked, his voice bellowing in your ears, breaking through the burning ice and sadness clouding your senses, chipping away at the practically frozen armor you guarded yourself with. Falling back into reality, you maintained your focus.

"Oh yeah, sorry, here you go." You refocused on his outstretched hand, placing both your ticket, and Wallace's into the presented palm. He tore off the stubs, grabbing two identification wristbands, and handed you both which you took with a small thank you.

Wallace took notice of your form, chilled and quiet. Soft and small and entirely too timid to be considered normal. You looked present but as if your brain was drifting far, far, away from the current scene. He nudged you with his elbow, sending a reassuring smile as you were cleared to enter the venue, being the lucky few to get there first at that. That alone chipped away at the frosted armor encasing your haunted form once again.

"Look, hun," he leaned against you reassuringly as you two snagged a spot near the front, his hands deep in his own pockets seeing how unusually cold the night was. His muscles tightened up to constrict any warmth in his body and keep it there, now feeling the bitter, unwavering, depressive, frost radiating from you.

"I think you were totally right back there. He's been really reckless as of lately, more so than usual, and yes, it has put a damper on things and, yeah, it has put his loved ones in danger. Also, yeah, its not really an ideal situation at all, completely unruly in fact. It is completely messy and depressing and unfair and it has put everyone he knows, we know, in harms way-" "Wallace is this supposed to be helping me? Because, I love and appreciate you and all, but you are absolutely shit at pep-talks-"

The two of you paused seeing the room already crowded with punk teens, adults, and misfits of the kind all murmuring and diving into their own conversations as the lights dimmed, one spotlight on the host of the venue who stood in the middle of the stage. He was all that could be seen, the light focused on his warm yellow jacket and his matching scarf. He was usually very peppy but seemed just as cold as everyone else on this frosted evening, legs visibly trembling as the ice chilled his scrawny form.

"Welcome everyone! Thanks for coming out tonight, we're real excited to show you what treats we have in store tonight because boy do we have a surprise." He grinned through his chattering teeth, tossing a thumbs up.

You watched intently, not as phased as all the screaming teens beside you had been. You toned him out. In fact, you toned everyone out. The host, Wallace, the screaming crowd of one hundred around you, all became muted. Your eyes honed in on the silhouettes that could not be identified in the shadows behind the current announcer. It seemed as though your concern for everything began to wear thinner and thinner as the cold night caressed your face to numbness, the fortress of ice around your body stilling the need to express, slowing you down and leaving you haunted.

You felt as though you could only bring your eyes to move, watching as the once obnoxious host started backing up off stage into the sidelines. You followed his mouth, watching every shaky trace of a pronunciation through chattering teeth mouthed something that visibly brightened the room and completely tore through your brain as the crowd began an uproar of excitement.

"Please welcome, The Clash at Demonhead!" His lips touched together slowly to form the words and you watched every second of it until he ran offstage, your eyes darting to the main portion of the venue to see the lights flicker on into a warm orange and red hue. Wallace, the crowd beside you, was long forgotten and you stood still among the chaos, relapsing the events that occured throughout the day. You shut your eyes to block it out, and reopened them to meet burning hazel. Your bitter, iced, armor suffered a severe blow at that, those hot eyes tearing right into your chest.

(Oh yeah)

(Oh yeah)

(Oh yeah)

Hello again

Friend of a friend

I knew you when

Your eyes were focused on one thing, the blonde who stood tall and confident in the middle of the stage, bright, pouty, red lips clouding your vision as she sung the opening words strictly, her own eyes on you.

Time moved faster and faster yet it felt like she was all you could see. A flame huddled in the cold dark, chipping further and further at you. You stood still, enjoying the music at that, but only standing to watch her while the excited chaos ensued around you as the music picked up.

She only broke your gaze to dance around the stage, completely strong in her movements and unwavering under the still present ice within the evening. She remained untouched.

During a small instrumental breakdown she strutted closer to the edge of the stage, right where you stood. You watched her, all of her. Her mouth and the way it moved as she sung intimately into the microphone, the way her warmth enveloped you and brushed across your paled face, completely melting any icy exterior you had left, any fight you had left.

Send you my love on a wire

Lift you up, every time,

everyone, ooh,

pulls away, ooh

From you

She was face to face with you now, on her knees in front of you like a panther while her aura burned into you unforgivingly. You gave in, sending a small smile and nodding your head along with the music which contrasted your haunted, frozen, stilled persona from before. You let go, and gave into the warmth. You were sure that there were tons of fans seething in jealousy and in simultaneous excitement seeing her so close to you, and of course they were probably screaming and jumping into chaos, but she was all you could see. With the next few lyrics, you mouthed the words along with her.

Send you my love on a wire

Lift you up, every time, everyone, ooh, pulls away, ooh

It's a mechanical bull, the number one

You'll take a ride from anyone

Everyone wants a ride, pulls away, ooh, from you

She smirked widely once the song slowed, then leaned forward and just managed to catch your mouth in a heated kiss as the lights faded into darkness. You melted completely, kissing back with fever at how overwhelmingly, comfortably, numbing the warmth was. She grabbed your collar, pulling you close so her mouth was at your ear.

"Meet me behind the venue in 20"

[okaybutlikeimagine]

The shovel talk prompt is so cute. I was wondering if you could do one where the kids or Joyce gives billy a shovel talk since Steve’s dad defiantly wouldn’t do it.

(heyo dears, the post we’re talking about is right here!)

I fuckin love this and you KNOW they both would but in very very different ways.

Bc with Joyce, it’s still very motherly and a lot more gentle than Hop, but also Extremely Serious.

Bc i like to think Joyce has known Steve since he was a very little kid. Like… her kids have always gone to school together and she went to school w/ Steve’s parents. and she doesn’t really like steve’s parents like… at ALL. and she kind of thought Steve was mean (bc he was, guys. Love our babe, he’s a gem, but 1st season he was a jerkwad w/ little to no self awareness and that’s why i love his growth bc he was a teenage boy who grew from his mistakes and i love that for him♥) but he’s softened up in the past year and he babysits all of the kids and it just means a lot to her. She knows she can trust Will in the hands of Steve and that will forever and always mean the world.

And of COURSE she knows she can trust Billy too, but she’s known Steve longer and she’s watched him grow up and she’s seen the way he’s grown and she’s just… so proud of him. She’s so incredibly proud of him. He’s such a good kid and he has a good heart and Billy is also a very good kid with a very good heart (and she will defend that stance till the day she dies) but he can be a bit… rough. She knows it. He’d probably admit to it too. He’s just a little rough and tough and Steve is a very soft boy and Joyce worries.

So she definitely sits Billy down and talks to him about it. She puts a motherly hand on his knee like she always does when she has serious talks with him. She’s very gentle about bringing Steve up.

And then she squeezes his knee a little tighter than normal and says: “Now don’t do anything to harm Steve, alright? Because you’ll have a lot of upset people on your hands, and one of them will be me.”

She’s stern. Billy just kind of… laughs nervously.

But the KIDS… ohgod guys, the kids.

The kids would devote their lives to protecting Steve if they needed to. I’m thinking that Knight guard at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade who loyally guards the grail w/ his life. I’m thinking of them forming a transformer like thing, all of them becoming a different part of the body so they can ward off evils and wrongdoers. I’m thinking something along the lines of London Tipton’s father’s body guards who form a literal blockade around him so you never see his face. Like, imagine these lil children banding together to form a little square around Steve, blocking him from the rest of the world so that no one can touch him or even look at him w/o going through them first. (There’s a scene where London dances w/ her dad except the body guard dudes don’t really move so she’s just holding his hands and all of the body guard dudes are moving side to side as they dance and it’s Hilarious and i just want to put that image into your heads but w/ the kids around Steve and Billy pouting bc whythefuck isn’t he allowed to see him goddamn boyfriend???)(anyway, i digress)(and might be making some references you don’t understand goodness i’m so sorry)

okaY so the kids are all at Mike’s house playing DnD or being dorks or whatever it is 14 yr olds do in a group alone. Or at least, that’s what Billy thinks. He’s really not sure what’s going on, he doesn’t pretend to understand their little shenanigans, he listened to Will rant about DnD character types for about 2 hours last week and his brain still feels a little fried by it so he just…….. He lets it be. All he needs to know is when to drop them off, when to pick them up, and when to tune them out just enough to where he doesn’t feel like a total jackass. Really, only w/ Will though bc Will is his favorite and he’d never wanna upset Will.

Anyway, he’s at Mike’s house, knocking on the door, here to pick Will and El up, when Mike opens the door and ushers him inside immediately.

“Hi Billy come in! We uhhh… we need you to help us… decide something.” Mike says lamely. Billy’s so unconvinced it’s insane.

“Decide something? Seriously? Since when have you nerds ever wanted my opinion on anything?”

“Well uh… this is a weird situation and we need your help.” Dustin says in what he probably thinks is sweet but to Billy is actually just very irritating, but he turns his attention to Dustin anyway.

Billy rolls his eyes and crosses his arms. “Whatever, what do you need?”

“Uhhhhhhh…. Now Mike!”

And suddenly, Billy’s world is black and very fabric-y. He’s been blindfolded. It’s very dumb and Mike probably would have struggled if he wasn’t Billy’s exact height so Billy starts wriggling and struggling and reaching for the blindfold when he feels someone grab his hand.

“It’s alright, Billy. We’re just going downstairs.” Will’s calm, soft voice says as he pulls him in some direction. Billy follows with a lot less struggle. He doesn’t wanna hurt Will.

And in a few minutes, Billy’s being pushed into a chair. He’s pretty sure he hears voices quietly bicker over tying him up but the consensus seems to be a “no” on that one bc soon he’s gaining sight again.

His vision clears from it’s blinded blur to see a kid w/ a mop of curly hair in front of his face.

“Hello Billy.” He says like he’s intimidating or something.

“Hi Billy!” El says extremely cheerfully. Dustin turns his head to shush her.

“El! Sh! We’re supposed to be intimidating!”

“Ohhhhh…. Intimidating?”

Max chimes in. “Like, scary.”

“Oh!” El says in understanding, making her best angry face and thinking way too hard and, very suddenly, exploding a lightbulb. She shrieks.

“Sorry…”

“It’s alright El.” Will says kindly, walking towards a closet. “Mike’s mom keeps extra lightbulbs in the closet.”

“Will!” Mike hisses “We’re busy right now!”

Will hits Mike with a silencing look. “I think you guys can handle this.”

Mike pouts. “Why are none of you helping us?” He looks to the corner where Max and Lucas are sitting, Lucas on the arm of a lounge chair and Max on the seat.

“We’re… supervising.” Lucas says over a sip of his soda.

“Yeah, we’re just making sure this dumbass doesn’t get murdered for being stupid.” Max says, gesturing to Dustin who makes a very loud noise of indignation. Max shrugs.

And Billy?? Is tired as all hell. Kinda just wants to leave. Really, he could leave and these little twerps probably wouldn’t even notice. They didn’t tie him down or anything, he’s just sitting in a chair watching these children fumble like idiots trying to be intimidating.

But…. he indulges them. He thinks it’s kind of entertaining. Sure, he could be doing a lot more w/ his day, but seeing these kids be dumb is still vaguely enjoyable. Plus, he likes El and Will and Max and he thinks sitting here for their sake might be worth it maybe.

So he sits and he watches and he listens to Mike and Dustin bicker about how to “interrogate a witness”

“We’re not interrogating him, we’re intimidating him!”

“Well you gotta use the same tactics, right?”

To the point where Max heaves a bit sigh and shoves them aside so she’s standing in front of Billy, sitting in her hip w/ her arms crossed.

“Alright Billy, look. We know you’re dating Steve. And we’re fine with you dating Steve.” She gives a hard look to Mike and Dustin, who look about to chime in w/ opinions of their own, but wither under Max’s gaze. “All we’re saying is we need to set some ground rules here.” Max says as she turns back to Billy. “Number one-”

“Don’t hurt Steve!” Dustin all but screams, causing Max to sigh with a roll of her eyes.

“Alright, yes. Rule number one: Don’t hurt Steve.  He’s like… family at this point. He’s super cool and nice to all of us and we care about him so don’t hurt him.”

“Or else I’ll hurt you!” Dustin pipes up again LOUDLY.

“Or Dustin will talk your ear off and probably accidentally spit on you while he does it.” Max says to a chorus of snickers and one very loud “Hey!” from the subject of her teasing.

“Rule number two: don’t be too…. Gross around us.” Max makes a face. “Like, if we have to witness you two kissing more than once a week, that’s excessive.”

At that is where Billy scoffs. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. at least for those of us who don’t live with you. And Number three: I don’t wanna hear ANYTHING about you guys… sleeping together.”

Everyone audibly gags at the thought. Billy is full on laughing now.

“Wow, such a kid you can’t even say the word fu-”

“NONE OF IT. Not even in passing or anything bc you guys accidentally talk too loud. I don’t want to be subjected to any of that.” Max is adamant about it, sealing it with a punch to his shoulder. Billy just puts his hands up in defeat.

“Yeah, fine, whatever. Like I wanna talk about my sex life with a bunch of twerps.”

Billy is thoroughly entertained by the faces of the kids, all looking absolutely mortified, Will’s face blushing like crazy, El’s head tilted bc she doesn’t understand.

Billy gives Max a look.

“Can I go now?”

Max shrugs, eyebrows furrowed bc she’s mad she had to hear the word sex come out of her brother’s mouth. He’s so grossly brazen all the time.

“Yeah, whatever. Just be nice to Steve.”

Billy pats his own knees and gets up, gesturing to El and Will to follow him.

“Let’s go, punks.” He says, the two of them following, Will’s face still red and El’s eyes a little less confused bc she doesn’t really care anymore. They say goodbye to their friends before following Billy out the door.

The three of them leave behind 2 very loud and complaining boys (Mike and Dustin), but it sounds like Max puts them in their place. Billy chuckles as he slips into his car.

[secretsantasides]

Gift #8: My Universe

Gift for @enby-fander

Prompt: Analogical High School AU

My Universe

Characters: Logan, Deceit (called Daniel), Virgil, mentions of Remus, mentions of Patton

Pairings: Romantic Analogical, Platonic Loceit, Brotherly Anxciet, implied Brotherly Logicality

Warnings: Alludes to homelessness and poverty, sad boi Virgil

Summary: Thank you to the two anons who showed up on @enby-fander's account and gave me major inspiration right when I needed it. Here you go, Trans Virgil and Nonbinary Logan that starts as angst and ends as fluff.

--------------------------------------------------------------

As the rest of Kingston High School's sophomores rushed into the cafeteria, Daniel Hyde instead ducked through an out-of-the-way, yet familiar, pair of dark, wooden, though probably fake wood, double doors. His head was down as he stalked over to the Fiction section, deliberately searching. For what, bystanders had no clue.

They parted, anxious to induce the wrath of Dan, a boy rumoured to be in a gang. None of them would put such a thing past the punk boy. He wasn't someone to mess with.

He walked with such a determination that they knew he was on the hunt. His prey? Another, hidden from all but him.

Logan Jekyll was seated in the middle of the mystery section, shrouded in darkness. The junior knew these shelves well, so much so that they could traverse them without requiring sight. That way, they had no reason to flick the switches at the start of each row to the "on" position, which would illuminate the row of dim fluorescent bulbs dangling above. Logan liked it better in the dark, anyway. It hid the introvert from those pesky freshmen. The ones who liked to taunt Logan for some unknown reason.

"Oh look, it's genius Jekyll. Aren't you the one with the ridiculously high GPA? Highest in your year?"

They gave a quick, curt nod to both questions, not speaking. Instead, they continued to read their book, turning the page after a few seconds of silence.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was most definitely living up to the praise they had heard it received, primarily by the Hyde brothers. Daniel had always pressed them to read it, so they had finally began the novel.

As they read, laughs were heard. The rowdy students had become bored with the junior and had stampeded away towards the computers. Logan never understood what they seemed to find so funny.

"Hey, first chair Jekyll, heard you got the solo for the next concert."

When they nodded, quick and curt, the group started laughing yet again. All the way over to the doors. Probably after they walked out the doors, too.

Logan recognized someone in that mob as the sophomore who liked to raise hell during rehearsal, along with a few trumpet players, a bassoon, and half of percussion. He brought the baritone horn section down considerably, even with Logan there to counterbalance his pure idiocy. And to think, this kid is laughing at him. Sheer stupidity, all of it.

"Jekyll, my man, the reason our debate team isn't shit. You're captain, right? Who's second, in your book?"

At the first question, they nodded. At the second, they scowled and looked back at his book. They did have an opinion on who would fall second, but that opinion was not owed to a group of freshmen who loiter around and taunt others. Seeing the spectacle-wearing one's scowl, the boys laughed. Turning and walking away, they kept on snickering and joking about "perfect Jekyll."

'Our debate team? You mean, my debate team.' Logan recognized none of those dumbasses as members of debate, especially not the one who initiated the conversation. He would be debating things when pigs flew.

"I found Jekyll, man of the hour. Nice speech you gave, didn't realize you could do that. Thought only seniors could."

They shook their head "no" at the statement, causing them to… big surprise… laugh at them.

At least they're eloquent enough to make a speech. These people could barely string together simple sentences, let alone write with enough skill to compose a speech at the level Logan did so at.

"Hey guys, here's Dr. Jekyll. Heard you finally found your Mr. Hyde, and you're terribly in love."

They scowled, otherwise ignoring all of them. That narrative wasn't even fitting to Robert Louis Stevenson's original story. In the end, it was revealed that Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde were one and the same, a relationship they and their boyfriend do not possess.

"What, don't want to admit that you're gay as f*ck for Hyde?"

The scowl already adorning their features intensified some, but that was the only indicator of how pissed Logan truly was. Lacking a reaction, the group turned and walked away, laughing as they went.

Did they owe them an explanation of their love life? No, they should f*ck off. It's their damn significant other, not theirs. They were thinking of multiple profanities that could describe those idiots, but decidedly did not execute them aloud. Their choices would make probably Remus Kingston proud, a boy who has an alphabet of swear words, an alphabet that only skims the surface of his cursing dictionary.

As Logan sat there, reminiscing about how much of an asshole all of those freshmen were, Dan was slowly honing down his search radius.

He had visited most of Logan's normal rows, besides mystery and parts of nonfiction. As he walked to non-fiction, he stopped abruptly and turned to walk down the row of mystery novels. Logan truly adored the who-dunits covering these shelves, or so he's heard. He may have good luck looking here, as long as his brother knew Jekyll well. Dan was certain he did.

Don't fail me now, nerd, I need you, he thought, breathing deeply.

He strolled casually into the aisle, flicking the switch at the start of the row. The dim fluorescent lining the ceiling flickered on, revealing exactly what he was looking for. Exactly who he was looking for. Logan Jekyll.

Logan hissed at the sudden lights, sparking a chuckle from the sophomore stalking towards him. They looked up, blue-green eyes meeting grey.

There was an amused smirk adorning the boy's features. Logan did not mirror the expression, but they were nonetheless glad to see the sophomore.

"Didn't realize us Hyde's had made an impression on you. Not surprised, though, with how much you see my brother."

The one clad in blue blushed a deep red at the mention of their boyfriend. Daniel laughed at the sight, before offering out his hand. Logan looked down at the palm obscured by black, fingerless gloves, bewildered as to why the other was putting his hand out. Their confusion showed, causing Dan to roll his eyes and huff.

"Take my hand, Calculator Watch, I'm helping you up. That sorry excuse for carpeting is stale as f*ck, so we might as well go sit somewhere more comfortable."

Reliasition flashed before Logan's eyes as they muttered an, "Ah." Their hand took the other's gloved one, allowing the younger boy to hoist the older off of the matted, black carpet. They now were roughly at eye-level with each other, Logan with a solid height of 5'5" and Daniel being just a half or full inch shorter.

Daniel ran one hand through his slicked back black hair, shoving the other in one pocket of his faded leather jacket. The hand brushing the hair joined the other in the pocket opposite.

"Now, Jekyll, we have a pressing matter to discuss."

The two walked in silence for a while, Daniel leading them through the hallways. Suddenly, he took a left into a classroom, Logan following behind.

The classroom was abandoned, obviously having been used as a science room at one point. There were posters adorning two of the walls, saying things like "Eat, sleep, science, repeat."

"We need to talk about my brother."

Panic flashed in the eyes of Logan, who hid the emotion quickly. Dan wouldn't have noticed if Logan had not coughed directly afterwards, drawing attention to their still shell-shocked expression

The older of the two anxiously scuffed one of their NASA-themed Vans across the linoleum tiles, before looking back at the aforementioned boy.

"Go on."

"Well, he has refused to leave his room for the past 5 days, so I wanted to ask you for…"

He hesitated, but Logan pushed him on.

"For what? Spit it out, Hyde."

Daniel coughed, before regaining his composure.

"I need your help, Jeyll. I need your f*cking help. You're the only person I know that can do anything to get my brother out of his hiding space, and that's all I care about. I'm willing to put aside our indifferences if it helps my brother. Now, tell me, will you?"

"So, what am I supposed to do again?"

The two were walking to the apartment the Hyde brothers shared.

Daniel cleared his throat. "You're supposed to get that bastard to emerge from the cave he has made out of his room. This may be a habit of his, but it has gone on longer than normal, which concerns me."

Logan chuckled. "Sounds like him, alright. At least I now know for certain you and I are talking about the same person."

Dan burst out, "Finally! Someone understands how antisocial that motherf*cker can be!"

He gestured dramatically to emphasize the point.

The older's face morphed into a grin and they began to laugh.

"Hey!" they said, through their laughter, "That's my boyfriend you're talking about!"

Daniel snorted.

"He's my brother! I'm allowed to call him an antisocial bastard."

The pair's laughter tapered off as they continued their trek.

"May I ask how far away your apartment is?"

Daniel coughed, shifting a bit awkwardly.

"Um… it's still a few minutes away, but we're heading up on it."

Logan cocked an eyebrow.

"Y'all live in the downtown area?" they asked.

Dan stayed silent, but nodded.

"My apologies for pushing the subject."

The pair had arrived at the place Daniel pointed them towards, a run-down, dirty-looking, crowded apartment building. Dan stopped multiple times before they arrived, obviously completing a routine.

First, he stopped by an older woman, who was walking across the sparsely filled parking lot with a cart. In the cart, canned food resided, all of which had a small message written on them in Sharpie.

As he reached her, Daniel pressed a can of food he procured from the pocket of his black backpack into her hands.

Logan heard her murmur, "God bless you, honey. You and your brother stay safe, alright Danny?"

They saw Dan give a warm smile towards her. "We will. Stay safe, Mrs. Cunningham."

Secondly, he waved to a group of little boys running in the lot, kicking a ball around. The one who had the ball kicked it towards Daniel, grinning brightly.

"Mr. Hyde!" the other boys shouted, having just spotted the teenager.

"Now what have I always told y'all? Call me Dan."

"Okay, Mr. Dan!" the boys chorused.

Daniel rolled his eyes, ruffling the hair of one. "I give up, y'all obviously are gonna be respectful at all times."

He paused, before clearing his throat.

"That's a good thing, boys. Respect everyone, even if it doesn't seem like they deserve it. Just gotta respect everyone."

The last part was murmured.

The boys all nodded vigorously, before one shouted, "First one to the tree over there gets to pick teams!"

They all sprinted, leaving Dan and Logan to chuckle.

"Kids, right?"

Daniel gave a half-moon smile. "Yeah."

The last stop before the Hyde apartment was at the front desk of the lobby. It could barely be considered a lobby, more like a room with a desk shoved in the corner, some assorted furniture in the other, and stairs to the upper floors. Daniel stepped up to the desk, pulling a sheet of folded notebook paper out of his jacket pocket. He set it on the desk before turning around and smoothing the worn-leather of his jacket. He popped the collar, looking Logan in the eyes.

"Let's go, Jekyll."

"Apartment 7C, correct?"

The pair had just arrived at floor 7, both out of breath. Daniel hid it better, though.

"...Yes," he composed himself, looking at the junior with a look of annoyance.

They strolled down the hall, stopping just short of the end.

APARTMENT 7C read a small, dirty plaque mounted just above the doorknob.

Dan proccured an equally rusty key from his back jean pocket. He turned to Logan and said, "Let's go get my bastard of a brother out of his damn slump."

The pair walked into the mess of an apartment, Daniel shouting out a quick, "I'm home!" to ease the other Hyde's anxieties. Though, the shouting may be contradictory, as the older Hyde brother was not a fan of loud noises.

Daniel quickly dropped the key on a rickety table close by to the door. His combat boots were shed, as Logan kicked off his Vans.

Dan turned to Logan, directing him towards his brother.

"Down the hall, first door to the left. It'll be locked, so… here."

He grabbed a penny from the counter and threw it to Logan. They caught it with ease, studying the coin. They looked up, raising an eyebrow.

"Our locks are garbage, so this should get it easy. I would've done it myself earlier this week, but I believe in the sanctitiy of one's room. That is, until you're in there for almost a week."

Logan nodded, turning to follow the instructions given.

Dan stopped them.

"I don't think he wants to see me, so I'll stay back. Jekyll, get my brother. Please."

He sounded almost desperate, so Logan obliged.

They found the door indicated easily, as there was a galaxy-patterned poster in blues and purples attached to the door with Scotch tape. It just seemed… right.

They jangled the knob a bit, discovering it was unsurprisingly locked. Logan took the penny, shoved it into the flat indentation on the rusty knob, turning slowly and carefully. It worked. The door was now unlocked.

Logan turned the handle, quickly entering the dark room. They heard a hoarse voice, dull due to lack of use, emitate from the corner.

"L-eave m-e the hell alon-e."

A throat was cleared, a few coughs ringing through the silence of the room.

"I'm fine."

Logan huffed, rumbling for the light switch mounted on the wall next to them.

Their hand knocked the switch up, prompting a hiss from the figure huddled in a corner.

"I thought you would be happier to see me. I assume I was wrong."

The figure looked up, revealing messy purple hair, tired and unfocused eyes, and a miserable expression adorning the features Logan would always find beautiful.

"Stella?"

"It's me, nebulosa."

Logan looked around the room.

It was very… Virgil.

He had a few band posters on the walls, hoodies with patches and stitching and a worn leather-jacket (much like Daniel's) hanging in the closet alongside his school-issued letterman's jacket, a black guitar propped up nicely in a corner, a chair that looked similar to those in the small dining room set with his low-quality music stand, band folder, and the large, bulky case of a euphonium put aside carefully, and a few trophies and certificates earned for track, for musical achievements, or for academic accomplishments were set on the dresser or hung on the wall above it. Everything was in black and deep purple, with subtle hints of navy.

They liked the color scheme a lot, as it was quite pleasing to the eye.

Much better than their brother's mixture of bright and pastel blues, all light in tone. Patton really didn't know how to mix colors.

Logan's attention was diverted, however, from the room surrounding them when they heard sniffles from Virgil's corner.

"Hey, hey. What's wrong?"

Virgil wiped his eyes, acting as though he wasn't just crying.

"I'm just over-emotional, I guess. Damn it, peri-"

He stopped himself, a look of shock adorning his features. Logan looked upon him with a look of pity, sad-smile creeping onto their features.

"Is that why you've been isolating yourself, babe? Hey, hey, come here."

Virgil shook his head. "I'm fine," he said stubbornly.

Logan walked over to him, wrapping their arms around him.

"It's okay, stella. ...I love you."

Virgil gave a weak smile.

"I love you too, Logan."

[abimee]

i'd like to request susie and kris just being friends having an alright day, whatever that means. if ur not feeling that as a writing prompt that's all cool- i love ur work and wish u a nice day.

this one is called ‘’Anthems For a Seventeen Year Old Girl” by Broken Social Scene for a title. It’s very silly but it was fun to write

Susie had a pretty sick bedroom, they had to admit.

It was like, painfully poster child aggresso-punk kid territory, with the strewn about clothes and the flannels with patches hanging on coat hangers that were hanging on command strips on the concrete wall, alongside various fucked up and wrinkled band posters and tacked-on F-graded exams and detention slips.

Her bed was grounded and without frames, and it was just two mattresses stacked together with no springboard, and Kris hopped on it and felt the top layer slightly move as they jostled the shitty thrifted blanket. Susie came in close behind them, slamming her door hard enough for the walls to shake a bit.

She took a seat at her desk, which was covered in a homemade paintjob of Walmart acrylic paints in various shades of blue. Kris stared at her ceiling fan, which shook with each swing, dangling a small string switch-pull.

“ Pretty sweet place you got going on down here,” Kris stared at the smallest window near the ceiling that gave them ground-level view of her backyard. Kris always wanted a basement bedroom.

“ Yeah, don’t anything that ain’t yours,” She pointed a finger at them before moving to face her desk. She fiddled with the various bullshit taking up real estate on it’s top, from stacks of CDs and empty fast food cups to a surprisingly large collection of god awful looking ceramic projects. Susie liked blowing up stuff in kilns, it seemed.

Kris rolled off the bed, meeting with the rug on the ground that protected them from the hard flooring. Susie didn’t bother taking off her shoes when she came down, but Kris had at least the courtesy to take their’s off, and they moved across the floor feeling the slight cold emitting from it.

A large closet stood opposite to the bed, door wide open and billowing with even more bullshit --- Susie had a knack for collecting the useless, it seems.

“ Hey, what’s the plan, nerd.” She asked as Kris grabbed the neck of a baseball bat that was poking out from a carton at the bottom of the closet.

“ Put on some music?”

“ Alright, whatcha listen to?”

“ You got Alternative?”

Susie’s brows furrowed, “ Specifics, dumbass.”

“ ‘Taking Back Sunday’.”

“ They’re not Alternative, they’re Rock.”

“ So you got them?”

“ Of course. You got good taste.” She complimented, pulling a CD out from the stack on her table, “ Is ‘Louder Now’ good for you?”

“ Oh fuck yeah it is,” Kris started to swing the bat around to get their bearings. It was a slugger, metal. Softball bat. “ Play ‘Make Damn Sure’ first.”

“ I’ll play whatever the first track is, i’m not scratching my CDs for you,” She smacked a small CRT TV that sat next to her desk on the floor. It seemingly turned on, and she pressed a button to open the slot and dispense the disc. She smacked the buttons to turn the sound all the way up, the crackle of the speakers warming up before filling the room with the sound of good, rough rock.

Kris struck a pose with the bat, “ You having fun with that?” Susie prodded, turning to face them on her chair. Kris pretended to hit a home run.

“ You play softball?”

“ No, it’s for protection,” She shrugged, “ Never know when you’ll need it.”

“ No wonder you’re so good with that axe, jesus christ.” The slugger had a decent weight to it, considering. If Kris didn’t keep a good grip it would definitely slip out of their hands and hit something.

Susie seemed embarrassed by the backhanded compliment, and the music just blared louder in their moment of silence, “ Thanks, I guess.”

They listened to the next handful of songs in silence, Kris moving around Susie’s room with pedantic hands, touching things not of their belonging and looking at the various notes on Susie’s wall--- she just watched them with calculating eyes, making snide remarks when asked about any of it.

Eventually it all got boring, and Kris returned to playing around with the slugger. Susie asked to change the CD, and Kris shrugged, “ Sure, it’s your music.”

She changed it to something else, something with a soft vocalist with obvious autotune on while a banjo plucked in the background, violins and soft instruments that didn’t feel anything like Susie. Kris laid down onto the bed, legs dangling off one end and head dangling near the other and still holding that stupid bat they’ve grown fond of.

Susie leans her head to rest on the chair, hands crossed beneath her chin. The silence was different, this time, as Kris saw Susie close her eyes and listen to the song; a constant repetition of lyrics about being wretched, about bleaching teeth and dreaming and a building of chorus in the sound.

But Susie seemed to have softened as she listened, and Kris found themself feeling tired to the music. For a little bit, they just relaxed there, in Susie’s basement bedroom, listening to chaotic music, thinking about nothing and holding that slugger, sitting in that chair, laying on that bed, thinking about nothing, thinking about nothing.

It was nice, surprisingly.

It was nice to be around Susie, when she wasn’t putting walls up. Little concrete walls, which she guarded with a little metal slugger bat in her hands.

Because, as she said, you never know when you’ll need to protect yourself.