#i just did this one because it's such a specific conundrum

[eff-plays]

Veilguard's lamppost problem

So I was doing a quest in DATV, as one does in video games, when I stumbled upon this here conundrum.

It baffled, amused, and enraged me in equal measure, which is to say: enough to write a snarky post about it.

Gaze upon this lamppost. It is one of many in this area. Really think about the essence of a lamppost.

Why do we have those? Why did people invent lampposts? Well, to be able to see outside when it's dark, correct? To provide light to the general populace, to illuminate spaces without relying on people having their own sources of light or real flesh guys standing around holding lanterns. But why are the lights ... on top of the posts? 🤔 why not just put them on ze ground? Well, pilgrim, because when the light is high up, it can spread farther and cover more of the area, so you can put fewer lights over a greater distance! It also protects the light from people or other things snuffing it out, by keeping it out of reach!

So in summary, a lamppost must fulfill the following criteria:

spread light in the dark

support the light source

protect the light

And with this in mind, you might now wonder -- why is this lamppost floating?

What is the point of this lamppost floating? Someone, presumably, enchanted it, yes? Somebody enchanted the post to which the lamp is affixed. Somebody affixed a lamp to a wooden post, lit the lamp, then enchanted the post to hover, so as to fulfill the requirement of a lamppost, which is to hold the lamp aloft, upon the post. The magic exerts no power over the position of the lamp, only over the post, which is enchanted. Are we in agreement? Good. Now please draw your attention to the end of the post:

We can see that this post has been designed with the floating enchantment in mind. Should the magic fail for whatever reason, this lamp post will be incapable of standing upright and fulfilling its intended purpose. Of holding the light up and out of reach.

Based on this design and function, we can assume the process of creating this post: elaborately carve a large piece of wood (upon closer inspection it might be stone, which is even worse) > elaborately design and create a piece of metal (and glass??) > affix upon this a lantern > light the lantern > enchant the light post to float > enchant the lamp post to float firmly in one location.

So now we come to the big question: Why? Why is this designed this way? Why would they do this? If you have the power to make the lamppost float, why not just get rid of it entirely? Why not just make the lantern float separately? Why go through the trouble of gesturing at mundanity by using a post at all? Why waste time, money, and resources?

I can think of a few theories as to why people might think this works as a design.

Let's say the lampposts float, and are thus able to be manipulated to move where they're needed. This is fair, but makes no sense, because then any passing mage (and there are many in Tevinter) would be able to move them around at will, which rather defeats the purpose of illuminating one specific area for public use. Remember, one of the purposes of a lamppost is to keep it out of reach of bad actors or accidents in general. Controllable lampposts would be just as unreliable as everyone having their own lanterns.

Okay, then let's say there's a specific mage that can move these because of some personalized ritual or binding, so that keeps the lights safe. In that case, what happens if that mage isn't available? Are these lampposts stuck in one place now? This would defeat the purpose of them being movable, if you need to go through one fucking guy to get them where you need them to be.

But alright, let's assume this is the intended use, their flexibility. This still doesn't explain why they need the lampposts to begin with, and don't just use floating lanterns. Why is there a lamppost when a lamp would suffice? Well, you might think, if the enchantment fails, you'd want the lamp to still be up high and lit, so it doesn't shatter, right? But once again, I draw your attention to the design of the post: if the enchantment fails, that post will not be a crutch, and it will not be there to catch and save the lamp. It will fall, because it is designed only to float.

(This is a subjective note, but the lamps did not float or animate or move when I looked at them in-game. They were entirely static. Just like regular-ass lampposts.)

Now, if they could be moved, in theory, why are there so many, and why are they placed so evenly throughout the area? It's almost as though their placement and distance from each other was meant to maximize the light from each lantern to cover bigger ground. Which would be pointless to do if they could be moved.

Okay okay, fine, let's say the lampposts snap back after a certain time! That would explain why they can be in a certain spot and need to be placed out evenly, but also why they can float. Cool. But what if there's something in the way. This is a harbor with bighuge cargo boxes and fuck-off stone statues. What if you need it for a longer period than you have before it snaps back? What if somebody needs it back in its origin point? It's far more reliable to just use your own light, which defeats the purpose of it floating, and it's too unreliable to light up a specific area, which defeats the purpose of a lamppost.

This screenshot up here also illustrated the only other "defense" of these posts that I can think of: Well, it's Tevinter!! Those guys will enchant anything just to flex on people!

First of all, who are they flexing on? Fereldans? Orlesians? "Hey, we also have stupid mundane lampposts, but ours float, so fuck you?" Sure, I guess, but look where these particular ones are. A drab, dirty, empty-ass dock, where there was only a handful of enemies and one minor friendly NPC. There was NOBODY ELSE there. No workers, no traders, nothing. But the lights were lit. For whom? Who is meant to be impressed by this? If you have enough magic to waste it on frivolous shit, why is this the only way you can express it?

Do you see my fucking issue?

And yeah, I know. It's just a fucking lamppost in a video game. But I want you guys to understand that this lamppost went through at least one concept artist, one art director/lead artist, one 3D modeller, and a level designer. None of those people went "hey this is fucking stupid," or if they did, they were incomprehensibly vetoed by somebody higher up the ladder.

This fucking lamppost encompasses so many issues with Veilguard. Like hey, this sounds pretty cool, right? And it's plausible in the world, right? So just do it. Don't think of the implications or impact of these things at all. Just do it! It's cool, right? Floating lampposts? Those are unique and cool and show off how magic-y Tevinter is! That's all you need! It's Tevinter, so they do normal stuff but with magic! Yes they use very mundane ways of illuminating an area but!! It floats!! So it's magic! Like in Tevinter? With the mages?

Environmental storytelling isn't just putting skeletons on toilets and leaving bloody notes next to a pile of gore. It's shit like this, too. And Veilguard just went "well this could totally happen and if it's cool then it should be in there!" and just didn't bother thinking a single step ahead of that.

Blech.

[kanmom51]

I actually have a crazy theory...

I have already sent this ask as the response to someone else’s thoughts, but then I thought about it and I REALLY wanted to know your opinion about this.

I think Jikook by the beginning of last year didn't know they were enlisting together.

I think they obviously knew about buddy system but didn't actually think they would need to use it. Because it's not really done by idols, and also they both could've gone to safer and easier stations, where they could have more freedom.

BUT THEN Jimin started working intensely on his album and JK started acting out (like having drunken lives), and it became VERY CLEAR that they would not be able to do 18 months apart.

I mean do you remember, that at this time JK said himself that he was not working on anything. And I think the plan was for Jimin to go first (just like a lot of us thought he would) and for JK to have more time for promo alone, when others are gone (I’m pretty sure that HYBE definitely wanted for JK to have big solo debut apart from other members).

But then like I said the drunken lives happened and realization hit, that they have to apply for buddy system, that 18 months apart would be BAD for both of them.

And that's when HYBE (or whoever) made specific demands from JK. Like if he wanted to leave by the end of the year (and he had to for buddy system to work) he HAS TO do the album, and because there was no time to write it from scratch they got all the English songs. Also his schedule was extremely packed and difficult.

So I think that the travel show was something Jikook specifically done for themselves because JK's schedule was so insane that if not for that excuse they would not be able to hang out freely before the enlistment. (By the way am I the only one who thinks that we are getting the travel show only next year? And waiting for it now is kinda crazy?)

But again it's just my theory, mostly because HYBE doesn't feel (to me) like the company who would just let their artists do whatever they want. To me they are waaay more pragmatic than that, and if they decided to allow their stars to enlist together (something that isn't really done in idol culture), than they would make sure to get something in return. They worked JK very hard, and I think he took it because he had a specific goal (more like a person) in mind that he was willing to work for.

So, although we might be on the same wave with some of your thoughts, I don't fully agree with you.

I agree that they didn't know they would be enlisting together way back at the start of 2023.

I think that way back then they were still struggling with the realization that they will have to be enlisting. All the way back to the end of 2022, basically up to around the Busan concert, which was October 2022, they still held hope that some kind of arrangement could and would be found to allow for them not to enlist or to serve a shorter term. It was quite a conundrum for them, something I think most of them struggled with (and I say most because I do think that at least one of them did genuinely want to enlist) - on the one hand this is a life changing pretty scary thing (terrifying even - we saw how sad, and I will even say broken, JM was having to shave off his hair, and that was only a small part of it) they would have to do (joining the army is not a walk in the park, no pun intended), not to mention being in their prime, in the height of their success, having to part with the life they are accustomed to (professionally and personally), not being something they would necessarily want to do. And on the other hand you have that sense of commitment to the country and to their fellow Koreans, that have to face that same compulsory enlistment, adding the knowledge that not taking that path of enlistment could also come at a price. Like us, they knew that there were those that indeed believed they should be given an exemption, but at the same time many Koreans would have frowned upon it, and it's them that have to live among their people. Also, enlisting like any other SK young man would allow them more freedom in the future when it comes to voicing their opinions, as they had, like all others who had served their country fulfilling their duties. Criticisms of anything within a society you live in is easier to swallow when the person voicing said opinion is part of that society and enjoys not only the rights bestowed on those who live there, but has also fulfilled all required duties as well.

Long story short, end of 2022 the decision to enlist became a reality and Jin enlisting hit them all VERY hard. At that point I don't think they had a plan of enlistment just yet, although we do know from RM, for instance, that he was supposed to enlist with Hobi but ended up pushing back as he was busy working on his album and preferred not to lose the momentum.

And btw, hearing this from RM also teaches us that JM was never going to enlist so early on. And here I think our ways part when it comes to the continuation of your theory, because I do believe that JM's plan had ALWAYS been to stick around for JK's solo debut, whenever that would be. And I'll get back to it in a few...

JK was struggling start of 2023. What we got to see, starting with his lives in Feb 2023, him deleting his IG, was him pulling himself out of the pit he was in. Taking initiative and deleting his IG (which I will once again say was a big old F U to the company) and reaching out to us with his lives was JK becoming more active in getting better.

*Side note: I'm using the term getting better meaning pulling yourself out of a bad place you are in mentally (one that effects you physically as well).

Idk if starting the lives was a conscious decision on his part towards getting better, but I do believe that starting them was a key part in it.

Talking to us, sharing things with us, setting (at least trying to set) boundaries with his fans what is and is not acceptable on his part as an idol when it comes to fan behavior and interactions with him, doing it all in the most JK way, intelligently and respectfully.

JM was busy all the way from end of July 2023 through to the release of Face and until the end of his promotions. It's not that they weren't seeing each other or spending time together during this time. It's not that JM wasn't there for JK, as much as he could in the moment. It's very important to state this. But JK was struggling with everything. It's the hiatus, Jin's enlistment, their looming enlistment (the unknown of what will be with the two of them - separation for such a long time is something that both of them would find extremely hard to handle for so many reasons), the lack of direction, the lack of a structured timetable (JK is neuro divergent - there is zero doubt in my mind - if it's asd or adhd or a combination of the two, which in my mind is the most likely of them all). He was kind of lost and his anchor, JM, was not available in the way that he needed. Not JM's fault. Not JK's fault. It just was what it was, and JK was a little lost. It's natural for something like this to happen. I spoke about it quite a bit in my posts about his lives at the time. We saw RM was kind of lost for a while there too. The trick is to pick yourself up and pull yourself out of it (with help of others if necessary), and JK did, and JM was ecstatic to see him doing it. Those comments of his during JK's lives (we are talking about the lives during Feb-Mar 2023) were testimony to that.

Once again I can't seem to reign myself in and keep on point, lol.

So, where was I? Oh yes, they didn't know what will happen, but at the same time JM was not planning on enlisting earlier that year. Understand this: JM enlisting earlier would, to them, mean them being apart for not 18 months, but for 18 months plus. Plus the time between JM's enlistment and JK's enlistment. And plus the time from JM's discharge to JK's discharge. Even without JK's situation this was not something that they would want or agree on. Not to mention JK not only wanting JM around for his solo debut, but NEEDING him around for it. And it's not about being by his side 24/7, which he wasn't and he couldn't be. It's about being accessible. Being there to support him if he needed. Whenever he needed it. Being able to be with him for his first solo performance (this brings me close to another ask I received and am working on regarding JK's FIRST big solo performance). All this has to be within the limits of their glass closet (glass getting a little murky for their own liking since the end of 2021 all the way to the end of 2023), and the limits set by the powers of be (some of which JK very defiantly crossed). So yeah, JM was going to wait for JK's solo debut before enlisting.

As for enlisting together. That was something that was being assessed and in the works for several months. Something obviously kept quiet for good reason.

Was there a give and take with the company when it came to JK and the album? 100%. There were things he wanted, there were things they wanted, there were frogs that it being a first solo album he knew he would have to swallow.

Were some of these concessions given to allow the two more freedom, like allowing the 'travel show'? I do believe they were. Perhaps also prices paid (with Golden) for demands agreed upon in their new contracts. I can definitely see that happening.

The push for a full length album could be one of those, for example. JK was talking about a mini album even as late as mid July, and then it turned into a full length album. Could it have been the company pressuring him into it? Yes it could, as in the company wanting this. But JK is not one to cave in just because the company wants. So very possibly we had a bit of give and take going on here, and some of it most definitley would have had to do with allowances made for the two of them.

But at the same time I don't think it had anything to do with the joint enlistment. Not only don't I think that the company would have a say in it, legally or morally, but this wouldn't be something that either of them would stand for. So, in case I didn't make myself clear here, I will say it again - the company didn't use the possibility of joint enlistment as a tool to get something extra out of JK.

You talk about Hybe not being a company that will allow their artists to do as they wish. BTS belong to Big Hit, which is a subsidiary of Hybe. But Hybe would not have existed if not for BTS. BTS made BH what it is today and Hybe was built on their coat tails. And BTS, the members, they have enjoyed many freedoms within their company over the years. Not full freedom though. And Jikook, well they were allowed to be (while in other companies this was not allowed, couples forced apart or forced out). And not only were they allowed to be, but towards the end of 2020 there was movement towards normalizing their relationship, ear suck, hickey and all.

But then came Hybe and Hybe going public, and I knew the day that was announced that even though the members will get a huge payout this move will cost them freedoms they already had, because now there were shareholders and share prices to worry about, and when your band is the main bread winner for that company, well, as I mentioned, there is a price to pay. And they have been paying that price. The two of them for the 2 years prior to their enlistment. As long as they were under their old contracts they were bound by them. Which is why I feel like there will be changes coming when they are done with their MS and well into their new contracts. This will be freedom regarding their art (I think we can already see part of that with RM's new album) but also regarding their personal lives, in a sense of what they can or cannot show if they choose to. JK telling us he's human, telling us he loves us but he deserves to be happy, or even more needs to be happy to be able to create and perform and make us happy (you need to be especially dense if you don't understand that this also includes being in a relationship with another person, who may or may not be a member of his own band). This includes setting boundaries with their fans - yes they love them and feel indebted to them, but at the same time they need to stay in their own lane (I do think JK has been too nice at times setting these boundaries, while others like RM, Yoongi and Tae - a couple of times - were way blunter).

Once again, Hybe wouldn't have the right to 'allow' or 'disallow' them to enlist together. This would have been their decision and theirs alone. Hybe could talk about timing and what they would like to happen before or after, but not if it can or will happen. Hybe could like or dislike it, support it or not, but they would have no power over it. The military alone would have a say if to allow it or not, and at the end of the day we know how that one ended.

I also want to touch on another point.

Again.

Their choice to enlist together.

I've seen talk about Jikookers using the term NEED when it comes to the two of them - needing to be with one another to get through their military service, and I wanted to put in my two cents on this.

The way I think of it is that when people use the term need in that case it's not about saying that if they weren't allowed to enlist together they wouldn't have survived it. No. That isn't it. Not in my opinion, in any case.

These two young men are strong physically and mentally, and they would get through whatever was thrown their way (wouldn't be easy, I tell you that, but they would get through it). Chances are that if they wouldn't have gone down the path of enlisting together they could have landed a cushier placement, band perhaps, like NJ, who knows. But definitley the choice to do this together had a price tag to it, and their letters from Festa tell us as much as well (even though they obviously sugar coat it for us, but the sentiments are clear - it's hard).

So, they chose this. They knew this was going to be hard. A harder, more difficult, placement if they were to go down this path. And yet this was their choice!!

Why?

And here comes that NEED into play.

Yes, I do think that they needed this. They needed each other. They needed to not be separated for 18 months not knowing if and how often they could get to see each other or be together (maybe, if allowed, once in 3 months, and only if their units allowed the time off at the same time). They needed that person that they trusted and KNEW that would stand by their side, that would support them, be their rock, catch them when they fall, be by their side in their time of need, just like they always have been.

They are each other's PERSON. The one that would ALWAYS be there through good and bad.

They both put it down in words:

JM

And JK

Shock, awe... I must be one of those delusional Jikookers that believe JK's lyrics were not describing his relationship with us, the fans. Another song written for the one person they love, yet given as a gift to Army.

And in his very subtle but intelligent way, he told us that himself:

"Even when I was working on the song, I really wanted to release it as a fan song".

Just like JM did, eh?

Would it be too hard to just say : "I wrote this song for my fans"? He chose not to, didn't he? Once again we have choices here.

I digress.

You could replace NEED with WANT, if you will. Same same in this case, imo. Seeing how hard they fought to find their way to this exact point.

The first, the only idols to ever do this!!

Bottom line:

To me, using the term NEED in this context is not about them not being able to make it otherwise, but more about a choice made to have that person they feel closest to, the person that has since forever been their emotional anchor, the person that lifted them up when they fell, the person that stood by them, cared for them, supported them when they were struggling. The person that KNEW them to the core and would be there by their side to get through this together with.

Each other.

[daemon-in-my-head]

Ok I'm possibly boutta screw this one up, but, this is one for the writers and the visual artists. This one's gonna get up close and personal too.

Durge Asks - Creator Edition

What or who inspired your Durges design the most? A particular idea or vibe or perhaps another hottie or baddie?

How does their race play into the design? Was it a conscious choice because of the racial features or did you simply enjoy the playstyle or lore?

How do you prefer to portrait your Durge? Do you enjoy them in writing or their visuals more? If you're a writer or artist, would you/have you commissioned someone else before? Would you like to, in case you couldn't yet do it?

How did Durge come to be? Why them? Was it a vibe you tried to capture or a specific visual you wanted to represent? Did you borrow them from previous works or were they handcrafted for this story you have in mind?

Are they a plot device or the driving force? Do they exist to enhance Gortash or has Gortash developed to become the accessory wife? Do they compliment or foil each other?

Personality or looks, what came to you easier?

Is their personal story represented in their overall design? Do they carry any mental scars or physical alterations from the shit that happened to them?

Contradictory or easy to understand, which one applies more to your Durge? Is their design and personality a conundrum, or did you try to keep it as clear cut as possible?

How much did Bhaal influence their design or personality in the end? Did you research lore to purposefully get the resemblance or do you just go with the flow and what feels right for the story you want to tell?

How much of yourself can be found in your Durge? Do you share the same personality, taste, a specific feature? Are they who you want to be or who you used to be? Are they entirely removed from you as a person?

What's your go to medium for their portrayal? Google Docs, a niche notes app, perhaps one specific for writing, Procreate, Clip Studio, MediBang? Hit me with those recs. Do you sometimes mix em up?

OC Art/Stories or shipping content? What do you enjoy the most? What's ur little hidden passion?

Final and spiciest question. How down bad are you for your durge. Would you hit it even though you'd probably not make it out alive?

Ask prev when u reblog, be nice, this isn't strictly romantic, bla bla bla yk what I usually put here. Basically, have fun, go wild, save a fading fandom or smth (yes I copy pasted this, laziness is the great mother of all bad habits and good mothers should be honoured)

Also yes ik I said I'd get to answering asks and they are queued I just wanted to drop this one first so y'all have smth entertaining to do. Time to return to the shadows until I have ideas for these again, aka another temporary retirement lol.

[capslocked]

DECAF

male reader x chou tzuyu

5k words

"Figured you should know," Tzuyu says, appearing in the bathroom mirror behind you, "you’re all out of coffee."

This unfortunate revelation comes as you’re halfway into brushing your teeth. Comes when her warm arm reaches around your waist, fingers splaying out across your stomach before they decide to slip past the waistband of your pajamas.

"Did you—" You raise an eyebrow at her before leaning over the sink to spit, and the mouthful of toothpaste no longer muddles the question, "check the cupboard above the fridge?"

"And the pantry." Tzuyu gives your cock an experimental pump. "And the hall closet."

As you eye her reflection, Tzuyu is already distracted, trading one vice for another: dragging her lips against the side of your neck. Of all the places she loved to be—at your side, in your arms, on the end of your cock—the pucker-shaped bruises shadowing in across your throat were beginning to indicate something of a clear favorite.

"Hey." You drag the toothbrush out of your mouth, minty foam nearly drooling off your lip as you let out a dry laugh at the fingers wrapping your cock. "Can you, like, give me a minute?"

Tzuyu looks up over your shoulder, straight into the mirror and blinks a few times. Caffeine conundrum aside, it’s not a sleepy kind of blink, rather the kind that might buy one but a moment to think, get their thoughts in order. She rolls her eyes, because she likes getting what she wants, especially when you’re involved, but you like her better when she’s a little riled up, after the suspense of waiting has caught up with her. Chipped away at that prim and proper outer layer of perfection.

"No," she says finally in a surprisingly steady voice, and squeezes her fingers tighter around you. Gets a couple of gentle pumps going under your shorts. "I don’t think I will."

It’s not through any fault of her own, but she looks an ounce less put together than when you both staggered through the front door of your apartment the night before—you’d gotten your hands into the delicately styled waves in her hair and as a result, all those primly smooth toffee-brown locks either tightly curled or straightened stiff to their own volition. Then it’s your sweatshirt thrown over her shoulders, she’s absolute swimming in it. Perhaps impossible to not find it endearing. And her cheeks, still flush (because oh, had you just done a real number on her) are smoldering and probably hot to the touch. You usually have no problem getting out of bed in the morning, but the fact that she’d woken you up with her ass in your hips made it hard not pick up where you’d left off the night before.

That fact that she’s all bundled lust and sin in your arms, playfully teasing your cock between her fingers and looking at you like you’re the one who’s at fault is en route to the same outcome again.

By the time the two of you are out of the bathroom and stumbling down the hall, it’s all hot kisses and heavy hands, working toward a common goal one moment, tugging gently at your hair, lined firm beneath her jaw, faces pressed together in this sloppy, consuming kiss—and antagonistic the next, silencing the loud smacks between your lips as Tzuyu begins to tug your shirt up over head.

Tzuyu pushes you down the hallway which is every bit as ludicrous as it sounds, presses your back against drywall with a hand at your waist, and gets her fingertip tracing a lazy circle over your chest. "Hey," she says, and her voice comes out cool and composed like she isn’t standing there in her underwear, the long lines of her legs getting tangled up with yours. "Do you think it’s bad?"

"Gotta be more specific, beautiful," you tell her, snaking a hand up her sweatshirt. Still no shirt. No bra. The same as how she woke up.

As she leans her body against you, all gentle angles and immaculate curves that would make Euclid roll in his grave, you’ve got a handful of incredible ass to knead and a second sinking fingers into her chest that makes her question come across all that much more ridiculous:

"That the two of us are always together, you know, like this." And even as she considers—however seriously—that the two of you might spend too much time behind closed doors and under fitted sheets making each other cum over and over and over until you’re gasping and red in the face, she begins to rut her hips gently against you, finds a circle of motion that brushes your stiff cock between her legs in just the right way.

"Well," you say, voice trailing while your thumb skates beneath her lip, admiring how much better she looks in your hands than on TV, in magazines, all glitzed up in studio lighting and digital effect.

And psychologically, you think you understand it. How this is the only way the two of you can put any part of yourselves—the joint self, the you and Tzuyu, the combined unit—first. You can’t do what regular couples do; you can’t indulge in everything that Tzuyu so desperately wants to do. You want to as well. Of course, you don’t whine about it as much as Tzuyu, but in reality, there’s nothing more than you’d like than to hold Tzuyu’s hand in the middle of a crowded street or kiss her passionately in an airport terminal, in front of a tourist attraction, get an indulgent makeout going at a concert or a bar like you see of so many other couples. You see them all the time, so happy, so wrapped up in each other, so oblivious to what they get to enjoy that you don’t.

So you’re both lenient about the going-ons in the privacy of your own home. To a degree.

Doesn’t mean you can’t say you try to be responsible about it, keep the way you two go at each other in check, under control. You know better than to let Tzuyu have access to you where her name is up in lights, where cameras are flashing and under all those prying eyes, where the two of you could turn a mistake into calamity.

But still you like to test those limits.

"How do you figure?" You nuzzle your lips into Tzuyu’s neck. Her response is exactly like what you expect: a heavy sigh and a tilt of her chin that tells you to kiss her more, touch her more, get your mouth all over her and make her feel good. When you get closer to her ear, you whisper, "where’s the harm?"

"I just think we really have to be more careful," Tzuyu has to tell you. Frequently. "You know you drive me crazy. But if someone were to find us—"

"Tzuyu," you start, and the sound of her name on your voice, coming out low and austere, always brings her to heel. Quickly. "No one’s going to find out. So tell me. What do you want me to do to you? Right now."

Her cheeks burn brighter with that beautiful rosy shade of pink, a flush heat that travels across the bridge of her nose—eyes flicking down to where you can’t see them, suddenly bashful like she wasn’t the one who jumped you in the bathroom, gotten you hard and ready—like she wasn’t the one who woke you up with her thighs sandwiching your cock and silently demanding you fuck her right there.

"I’m just saying—"

"Tzuyu," you say again, and this time she all but shudders. Starts to quietly whine as your fingers get closer to where they can have her absolutely creaming and whimpering and coming undone; teasing at elastic, tracing the wide form of her hips; only closer without ever arriving. "Tell me what you want."

You watch the usual suspects: the swell of her lip twisted between her teeth, eyelids lidding and dusky irises glinting with thoughts of you. It’s all there, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. The Want. The need.

Tzuyu’s mouth falls open in a whiny moan as you realize there’s not a lot keeping you from simply shoving her across the hallway, turning the tables and getting your weight on top of her. She bites back a needy sound as you pin her in place. Normally, the proud smirk on your face would be enough to make Tzuyu groan and roll her eyes, but it’s hard to muster up the resolve required to send you a piercing glare when her current expression is as far from intimidating as it could ever be.

"Tzuyu," you say a third time, after a long pause, breathing slowly and keeping your voice even. You don’t need her knowing that seeing her like this gets your heartbeat going rabbit-fast. Don’t need her knowing how bad you want to turn her around in your hands and fuck her senseless.

"What are you doing?" Tzuyu asks, and the muscles in her body are coiling so tight they’re practically screaming. "I’m not a little girl. Stop teasing me."

You’ve got your free hand running a thumb down Tzuyu’s chest, along her stomach and sliding it across the smooth pale skin that stretches over her ribs, until in one quick delivery, you’re pulling her soft cotton panties down around her thighs. When your pointer finger makes contact with where she’s hot and fidgeting between her legs, Tzuyu’s throat clicks with a swallow.

"Just tell me what you really want," you repeat, gliding your finger across the surface of her cunt’s aching lips, "or I’ll stop." It’s possible you’d never be able to help yourself, you have to tease, playfully nudge her. The real fun is when you could get her to start cussing and swearing and begging—that’s how you knew you’re giving it to her good, that toe-curling, mind-blowing sex that everyone dreams of, when that delicately maintained veneer started to show cracks and rough edges. "Let me make this easier. Do you want me to hold you down?"

It’s not a surprise that you’re hitting the nail on the head. She’s yours. You know Tzuyu, and her eyes go wide. She nods, because it’s what she’s only ever wanted—filled her nighttime fantasies and daydreams for months before she’d ever truly seen it, truly felt you over her and fucking her with your tongue, your fingers, your cock. She’ll later swear up and down that you’re the one always dragging things to the bedroom, getting her so worked up she can’t help but ride out her own frustration. The way she sees it, you’re the one who’s corrupted her. Not that it’s even half the truth.

"Do you want me to get you wet?" You ask, even lower now, like a growl at her throat, and Tzuyu lets out a delightful sound at the mere mention of it.

She spreads her legs wider as you continue to finger her, wriggles her hips desperately on your hand to find some sort of friction that might set her loose, but you bring a grip down hard onto her waist, pressing her firmly into the wall to keep her from shifting.

"I want—" Her words become cut off and unintelligible when your fingers find purchase inside her, find her immediately soaked and dripping around you. She gets that adorably needy tone in her voice the moment your thumb comes to rest on her clit, prodding at the bud just light enough to make her shiver. "Please."

It seems to take a special kind of awful to look down at Tzuyu’s desperate expression and find it nothing other than charming and adorable, but much to her impatient displeasure, you’re that exact kind of awful.

"Speak up," you say, even though rationally, everything is clear to you—the fact that you can get Tzuyu begging for it a whole separate matter. "Wanna hear your lovely voice, Tzuyu."

She sighs. It’s anxious. It’s needy. It’s a perfect honesty: "want to feel you in me."

"Want me to fuck you," you amend, kissing her once, hot and hard, and when you pull yourself off her mouth, you make sure she’s listening. "Want me to cum in you."

She nods. Swallows. Rolls her lips between her teeth.

"Want it." Tzuyu’s chest heaves to shoot out a hot, pointed breath, and she preens the misplaced hair off her cheek and back behind her ear before returning to a moment more composed. "Want you now."

"Oh, I think we all have all the time in the world, darling," you breathe into the hollow of her throat, and the two of you don’t stop kissing this time, your lips always on each others, the smiles growing at the corners of your mouths giving way to something more heated and intense. More urgent.

Tzuyu’s arousal is like a living thing, fighting for control, getting her furious and blotchy and burning up to the roots of her hair. When you draw your fingers out of her throbbing cunt, she doesn’t even stop to think; takes them between her lips and starts sucking. She doesn’t decide to do it, you figure, it just happens, as if she’s meant to. She’s perfect for everyone, and then she’s flawless for you.

"Gonna make you cum now," you growl against her cheek, and she coos the moment you sink to your knees. Starts slipping her hands through your hair in anticipation. Gets your face between her legs where you’ve got wet kisses trailing down her inner thighs. It’s so close to where she needs you, has her rocking and circling her hips in the hope she might reach your mouth, the pleasure she might only realize at the end of your tongue.

And finally, you slide your mouth upward. Tongue flattened, lips hot and loose, you let her find it.

"Fuck!"

Between her legs, you grin, pull back enough to murmur, "there’s my girl." And with that you’re hooking a hand behind her thighs and diving back in.

Tzuyu’s eyes are all docile gleams and innocent glimmers, watching from above as you push her legs open wider for you—sharp draws of air as you eat her pussy with delicate and calculated approach: the tip of your tongue against her clit is just the right amount of hot and wet and firm to get her dizzy, voice flooding full of lust and want. She yearns for nothing more than the way you pull at her swollen lips, masking her cunt with these hot, hungry kisses that cover your chin in her slick, fill your mouth and your thoughts with her.

"Oh, my god," she says behind the knuckle worrying her teeth, crying out in such obvious satisfaction that it has you nearly laughing—so smug and self-satisfied that you push your face into her hot pussy harder to hide the expression. Like flicking a switch, you’re tapping, teasing, torturing that button that makes her feel all of that pure concentrated relief. Makes her feel like you’re pulling her apart and tearing her to pieces—makes her desperate and choke back moans, ones that cry for more.

"God," Tzuyu curses, and your name on her lips becomes a wish, a prayer, begging, "fuck, what are you doing, that’s so—that’s so good, you’re so good, please, please don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop."

Even if you consider keeping her on that precipice, nudging her closer and closer until she physically can’t take anymore, Tzuyu’s cunt is so warm and sweet, and even her cum tastes incredible, all strange and familiar at once—gets you bearing down to kiss deeper, harder. You know the basic principle of what you’re seeing: that Tzuyu’s body is reacting, that you’re reducing her to instinct, bringing her to the edge and fucking her earnest.

"C’mon princess, you can cum for me, I want you to cum," you rasp, and the pet name—one that you’re sure would in any other context make her wince—gets her heating up even more. When you lower your mouth again, you swirl your tongue around her clit and then suck.

"Yeah," she says, nodding, "Yeah, yeah." The word becoming all she can manage between hot, shuddering breaths that you can feel coil in her distinctly tight stomach, only releasing in the violent jerks of her hips, each spasm more uncontrolled, less predictable than the last.

It’s a concerted effort: the wet touch of your mouth, the two fingers—three now—that you have fucking her dripping cunt get her needy cries echoing through your apartment and her throat hoarse. The pressure must be just perfect because Tzuyu flies right over the edge into everything. She’s all broken moans and stutters and hiccups—all you find between her thighs is hot and wet and pulsing and quivering and perfect. The beginning of the end, and she’s pleading, begging for release.

"You’re going to make me—" she pants, twice, holding tight to your shoulders, nails sharpening like claws into your skin, and her legs aching into quakes and tremors around you.

That’s your Tzuyu.

"Cumming—I’m cumming," she cries out, almost silently, and then it’s your name and curses all sputtered out across these keening moans that almost see her young, tight body collapse and spill all over you. "I can’t—You’re making me cum."

"Good girl," you murmur, your mouth still dragging across her stomach, and it’s the praise that all but kills her, gets her breath arriving in fits and starts, wrestling against you for control, but it’s far, far too much. Far too gone in her own orgasm to realize she’s fucking soaking you in her slick. Of course, you’re kneeling there, just grinning like the devil himself, pushing your fingers in and out of her slowly to ensure that Tzuyu’s fucked right through the apex of her high; curling against the way she throbs; feeling the way she quivers.

She’s the girl whose name is on everyone’s lips, and she’s practically drenching you—oh, what a heartthrob, you think, and then immediately remind her: "you’re so fucking pretty Tzuyu. Love when you cum for me."

Her fingers thread through yours, and she finally lets her lips twist out that million dollar smile, laughing all abashed and flushed and red in the face until finally giving you that look: an expression that lets you know she has only one thing on her mind, and that she wants for nothing more than to get filled by your cock, mend the empty feeling knotting in her stomach, the utterly foundational need.

And after kissing you, melting into you and getting her own taste off your lips, she brings her mouth against your ear, breath still hot and haggard, tells you, "get on the bed, baby."

And but so, you arrive at a familiar crossroads, those four corners of your bed. You’re sprawled with your head at the base and feet at the pillows because that’s simply how you two managed to tumble, Tzuyu controlling the fall. When she peels the sweatshirt from up and over her lithe frame, your cock jumps, twitching in her hands, because the image is nothing less than perfection. The fact that a girl could have a face like hers, and a body like that is some sort of error, a cosmic mix up—one to which finds you the sole beneficiary.

"Maybe I should tease you," she says, licking her palm and getting both hands around you, pumping you languidly to full attention. "Look how bad you want it."

"You’re in charge, princess." you say, laughing out loud.

Tzuyu rolls her eyes. Gets her elbows on either side of your face so you’re looking at nothing other than just her. There’s a story here, and sure, it’s novel and unique. Right up until the point it isn’t; there’s never been a different ending beyond your cock buried deep inside her until she’s panting and whimpering.

"Is that right?" she asks, leaning in so close you can feel her warm breath tickle your neck.

"I mean, I might be lying; decide to get you underneath me if you go too slow."

"I’ll keep that in mind." Tzuyu chuckles, her laugh echoing against your chest as her lips curve up into a toothy grin. If that isn’t a look perfected. She grabs you by the jaw and kisses you, so thoroughly that you really haven’t the shadow of a doubt in your mind that she will be every bit the challenge you could ever hope for—and when she pulls away, her tongue licks across your lower lip, before gently biting down and whispering, "I’m gonna ride you now, baby."

The look on her face is careful, more determined, as she lines herself up against your body, straddles your hips and rubs the head of your cock through her heat, kissing it to where you’d made her soaked and wanting; there’s a deep breath between you, and then Tzuyu slides closer in your lap. Sinks down.

And then you feel her—all of her—as she takes the full length of your cock into her hot, tight cunt. Neither of you even move. Simply sit there and look on all teary eyed and so wracked in pleasure to the point your mouths just hang, frozen, because apparently she was discovering the answer to every question in the universe, and all of them were you.

"Move your hips for me, Tzuyu," you say, and you’re guiding her, urging her, making haphazard grips out of the beautiful curve beneath her tiny waist, a makeshift reign where her hips flare and that ass smacks down hard against your thighs. "There you go; fuck yourself on my cock."

Actually it’s more like she slams down. It’s a lofty goal of hers, to get you so fucked and bothered and reduced to smithereens. That, or get you so close to the edge, get you so needy for your own release that you’ll simply throw her off you and pin her to the mattress and fuck her like she really wants.

"It’s so fucking good," Tzuyu gasps, raising her hips. The sound that comes out of you is indescribable when she lowers them again. That’s the reaction she’s looking for, that you—ever indomitable you—are shuddering under her hips, that every time she drags her pussy along your length, gets you aching inside her tight, hot cunt, she has you absolutely struggling, hanging on by a thread.

"Tzuyu," you choke, and you’re gathering all these smirks and haughty looks; she throws her head back because apparently that vice-like grip she has around you, a glove to your cock, all velvety smooth and addictive is just as good for her as it is for you. "I just love how this pretty little body looks when it’s bouncing up and down on my cock."

"Oh my god," she curses, moaning at how good you feel inside her, voice finding a familiar tremble as each bounce on your cock gets her hot cunt that much more fucked, more soaked, more perfect, and you’re both whimpering mindless. Her body stretches to accommodate you as she squeezes up so tight around you that you’re joining her groans with a lazy smirk. She nods, slapping her hips roughly against you, fucking you with all the energy she can muster, and she rasps, smiling in silent laughter, "ugh, I can feel you filling me so deep. Love fucking you like this. Could do this all day."

The sounds coming out of you—fucked out of you each time her thighs land flat against yours, each swivel of her hips in a rhythm that doesn’t falter even once—are driving Tzuyu up the wall. Every last moan and sigh only spurs her to ride harder and harder until she realizes she’s better off lifting herself onto her feet, crouching over and using every muscle of her toned legs to fuck your aching shaft. With her beautiful form above you, tight young body glistening with sweat and whimpering at the bottom of every rut, you hold tight to her waist, carelessly marking bruises under your fingertips, grasping hard as you’re fraught with the utterly perfect, tight, wet cunt wrapping your cock.

"It’s good," Tzuyu gasps, on repeat, and her cheeks begin to flush again, fill so unbelievably pink. "It’s so fucking good, baby."

On the basic, thrust by thrust level, it’s kind of her trademark—what you’ve come to expect from her. She’s all toned muscle and coiled lust around you, merciless, truly fucking you, taking you up and down while her curves ripple in place: small, perfect tits shaking each time she crashes onto you, and her ass against you waist feeling incredible.

It’s fast and heavy and hot and you’re nearing everything dangerous, nerves on fire and holding your breath right up until the moment Tzuyu cums all over your cock. She slows to a near crawl, hips still circling against you, and then, overcome by the sensitivity of another orgasm, freezes. This time, it comes with no warning, just the writhing and wracked look of a girl who can’t believe how good your cock feels deep in her pussy, making her feel so full and complete.

"Tzuyu, you’re gorgeous," you reaffirm, reaching a hand against her chest, sinking your fingers hard into her perfectly sculpted breasts. You know how this goes, the fact that she never knows how to ask for what she wants, that when she’s like this, she needs you to take control. There’s always such sweet fun to be had in grappling her hands behind her back, get her ready to be fucked and used like she craves. Shift your hips downwards and prime yourself at the perfect angle, and get her cumming over and over until she’s a hot, fucked mess. "You look so good cumming for me. I’m going to fuck you through it sweetheart. I’ll take care of you. I always do."

"Mnppph." Tzuyu moans into your neck, as you start to glide upward into her hot, fucked hole. She’s so massively drenched that the sound of it, you thrusting fast into her cunt, is absolutely filthy. If the sheets were in bad condition from your romp before, they’re approaching new levels of fucked, completely beyond repair.

Tzuyu grins. She loves this. She loves whittling down your arrogance and repurposing it into an unabashed lust, the kind of raw emotion that will hammer at her cunt until she’s mewling, keening, and simply falling apart. Until she’s recovered enough from losing herself on your cock, and she’s whispering in your ear, "want your cum, want to feel you fucking burst."

You consider it. All with Tzuyu’s lips on your throat, kissing your face and punching out tiny breaths every time your cock buries into her, it’s a pretty real possibility. It was taking some amount of self-control to hold back before with Tzuyu’s pussy being the hottest, tightest, wettest you’ve ever known—only growing more unbearably immaculate with every inch you bore into her—and here you are, fucking her with such strong, hard strokes that slide so easily from base to tip of your cock that you’re approaching it all. Dangerously fast.

Yours, Tzuyu croons in your ear, crying out in heavy desperation with a voice so crushed and gravelly it’s near irreconcilable—she’s so wracked that the only thing she can do is beg for you to unload in her cunt. "I’m yours. Want you to cum in me so bad, fucking own this pussy baby, fill me and make me yours."

"Tzuyu, you—" Holy shit. You’ve got it all twisted, explosion imminent. Nerves and muscles acting together and without your permission. "—feel so fucking good."

"I know," she says, thumb rubbing at your cheek while she barely holds herself above you—eyelashes fluttering each time you bottom your cock out in her cunt. "You can cum. Go ahead. Cum for me, baby."

Your teeth grit, and you take a final gasp of air between your teeth, "Tzuyu, fuck."

You’ve got your hands clamping down on her ass, pulling her into the end of each thrust, and as you bury yourself deep into her cunt again, you cum. 

"Amazing," Tzuyu breathes against you, ignoring the groans and sighs still billowing out of your lips. "You’re perfect." She clenches down on you, tightening around you to wring you dry with each shallow thrust you make to fuck your cum deeper into her. It’s hot and wet and fucking unbelievable.

It takes all your remaining energy—those last waning vestiges—to shift Tzuyu’s body aside you. Your cock falls out of her well-fucked pussy and onto the sheets before you feel her ass snuggle again into the crook of her hips, as good a way to start as it is a way to finish, and the exhaustion of your own orgasm has your breath short and unsteady.

"Hate to say it," Tzuyu says, wiggling her ass against you, which is truly a dangerous game, regardless of your condition, "but I’m really hoping you’d go get more coffee."

[yeyinde]

IN DREAMS | Price x GN!Reader

Sweet dreams. Warm knuckles. The ghost of your lips pressing against his crown.  He never tells you he doesn't sleep enough, but somehow you just know.

》 WARNINGS: 18+ – MATURE, SMUT | GN!Reader: no use of pronouns, gendered language or anatomy; very soft smut; soft John Price; established couple; gratuitous fluff (does this count as fluff????)

》 WORD COUNT: 4,6K

》 NOTES: Since there were no gender specifications, I kept everything as vague as possible for the descriptions of MC so this could (hopefully!) be easily read as Gen Neutral Reader, Fem Reader, Male Reader, or whatever you prefer. I did my best to exercise as much of the angst out of this as possible but still found myself having to slap my fingers from typing out legions of hurt. This is my BEST attempt at fluff. Sorry.

This is wholly dedicated to this anon!!! I hope you feel better! ��� 

Waking, he finds, is often easier than falling asleep. 

It's a quick descent into cognisance, the dream he had—long forgotten, never remembered—fading into smoke in the back of his head. The popcorned wall of his ceiling takes its place. A water stain in the corner—coffee brown. A crack above his head. The hairline fracture is just a small river of black that cuts through off-white. 

Falling asleep takes ages, aeons. Lying on his pillow for hours without feeling the talons of sleep dip into his temple. 

Silence is consuming. Crushing. It makes the threads of his thoughts echo in the recess of his mind, bouncing off the walls until they bruise. It leaves its mark in the shape of burning eyes, restlessness. 

Cureless insomnia. 

It's easier with someone else. You. 

Price isn't a man who needs much outside of a stiff drink or a rich cigar. Cures to an age-old conundrum in the form of vice—vices because Price was never a man who could just stop at one—but nothing batters the errant thoughts into quiet disinterest quite like you sleeping beside him. 

The noises you make are loud enough to drown out the ghosts in his head. Soft snores, the rustle of sheets. Your arm draped over his broad chest keeps him locked to the mattress, forced to forego his usual nighttime ritual of rising after trying—and failing—to fall asleep after a few hours. You stop him when he'd normally pour himself another drink, light a cigar on the deck, and watch the ethereal gloom of midnight swell over this little part of Liverpool he calls home. 

Keep him in check.

Though, sometimes, it doesn't work, and he lays awake all night staring at the damned ceiling while you curl up against his side, chasing lavender in your bare palm (a recurring dream, you tell him, and he tries to remember when he last slept long enough to truly have one. He comes up short each time.)

He rises before you, always. Doesn't have the heart to tell you he doesn't sleep. That he stares at the ageing canvass of the ceiling, mind stuck in an endless loop of inanities that are not worth losing sleep but still rake across his mind with a viciousness he knows won't go away until morning, when he wakes in a daze. A fog. 

So, when you ask him how it was, running rheum from your eyes, he lies and says it was okay. 

But he slept last night. Knows it because he dreamed. 

Falling lavender. Knuckles warm, soft against his temple. A voice—susurrus, low; the sibilant echo of sweet dreams whispered against his ear.

Sweet dreams.

Sleep, as an insomniac, is always a double-edged sword. No matter how many hours he spends chasing REM, that fickle mistress, she always evades him in the end. Dancing just out of reach. 

He wakes up feeling worse each time. Over-exhaustion. The paradoxical conundrum of being too tired to sleep. 

He feels the same clutch of evanescent slumber tangles through his lashes, making his lids too heavy to open, but it's dulled. Lessened. 

Price forces himself to keep his eyes open, staring at the blurry ceiling above. He wakes to this sight every morning. A familiar ritual. Three blinks. He watches the ceiling gradually grow clearer. 

His hand threads across the sheets, and where he expects to find the warmth of your skin, he instead meets empty space. The sheets are already leaking the heat you left behind. 

Price blinks, lashing clinging together from the sleep crystallising along the crease of his eyes. He has a headache needling behind his brow, a tension building from lack of sleep, and—

His tired eyes slide from the empty bed to the half-smoked cigar sitting in the ashtray. The empty glass of scotch beside it. 

He's found a cure for woes in the form of a stiff drink—scotch, neat; and a side of spring water—and a perfectly rolled cigar. Vices, of course: the kind that rots his insides, and stains his teeth. 

Cirrhosis. Emphysema. All the ugly little warnings on the back of a tobacco box. 

But it numbs the ache in his bones, and the ghosts in his head, so he considers it an equivalent exchange. 

(Just one that takes more than its fair share when he doesn't oblige by the rules.)

There is a respite from the steadily growing throb behind his left eye when he grinds the heel of his palm into his eyelids. A brief moment of fleeting pleasure. It rears when he pulls his hand away, letting them fall to the sheets. 

Today feels a little off-kilter. 

Without you grumbling about sleeping in beside him, peacefully chasing after lavender, and the same dream clotting behind his eyelids, he feels distinctly out of place. 

His hand slides over to your spot, fingers curling around the cooling sheets. The blankets are tucked in around him. 

Sweet dreams. Warm knuckles. The ghost of your lips pressing against his crown. 

He never tells you he doesn't sleep enough, but somehow you just know. 

You're not hard to find. He can hear the rattle of the old pipes as you shower; the hiss of the water hitting the title. 

Lured in like a beacon, a siren's call, he follows the breadcrumbs that lead him to you. 

Your silhouette is a dark line against the old curtain he keeps meaning to replace, but even the shadow of you seems to dampen the maligned feeling curling in his gut. 

A sight, he thinks, for sore, tired eyes. 

He rasps on the doorframe, announcing his presence. You scare easily, he finds, and he'd rather not get a bottle of your shampoo tossed at his head for the trouble. 

The curtain peels back. You greet him through the cracks, blinking owlishly through the rivulets running down your forehead. 

"Room for one more?"

A wide grin stretches across your face as you nod eagerly before disappearing behind the curtain once more. The spray of the shower swallows the echo of your laughter. 

"Thought you were gonna sleep all day, old man," you call, loud and exaggerated. He watches your arms lift over your head, fingers threading over your scalp. 

You think you're funny. Charming. 

(He does, too—he'll never admit it, of course, but he laughs the hardest when it's just you and him; when the world around you fades into the background, and all he can hear is your effervescent giggles over the words you uttered, the jokes that always come after the punchline. The ones that fall flat, that miss. 

It's funnier, you say. When it isn't supposed to be, you know?)

You wander through life with ease in your gait, a sense of peace in your mien like the world and everything in it is your best friend. Comfortable in your own skin, content with your lot in life. Happy, he thinks, just to be included. To be a part of it. 

Happy to have him in it. 

"Might have," he mutters, affection blooming in the gnarled remains of his heart. 

You bring a sense of chaos to his life that feels like watching a nasty storm brew in the distance from the sanctity of his window. Laughter that sounds like a whip of lightning striking the pavement, close enough to smell the ozone, to have his neck prickle with danger, but far enough to feel safe. A voice that echoes like a thunderclap. Pelting hail. A torrential rainfall. A gale. 

(All his life he was told to run from storms, but you make him want to chase the calamity brewing in the distance; to feel the hazard against his skin.)

"But I couldn't sleep without you snorin' in my ear."

"I do not—!" 

Your words of indignation taper off into a yelp when he pulls the curtain back fully, letting the chill of the mid-spring morning drift over your slick skin. Goosebumps ripple across your trembling flesh—no longer a tantalising tease behind plastic (ohh, you cooed when you first saw the simple navy and blue striped curtain. Very predictable, cap; very you) but bared to his eager, hungry eyes. 

He takes a moment to appreciate the sight that greets him, a low rumble spreading through his chest. "Well, don't you look cosy?"

"It's my day off," you whine, shivering when he draws out getting into the water behind you. "Let me pamper myself a little bit." 

"Don't you get pampered enough?"

"Do I?" 

His hands settle on your waist, nose bushing against the wet space between your ear. When he breathes in, the familiar scent of you floods his lungs. Warm milk. Honey sweet. A touch of loam, something bitter. The acrid tang of your sweat still clinging to your hairline. It reminds him of sex. Of your dewy skin when he has you pressed into the mattress, head burrowed into his neck, he fucks into the tight clutch of your willing body. 

He stirs. Want smouldering low and heavy in his belly. You feel it when he presses tight against your back, but there's no rush. He feels no urgency to seek release. To get off. He just—

Wants. 

Always, really. There is this distant buzz of desire that sits low in his belly whenever you're around. A constant simmer. 

Wanting you, he finds, is the same as craving a draw of nicotine behind his teeth. 

"Always," he rasps, nose running down the length of your neck. The warm spray of the shower rouses him from the last tendrils of sleep, clearing the congealed rheum around his lash line. "You always get pampered, love." 

When you hum, he feels it reverberate through his chest. "You're slacking today then, John."

His hands slide from their perch against your hips, your quivering stomach. Soft skin, slick from the water, flutters under his touch. He dips his hand down to cup your sex in the palm of his hand, feeling the heat of you bleed into his skin. 

"How do you want to be pampered then, love?" 

You lean back against his chest, tucking yourself into the fold of his body where you fit like a mismatched puzzle piece, bent and cut until it slides in. The gaps between your bodies are filled with the steam that curls off the hot water pulsing down around you. 

"Just—fuck, John—," you gasp when his thumb rubs soft circles over your sensitive skin, arching into his embrace. "Just—ah, just this—"

"Want me to wash you?" He presses his hips into the plush softness of your ass cheeks. "Or want me to get you off?" 

His question makes you mewl, thighs spreading to fit more of his hand between them. "A–anything—both—"

"Greedy little thing, aren't you?" 

"Fuck, John—"

Your petulant whine disintegrates into a soft hum when he wraps his arm around your waist, pulling you tighter to his chest. His chin settles on the plinth of your shoulder, watching his fingers trail over your sateen flesh. 

He's content to just feel you. The keen in your naked chest when his thumb brushes over a spot that makes you melt. The harsh pants; soft, languid little noises slipping through your wet lips—uh, uh, uh—interwoven with the hymn of his name. The shudders that wrack through your body when he presses the fat length of him against the plush seat of your ass. Your hips cant, rocking into his hold, as you greedily seek your release. 

Your fingers curl around his thick wrist, thumb and forefinger barely able to lock in the middle, and it's the sight of you wholly in his grasp that ignites a childish sense of glee in his chest. 

He's never been a particularly possessive man. 

The transient lifestyle he led, the one he'd been primed for since he was young, and everyone around him just expected that he'd follow in his father's, his grandfather's footsteps, doesn't allow such luxury. 

And he'd never been the type of man to take it. To want it, to pursue it. He was content with the ephemeral romance that came and went, a flickering flame that bloomed bright before eventually burning out. It was easier. 

Lonelier, too. 

You had been unexpected—a squall. 

Your presence has ripped through his life like a violent tornado, leaving everything turned upside down in your wake. 

You left him wanting. 

It always seemed silly to run toward the thing that could kill you, but when you grinned at him—the recession of water before a tsunami hit—he finally understood why some people chase danger their whole lives. 

He thought he'd have to adjust, to make room for you when there is no more space left. 

But storms don't squeeze to fit. 

They rip through. 

He supposes, then, that there's no need to worry about making room when there are no walls left standing. 

"Give you whatever you want, love," the words are a broken snarl in his throat, bleeding with the tangled remnants of his filthy desire; an aching sense of possession, and hunger. "Anythin' you want. Anythin'. Jus'—"

The empty bed flashes behind his eyes. Your side, now cold to the touch; the heat already fading out from the sheets. Whispered promises in the sleep-stained curl of his hair. 

"Jus' stay—," the mangled plea is a faulty firecracker in his throat. 

His arms tighten around you. Possession, he finds, is a silly thing. Ownership. Covetousness. All of it means substantially little to him when the only home he'd ever known is a duffle bag packed full of clothes he'd never wear. 

And then he comes home to you. The space is saturated with your scent. Little markings around the flat that remind him of your presence. That scream out into the desolate stagnancy of a place that was always covered in a fine sheet of dust, and cobwebs, that you were here. Are here. 

The fridge is stocked. The cupboards are full. 

His bed slept in. Calendar marked with dates that mean something to you—meetings, negotiations, birthdays of people who matter in your life. 

Scented candles run out the stench of disuse. 

The days when your worlds don't overlap, and he comes home to an empty flat in a city he thinks he loves, he's never felt emptier. 

It's harder to sleep those nights, too. 

The whisper of an empty bed haunts him, echoes isolation and loneliness each time he reaches out and can't feel the warmth of your skin. 

"Greedy," you mock, words a breathy mewl that are quickly swallowed by the hiss of the shower. Your fingers tighten around his wrist, clinging to him as he works you through the gentle waves of pleasure, slowly letting you drift toward the precipice of your release. 

It's when the other reaches up behind you to thread through his damp locks, nails scratching across his temple, that he finds himself a little lost under the swell of you. Swept away by your breakneck pace. 

Possession, he thinks, and finds himself drawn to the way your fingers curl around him. How you hold him tight, keeping him locked against you as you take. Syphon your pleasure from the feel of him against your skin. 

Hard, wanting, he barely thinks of himself when he grinds his pelvis into your ass, cock slipping between the globes of your cheeks. Too enraptured by the way you fit in the palm of his hand (in his head, his bed, his house, his life—) to worry about anything else. 

"Tha's it," he slurs the word into your neck, the scratch of his beard catching the droplets that run down the smooth column of your throat. "Jus' like that, love."

You writhe against his hand, strangled noises slipping from between the parted seam of your mouth. It's when his name falls, bitten in half when you snap your teeth together, lips curled, does he realise he's not even kissed you yet. 

His hand slides to cup your jaw, craning your neck until your chin rests on your shoulder. He meets you with a kiss, and can't stop the groan that rumbles out when he feels the weight of your lips on his. 

"You're extra touchy today," you breathe into his open mouth, words curling around his teeth. He tastes you when he swallows, and it soothes the burn in his joints; the ones that ache for nicotine. "What's got you in such a mood?"

"A mood?" He volleys, thumb rubbing the skin of your cheekbone, keeping you locked against him. He isn't ready to forfeit the taste of you, the feel of your lips moulding against his. "What kind'a mood do you think I'm in?"

"You're—," you gasp so prettily when he touches you in tandem with his peppered kisses; back arching in a way that makes him throb. "—clingy," you pant, breath warm and sweet when it ghosts over his tongue. "Needy."

You have this way of pulling truths out of him. Like you know how to crack his skull open, and rifle around inside until you find what you're looking for. A remarkable ability to galvanise his whims into words. 

Price doesn't even try to bite them back when they slip out, syphoned into the air from your pull. A black hole. A vacuum. You consume. 

(And he lets you.)

"Wakin' up," he starts, words trailing off when you buck, clumsily, into his palm. 

He devours you, then, swallowing down each moan and grunt you make as he brings you close to the edge, desperately wanting to see you fall. Break apart in his hold. 

"Tha's it, love." He murmurs, trailing open-mouthed kisses across the smooth column of your throat. His matted beard grazes your sensitive skin until you shiver, whimpering from the coarseness of it juxtaposed to the soft kisses, and teases of his teeth in small nips he plants over your slick flesh. "Come on—wanna see you cum for me." 

It doesn't take much to bring you to the brink. Years of learning your body, of decoding the little places and tricks that make you howl for him, have given him the insight into how to work you to completion. He uses them all, a softer, muted descent up that wobbling precipice, and knows when your toes are dipping over the edge when your nails bite into his skin, and your hips buck into his palm. 

You're a pretty little thing when your eyes snap shut, mouth dropping open as you dive down the vertiginous slope and into the maddening clutch of nirvana. 

His pretty little thing. 

He cups you in the palm of his hand, a fluttering little bird beating against his lifeline, and wonders if he can entice you to crawl back in bed with him, nestled tight under the covers while he spends the whole day worshipping every inch of precious flesh.

Might be able to, he thinks, when you go lax in his hold, chest shuddering with the shocks of pleasure the tips of his fingers bring. 

"God, John—" you whine when he keeps it up, 

 stroking your sensitive, throbbing flesh until your knees threaten to give in. "Stop—I can't—"

You could. He knows your body by now. Knows he could get you off again and again until you were a weeping mess tangled in sex-soaked sheets, begging him for reprieve. He nudges against your mettle each time, rapacious to see how far he can push you until you're overstimulated, and barely conscious. 

Greedy. Always. 

His hunger for you is never satiated. No matter how many times he buries himself inside of you, it's never enough. A ceaseless wanting deep in his gnarled chest to have, to consume. Something in the polluted pit of what was once the heart of a man who didn't think he'd succumb to greed, to gluttony, now wants to devour you whole. Ingurgitate you into his marrow, into the rotted remains of his still-beating heart where you'll stay, safe and sound, forever. 

His fingers itch, even now, to delve deep into your being. And so, he does. 

Tries to, really. But there's a surprising dearth of strength hidden in your body, and he lets you go without a sound when you push against his wandering, hungry hands. 

You twist in his hold, knees buckling as you try to slide down for him, but he stops you. 

"No, love," he rasps, the words ungluing reluctantly from his throat. "Later. Jus' wanna take care'a you for a moment, mm?"

His arm winds around your waist, pulling you taut against him. His cock is trapped between your bodies, leaking prespend over your quivering stomach. Price thinks he could get off like this. Staring at you like this—eyes lidded, cresting in the aftershocks of your bliss; gazing up at him through heated skin, warmed from the molten spray of the shower pelting across your body; lips blistered and bruised from his kisses, and the abrasive scrape of his beard over your flesh—he doesn't think it'll take much to get him there, but he finds he likes the delay a little more than usual today.

Likes the lazy way you lean into him, fingers threading through the damp, matted hair on his chest before sliding your palms down to where he aches. His cock juts up between your soft belly, and trembling thighs—fleshed vermillion, and swollen. Your fingers dance across his weeping slit, catching the thick pre-spend gathering there. The feel of your flesh on him—hot, and softened from the water—sends tendrils of pleasure coiling through his loins. 

He won't last. Not when you rest your chin against his sternum, staring up at him as you languidly work your hand over the head of his cock. Eyes heavy, drunk with the slow ebb of your bliss. 

You paint a pretty picture. One he finds he could stare at all day—every day—if you'd let him. 

Mauldin spools in his eyes. He knows this by the way your hands spasm around him, eyes catching the frisson that flickers across his face, mirrored in your liquid gaze. 

"What were you saying earlier?" You murmur, pressing a kiss to his slick chest. "Waking up—?"

You're teasing him, of course. The impish twitch to your lips gives you away. 

"Wakin' up alone—," he grumbles, hips canting into your grip. "Guess it made me miss you some." 

The impact of the words on you is breathtaking. The sudden bashful dip of your chin, the flutter of your lashes as you drink in his words—it's a sight that tucks away in the fibrils of his heart, kept safe for later when he's all alone in his bed, or off in some corner of the world with bullets raining down on him. 

(You don't have to worry much about bullets, you always quip, the barb in your voice, the teasing nonchalance, dulled by the quiver in your joints. You've fallen out of a helicopter more than you've been shot at.

He's never felt more drawn to you than when you're struggling through the fear gnarling in your eyes to joke about the many ways he'll die just to bring him some iota of comfort.)

His release bubbles quicker than he'd expected, aided when you press a soft, gentle kiss to his thundering heart. A wild storm on the horizon, one that leaves no wall left standing. You break him into pieces without even so much as a murmur. 

Price falls apart in your hands, and he thinks, then, about the promise in his dream. 

I'll catch them all for you, he'd said when you pointed to the whirling lavender petals falling down around you, eyes light with wonder. All of them. Jus' promise me you'll stay—

Your knuckles against his temple. The sun dawning in the curve of your smile. You breathe and he tastes wildflowers on his tongue. 

Stay? You echo, teeth flashing. But—

"I'd never leave you, John." 

He shudders in your grasp, fingers digging into your skin as he pulls you close, slanting his mouth over yours in a clumsy, searing kiss. 

Your name is drenched in benediction when he spills himself all over you, words a hushed gospel over the altar of your tongue. 

You pull away from him, eyes gazing toward the field of yellow sprawled around the hazel boscage. 

When he looks up, he finds thunderclouds on the horizon. A looming storm. 

"It's gonna rain," you murmur. 

He rumbles. "Doesn't it always?"

"Only when you're around." 

He catches a petal in his palm. That shape of it reminds him of the curve of your smile. He tucks it in his breast pocket for safekeeping.

"Best keep me around for a while, then, mm, love?"

The sound of your laughter is swallowed by the crack of lightning.

In life, he finds there is nothing better than a cigar, and a finger of scotch after a round of sex. 

(Or anything, really.)

He sparks the lightener, holding it to the end, and takes quick puffs from the stem. The sound of burning paper crackles as it burns in the flames. 

Price stands on the balcony, eyes aimlessly drifting across the docks. The water is grey, nearly black; shaded by the approaching storm in the distance. A dark cloud on the gunmetal horizon. He tastes ozone in the air; the electric buzz of a gathering lightning strike. 

The morning leaves him feeling off-kilter. The dream—dreaming, even—and the empty bed still sits in the pit of his guts. Uncomfortable, disquieted. 

He's anxious, he notes, fingers trembling around the fat stem of his cigar. Each draw does little to quell it. Nicotine and scotch on little sleep and an empty stomach do nothing to calm his ruffled nerves. A state he hadn't fallen into since he watched Laswell grow smaller and smaller on the horizon. 

He nearly smoked three cigars back to back before Gaz snatched his lighter. 

("Don't think this is helping you much, cap.")

It does. Did. 

But—

Your arms snake through the brackets of his elbows, curling around his waist. He's too tall for you to notch your chin on his shoulder, and so you settle for leaning over, and peaking out around the bulk of his broad back. 

"Lovely morning for it," you murmur. 

He catches your eye, teeth sinking into the stem of the cigar to hold it steady as his hands drop to your forearms. He catches the derision in your gaze. The pointed look you send him, sarcasm dropping from your eyes when they swing, pointedly, between the clock on the wall—barely noon hour—to the cigar in his mouth, and the glass of scotch on the patio table. Wordless disapproval of his mid-morning choices. His vices. 

It makes his lip twitch up, pulling back from his teeth. It's hard to talk around the delicately balanced cigar clenched between his incisors, but years of practice lead him well. 

"Ain't it jus'?"

He likes it when you're close to him. 

Needy, you'd said. Clingy. 

He feels it, too. There's a desperation inside of him, a clawing sense of affection woven with the threads of anxiousness, and it makes him unsettled when you're too far away from his greedy hands. 

His fingers latch around your arms. 

"You should stop smoking so much," you say in that tone he knows well—the one that, despite the subdued words murmured in a soft breath, actually means: stupid old man, you better listen or so help me God—

The same tone his mother had perfected when he was younger. Equal parts hedging, cautious, but firm enough to feel the blooming heat behind them. A caustic warning. One that, translated, means: there won't be another one. 

No more chances when you speak to him like that. None. 

And he gets it. 

He's on the wrong side of forty, and you're tired of the ashes on the sheets, the cigar burns punched through the mattress you just bought (at a steal, you'd said, gleeful and bright, and—fuck). 

So, he says, "sure, love."

(And really, giving up that extra cigar a day seems easy when you smile at him like that.)

You say nothing when he holds you a little bit tighter to his body, keeping you close; but he catches the soft sigh when he relaxes in your arms, and the tension bleeds from his shoulders.

You make a soft noise when he stubs the cigar in the ashtray, and then turns to you, eyes heavy.

Thunder cracks in the distance. The heavens split in two sending a deluge down that rips across the grey docks. Liverpool smells of ozone and wet pennies in the downpour.

Price pulls you in to his chest, hands heavy on your skin. Firm, rough. He's never been a gentle man, but you make him want to try. To be tender. Soft. Whatever you need, and more. Anything, he thinks. Anything.

You echo the call, and place your warm palm on his cheek, lids cresting in that sleepy desire that never fails to make his heart race.

He likes the way you make yourself fit against him - an imperfect puzzle piece - and draws you close when you lean up on the balls of your feet, eager to meet him in the middle. It's a searing kiss, the kind that instantly warms him against the sweeping winds howling through the wet streets below.

Nirvana in whispers. A soft tongue tracing the seam of his lips. He imagines this is the closest to peace a man like him will ever get, and it makes him hold on to you just a shade tigher. A bit more desperate. Unwilling - unable - to let go.

Thunder booms in the aether above, and echoes through his hollow bones. He feels the pulse of it thudding in his throat when it strikes again, and scents the livewire tang of a lightning strike when it cracks across the grey sky in a blinking, evanescent flash that makes you jump a little when it hits.

Price huffs into the kiss when you tremble in his arms, and holds you closer in the bracket of his chest.

"Jus' a storm, love," he whispers, the words a rough rasp pulled from his throat. "It'll pass."

"I know," you murmur, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt when another strikes scorches the pavement.

"Maybe I should distract you, mm?" He peppers kisses across your face, brows drawing together. "Could go for a nap after."

It makes you hum, a soft, honeyed coo. ", Take me to bed, John."

"Gladly, love."

He's never felt more at peace than in the middle of a terrible storm.

(But that should be a given considering they always seem to remind him of you.)

[goodqueenaly]

Let’s give Team Black the best case scenario where they win the war uncontested and there are no betrayals by any dragonseeds- where do you think Nettles would fit in the regime after the war? Ulf & Hugh get to be knights and have holdings while Addam is taken under Corlys’s wing, but Nettles is now a (presumably) non Valyrian lowborn dragonriding female- she’s kind of a conundrum for the powers that be.

Jace’s call to action is gendered- “…vowing that any man who could master a dragon would be granted lands and riches and dubbed a knight. His sons would be ennobled, his daughters wed to lords, and he himself would have the honor of fighting beside the Prince of Dragonstone against the pretender Aegon Il Targaryen and his treasonous supporters.”

Do you think the plan could have been marriage as opposed to knighthood for Nettles? But then that introduces the sticky situation of essentially giving dragons to other noble houses. I thought maybe Alyn (assuming Addam survived in this scenario), but I’m not sure.

(Obvious preface that this is not about That Other Show and anyone using this to talk about That Other Show is getting blocked.)

You ask an interesting question, because Nettles very clearly stood apart from the other non-Targaryen dragonriders in ways that I think would have left her without an obvious place even in a world where the black faction was victorious. Addam of Hull (and, by extension, his dragonless brother Alyn) fit most comfortably in the black faction’s political calculus: as the acknowledged bastardborn “grandsons” (really sons) of the Lord of the Tides, helpfully introduced just after that same Lord Velaryon had lost his designated male heir, Marilda’s sons could follow the same path as so many aristocratic Westerosi bastards before them (including knighthoods, lordships, and aristocratic marriages); moreover, as very evidently Valyrian descendants (with one riding a Velaryon dragon, no less), these boys could be logically accepted as Valyrian-blooded dragonriders. While neither Hugh Hammer nor Ulf the White displayed so open a connection to any such Valyrian heritage, their lifetime residence on Dragonstone and seemingly “natural” bond with their respective dragons (not to mention Ulf’s silvery hair) allowed for a satisfactory narrative which cast them as dragonseeds, ancillary dragonriding scions of House Targaryen akin, if not specifically equivalent, to other royal and aristocratic bastards. While it doesn’t appear Rhaenyra had specific careers, so to speak, in mind for either Hugh or Ulf - both were knighted and given small holdings seemingly only after the Rosby and Stokeworth inheritance dispute - their identification as male dragonseeds could, to some extent, smooth their transition into a level of aristocratic life for them within the black faction. 

However, where could Nettles fit in this socio-political universe? Nettles’ scheme to ride Sheepstealer did not simply demonstrate her cleverness (though it certainly did) - it also provided Nettles with a unique, indeed perhaps revolutionary, path to personal power. Rejecting Jacaerys’ proud declaration that “only Targaryens ride dragons” (emphasis in the original), Nettles, by her shrewd tactics,  argued that one did not necessarily have to be a Valyrian descendant to be a dragonrider. The singular Targaryen mastery of dragons, which constituted the source of their dominance during the Conquest, the cornerstone of their diplomacy afterward, and the foundation of their religious Exceptionalism, now potentially lost its potency; if anyone could ride a dragon, why should the Targaryens rest at the top of the feudal hierarchy? The black faction, in any post-victory scenario, would need to grapple with the presence of a woman whose very existence as the sort of dragonrider she was opposed the Targaryen royal narrative, even if she herself was no rebel against the black faction or the Targaryen political system. 

Furthermore, Nettles would still be subject to a variety of prejudices even in a post-victory world for the black faction. Sexist Gyldayn’s disgusting and typically derogatory commentary aside, Nettles certainly came from what Westerosi (and specifically blue-blooded Westerosi) would consider a rather unsavory background: “a bastard of uncertain birth”, potentially “the daughter of a dockside whore”, “foul-mouthed” and apparently considered ugly by Westerosi standards (at least in the opinion of the openly pro-green Septon Eustace, who in all likelihood never actually saw her). Hugh and Ulf might have been just as lowborn, to be sure - Hugh is identified as a “blacksmith’s bastard”, while Ulf is described as a man-at-arms, in other words a low-ranking soldier - but since Westerosi patriarchy is gonna patriarchy, these men could pursue careers and have levels of social standing that Nettles, simply by virtue of her gender, never could; consequently, these men could also be moved up the social ladder, to at least a limited extent, with some ease where Nettles, by contrast, could not. Even if Nettles never actually worked as a sex worker (again, Gyldayn can fuck off with any such notion), the surface-level associations would always be there, certainly in the eyes of those already prone to look down on Nettles - she was the (presumed) daughter of a whore, living alone on the streets without any obvious trade or skills, so of course she was no more than a whore herself, or at least so onlookers would assume. In a world where even aristocratic women born to power and privilege have a harder time than their male counterparts in asserting their rights and claims to authority, how could the orphaned, lowborn girl Nettles be left to enjoy the sort of independent power she had as not just a dragonrider, but as what we might call a self-made dragonrider?

Too, because Nettles was a person of color, she was that much more easily othered by Westerosi society. Rhaenyra might have been the most blatant in using Nettles’ appearance (which is to say, her race) to undermine her, Nettles’, accomplishments - calling her a “a low creature” and declaring that “[y]ou need only look at her to know she has no drop of dragon’s blood in her” - but Mushroom, Munkun, and indeed Gyldayn all define Nettles first by her race, in a way they very obviously do not for the non-POC characters. With the racial xenophobia and prejudice which can permeate Westerosi society - see, for example, the dismissal of the current generation of Westerlings for the “doubtful blood” inherited from their Essosi great-grandmother, or the exotification of the Myrish Taena Merryweather, or the long history of antagonism against the people of Dorne from their non-Dornish Westerosi neighbors - Nettles might have found herself very much alone even among a triumphant black faction. Would she too be seen as a lesser dynastic prize, or ineligible for holdings in her own right, by virtue of her race, someone excluded from the upper echelon of Westerosi power politics because of the color of her skin and the foreign ancestry it represented? 

So I could see where, even in a victory scenario, Nettles may not have found herself totally or indeed at all welcome among the black faction. Nettles was a young woman who challenged the expectations of Targaryen draconic power, and who did so despite her race, sex, and class all assigning her an otherwise likely permanently low-ranking position in Westerosi society. Sadly, Nettles’ actual choice at the end of the Dance IOTL demonstrates the limited options she faced even as someone ostensibly so powerful as a dragonrider; her best case scenario in a post-Dance world was to live in permanent exile from the only home she had ever known, among people who were completely alien to her in custom, religion, and background, left to be isolated, worshiped, and feared as a local god. 

[blueboyluca]

And yet, in attempting to solve one set of problems, pit bull advocates inadvertently stumbled on a different set. "If pit bulls are so difficult to identify," Dr. James Serpell, the director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine, asked me, "then how do these advocacy groups know what they are rescuing? You can’t have it both ways." Others wondered why one type of dog needed an entire social movement in the first place. Weren’t breed-specific incentives, parades, and moral crusades the flip side of breed-specific laws? Didn’t it feed into the same sort of tribalism? "I once knew someone who said that pit bull pride is worth the prejudice," Berkey told me. "But trust me, it isn’t." Some of the old negative inaccuracies about locking jaws and supernatural strength were replaced with positive untruths, such as the trope that pit bulls were referred to as "nanny dogs" in the early twentieth century. Just as the twenty-four-hour news cycle amplified 1980s fearmongering, so, too, did the rise of social media make it possible for reams of feel-good myths to circulate. Now anyone who had ever seen a pit bull could declare himself an authority and insist that "it’s all how you raise them." Additionally, some animal advocates displayed a cringe-worthy lack of cultural sensitivity by first equating breedism with human racism, then using coded racial language to condemn certain pit bull owners. A popular T-shirt read "Pit Bulls Are for Hugs, Not Thugs." This type of marketing implied that pit bulls were only acceptable pets when they belonged to upper- and middle-class white people. It allowed the specter of the "sinister other" to lurk in the background.

...

"Our job should be to put ourselves out of business," Jane Berkey once told me. Yet the paradox of "different is dead" makes this task infinitely more difficult. AFF [Animal Farm Foundation] continues to fund breed-specific initiatives in shelters around the country, she said, because "the damage done to these dogs was so great that some kind of extra help was necessary." But doing so, she acknowledged, necessitates treating the dogs "differently." That is the central conundrum of the pit bull movement, for Berkey and others: How do you know when your mission has been accomplished? And what will become of pit bull advocates when that happens? Is there a future for National Love Your Average Pet Day? "All I want is for this to be over," Berkey said. "I am ready to move on to other things." As for the charges of "pit bull lobbying" leveled against her by proponents of breed bans, she laughed. "If it were possible to simply buy a solution to this problem, I would have done it," she said. "But trust me, if it were that easy, this would have been over years ago." Her greatest hope is that the day will come when pit bull advocacy is no longer necessary, when America relinquishes its tight grip on the image and identity of the pit bull and simply lets them be dogs. "It will happen one dog at a time, one mind at a time," Jane said. "The dogs will open people’s hearts. All we have to do is get out of their way."

— Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull (2016)

[utilitycaster]

Hey, so can you explain to me the difference between the gods taking down Aeor and Ludinus destroying Molaesmyr? I’ve read some pro-Ludinus takes and, at least the ones I’ve read, seem to forget Molaesmyr. I feel like Ludinus and the gods did the same thing but for different reasons. The gods wanted to save themselves and at the same time (maybe I read it wrong) tried to find other ways to take down The Factorum Malleus with minimal casualties. Ludinus, according to his notes in episode 58 of c3 hoped “a channel of consciousness could be opened and perhaps whatever is seeking his attention from the red moon can bring clarity and purpose.” But that didn’t happen. He caused poisonous fumes, miasma, to happen and it killed a lot of people. A lot of people who are pro-Ludinus (at least the ones I’ve read) always bring up the innocents of Aeor and how awful it it that they died because of the gods actions, but what about the innocents in Molaesmyr? The ones Ludinus killed? They both brought down citys. So, what’s the difference? I could totally be wrong, but every time I read Ludinus lovers takes I feel like I lose brain cells.

Hi anon,

I can't say I've avoided ascribing intent to other fans in the past, nor that I don't at times speculate (see: the Laudna ask from last night) but I cannot answer the question of why other people might gloss over Ludinus's destruction of Molaesmyr. I think it's fair to say these are very different situations in terms of intent of the destroyers, number of survivors, innocence and intent of the city itself, and lasting effects; I personally would say "Ludinus Da'leth has no moral high ground re: destroying a city," but some people wouldn't. You would have to ask them.

I did want to use this opportunity, however, to sort of explore my sticking point re: people in favor of Ludinus because what gets me in the end is I can't find any like...narrative or moral throughline. I don't think I've seen anyone at this point say that he's right, is the problem; the people who are in his favor still have him joining Bells Hells as a redemption arc.

I find a lot of the fans of Ludinus believe that the gods should leave. They downplay the threat of Predathos and the vast harm Ludinus himself has done; wildly overstate the harm done to Ruidusborn (and ignore that a lot of the contemporaneous harm towards Ruidusborn is specifically directed at the Vanguard, a cultish army), and make unsupported assumptions regarding the positions of the gods re: Laudna; they overstate the power of Vasselheim; and generally have either a tenuous grasp on the lore or a shameless willingness to fabricate support for their claims. However, outside of the occasional banal "idk maybe it would be interesting if a god got eaten!" post, pretty much everyone stops short of actually fully siding with him.

This, to be clear, is good, because he really has been an architect of such war and destruction and abuses of power within Exandria over the past several centuries that it's fairly unconscionable to do so. The thing is, this leaves us with an interesting conundrum: how does the campaign end? Does Ludinus just. step down? Does he start killing the Vanguard? Does he undo the harm he's done to the weave of magic? What happens to the Weave Mind? Do they become the enemy? If your clear and present BBEG just flips sides, and his larger goal is one you think is kind of okay...where does that leave us? What does this look like? What happens to the gods then when the guy trying to kill them just gives up? Is there any resolution to any of the story beats? Like, what is the ending of this story when Ludinus is on Bells Hells' side?

It's honestly the eternal fix-it fic/What if the Villain could be GOOD problem. I'm not saying there can't be compelling stories about redemption and healing - obviously there can be - but sometimes a fictional character really isn't built to make sense of a narrative of redemption and healing. I don't think Ludinus is built like that. The story kind of unravels around him if he does not see his purpose of a thousand years through to the bitter end. I'm not saying it's impossible; a simultaneous strength and weakness of actual play is that the unexpected can happen because of player choice and particular dice rolls, and sometimes the unexpected is brilliant and sometimes it really isn't.

I find myself with the following two hypotheses. They are only educated guesses; they are not confirmed in any way.

Ludinus Da'leth is, in a way, Matt exploring the terrifying question "what if someone who subscribes to the politics of bitterness and revenge happened to also be intelligent and competent." I hesitate to draw direct comparisons to such figures as, say, Trump, or Elon Musk, but there is something in how Ludinus is played that evokes that base desire to destroy something because you found it insulted you (especially if it wasn't even after you personally), and dedicating your power and resources to taking it over, even if that is a joyless endeavor that destroys you in the process.

I think a lot of fans of Ludinus Da'leth are terrified of being wrong, either morally or in terms of their predictions; ironically this leads to a tendency to hedge to the point of incoherence as seen above such that I think it's impossible for them to ever be correct in their predictions other than in the most tangential or obvious (ie, everyone is predicting this) ways.

Anyway: this didn't really answer your question for the reasons given but I hope this explores why, in my mind, it kind of doesn't matter.

[jolynejay]

Now wait a damn minute - I just figured out something important about the prologue and why MC doesn't have their phone when arriving in Twisted Wonderland

So, right off the bat the Prologue presented us with a couple mysteries in its introductory sequence:

Someone is in the middle of the mirror chamber slowly approaching the central mirror which itself flickers with green flames and mist. Over this scene we hear Crowly speak with another person: his "dear esteemed benefactor", that "proud, beautiful flower of evil" as he describes them. He seems to essentially be thanking them (almost groveling) for providing him the means to summon a specific person to him with the help of the Dark Mirror. Because he next seems to be talking through the Dark Mirror to the person slowly approaching said mirror.

Crowley says:

"O magic mirror, thy wisdom I entreat... Reveal unto me the visage I seek.."

What follows is an image of a carriage arriving with a coffin at the entrance of NRC. The implication being that the one whose "visage Crowley seeks" is arriving with the carriage.

He continues:

"You, whose image the Dark Mirror did beckon forth...

If your heart bids it, take the hand of the one reflected in the mirror."

With that a hand appears in the mirror. And I think it is important to note that the hand is, because this is the first concrete depiction of a person within this sequence.

After establishing all this, we are left with a bit of a conundrum as to the sequence of events we are presented with. (Especially, since time itself in the Twisted Wonderland seems to be a little backwards of sorts)

As the hand appears to be reaching out to "us" (the player), I first thought that MC is the person approaching the mirror. However, that shouldn't be able to be the case (unless it is a dream sequence). Because it would mean that MC already was in Twisted Wonderland when being reached out to from another (?) Twisted Wonderland.

So, that would leave us with the hypothesis that the person who is approaching the Dark Mirror is actually Crowley. And that means potentially that the hand we first see reflected in the mirror is also his - but for the person on the other end of the connection, they sees someone else. They see a student from NCR that will be attending that year.

If this hypothesis is true, then that would imply that the interspersed scene of the coffin arriving with the desired "visage" follows after the summoning is completed. Crowley knew that there would be an additional student, one that doesn't belong to this world, because he had to provide them with the ceremonial robe.

Now, as to my claim that I think I know why MC doesn't have their phone: The summon is an active task. The one, "whose image the Dark Mirror did bekon forth," had to actively take someone's hand and make a choice to do so "if their heart bids it."

This means that the mirror must have connected to another - otherwise travel between the two points would not be possible. But then how would the Dark Mirror connect to another Dark Mirror in a world where magic does not exist? Simple. You are likely even looking at it right now.

Your phone screen.

I propose that MC entered the world of the Twisted Wonderland through their phone. Either, completely in body, mind, and souls. Or perhaps... maybe their spirit alone entered the Twisted Wonderland as an avatar - as the "Main Character" - for "The Player" in the real world.

After all, we are playing this game on our phones and mobile devices..

On our own Dark Mirrors...

TL;DR The initial sequence of the prologue we see is from Crowley's perspective before switching to MC's perspective as they choose the hand they will take. And the reason MC doesn't have their phone is because they couldn't take it woth them - their phone was their portal to the Twisted Wonderland.

[yuurei20]

Hi hi! I have a weird question/thought after seeing the talk about Idia's use of language. There are a lot of things that are just unable to translate from Japanese to English, and some things that get changed as short hand. The whole nerdy implications of Idia using "-Shi" are basically absent from EN, instead he seems to use "Mr." (If I recall correctly) which really doesn't give the same impression? In your personal opinion - is there anyway you'd personally localize it? Stick with the same? Remove it completely? Use "M'lady/M'lord" instead? (haha)

Hello hello!! I love your "M'lady/M'lord" solution more than I can say ♡ It is associated with the past while still being used by some people in present-day just for fun, which is just like how Idia speaks! That would have been so great for the English-language adaptation!

As you say, Idia's honorific for others has (kind of) been translated as "Mr." on EN, but only in a select few places.

For the most part it has just been removed, but the curious continuity makes it seem like he thinks that only Malleus, Azul, Grim and Riddle are (sometimes) worthy of "Mr." (the Riddle screenshots below are even both from the same vignette).

And then there is the Harveston sub-plot between Sebek and Marja, where Sebek refuses to refer to Marja with an honorific until she proves herself worthy of respect (by fixing his plushie).

At that point he awards her with an extremely respectful honorific (equivalent to "-sama," and the same word Silver uses with Lilia).

Marja, however, immediately gives him permission to refer to her in the same way he has been throughout the entire trip.

Idia is a psuedo-narrator for this sub-plot, commenting on Sebek's disrespectful way of speaking in both languages.

But on EN he then proceeds to refer to Marja in the same way as Sebek (and everyone else) does.

This has the unfortunate result of making Idia look odd for mentioning it in the first place, when the odd person is actually Sebek, as everyone else is using a respectful honorific with Marja.

Idia using "M'lady" and everyone else (except Sebek) using "Ms." probably would have been a lot more successful in getting the situation across to people who may not be familiar with such Japanese-language nuances!

As for what I personally would go with...this conundrum reminded me of this amazing joke by @anottercoffee on Twitter:

And I would be very tempted to go for the "fansubber" solution of translating everything literally, but just having the words doesn't mean that the players are going to understand the nuances, and might cause even more confusion.

If "-san" and "-senpai" are just mouth-sounds to someone, they're not going to understand the significance behind Riddle and Azul dropping it from Leona and Riddle's names in important moments, for example.

But maybe that's okay! Because at the moment, the alternative that we have is everything getting removed from everywhere, and no one has the chance to understand anything at all.

The best comparison I have come across is Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, where authors incorporated languages that are completely invented, giving no one any chance of understanding them.

Japanese is a language that already exists, so it seems like it would actually be less of a challenge to introduce world-specific terms like "-sama" and "-chan" for people to either glaze over as a world-building aspect that doesn't interest them, or to gradually adapt to through sheer repetition, so by the end of Book 6 they might have a greater-than-zero understanding of the nuances of a foreign language (much like another magic-school series did with Latin).

The manga is actually approaching the honorifics in a different way than the game and giving “Mr.” to everybody, so Azul’s “Riddle-san," Crowley’s “Trappola-kun” and Deuce’s “Diamond-senpai” are all now Mr. Rosehearts, Mr. Trappola and Mr. Diamond (more here).

So it seems that VIZ Media did not agree with Aniplex USA's localization?

What is going to be the most interesting is the novel! Slated for an August, 2024 official English-language release, the novel is also being overseen by VIZ Media.

This means that we might see "Mr." being used everywhere (to uphold continuity with the manga), but the novel goes much deeper into character relationships than the game, and relationships are what honorifics are all about.

Cater, for example, uses them with everyone:

“Usually, Cater does not ever yobisute anyone. When he calls to Trey, he always adds ‘kun’ to his name...When Cater uses Trey’s name like this, it is only when he is really serious. Only when it is important.” -Twisted Wonderland the first novel

Is Cater going to be calling Trey "Mr. Clover"? And how are they even going to localize these sections describing a feature of a language that is not being spoken? It gives us a lot to look forward to!

In the end, writing out Japanese-specific honorifics into English might actually cause more confusion than it's worth, which is why Twst (and so many other foreign-language-adapting-to-an-English-speaking-audience properties) has gone in the direction that it has.

I like to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they know more than we do about what is going on, and that there are important reasons behind the choices they have made.

But I also think that the sheer popularity of the "fansubber" approach to this situation is a good sign that maybe people are sometimes okay with not understanding things, as properties like Lord of the Rings and Star Trek have shown us!

While too late for Twst, it will be interesting to see how this situation continues to evolve in the years to come. Maybe, one day, we will even get an official localization that introduces honorifics directly!

If such an experiment fails it will be most expensive for the localizer, and money is likely a large factor behind why companies might be reluctant to take such a gamble and would rather play it safe and just have everyone say "Mr."

[cripplecharacters]

hi! long ask up next.

I'm not sure if this is the right blog for this question, i'm really sorry if it's not. I'm part of a theatre class/group that is putting on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. The teacher has a very specific vision in mind that i generally vibe with. However, she's asking me to play a character in a way that might be offensive. I play two characters, one of them is Snug. There's a play within the play that an incompetent artisan theatre troupe is putting on, which snug is a part of. In our version, snug is meant to have a speech impediment (the teacher hasnt given me more specific directions on how to talk). I did a bit of research and decided that my version of snug has dysarthria (no dysphasia or aphasia) from a degenerative disease that he inherited from his dad. Im trying to play him as having distorsion and omission type articulation errors, in the initial and medial positions respectively, but it's been very hard for me to consistently play him like that becuase i dont have his disability. The only correction the teacher has given me so far is to speak slower so my dialogue is more comprehensible.

Now, i shouldn't have, but i did watch some scenes on youtube with snug in them. And none of the versions i saw give him a speech sound disorder, from what i could tell. What most versions do have in common though, is that the artisans who are putting on the play are, for lack of a better term, meant to be "dumb". Snug specifically has a line which i didn't realize was supposed to be a dig at his own intelligence until i saw a clip. The line is:

Have you the lion's part written? pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study.

In the video i saw, the actor paused briefly after saying "slow", for emphasis:

for I am slow... of study.

I'm autistic and i know what it's like for people to assume i'm "slow" because of how i talk, and i don't want to promote those stereotypical views.

What makes this whole conundrum more complicated for me is that our version is going to be (sort of?) a musical. And my teacher is adamant on me rapping an eminem song. I thought this would be fun but thinking about it more carefully i worry that the joke might be that snug is faking his disability for some reason, and that he can actually speak "normally".

sorry if some of this isnt clear, english is not my first language.

Anon S

Hello! I wanted to address this ask as a former actor and current student studying speech language pathology as well as someone with an articulation disorder.

You can give a backstory in your head as detailed as you want - and as an actor this is a good thing, and something you should do with every role no matter how complicated or simple - but the unfortunate truth is most audience members are not going to interpret it exactly the same way without the same context. You may be thinking of portraying a mixed dysarthria (and there are many types of dysarthria, from spastic to flaccid to ataxic, to mixed that will all have difference in sound quality, articulation, and rate) but unless it's written somewhere the audience, who is just noticing a slow rate and articulation errors, and who may not even be aware of what dysarthria is, may think your character has some dialect or strange difference they don't recognize.

From my knowledge of the play, the Rude Mechanicals are meant to be laughed at and this falls into the idea that people with certain speech patterns or disorders are funny or silly or even, yes, stupider than others. However, there's not much you can do about this if your director is insistent other than refuse to treat your character as a joke. I would feel better about a character with consistent errors and whose disability was thought through than one who wasn't, even with a character like a Rude Mechanical.

As for a disability disappearing during a rap, for something like stuttering that would make sense but not for an articulation disorder and certainly not for dysarthria, which causes a slower rate normally and can cause articulation issues due to coordination of the parts used to speak (not only the mouth but also the soft and hard palates and the lungs, for example). I would talk to your director about what the point of the rap is - is it to be funny? is it to show another side of him? why does this character need a speech disorder? why does this character need to rap, and why does the speech disorder need to be dropped during the rap?

If you can talk with your director and figure out what the vision is for some honestly bizarre choices it may help you figure out if you're on the right track (and if dysarthria is the right choice for a disorder for your character, as well). As always, if anyone has advice or input please feel free to add it!

[dulcewrites]

New Traditions

Pairing: Rhett Abbott x afab!reader

Summary: As the first holiday season in your new home approaches, Rhett and you start new traditions and make promises (wc: 3k)

Warnings/Fic notes: mentions of unhappy childhoods (reader and Rhett probably needed more hugs as kids). Allusions to a rich!reader. Me using decorating as smokescreen for a character study lol. Daddy issues galore. The Christmas music is very self indulgent on my part too. Allusions/mentions to 18+ content

A/N: *Mariah Carey whistle note* ITS TIMEEEEEE. Lmao hiii, I hope you all are doing well. It has been a minute since I have written for a fandom outside of hotd so please bear with me on that front. I eventually want to take request soon (for Rhett, some tgm characters, and Calvin Evans) so my inbox is always open if y’all are interested - just shoot me something. If you read anything you like please reblog, like, and or comment. Also let me know when y’all put your decorations up (if you celebrate anything). I’m a staunch first weekend of December girlie myself ❤️

Masterlist

As pathetic as it sounds out loud, Rhett had grown accustomed to having the rug pulled out from under him. He had a looming and painful history with differentiating the cards life dealt him and what he deserves; over time, they began to blur together. At a certain point, he just resigned himself to life just being sort of... eh. Reminding himself that though things could be better, they could also be much, much worse.

It would all combinate in this hazy, syrupy snapshot of moments that ran together. At least, that is what he thought till he met you.

He thinks you would not understand it if he told you - that you are one of those people that is easy to love, while people like him took work to want. Hard work. Something that would be likened to the type of manual labor a Wyoming, farm grown boy like him is used to doing day in and day out. If he dared to express it, you would give him a good-natured laugh and shake your head like you always did when he said something self-deprecating.

"What kind of women do you take me for, Abbott," followed by a playful eye roll. "The type that settles?"

Rhett supposes that was the conundrum with you. Because the statement is not wrong; nothing about you gave off the impression you would settle for anything. That could come from a life of having almost everything at your fingertips. But the questions still tickle his tongue and doubts still makes his brain hazy.

It has only compounded since the two of you moved in together.

It was you who posed the suggestion, a shy smile on your lips. Despite the skepticism and disappointment from your parents, it did not feel right for you to sell your grandmother's ranch, the one your father grew up on, after she passed. You insisted on keeping it yourself, clearly having a soft spot for the house you would visit whenever you had the chance to.

Our home, you called it.

Your baking kits in the kitchen, his horses in the stable, and various clothes in the closets. He should feel reassured by this all… and yet… he waits for the other shoe to drop. For the rug to once again be pulled out from under him. Everything is so warm and new, and he worries about the day it slips through his fingers like sand.

Words in general, and expressing this specifically, does not come easy for him. Though loving you comes as easy as breathing for him. Rhett puts all that stuffing emotions and feelings away to good use as he tries to focus on the present. The only thing that manages to keep his mind clear is keeping his hands busy. So, he tries to make up for it in any way he can. The pale wall color your grandma insisted on keeping but reminded you of a sterile hospital? Painted to something more vibrant. The light fixtures in the kitchen that you said were ‘far too phallic to enjoy a meal under’? Well, those new ones are the best money could buy.

He just finished the building that rocking chair you got for the porch when you stick your head out of the house to call him in for dinner, eyes alight with something he could not put his finger on.

Dinner was silent, too silent for you, who always could spark up a conversation with anyone. A tiny sense of dread sets in, and he can’t help but think it maybe something he did… or did not do.

“The chicken is good,” he tries to start any kind of conversation or joy behind the eyes, but all he gets is an empty smile.

The unnerving quietness carries on for a few of minutes, but you suddenly drop your fork on the plate with a clank.

“Did y'all go all out for Christmas?”

Along with the noise the fork made, the question startled Rhett. He blinks blankly utterly confused by how it went from silence to that.

“What?”

“Oh, sorry,” your lips downturn into an embarrassed frown. “I should not have assumed y’all even celebrate it. I guess I just assumed with your mom and all.”

“No, we do celebrate,” he shakes head.

“So, did you go all out? When did you guys put the decorations out?”

Rhett shifts in his seat uncomfortably. Much like everything else that comes to his family, it is never linear or easy. He doesn’t know how to explain how one year they just stopped decorating; gifts and midnight mass were seen as hassles not the usual. Everything that the holidays stood for: family, love, gratefulness, togetherness was the antithesis of them. The joy and warmth of the holidays was sucked from the house and never came back till Amy was old enough to know what Christmas was - till Rebecca and his ma teamed up one day to make a fuss about the house being cold and sterile. What they meant is that Royal was cold… and sterile.

Rhett can still remember the look of disbelief in Rebecca’s eyes when Perry didn’t back her up on the matter. It was a look Rhett had seen from when he was a teen till the last day, he saw Becca. He still gets a rotten taste in his mouth thinking about he never got to tell her how much she meant to him. But that would also mean admitting that often his biggest advocate was a woman basically forced into the family versus the people he shared actual blood with.

Slight embarrassment burns his mouth like a hot iron down his thoat.

With a tight throat, Rhett shrugs. “It changed every year,” he lies. Then shakes his head. “It wasn’t a big deal really.”

Almost as abruptly as you stopped eating, you get up from the kitchen table. He just about calls out to see if you are ok, but you come back in the dining area carrying a picture.

“When I was cleaning out the garage, I found this.”

Rhett leans over, and he can’t help the slow grin that settles on his face. At first, he didn’t recognize the faces in the picture but then he saw a familiar crooked, mischievous smile, but this time on a younger girl. A little you. Decked out in a red, poofy dress and tiny white fur shawl. Shiny black saddle shoes that gleam even in the old photo.

“My baby as a baby,” he whispers.

Rhett continues to scan the photo. Behind you was two older people, and he can only assume they are your parents. They are exactly how he thought they would be and nothing like he thought at the same time. Your mom casually glamourous in green, your dad in a suit far too done up just for family dinner with a heavy hand on your shoulder. You wear her eyes but his nose. Right behind the three of you, a heavily decorated banister and in the foreground a Christmas tree so large that Rhett thinks it has to be a safety hazard.

You do not seem as happy or in awe of the relic as him, in fact you look sick at the sight.

“That was taken before they sat me down to tell me they were getting a divorce.”

Rhett’s heart sinks a little at the as the way your mouth juts out in bitterness.

“Looking back on it, I should have known. Dad was never home, mom was detached, probably depressed. Ya know, I remember them specifically saying that nothing would change, and naive little me not only believe that but wanted it. Not realizing something was just… off. But I guess most nine-year-old’s can’t tell the difference.”

He supposed it was easier for him to paint a rosier picture of your parents, for his sake and yours. Maybe winters in Texas were better than ones he experienced, maybe life was better. He has seen pictures of house, the compound, you grew up on. But now hearing what you are saying made pity take over the normal envy.

Rhett reaches out to grab your hand, and squeezes. “M’ sorry.”

You wave your free hand nonchalantly thought the casualness does not meet your eyes fully.

“No use crying over spilt milk,” you sigh. “I just saw the picture and tried to rack my brain for the last time we were all together for the holidays. After that one, it was one year with mama, the next with dad. And I don't think we ever decorated the house together. That was my caregiver, Jodie's job. Made me curious other people’s traditions I guess."

Rhett fiddles with the rings on your fingers while chewing on the fleshy part on the inside of his cheek.

“Maybe we can make our own,” he mutters softly. “Startin’ this year.”

You look up through your lashes, eyes fluttering away from the picture that sat on the table.

“Really?”

He nods. If that is what you want, he’d do it for you. Like he would do anything for you. Your gaze goes out the window across from the table. The leaves on the trees already began to change and fall to the ground. Going from green to various shades of red, purple, and brown. The season already has changed; heat melting away as the temperature dropped and cool breeze set in.

Your spirit noticeably lightens. “Do you think we can get a real tree? Mamma always said it was too much of hassle to get a real one.”

Rhett holds up his hand and extends his pinky. “As long as there is mistletoe in the house.”

Under new light fixtures, and with the sun grazing the ground as it sets, the two of you made your first promise.

Investments are important.

Your father told you so all your life. To the giant painting he bought for the Tennessee house (the one you later realized was a Degas), the stocks he bought for you for your fifteenth birthday, or his insistence you go to his alma mater. All investments that he expected payoff for. Your father will always be the smartest businessman you know, and he still managed to be so clueless with everything else.

People are not investments. Not really, at least. Not in the way your father looked at it. You can put money and effort into something, but it is never a guarantee it will work out that way. And you can’t just leave when things do not go your way. Your poor father never seemed to understand that, and you think it broke your grandma’s heart in the process.

And maybe you are no better than him. As a child, you admittedly reaped the benefits your parents offered you, almost to a fault. They would often laugh at your ability to move on to the next thing without so much as a blink of an eye. Onto the next toy, the next piece of clothing, the next makeup item. How can you criticize behavior you gave into yourself?

“You’re a reformed brat,” Jennie, your old debutant buddy turned psychologist said over the phone. “Give yourself some grace. At least you want better yourself now.”

So, you gave yourself just that. You didn’t sell your grandma’s place for the equity or whatever bullshit your dad mentioned. You didn’t Amelia County leave though your mom offered to set you up with her in New York. And God… you’re letting your fall - fall so deeply in love with Rhett, despite the voice in your head that tells you not to.

You replay your, in your opinion, embarrassing meeting. Bursting into tears in the middle of a grocery store was not the romantic story you want to tell others. But he came up to you to say that though he only spoke to her a handful of times when she would stay in her vacation home in Wabang, he knew your grandmother was a good woman and would be missed.

A blubbery mess of grief right next to the meat aisle spiraled into decorating your grandmother's house together - your house.

With Frank Sinatra’s version of ‘Let it Snow’ playing in the background, a rush of giddiness takes over. Jodie always said you had an eye for pretty things.

"A little excited, no," Rhett eyes copious amounts of bags you brought into the house. “It’s not even December yet.”

You survey the bags and boxes laid out. So, you went slightly overboard. Like driving out of town to the nearest big city to do some more shopping. Some habits die hard.

"This is just the starter stuff," you pull reams of garland out of the bag. “Just wait till they start selling the trees. Oh! And I got ingredients to teach you how to make sugar cookies from scratch.”

Rhett is silent for a moment, and you wonder if it is too much too fast. Your mother always said that enthusiasm, especially around men, should be tempered and demure. No one likes a girl that acts like a dog with a bone, sweetheart.

“Do.. do you think we can invite Amy over for the cookies thing,” his cobalt eyes soften at the mention of his niece. “I think she would like that.”

“Of course.”

You knew how important it was to Rhett for things to stay good with Amy. Her reception of the move was the only one he seemed to care about. You could not help but think the rest of Rhett’s family was skeptical about his decision. Cecilia was always kind towards you, and she was mostly receptive to the idea, but you assume it must hurt to see her baby venture out. Something about her reminded you of your own mother. Two women clearly used to the short end of the stick, and had to find ways to deal with it. While your mother found salvation in travel and extravagant parties, Cecilia found hers in faith.

Perry was well… Perry, about the whole thing. Just based on how he handled the news, and small tidbits you picked up from Rhett, it seemed like Perry was upset about Rhett making a choice just for himself. A luxury that the eldest son had a premium on for some time.

But you think it was the patriarch of the family who took it the hardest. It may be the reality of having two less hands around 24/7 like Rhett says, but you tend to think it is something deeper with Royal. Anger, sadness, pride - all of them??? You don’t know.

But what you do know is that family tension is something both you and Rhett know far too well.

After unpacking the bags and boxes you got, the smoky coos of Frank Sinatra transition into the pop Christmas playlist you put together. You don’t remember when the bottle of red wine came out, whether it was between Britney singing about what she wants for Christmas that year or Mariah singing about a holy night. It might have been after you insisted the two of you try your hand at diy decorations. But Rhett rolled his eyes when you talked about getting glasses, taking swings straight from the bottle instead.

“I don’t know how you drink this shit,” he wrinkled his nose, but he takes another hit.

“Just like you enjoy your watery beer,” you retake the bottle from him to have some more yourself.

“Last time I checked,” he expertly ties red and green ribbon into pretty bows and knots. “You were there with me, drinkin’ said watery beer.”

You bite your lip as you watch his brows furrow, and he pokes his tongue out sweetly as he ties meticulously.

“You’re quite good at that.”

“‘M good with ropes too.”

It could be the red wine, which always made your insides warm and fuzzy. Or if could just be the Rhett of it all. Him indulging this perhaps silly childhood wound of yours in full earnest.

“Hmmm,” you shuffle closer to him. The two of you might a makeshift area on the living room floor of pillows and blankets. An almost sickly-sweet peppermint candle ablaze on the table, and the fireplace crackling nearby.

“Royal used to make me secure the lines and pull logs. Kinda got good at it.”

By this time, you’re stuck at his side, suddenly a little fixated on hair on his neck that trickles up to his jaw and cheeks. You like him like this; hair falling from behind where it is tucked behind his ears. Scruffy and soft.

“Maybe you can show me how good you are.”

Rhett’s attention still doesn’t stray from the ribbons he cuts and ties, a task he is clearly taking seriously, but he nods in agreement. You roll your eyes slightly at how oblivious he can be.

“On me, Rhett,” you spell it out for him. “You can use the ropes on me.”

He stops and turns with a look of wanton, wetting his lips for a moment.

“Yeah,” he asks, the inflection at the end of the question breathy and soft.

You nuzzle your nose into area right under his ear with a hum, kissing the skin there and taking in the smell of his cologne. A woodsy scent with sprites of magnolia and cedar. It was one that consumed the bedroom and your mind. You spent much of your formative years pretending to hate the idea of being desired or wanted - chasteness an idea drilled into your head since you were a little girl and told by the ladies of your church that the only thing worse than being ungodly is being ‘fast’. Then you spent college overcorrecting to the point of farce. Letting the guys you knew had little regard for how you felt at the end of it make decisions for you. Emotionally, mentally, and sexually.

Your first time with Rhett was a hodgepodge of giggle and sighs only to be heard by vast emptiness of the home you do sit in now. His boots and jeans askew on the floor. You eccentric grandma’s knick knacks watching you two. Most notably, the cat clock that reflected in the moonlight, the one Rhett insisted you keep when he moved in. After him eating you out until you cried, and a night that ended in you making a trip to the local pharmacy for a Plan B, you honestly expected a series of awkward moments that would single-handedly ruin the small town bliss you experienced for the first time. And yet, in the morning, his lips turned up in a shy smile and he asked if you had bacon in the fridge.

You didn’t realize how badly you were under water and needed to breathe until you came to Wabang. Your lips work their way up his jaw til you reach the corner of his mouth.

“Let’s make it another tradition.”

[baeddelilluminati]

Do afabs have power over amabs on the agab axis? If so, this implies that cis women dominate cis men in agab-based social dynamics

dont think anyone other than terfs or others who are stuck in the same narrow conception of gendered dynamics think this is a coherent axis. like. theres so much to the medico-legal designation of gender and that interpolations following mechanisms of negative reflections of gendered binaries, plus histories before the present medico-legal birth certification that brings a long linage of complicated interrelations.

you're asking the wrong questions because theyre, to whats pretty unequivocally to me, steeped in so much gender hegemony thats just using AGAB terminology in place of more archaic terms as a way to either find some easy way through, around (out?) of the trouble you and i are in here.

with regards to the assumption that followed your leading rhetorical question, cis white women oppress black cis men in many cases, cis women oppress trans women in many cases, wealthy women oppress working women and men alike - while this doesn't have to even imply the absurd notion of a "misandry" just rather that gendered oppression cannot be separated from many other axis

cis and trans are axis that you wish to erase for your own simple minded worldview.

examples like the last point in ur anon that takes an ahistoric cis/het normative idealist situation as the crux from which to base that statement eclipses so many things even on idealist terms,

but in an historicised context, one that takes note of the role of colonialism (e.g very targeted transfemicide of indigenous populations), racism, xenophobia, global supremacy of western taxonomic models, imperialism, capitaist atomisation of family, specific materialised intersex babies and, to whom agency is over ascribed (when they are disempowered) vs who it is under ascribed (when they are empowered)... we just...

there is no way the reductive identity politics of the last 20+ years (not mentioning before then) is going to allow us to champion a world where we make impossible the violence that not just transfeminime people face but everyone else, by the very demands of nation states and capitalists to have homogeneous citizens, families, workers and underclasses to shift the harsher bunts of crisis to (like surplus population control/repression).

we are just one piece of a wider puzzle of LGBT+ solidarity through developing political thought. peoples opposition is expected, but 101 (assumedly bad faith?) asks like this allow for introspection for those of us invested in finding solutions for this conundrum where we seek to not do another version of what white usamerican feminists did to black women (not that its stopped mind you)

like the question is why this anon is backwards?

the implied false equivalence that transfeminine subjects are in the patriarchal club of male society because cis men and transfeminine subjects share one small moment after birth that some clinician saw a protrusion between their legs and then ticked a box on a governmental document completely and utterly undermines the lifetime of attempts to correct behavior and reinforce 'sex' dimorphism (that doesn't exist past unscientific generalisations), which has more time and particularities that doesn't just implicate fathers, but mothers etc etc in the social reification of gender.

colors put on them, hobbies theyre encouraged or discouraged, control over childrens bodies to drill into them their "destined" place in the reproduction and reinterpretation of norms that maintain the social order of this vastly violent and anti community world - its all a very large process that (c)AGAB alone can't manage alone nor can crude reductive ideas of a socialisation binary!

anon, this wasnt for you, but thank you for giving me something to chew on while i was vibing really hard with my cadre of shamanic priestesses.

[this was the draft we lost and now found]

[writingamongther0ses]

Fifteen Letters

Summary: Mercury delivers letters, Hermes complains.

For @flashfictionfridayofficial's prompt of "Seal It Tight"! Still working on this WIP idea, still figuring out these characters. And I needed to repost this because I published it to the wrong blog.

-_-

Father had relaxed the rules about leaving Olympus until the threat was handled, just a bit. A few gods could leave to do their duties, including Mercury. However, he had announced that nobody was allowed to visit or help the questing group, unless of course someone ran into them.

Which left Mercury in a bit of a conundrum.

"Fifteen letters?" Hermes mused in the back of his mind. "R.K. usually doesn't get that many in one sitting. Not unless it's academy business."

"Don't sound so gleeful about it." Mercury huffed, flipping through the letters. Most were from Olympus. Five were from Poseidon's family, one was specifically from Headmaster Apollo, another one marked as being from the Ithaca family, and three were from... "The Underworld?" He shook it away to focus on the problem. "Father said none of us are allowed to visit the quest."

"Except he also said that we need to perform our duties." Hermes audibly had a smirk in his tone, one that made Mercury's stomach twist unpleasantly. That was the tone he usually had before he got into something. "I'll just be delivering mail to her, as part of my duties. I'm not breaking any rules-"

"No." Mercury set the bundle into his bag and stepped off the platform. "I'll be delivering the letters."

There was silence. For about five seconds.

"WHAT?!"

Mercury jolted, nearly losing the focus to keep flying. Once again, he had to bite back a mental scream at whatever force had shoved them together all those eons together. "She distracts you," he huffed instead. "Remember what happened when you delivered the moly to her?" His lips still tingled from the kiss given as R.K. had accepted Hermes' gift, two weeks after it had happened. Based on the new silence in the back of his mind, he did. "If I let you deliver, I don't think you'll leave her side."

"She's my girlfriend! The one I haven't seen in six months! Even greater than that, she's my favorite mortal!" Mercury rolled his eyes as Hermes raged. Honestly, he was more like a toddler than a god about this woman. "You try not seeing her for six months and not get distracted!"

"Well, I was perfectly put together when I met her." Mercury humphed. "You just need self-control."

Hermes continued yelling about the topic as Mercury began delivering the mail. Four letters, all from Jupiter, were delivered to the four winds. One letter was sent to Juno's private palace in Samos, where he was turned away from actually seeing the queen. Several letters, marked as being from Neptune, were delivered to several river nymphs. The mail in his bag trickled to nothing as Hermes gradually grew quieter, and Mercury tried to ignore the packet of fifteen letters, all sealed tight.

Was he stalling? Maybe. Just a little bit.

Finally, however, he couldn't.

The ship was eye-catching as it sailed up the West Coast, with blue sails marked with a trident visible even in the night's darkness. Mercury could see about three people on the deck, two yawning. He slipped past them and entered the lower deck. It was easy to figure out where the crew's rooms were, as the doors were marked with names.

His plan was to just knock and leave the letters at her door.

Instead of fifteen letters, however, he pulled out sixteen.

"Oh, you idiot," Mercury said, glaring at the small envelope marked as For R.K. with swooping letters. He knew the silence had meant nothing good for his health.

"Just because you won't let me talk to her, doesn't mean I can't communicate."

"This is exactly what Father forbid!"

"No, I'm not visiting. I'm writing her."

"Why you-"

The door opened before Mercury could finish the threat.

"Herm-" R.K. came to a stop, blinking those soft blue eyes. Her wide grin faded, replaced by a small but polite smile. "Oh. Lord Mercury." His irritation faded, replaced by a spark of delight. She recognized him!

"Oh, you-"

"What brings you here?"

"Mail, for you, Miss Calimeris." Mercury held out the packet of letters, trying to ignore the fact that there was one more than what he started with. Despite his words, he felt himself linger, watching as she flipped through the letters. "You have many people eager to get back in touch now that you've been found."

"Mr. Calimeris is my dad. I'm only twenty-five, I am not ready to feel that old yet." R.K. started by pulling out Apollo's letter first, flashing him a warmer smile that made heat rise up in his face. "Please, call me R.K." Mercury felt his eye twitch, a motion that was not his, as she ripped open the envelope and scanned the letter. "And Apollo knows I don't handle the taxes of the academy, that's all him... Mind sticking around so I can send a letter back?"

"No-"

"I have the time."

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I don’t know how much you want to delve into muse discourse but with the voice memo today I’m so fascinated by the obvious muddling of muses that happened from initial draft to final. It makes me think quite a few songs may have been more clearly about the initial muse and re-tooled after the microwave of it all as she processed how similar the experiences were. It’s opened up a whole new discussion point of me lol!

I KNOW!!!!

To be clear when I say I don’t want to delve into the muses I mean I don’t want to personally discuss them as people because I do not care about these men and find them so uninteresting and also I just feel uncomfortable making statements about these real people. And discussion about them always tends to lead into their personal failings and whatever and it just feels weird to me in some instances whereas in others I have no problem calling them out idk i don’t make the rules im a conundrum

That being said I AM SO FASCINATED BY HER WRITING PROCESS

I do think that there are probably many instances where the song started off about one thing and evolved into another which is how they became so muddled. And like you I would not be surprised if some songs DID start out about one person (ahem) but as life happened they evolved into another or both or many or whatever. Like I said earlier, when it comes down to it, Taylor is a storyteller and I assume in many cases she takes the kernel of the idea which is the emotion or the specific event and she creates a story around it. Which may remain factual or may move into metaphor about many things. (Like how I think hoax was created.)

It’s like… I figured that was the case but now she’s basically confirmed it and it’s made my mind race lol

[noblest-roman-of-them-all]

Goodnight, Virgil

Have another prompt by @sleepyvirgilprompts

I did write this with being platonic in mind, but interpretation is always in the readers hand. Enjoy.

Roman stumbled, bleary-eyed down the stairs toward the kitchen. His hand shook slightly as he gripped the banister, the last of the nightmare still fading away. He paused at a dark lump at the base of the stairs, right where Virgil typically stood for their discussions and videos.

It took a second to process, squinting in the half light as he came closer, that the lump was Virgil, nearly face first on the floor and curled into a ball.

Roman hesitated. He was pretty sure Virgil was asleep.

"Virgil?" he whispered. No reaction. He tried again, a little louder, "Virgil?" Still nothing.

He was slightly more sure Virgil was asleep.

He knelt next to the Embodiment of Anxiety, reached out and put a hand on Virgil's shoulder, and when there was still no response, he carefully maneuvered the other Side into a more comfortable position. Virgil must have been exhausted, to fall asleep like that.

Virgil made a noise of complaint as Roman gently pulled him onto his side, his face tightening as he did so.

"It's alright, Virge, it's just me," Roman soothed, debating if he should let Virgil remain on the floor or risk moving him to the couch.

Virgil began to stretch and for a moment, Roman thought he might be waking up. Instead, Virgil made another noise and curled into a tight ball.

"Virge? You alright?" Roman asked the still sleeping Embodiment of Anxiety. He rested a hand on Virgil's chest, intending on pulling him onto his back so he could get a better look at Virgil's face.

Virgil grabbed his hand and pulled Roman's arm close as if it were a plushie he'd lost in the night and curled himself around it.

Roman choked back a yelp of surprise and stared at the wall, contemplating his new conundrum with a deadpan expression.

Finally Roman sighed and decided to use his arm tucked around Virgil’s chest to his advantage. He gently wiggled his arm slightly more under Virgil and tucked his free hand under Virgil's shoulder ans carefully pulled him upright and against his chest.

Shockingly, Virgil remained asleep the whole time. He must have been very exhausted indeed. Roman paused this way, Virgil sitting up against his chest, hugging his arm tightly, before deciding his next move. The answer to that seemed obvious enough, but still Roman hesitated. It felt like an invasion of privacy to sneak into Virgil's room in the dead of night, even if it was to carry the exhausted Side to bed. Virgil had made specific requests about the others not popping into his room whenever they pleased and Roman, being the honorable prince he was- he tried to be, wanted to respect that request.

Which really left one other option.

Roman hugged Virgil close and slowly as he could sank them both from the living room, concentrating on his bed.

Once more Virgil remained completely asleep, and if he was being honest, it was starting to worry Roman a little and if it wasn't so painfully clear that Virgil needed the rest, Roman might have more seriously considered waking him up, just to make sure he could.

But Virgil was still breathing and still clinging to Roman's arm with enough determination to assure Roman, he was indeed conscious, because when he started to pull away to shift them both into a slightly more comfortable position, Virgil's grip tightened.

Roman smiled fondly at him and let him have his way, simply lying down behind him, as Virgil once more curled up into a ball. Roman pulled the blanket up around Virgil’s chin then curled around him.

"I've gotcha, Emo," he whispered into the dim light cast by his nightlight. "You're gonna hate me for this in the morning, but that's okay. For now, I've got you and you can rest. G'night, Virgil. I love you."