#i guess?? at some point i’ll need a real tagging system | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

nvuy · 28 days ago

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your writing style is a dream of mine, and the pacing & humor in your fics are some of the many reasons i decided to follow you !

i'm trying to write fanfics myself & potentially even run a writing blog! could you share a few writing tips?

you are so cute.

i’ll let you in on a secret: i started actually publishing my fics in 2020, but i since abandoned them because they’re embarrassing. however, here’s one as a starting point. i look back at it and cringe A LOT, but it was my foot in the door, and 15 year old me was very proud of it, so i didn’t want to straight up delete it.

i didn’t start out on tumblr because i get nervous being forced to interact with people because im a pretty abrupt person and i talk about the things that i like too much and im aware that can scare people away. it was about halfway thru writing old habits before i actually posted something. that was this and i posted it because i knew what little audience i had knew ME because i wrote a scaramouche fic. so. scaramouche content.

and because of the tumblr tagging system, people saw it, they liked it, and some people wanted more.

i then interacted with other writers slowly even though i was scared and frankly still am. you dont have to go around asking to be moots or spamming hearts left and right and putting their dicks in ur mouth, but being nice and having a scope around on what other people do on here helped me develop this ugly little blog i have.

i got really into hsr so i write a lot of hsr. i get a lot of people that ask if i could write more genshin impact, and i could, but at the end of the day, it’s my blog, and if i dont want to, i dont have to. i lost interest, so i dont really have to care about it, nor pay it any mind. do i still write it? sure! rarely, but i do. i don’t play wuwa anymore, but im down to write a piece or two if i get an idea, etc etc.

another thing is: don’t write in the hopes that you’ll post it on tumblr. same way i don’t think artists should draw just for the sake of posting. i have so much shit laying on various docs that won’t even be shown on this site, because it doesn’t need to be here. not because it’s bad, or it’s weird, but because i don’t have to post it, because it’s my blog.

the thing is you just be yourself and write whatever the fuck you want. i write horror & weird shit; my audience is probably well aware of that by now, and im not really worried to post anything super weird because its sort of what’s expected of me.

i know horror and romantic cannibalism connotations and yanderes and unsubtle sexy threats is not everyone’s thing, and that’s ok! they don’t have to like what i put out, and i don’t worry about it, because people who like your shit will interact, and people who don’t will not. and people that don’t like ur shit and still interact are losers. hit the block button & move on.

someone is always bound to like your works.

i guess the ‘funny’ comes from the fact that i try to write dialogue how real people would speak. in fictional context, someone like kaedehara kazuha could wax poetry for three hours without stuttering in game, but realistically, nobody can probably do that without pauses, stammers, messing up words, etc. so i try to incorporate a sense of realism into everything, even if it’s a fanfiction in a world where a small boy in white tights is a god and everyone gets tiny little orbs that give them magical elemental powers.

i remember that even though these characters are fictional, i write them as though they could potentially be real people that do things real people do: fidget, stutter, blush, try and be funny and fail, they have problems large or small, etc. you have to mould your personality and writing style to make these characters alive on what you put out—childe seems like a great husband on paper, but is he all that good when he has unchecked mental health problems and has violent outbursts and desires? think about it.

another thing: don’t doubt your skill and prowess, especially in comparing yourself to posts with like 10000+ notes. most of them are note farming bullshit anyway—and a lot of the reader community is more likely to click on porn fics than normal fics. its why the popular posts on the x reader tags are usually porn. it’s half the reason why confiteor is infinitely more popular that old habits when im pretty sure scaramouche is a bigger character on the popularity charts.

strictly nsfw blogs that people make i can guarantee you are a lot more popular than their main blogs.

which brings me to: dont hop on trends. don’t do it. youll burn yourself out. just write what you want. fuck everyone. do whatever the fuck you want. if porn is popular but you’re extremely sex-repulsed or not comfortable, don’t write it. dont write to please people; it’s your blog and your time you’re putting into to do what YOU like, and you’re sharing your work for FREE on a public platform. a lot of people can’t do that. there’s people that follow my blog that openly admit they don’t like yandere/horror/whatever content. am i going to change what i post because of these people? no. not my problem. don’t care. i don’t exist to please everyone, and neither do you. stick to what you like.

don’t write for fandoms you don’t give a shit about just because they’re popular. even if what you like has a small, non-existent fan base, i promise you’ll enjoy writing for that more than something that you’re creating for clicks. notes are nice, but again, you don’t have to post everything you create. half the joy in writing is rediscovering old shit you don’t remember writing for a fandom you actually like. it’s like a reward.

#✦ ( love mail. )#✦ ( anon. )

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chipped-chimera · 1 year ago

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WIP WEDNESDAY - 21/06/23

(I mean it’s technically Friday now between timezones and spoons but have this otherwise I’ll keep forgetting) My first WIP Wednesday! Thanks @theviridianbunny for the tag! I’ve been really getting stuck into modding - as well as falling into my usual mod habit of ‘start like six project at once and end up with a million WIP files' but I guess I’ll talk about the major ones.

Graphic design is my passion ...

(Long) rambling about mods I'm making + things I've learned below the cut~

My V’s tatt project is still ongoing, and I’ve (somewhat begrudgingly) been trying out Substance Painter to work on bits of it, mainly polishing seams between UV maps. It’s definitely got a lot of benefits, especially for graphic placement in really tricky areas (like anywhere in the entire head mesh region for example) but I still think a lot of the heavy work will still be done in Photoshop so I’ll probably be writing up both experiences with them when I do that tutorial I keep hinting at for complex tatt work. I’ve started drafting a tumblr tutorial but I wonder if that’s the best format, maybe a PDF? Google doc? Github wikis look cool? (tho I think I need to pay for that) - if y’all got suggestions for tutorial formats pls let me know!

As for the other arguably overly-ambitious-project-where-I-bit-off-more-than-I-could-chew ...

H A I R.

Hair has been the bane of my existence for about the past week( ... weeks? Maybe two?), most of it involving cursing, a lot of reverse-engineering game meshes and smashing my head against blender. But if not already evident from my monowire post - I am a stubborn bitch with too much time on my hands so even though there were at least two moments where I wanted to curl up on the floor under my desk and just stay there - we got there.

This all started because my favourite hair mod which I cannot split from my V’s identity was acting funky and the shape of it had been altered since a physics update. It wasn’t her anymore. So I needed new hair. I tried editing the existing hair. I tried importing the old hair mesh. I tried so many things and they didn’t work out one way or they threw a million errors or there were an obnoxious amount of verts.

I even tried looking for replacement mod hair. None of them fit, all of them felt too ‘clean’ for my V. So I just concluded: FINE. I’ll make my own damn hair. From scratch. At least then I’ll actually KNOW what’s going on with the mesh, right?

Problem with hair is tutorials are very limited in respect to Cyberpunk, so I had to learn a lot of this by myself and looking at other processes used for building game hair. I’ve had a previous stint in game design at uni but it was very introductory and more broad-strokes concepts not specific stuff like what ‘real time hair’ is and how you actually go about placing hair-cards (there’s a million different ways btw) but after another 3 days smashing my head against blender I finally got shit to work to a satisfactory level using hair tools for blender and the particle hair grooming system (not the 3.5 blender system, maybe more on that at some point).

Putting together the hair cards I was 120% convinced this was going to blow up in my face, primarily through vert count. But this hair tool plugin? Alarmingly efficient. I was frequently checking my work against Alt's hair mesh (one I was planning on rigging to) and here's the final-ish stats -

This is with only Alt's hair mesh selected (no cap) and then only my mesh(s - lots of layering to build it up), and by comparison I felt I'd built up the density of a chinchilla. This is not a brag, this is mostly genuine confusion over how efficient this plugin is, all I did was smack around hair curves. It did all the UV mapping junk on the fly.

Although structurally complete, I still consider this a WIP (yes I know there's a reeeeal fun vert funkiness in that second render, it's been fixed) since I'm having to go back and fine-tune some of the UV's the plugins mapped that I'm not happy with and generally figuring out my density problem because if anything, after putting it in-game it felt too dense.

Because yes, somehow I got it in game.

WITH. PHYSICS.

This may have driven me absolutely up the wall between having to learn blender from scratch then what the heck real time hair is and how that works etc. etc. but ... god, seeing her move back from the mirror and just feeling that instant catharsis of 'IT'S HER!' made it so. Damn. Worth it.

It looks too thick - this might be because I chucked in the 'doubled' feature Wolvenkit comes with because I hadn't spent any time doing backfaces. But it also might be because it's black? That's going to need investigating.

The physics need a lot of work too, I did a pretty rushed weight painting job last night on a merged version of the mesh because I was worried whether it was even viable and I'd already dumped an insane amount of hours into this between trying to salvage the old hair and building a new one (with some more bells and whistles. Mainly - curly). That wasn't without it's issues -

This almost fucking cracked me, given this was one of the issues I was experiencing before trying to fix an existing mesh mod. Turns out I was just being dumb and forgetting to export the armature, which I'd thought I wasn't supposed to do after having blender throw a bunch of errors on other hair attempts. I gave it a try after one last shot and boom. Worked. (I dunno what those errors were about man but now I know armature? very important).

Will I release this hair? no damn clue, depends on if I can get it to a level I feel is 'releasable'. I already know what I'm calling it though - Venatrix her side-handle I've decided on.

I look forward to adapting it into maybe a comb-back version, as well as a tied up version, so I can show off both her undercut + have the option of NOT hiding every damn tatt I've obsessed over placing on her neck haha.

In other news -

My much-needed wacom tablet replacement arrived (as well as other things I was looking forward to 👀) meaning my Wacom Cintiq, workhorse of ten years can finally enjoy her retirement. Her controls were getting funky, she had a few dead pixels but man. I'm convinced they won't make them like her ever again. Either way she's done unfortunately - upgrading my monitor to 2k made this painfully obvious. I don't think it's even running in full HD, it's that old. And with Phantom Liberty coming out this year? I'm probably going to need a new videocard and DVI compatibility isn't really a thing anymore.

So for future I think I'll just stick to the basic tablet set up, invest in screens. Also now I FINALLY know what her hair is gonna look like and with the tablet here, I can get back to work on the tattoo bodysuit.

Anyways, that's it for now! (Jesus Christ did you really read all of this? If you did you're a fucking trooper). Sorry for the extended ramble but MAN I did a lot, I needed to yell.

Till next time Chooms! Thanks again @theviridianbunny for the tag~ <3

Oh shit wait, have the blender renders before I forget because hahah I figured out how to do that too lol -

#cyberpunk 2077 #my mods #wip wednesday #kerytalk #god I am sorry this is a fucking essay but I had a lot to talk about I guess #one can do a lot in a week with nothing but the power of autistic hyperfocus and the love for one's OC blorbo ok #cp2077 mods #cp2077 modding

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cookinguptales · 2 years ago

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That last post I just reblogged was fascinating to me because it was obviously a joke but it actually lined up so well with a common PMDD symptom of mine that I was writing about it in the tags. Then I kind of thought about it again and realized OP doesn’t deserve all that in the tags of their joke post so like. I guess I’ll put those thoughts here instead.

(under a cut, cw: frank discussion of mental illness)

Like I’ll warn here that I’m about to talk about mental illness in some pretty explicit terms. I have Premenstrual Dysphoria Disorder (in addition to Major Depressive Disorder) and for the most part I have a pretty good handle on it. My depression is treatment resistant, but I did some hormonal treatments for years to help with that, my endometriosis, and my menstruation-induced EDS complications.

(Have you ever had menstrual cramps so bad that it dislocated your hips and ribs? I have! Every goddamn month lmao.)

About a year and a half ago, I had to stop taking the hormones because they were honestly making certain things worse, so I had to kind of just. Figure out other ways to deal with it. Working with a doctor, a regimen of cannabis tea and ketamine has helped a lot with the physical symptoms, and has helped some with the emotional symptoms. It’s still not perfect (still get bad days sometimes) but my suicidality is way better than it was.

(People with PMDD are apparently estimated to attempt suicide seven times more than the general AFAB population so like. I guess that’s something to keep in mind.)

That said, my ketamine regimen was fucked up recently because of some issues at the doctor’s office and uh. Well, I’m still kind of building the levels back up. The past few periods have been very rough for me. Mostly physically, but I’ve had some emotional issues, too.

This month, my PMDD has been… I guess not as severe as it was in the past, but boy is it lingering. I’ve been very jittery, very anxious, prone to bad mental loops, etc. It’s been about a week at this point, which is on the long side, but you just gotta tough it out, right?

(Don’t worry, guys, I do know when to reach out for help when symptoms get bad, and have done it before in the past.)

Anyway… one of my least favorite symptoms has come out to play and I’m Dealing with it but I hate itttt. It’s the one that the post reminded me of! And that’s the one where you feel guilty for wanting people to love you.

I think… when you’re dealing with something difficult alone, it’s very normal to fantasize about someone helping you through it. Telling you you’re not a bad person, that they love you, hugging you, etc. Normal stuff like that. I think people sometimes use fictional characters, sometimes real people who love them (like family/friends), sometimes people they make up in their head, etc. I think fantasizing about comfort is fairly normal.

But when you’re in the trenches, your mind is like No It Is Not Normal It Is Bad. I have to remind myself that like… in some ways, it’s kind of like an abusive relationship. During bad PMDD spells, my mind wants to hurt me, it wants to kill me, and it wants to separate me from my support systems. Your brain tells you that burdening others with your feelings is Bad and you are Bad for doing it.

This makes it hard to reach out for help when you need it (again, I do know how to do that, I am safe, I know that I have people who would come to my house right now if I needed them to — and failing that, I do know how emergency mental health intake works, too) but also like… it often gets to the point where you feel like a terrible person for even wanting to be loved.

Like — this is hard to explain, so here’s a sample spiral.

(cw: mental illness, suicide mention. I’m going to try and be as realistic as possible here and that might be troubling for some readers.)

I am feeling bad. I am sad and anxious and scared and feel like I am worthless. I want someone to hold me and tell me they love me. I imagine a person I like doing this. I then think — no, you are a bad person. They would not want to do this. You are putting the burden of your feelings on some unsuspecting person again. It is unfair to use a real person as a mental support. You are forcing them into a situation they did not consent to, and you are using them as a crutch. You are a bad, selfish person and they would hate you if they knew you were doing this. You are asking for too much from the people around you; how dare you ask for love and support? You are worthless and no one will love you and imagining them loving you is unfair to them and frankly very invasive. You are being parasitical right now. Stop imagining people doing things they’d never want to do, you’re such a bad person. Don’t you care about their boundaries? Of course you don’t, you always hurt people because you’re selfish and bad and no one will ever like you. So stop imagining them liking you! Just kill yourself and get it over with, etc. You are a bad thing and bad things should go away and you should stop existing. Stop writing RPF about the people you like, that’s even worse than the crime of just being you. Just kill yourself.

And honestly, this will probably go on for a couple hours and there will probably be a lot of crying. >.> It’s good to keep electrolyte solution around because dehydration just makes it worse.

I’ve dealt with MDD for almost my entire life, but PMDD is… different. There’s a sort of exhausted doneness with MDD, like you don’t want to kill yourself, necessarily, you just want to stop existing. PMDD is different. There’s a very loud, very manic aggression to it. Your brain is very actively trying to kill you. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s like being in a crowd of people all screaming at you at once until you cry, and then screaming at you for crying. There is a mob in your head and it hates you.

It is… very, very loud and very difficult to drown out. I can usually catch the warning signs and head things off before I get into a spiral. Going for a walk is good. Helps break the cycle. Creating is good, too. Makes me feel productive and useful to others, which is a whole other can of worms, but it is effective. And if all else fails, I usually weaponize my hyperfixations lmao. Start up an old video game that I know will take all my focus, or start a new tv show that I know I’ll get fannish about, whatever.

This month has been hard because, frankly, it took me by surprise. It’s a little earlier than it should be and I haven’t had to deal with it as much in the past six months, so I guess I got out of the habit. I didn’t notice that I was starting to get kind of stressed and anxious over small stuff and was beating myself up for feeling normal human emotions. This is usually the big warning sign to me. I will latch onto a negative feeling I’m having and feel very guilty about it. I scratch at it like a healing scab. Then the spirals starts. So I have to keep a watch out for that.

But… like I said, I do tend to withdraw and feel guilty about talking about these things. I feel guilty for wanting to depend on others because I feel like that’s asking too much, a miserable person like me demanding attention from people who are too good for me. And once I start withdrawing into myself and not talking to those around me, things get worse.

Like I said!!! Your brain is abusive and it wants to separate you from your support system — so it makes you feel like a bad person for even wanting a support system.

(I find that it helps, actually, to frame it like that. I can tell that my thoughts are starting to get irrational and it’s like “oh, THIS asshole is back to say mean things to me again.”)

So… idk, I’m trying to talk about it. I figure that I tagged this post appropriately and put multiple warnings on it, so anyone who is reading this wants to be here. Maybe out of curiosity, maybe out of support, maybe because they deal with these things, too. idk.

I’m basically telling my mean brain that fuck you, it’s good to talk about my feelings and no one hates me for it.

Because… this is the big thing… I was thinking about that one Tumblr post… the one that was like “the me in your head is nice to you, right?”

I want the me in your head to be so nice to you. I want the me in your head to hold you and tell you you’re a good person and that I love you. Even if I don’t know you. I want the me in your head to be so damn comforting.

I love the idea of being a comfort to people. That’s… why I write so much of why I write, I think. There’s nothing that chokes me up like finding out I’ve managed to comfort someone that I don’t even know. Is there anything more beautiful than comforting and supporting others in this bitch of a world?

NO we gotta be kind.

So… if I want the me in your head to be so, so kind, why do I feel so guilty for wanting the you in my head to be nice to me, too? Why do I feel like I am so innately unlovable that even fantasizing about someone loving me could stain them somehow? Like I will stain their clothes with my own awfulness.

I DON’T. I don’t feel that way. I have been doing so much better lately. I have been reaching out to people and doing fun things and spending time with people and thinking about loving people and them loving me back. I’ve thought about people loving me!!! And I’ve started to have the creeping hope that it could happen! That I am worthy of love.

Guys, I’ve been better. I know that all sounds like not much, but it’s been so easy for me to convince myself that no one will ever love me because I’m sick, I’m disabled, I’m unattractive, I’m unkind, I’m cringe, I’m annoying, I’m selfish, etc. It’s been so easy for me to find a million excuses for why I, out of all the people on this earth, will never be loved.

So… feeling hope that that’s not true is actually a very big thing for me, and something that I’ve been delighting in recently.

All the things in my head are fake and mean and… you know, hormones. That’s all.

Idk, this was meant to be a discussion of one small part of PMDD but I guess it ended up being a ramble about a lot of things. I’ll admit that it’s much more difficult for me to be focused and eloquent when I’m dealing with these symptoms. I had a moment where I wanted to apologize to anyone still reading this, but — instead I’ll thank you for spending your time with my words. For whatever reason you decided to do it, for whatever reason you’re still here, I appreciate that you did it.

I want the version of you in my head to be nice. And I want to thank you for being nice. And I want to be nice to you, too.

In conclusion

Now I’m gonna go take my medication and be quiet for a while.

#just me #personal post #long post #cw:#mental illness #PMDD #MDD #anxiety #self disparagement #seriously this is mostly me rambling about recent mental health issues and I want to be super clear about that #my hormones are Bad lmao #they do Bad things to my brain and my body and I hate them

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eyeballsoup7310 · 2 years ago

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Last updated October 25th 2024

As far as names go I don’t really care what you call me, I accidentally tricked myself into referring to myself as “Soup” but it doesn’t. matter much either way. They/it and neopeonouns are welcome. One day I’ll make a nice little doodle to stick here

Closest thing to a dni I have for the moment is that, if I notice you post regularly about proshipping, I will be blocking you immediately. I can’t and won’t try to stop you, free speech and whatever— fiction doesn’t directly equal reality, but it still makes me wildly uncomfortable. I’ll also probably block you if you post a lot about kinks, though I care even less about that than proshipping as long as everyone involved are adults, I just personally don’t wanna see that.

I will not be directly answering asks for money. When it comes to Palestinian fundraisers, I’m gonna limit myself to only sharing ones that have been fully verified (on one of the trusted* spreadsheets/lists) or ones that have been kind of verified (shared by trusted bloggers and/or other vetted folks) that are also donation protected gofundmes. I judge based on the stuff on your account, not necessarily in the ask itself.

If you just need help with things like rent, pet bills, hospital bills, etc., I’ll immediately be deleting your ask unless we’re mutuals or I have some other reason to trust you. In general, I will reblog one of your posts, I will not make my own. I am not a notable account, I do not have the network to set you up with money, I’m sorry

*My main trusted list is this spreadsheet by el-shab-hussein and nabulsi, but I’ll also reference other lists that seem to be trusted as needed

Quick guide to my godawful tagging system below the cut because I was supposed to use this for art and then just. Completely ignored that so

#my art - self explanatory

#soup uses paper - traditional/physical art

#animatic - my animatics and animations

#just talking - non-art posts by me

#eyeball rants - my rambling but with like 5% more effort than my just talking tag

#eyeball’s animatic ideas - self explanatory

#blockprinting - my own stamps and prints n shit

#blorbo posting - oc posts

#other peoples stuff - reblogs with little to no addition from me

#cool art - reblogs of art that’s either not fandom related or from a fandom I’m not in (I expand on this tag much further down because I’m insane I guess)

#cool pictures - photography

#cool information - posts with information I find interesting

#serious post - mostly self explanatory. Technically a mix of serious posts and important posts, I use the same tag for both

#resources / #signal boost - ways to help people. Gofundmes and organizations and stuff. At some point the difference between the resource tag and the signal boost tag fell apart so feel free to check both, I don’t know

#polls - polls with or talking about polls

#stories - self explanatory

#general - mostly non-fandom stuff. Serious posts no longer get tagged with general

#long post - self explanatory

#gif - posts that include gifs

#asks - both asks I’ve sent and asks I’m responding to

heads up: I tag triggers in the real world (like death n stuff) with TW, but if I talk about it in regards to fiction or jokes or whatever I use either CW, warning or Mention. Like, a post about some graphic person-on-person violence will be tagged “violence tw”, whereas a drawing of characters fighting would be “violence cw” or “violence mention”. There are a few exceptions (any sexual violence, suicide, or self harm, regardless of if it’s about a fictional character or not, will be tagged with tw) but generally the main ones like death, violence, etc are tagged with this system

The current body horror tag is #body horror warning but I think I used to use #body horror tw so if you’re gonna go back through my blog you might wanna filter that too. Bug stuff is tagged with either “#bugs” or “#bug warning”. There’s no real system there but eh. Also I’m including spiders in this tag.

Uhh I don’t generally reblog anything sexual in nature other than jokes, but if you wanna filter those out anyways, I think I use “#sex mention”. I also tag “#nonsexual nudity” when applicable.

If you have trypophobia or a fear of things being beneath your skin, you might just wanna block the Jane prentiss tag altogether I’m sorry I’m really bad at tagging stuff for her

Imagine there’s one of those fun divider gifs here

#Cool art expanded:

(Artificially generated images will never fall into this tag, if I ever share ai ‘art’ it will be to dunk on it.)

#Misc fandom stuff - fandoms I’m not in

#Creatures - art that features a real animal. I don’t tag bugs or fish with this even though they both are animals, don’t know why, guess I just got tired of typing it out. As opposed to my very mismanaged creature tag for anything animal related, this one has an s on the end!

#Bug art - it’s bugs, baby!

#Fish art - fish!

#Digital art - art made through digital mediums (this includes 3D renders, photoshopped pieces, and photobashed stuff)

#Physical art - pen drawings, paintings, stamps, anything on paper or canvas

#3d art - ceramics, clay, digital 3D models, handmade figures, sewed creatures, you get the gist

#Prints - Linocuts, block prints, stamps, et cetera.

#Animation - self explanatory

#Comics - self explanatory

#Pixel art - self explanatory

#Threads yarns felts and strings - felted things, crocheted things, patches, embroidery— all that stuff

I also have a tag for art about Palestine, specifically relating to the ongoing genocide. #Art for/from Palestine.

Most of my tagging system is just to make it easier for me to find stuff on my blog, which is why it can get inconsistent at times. ATM my featured tags is maxed out so I might have to shuffle things around later but for now, I think that’s it.

#pinned post

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wirewitchviolet · 2 years ago

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Grifters Gonna Grift, “AI” Edition

Can I just start off here with a quick expectations vs. reality comparison we can chuckle at? Here’s a quote from a director I’ll be cool and not embarrass about where “AI” will be in a couple years:

And here’s a couple choice bits from when I was watching someone make a valiant effort at streaming the new “AI driven” Portopia remake Square-Enix is pushing:

My favorite though is this wonderful stretch of the streamer desperately repeating “ask about Hirata” and the increasingly amazing guesses popping in the chat log.

More serious talk under the fold, like I do...

So... the very first thing I, much like anyone else with both a conscience and a clue, need to say when getting into this is that the reason you see so much talk these days about “AI” and how amazing it is have absolutely nothing to do with any new developments in AI research, and absolutely everything to do with a whole bunch of techbros being stuck holding the bag after the pile of naked pyramid schemes that were the NFT grift well and truly fell completely apart, and they need a new grift to move on to, ideally one where they can use the giant server farms they all set up for crypto crap to still be usable for something. And of course the second thing I’m morally obligated to say is that “AI,” as these con artists talk about it, flat out does not exist. We’re not “almost there,” it’s not “around the corner,” there haven’t been “exciting breakthroughs.” It is a complete outright lie a whole lot of people are telling to a whole lot of other people to con them into investing heavily into some combination of vaporware and parlor tricks, and also to throw off people who might otherwise look at the things they are actually doing and see all the really blatantly illegal stuff they’re doing.

Having gotten that out of the way, it’s also worth explaining that what people are actually talking about when they talk about “AI” is really search engines, for the most part. Like, if I want to read maybe 5 paragraphs about oh, I don’t know, Big Slammu from Street Sharks, I can just open up literally any search engine, type really probably any string of words that contains word “slammu” really, and get a sloppily written wiki page with maybe 5 paragraphs of random facts like his pre-gene slamming name being Coop Bolton, early revisions having his name be the far less memorable Boomer, and him having a friend called Moby Lick. Which... OK I wasn’t expecting my randomly chosen example to go down that sort of road.

Anyway, I could also have one of these overhyped “AI” things tell me about Big Slammu, and most likely get literally this same exact wiki entry. Because yeah, that’s all that’s happening there. It’s grabbing keywords from my input string, looking them up in a database, finding an entry that best fits my string in terms of my terms showing up in it a lot, and printing it out at me. The only difference really is the latter is put together by someone trying to con me into thinking I’m talking to some sort of Real Life Computer Guy who just knows all this naturally as someone who watched the show and has well-articulated thoughts to share on it, and we’re maybe going to play up that fiction by stripping out any headers in the webpage we’re just grabbing and other bits that aren’t the core article content.

None of this is hard to do or novel. If you’re old enough to remember card catalog terminals in libraries, those were doing the exact same thing, except they just pointed you at a book rather than print the contents because storage on computers was at a premium back when they were made. Oh and when you see people talk about giving “AIs” more “training data” that’s literally just adding more to the database it’s searching, or more likely, widening the list of websites it’s searching with preexisting search tools.

“AI art” to be clear is the same thing. Get every art site you can get your hands on that has a tagging system, scrape every image and the tags on it, and then when someone asks for like, “brown hair anime girl hot giant boobs huge boobs enormous boobs” you just rifle through the pile of stolen art for something that comes as close as possible to covering all that text with tags and ideally not having any other tags, and forking it over. Which again, also works if you just do that with a search engine, and always has. But again, since we’re trying to sell people on the lie that some little magical computer boy like Data from Star Trek speed painted you a painting on the spot, we make some effort to hide the fact that we’re just stealing somebody’s art by stealing art from several different people, pasting bits over onto the main image we’re stealing, and wiping over the seams with like the photoshop blend tool or whatever a little to hopefully make it less obvious.

Now to me the part of that that’s basically computer magic is how we just have software tools to blend two images together to make them look like it was originally just one image, but, that part’s been a thing for several decades. Mostly it impresses me because art programs are prohibitively expensive to the point that I personally am to this day using something with all the functionality of Aldus Super Paint on the Apple ][. There IS some actual sophisticated code involved in instructing the program how to identify a hand so that it can paste the hand from one stolen image over the hand from another (and the iffy results from that are why you so routinely get extra fingers with this stuff- some of those were part of the original image, before we pasted another over that wasn’t in quite the same pose). We don’t have an actual Little Gear-Filled Brain Chum who lives in the computer we can explain these things to, so people just have to work out how like if you look at the raw image data and see darker RGB values in a line of pixels or in a circular pattern or some such, that’s probably the outline of a finger, so cut around that.

The best visual aid I can give to explain how this works is this spectacular failure of “AI art” that... I’m not sure I can just paste in under Tumblr’s current rules? Here’s a discussion of it on another site. Anyway if you just open that up, and use your hand or a piece of paper to block out everything from the belly button up, then again from just below the belly button down, you can kinda get a handle on what actually happens here. Presumably the rule this particular “AI” was using to paste pictures together was “find darker pixels than their surroundings in a pattern where one line branches off another at a 30 degree angle or so” which yeah, if you’re looking exclusively at a pile of stolen images of big boob anime waifus is most likely only going to appear in the cleavage. Here though, whoopsie, one of the images we grabbed out of the pile has lines intersecting like that in the crotch. So, that became the paste guide, and we get our wonderful little game of Exquisite Corpse. A human couldn’t make this error. Some sort of actual AI capable of comprehending a request to draw something and using its astounding reasoning to paint an original work (which, again, is straight up not a thing to exist) would also never do this, it’d be starting from a basic anatomical understanding as that’d be the easiest starting point. This only happens because we’re stitching stolen works together based on whatever small part of them matches up well enough to hide with the smear tool.

All that out of the way, if I might cycle back to that failure of a Portopia remake, because everyone in the “AI” scene is either a hustler or a mark, everyone ends up convinced that these “AI” projects can only be improved by giving them more “training” data. If you know it’s a scam, widening the pool of sources you’re stealing from makes it harder for people to notice (especially if you can grab files that aren’t publicly searchable, something people openly admit they’re working on), and if you buy into the hype, then yeah every trashy work of science fiction agrees the more books the amazing computer man speed reads, the more he comprehends our language and customs. In practice though, it just kinda... clutters things up with useless garbage.

Portopia is a very very old, very very simple adventure game. You have like, six or so each of verbs, locations, named NPCs, and something like four items. If you wanted to make a remake that went off speech to text to parser commands, you could probably get it to behave pretty well if it was designed only to listen for and distinguish that handful of relevant terms. But no, this sucker was given the widest possible corpus of “training data,” so even standing in an interview room where there’s literally no valid options to the player than leaving or asking an NPC questions about a very short list of subjects, like say, this other NPC named Kawamura, it’s considering that we might be making plans to get together the next day, or see what people have to say about California.

Probably bloats the game and the processor load by a ton too, or has it communicating with a fully unnecessary server. I’m told at launch, this was way more ambitious, and the idea was to include “AI” primarily so you could just use natural language to pick your assistant’s brain on whatever subject came to mind, not as an explicit hint system, but getting opinions or fun facts about anything you were unclear on from a neutral source. Which... yeah, that kind of “AI” does not exist. You ask “where does Hirata live?” and you’re going to find out about an MMA fighter’s gym or maybe learn some fun facts about the game Sekiro. So they just kinda dummied out everything that’d actually make the game novel for reasons of embarrassment and legality, and we’re just left with this speech to text program that doesn’t recognize the names of the characters, attached to a text parser that... can’t handle the fact it has more than one port as a location. You know what didn’t have this sort of problem? Zork. In 1981.

It also has problems with context. Like, ask a character something they don’t have a response to, and they can just be suddenly replaced by whichever character does have a response to that, because hey, that’s in the list of legal responses, right?

Anyway, when everyone gets on the same page on the emperor having no clothes here, can we please all promise to keep our eyes on the grifters as they look for the next scam and remember these were the same people breathlessly trying to convince people that slight palette swaps of a badly drawn monkey were all unique irreplicable works of special art worth millions of dollars, and just skip to the part where the new obvious scam gets called out?

#ai #scam #grift #portopia #I hate how crap like this poisons the well for discussions of legitimate uses of ML algorithms and such

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blueeyes-crystalskies · 10 months ago

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‪12/2/19, 7:20 PM ‬

(Five years ago now)

‪I guess this whole time it’s just kind of felt like, “what the fuck is the point?” because I had a good life. I had a good support system. I had my mom, and my dad, and my sister, and my dog and I didn’t really care about anybody else. I used to feel like I had a best friend who understood me, but then she grew up and became a different person and stopped trying to understand me so she could start to understand herself. Which is fair, I guess. Except she stopped even asking me about me and started talking over me. It’s okay to dive deeper into yourself, as long as you don’t reflect that on the outside, too. As long as you share some air with people around you. ‬

‪Anyways. When it’s the holidays and everybody is home, I feel so full. Like I have everything I need. My mom takes care of us because she’s an angel and I really don’t have to do anything for myself besides basic grooming. She plans out our days. She feeds us. I tag along with whatever somebody else is doing. I don’t even have to fucking think for myself. ‬

‪And I know that’s wrong and I know I shouldn’t let her take care of me like that, but holy shit it feels so fucking good to be taken care of. I cannot stress enough how hard it is to even feed myself. I don’t know how everybody does it. I don’t know where they get the energy. ‬

‪And then I go back to my apartment and the ripped siding by my window scratches against my wall and keeps me up all night. There’s no coffee in the cupboard. There’s some food, but nothing good. Nothing I haven’t already made for myself a hundred times. When you’ve eaten the same thing a hundred times in a row, what’s even the point? I’d rather not even eat. Which I don’t. ‬

‪And then you also realize there’s no one around you to fill the silence. No one in the morning. No one to share the bathroom with. No one to accompany you on the ride to school. There’s people in your classes, but you feel alone anyways. ‬

‪I don’t like my friends. I don’t talk to my friends. And when I do, I feel deeply ashamed. When I do it’s just complaints and I hate myself more for complaining. ‬

‪I don’t see them outside of school because I want to push them away. My roommate is never home. We haven’t really spoken in three months and I’ve known her my entire life. We were so close last year. Now it’s just really quiet. Everything is so, so quiet. ‬

‪I feel like I’ve already lived a full life. The life I wanted. I don’t want to go off on my own anymore. I don’t want to fall in love because at this point I don’t think that exists for me. I can’t even keep a single friend that I like. ‬

‪I feel whole and real when I’m home with my family. Maybe not all the way full, but more than when I’m alone. I feel like I belong to something. And now we’re all getting old and my sister is in another state with her boyfriend and my dog will probably die soon. I haven’t known a father figure in my family that’s lived past sixty years old. Our house won’t always be there. ‬

‪What I’m afraid of most is the one person I really love leaving this earth. The one person who helped me through the hardest times in my life, who takes care of me without giving me reason to feel remorse. Who loves me unconditionally and will always love me unconditionally. My best friend in the entire world. I know she won’t be around forever. Being with her feels like being next to a ticking time bomb. That’s not fair to her. Though none of this is. ‬

‪I can pretend these wounds are healing with time and I can write about them a million more times but I don’t think this will ever change. Maybe in four days I’ll feel better for a little while again but what about after Christmas? What about next semester? What about after graduation? What about the rest of my life? ‬

‪Where does this leave me? When all of this is actually gone for good, what does that make me? Everything I love the most is so impermanent. And that’s so unfair. ‬

‪Each day takes me further and further away from the person I was. I know I wasn’t happy then either, but at least I was safe. At least I knew what was coming the next day and the next and I knew I’d never have to go through it alone. ‬

‪I just don’t know anymore. I just don’t know…

#from my notes #words #five years later #this one really hurt to reread #for so many reasons #poem #poetry

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honeybee-dyke · 1 year ago

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ℹ️ ‼️ mentions of, uh. i guess ableism…? maybe? i dunno. reply or dm or smth and i’ll edit for better tagging.

it’s so weird being a non-fictive alter and having disabilities in headspace that we don’t have physically. like, i perceive and depict myself as a crutch user with esotropia, but externally, although diabetic and at risk for developing hashimotos thyroiditis, we have near-perfect eyesight and no real mobility issues (i think. unless our bg is low, but that’s easily fixed with some sugar and a 15-20 minute break). i understand it from alters like vik, hugh, ed, and donny — they all have exomemories of being disabled (ed and don) or are based on explicitly disabled characters (vik and hugh), but i’m just. kinda. here? with no fictional past or backstory to point to for as to why i’m like this.

it’s similar with kassidy, but she’s technically a fictive of a background character from turning red, so. idk. it’s just. auaaaugh. hiding my head under a pillow.

and like, ultimately i know it’s not much different from my being a girlthing who likes girls in a system hosted by a transmasc and largely populated by guys who mainly or only like guys, or stella and lal being androids, or quark being a fucking floridian space bat (/joke, he’s a ferengi) hell, woody has described himself as a sentient hunk of polyvinyl and cloth. and i’m not hurting anyone. i’m not claiming to be something i’m not, and i don’t leave the house enough to potentially infringe on anyone who genuinely needs aid that we don’t — not that i or anyone else wants to do that anyway. i just. aughhhhhhh.

pulls blanket over my head and grumbles indistinctly.

#bea speaking #vent #sysblr

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marbles-for-breakfast · 2 months ago

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There’s not a lot that I necessarily take issue with here, but I guess I want to respond to a few things. (This is long though)

Firstly, I don’t have “suspicions of trauma I don’t want to look into” as much as I simply understand that there’s a very strong link between CDD’s and trauma and I haven’t decided to rule it out with no reason. I actually don’t really have suspicions of any particular kind of trauma. And the only real evidence I have that I may have had more serious childhood trauma than I thought is the fact that I think I have a CDD. I think I don’t ascribe an unknown trauma to the formation of my system. That logic feels a little circular to me, at least rn.

I guess the other point I’m trying to make is that I’m not ignoring signs of trauma or trying to insist there’s nothing there. I acknowledge that there might be, but until I have actual evidence of it, I’ve decided not to speculate (which has, again, helped me greatly). But yeah, that’s something I wanted to clarify.

Second, I know that growing up autistic can be very traumatic, and if someone really cared about pinpointing a reason for being this way that’s something they could point to. Maybe there’s something I’ll remember one day. Maybe there’s not. Ultimately, I don’t really care atm.

I guess I haven’t seen anyone advocate not seeking help. I definitely want to see specialists when I have the chance (none in my area, unfortunately), and I guess I haven’t seen anyone else saying that endos don’t need therapy. I could be missing things, obviously, but I haven’t experienced the rhetoric you’re trying to counter there, so it felt weird to me.

Again, I don’t insist on these things. I actually try to be quite careful to not piss off any potential trauma holders by saying things like “I don’t have evidence/memory of that happening” when I have intrusive thoughts speculating about this stuff, rather than saying “that didn’t happen”, or something. I very much acknowledge that things might have happened that I’m not aware of. I don’t think we’ll be at a place where people might be ready to talk about it for quite some time, though.

Ultimately, like you, I do kind of take issue with the term itself. I don’t see it as redundant, necessarily. I just think there are more useful distinctions to make. The two binaries I think are more useful are disordered/non-disordered and created by oneself/not created by oneself. I fit into the less contentious sides of both those categories and don’t know too much about the other side, so I’m not going to talk about it more. Those are just examples, because plurality encompasses such a wide range of experiences, and we do need some way to distinguish between them sometimes. I don’t think the trauma/endo binary is a very good way to make those distinctions, especially since it’s all extremely speculative, ultimately. But I digress, since we agree on this point.

I don’t feel like I’m separated from other systems, with the big exception of systems who do really cling to the label of traumagenic (and even moreso the ones who call you delusional for wanting to identify as anything else). I only feel separated from other systems when they’re yelling at plurals who aren’t traumagenic and I don’t know where I stand. I guess because I’ll never be able to prove what my origin label should be (bc no one can and that’s why they’re kinda bullshit), I feel like I always have one foot in the endo door. So when people come for endos, it feels a little personal. And I do feel alienated from systems who engage that kind of rhetoric. But I also know that most systems irl don’t actually care what you call yourself and syscourse is a pretty online issue. I’ll be happy to be able to engage with this stuff and be open about it in person when I finally get the chance.

Okay, now the things I actually take issue with.

First, I knew you would latch onto that tag and I probably shouldn’t have included it but I was being open and honest and vulnerable and shit. You don’t outright say I’m doing anything for attention, but I don’t know why you would have brought it up if you weren’t kind of saying that. So here: not identifying as traumagenic has not gotten me any more attention than I would have gotten otherwise. I don’t scroll these tags for attention. I don’t even think I argue with people for attention. I argue because people are saying something wrong enough to piss me off or that I think I can change their mind on. Or I argue because the things people say make me feel unnoticed and unwanted and I feel a need to get them to acknowledge me. Usually in these instances, it’s a mix of the two.

1. I’m not in any more of an echo chamber than anyone else.

2. I’m going to say this every time it’s mentioned here because I care about being perceived correctly: I don’t deny any of my trauma. I don’t have a lot that I know about, but if I had evidence of something I wouldn’t just deny it. Or at least I hope I wouldn’t feel the need to do that. Because it’s obviously not healthy. I don’t think that and I don’t advocate for it. In my last post I tried to point out that some people might need to time to come to terms with other things before being confronted with their trauma. I stand by that. What I don’t believe should happen is people are confronted with their trauma and “vehemently deny” it. That’s not healthy for anyone. I also don’t think anyone is advocating for that. I assume most “traumagenics in denial” that are out there (and I’m sure they do exist) are people like me who are not “in denial” as much as they simply haven’t been told about this stuff yet. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that someone is in denial if they literally just don’t have all the information yet. Maybe there are endo hosts that insist they don’t have trauma despite being told otherwise by other members of their system. But I seriously doubt that’s a common enough problem to make the label dangerous. Especially since a lot of endo systems are very open about the fact that they do have trauma, just don’t believe it formed their system for whatever reason.

I do think that systems like that should really share a label with systems who do believe their system was formed from trauma. Because if trauma is very intertwined with your system and/or you experience severe dissociative symptoms then you should be part of the same group as other people with those experiences, regardless of the narrative you have about your origin. That’s ultimately one of my biggest frustrations with those labels.

To your last point: I don’t think anyone’s trying to convince anyone else that they don’t have trauma or a trauma disorder. Some people have trauma disorders and still identify as endo. That was the case for the creator of the term, actually. I honestly think a major problem with this area of syscourse is that “endogenic” means waaaay too many different things, which makes it really confusing to talk about. Some endos have trauma and a CDD but don’t believe their plurality was caused by trauma alone. Some endos don’t have a significant amount of childhood trauma or a CDD, but were just born this way or something. Some endos became plural on purpose through various methods I have no real knowledge about. Some endos have origins that are very intertwined with spirituality, sometimes creating systems though specific spiritual practices. Some endos believe their systems came about through some sort of supernatural means. It really does mean too many wildly different things.

“We, since we’ve been Actually Healing, don’t need to be seen as “smart and reasonable”. We simply state what we feel to be true.”

Isn’t that literally what endos are doing? It’s certainly what I’m doing. I know I have issues. I was literally pointing them out when I said those things. Like, good for you for not having them anymore, but I don’t understand why you felt the need to point that out?

“You are actively neglecting parts of yourself when you refuse trauma work (refusing is different then not being ready).”

I would think it would be difficult to do trauma work on trauma you literally don’t remember. I’m not refusing, and I’m not even not ready. I guess the people who might have the trauma aren’t ready, and we do not have a space to unpack that since there’s no one in our area who can treat us, but I’m not “not ready”. And I’m certainly not refusing to confront something that I looked for and couldn’t find. All that speculating, all that shit that actively did harm my mental health, that was my attempt to find out what might’ve happened to me so that I could figure out what to do next. It didn’t work and it made things worse. I’m not running away by leaving it alone until everyone else is ready. You seem to think any trauma holders I might have are desperately trying to get me to acknowledge this shit, but I think if they exist, they’re most likely actively trying to keep this from me. I feel like that’s probably pretty common, actually.

You seem to think I’m refusing help. That’s perplexing and actually sounds pretty condescending when you consider the fact that I said I want help in the tag you highlighted. I don’t know where this is coming from or what gave you the idea that I don’t want therapy or to work through any trauma I might have. That’s exactly what I want, actually. That was an assumption that doesn’t make sense to me and again, feels pretty condescending. Of course I need fucking therapy. Everyone kinda does, but I definitely do. I’ve been in and out of it since I was 13 (almost 19 now). I’m on meds! I have been for years! I don’t reject therapy and I bet most endos would benefit from it. I bet a lot of them already are going to therapy. I don’t see anyone saying that endos don’t need therapy. I don’t know where you’re getting that stuff from.

I also don’t understand how a system refusing to acknowledge their trauma reinforces harmful arguments that singlets make, but that’s beside the point. I don’t want to litigate that.

Anyway, in conclusion, I greatly resent some of the assumptions made about me in your response. Mainly, the assumption that I am resisting working through my trauma or healing in general. It’s a little offensive, honestly. Other than that, we agree this is stupid. I’ve said my piece. I think we’re in agreement about the kinds of things that need to change in this community and the general direction it needs to go. We agree that the division is completely pointless when it comes to systems like us.

I do ultimately want to thank you for trying to meet me where I’m at and help me. Just being seen, and somewhat understood means a lot, honestly. It’s kind of why I come here, actually.

Sorry this was long, I guess. This is kind of how I work through these things. And I guess I want you to know that even if this was pretty much a waste of time for you, I did get some things out of it, and I’m always glad to hear different nuanced perspectives on things. This is all complicated, and I’m starting to get the feeling there isn’t really a “right” opinion in this whole discourse. As long as people try to be understanding and don’t just dismiss each other’s opinions without listening.

Anyway, bye.

"Endos" do you know why you're hated?

Because there are GROWN ADULTS who get put through horrific trauma and have no idea for years and years. Most people don't accurately remembers their childhood as it is. So what makes your lack of knowledge of any trauma despite being plural so fucking special?

If you insist it's a coincidence then "professionals" whose real profession is HARMING CHILDREN FOR PROFIT will use your testimony against victims everywhere.

Stay blissfully ignorant if you want but shut the fuck up about your lack of desire to understand your own mind. Make up all the words you want, it changes nothing. Plurality is a defense against trauma amd that defense is AMNESISA-BASED. THE AMNESIA IS INHERENT. IT'S HOW YOU'RE SEPARATE FROM YOURSELVES TO BEGIN WITH

So yeah starting to understand why the community is so obsessed with hating on you peoplw. Personally I feel bad for you; no one can ask you to explain or even remember your trauma to be "valid." The trauma is a given; stop preaching false hope to everyone in denial.

#syscourse

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buckys-black-dress · 3 years ago

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see through

＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚　　˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊

a/n: i dont have much to say other than that it's 1 am and i needed to get this out of my system. chapter 4 of play the game is underway, i promise. also, there will be a pov switch in this fic!

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. = POV change!

wc: 4.1k words

[ neighbor!bucky barnes x fem!reader ]

＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚　　˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊

Every Friday night, without fail, you saw the light filter into your apartment.

Notice how you said night?

Yeah, it was almost two in the morning, by the way.

And why was there light coming through the chiffon curtains you had hanging on the rod above your window?

(Great choice on your part, by the way.)

Well, because of your neighbor.

You've seen him a few times, actually. Usually on the street outside your buildings, or just out and about. Never spoke to him, though. He was quiet, kept to himself. Didn't seem very friendly or willing to exchange a greeting if he ever saw you.

But you never took it personally. Maybe he was having a bad day. Every time you saw him.

But that's besides the point. The point right now is that you can see the lights blaring in your room. From the apartment across from yours.

Should it even be possible for light to travel that far? I mean, we don't even live in the same building. You think to yourself as you watch the colors dance in the dark.

You debate getting up and yelling out your window to tell him to shut that shit off or to invest in some blackout curtains. You were tired of sacrificing your sleep every week.

But then you decided against it, because you quite frankly could not be bothered to get up from the warmth of your bed. You'd tough it out for the night, but the next time you saw him, you'd have a few words for him.

The next morning, it was almost ten when you woke up. You didn't have your shift at the coffee shop you worked at until three, so you took your time in making your way out of bed.

You noticed the curtains of your neighbor's apartment were still open, but you could see his figure moving across the room. He was clearly on the phone with someone, and he didn't look too happy. You wondered what could have him so angry at such an early time of the morning. He seemed like a person who could use someone to talk to, someone who he could vent to.

But before you let your thoughts get ahead of you, you turn away from the window, heading back into your kitchen to eat breakfast and get ready for the long day ahead of you.

"Hi, what can I get started for you today?" You ask as brightly as you can muster at the moment. You were halfway through your shift, another three hours until close.

"Uh, just a large black coffee." The gruff voice says, and it takes you a second until you look up and look closely.

It was him.

"O-okay, that'll be $3.27." You say, and he hands you a five dollar note before grumbling,

"Keep the change."

"Thanks, and your name?"

He gives you a look that's asking, 'what the fuck do you need my name for?'

"For the order." You try and salvage your dignity, because it feels like the stare shrunk you to a speck of dust.

"James."

That's all he all but growls before turning back to find a seat.

As your coworker takes over the cash register, you grab the biggest cup and fill it with his desired coffee.

You try to not think about it too much, but the anxiety you feel rising up inside you and just calling his name to give him his coffee feels absolutely ridiculous.

"Are you just gonna stare at the cup or give it to the customer?" The voice of your coworker, Jenna, rings in your ears and you look up at her, snapping out of the trance you were in.

"Sorry, I'm just a little out of it today, I guess."

"Everything alright?" She asks, and you nod.

"I'm fine, it's just... that's my neighbor." You nod your head towards where James is sat, in the corner by the window as he watches the raindrops run down the expanse of the glass.

"The one who doesn't let you sleep?"

"Yeah, but I don't think he'd take it too kindly if I tell him about that. He seems to have a lot on his own plate anyways," You explain, and she just nods.

"Well, that sucks, but you still need ta' give the guy his coffee." Jenna smiles and walks back to what she was doing before.

You gently slide out from your spot behind the counter and walk to his table.

"Here's your coffee, James. Enjoy, and- uh, let me know if you'd like anything else." You tell him while placing the steaming cup in front of him.

He murmurs a thank you that you barely catch, but you don't quite have the time to sit and wait for more of a reaction.

For the next several hours, James sits right where he was. He doesn't do anything in particular, either. He just watches outside, as the rain continues to pelt down on New York City, and as people come and go from where they were.

Eventually, about an hour left until close, you offer another cup of coffee.

"Do you want a refill? On the house." You ask gently, waiting to see if you'll get brushed off again.

"Uh... are you allowed to do stuff like that?" He asks, and you're a bit taken aback at the sudden concern.

"I don't think you should worry yourself too much, James. Free coffee's free coffee." You smile lightly, and grab the cup before filling it up without his confirmation. You could tell he wanted to say yes but didn't want to seem rude.

"You didn't have to..." He grumbles, and you simply shake your head.

"I know, but you've been here a while, and what kind of employee would I be if I let a customer sit here without any sustenance?" Your lips ply into a tiny smirk, trying to get him to loosen up a bit.

He seems so guarded, defensive. Like any moment, he's ready to run if need be, you inspect to yourself.

"You'd just be a regular employee, Y/N." He says, but the way he says your name makes a shiver run down your spine; and you can't tell if it's a good or bad one.

You unconsciously look down at your name tag, pinned to your black apron that's branded with the café's logo.

"Well, I felt like being nice. I hope you can deal." Your voice comes out short, but he knows you mean no harm.

As you walk back to the counter, you see a small smile playing on his lips, but he doesn't allow it to manifest on his face. You take that as a small victory for your last hour of work.

(bucky's pov).・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

The girl who works at this café is annoying.

But she's got a nice smile. And she's nice to me, Bucky thinks to himself.

He sips on the new coffee you'd just poured for him, without his consent, he thinks bitterly.

But it was a nice gesture.

Why can't you just take a nice gesture?

Because your brain's been scrambled eggs for 70 years. You don't know what to think about anything these days.

He watches you fiddle with the espresso maker, cleaning it with a rag, which you then dip into a bucket.

You look extremely familiar to him, but he can't exactly pin where he's seen you before.

Bucky closes his eyes for a moment, trying to recall where he'd seen you, but for a moment, he comes up with nothing.

Ever since he's been living back in the real world, he hasn't been outside too much.

He goes on the occasional walk, or goes to the tower to see Steve and Sam.

But other than that, he spends a lot of time in his Brooklyn apartment. He watches movies that Steve suggests, or he invites Steve and Sam over to have beer and watch TV with him.

He hates how lonely it gets, though.

Bucky wishes that he had someone.

Someone who could understand.

And don't get him wrong, he loves Sam and Steve. They fill in the gaps in his days, and they make them better.

Sometimes, thinking about having something to do that day is what makes it. He likes having something to do, something to plan for for when his friends come over.

But it feels like a teeny, tiny part of his life is missing. A person shaped-hole in his heart.

But Bucky doesn't spend too long thinking about it, or it'll send him into a spiral about failure and how he needs to 'push himself to get out there more.'

Or that's what his therapist says.

"Hey, we're about to close, and we usually throw the pastries out at the end of the day. Do you wanna take these home, by any chance?" Your voice rings in his ears, snapping him out of the impending slippery slope of his lack of love life.

He hesitates to answer for a second, looking at the brown paper bag pinched between your fingers.

Bucky can tell you were nervous when you spoke to him. He knew he made you uneasy, and it killed him inside.

He hated that. He just wanted to have a normal conversation with someone. But everyone seems to know who he is.

Who he was.

"Uh, what is it?" He croaks, unsure of what to say at your gesture.

"It's a few cookies and a chocolate croissant."

"Sure, I'll take 'em." Bucky simply answers, watching as you hand the bag over with a soft smile and watches you walk back.

You sweep up the floor and put up all the chairs, except for the one Bucky's sitting on. You leave his table alone, and bid farewell to your coworker who was scheduled to close with you.

Bucky doesn't know what drives him to do it, but he gets up after he sees you walk out the door, and follows you home.

Damn, if you like a girl, you usually ask for her number or somethin'. Not follow her home to make sure she's safe, you idiot. Bucky's inner voice speaks and sometimes, he wishes it would just shut up because he knows he has no game nowadays, but this is all he knows to do.

He realizes the way you're walking is familiar, and not at all of the way he was supposed to be going. That made him feel a little better, less like a creep. He's about half a block behind you, and when you turn onto the same street he lives on, he's really confused.

Did you know he was behind you? Are you trying to play a trick on him?

But before Bucky can speak up or say something, you walk right past his building, and into the one right next to it.

All of a sudden, images of you right on the street in front of your buildings flash through his head. He's seen you because you're his neighbor. Bucky's seen you right there, getting ready to start your run through the neighborhood, or probably on your way to work, now that he's seen where you work.

But he feels like there's somewhere else he's seen you; somewhere familiar.

He shakes his head, wondering why he's so caught up in you. He thought you were beautiful, but he feels a pull to you that he's never felt with anyone else before.

Bucky's hands move to unlock his door, sliding the key in and twisting the lock open.

He enters, staring at his dark apartment. It's moments like this, when he spends a long day alone, that he wishes there was someone.

Someone to come home to, to hug, to kiss, to share dinner with.

Some to fall asleep with at night. Someone to keep the terrors of the dark away.

But there was no one.

And then his mind thought back to you. Your hair, your face, your warm hands that touched his while you passed him the brown paper bag of treats.

Bucky wishes he was man enough to ask you out. Not even that, just to talk to you. Have a normal conversation, to get to know you.

But that wasn't in the cards for him anytime soon, he thinks.

For now, he focuses on taking things one at a time. And right now, all he wanted was a nice, warm shower and to get at least three hours of sleep tonight.

He's in his room, forgoing the lights for now, before he looks out his window.

For a moment, he believes his eyes are playing tricks on him.

There's absolutely no way that you are standing right there, right outside his window.

Well, in your own apartment, of course.

And there's absolutely no way in hell that Bucky is watching you undress right now.

As soon as you pull off your top, Bucky turns around before he could get more than a peek of your black lace bra, and he feels a burn in the pit of his stomach.

He can't tell if it's shame, guilt, or arousal.

(y/n's pov).・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

You couldn't stop thinking about James all day.

After yesterday, you wondered why you couldn't shake this feeling about him.

He'd made it quite clear that he's not a people person. Or maybe he just wasn't a you person.

But again, you tried to not take things too personally these days.

Sometimes, you wondered, though, as you looked through your bedroom window to his some nights.

You imagined what it would be like, watching one of those movies with him at night. Making dinner with him. Having coffee in the mornings before work, wondering what he did for a living.

You chastise yourself for your thoughts, thinking that you were crazy for these ideas you were coming up with out of nowhere.

As you pull off your clothes to get ready for bed, you feel the same emptiness fill your heart when your head hits the pillow, and another day has gone by where you're all alone.

The next day, your shift was at ten in the morning so you were up early.

You took your time in rolling out of bed. The warmth of your duvet was holding you down, and you couldn't help take a peek out your window.

You see that the room facing yours is finally housing a body in the bed. In all the time you'd been living across him, you've only seen him on the floor.

You feel a warm flutter at that. Whatever reason led him to actually sleep in the bed last night was, you hope you played a role in it.

You make your way to the café, and although walking in the rain wasn't ideal, you made it, somehow.

You clock in and head to the register, ready to take the millions of orders that come in through the day.

"Hi- oh! Welcome back. What can I get you?" Your tone of voice made it clear you were surprised, but was trying to not let it show.

"Uhm, just the same as yesterday, and... Can I get a chocolate croissant?" Bucky's gruff voice tells you.

You ring him up, wondering if you should say something about him being your neighbor. Although, he didn't seem too keen on looking you in the eye right now, and you wonder if you did something to make him uncomfortable yet again.

He seems to have this issue quite often.

Little do you know, this time, it isn't because of you or anything you did.

Well, nothing you did on purpose.

Nothing you were aware of at the time.

Anyways, you tell James to go take a seat and that you'd be right out with his order.

"Here you go, James," you place the plate and mug on the table, and this time, when you hear him say something, you turn around with furrowed brows.

"Sorry, I didn't catch what you said." You apologize, waiting for him to repeat himself.

"I- nevermind, it was stupid anyways. You probably have to get back to work." He mumbles while looking back down at his pastry.

"James, whatever it is, you can tell me." You offer with a kind smile. "I can come sit with you during my break, if you don't mind?" A hopeful smile crosses your face.

"Uh, I- yes, yeah, that would be nice." He struggles for a moment, but finally nods his head in confirmation along with his words.

"Alright, James. I get off in an hour for my break." You simply tell him with a soft grin, and you can practically feel his eyes burning into you as you walk away.

The blush creeping up your cheeks also stays there until the remainder of your shift.

As you plop in the chair across from James, you inspect him for a moment.

He was attractive, you'll admit.

Okay, he was more than attractive.

"So, James, where are you from?" You ask, your own cup of coffee in front of you on the table.

"Well, I'm Brooklyn born 'nd raised. Never was a time I didn't live here. You?" His lip twitches, looking out the window fondly.

"That's nice. I moved here when I was nine, so I guess I've been here a while. But no matter where I go, there's nowhere like home." You smile.

"There really isn't, huh? This place is irreplaceable." He gives you a crack of another smile, and you find yourself yearning for more from him. Just a tooth, something.

"Well, do you live around here?" You ask, deciding to play coy. You wanted to see what he'd say.

"Uh, yeah, actually. Over on DeKalb and Clinton." He clears his throat, the hint of a smile on his face melting right off.

"Huh, that's so funny. I live on those streets too." You grin, waiting to see his reaction.

"O-Oh really?" James doesn't really know what to say without giving away that he knows where you fucking live.

"Yeah, isn't that funny? Which building?" You're pressing, and you know he knows, but you're having your fun right now.

"T-the uhm... I live in the Washington." He's now making zero eye contact with you, and you're close to breaking.

"What a coincidence! I live in the Oakley!" You're in a fit of giggles when his face drops, you just can't help it anymore.

"James, can I tell you something?" You ask in a coquettish manner.

"Yeah, I suppose you'll tell me even if I say no." He gives a tight smile as a joke.

"I don't wanna sound like a creep, but I knew you lived in the Washington."

"Oh," James releases a breath of relief, "thank God. I knew you lived in the Oakley, but I didn't wanna sound like a stalker either." He says.

You laugh, sliding a hand on top of his resting on the table.

"Y'know, you do this really annoying thing where you leave your movies running on full brightness on your TV, and I can see it through my windows at night." You laugh at the incredulity of the situation.

"Oh... I never even thought of that. I'm sorry, Y/N." He looks genuinely remorseful, and now you feel bad for any bad thought you've had about the man that lives across from you.

"It's alright. No big deal." Your smile does a good job of convincing Bucky that you truly weren't bothered by his actions, but he still felt bad.

"Y'know, maybe I could make it up to you?" He asks, and you feel a blush moving up your chest. "Like, maybe over dinner?" His voice is timid, you can tell by the way he tilts his head down while speaking.

"James," you slide your hand into his this time, your smaller one resting in his large metal one. "I'd love to go out with you sometime."

Before he could react, you stood up from the chair.

"My break's over, but I get off at 3." You lean down and pull a pen from your apron, scribbling your number onto a napkin. "Here."

You walk away before he could say anything, but there's something about him this time that you notice.

He's blushing, too. And he's smiling. A bright, white, blinding smile.

You think of that smile throughout your whole shift, until you see he's still waiting for you when it's time to go.

"So, do you like Chinese or Italian better?" He asks with a crooked smile.

bonus scene:

six months later

You and Bucky are laid across your bed, the TV blaring a movie that neither of you are paying attention to. Your head is resting on his shoulder, leg thrown over both of his, and his hand running through your hair.

"You wanna know somethin' doll?" Bucky asks, and you feel his chest rumble under your head.

"Yeah, everything okay?" You ask while leaning up on your elbow to get a good look at him, trying to gauge his mood.

"Everything's okay, just remembered something." He laughs, his hand moving to hold your jaw in it. You shivered at the touch, but smiled fondly at the action.

"When I first saw you at the coffee shop, that first day when you gave the free coffee and pastries... I followed you home."

Your brows furrow and it's clear that you were confused as to why.

"I wanted to make sure you got home safe, and then it turned out that you lived right next to me. So I went up to my apartment and wondered what I'd done right in a past life to have you live right next to me, and then I saw you lived right across from me." His face was tipped upwards, like he was replaying that night in his head.

"You followed me home just to make sure I was safe?" You asked in disbelief that he did something so nice for you, when at the time you thought he hated you.

"Of course, sweetheart. It was dark out and there 're some real jerks out there, y'know." One corner of his mouth lifts up in a soft smirk. "Didn't want anything to happen to ya."

You lean down and press a kiss to the corner of his mouth, appreciating his gesture.

"I really thought you didn't like me back then, so this is a nice little secret you've been hiding from me." You giggle when he pulls you back in for a real kiss.

"Yeah, well, I don't think I could'a hated you if I tried, baby. You're too sweet. And at the time, I was still getting used to being out in the open without being a national security threat." You both laugh lightly, dropping your head down.

A moment passes where you bask in his words, letting them soak in. And then a thought hits you, and you can't help but become more curious. Now you need to know the answer.

"Hey, can I ask you something?"

"Sure, hon." Now Bucky's brows are pulled together, and you reach up and smooth out the wrinkle with your thumb.

"Did you ever... see me doing anything in here? Like, I usually keep the curtains open, and even if they're closed, they're pretty see-through..." You trail off, giving him time to craft his response.

You have a feeling you know the answer, considering how he turns red like a tomato in an instant as words leave your lips.

"I... there was this one time, but I swear, I wasn't trying to peep on you or anything, it was the same day I followed you and I just so happened to look into your window, and you were getting undressed, but I swear, I turned away as soon as I saw what you were doing, baby-" He was rambling, trying to save himself from sounding like a complete creep after all he's just told you.

"Did you like it?" You ask, innocently, but he knew what you were trying to do.

"I-I- You were getting undressed, sweetheart, of course I liked it... are you kidding me?" Bucky's grasping for the words, trying to make you understand.

"Well... we could always recreate it, but maybe in the same apartment this time?" You cock your head to the side, your doe eyes stirring a feeling in his abdomen.

"I think that's an excellent idea, honey." Bucky's hands grasp your waist as you slide on top of his lap. "After all, I am a hands on learner."

fin. i hope you enjoyed!

#bucky barnes one shot #bucky barnes fic #bucky barnes smut #bucky imagine #bucky x reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky fic #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes fluff #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes x female reader #bucky barnes reader insert #neighbor!bucky #bucky barnes au

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frostedfaves · 3 years ago

Text

Naive (3)

Masterlist

Pairing: demon!Wanda Maximoff x fem!reader

Summary: You pick up on the lies in Wanda’s life and she decides to show you the truth.

Warnings: 18+ ONLY, dark!fic, demon things™️, more hints at dom/sub because I’m a whore for demon!Wanda

A/N: I can’t believe that it’s been a month since I posted the last one 😭 I have some things planned for the next part and so on but I also kinda wanna take requests again??? idk we all know how I get overwhelmed easily with that so we’ll see what happens there. anyway tell me your thoughts on this please!

Previous part

Waking up feels like gasping for air after being trapped underwater. You aren’t sure how long you were asleep, but the mid afternoon traffic quickly alerts you of how much of the day has passed.

Despite your head feeling like it’s made of cement, you manage to stand up, slipping off thin pajamas as you walk into the bathroom and stop at the mirror. Your skin seems tender in places and you’re a little bit startled when there isn’t a single indication of the bite marks and scratches you feel, even after rubbing your eyes a few times and turning in every direction possible. Deciding to let it go for now, you reach for the shower stall to turn on the water, detouring to the bedroom instead when you hear your phone ringing.

“Hello?”

“You didn’t save my number, did you?”

“Wanda?” You pull the phone away long enough to quickly clear your throat. “I mean hey, Wanda! What makes you think I didn’t save your number?”

“You answered like you didn’t know who was going to be on the other end.”

“Okay, you caught me,” you admit after a moment of silence. “I promise I’ll save it as soon as we hang up. Anyway, what’s up?”

“Remember that pet adoption center you pointed out to me?” You acknowledge her with a hum. “I was thinking about getting a cat…Wanna tag along?”

“Absolutely! I was just about to shower though so I can be ready in an hour or so.”

“Perfect! I’ll text you when I’m outside.”

The two of you say your goodbyes and you keep your promise of saving her number, typing in her name and hesitating on the emoji keyboard. Realizing you’d spent far too much time contemplating this, you simply save what you have and hurry back to the bathroom, something in your brain urging you to not keep her waiting.

Within an hour, she sends you a text in all caps and a smiley face that tells you she’s arrived, and you can’t hide the fact that you’re surprised when you come outside and she’s waiting on the passenger side of the car.

“Hey! How are you?” she greets cheerily as she approaches you with a hug, and you shiver when her hand touches your lower back. “Are you cold?”

“No, I’m okay.” You smile and thank her when she opens the door for you, attempting to collect yourself as she crosses to the driver’s side again. “I’m really happy to see you again.”

“You are?”

“Yeah,” you admit quietly as she pulls away from the curb. “Is that such a bad thing?”

“No no, I just didn’t want to assume you were enjoying our time together as much as I was.”

She places her hand over yours while she glances at you, smiling as she squeezes your fingers and thigh lightly. You feel a rush of something traveling from the places she touched to your brain, only slightly aware of the fog settling in your mind.

“Well I didn’t want to be too enthusiastic about it and scare you away if all you wanted was friendship,” you clarify, meeting her eyes when she reaches a red light.

“I suppose you’re looking for more too, then.”

“I am now.”

The light turns green and she breaks eye contact, but the little smirk that follows tells you everything you need to know. At least, you hope it does.

“I think he’s the cutest one we’ve seen yet,” you comment about the kitten that hasn’t looked away from Wanda since you approached his area. “He seems really drawn to you, too.”

“How did he get the name ‘Baby Satan’?” Wanda inquires with an employee, who approaches you with a chuckle.

“It’s actually Baby Stan, because we used to have an adult cat named Stan as well and needed to tell the two apart. We were going to give him a new name but decided to leave that up to his new family.”

“It says ‘Baby Satan’ though,” you cosign with Wanda, gesturing to the extra A mixed in with the magnetic letters that spell the kitten’s name.

“Oh, I’m so sorry! I don’t know how that got there,” the employee apologizes as she reaches over to fix the sign, and you watch her freeze as Wanda touches her arm.

“Don’t be sorry. Keep it; I want to adopt him.”

“Okay, right this way,” the employee mumbles as she turns awkwardly and stumbles over to a desk, and as the two of you follow her, you look back to see Baby Satan still staring at the woman beside you.

“What was that about?” you speak up finally once you’re in the car with her new furry friend, and Wanda frowns at you while fastening her seatbelt.

“What?”

“Why did that employee react to you like that? You touched her and she started acting really weird after.”

“Oh, Kim’s fine!” she assures you as she fixes her mirror before pulling out of the parking lot. “I actually asked her about that while you were looking at scratching posts and she said I’d overstepped her boundaries and made her uncomfortable. Don’t worry, I apologized and everything’s good again.”

“She told you her name?”

“She was wearing a name tag, babe.”

Babe...that’s new. Still, the sudden nickname doesn’t completely distract you from the fact that you’re certain there was no name tag on Kim’s uniform. You’re debating with yourself about bringing this up when you notice her heading toward Lane County.

“Are you taking me to your house?”

“Yeah, if you don’t mind.” She glances at you and over her shoulder toward Baby Satan before turning back to the road. “I figured I could introduce both of my kittens to the place they’ll be spending a lot of time in.”

Her fingers brush over your knee as “my kittens” leaves her lips, and you’re almost embarrassed when your hips involuntarily buck slightly. Noticing the small change in your behavior, she takes advantage of your head turned toward your own window and allows her instincts to continue driving while she stares at you, placing her palm on your thigh and rubbing circles on the fabric covering it that brings her closer and closer to your core.

“Home, sweet home,” Wanda announces as she pulls her wandering hand away to park the car, jumping out a second later and grabbing her furry son from the backseat. “Hey there, Baby S.”

You step out of the car in a similar fashion of pulling yourself out of a swimming pool, taking in the fresh air and trying to relax yourself as you follow her into the apartment building. The hallways reflect the quiet and clean neighborhood as you make your way into the elevator and up to the 6th floor, suddenly entering the most empty apartment you’ve ever seen.

Of course there’s furniture: a couch with a TV mounted on the nearest wall, a dining table with a set of matching chairs, a few stools placed at the island and kitchen appliances that are shiny and new. But there isn’t any personal artwork, posters, books or even just a lamp that you could tell Wanda purchased herself with one glance.

“Are you staying in an AirBNB or something?” you ask as she carefully places Baby Satan’s carrier next to the couch, and she chuckles.

“I guess technically it was one before I moved in, but I’ve been here for two years.”

“Okay...so where are your pictures?”

“What?”

“Where are your pictures?” you repeat, maintaining a steady voice despite the expression she gives you as she faces you again. “Pictures of your family, friends, you as a child?”

“If you knew my family, you’d understand why you don’t see them here.” She startles you by practically growling her words but you press further.

“Okay but you also said you love plants and we’re the only living things in here.” You step back to put more space between you while quiet shuffling noises are heard inside the carrier. “What’s really going on here?”

You can easily spot the shift in Wanda’s emotions: going from defensive, arms crossed and eyes glaring to resigned with slightly sagging shoulders and a defeated sigh.

“Fine, you got me.” She bends over to pick up the carrier again and passes you on her way to the door, stopping a few feet away. “If you’re serious about pursuing a relationship with me, then I should probably show you my real home.”

“I don’t know...”

“Come on, love.” She comes just close enough to bring your hand into hers and a tingle spreads through your body, causing you to pull away but her grip only tightens. “I promise I’m not going to hurt you, and this is the only time I’ve lied.”

You find yourself being drawn closer to her, and an almost familiar feeling washes over you when her thumb begins rubbing gentle circles into your jaw. The metal on her ring is so cold it almost burns upon contact, yet you nuzzle into her more with each pass along your skin.

“Don’t you want to be good for me without being forced to your knees first?”

If the fog surrounding your consciousness wasn’t so thick, you might’ve been shocked by this side of her, so calm yet demanding you serve her. But the hand on your jaw seemed to cover every inch of your body and sink into your nervous system, forcing you to fall into her and let her lead you back to the car with a simple arm around your waist. You’re buckled into the passenger seat again and a slightly blurry grin greets you from behind the wheel seconds later.

“I can’t wait to make you mine.”

Your head falls against the car window as she drives to the edge of Lane County, and your altered vision picks up on businesses turning into isolated suburbs into grassy fields into forests. You travel along narrow, winding roads past the tallest of trees with very few spaces in between, and your hazy state of mind prevents you from panicking when Wanda turns onto a dirt path that doesn’t even seem to be safe for bicycles. The wheels bump along the forest floor until she comes to a stop just outside of a two foot dwelling, similar to a cave.

Once the two of you are out of the car again, she holds your hand with her free one until you reach the cave, instructing you to sit in front of it while she does the same. She places her palm on the door, and her rings seem to come alive as they interact with it for a few moments before it swings open and the three of you are sent flying through a tunnel. You land with a groan on the hard floor and dust yourself off as you carefully stand, any questions dying in your throat as you face Wanda again, now standing before you in her true form.

“Welcome home.”

#wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x reader #dark!wanda maximoff x reader #avengers x reader #marvel x reader #frosty's dark!fics

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reidjumpers · 4 years ago

Text

Here Comes the Sun: Dumplings

Spencer Reid x Reader

Warning: mentions of food, some curse words, domestic bliss, Spencer being a little anxious

Series Summary: a journey of going through parenthood with Spencer Reid

Chapter Summary: When Spencer woke up to you making dumplings in the dining table, he knew he was in trouble.

Note: welcome to the first chapter of dad!Spencer series! For those who have faint heart, fear not, because I am not mean and I write this so we can all have serotonin boost together. Enjoy!

prologue, next chapter, series masterlist.

Nobody in their right mind would ever call Spencer Reid a fool. He might have encountered people that underestimate him or didn’t think he was as smart, yes, but no one would ever call him a fool. Not even when Emily joked about his IQ getting slashed into 60 in the presence of a beautiful woman. He had to silently agree with that statement. How could he not? In front of him was a very beautiful woman that he had the luxury to call her his wife. His beautiful, gorgeous, very understanding, intelligent wife.

But right now he definitely felt like a goddamn fool.

When Spencer woke up to an empty bed and the apartment smelled distinctively sweet like the bakery, he thought he was waking up on a really good day. But when he walked out the bedroom and spotted you sitting at the dining table calmly, a hum of songs from the speaker played in the background, and a stack of dumpling skin placed on the table, he knew he was in the doghouse.

It was common knowledge that whenever you’re stressed or upset upon something or someone, when life seemingly wants to fucks you over and over, you’d channel it through baked sweets or as strange as it sounds, dumplings. He never knew witnessing you silently make dumplings on the dining table with freshly baked cookies on the counter would be such a terrifying and worrisome sight to see.

Spencer stood silently in the doorway, rocking on his heels forward and backwards. He was quiet and careful not to burst the bubble of your own world. His mind started to run a few scenarios inside his head over and over, trying to walk through every minute by minute of every event in his life that had led him into today.

“Hey,” he greeted you after two solid minutes of thinking and couldn’t come up with any answer. His voice was gentle to not startle you as he pulled a chair across yours.

“Good morning, sleeping beauty,” you teased. It was 11:15 AM, you were most definitely saying that just to tease him.

Spencer rolled his eyes at your jab, silently reached for the dumpling skin in front of him and started to fill it with the filling. He had done this thousands of times over to know the right way to make dumplings. Your first few dates with him consisted of homemade dumplings and sipping wine. He was honored when you showed him how to make dumplings the way your grandmother did it, grinning as you said it’s a family secret and he promised to keep it as one.

“Are we having a guest?” Spencer asked as he put his own dumpling carefully into the designated plate. His dumpling would never be as good as yours no matter how much he tried, but he was proud that it was passable enough to your standard.

“No?” you furrowed your eyebrows, glancing up from your own dumpling. “Why?”

“You make more dumplings than usual,” he pointed out.

“Oh,” your voice was soft, barely audible, and he nearly missed it. “Didn’t realize that.”

Spencer nodded, reaching for another dumpling skin to soothe his worry away. Study has shown that repetitive action proven to soothe anxiety and increase focus. He could recite the study in his sleep, forward and backwards without stuttering. But the damned repetitive action of making dumplings didn’t work for him right now.

He cleared his throat. It is now and never. He would have to kiss his husband of the year trophy goodbye if he couldn’t figure out for his life what makes his wife this upset. “Hon?” he called for your attention.

You let out a hum of acknowledgement, eyes didn’t leave your dumpling for a second. It made the corner of his lips twisted downwards.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” he asked gently, mindful not pressing you into telling him things. He knew you would never keep things away from him. You would tell him eventually, but he needed to hear it.

You, however, just scrunched your nose adorably in confusion. “Talk about what?”

“You bake cookies and make dumplings, and it’s just…” he craned his neck to take a glance towards the hanging clock above the cabinet. “It’s not even twelve yet.”

You blinked at his statement. “I’m hungry.”

“You do stress bake,” he patiently pointed out. Placing his yet another passable looking dumpling into the designated plate, he let out a sigh. “You also make dumplings when you’re stressed or upset. And now you do both first thing in the morning.”

“You know me so well, huh? You should marry me if you know me so well.”

“Already did, nine months ago,” Spencer rolled his eyes at your humor, but a smile graced his lips. “So, do you want to talk about it?”

You blinked at him again, nose scrunched up in confusion at his question. Spencer could feel silence slowly settling in, filling the gaps between you and him. His mind started to make a list of things that you like, making mental notes to make a short trip to a grocery store to pick up your favorite ice cream and take a reroute towards the flower shop he saw a week ago and picked up a bouquet of roses.

He was in the middle of mentally reciting his apology for fucking up when he heard you burst into a laughter. It took him a moment to register that the sound of you cackling so hard was not a mere figment of his imagination. He saw you laughing so hard, head thrown backwards overwhelming the small dining room.

“I’m sorry,” you hiccupped, wiping away tears from your eyes with your sleeve. Spencer would’ve smiled at the sight if he weren’t so puzzled. “Babe, are you really thinking I’m mad at you because I bake cookies and make dumplings?”

Spencer sputtered, “How could I not!” he huffed, throwing his hands into the air dramatically as you laugh upon his misery. “I was so worried! You always either bake or make dumplings when you’re upset, but never both! And now you do both and you keep dodging my question.”

“I didn’t mean to!” you said defensively between your laughter. You cleared your throat, not wanting to make the pout on Spencer’s lips even more prominent. “I guess my brain really associated cookies and dumplings as something comforting. I crave for some comfort food, and my brain just screams, ‘cookies and dumplings!’ I didn’t mean to make you worried, I’m sorry.”

“This much? You’re really hungry, huh?”

“Pretty hungry since I’m eating for two now.”

Spencer froze on his spot, his hand stopped midair before he was able to reach for another dumpling skin. He blinked. Once. Twice. Three times. “W-what?”

You just smiled cheekily at him. You got up from your seat and walked towards the kitchen, leaving him alone flabbergasted at your statement. You came back a minute later, a wide smile at your face and your hand tucked behind your back.

“Ta-da!” you cheerfully said, placing baby shoes on the table in front of him. Spencer let out a soft gasp, cooed at the sight of how tiny the shoes are.

“Are you…? Are we…?”

“Pregnant,” you finished his sentence for him with a wide grin. “I found out during our case in LA and I was meaning to tell you earlier, I swear! But the case got a little crazy and we’re whisked away into doing a lot of things at once.”

Spencer let out a shaky breath, staring into the baby shoes with eyes full of awe. The news still felt unreal for him, artificial, but the warmth blooming on his chest that slowly spreading through his system left him fuzzy. A small reminder that it was as real as he wanted to be.

You probably have mistaken his silence for something else as you shifted your weight from one foot to another. You started to fidget with the hem of your shirt, eyes not meeting his. “I know we agree to wait for a year, but–”

Spencer practically leaped from his seat and scooped you into his arms. His smile was so wide that his cheeks started to hurt. You let out a small yelp as he spun you around before he placed a tender kiss on your lips. “I love you,” he said between your kisses, grinning as he stole a few more small kisses.

You giggled between his kisses, your hand flew into his face and patted his cheeks as he assaulted your face with his lips. “I love you too, you big goof.”

“A baby, huh?” Spencer let out a happy sigh after he spared your life from his kisses. His hand nestled on your waist, gently swaying you in his arms. “We’ve got to start baby proofing the whole place, make sure there are no sharp edges,” he rambled.

“Spencer–”

“I’ll go to the bookstore and pick up some book about baby names! Do you think Jason is a good name?”

“I think–”

“Oh, we should start shopping for some clothes and socks too. Make sure they’re warm–”

“Spencer!” you interrupted his rambling with your hands squishing his face. You smiled at him as he blinked his eyes towards you slowly, a little fazed that you broke his train of thought. “I love all the planning ideas, but right now let’s just focus on making dumplings and feed three of us, okay?”

“Okay,” he breathed out, slowly collapsing into his seat again. “Okay. Dumplings…” he muttered to himself, grabbing the dumpling skin in front of him. “But seriously, what do you think about the name Jason?”

“It’s a lovely name.”

“Oh, common ground. I like that.”

====================================

Series tag list:

@measure-in-pain @wooya1224 @reidemandweep @manuosorioh

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paisley-print · 3 years ago

Text

Near The Water’s Edge: Chapter Four

After fleeing your abusive husband, you find yourself in the small coastal town of July, North Carolina. Soon you meet Frankie Morales, Air Force Veteran and single dad. As the two of you grow closer, you begin to let go of your past and learn to love again. That is until a strange man shows up in town, and you ’re forced to choose between your safety or the safety of the people that you love.

Inspired by the novel “Safe Haven” written by Nicolas Sparks.

Series Master List

Frankie Morales x Female Reader Rating: 18+ / Heavy adult themes eventual smut. Trigger Warnings: Domestic Abuse, Mentions of death, PTSD, anxiety, mentions of police case, police. Word Count:

Note: Another heavy chapter, but things will let lighter as the chapters go on. Enjoy the first half of the beach day.

Tag List:@qytyy @winter-fox-queen @sherala007@inkededucatednnerdy @quica-quica-quica @hnt-escape @giizhkens-cedar@heythere-mel @toomanystoriessolittletime

The ride passed in comfortable silence, the three of you listening to the radio and Lucy looking out the window at the cars in the next lane. All Frankie could think about was how nice it was to have someone else there to spend the day. He knew Lucy must have been feeling the same way, since he hadn’t seen her so excited about a beach trip in a long while.

He appreciated how patient you were with her; it was something he noticed even on that first day. The way you refused help until you knew she was alright. That moment had stuck with him more than anything else.

The memory of what Will said earlier surfaced in his mind. He shifted in his seat and glanced at you. Yes, you were beautiful. Strikingly so. A woman who could walk into a room and turn every head in the place; both men and women alike. Of course Frankie had been taken with you. He tried to suppress it, scolding himself whenever he was alone in bed at night and found his thoughts wandering....

His only goal right now was to be your friend because he cared for you and knew that you needed help. He wasn’t sure what kind of help, but he sensed that you were alone and at some point in your life something very bad had happened to you. He wouldn’t pry though, he would wait until you were ready to share.

The beach wasn’t too packed; it was still early in the season and the tourists hadn’t moved into their summer homes yet. The boys had done an oddly efficient job at setting everything up. When Ben and Will got into a little spat about how to sink the umbrella into the sand , Frankie simply rolled his eyes and continued to spray Lucy with sunblock. It made you laugh, they all seemed so comfortable with one another.

The day was hot and everybody seemed eager to get into the water, everyone except you and Frankie. You had bought a bathing suit at the store, intending on going in... but somewhere during the car ride you changed your mind.

“You can go in if you want,” you told Frankie “I don’t mind just watching.”

He shrugged, “I don’t normally go in either.”

Then just like that the two of you were suddenly alone, both woefully unprepared for any sort of conversation.

You thought of something quickly, filling the silence “the marina was packed today.”

“Yeah, It’s always like that on memorial day. Most of the summer too, be prepared for the restaurant to start getting busy.”

“I prefer it that way. It makes the shifts go faster. So I’ve been meaning to ask, what exactly do you do? I assumed you owned the marina?”

He paused for a moment. “Uh, technically I do. It was a wedding gift from my parents. An uncle had died and left it to them. I think they just wanted to get rid of it, but I have an office manager that does all the upfront stuff….. normally I just work on repairs.”

Married. That wasn’t what you were expecting, but still no ring. “Did you go to school for that?”

“Kind of. I had training for planes, but you would be surprised just how similar the two are.” You gave him a look. He glanced at you and laughed sheepishly. “What?”

“I’m sorry, did you say planes?”

“Yeah”

“You fix planes?”

He smiled and crossed his arms, trying to seem much cooler than he actually was. “I fly them too.”

“You fly pl-....do you take constructive criticism?”

He laughed, “Of course.”

“Lead with that next time.”

He looked at you skeptically. “How am I supposed to lead with that, exactly?”

“You say, hi my name is pilot Frankie …..”

He shook his head, grinning. “Morales,” he informed you.

“Hi my name is pilot Frankie Morales, nice to meet you.”

He played along, “but how will I know if people actually like me for me, or they just want me to take them for a ride in a plane?”

You shrugged “it's tough being a celebrity, I don’t make the rules.”

“Oh yeah, celebrity, that’s me,” he said sarcastically.

You kicked at the sand with your foot. “Also I liked you before I knew you had the coolest hobby in the world. So, you know that you can trust me.”

He glanced over at you and immediately noticed your smile. He had seen you smile before, but they would never quite reach your eyes. This one, he could tell, was real. He opened his mouth to speak when, in the distance, a wave crashed and Lucy squealed with laughter. Both of you turned your heads to look.

“Will Lucy be okay out there?” you asked. She had on a life vest and was being supervised in the shallows by the rest of the adults. Santi was holding onto a boogie board Lucy used to keep herself up.

“Yeah, I know they seem like idiots but they are good men.” Frankie reached into the cooler to grab a bee and popped the cap off with the bottle opener. “Do you want one?”

You shook your head, “No thank you, but I’ll take a water bottle if you have it.” He set his beer down in his cup holder and reached into the cooler again. The bottle was freezing cold when he handed it to you. Perfect for a sunny day.

You wiped the condensation off on your dress. “Can I ask you something? It’s okay if you don’t want to answer.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, taking a sip of beer.

“Lucy’s mom is she….? Are you two still….? I don’t mean to pry, I guess I’m just a little confused.”

“You and I both,” he said with a sigh. “I’m married but we are not together anymore, haven’t been for a few years.”

“Oh,” you said simply, not finding any clarification in what he told you. If anything, you had more questions, but you didn’t want to push. Besides, it didn’t matter anyway…. you couldn’t, you were married as well. “Does your family live in the area?”

“Nope, they live up north. Katie never really knew her family. She grew up in the foster system and was bounced around until she enlisted at eighteen. It’s just me and Lulu now, and the guys when they find the time to travel here.”

“I’m sorry,” you said honestly. “It must be hard not having your parents support.”

He shook his head and took another sip. “I expected it, even when I was younger, it seemed as though they were only interested in keeping me alive.” He looked down and started to peel off the sticker on the bottle as he spoke. “They are both doctors, mom is an archaeologist and dad an engineer. He actually helped design parts of the international space station…. I think they valued their careers more than anything else... they still do. The only time they ever came down to see Lucy was right after she was born, aside from that it’s usually a phone call on a holiday and a card with money in the mail.”

Although he tried to play it off as if it were just another part of life, you could see that it still affected him deeply. For a moment you thought about reaching out to take his hand, but you stopped yourself. “It really is their loss, they are missing out on two wonderful people.”

Frankie adjusted the baseball cap on his head, a sheepish little smile playing on his lips at the compliment. “Well, thank you. Lucy and I could say the same thing about you. You’re great with her.”

You glanced back at the little girl. She was smiling happily as Ben pulled her along on the boogie board. “I think little girls need to be protected, but not only that - they need to be seen and heard. She is already so independent and fierce. I can see how you encourage her to be her own person and not fit into any one mold. That’s important for little girls to learn.”

He laughed, “Yeah, she definitely gives me a run for my money, that's for sure. She can already repair an engine better than most men I know.”

A large gust of wind came through and took hold of the multi-colored beach ball beside you. Both you and Frankie sprang from your seats to race after it. The thing was fast, and you could not stop it from crashing into the waves. You noticed just how much cooler it was near the water’s edge. Although the temperature outside was sweltering, the Atlantic still held that winter chill. Both of you stared at the ball as it bobbed up and down with the tide.

Frankie waved it away with his hand and squinted in the sunlight. “It’s fine, it’ll probably just float down the beach to another family or something.”

You smirked at him “or choke a poor dimwitted sea turtle to death.”

He paused and shot you a pretend glare, then took off his hat, dropped it in the sand and reached for his shirt.

You giggled “no, no I’m joking. I got it.” You said, starting to strip down to your bathing suit also.

“Well, you gotta be faster than that,” he said, half jogging to the water.

You slipped off your dress easily and ran straight past him into the waves. Frankie was not far behind. You two were pushing against the tide as you reached for the ball. Fingertips just barely brushed against the plastic before it slipped a couple more inches away. This left just enough time for Frankie to swoop in and grab it.

Your stomach hurt from laughing so hard “hey!”

He shrugged, “I’m sorry that I care more about the environment than you.”

You splashed him with water playfully.

The two of you swam for another fifteen minutes, chatting about the town and volleying the ball back and forth. Frankie pretended not to see the way the droplets of water clung to your skin and sparkled under the sunlight. When he noticed the little lace pattern on the bottom of your swimsuit, he knew he had been staring for too long and forced himself to look away. The very last thing he wanted to do was scare you away, or make you believe he had some sort of ulterior motives to helping you.

You both dressed again before walking back up to the chairs. When the two of you returned, the group had already come back from swimming. They were passing around Tupperware full of fruit while Santi was starting up the tiny little grill he had brought.

“You guys really don’t play around for beach days,” you mentioned to Frankie.

“I tried to warn you,” he said with a smirk.

Will had Lucy thrown over his shoulder, carrying her easily with one arm. “Has anyone seen Fry?”

“I’m right here!” Lucy’s little voice drifted out from behind him.

Will started turning, pretending to look for her “Fry! Fry! Where are you!”

Lucy was hardly able to speak through her fit of giggles, “I’m behind you!”

He put her down on the sand, pretending as if he had seen her for the first time. “Jesus Fry! You scared me!”

“Lulu,” Frankie said, “come here so I can put more sunscreen on you.” Frankie took the bottle from the bag and sprayed her again, making sure to get her ears and the tops of her feet as well. He sprayed some in his hands, and Lucy scrunched up her nose as he applied it to her face.

Watching the two of them together made you smile. You were reminded again just how different Frankie was from your husband. David would have felt emasculated by having to take care of a child. If he had attended today, you would be sitting beside him silently the entire time, only getting up to fetch him a beer.

“Do you want some?” Frankie asked, and you were suddenly snapped right back to reality.

Even though you weren’t threatened by a burn yet, you figured it would be a good idea. “Yeah, thank you.” You offered him your arms, then the front of your legs.

“I used to be terrible with remembering sunblock until I got sun poisoning in Iraq, god never again.”

“Iraq?” you asked, and turned so he could get the backs of your legs.

“Yeah, with the air force” he told you, assuming you already knew.

Breath hitched in your throat as he brushed your hair over your shoulder. You cringed at the feeling of the warm sunscreen hitting the back of your neck and jerked away. It was enough for the others to notice. You laughed and lied quickly “damn horse flies hurt when they bite. They say you should wash off the bite with soap to get it to stop the swelling. Is there a bathroom here?”

You sounded believable. Becoming an expert liar had been the only thing keeping you alive for so long.

Frankie felt horrible. He didn’t quite know what he had done to trigger you, but he knew it was something. “It’s pretty far, I can walk with you-”

You shook your head, a wide smile still plastered across your lips. “Nope, I just need a direction.”

Santi jumped in quickly. “That building when we first came in, near the tennis courts.”

You nodded and started forward, tears stinging at the corners of your eyes. Why was this happening right now? You were fine a moment ago and now you felt as though you couldn’t catch your breath. You shivered, remembering the feeling again and putting your hand on the back of your neck to stop it.

A soldier…. it made sense. You were too stupid to have seen it, the nicknames and the holiday......

Thankfully, they were single stall restrooms; you pulled the door shut and locked it behind you. The bottom of the floor was disgusting and filled with wet sand. You lifted yourself up onto the counter and sat, trying to calm down. A soldier, a soldier, you kept repeating to yourself. It was too similar. The anger, the potential for violence…. just like your husband.

You placed your head in your hands, and suddenly you were back in New Jersey. It was a bitter February, snow still on the ground. You were in your bathroom hiding as David raged in the living room and screamed at his coworker on the phone. A little boy had been killed by his father weeks ago. David was assigned to the case. When the trial came, the jury found the man innocent and let him walk free, even though all the evidence pointed to him as the killer. It was an embarrassment to David and the entire homicide unit

“God fucking dammit, y/n! y/n!”

You pulled yourself up on shaking legs, straightened your dress and walked out. David was red in the face waiting for you. “I thought I told you to call Comcast, did I not?”

“They said that they could get someone out here Wednesday because of the snow-”

He took the television remote and threw it at you as hard as he could; he aimed for your face but it hit your shoulder instead. The plastic connected straight with your collarbone. You doubled over in pain, holding it as it throbbed. He stalked up to you and you moved back, the fear evident in your eyes.

His voice was teetering on the edge of lunacy as he screamed at you.

“I give you a simple fucking job to do and you can’t even get it done. You’re a lazy fat fucking bitch.” he shoved you hard but you manged to keep standing. “Spend all day sitting on your fucking ass while I have to go to work for the both of us! I need the television because I need to see the news coverage of the fucking case! You knew this! Or would you like me to get fired and the both of us live on the fucking streets!” He shoved you again, and you fell against the stone fireplace. Your hands came up to shield your face as he picked up the remote and hit you with it repeatedly. It caught your lip, busting it open.

You didn’t care about the blood, all you could think about was the gun still holstered in his belt. You got the television fixed the next day-

“Summer?”

You stood quickly and wiped away the tears from your cheeks, pretending like nothing was wrong. “Yeah?”

“Are you alright?”

It was Frankie.

You shook your head and smiled in the dingy plastic mirror in front of you. “Yeah, why?”

He could hear that you had been crying. He pushed on the door but it was locked.

You didn’t like that at all; you slipped off the counter and sat on the floor, against the door. Bracing it closed with your body “I’m fine-”

“You’re crying-”

“No, I’m not I- I get allergies and that horsefly hurt. I am such a baby I’ve always had a low pain tolerance-”

“If it’s something that I did -”

“Nope, it’s nothing that you did. I’m fine, I’m really, really fine I promise. I just got overwhelmed and needed some air. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and you guys can eat without me. Don’t let me hold you up.”

Frankie wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t want to force anything. “Would you like me to save you a plate?”

“Yes, please.”

You could hear his footsteps start to retreat and relaxed a little.

“Summer?”

“Yeah?”

Frankie was about to say something, but he thought better of it. He figured it was better to let you have your space now.

#ntwewy #nearthewater'sedge #pedro fanfiction #pedro fanfic #Frankie Morales fanfiction #Frankie Morales fanfic #frankie morales #Frankie fanfiction #triple frontier #triple frontier fanfic #triple frontier fanfiction #pedro pascal fanfic #pedro pascal fanfiction

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whimsicallyenchantedrose · 3 years ago

Text

Dead Man’s Cell Phone--Chapter 2

Summary: When Emma Swan starts getting phone calls and texts from an unfamiliar number, she decides to check it out–only to discover the number belongs to a Killian Jones, who was killed in a robbery gone wrong six months ago. With some help from a medium, Merlin Emrys, Emma hopes to find out why a dead guy is contacting her–and why she feels such a strong pull to someone she has never met before.

Rating: K+

Tagging a few people who may be interested (Let me know if you want to be added or taken off the list): @sailormew4 @annaamell @flslp87 @emmateo26 @bethacaciakay @ultraluckycatnd @effulgent-mind @ilovemesomekillianjones@kat2609 @brooke-to-broch @missgymgirl @galadriel26 @the-lady-of-misthaven @charmingturkeysandwich @jennjenn615 @laschatzi @kimmy46 @snowbellewells @iamanneenigma @daxx04 @nickillian @a-rose-for-a-savior@in-spirational @gillie @britishguyslover @ginnyjinxedandhanshotritafirst@kmomof4 @linda8084 @golfgirld @captain-swan-coffee @searchingwardrobes @hollyethecurious @laughswaytoomuch@allyourdarlingswans @winterbaby89 @facesiousbutton82 @cssns @therooksshiningknight, @lfh1226-linda @tiganasummertree @eastwesthomeisbest @dreamingdreamsalways @xsajx @justren21 @laughterandbooks @cocohook38 @therealstartraveller776

Welcome to my entry for the Captain Swan Supernatural Summer! A big thank you to @cssns, the ladies on the Discord! Thank you also to @eastwesthomeisbest, my artist and my beta @veryverynotgood!

Other Chapters: Prologue 1 3 4 Epilogue

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"So after the phone calls, the text messages started coming," Emma said, settling into her best friend's plush sofa.

"Texts?" Mary Margaret asked curiously before taking a sip of her tea. "What kind of texts?"

It felt like Emma had known Mary Margaret forever. Both girls were placed in the system at young ages-Emma, because her parents abandoned her on the side of a road as an infant, and Mary Margaret, because her parents both died of illness. They ended up in the same group home, and quickly became the best of friends. They were closer than sisters until the day Mary Margaret was adopted by Cora Mills, and then eventually, Emma was fostered by Ruth Nolan.

Even after being placed with other families, Emma and Mary Margaret kept in touch-letters, phone calls, even the occasional visit. On one such visit, Emma's foster brother, David, was home from college, and as soon as he and Mary Margaret met, it was love at first sight.

They were so in love it was honestly a bit nauseating.

When they got married fresh out of college, Emma couldn't be happier. She'd always considered Mary Margaret her sister in all the ways that counted, and now they truly were.

There was no doubt about it - Mary Margaret Nolan was the person Emma was closest to in the entire world, and so it was only natural that when the weird stuff with the cell phone started happening, Emma decided to discuss it with her.

"Weird ones," Emma answered, taking a sip of her own hot cocoa with cinnamon. "Stuff like Help! or You're the only one who can save me!. And then some of them were even stranger. Just...random letters and symbols, almost like someone was randomly pressing buttons on a keyboard."

"So what did you do?" Mary Margaret asked, sitting on the other side of the sofa and turning toward Emma.

Emma shrugged. "I tried answering at first. You know, you hear about people who are abducted and, like, stuck in a basement for years and stuff like that. I kept thinking, what if someone really needed help and I just...ignored them?"

"And what happened when you answered?" Mary Margaret asked.

"Nothing," Emma answered before taking another sip. "No answer, just another cryptic text several hours later. Finally, I decided I'd had enough. Either someone needed help, or someone was messing with me. I decided I'd call the number, decide whether I needed to help them or tell them to go f-" She stopped, glancing over at Mary Margaret's toddler playing with blocks nearby. "Well, go do something not at all child-friendly to themselves."

"Let me guess, your call didn't get through."

"Nope," Emma confirmed, "but it was even weirder than that. I dialed the number just after receiving a text, but it went directly to voicemail."

"But that's not possible!" Mary Margaret exclaimed.

"Right?" Emma said. "So I tried to ignore the whole thing. Maybe the phone was just...I don't know..glitching or something, although I don't know how a technological glitch could make phone calls and text someone. Anyway, for some reason, I just can't let go. Even though I don't know him, somehow I feel a...connection...to this Killian Jones. I just-I don't know what to do about it."

Mary Margaret was silent for a moment, taking several sips of her steaming beverage, before turning back to Emma with a cautious look in her eyes. "There is...there is another possibility, if you have an open mind."

"Just how open are we talking?"

"Pretty open," Mary Margaret said. "What if-and just hear me out, I know this is crazy-what if Killian Jones is contacting you from beyond the grave."

"What, like a ghost?"

Mary Margaret shrugged. "I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but why not? One of the other teachers I work with was talking about this medium. His name is Merlin Emrys. Supposedly he can contact the dead and see ghosts and stuff like that."

"A medium? Seriously?" Emma asked, crossing her arms and raising an eyebrow. "Mary Margaret, you know those people are frauds. It's all about researching their marks ahead of time and then cold reading them. They're only in it to bleed as much cash out of vulnerable people as possible."

"I know it sounds crazy," Mary Margaret conceded, "but what if it's not? I've thought about going to him myself. If I could just talk to my parents one more time-make sure they're okay, make sure they've moved on, or whatever happens after someone dies. Well, it would provide a lot of comfort."

Emma's heart turned over, and she took her friend's hand. She knew how much Mary Margaret missed her parents. It was different for Emma. She'd never known her parents, only knew they'd tossed her out like garbage. She wasn't sure she even wanted to find them.

"I know you miss them," Emma said.

"I do," Mary Margaret said, "but that's not the point. The point is...what do you have to lose? Maybe this Merlin is just a quack like you said, but maybe not. Maybe he could be the key to unravelling the whole mystery."

Emma was silent for a moment. It was crazy; she knew it was. A medium wasn't going to give her the answers she needed if all her bail bonds tricks had failed her, but what the hell?

"Fine. I'll go see Merlin," Emma caved.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Emma's eyebrows rose as she took in the small, ranch-style house Mary Margaret had directed her to. She was skeptical before seeing the place, but now-now red flags were going up everywhere.

There was a huge, gaudy sign out front that read "Merlin, the great and powerful. Wizard of the unknown and medium of the great beyond." The sign-indeed the entire front of the house-was decorated with all kinds of astrological signs and symbols.

Was this guy even for real?

Emma seriously considered turning around and getting back in her car, but she'd promised Mary Margaret she'd at least check this Merlin out and give him a chance, and Emma was a woman of her word. She took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

A moment later, an older man with longish, thinning gray hair and a rather unkempt gray beard opened the door. He was wearing long robes. Really playing the part, apparently.

"Merlin Emrys, I presume?" Emma asked as the man welcomed her inside with a sweep of his hand.

The man chuckled. "I'm afraid not. I'm merely his apprentice. Who might I tell Merlin is calling?"

Emma cocked an eyebrow. "You mean your all powerful boss didn't see me coming with his second sight or whatever?"

Emma stepped inside and the apprentice shut the door after her. "My master isn't clairvoyant. He merely has the ability to speak with the dead."

"Right," Emma said, not even trying to tamp down the skepticism in her voice. "I'm Emma Swan, and I'm here to-"

He stopped her with a raised hand. "Don't say too much. Merlin does not wish to be influenced by his clients. He wishes to sense the energy around you for himself."

Emma shrugged. "Sorry."

"It's quite alright," the apprentice said, moving toward large drapes at the far end of the room. "I'll be just a moment. Please, make yourself comfortable."

Emma looked around the room while she waited, and it took everything in her to keep from rolling her eyes. This guy was really playing up the whole "psychic" thing. It felt like she was in some sort of fortune teller carnival tent. All the signs and symbols. This guy even had a crystal ball. An actual crystal ball.

This trip was a massive waste of her time, but maybe it would at least prove to be entertaining.

"Emma Swan, welcome!"

Emma looked up at the handsome black man who made his way through the curtains. He was dressed in much the same way as his apprentice, only he wore a sorcerer's pointy hat on his head.

"Uh, thanks," Emma said, stepping forward and offering her hand. "Full disclosure. I'm more than a little bit of a skeptic, so if this is one of those 'it can only work if you truly believe' deals, we might have a problem."

"My gift can withstand the doubts of the skeptic," he chuckled before reaching out and taking her hand.

No sooner had his hand touched hers than he gasped, taking a step back, eyes going wide. "Would you-would you care to follow me back to my private sitting room, Miss Swan? It's far more comfortable back there."

Emma cocked a brow again, wondering what this odd man was on about. Still, she didn't sense any overt deception in him, and he didn't seem to be any threat to her, so she shrugged before following him through the curtains.

This backroom was far more ordinary than the room they'd just inhabited. Emma took a plush armchair, and Merlin sat on a sofa across from her.

Merlin pulled off his hat and sat it beside him. "I apologize for all the theatrics, Miss Swan," he said, reaching for a pot of tea and then raising an eyebrow in question. Emma declined the beverage with a small shake of her head, and Merlin proceeded to pour himself a cup. "I attempt to play up to what most clients expect from a psychic. Unfortunately, most poor souls who come to see me are out of luck. The loved one they wish to contact has passed on. For most, all I can do amounts to smoke and mirrors. I could tell the moment I shook your hand that you were different."

Emma inwardly scoffed. She knew enough about cons not to be fooled by a clever con man. Made sense he'd use a different tactic with a skeptic than he would with some poor, grief-stricken sap who was a true believer.

"No offense, but I still think you're full of crap," she said.

Merlin smiled. "It seems those with the most energy surrounding them always do."

"So, what?" Emma asked. "Are there ghosts all around me or something?"

"There are a few spirits here with us today," Merlin confirmed. "There's one who's quite insistent. It's a man; looks as though he died rather young. I don't sense he's family, but you were close. Maybe coworkers? Perhaps friends?"

Emma took a deep breath, a face coming to mind. Surely he couldn't mean-

"I'm getting a G in the name," Merlin said slowly. "Greg or Gray….no. Graham."

Emma's heart turned over. Graham. Sweet, slightly dorky Graham Humbert. They'd worked together on more than a few cases, and they'd become good friends.

In fact, they'd been teetering on the precipice of possibly becoming more than friends when he died suddenly.

"How did you know to mention Graham? How did you know that name would get the biggest rise out of me?" Emma demanded, voice hard.

"I don't choose the spirits who come to me," Merlin explained calmly, "I merely give them a voice. Graham is pleased to see you again. He's glad you're doing well."

The anger came then, spurred on by the pain the memory of Graham's death brought back. "Why are you doing this to me?"

"He died quite suddenly, didn't he?" Merlin asked, ignoring her question. "I'm feeling a tightness in my chest. Something with his heart?"

"Heart attack," Emma confirmed tightly. "He had a heart attack right in front of me and died in my arms."

"He's sorry, so very sorry you had to go through that," Merlin said, putting a comforting hand on her arm. "He never wanted to be a source of pain for you."

Emma felt the tears at the back of her eyes and had to take a deep breath to keep them from falling. "Yeah, well, he didn't exactly have a say in the matter. Look, I don't know how you knew to bring up Graham, but I'm still not buying it."

"He apologizes he couldn't bring you a bear claw today," Merlin continued with a smile. "Oh, and he asks if you remember the day he thought he saw a wolf. He wants you to know he wasn't drunk. It really was there-in spirit at least."

Emma gasped, remembering the night she and Graham had gone to the Rabbit Hole for a drink after a long shift and Graham swore he spotted a big, gray wolf right there on the main street of town. Emma had made fun of him for that, telling him he'd clearly imbibed a bit too much that night. There's no way Merlin could have known about that incident. He couldn't have found it in any newspaper or online article about Graham's death.

Was it...was it possible this guy was the real deal?

"Okay, I admit, it's weird you'd bring that up," Emma said. "Let's say I believe you, can you ask Graham if he's okay? If he, like, moved on or whatever?"

"You just asked him," Merlin said. "He's here with us and can hear you. He wants to tell you that he is okay. He's more than okay; he's happy. He's moved on, and he's at peace, more than he could have ever thought possible."

Emma smiled, feeling comfort at the thought.

"There's someone else here with us as well," Merlin said. "Another male presence, but I don't believe you know this one. This one seems angry, desperate."

"Um...should we be scared?" Emma asked.

Merlin shook his head. "He doesn't mean us harm, only wants his story told. He's too indistinguishable to speak now, but I sense he'll be accompanying us on our journey today as well."

Wonderful. An angry, desperate ghost guide. Just fantastic.

"So, Emma," Merlin said, after a moment, "what brings you to me tonight?"

Emma pulled out her phone and laid out the entire story for Merlin. She told him about the calls, the texts, everything. Merlin took her phone in hand and gasped as soon as it touched his hand.

"There is a huge amount of energy here," he said. "There's no doubt a spirit has attached itself to you-or at least your phone."

Emma felt a chill. "My phone is haunted?"

"Not precisely," Merlin murmured, turning the device over in his hand. "Someone wishes to get your attention; wishes for you to help him, but there's something odd here, something I can't quite place."

"What do you mean?"

"The spirit is...indistinct," Merlin said, "hazy and just beyond my reach. I've never experienced anything like this."

Emma waited, her curiosity more than piqued at Merlin's odd reaction to her cell phone.

After a moment, Merlin's eyes widened. "Your friend Graham cleared up the mystery for me."

"What?" Emma asked. "What does Graham say is going on?"

"The reason I can't get a clear read on the spirit attached to your phone-this Killian Jones-is, well, because he's not dead."

Notes:

-So there you have it. For those of you who have wondered how this story could possibly have a happy ending since Killian is dead-this is how. He's not actually dead!

-Up next: With Merlin's help, Emma finds out how this is all possible-and she finds the not-dead Killian Jones.

Next Chapter-->

#cssns21 #captain swan supernatural summer #my franfiction #cs ghost story au #dead man's cell phone

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olivia-anderson-fanfic · 3 years ago

Text

Stalker X Stalker, Part 5

First

Perma tag: @nathleigh

Stalker x Stalker taglist: @aespades @jayjayspixiepop @blueslushgueen @fan-written @seraphichana @nerd-nowandforever

Marinette listened in on Tim for three days.

Not actively, of course, she didn’t hang onto every word he said. She just let her consciousness drift in and out of the conversations he had while she worked on finishing up the outfit she had designed for Audrey...

And, yeah, she was getting to the point where she was willing to bet on him being an okay guy. Better than okay, even. He was just so… genuine?

The first two days he had come in sick. She knew the signs of working while sick by heart, the trudging around and the groaning and the constant banging your head on the desk when you pass out randomly, and damn she was pretty sure even she wasn’t as bad as him. He probably shouldn’t be working at all, to be honest, he was CEO and there was nothing stopping him from taking the day -- or even just a few hours -- off. But, no, from the sound of it he was drinking ungodly amounts of coffee and calling it okay.

And despite the fact that he seemed absolutely miserable, he hadn’t taken it out on anyone. She had yet to hear him be impolite to anyone, not even the people that worked under him. His secretary had made a scheduling mistake and he had not only assured her it was fine but didn’t even require her to fix it.

Even when he was talking to himself while working he never once said anything questionable. And he talked to himself a lot. It was like a podcast, honestly, just hearing him rattle off numbers and weird business terms she hadn’t learned because she was self-taught. He talked almost constantly and he should have slipped up by now, yet here she was three days later with nothing to show for it except for a whole lot of guilt.

Marinette hadn’t thought much about it on the first day, everyone had their good days from time to time. On the second day she said ‘oh, it’s a coincidence’, but on the third day she had to call it: her paranoia had been a little unfounded.

Literally the worst thing about him so far was that he didn’t seem to care much about his own health… and that wasn’t really a bad thing about him as much as it was a bad thing for him.

So, yeah, it looked like she had no real reason to listen in on him anymore.

… but…

Something about him was nagging at her. He was a nice guy and she’d like to be his friend… it was just that, sometimes, she could swear she recognized his voice.

And it wasn’t like there were a lot of people she knew in America, she knew who he probably was.

Her hand itched towards the tiny device hidden under her window seat. One click (and maybe a little researching) and she’d know for sure who the bats were. The only thing stopping her was the knowledge that, if she did know their real names, she’d accidentally call them by them once and immediately get thrown either into a cell or out of Gotham. She was a meta (kind of), she was already on thin ice. She didn’t need the paranoid idiots that were the bats being more wary of her than they already were.

So, she left it alone.

She kept the bug, though. Mostly just because she wanted to hear it directly from him rather than just guessing by his voice. After all, voices can be similar. If he were to directly talk about bat business while she was listening in, though… that would definitely be a point towards her theory, to say the least.

And, yeah, she knew it was kind of messed up. She could be listening in on some innocent guy for all she knew, but it was… morally kind of okay? The whole thing about stalking is that it makes your victim feel unsafe. If he was Red Robin then he had found the bug and hadn’t felt unsafe enough to remove it and if he was a civilian then he would never know about the bug and therefore couldn’t feel unsafe. Therefore, it wasn’t stalking, not really.

… yeah, that makes sense.

She glanced at her sketchbook and yawned. She really needed to get a new outfit idea soon. Good thing Tim said he was taking her out tomorrow --.

Shit, Tim was taking her out tomorrow.

She jumped up from her spot at the window and ran to her closet. What to wear, what to wear...

Frenchie: where are we going tomorrow

Spiderman: It’s a surprise.

Frenchie: fuck your surprises tim what do i need to wear

She heard his laugh crackle through her earpiece. Rude.

Spiderman: Casual clothes.

Frenchie: there are LEVELS of casual tim

Spiderman: Oh, so we’re breaking out the capital letters. This must be serious.

She scoffed. Of course it was serious.

Frenchie: just tell me what to wear

Spiderman: A t-shirt and jeans is fine.

Kwamis, send her strength. Like she was going to wear a t-shirt and jeans. Did he even know who he was talking to?

But at least she had a gauge on how casual she could go. She picked out a light pink button down and black shorts for herself and then, because she had a little bit of foresight, she added some black tights.

She smiled faintly and dropped back in her bed.

She couldn’t wait to see where he was going to take her.

She found out the next day. Because that’s how things work.

She raised her eyebrows. “There’s no way it’s actually called a ‘space museum’. You’ve gotta be lying.”

Tim shrugged, a grin poking at his lips. “Do you really think I’d make it up?”

“Well, considering your outfit, I’d say you aren’t the most creative of guys so maybe you did,” she teased.

Tim looked down at his outfit and pouted. He was wearing little more than a black turtleneck and pants under a white jacket. “Must you make fun of every outfit I wear?”

“Only the bad ones. Seriously, would it kill you to wear a little bit of color?”

He rolled his eyes. “At least I thought to bring a jacket. It’s thirty degrees!”

She had forgotten that Americans used Fahrenheit, sue her.

Of course, she was never going to admit to this. She stuck her tongue out at him. “Maybe I’m just not a wimp.”

He snickered. “Oh, so you’re not cold?”

“Not at all.”

“Then stop hugging that coffee cup.”

She looked down at the coffee cup that was her only source of warmth and happiness in this cruel world that had two different measuring systems (three if you counted Kelvin). She gripped it tighter. “... no.”

He rolled his eyes again and, after a beat of hesitation, shrugged his jacket off and offered it to her.

Marinette normally wouldn’t give in this easy… but she really was cold and his clothes were far thicker than hers were and she knew that her teeth would start chattering soon which would have been so embarrassing...

So she blushed faintly and slipped the jacket on. It smelled like ungodly expensive cologne. “Thanks.”

He grinned. “I’m taking your coffee as payment.”

“No --!”

After dropping by a cafe so Marinette didn’t kill him, Tim took her to the space museum (yes, that actually was what it was called).

He thought she would have missed the night sky. Gotham hardly ever had a clear night due to the thick smog that hung over the city like a curse. And they spent quite a lot of time outside at night, she must have been feeling a little homesick.

So, he rented out the museum for the day. Yes, the whole museum. He was rich and mildly famous and what was the point of that if he wasn’t going to use it to make the people he cared about happy? He doubted she would be able to enjoy the sights as much if people were constantly taking pictures of them and asking about their relationship.

She raised her eyebrows just slightly but otherwise didn’t acknowledge the lack of people.

They slipped through the rooms quietly in search of inspiration.

Many of the rooms were your typical museum things: exhibits showing off different space rocks and explaining stars and supernovas. They didn’t stop much here, obviously, there was little to be inspired by. The most that happened for a long while was Marinette stopping from time to time to take a picture of a nice color that she wanted to try and replicate later.

And then she had stopped to look at a spacesuit. She blinked a few times before breaking into a grin and flipping to a new page in her sketchbook. He could barely make out the name ‘Jagged’ from where he was fiddling with his camera a respectable distance away.

So, Marinette, at least, was having a productive time. Tim was… a little stressed, to be honest.

Tim was having a particularly hard time getting ‘inspired’.

It had been years since he had picked up his camera, which was certainly a problem but it wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that he had never been one to take pictures of locations or objects. Sure, there was the occasional picture of the Gotham skyline, but he had always had a tendency towards taking pictures of people. Batman and Robin working as a team to take out a bunch of thugs, Robin and Nightwing racing each other across the rooftops, Batman and Nightwing stopping for ice cream after a particularly long patrol… and now he wanted to take pictures of Marinette.

But that would be weird because a) the first day he had implied he took pictures of attractions in order to alleviate suspicion about why he just so happened to be on the same rooftop as her and b) she probably wouldn’t think they were close enough for him to take pictures of her.

He kind of wished he could just go back to the old days where his subjects didn’t know he was there and he wouldn’t have to worry about what they would think about him if he took a picture of them.

His fingers itched towards the camera hanging from his neck because she looked so cute with her tongue poking out of her mouth and her orange, yellow, and white colored pencils sticking out from between her fingers like little Wolverine claws and he loved the way his jacket looked on her and --.

“You can stop staring, I’ll be done as fast as I can.”

His brain shorted out and the only response he could come up with was a squeaky: “Sorry?”

She looked up from her work with an awkward smile. “I’m sorry it’s taking so long, I just… if I don’t do it now it’ll slip my mind. I’m working as fast as I can, though.”

He was rebooting. Give him a minute.

Ah, there it was.

Wait, she thought he was being impatient?

“Nononono take your time, it’s fine! I just...”

He trailed off before he could finish the thought because this was the second time they had hung out he couldn’t make things awkward between them already.

… but she was giving him a confused, vaguely concerned, look and he was pretty sure that if he didn’t come up with something soon it would be awkward anyways.

“IwasjustwonderingifIcouldtakeapictureofyou?” He blurted out before he could stop himself again.

She blinked once. Twice. And then a blush spread across her face.

“Oh. Uh… sure?”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he said.

“It’s fine. A little sudden but… fine,” she said with a tiny smile.

Tim couldn’t keep the smile off of his face.

Not one to be blushy for long, apparently, Marinette flashed a wink. “Should I call up my friend Adrien for modeling tips or…?”

He rolled his eyes and schooled his face back into his usual grin. “It’s fine, just keep working. I’ll figure out angles and stuff.”

She tipped her head to the side confusedly. “Don’t you need me to be still?”

He didn’t look up from messing with the settings of his camera. “Not at all. You’re probably going to be one of my easier pictures.”

“... thanks…?”

“I do mostly nighttime photography. Capturing things in motion without it blurring requires a --.” He cringed. “Sorry, um… basically, when you want to take photos of things that are moving fast, you need a lot of natural light.”

“... you can talk about it more in depth, if you want.”

He shrugged. “I’d bore you.”

“I like your voice,” she said… then she seemed to realize the implications because she cleared her throat and did her best to backtrack: “In comparison to every other American I’ve heard so far, at least. Why do your accents… sound like that?”

“Ah, yes, because everyone knows that French people have the best accents.”

“Excuse you, I have been told by many people that my accent is actually very nice.”

He grinned. “By whom? Half-drunk men on the street?”

She gasped as if offended. “I get my information from much more reliable sources... like drunk women in bathrooms, thank you very much.”

“I see. My mistake. I apologize.”

“As you should.”

He rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Don’t you have a design to make?” She looked down at her sketchbook and a silence stretched between them as she squinted at her design.

“You forgot what you were doing, didn’t you?”

She groaned and rested her head in her hands.

He took a picture of her exasperated pout.

Marinette ended up with two outfits.

One was for Jagged, based off of the spacesuit she had seen. She had figured that, with all the songs he wrote about being free, there was bound to be one about how he ‘finally had his own space’. It was good to be prepared.

The other was for Cassandra Wayne. Marinette hadn’t thought much about it, to be honest. She just knew that Cassandra liked the color black with designs on top of it, and that the planetarium had a nice star pattern that would work for that. It would be super expensive, what with all the gems she would need, but it wasn’t like the Waynes couldn’t afford it.

… and then she looked up to see Tim pouting.

She giggled, resting her head on her hand. “What?”

“My sister is getting a dress and I’m not.”

Oh, so he was an actual fan. Interesting.

She brushed that conversation aside in favor of teasing him: “You want a dress?”

“Yes! No? Yes? I --.” He huffed and took a seat in the chair next to her. “I have faith anything you make will look nice.”

She felt a blush rise to her face and she rolled her eyes. “Hm. Telling the person in charge of your wardrobe ‘I have full faith in you’ is a terrible idea.”

“Oh? I don’t think you, in good conscience, can make and give me anything bad.”

She squinted at him for a minute before breaking into a grin. “Wanna bet?”

He leaned back in his chair, scrutinizing her for a few moments, before smirking. “Sure, how about we put five thousand on it?”

She choked. She’d forgotten he was rich rich.

She was quick to backtrack: “Nah. With all your fashion choices so far I can’t trust you not to wear it to some Gala or whatever it is you rich people do.”

“Damn, there goes that plan.”

She grinned and looked down at her sketchbook. After a few seconds she flipped to a new page. She squinted at his outfit for a few moments before starting to doodle something.

“What’re you making now?”

“I’m making you something with some color.”

He huffed. “Excuse you, I’m a goth in a family of goths. I can’t wear color.”

“Yeah, yeah. Trust me, I know. I’d say Richard is the black sheep of the family in that aspect but he’s the one wearing color.”

He laughed a little. “So Dick is the white sheep, then?”

“Yea --.” She stopped and then squinted over at him. “Dick?”

“It’s what he insists everyone calls him.”

She looked down at her sketchbook for a moment, processing, and then shook her head. “Your brother has a degradation kink.”

Tim brought his hand to his mouth in stunned silence before pulling his phone from his pocket and definitely not informing the family group chat of his discovery.

She snickered and went to work on the outfit again. It was a simple one, because she didn’t want to go too far out of his comfort zone, but there was no way she was going to be friends with a monochromatic idiot.

She leaned over until her head rested on his shoulder. He tensed up just a little before resting his head on top of hers.

When she had finished he took a picture of the planetarium to keep up pretenses and they had made their leave.

… but first, they stopped by the gift shop. Because why not?

Tim could have bought everything there for Marinette -- and probably would have, if asked -- but, considering she had freaked out about five thousand dollars earlier, he figured maybe he should keep that more or less quiet.

Instead, he followed her around while idly bouncing a Saturn shaped bouncy ball. It was a terrible shape for a bouncy ball and he kind of loved it, to be honest. Not to mention the little smile Marinette made behind her hand every time the ball would try another mad dash for freedom was pretty cute.

And then they hit the t-shirt section. And her lips twitched as she reached out and picked up a bright blue shirt that said ‘May the F=MA be with you’ in white text.

“It’s awful. It’s perfect.”

He grinned. “Wow, look at you. You know one of the simplest physics formulas by heart, aren’t you smart?” He joked.

She bowed. “I know, I know.”

He held out a hand for it and she stared at him for a few seconds in confusion.

“I’ll hold it until we get to the front desk.”

She squinted at him. “I’m paying for my own shirt.”

“I can afford it,” he said with a sigh.

“So can I.”

“Either you let me pay for it or I’ll keep track of everything you buy while with me and add it to your commissions.”

“... either you let me pay for it or I’ll never make an outfit for you ever again. I know your measurements and style, Timothy, you won’t be able to get past me.”

They narrowed their eyes at each other, daring each other to call their bluffs…

And then his shoulders sagged. “Fine.”

He’d just have to use his connections to lower prices on fabrics for her. Did he mention that he was rich and mildly famous? Yeah. It was pretty cool.

She smiled as she leaned against the doorframe to her apartment. “Thanks for taking me out. It was fun.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and smiled back. She was determinedly ignoring the way his smile made little butterflies flutter in her stomach. She patently hated butterflies. They weren’t allowed.

“I had fun, too. Want to do it again, sometime?”

“... sure, I guess you passed my test.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Your test?”

“Oh, yeah.” She waved him off. “If you had made any creepy comments today I would have blocked you.”

He seemed a little relieved by this information, though she wasn’t quite sure why. “That’s a pretty good test to have in Gotham.”

“I know, I’m pretty smart,” she said jokingly.

He shrugged. “Yeah.”

Damn it, now she was blushing. Shit.

She crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you flatter every girl you take to the space museum? Is this your strategy?”

He snickered. “Well, considering you’re the only girl I’ve taken, I’m going to have to say yes.”

She hummed. “I’m glad I’m so special to you, because that means you won’t drop me when I never give you this jacket back.”

He huffed. “You can’t just do that.”

“I can and will,” she teased. Then, because she wasn’t a completely cruel person, she reached up to her coatrack and pulled down a red scarf for him. “Here, take this so it’s more of a trade than stealing.”

“If I don’t?”

“Then you get to walk back to your house in the cold like that.”

He snorted. “What happened to not wanting to steal?”

“At least I offered!”

He rolled his eyes and leaned down so she could wrap the scarf around his neck.

She looked up at him, a blush spreading across her face, and then carefully draped it over his shoulders. “There. Now you have a splash of color.”

He smiled at her. “Ah, I see, this was all just a plot to get me to wear colors. It all makes sense now.”

“Of course.” She tugged him down more by the scarf to press a kiss to his nose. “You should wear red and black more often. They’re totally your colors.”

He smiled a little dopily. “You have no idea.”

She pushed his face away. “Weirdo. Go be cryptic somewhere else.”

“Fine, fine. See you in a few days.”

“See you then.”

~~~

Bonus Batfam group chat stuff

Timtamalam: What if Dick makes everyone call him that because he has a degradation kink?

LetMeLeaveTheChat: i fucking hate this family.

BloodSon: This is exactly the kind of lowbrow humor to be expected of you, Drake.

Timtamalam: I’m unappreciated in my time.

CAss: :0

Timtamalam: See, this is why Cass is the favorite.

YouDontSeeMe: DickJoke please respond

DickJoke: I raised each and every one of you and this is the thanks I get

LetMeLeaveTheChat: sucks to suck, dickwad.

DickJoke: That’s it when I get through all this dumb Heartless stuff I’m coming back to the manor and we’re all going to have family time

CAss: :(

ItsEggplantNotPurple: damn it

YouDontSeeMe: crap

LetMeLeaveTheChat: fuck. and an extra “fuck” on duke’s behalf.

BloodSon: Look at what you have done, Drake.

Timtamalam: Sorry guys.

#stalker x stalker #maribat #timinette #timari #shutterbug #timmari #marinette dupain cheng #ladybug #tim drake #red robin

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