#i can use the wig that i used for daenerys once upon a time

[righteousliar]

might just add making an Ianthe Naberius cosplay to the list of goals this year

[canonconspiracy]

Khaleesi (Ben Wyatt x Fem!Reader)

AN: In efforts to post more on here specifically, this is one that I just cross-posted into my Michael Shur Oneshot Collection (Wattpad and Ao3 - rmorningstar21).

Fandom: Parks and Recreations

Pairing: Ben Wyatt x Fem!Reader

Warnings: None

"Hey there, you stunning woman you!" You said into your phone, a smile across your features.  You sat upon your dresser, staring at your newest project confidently.  It had just been finished, and you couldn't be happier with how it turned out.  Everything was as perfect as you could make it, from each in seam all the way down to the wig styling.  Your best friend was the first person you thought to contact, primarily for a fun little favor.  She always seemed to love participating in your little projects anyhow, when she wasn't busy.  "Guess who just finished up a masterpiece." 

"No way, Joe Biden?" She guessed, with a clear smile against her own features.  

You rolled your eyes at your silly friend.  "I'm sure Markie Mark would be so jealous," you teased back.  "But seriously, Les, I'm super duper proud of this one.  You have any time coming up that we could head over to the park for some pics?" 

"What did you do this time?" She said curiously.  "Come on, you're on speaker.  Let us hear all about it!" 

"Who am I on speaker phone with?" You asked cautiously.  "Oh well, eff it.  I'm going to be the mother of dragons, Khaleesi outfit.  I even made a little dragon plush for Drogo." 

"I have no idea what any of that means," Leslie said with a chuckle, a smile clear in her voice.  "But the stupid surprise face on Ben's face means it has to be nerdy." 

"Hey!" You heard a male voice counter, likely the Ben that she meant.  

"I figured you wouldn't," you said with a chuckle.  "It's fantastic that at least someone does.  It's Game of Thrones.  I know your schedule is normally packed, but I'm flexible.  Whenever you're up for it." 

Leslie paused for a moment, an idea coming to mind as she glanced between the others at the Parks Department meeting.  "Do you mind if I bring some friends?" She said slyly.  "I've been dying to get you to meet them." 

You bit your lip, thinking about it.  Your eyes glanced over to the hopeful outfit that you had made, thinking maybe one day you would have you Khal.  "You think any of them would fit in a male's medium?" You said slyly, a little jest in your tone.  Knowing best not to get your hopes up, though you would love some killer Khal Drogo and Daenerys Targaryen photos.  

"I mean," Leslie said, laughter clear in her words, "if you want to drop off the outfit at City Hall, I could have someone try it."

*** 

You felt a little anxiety bubbling inside of you as the time drew closer.  A few days prior, you dropped off your Khal Drogo cosplay that you custom made at City Hall, with absolutely no inkling as to who Leslie was going to have wear it.  On top of that, she gave you that whole sneaky wink that she has that only showed she was up to no good.  Being her best friend, you knew she was far from sneaky.  

"Well, if they all hate me, at least they'll hate me as Dany," you mused as you spun around in front of your window, checking out the cosplay one more time.  You were in your mid twenties, likely younger than most of Leslie's friends.  As the Khaleesi, you wore practically snow white blonde hair down past your chest and slightly crimped.  Your outfit consisted of the ragged off white outfit that Daenerys wore after marrying Khal Drogo.  Everything you had created for it was mint, while the little dragon plush was simply for a little extra fun.  

A knock sounded at your door and you inhaled deeply to calm yourself.  Striding to the door with confidence, you slipped out your door to literally be surrounded by the entire Parks Department, and more.  Apparently when Leslie meant she wanted you to meet her friends, she meant all of them.  Immediately pulling Leslie into a hug, you whispered, "You're lucky I have a lot of acreage." 

"Well, I couldn't pick just a few, so," Leslie said with excitement in your tone, "I brought everyone." 

Beside her stood Markie Mark, as you liked to call ark Brezanowitz, her long term boyfriend.  Next to him stood Ann Perkins, whom you had met offhandedly a few times.  The rest of the crew, though, you had no idea.  After greeting Mark and Ann, Leslie introduced you to each and every one.  

As you noticed that little twinkle in her eyes, you knew there was something strange up.  For one, no one out of the group you were introduced to clearly wore your Khal Drogo outfit, and the fact that she was practically beaming at you had you curious.  When she said, "I already set up your backyard for the set!  Let's go!"  you could feel anxiety rising.  

When she said she set it up, it was clearly an understatement.   The camera was set up professionally, surely by someone else, since you always had to fix it for her.  What caught your eye was something that would truly have the Khaleesi blush, and your face was as red as a tomato.  

Looking off, clearly awaiting everyone's arrival, stood a handsome and lithe Khal Drogo.  Though he did not have the perfect body type for the cosplay, he was clearly handsome covered in the outfit you created.  He stood taller than you, and once he glanced your way, you could see his chocolate brown orbs that made you melt.  The excited smile that tugged upon his lips had your heart aflutter.  

"M'ach," you greeted in Dothraki as you moved closer to the male.  "I didn't expect Leslie to get me such a handsome Khal, but I greatly appreciate you doing this." 

"You speak Dothraki?" He said with an eyebrow raised, though the excitement did not leave his face.  "I was thrilled to be chosen, especially since I'm sure I'm the only Game of Thrones fan in the majority of City Hall.  I'm Ben Wyatt, and you must be Y/N?" 

You nodded with a large smile against your lips.  "It's a pleasure, and I speak a little," you said sheepishly.  "Just as Dany, I know bits and pieces of the dialect." 

"Okay, nerds," the man you were introduced to under the name of Tom Haverford said with a laugh.  "How about you two get into positions." 

You ended up positioning your Khal for multiple photographs, before he began getting into the character more.  The two of you had been blushing messes half the time, and you were sure that a great deal of the photographs would not be useable, but kept for memory purposes.  

As the two of you got further into shooting, Ben moved his hands to either side of your face as he said, "Yer zheannae sekke." 

You prayed your face did not hold too much blush as you replied, "Yer mezahe sekke."  A smirk pulled upon your lips as you replied, though you did wish to call him handsome instead of simply sexy, your knowledge of Dothraki was small.  

As the two of you simply stared into one another's eyes, you could hear the camera continuing to take photographs.  The one thing you had been too shy to accomplish, Ben was not, as he captured your lips for the photographs.  Surely, you thought he was simply putting on a show for your collection, but you could still feel your heart reverberating in your chest.  Mentally, you had been screaming.  

When the two of you had been done modeling your outfits, you both excused yourselves inside to change.  Ben had thankfully brought a spare outfit, knowing he wanted to leave your property with you.  Once he entered your home, though, his eyes were wide in shock.  

"So, you're a professional cosplayer?" He questioned as his eyes moved between different creations you had made.  

You hummed in approval, a smile against your lips as you moved to grab your street clothes.  "Are you sure you haven't modeled like that before?" You asked with an eyebrow raised, turning to meet chocolate brown eyes.  "You surprised me out there." 

He took off your wig to reveal partially mussed brown locks, appearing much more handsome than he had even in the Khal Drogo attire.  Sheepishly, he smiled, a clear bit of blush risen in his cheeks.  "That was genuine," he replied sheepishly.  "You're very beautiful, and I apologize if I crossed a line." 

You told him just a second before you went to change back into your normal clothes.  Brushed through y/h/c locks and your normal attire, you bit your lip gently, wondering if the handsome man would still be attracted to you as, well, you.  Emerging from the bathroom, you were shocked to see that he had already changed out of his own outfit as well, simply buttoning up his shirt as you came out.  

"I'm curious, handsome, do you still think that without the cosplay?" You teased, a smile tugging against your lips.  

His chocolate gaze was sincere as he smiled down at you, nodding and he said, "Khaleesi or not, you're beautiful, and I'd love to get to know you better." 

"I'm sure I'd love that," you said shyly.  

____________

Leaving this note at the end as to not ruin the one shot itself, but like - can you picture Ben as Khal Drogo?  I think I would die immediately. 

[starringemiliaclarke]

Press: Emilia Clarke, the Queen of Dragons, Tells All

  How HBO’s insanely popular hit show turned a young British actress into a feminist, a fantasy icon and a royal fan favorite

    ROLLING STONE – On a recent Monday afternoon, the queen was taking her tea. “Could I just be more English than sense itself and get an Earl Grey?” asks Emilia Clarke from the deep folds of a leather chesterfield sofa in the so-called Drawing Room of her downtown Manhattan hotel. The young waiter is only too happy to oblige, though it’s unclear whether he knows he’s in the presence of the Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons and rightful ruler of the Seven Kingdoms.

  That being said, six seasons into HBO’s Game of Thrones – a cultural phenomenon that plays in no fewer than 170 countries, has inspired countless tattoos and baby namings, and has proved to be the network’s most popular show of all time, with a seventh season set to premiere July 16th – it’s more than likely that he does. Clarke smiles and tucks her feet up under her. “I’m crap at getting recognized,” she confides. “People are like, ‘Oh, hey!’ And I’m like” – she starts yelling – “‘God! Oh, hi! I’m sorry!’ ”

  When I first met Clarke, back in 2013, the actress was 26, still relatively unknown when not wearing her signature GoT blond wig, and not likely to compare herself to her warrior-queen character. She’d still seemed slightly in awe of the fact that she’d gotten the job at all, which was only her third acting role ever. “I’m all too painfully aware of how quickly this can disappear,” she’d told me when we’d met in a Broadway dressing room, where she was rehearsing to play Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  Four years later, Clarke has maintained her hallmarks – wry humor and ample good will, among them – but it’s clear we’re in another realm. Even in a messy bun and frayed blue jeans, she now comes across as a sort of beacon – poised, almost glowing, a point to which all other attention can’t help but be drawn. In other words, she has a way of commanding the room that seems downright Khaleesi-esque. She has, after all, now spent the bulk of her adult life embodying one of our culture’s most striking images of female domination, while eloquently explaining her onscreen nudity in broadly feminist terms. She’s turned 30 (of which she says, “I was just quietly panicking”). She’s graced the big screen multiple times, including opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys. And, like the rest of us, she’s lived through Brexit and the ascendency of Trump, or, as she puts it, “ ’16. The fucking year where everything shit happened.” So, times have changed – for better and for worse.

  “You can’t expect everyone to just stop doing their jobs and march every day of their lives,” she says of the volatile political climate. “But we’ve got to be in this shit for the long game.” And for Clarke, being “in this shit” means not being OK with a lot of what goes on around her – a realization that grew and amplified “in a [post-Brexit] era where you suddenly go, ‘What do you mean my views are so vastly different from my neighbor?’ ” Like, for example, her views on being one of the few women on any given set. Or the fact that women consistently have fewer lines than their male counterparts, even when they’re playing the “lead.” Or that actresses must arrive for hair and makeup hours before most of the male stars.

“I feel so naive for saying it, but it’s like dealing with racism,” she says. “You’re aware of it, and you’re aware of it, but one day, you go, ‘Oh, my God, it’s everywhere!’ Like you suddenly wake up to it and you go, ‘Wait a fucking second, are you . . . are you treating me different because I’ve got a pair of tits? Is that actually happening?’ It took me a really long time to see that I do get treated differently. But I look around, and that’s my daily life.”

  She recognizes, of course, that this is a complicated stance to take as a woman who has no doubt benefited hugely from her, ahem, pair of tits. She was Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive in 2015 (“My mum bribed them”), and her role on Game of Thrones has been punctuated by momentous scenes in which she happened to be naked. “It doesn’t stop me from being a feminist,” she counters. “Like, guess what? Yes, I’ve got mascara on, and I also have a high IQ, so those two things can be one and the same.” But the complexity of gaining women’s-empowerment cred through such channels explains why she’s also glad about the evolution of her character, a woman who rose literally from the ashes and now seems poised to win the game of thrones. Throughout history, Clarke reminds me, “Women have been great rulers. And then for that to be a character that I’m known to play? That’s so fucking lucky. Anyone who seems to think that it’s not needed need only look at the political environment we’re all living in to be like, ‘Oh, no, it’s needed. It is needed.’ ”

  All of which means that Clarke is now embracing her character’s power in a way that might not have been possible for her when the series first aired, when the dew of Oxfordshire was still fresh upon her. Clarke grew up about an hour outside London in the tweedy British countryside of meat pies and bovine creatures. “You know, I grew up with a stream in the garden and with fields everywhere,” she says. “We used to go mushroom-picking. There were ducks. It was idyllic on every level.” She followed her older brother to St. Edward’s, a private boarding school in Oxford where, as the daughter of a sound designer (who’d started out as a roadie) and a marketing VP (who’d started out at secretarial college), she was somewhat removed from the upper-crust kids of her new milieu. “It was a fancy school,” she says. “And we weren’t that fancy.” She was also an artsy kid at a school that wasn’t that artsy. “People were good at hockey and wanted to be lawyers. I just wanted to be everyone’s friend,” she says. “It was painful – I was on the outskirts, peeping in, going, ‘You guys look fun. Can I come join?’ ”

  After graduation, she applied to RADA, LAMDA and Guildhall, a trifecta of hallowed institutions for British would-be actors, and got rejected from every one. She waitressed, saved up some money, went backpacking around Southeast Asia and India, and then reapplied to “a bajillion schools,” only getting into the Drama Centre London “by the skin of my teeth when I got a phone call saying, ‘This girl broke her leg. The place is free if you want it.’ ”

  Drama school was another venue where she learned her place. She was never the favorite. She was never the ingénue. She played old ladies and bedraggled prostitutes. “They broke us down,” she tells me. “But if you’re a favorite at school, you’re fucked for life. I mean, you come out and you’re like, ‘Hey, where’s my golden egg?’ Whereas when you haven’t had that at all, you’re just like, ‘I will do anything. I will work harder than you could imagine.’ ” She gave herself a year to break into the industry. Right around that deadline, cash-strapped, despairing and casting about for alternative life plans, Clarke – just scraping five feet two, curvy and brunette – got a call from her agents about auditioning for the role of tall, willowy, blond Daenerys Targaryen. She turned to Google for a crash course on George R.R. Martin’s novels and then went in to meet the HBO execs. At some point in the audition, she found herself doing the funky chicken.

  “You wake up and go, ‘Wait a fucking second, are you treating me different because I’ve got a pair of tits'”

  She also managed to broadcast the range HBO was seeking: Clarke had the vulnerability of someone who wasn’t the favorite but also the strength of a young woman who’d grown up with a working mother who had herself risen out of secretarial school to forge a high-powered career. “I was so lucky that I was brought up with a mum who just showed by example,” Clarke says. “It was never spelt out that I would have a harder time in life. My family put a fair amount of onus on wanting to expand your thinking as opposed to shrinking your bottom.”

  This goes a long way toward explaining the more personal reason why 2016 was a shitty year for Clarke. On July 10th, her father – whose behind-the-scenes work got her interested in acting in the first place – passed away from cancer. Clarke was filming a movie in Kentucky and unable to be home for all of his final days. When things got dire, she wrapped the movie early but arrived at the airport in London to learn that she’d just missed him. “I definitely think I’m still in varying degrees of shock,” she says. “There’s no measure for it. There are all of these books about grief, but there’s no guide. Like, ‘Oh, on Tuesday, you’ll feel this, but on Thursday, you’ll be here.’ ”

  Three weeks after her father’s death, Clarke began filming the seventh season of Game of Thrones. A few weeks before it, Brexit had happened. “The world felt like a scarier place once my dad wasn’t in it,” she says. “And then those two things happening in quick succession threw me off balance and made me re-evaluate who I am. And it was in that re-evaluation that I was like, ‘I’m a fucking woman, and there aren’t very many of us performing in the environment that I’m performing in. I need to be incredibly sure of the ground on which I’m standing, and I need to take ownership of the choices I’m making.’ ”

  That included the way she comported herself on set. Clarke’s general approach to the world is self-deprecating levity. “When one spends your days discussing the politics of King’s Landing, it’s very important not to forget to do your penguin dance between takes,” co-star Peter Dinklage says of her capacity for goofing around, while she describes what goes through her mind when acting opposite a mechanical dragon thusly: “I’m like, ‘Is he clenching? Is he farting? What do you want me to do?’ ”

  But over the course of the show, Clarke’s own vulnerability has shrunk as Khaleesi’s power has expanded. “You don’t get to be a mother of dragons without a change or two,” she says. “Being able to encompass and understand the kind of woman who could conquer armies and topple societies allows me, the actor, to stand firmly in those shoes.” Which came in handy on set when something would remind her of her father and literally “take my breath away,” she says. “You underestimate the enormity of it. I didn’t know feeling this way was possible.” In those moments, she’d gather her strength and try to channel that emotion into her work. “I was like, ‘I’m not gonna let you see me cry. That ain’t happening.’ ” Instead, she’d steal away for a moment and then come back to being Khaleesi.

  For Clarke, Khaleesi’s story is about to come to a close. Sometime next year, the final episode of Game of Thrones will air and the role that she’s been playing for almost a decade, the role that “saved my ass in so many ways – propelled my ass, really,” will be over. “There’s going to be a shake-up of my identity, I think,” she says of that inevitability. “And I feel like I’m only going to understand what the last seven years has been when we stop.”

  She promises the upcoming episodes of the epic will not disappoint. “Spoiler alert – I normally don’t spend very much time in Belfast, but this last season I spent a little more time there,” she says, throwing a hint to the GoT obsessives. “It’s a really interesting season in terms of some loose ends that have been tied, some really satisfying plot points, some things where you’re like, ‘Oh, my God. I forgot about that!’ Rumors are going to be confirmed or denied.” But Khaleesi’s plotline will continue through to the end. “I mean, I have no doubt there’ll be prequels and sequels and who knows what else. But I am doing one more season. And then that’ll be it.”

  After that eighth and final season, Clarke will have a freedom that she hasn’t had since she was cast at age 23. The roughly seven months of each year she’s spent waking up at 3 a.m. to get into hair and makeup, the 18-hour days in which she’s pretended to ride a dragon or lead an army or walk naked through fire, will suddenly be hers again. The thought is both daunting and titillating. “It makes me emotional to think about,” she says. “It’s my beginning, middle and end – the single thing that has changed me most as an adult.”

  Not that freedom is here yet. When she returns to London in a few days, it will be for the Han Solo Star Wars prequel, in which she presumably plays yet another bad-ass woman. “All I can say is that she’s awesome,” Clarke tells me. “Like, legit, that’s all I can actually get away with saying. There’s a stormtrooper with a gun, and he’s going to come walking in any second.”

  After Star Wars, Clarke’s ultimate goal is to create the kind of shop that rights the wrongs she’s witnessed: “I would love to start a production company that was just full of nice, funny women,” and where the vibe was one of “‘Yeah, I’ve got a pair of tits, and aren’t they lovely? Aren’t they great? You do too! They’re great, you’re in the club!’ ” In the meantime, she says, she’s been working on expanding her mind rather than shrinking her bottom.

  “I’ve suddenly got a ferocious need to learn things,” she adds. “Like, I listen to podcasts manically – The New York Times and The Guardian and The Economist and TED Talks and Fresh Air. I need information. I’m like, ‘I just want to know as much as humanly possible.’ ” Which means that for all Khaleesi has given Clarke, Clarke’s in the process of reciprocating. “Khaleesi got a little something extra this year, you know what I mean? She got a little something else going on.”

Press: Emilia Clarke, the Queen of Dragons, Tells All was originally published on Enchanting Emilia Clarke