#i said my piece cos i think its important for those like me to hear

[yooniesim]

you can tell i don't have the heart for this shit anymore bc I can't sleep

[fear8not1]

FIC WRITER INTERVIEW

thank you for the tag @its-all-papaya and for reviving my dead tumblr

How many works do you have on AO3?

i currently have nine works on this account and i had about 11 on an old one

What's your total AO3 word count?

115,450 jesus who wrote so many words????

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

anything you ask i do (for you) - 1 496 (wtf) - Formula 1 RPF

let's take a breath (before we go, go, go) - 758 (???) - House MD

that's the speed - 672 - Formula 1 RPF which might get a chap 2 and 3 before the end of the year .... ???

i wanna hear you say my name - 668 - One Piece

except you (you can stay) - 572 - Formula 1 RPF

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

yeah, i do ! i respond to all comments except hearts (because i'm not sure they're really meant to be answered). i think it's really important to thank people who take the time to leave comments, whether they're entirely fleshed out analysis of our works or just keysmashes.

i most likely will never be an actual writer, but writing on ao3, exchanging with people about the dumb little things i write is the closest to being a proper writer. it's really nice and i want to give back as much joy and happiness as i receive :)

What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

i just realised i don't write a lot of angst at all. i do have a couple of angsty drafts but i never feel good writing angsty ending... i guess song of myself would be the closest thing to an angsty ending in all of my works ? maybe ? but it's a dead poets society fic so of course it's kinda angsty. maybe i'll try to finish those angsty drafts one day, i'm not terrible at it it just makes me :(

What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

i like getting together ending so pretty much all of them outside of song of myself LMAO

Do you write crossovers?

no, never tried

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

back in my fanfiction.net days yeah but nothing bad

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

yes! i write a bit of everything for smut, although i haven't dabbled in uncommon fetishes and kinks (don't know if i ever will but it'd be good practice). i find it rather easy to write smut because a lot of it is focused on emotions and feelings, which is what i prefer writing.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

don't think so no

Have you ever had a fic translated?

no

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

back in the days yeah but co-author ghosted me LMAOO and then like soph, a lot of roleplaying so a technical yes ig

What's your all-time favorite ship?

oh that's a tough one. honestly this may sound a bit dumb but probably landoscar ? i've written a lot of ships, been a fan of even more than what i've written, but i just can't seem to let go of landoscar at all. i think it's half because i truly enjoy their personalities and dynamic and half because i feel so close to oscar. we have a very similar personality and way of doing things that makes it soooo easy to write him. so the process is not difficult usually

What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

as soph said, all of my WIPs LMAO i have over 30 drafts just for landoscar stuff. there's one that i absolutely love but know i most likely won't finish it (and since i won't, i'll share a bit with you) ;

it's a color soulmate AU. you live life in greyscale up until your soulmate touches you.

lando is a very famous painter who sees in greyscale as he has not touched his soulmate yet. oscar works at a museum where lando is granted access because he's struggling with his most recent painting. they spend a while together analysing paintings and techniques and everything, getting to know each other through art. lando still deeply struggled with his painting ; no matter what he does, it feels wrong. his background is painted, but the middle stays empty. after a while, at a party, oscar briefly touches lando who regains his color gradually. he doesn't know who touched him, obviously, and has a major freak out where he ditches oscar for a few days. he finally sees his paintings in color for the first time ever which makes things even worse. he refuses to see his works for a bit, tries to figure out who the hell could have touched him (obviously fails). finally, he grows some balls and goes back to the museum and oscar is just observing his favorite painting, one he has master copied while oscar was watching, and it hits him like a brick. oscar is what he needs to add to his painting.

anyway. the thing is entirely fleshed out in my head but i have so many drafts, so many things to write that even the tiniest bit of research is too much atm. maybe one day...

What are your writing strengths?

i think i'm good at dialogue and emotions. a good number of people have told me they've cried reading some of my other stuff, which is always good, and i think i have a high understanding of how people work mentally so it makes writing emotions, dialogue, characterisation in general a bit easier.

What are your writing weaknesses?

i really suck with descriptive pieces. i always forget to set the location and include spatial points for the reader to cling onto. i don't think i'm great at action scenes either because i'm too deep into emotions and feelings to really give a proper view of everything.

more than everything, though, i have a huge, huge problem with motivation and inspiration. im always inspired, i have a concerning amount of drafts, but most of them are around 3-4k. that's when i generally forget about them or move on to another idea. i try to fix that by going back to one of them every time i write my main idea but i only end up adding 500 words before going back to my main idea. which sucks.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

i think it can be useful if the reader is meant to be alienated, but it never works fully unless its a made up language. other than that, i don't mind it too much but i think outside of tiny words here and there (pet names in mother language, national name for a town etc) it's not that useful. a bit of a pain in the ass if you're a native english writer (i'm not, but still), and a bit of a pain in the ass if you're the reader.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

funnily enough, same answer as soph. i used to write a lot of one direction back in the days. technically, the first ever fandom would have been warrior cats which is . something. so i'm gonna stick with one direction, the second fandom i've written for. after that it'd have been harry potter or teen wolf.

What's a fandom/ship you haven't written for yet but want to?

for ships, i have a few loscar drafts and a few logan/alex/george ideas. i don't feel entirely comfortable writing alex (specifically), but who knows. for fandoms, i have a few shield fics that i absolutely love (WWE team) and want to get to soon, a few friends fics that i think would be nice to post, some mentalist/the office/hannibal ones, too. i tend to always be too into whatever i'm watching so that makes a lot of fandoms in the end lol.

What's your favorite fic you've written?

i'm satisfied with all of them, but i really like anything you ask i do (for you) because i don't usually write getting together stories without a side of smut, so it felt a bit different. it also was purely because i love fake dating and wanted more for landoscar. except you (you can stay) is also a favorite of mine because it was my way of coping with being sick far from my family and the idea of someone washing my hair for me honestly carried me through it LMAO.

i'm gonna cheat a little but i'm also gonna add vampire landoscar, my current WIP, because it has been very fun to write even though i kinda forgot about it for like, six months.

not tagging anyone but please do this if you feel like it !! <3

[qqueenofhades]

The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

[jdrizzle15]

Her Second Return

Just like all of you, and especially my fellow Penny fans, I am absolutely devastated by the Volume 8 finale. I had been in quite a state these last few days, utterly heartbroken, and actually nauseous at times. It feels strange to me to be legitimately grieving a fictional character, but it’s not a bad thing to feel this way. To me, this just shows that CRWBY loves her just as much as us to have written her so well that we connect so completely with her, that it feels like we lost an actual piece of ourselves when she’s gone.

But as you can probably tell by the title, this mega post isn’t gonna be about accepting this end, not in the slightest! Today I want to share canon evidence that can point towards another return of our beloved quirky red headed cinnamon bun! I’m here to spread this hope that I and others in the Nuts & Dolts dolts Discord server have!

I have this separated into many different sections to keep these thoughts organized. With that said, here goes…

A Father’s Words:

In Episode 7 of Volume 7, ‘Worst Case Scenario’ we learn the origins of Penny’s aura, and thus her soul. We also learn that it takes more aura each time she’s brought back. This leaves open an option that could be used at a later point.

Many people theorized that Pietro could indeed revive Penny one more time, which he would absolutely do. But there also lies the possibility that someone else could donate some of theirs, I’m not sure about this as I feel like it’s akin to blood donation where compatibility matters or there's a high risk of altering her, but the possibility is definitely there.

Now, the conversation in Chapter 5 of Volume 8, ‘Amity’ that Pietro and Penny have is an important moment for both Father and Daughter. It was there to show how her death in PvP all that time ago really did have a heavy impact on him and is still affecting him to this day.

Instead of continuing to pretend that everything is A-okay, like he had done for most of Volume 7, he finally lets his true feelings about how it come out to Penny for what is quite likely the first time. Even going so far as to say "Are you asking me to go through that again?" when she offers to take the risk of trying to lift Amity with her power. He wants Penny to be able to live her life.

This entire scene with Pietro established “this is what will likely happen” even if circumstances are much different now, it doesn’t negate the fact that this is a key part of Penny’s story. Scenes like these have a purpose beyond simply making an eventual death all the more heart wrenching. Her never actually getting to live her life makes those scenes basically moot. It makes them effectively pointless from narrative point of view. Unless there's more to it.

Building Relationship:

The build up between Ruby and Penny the last two volumes has been absolutely phenomenal with a definite destination in mind, and this doesn’t feel like that destination. So much of the arc of this season was to help Penny. This girl that our main protagonist absolutely adores and treasures, it would just be awful to throw all of that out for what amounts to an avoidable end. Why use so much of their precious and very limited runtime on deliberately building up this relationship only to end it abruptly, and permanently, when they’re separated?

In my opinion, RT is definitely smarter now than to intentionally set up what was really looking like a budding gay relationship only to kill one of them for good. If N&D wasn't actually going in a romantic direction, why would they leave in all of the romance-adjacent stuff that they got, that's not how ‘just friends’ act. And that is not something you use such valuable time building up for absolutely no pay off whatsoever...

Representation of Hope:

At its core, RWBY has always been about hope. It’s not at the forefront the whole time, but there's been an underlying theme of hopefulness that has persisted since it began. Some describe the show as a Hopepunk, I personally find this to describe RWBY really well. This genre of storytelling is about caring for things deeply and the courage and strength it takes to do so. It’s about never submitting or accepting the way things are. Fighting for what you believe in and standing up for others. RWBY fits all of this extremely well. How does this relate to Penny? She has been shown to be a sign of hope for everyone, but especially for Ruby, the main main protagonist. A prerequisite for a Hopepunk story is the hope.

Her first death in V3 was something that fundamentally changed Ruby. For the first time in the series, we see our main character all but broken by this event. With the loss of Penny, immediately afterwards, Ruby’s hope followed. She made up for it through determination and force of will. We see it affect her multiple times throughout the journey to Volume 7. But upon her return in V7, Hope reached a high point for everyone, the sheer relief on Ruby’s face is plain to see!

In V8 chapter 5 ‘Amity’, Penny literally raises hope by lifting the arena into the sky so Ruby could spread her message. And when she falls, and Amity with her, the connection is lost and hope plummets again. From there things take a very negative turn with the hack begins to take Penny’s agency.

In chapter 11 ’Risk’ is the point in the arc where everyone is reunited for the moment, so two separate hero stories are no longer a thing at that point in time. For the time being focus seemed to be shifted to care about the characters and how they’re going to solve the current problems. This is also where Ruby reaches her lowest emotional point in the season.

It’s not huge, but it’s interesting how connected this is. Before Ruby and Yang share a good cry over learning the possible fate of Summer, Yang brings up restoring optimism and hope to Ruby after the younger sister storms out of the room in frustration. This is where Penny’s scenes take up the rest of the episode. Getting Penny back in control of her own body and safe again is what makes the ending of the episode much brighter, when just 5 minutes before Ruby had been distraught and scared. This then spills over into the group coming up with the plan to use the staff, putting the main group in a much better mood. Of all the things to go right, it’s interesting that it’s Penny.

Things go wrong with the plan in the end and Penny dies. I find it interesting that once again, Penny got them hopeful in their chances of doing something right. Given said plan succeeded but at the cost of Penny of all people, Penny is shown to be the beginning and end of hope for them

The highest and lowest points for hope seem to directly correlate to when Penny’s around. When she comes back again, hope will return too, just like it had before. And because she’ll likely be back for good this time, the second return will probably be close to when Ruby is nearing the complete abandonment of hope. This would be pretty par for the course of the show honestly.

A little aside, but in a sense, Penny also represents Unity. The CCT in Vale fell after her first death, knocking out global communications and the unifying connection it gave. When it was restored for the briefest moment, she was there. Her body connected so she could allow for its launch, her soul lighting the night to hold up Amity with every ounce of her strength. So of course when the Hack succeeds and she falls, she takes global comms down again with her. At a smaller scale - even at the Hack's second last attempt to control her, she draws everyone in the Schnee Manor together. At the start of the volume, Yang states the one thing that they all agree on is not surrendering Penny.

Unity seems appropriate for one whose first song and wish was for but one friend, who would go on to find so many more in the process, and permit for a moment the possibility of all Remnant becoming friends once more. Where she first died, the name of the episode devoted to her story - Amity, "friendship", from the Latin root amicus, "friend" - she almost lives and dies with the very possibility of a united Remnant. It's no wonder she's a priority target for Salem, the great divider, and it seems natural that her next restoration may very well allow the next bid to bring the world together.

The Void Screams:

Moments after Penny's death, we hear a weird scream in the void space. It was a guttural, pained, angry scream, almost like the void space itself was crying out. All the portals shuddered and flickered when it happened.

Some think that this scream was Salem returning, but that happens earlier than Penny’s death, her return is signaled with cinder's arm acting up. We know this because after the arm finished flailing uncontrollably, Cinder said triumphantly "she's back." If it were Salem screaming, it would have happened after she fixed herself, but it didn't.

And I doubt Cinder would have been surprised or unsettled by it considering she was happy Salem returned not long before it. And why would a Salem scream affect the portals anyway, she has no connection to the staff or it's magic.

Another thing to consider is the fact sound is not transmitted through the portals. Otherwise, they would've heard Oscar and the rest calling for them, or the screams of the citizens of Mantle and Atlas. This lowers the possibility of that scream being from Salem even further.

The sound really seems to be coming from something else entirely within the void, and that something is not at all happy. There’s also the fact that Penny was the only person who died in the void space, everyone else was just thrown out of it like Ruby and Co. The only logical cause to me is Penny. Her body was a product (or byproduct) of the same creation magic that made the void space, her blood seems to have been a trigger.

Now I can't be sure about it, but this makes me feel like Penny is almost a part of creation itself? For whatever this thing is to be so angry, that is the only explanation I can think of currently. But all of this could possibly relate to the Narnia allusion of 'the willing victim killed in a traitor's stead' that others have brought up, which will be covered next.

Narnia Parallels:

Atlas has several parallels and references to fictional places (putting aside real world ones like the United States). One of those is that of Narnia, both on the surface and on a deeper level. It is a land of winter year round, where people struggle to survive and there is a present divide between those loyal to the current Monarch and those who are not. James is a parallel to Jadis, the White Witch, a ruler whose thoughts and cares aren’t exactly centered around the actual well being of the people. The hologram table in Ironwood’s office is designed to look like stone, like the Stone Table which features prominently in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He has a handpicked cadre of special agents/secret police, like how Maugrim and his wolves served Jadis. Another key parallel is how Jadis’s winter sets in to oppress and kill everyone in Narnia, but the Witch provides aid and protection to her loyal followers. She has all the power to spare harm to others, and uses it only for the loyal. As soon as Mantle splits from James and Atlas, no care is taken to protect them from the cold of Solitas even though he has every ability to turn the heating grid back on. His protection is only for the loyal.

Now that the parallel is established, let's look into the details. Starting with how James plays the role of Jadis.

"I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of State? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny." These are the words Jadis says in the Magician’s Nephew to justify the blood civil war she and her sister had waged for rulership of Charn, before she came to Narnia. She won that war, technically, but only after the last battle had been lost and her sister had marched right up to her so that they were face to face. Jadis’s troops were dead, her followers had surrendered, and the capital was under full control of her sister. But, she still had one card, one ultimate play to win and prove the throne of Charn was rightfully her. The Deplorable Word, a piece of old magic that killed everyone and everything except for her on Charn. It was monstrous, senseless, cruel beyond measure. But it got her that hollow victory. This mindset, the disregard for the people except as tools for her own will, the ultimate ‘aoe’ destructive move that no one had even considered her using, the unwillingness to stop even when by all practical measures the war is over, is a shocking parallel to James. In many ways, he is Jadis in mindset and deed.

Then there is the shared desire for A Thing that both James and Jadis have. For James it’s the Winter Maiden and control over her. For Jadis it’s the Silver Apples from the Tree of Youth. And funnily enough, the Maiden Powers parallel the Apples quiet well. These apples grant power and a life of eternal beauty, but should not be taken or eaten on one’s own initiative. They must be given, a gift granted by another, or only suffering will come from obtaining them. "For the fruit always works — it must work — but it does not work happily for any who pluck it at their own will. If any Narnian, unbidden, had stolen an apple and planted it here to protect Narnia, it would have protected Narnia. But it would have done so by making Narnia into another strong and cruel empire like Charn, not the kindly land I mean it to be.” Jadis’s immortality, and some of her power, come from the fact that she ate an Apple of her own will after stealing her way into the garden where the Tree of Youth had been planted. She gained the eternal life she had wanted and the power along with it, but she did so by taking it and was cursed because of it. Her skin turned pale and her lips blackened as if she were a frozen corpse given life. She will be trapped in a life of misery and hate according to Aslan- oh hey Cinder, how’s having stolen the Power you always wanted working out for you? Cinder had the power she wanted, but she only got hungrier, eager to claim more and increase her might. But in her pursuit she was defeated and humiliated by Raven, had to steal her way out of Mistral, and then suffered defeat after defeat while in Atlas. Only in the end, when she didn’t keep pursuing the Maiden Power, did she get any kind of victory.

The reason these parallels to Narnia are so important is one of the most famous events of the series. The cracking of the Stone Table and the rebirth of Aslan after his death. ‘When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.’ Well, the ‘Stone Table’ in James’s office has cracked, and Penny strikes me as a pretty willing victim. She has never actually committed any actual treachery or harm, as she was the Protector of Mantle, and fought for its and Atlas’s people until the very end. And because of her death, the actual traitor, Winter, who loyally served James until he had gone too far, was saved. Through Penny’s self sacrifice, Winter was saved. So now Death itself will start working backward.

(Major props to my friend @catontheweb for writing this section, I was getting nowhere with it, if they weren't there this part wouldn't exist!)

Norse Mythology:

The tree we see in the post credit scene gives off some serious Yggdrasil vibes. Also called the World Tree, it is essentially all of creation in Norse Mythology. It connects all nine realms, including the God realms of Asgard, the human realm of Midgard, and the underworld of Hel.

Humans are born from the branches of Yggdrasil. The web of Wyrd is woven for every person once they're born, and their path is set from there regardless of how many times the souls cycle over. But at the end, they're destined to end up in one of the worlds, for a myriad of reasons.

I believe Penny landed closest to this giant tree. She was on the center platform in the void space, so if that space is directly above the island(?) the tree is on, it makes sense for her to fall by the center nearest to the tree. This would not only open up all kinds of possibilities for the volume in general, but it would also create options for Penny.

The whole of Yggdrasil’s representations fit well into Penny’s story. Birth, growth, death and rebirth. We can count Penny’s appearance in V7 as birth for now, her growth is all her development in leaving =the military and becoming a Maiden, her death just happened, and her rebirth would be her revival. And this is a cycle she’s gone through before.

The Norse god Odin and Yggdrasil have quite a connection. In one story, Odin cut out one of his own eyes to gain knowledge from a pool underneath Yggdrasil. The only one that fell whose eyes alone are incredibly significant to the story was Ruby. So, they could choose to have her allude to Odin by having Ruby make some kind of deal with whatever entity likely rules over this magical place. An eye for Penny’s life.

There’s another story about Odin, Yggdrasil and the pursuit of knowledge. Odin so loved knowledge, that he sacrificed himself in a quest to learn the deeper magic of runes. It was believed one could only learn the magic spells from runes in death. So, Odin hung himself on Yggdrasil for nine days as an offering, and teetered between life and death. After he mastered the last spell on the ninth night, he ritually died and all light was extinguished from the world. Odin’s death lasted until midnight, when he was reborn and light returned to the world.

This story doesn’t fit Penny perfectly, but allusions often don’t. So If she really did land near the tree, she could be another loose representation of Odin’s story here. What she did wasn’t for knowledge, but to save her friends and keep Cinder from getting the Winter Maiden power. She believed it necessary that she sacrifice herself to achieve this end. As we established, Penny represents Hope, so her death means the loss of hope. This parallels Odin’s story of his death meaning the loss of light itself. So if this theory holds up, it would make this death temporary, until her rebirth and the return of Hope with her once again.

Alternatively, Ruby has the potential of loosely representing Odin in this story as well. Odin later uses the knowledge of the runes to do many things, but the most relevant one right now is awakening the dead. Both of these stories are about making a personal sacrifice to gain something that is desired. Ruby would absolutely make such sacrifices if it meant saving Penny.

It is said that Odin lived “according to his highest will unconditionally, accepting whatever hardships arise from that pursuit, and allowing nothing, not even death, to stand between him and the attainment of his goals." This sounds like Penny's arc of accepting the WM powers. This is more just a general connection between Penny and Odin, but I found it interesting.

Side Note: I encourage anyone who’s interested to look into RWBY connections to Norse Myth, there’s a surprising amount of things that feel eerily similar to the show. Likely just coincidental, but it’s fun to think about!

(If I got any of this wrong, I sincerely apologize by the way. I researched as best I could, but I admit it could have been lacking.)

Ambrosius and the Staff:

Ruby told Ambrosius "we kinda wanna keep her around longer than that" as part of her very specific instructions. Then Penny died about ten to fifteen minutes, at the absolute most thirty minutes later in-universe. I don’t know about you, but to me that seems very short to be considered ‘longer than that’. Technically it is, but when writing a story and a character says something like that, you typically don’t just kill the character they were referring to basically right away. It makes sense for a week-by-week watch, but in a volume binge, which many viewers do, it becomes ironic how fast Penny dies after being removed from her robotic body.

The first time we see the staff of creation being used, it's to save Penny. Using the staff of creation to help Penny is a sign of how incredibly important she is.

They’ve even got this entire transformation sequence for her, so it wouldn’t make sense for them to throw all that away two episodes later. In a meta context, it’s a massive waste of time and budget considering the asset creation for Penny.

Penny is a character who has already hopped bodies two times. And now we're supposed to just believe that this time it really is a final death? Just two episodes after we were explicitly told her body isn't what matters, that "Her soul is who she is" and that "the mechanical parts are just extra"? From a writing perspective, it feels strange, like your breaking a promise right after making it. And frankly, CRWBY is better than that, which makes me think this is not the actual end for her.

A possible connection between Penny, Ruby, and the Staff (thus Creation) can be seen in the intro. As Ruby is falling and being dragged down into the darkness, she is shown reaching for the staff. In the void space, Penny is the one with the relic. So with Penny having this strong connection to Creation, and the lyrics “fight for every life” playing as Ruby reaches for the staff, it’s a safe assumption to make, with the knowledge we now have, that the Staff of Creation represents Penny in this particular moment. Which could mean that V9 will be about, at least partially, fighting for Penny’s life.

Musical Hints:

In terms of music, Friend, as a song for Penny, is very dissonant from the episode itself. The song is oddly cheerful for Penny’s recent untimely death, and it overall highlights the wrong parts of death. It’s simply too happy to be a song about losing one of the most, if not the most joyous characters in the entire show. The song also abruptly ends. There’s no outro, and while this could symbolize the fact that Penny died young, it could be that the song itself is unfinished in a story sense.

What do we hear just before the song finishes, though? A progression of notes that sounds eerily similar to the last line of the opening of Volume 8. The notes for “Fight for ev’ry life” and “Who fin’lly felt alive'' share a similar melodic structure, they aren’t perfect clones of each other, but they are incredibly similar, to the point where it seems intentional. Penny may very well be the life that the opening song is fighting for. It is also worth noting that the line “Fight for every life” comes just after “Sometimes it’s worth it all to risk the fall,” which is the exact wording used for the description in the Volume 8 finale. Team RWBY risked the fall, yet, strangely the opposite of fighting for every life happened with Penny’s sacrifice. Perhaps the time to fight for every life has yet to happen, and we will see it come Volume 9.

For another thing, the lyrics for Friend are entirely centered on Penny’s feelings for Ruby, to the point where they read very much like a bittersweet love song. The music itself is incredibly cheerful, as mentioned previously, creating a mood whiplash with the end of the volume. Why would we hear a song about Penny’s feelings for Ruby, sounding like a love song, if her death is supposed to be a tragic sacrifice akin to Pyrrha’s? The song may very well be giving a clue into its future use in the show proper.

If this was meant to be a good bye song, why make it so cheerful and romantic sounding? There's only one part about her dying and even then, it's just too accepting and goes right back into cheerfulness. The song is also pretty hopeful, telling Penny's story in a fairly chronological order. And the part where she talks about sacrifice is quite pointedly followed up by one about feeling alive. It also ends with the super cheerful chorus, the word "alive" being the last... (Remember the episode title: The Final Word)

(I want to thank my friend @shadow-0f-x for writing the majority of this section! I was struggling to choose how to tackle it as I am not well versed in music theory.)

What We Didn’t See:

It is likely that Penny understood Jaune's semblance better than him and figured something out about it’s abilities in the same way that she understood Ruby's semblance better than her. She had plenty of time to observe his semblance up close as he boosted her aura to stave off the virus. Because of that intentionally timed cutaway in the finale, we don’t get to hear her explain herself after her strained “Trust me.” All of that seems really suspicious to me.

Pyrrha Parallel:

Pyrrha and Penny both sacrificed themselves to stop or stall Cinder. Jaune tried to convince the both of them to stop. With Pyrrha, he failed, while with Penny he actively helped her sacrifice herself. Doesn’t make sense for the guy who was determined not to let anyone else do what Pyrrha did, unless of course Penny assured him she’d be alright.

The Moment:

RT including the suicide hotline in the description shows that they're aware that Penny basically committed assisted suicide, seeing it as a noble sacrifice worth doing to save her friends. They're aware, and I believe they're smart enough to condemn that decision to hell and back.

The best way to do that in my opinion is to pull her back into the land of the living and let her witness first hand the consequences of throwing her life away so freely. This would show Penny how her actions affected others so maybe she could learn to truly value herself. To not think herself expendable. It would be bold and unwise to portray this choice as something good, unless it was going to be called upon later and be pointed out for how horrible it really is.

On top of this, Penny was way too content with her death, happy even. There's no way team RWBY is letting her stay content with it. It’s almost as though we're supposed to join Ruby and Co. in calling bullshit on what Penny is saying and doing because no, Penny, this is not how things are meant to work. It's as if Penny was basically saying "I want to die for my friends" because most of the volume had been about everyone else making sure she didn't die. She knows it will hurt them. She knows.

At the peak of it all, a choice like this will totally destroy Ruby. It may very well be her breaking point for Volume 9. Curiously, the moment itself is written like it’s the first choice Penny’s ever made, yet the entire Volume shows this isn’t the case. However, this is the first choice that Penny’s made solely independently and it’s rather pertinent that the choice she makes is a mistake. Outside of giving Winter the Maiden gift and saving the day temporarily, this sacrifice will not have any lasting positive effects. Jaune will be saddled with the grief of killing Penny. Ruby will have to live with losing her best friend and not being able to protect her a second time, and Winter now has the burden of the Winter Maiden abilities, making her a target of Cinder. This is a bad thing, and Penny needs to see the long term consequences.

Transfer of Power:

As we all know, colors in RWBY are really important and get a lot of focus in the show. That means the yellow we see as Penny gives Winter the Maiden Powers was intentional and likely important, no matter how insignificant it may seem. It’s possible that the transfer effect being yellow could have something to do with Jaune’s semblance. When Fria gave the power to Penny, the effect was very much blue, so this transfer should have been green since she was the one giving it this time. The weirdness of this transfer and the focus on color in RWBY really makes it look like something’s up with how that went down.

A little off topic, but Penny saying "I won't be gone, I'll be part of you." makes me think... Winter is smart, so when she gets time to think about what Penny said, maybe she'll arrive at the same question many in the audience came to; if she's literally part of Winter, can they be separated again? If Winter starts questioning that, the possibility of Penny coming back just skyrockets.

Fria actually tells Penny "I'll be gone" before giving her powers up, which is an interesting contrast to Penny telling Winter "I won't be gone". She may have gotten that line from Winter be all philosophical in V7, saying Fria was now a part of Penny, but it hits differently coming from an actual Maiden. S5o it’s possible that Maidens usually actually will be gone, but Jaune's semblance did something to change that.

This could go well with the theory that they won't need to find an aura transfer machine, or build another one, because Jaune will have a semblance evolution allowing him to do the transfer instead. It might actually be that this evolution already happened and the golden light we saw was Jaune transferring penny's aura to Winter in some way?

An observation that I find interesting is when Penny gives winter the powers, not only is the aura yellow but penny completely glows yellow too, and she obviously starts to disappear, but she doesn’t seem to fully disappear, she just glows.

It's possibly a fading out effect and she does fully fade but animation makes bright light easier, and so we don't actually see her disappear because she's dead and not gone. But it does once again emphasize the color yellow here!

And the color is coming from Penny, it does go up Winter's arm a bit, but Penny is clearly the source. This transfer is so weird and I’m not really sure how to interpret it. There's just actually no reason that we are aware of to make the effect yellow here is the thing. Unless it has something to do with either Jaune or Ambrosius, or potentially a combination of both...

Jaune’s Aura:

The way we see Jaune's aura break in the finale is strange. His aura shouldn't be breaking here. It had been long enough since he was boosting Penny, he's had time to recharge, and it didn't look like it was a strain on him at all. Plus, we know he has a lot of aura, so there probably wasn't too much to recharge in the first place.

He has a massive amount of aura, it has never broken before as far as I remember. Even if it has though, that doesn’t make this occurrence any less odd. It should absolutely never be a one-hit KO. We didn't see anything that would've drained it, that should not have been enough to break his aura. Unless he did something - something that would require a huge amount of aura - that we just didn't see. That amount of aura drain is far more than just an attempt at healing would do, Jaune absolutely did something with his semblance that took up almost all of his aura.

Pinocchio Allusion:

As any Penny fan knows, her character allusion is Pinocchio, the puppet who became a real boy. Penny deviates from the allusion by having always been a real girl, as Ruby is quick to point out, but she shares many story beats with her original story including multiple deaths. In the original story, Pinocchio dies from being hung by his own strings due to his poor decision making and he dies. Sounds a little familiar, does it not? This is where his tale originally ended. Readers were unsatisfied with this ending however, so the author decided to change the story by reviving Pinocchio and teaching him to be more careful.

Unlike Pinocchio making all the wrong decisions, Penny often makes the right ones, or ones she thinks is right, when concerning others. While usually a good thing, this has meant Penny almost giving herself up multiple times during V8, her last attempt being successful. This is where Penny and Pinocchio begin to share similarities again. They are both very reckless when it concerns themselves. This carelessness comes from different places, but it ends with the same result of them endangering their lives and even sometimes losing them.

In the Disney movie, Pinocchio dies by drowning after going to rescue Geppetto and washes up on the shore (like the beach in V8’s post credit scene). His father is devastated and takes him home to grieve, but as a reward for his selflessness in rescuing his father, the Blue Fairy returns and brings him back to life, as well as granting him humanity. Penny sacrificed her life as well, and it stands to reason that she should be rewarded for it, much like her allusion was.

Penny got her maiden powers from someone with blue aura and then gave her powers to someone with blue aura. So it could be that not only Ambrosius, but Fria and Winter as well represent the Blue Fairy. It could be set up for Winter helping to bring Penny back to life once more. It’s an out there theory I admit, but it’s not outright impossible either. The Blue Fairy in Pinocchio saved him three times that I know of, so RWBY having three representations does make sense.

Geppetto wished for him to live as a real boy, but it depended on what path Pinocchio took. This is very reminiscent of Penny and Pietro. Pietro wants to see her live her life, and surely with him absent in V8C14 that didn't work, despite Penny choosing. Her father did not see her happy enough to live her life, and will only be able to learn her death through others. But Pinocchio's themes were life and being alive. So the likelihood that this is not her end yet is quite high!

A Girl That Fell Through the World:

Penny could be the girl who fell through the world. The girl in the story fled the consequences of a choice. The only person who chose her ultimate fate was Penny. The others were pushed into the void, but she chose to die. The consequence of her choice is Ruby’s grief first and foremost, which Penny won’t see. The girl who fell through the world does come back though, and the world will be changed severely with Penny’s absence. Alternatively, it could also be Penny coming back to Wonderland or wherever they currently are, as long as it’s unrecognizable to her.

What Returning Brings:

Others might say another return would have no story relevant purpose, but I wholeheartedly disagree. Penny gives a profoundly youthful, joyous, and wondrous outlook on the world and story that we hadn't seen since Ruby in Volumes 1-3(not the end), Penny returning would bring a much needed levity back in after the despair they will undoubtedly be going through. While not necessarily a huge thing in most other shows, for RWBY, a show largely about keeping up hope, an ounce of such relief is a necessity.

As much as I hate saying it, Penny’s death does actually make some narrative sense because she had to pass on the Maiden powers. (They could have done this in a number of ways, and I personally think they chose rather poorly, but I digress.) Throughout this whole volume, we can see Penny seemingly being set up to join the main cast, but would have been too strong with the powers. This also accomplishes ridding her of the burden of responsibility that comes with being a Maiden and lets her obtain the freedom that’s so important to her character.

Once she returns, seeing this grief that her actions caused, particularly to Ruby, will get her to realize more that her actions can have serious repercussions. She made a choice, but that choice hurt the people she loves. She must have known that it would but I’m not sure she ever realized just how much.

I didn’t want this post to be heavy in the shipping department, so I largely left it out, but I am going to say this one thing that could have an impact. If Nuts & Dolts is on its way to being canon, which this volume makes it feel highly likely, this could be a catalyst.

It could prompt an arc for the both of them in which Penny learns to live her life fighting for her loved ones, rather than sacrificing it for them. A relationship could potentially start from there. And Ruby seeing Penny learn these things may also help her to stop doing the occasional but very dangerous and reckless things she does. Ruby witnessing Penny coming to terms with what she did to the people that care about her would actually make her stop to think “wait, is this how everyone else would feel if I got myself killed?” That would be a very important moment of character growth for her.

I’m certain there are other significant things that Penny returning can bring to the show. And there are definitely more sections I could add to this. At this point though, assuming anyone even made it this far, I think I’ve been going long enough already. So let’s just roll into the outro!

As painful and hopeless as it seems, I'm choosing to trust them with this because there is absolutely no way they didn't see backlash coming. The way this finale went makes me think that they calculated for backlash and aren’t jumping into something they don’t have a plan to recover from. Whether this trust is unfounded or not remains to be seen, but I don’t think it is currently. I do think, however, that the cause of this backlash was a major misstep. Now that it has happened though, they have a chance to do something good with it.

I know for a lot of you, trust in CRWBY has been damaged, some even irreparably so. And for those that feel this way, I don’t blame you. My trust in them took a hit too, but isn’t broken completely yet. There are many ways that they can bring her back that would make sense with the narrative, they have the ability to make it right, and after going over all of the hints and general weirdness of things many times, I think they will.

I'm feeling pretty confident now and I really didn't expect that to happen at all to be honest. But discussing and theorizing with the discord server seriously helped get my hopes back up surprisingly fast! It’s actually thanks to all of them that this gigantic post even happened! So thanks a ton my fellow Dolts! And a special thanks to!!

@arcana-amicus

@catontheweb

@cosmokyrin

@gaydontmesswithme224

@jammatown919

@shadow-0f-x

They really helped get this thing across the finish line!

And thank YOU for reading all~ of this! I sincerely wish it gave you some of the hope and confidence that I now have!

[differentkettleoffishalltogether]

I’m On Fire [Chapter 1]

Summary: With her sister’s wedding fast approaching and her Mom hounding her about finding a date, Y/N makes a terrible decision that lands her and her least favorite genius in a confusing situation.

A/N:  This is the first part in a series, I’ve written the first few chapters already so I’m hoping to update pretty regularly! I hope you guys enjoy, and any feedback is always appreciated! ❤️

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem Reader

Category: Fake Dating, Enemies to Lovers, (Eventual) Smut, Fluff, Angst, it’s a Slow Burn Baby

Warnings: None really for this chapter, cursing? Mean-ish Spencer

Word Count: 6.5k

Next Chapter

Series Masterlist

Masterlist 

I wasn’t at the BAU long before it started to feel like home. The team became my family, pure and simple.

Having been recruited by Hotch at only 22 I'd sort of fallen into the roll of the little sister to the team without really meaning to. It's not that I was naive, or particularly sheltered even. I know I'm good at my job, and I'd want to be, given how my life's revolved around it almost entirely. But the team seemed to adopt a protective mindset over me right off the bat.

When I first joined the FBI everything was terrifying. I worked so hard for my PhD, trying to get into the unit, but there's almost nothing that can actually prepare you for the real thing. Being out in action in the field, working the cases out in real time. Sometimes they had a smooth, easy conclusion followed by loud obnoxious drinks together. Then there were the others, the ones that kept me up for days after and felt as though they owned little pieces of my heart still.

It was JJ that helped the most on those horrible flights back on the jet. Noticing my anxious ticks and uneasy disposition after that first case that had ended badly. JJ had been through it all before, taking too many cases home with her. Seeing her son's little faces in the kids that we couldn't help. If I was the baby of the team JJ was the big sister, looking out for everyone.

Morgan on the other hand was the outrageously cool older brother, the one you just wanted to be. Early on he'd helped my weak self with the ruthless fitness regimen the FBI required, he offered to pull some strings and get the test written off. But I couldn't accept that, there was something in me that just wanted to impress Morgan, and honestly still does. Like somehow if he thought you were cool, then it became true. So I passed the exam, but getting up a flight of stairs was near impossible for a week after.

Emily was probably the fun aunt. The one that would sneak you booze at the family gathering, or take you to your first concert. Emily was actually the one who'd found me, digging around colleges for potential recruits she'd had me picked out for a while I later found out. Insisting that Hotch give me a shot. It was reassuring to know I had someone who would stick up for me from day one.

I was an tech analyst, among other things, sort of a counterpart for Garcia in the field. So it was no surprise to anyone when the two of us hit it off as though we'd known each other forever. We weren't the same by any means though. Penelope was bold, and bright, and confident beyond measure, where I've typically felt like more of a blend into the background type. I've always thought of myself that way, despite my achievements. I'd also always believed I was fairly inoffensive, no one I'd met had ever had a huge problem with me, 'till I got to the BAU that is.

Every rose has its thorn I suppose.

That thorn in my side was Dr. Spencer Reid.

It wasn't that Dr. Reid was a bad agent, or even a bad person. I hadn't actually met him before that first day in the conference room, but I'd known who he was for a long time. Before I came along he'd held the mantle of 'youngest ever recruit' in the unit, while I was studying I'd read any of his work I could get my hands on because of that fact.

I figured it must've been some sort of hazing when he looked me up and down that first day I was introduced, and then proceeded to blank me entirely for a full week. Up until I'd wrapped my first case.

The whole team went straight from the jet to the bar. Proceeding to get far too drunk. Spencer joined, which the rest of the team found unusual, and I probably should've taken as a sign of things to come.

That case went well, and everyone was in high spirits but Reid had a sour disposition, at least it seemed that way every time he looked at me. After a few too many drinks I went outside in an attempt to sober up in the cold air, unfortunately Reid must've snuck outside not long before.

"Ugh" was all he said when he first caught my silhouette approaching him. The night was unusually cold so it had been deserted outside the bar that evening. I wasn't really sure why it made me nervous to be alone with him like this, the two of us leaning back against the same small area of brick wall, looking out at the cold night.

"Nice to see you too doctor" was all I could muster, I was drunk enough that I let my sarcastic tone leap out, "you can relax, I'm just trying to get some fresh air, it's too stuffy in there, and loud. I'm not here to talk to you or anything."

"Well aren't you a sensitive thing" he responds in kind, at that point I wasn't really sure if it was a coincidence or if he'd been genuinely avoiding me, but things were starting to clear up.

"I'm sensitive, that's a fun take on things" I joke, taking a long sip of cold water from my glass.

"And what's that supposed to mean, newbie?" his emphasis on the last word all but confirms my suspicions.

"Fuck man, what's your problem with me? Is it because I'm new, or because I beat your stupid record?" I quip. hoping that at the very least it might coax him out of his shell. Dr. Spencer Reid getting angry at me could honestly be better than the nothing I'd been experiencing from him until now.

"What stupid record?" he sounds genuinely confused

"I'm the youngest BAU recruit now?" I didn't know why else he could be so sour. He'd never met me before last week, and since he'd ignored me that first day I'd done all I could not to step on his toes. So if he had a reason to hate me this much, it wasn't something I'd done on purpose.

He takes a few moments to respond, raising his eyebrows and considering the information. He chuckles. He fucking chuckles.

"That's funny." he says, his voice leveling out, "I didn't peg you as funny newbie" that word sets something off in me again. Something about it is dismissive, or belittling. Before I could fight back he starts to move, maneuvering around me and heading back inside. A little too tipsy to think of anything constructive to say, I just mutter "Fuck you Spencer."

He swings open the door, as he walks inside he just says "See you Monday, Newbie" without even looking at me.

And that was only the beginning.

----

"You know I'm just trying to make sure you get enough rest sweetheart. There's no need to get so defensive!" it was far too early in the morning to be dealing with this call. Since joining the BAU a few years ago this was a standard call from my Mom. Equal parts well meaning and over-bearing, and generally asking far too many questions.

"I'm not getting defensive Mom, I get plenty of rest, my job is just very important to me and you know that." I knew she was right to be at least a little worried, this job was consuming, and in all honesty I wasn't sure how people like JJ were married and still here. It seemed like an impossible feat.

"Fine sweetie, how are your co-workers doing then? How's Penelope? Give her my love" she loved Penelope, I think she thought that Penelope tethered me to the normal world, and in a way she was right. She kept me sane, and fun, and made me eat pizza and do face masks once a week at least. Even when I didn't think I wanted to.

"Pen's great Mom, everyone's good. Well, the usual ones get on my nerves, but I'm fine." As I say it I glance across at Dr. Reid, the only person who's also in as early as I am most days. I'm not sure if he can hear me but he's tapping his pen so loud on his desk that it takes all of my energy not to walk across the bullpen and stab him with it.

"Y'know what Mom, I'm actually just after getting to work and it's a busy day so can I call you back later?" I chance, getting her off the phone is always an ordeal.

"Fine, fine, I'll let you go. But wait one last thing!"

I knew what was coming. It was always coming.

"Are you seeing anyone, Margot's been wondering too, just thought I'd check in?"

Pinching the bridge of my nose and trying not to scream down the line, I just sigh out the frustration instead.

"No Mom, believe it or not, I've made no progress on that front since you asked me all of 3 days ago."

"See you are being defensive!" she snaps

"I gotta go, bye Mom. Love you!" I say, hanging up quickly before dropping my head down into my arms on my desk, resting like that for a few moments in silence.

Hearing Garica chuckle behind my ear I perk up and spin around. She's holding a small paper cup of coffee and hands it to me. I look at it confused, "Sorry about the paper, I couldn't find your mug in the cabinet" she apologizes, looking over at Dr. Reid and rolling her eyes. Now I know he can hear me from his seat, he takes that moment to sip from my mug and place it gently back on his desk.

It hadn't taken long for him to start toying with me. It was always stupid childish things. Things I couldn't get genuinely annoyed at, that would give him far too much satisfaction, knowing he was getting to me in any real way. This was one trick he liked to play if he got into the office before me, he'd take my mug and make his coffee in it, just to spite me I guess.

"Why does he even do that, it's so stale" she said, just a little louder than normal to make sure he could hear. Garcia and Reid were still good friends and team-mates but she liked to stand up for me when she could. He liked to avoid me as much as possible so he'd usually go to Garcia before me if he needed help with something. Even when the two of us were out in the field together. Which was obnoxious but it was just another thing I'd gotten used to over time. And as long as it didn’t interfere with the case I just forced myself to let it go.

"I know it's such low grade bullying isn't it?" I shot back with a chuckle.

"So I'll take it that was Mommy dearest" Penelope gestures to my phone. She knew my Mom, and she knew about her general overbearing energy. I let out a groan thinking about the call again, and the calls that were to come.

"Isn't it always Mommy dearest?" I joke

"So she's still on your ass about the wedding then?" I'm sure Penelope was almost as sick of hearing about it as I was,

"Margot's getting married in like 4 months now, and every time Mom calls there’s just some new hometown loser she wants to set me up with Pen. It's fucking exhausting" I take a sip of the coffee she made me, savoring the bitter taste. She sits down on my desk for a moment, leaning in.

"Honey, did you ever think that if you got out there and found someone, she wouldn't be on your ass at all?" I don't want to think about that, about how she's completely right. All I can do is let out another small groan and lean back down onto my desk.

"Too early Pen" I say, it's muffled by the desk but she gets the message. Hopping up and heading to her own office as some more people start to arrive for the morning.

Leaving me alone to make a start on my paperwork that had built up throughout the week. Fridays were usually slow like this, giving me a little too much time to think. I couldn't shake the thought that my Mom and Penelope were actually right. Maybe I was a bit too invested in the job, and maybe that was a pretty big factor in why my last relationship imploded but I wasn't about to admit that to anyone.

----

After that the day crawls by, thankfully no cases pop up so the weekend might actually be free. Trying to make sure I clear up all of my paperwork takes a little longer than I'd hoped and leaves me alone in the bullpen. It seems like everyone's gone home by the time I've packed up and I'm ready to leave. Which wasn't as out of the ordinary as I'd like it to be really. Everyone else seemed to have somewhere to be on a Friday night.

Waiting for the elevator to arrive my phone started to ring, I could see my Mom's caller ID on the screen. If I just let it go I know she'll call back later, may as well get it out of the way. I take a deep breath in anticipation before I answer.

"Hey what's up?" I answer, stepping inside the elevator as the doors ping open.

"Hi sweetie, I've got good news! Do you remember David? That lovely boy, he helped out your Father that summer in high school?" I know what's coming and rub my temple, trying to stifle the headache I know is coming. As I answer a hand slides between the elevator doors, popping them open again.

Dr. Fucking Reid walks in, and he looks about as happy to see me as I am to see him. I make eye contact and look away just as fast, willing him away with my mind. "Yes Mom, I remember him, why are you telling me this?" I already know the answer but I'm fed up, she still sounds excited when she responds.

"Well you won't believe it! I ran into him at the market this morning and I thought you'd like it if I passed on your phone number to him, maybe for the weddi-" it took all I had not to shout into the receiver, and maybe I would've had the elevator been empty.

"Mom! Jesus!" I have to reign myself in, but I have a bad idea, "You know what, I'm actually sorted. I've got a date lined up now" I'm not sure why I said it with no real plan in place. She sounds even more excited than I've ever heard her.

"Oh my, that's amazing sweetie! That was fast, I can't believe you found one since this morning, it's someone from work so?" she assumes, and I'm just not thinking fast enough to correct her.

"Mmhmm, yeah" I'll figure out the logistics later I rationalize.

"Oh! Is it that boy you're always on about, the one who teases you?" she asks, and her voice is full of joy, and it makes me feel horrible that I'm lying already, and that I'm going to let her down.

"Yup, that's the one, look Mom I gotta go, I'll talk to you later! Night" I blurt out so fast it has to be obvious I'm nervous.

I can hear a stifled chuckle behind me. Fuck. How loud is my phone speaker. Could he hear that. Surely not. But this elevator was completely silent. The doors open and I have to stop myself from running to my car at top speed. Instead I walk out just a little faster than normal, turning around to shoot him a small wave goodbye. And he's got this devious smirk on his face that makes my stomach turn.

Sitting into my car I pull out my phone to text Garcia immediately.

I'm on my way to yours right now. It's urgent.

——

Traffic's light so it takes maybe 10 minutes before I arrive at Garcia's place. My mind's racing and my body takes me there on autopilot. Why did I say any of that, why did I even answer the damn phone. Why did I wave goodbye to Spencer, I never usually did that. Maybe that's why he had that look on his face. Maybe he was just thinking of something funny that happened earlier and it had nothing to do with me at all. That was something he'd do to mess with me for sure.

How was I going to walk this back with my Mom, she was just gonna have more questions that I couldn't answer. Fuck.

Garcia buzzed me up and her door was open for me by the time I got up the stairs. This little purple apartment had become my second home. It was where I spent most of my evenings off, laughing on the same sofa I was collapsing face first into right now. Garcia nestles in beside me and runs her hand over my hair, "Hey sweet pea, what's happening? I don't want to sound too concerned but you're not giving me much to go off? Are you dying, is there drama? You're going to have to tell me what's so urgent before I burst a blood vessel?"

I let out a muffled, "is drahmuh" into the pillow, Garcia shakes my shoulders.

"Sit up babe, damn!" I have to heave myself out of the pillows, sitting upright on the sofa beside her, clutching one of the pillows in my arms.

"It's drama" I repeat,

"Well, out with it then, you know I'll take all the drama I can get! Spill, spill" she rushes me along. I'm already apprehensive, Reid's her coworker too, but if anyone would understand why this was such an issue it was gonna be her.

"Okay, I'm after doing something stupid and I think I really need your advice" I cringe already, thinking back to the elevator, throwing out my words faster, I continue the story, mostly trying to get it over with, "my Mom called again when I was on the way out tonight and she was trying to set me up with this guy, and Reid was there, and I got all flustered, and I told her I had a date already" I throw my head down into the pillow again.

"Wait why was Reid there?" she looks like she's trying to fit puzzle pieces together and she's getting nowhere, "And what's the drama?"

"Shit Garcia, it was in the elevator and it was all quiet, and maybe he heard the call, maybe he didn't but he had this fuckin' look on his stupid face" I can't shake the smug little smirk, it's burned inside my eyelids. Garcia's face falls in what looks like disappointment.

"Ugh Y/N! That's nothing chill out, why does it matter if he heard your call? I know you guys are all weird but none of that is any of his business anyway!" she shoo's her hand in the air, dismissing the whole situation.

"No Garcia, it is his business now" I have to close my eyes when I say it, I can't look at her "I told my Mom that he was my date, well, I didn't say his name or anything, she assumed it was someone from work and so I just agreed, and then she suggested that it was him and then I fucking panicked Pen, I fucked up so bad. What do I do?"

I finally opened my eyes to look up at Garcia. She was sitting in pure silence, pursing her lips in what seemed like contemplation. The puzzle pieces finally slotting together. It's as though a light bulb goes off behind her eyes and she bursts out in fits of laughter. Doubling over on herself before finally taking a few breaths to calm herself down. I'm honestly not sure why she finds the whole thing so funny, she know's how needlessly annoying he's made my life, she's seen it first hand and heard me talk about it over and over again in this very apartment over pizza.

"Garcia, this is not fucking funny! This is serious!" I try to calm her down, I need advice not whatever this is.

"I'm so sorry Y/N, I love you dearly. But this isn't funny, this is hilarious. It's like you're Sandra Bullock in some mid-90's rom com. I love it" I don't love it, in fact I hate it. I nearly snap at her but pull myself back.

"Pen, come on, help me out. What do I do with this, how do I fix it?" I plead.

She stops laughing and pulls out her phone, "Okay, I'm sorry. I'm going to order us a pizza, and we're gonna sort this thing out together, sound good?" I just nod and collapse back into the sofa. I think I feel better now that I've gotten it out in the open.

----

Penelope makes us tea while we wait for the pizza, she keeps lemon & ginger in her cabinet for me, just like I keep mint for her. The warm mug and the steam calm me down. After a few minutes alone to think about it I start to figure it out a little better. I figure I can just lie to my Mom for a while, it might suck but I can pretend for a bit and then make up some excuse as to why he can't come closer to the time. Then I can just bring Garcia instead and everyone's happy. I'm about to float my plan to her there's a knock on her door. I was so caught up that I hadn't really noticed quite how starving I'd gotten. Leaping up of the sofa to grab the door.

I swing it open but it's not the pizza guy. Somehow it's the opposite of the pizza guy, my worst nightmare is on the other side of the door. He must notice my eyes blow completely wide. "Y/N!" he says, more of a statement than a question really, like he's telling himself that he's actually seeing me in the doorway. I'm not as gentle.

"What the fuck are you doing here Reid?!" I can't even disguise my anger. He seems a little flustered, like he's got absolutely no idea how to proceed.

"Um, uh, is Garcia here? I can, um, I can just come back later?" he swallows hard and shakes his head, before I can agree and tell him to get lost Penelope races to the door, pulling it wide open.

"Nope, that won't be necessary Doctor! Come on in, you're right on time sweetheart" she waves him in and he walks past me, his demeanor changing almost instantly. He's smug, like he's won whatever battle this was. And I hate it. Though he's still as confused as me despite the newfound attitude. Reid sits down on the sofa, right where I had been sitting. I bite my tongue and sit on the opposite end.

"Are you okay Garcia?" he asks with a genuine concern, "What's going on, what was the emergency?". He's not stupid, he knows she's not in danger now that he's here. But he wants answers. I don't know that I've ever seen him this confrontational with anyone, well anyone but me. The entire time I’m staring her down as she sits in the armchair opposite the two of us. My keys are in my pocket and my car's right outside. I could just jump up and make a break for it. Escape.

"You know what Doc, you won't believe it but I'm not actually the one with the emergency" she takes a beat, and I'm starting to think that I might understand why people murder other people after all these years, "Y/N has something urgent she needs to talk to you about" she's silent for another moment, and she almost looks giddy, "Actually Spencer, you might already know a little something about the matter already, now that I think about it" she smirks, and it's pure joy.

My keys are in my hand ready to bolt when the doorbell chimes again. "Oh, that'll actually be the pizza this time, if you two will excuse me" she hops up out of the armchair and races to the door, leaving the two of us alone in a horrible silence. The tension is almost too much, I want to speak but I really have no idea what to say, or how to even start saying it. But he starts.

"Y/N what's going on, I feel like I'm out of the loop here? What am I missing?" he asks, and there's something uncharacteristically genuine about the way he says it, but he can't turn to look at me as he speaks. I almost want to let my guard down and just have a conversation but I can’t force myself to do it. "Shut up Reid." is all I mutter, folding my arms across my chest.

He turns sharply on the sofa to face me. "Hey Y/N. Believe it or not I'm about as happy as you with whatever kind of Parent Trap situation Garcia's got going on here. But from what I'm picking up on you've got a problem and I'm supposed to be able to help with it. So do you want to tell me what's going on or not? I can just go?" I can see that there's an anger bubbling right below the surface, threatening to burst. I know I shouldn't but I let him stew in silence for a little too long and he jumps up off the sofa.

"Y'know what, typical" he mutters, rolling his eyes as he says it, "this is all about you." he throws his bag over his shoulders and begins to walk towards the door. Something in me just snaps.

"All about me?! Are you fucking kidding? I've been tip-toeing around you for years, ever since I joined this damn unit!" I shout as Garcia comes back into the room, pizza box and plates in her hands.

"So, who's hungry?" Garcia asks, trying to break the tension, or pretending there's no tension at all. Reid shakes his head in disbelief and rubs his temple before he speaks again, "Actually I was just gonna head out" he gestures to the door, "I'm clearly not wanted here so I'm gonna leave you guys to it." Spencer makes a move to leave but Garcia grabs the strap of his shoulder bag, yanking him back ever so slightly before he really has the chance to escape.

"You are going absolutely nowhere kid" She points back to the sofa, "get back there" she glances to me, staring with far too much intensity. "You too, sit." Her voice is more stern than I've ever heard it, even while we were on a case. I can't help but obey her command and I sit back down on the sofa in silence. Followed by Reid, clearly processing the same uneasy feeling of a serious Penelope.

She sits opposite the two of us again. "Y/N, Spencer, I love the two of you with all of my heart, albeit separately, and I would die for either one of you. But you've got to chill the hell out!" she says it like she's had it bottled up forever. The tension that releases from her as she says it looks euphoric.

She opens up the pizza box and lays it on the coffee table and takes out a slice for herself. Taking a bite she leaves the two of us in stunned silence. Once she finishes the mouthful she turns to me specifically, "Y/N you tell him, or I will." dead serious. And the feeling in my belly is like I've just fallen down an elevator shaft.

My stomach is in knots as I turn to Spencer on the sofa next to me. His face is puzzled and I think I might be able to make out pure terror in his expression. I don't know that I've ever been looked at like this before and my stomach screws up tighter. I have to take a deep breath and I can't believe I'm about to say it. "Fuck it" I have to take another breath almost immediately so I just have to force the rest out, "I don't know if you heard the call I was on while we were in the elevator earlier?" I look up to gauge his reaction and I can see his face relax, and worse than that, one corner of his mouth lifts into a sort of smile. It's a look of pure smug satisfaction and I think I might scream. I have to close my eyes because I really don't think I can look at that face as I say the next part.

"My sister is getting married in a few months and my Mom's been on my ass to find a date for the wedding and she keeps trying to set me up with these losers, so I fucking panicked, and I told her you were my date." by the time the sentence is out my eyes have screwed up so tight it feels like I have to pry them open.

He sits in silence for too long. Thinking, maybe?

"So I'm the boy who teases you then?" he grins. So he did hear. And he did laugh. He looks far too self satisfied. Now he knows he's right. He knows I've talked to my Mom about him, that he's gotten in my head. I can tell from his smile that he's savoring the moment. Mostly because I can't slap the smug smile off his face I drop my head into my hands. In an effort to disappear I guess.

"So," he says, taking a moment, "is that all you wanted to say then?" he asks, lighthearted and obnoxious, back to his usual self. I snap back to reality, shooting my head back up.

"What do you mean is that all?" I throw back genuinely shocked,

"Is that all you had to say Y/N? Can I go now? It's a long bus ride home y'know" he smirks but makes no effort to move. He can't possibly be making me do this.

"Well no, obviously!" I stutter, "I mean, are you, will you, uh?" I can't bring myself to say it out loud. He leans in on the sofa looking directly at me, refusing to break eye contact.

"Did you have something you wanted to ask me Y/N?" I just want to smack that fucking look off his face,

"Fuck you Spencer Reid" I almost whisper under my breath, but Garcia snaps me back to reality.

"Hey!" she looks at me, stern again, "Ask him." it's not a question, or a suggestion, it's a command.

"Fine okay" I scrunch my eyes up again, "Will you come to my sisters wedding with me as my fake boyfriend?" I curl up into myself as I say it, I can almost feel the bile rising up from my stomach. Like I'm having a biological reaction to the whole thing.

Reid crosses his arms and sinks back on the sofa, like he's performing the act of thinking. He's considering my offer to make me squirm.

When he finally speaks he says "Well I would Y/N, but I really fail to see what's in it for me" he's after getting cocky now.

Garcia pipes up, excited, "Oh, Oh! I know! I have an idea!" she interjects, "Spencer remember how a while ago, back after your apartment flooded you were all all worried about your antique books and prints and stuff?" he nods, "Well Y/N could digitize the collection for you as a back up? I know you're a technophobe? C'mon Y/N, you know you could do that no sweat, and it would take you a lifetime alone Spencer?" I really don't want to admit it but she's right. Even I knew Reid was adverse to any technology that wasn't vital, but it was your specialty. And maybe that was a good trade off, a job like that would be near impossible for him to pull off without help. I take a glance over at Reid and he seems to have had the same train of thought as me. He lets out an exaggerated sigh and relaxes his posture.

"Fine, I guess that's a fair trade. I'm in." he resigns and I almost can't believe it. I'm barely processing the whole conversation as he sticks his hand out to me, I'm confused for a second before I grab it and shake it firmly. Condemning myself to whatever's about to happen. And it's not the time to be thinking about it but maybe this is the first time Spencer and I have ever touched? But I shove that thought away.

Garcia's positively beaming and she's not even trying to hide it. "Now it's like you're both in a Sandra Bullock movie, oh, but you're Hugh Grant maybe?" she points to Reid.

"Don't push it" I shoot in her direction, taking a slice of pizza, now that my anxiety stomach has sort of passed.

Once the pizza's been eaten in near completely awkward silence Spencer stands up off the sofa. His unsure demeanor has returned and he looks nervous. "I actually should get going this time" he says but Garcia pipes up to protest,

"No, it's not even late!"

"It takes me a while to get back home, thank you though Pen. For... this?" he gestures to the whole living room, "Night" he waves. He's almost made it to the door before I stand up out of my seat. I'm not really sure what comes over me, maybe it's gratitude, maybe it's guilt, or maybe I'm just exhausted.

"Wait Spencer. Let me give you a ride home?" I ask and it's like it's not even me saying it .

"Thanks, but I think I can make it home just fine" he dismisses, and there’s an antagonizing tone in his voice that snaps me right back to our usual rapport.

"I'm trying to do a nice thing here, fuck! Just let me do something nice!" I snap, and he throws his arms up in surrender.

"Fine alright, if it'll make you feel better"

"Fuck you Reid" I mutter under my breath and I sort of hope that he does hear me really. If he's gonna be hostile about this I can be too. I give Garcia a hug goodbye but I'm going to scold her for this whole thing later.

----

I lead the way outside and climb into my car, Spencer hops into the passenger seat and it feels as strange as always to be alone with him. Especially because it's not an accident, and it's not in work. Maybe this was a horrible idea. He seems like he's unwilling to break the silence, so I just get it over with.

"Where the hell do you live man? I'm gonna need directions." I say, as deadpan as I can muster, which probably isn't all that intimidating.

"Sorry, yeah, so you're gonna want to turn on the ignition" he teases. I definitely wasn't intimidating enough.

"Don't push it" I say, turning to give him a cruel stare, he just reacts with a smirk, that same one from the elevator earlier.

"Oh, I'm pushing it?" he asks, feigning disbelief

"I'll kick you out of this damn car" is all I can think to say. He barely responds, he just lets out a soft chuckle. I want to ask 'what's so funny' but he speaks before I can get the words out.

"I can't believe you talk to your Mom about me" he continues to laugh. That's enough.

"You know what Reid, of course I have! I work with actual murderers on a daily basis and somehow you've been the only real source of friction in my life since I joined the BAU!" He stops giggling a little, but not entirely, he looks like he's making an effort to contain himself.

"I'm sorry. I guess I just never knew I got to you like that" he still finds the whole thing amusing, but I sure as hell don't.

"Directions, now" I demand, looking straight out the front windshield.

"Fine, keep going straight on this road for a while and I'll tell you when to turn" he says, finally playing nice.

The two of us drive silently for most of the journey, the radio playing softly in the background. Eventually we arrive outside his building, and it's nicer than I thought it would be. But I have no idea what I was really basing that on. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me that Dr. Reid lived in an actual home, I had pictured him sleeping upside down in a cave maybe, or in a cryogenic chamber with all the other life-like genius robots.

"So," he says, breaking the silence, "When is this wedding?"

"4 months from now, in and around" I respond, matter of factly. Spencer nods, taking it in.

"Alright, so I've got 4 months, in and around, to learn enough to convincingly pass as your loving boyfriend. Doesn't sound so difficult." he jokes, his tone harsh and sarcastic.

"Look Spencer, I know this is insane and honestly kind of stupid. But in all seriousness, you can back out right now if you're not on board with whatever this is. I'm telling you this is the last exit ramp." I try to say it with sincerity, giving him a genuine out if he's not comfortable with the weird set-up that Penelope pulled on us both. He thinks on it for a moment and shakes his head.

"So how are we gonna do this?" he asks, and I really thought he was going to back out. So I don't have an actual answer.

"Well, I uh, I haven't really given a plan much thought. How about I come over and start working on some of the stuff you want digitized like Garcia mentioned and I can use the time to give you the footnotes on my life?" I suggest, at least that would make it easier to knock things out all at once. Rather than having to spend even more of my free time with Reid than necessary. He looks content with the improvised plan.

"Alright, sounds good." he undoes his seatbelt and opens the door to hop out of the car before turning back to me, "Are you coming inside or what?"

— —

Next Chapter

Series Masterlist

Masterlist

[sharkselfies]

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast Transcript - Episode 1

Since some folks requested it on Twitter, I’ve started transcribing The Minds Behind The Terror podcast episodes! Below the cut you’ll find episode 1, where showrunners Dave Kajganich and Soo Hugh talk to Dan Simmons, the author of the novel The Terror, about episodes 1-3 of the show. They discuss Simmons’s initial inspiration for writing the book, the decisions they made to adapt it into a television series, and the depictions of some of the characters such as the Tuunbaq, Hickey, and “Lady Silence.”

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast - Episode 1 

[The Terror opening theme music plays]

Dave Kajganich: Hello! Welcome to Minds Behind The Terror podcast. I’m Dave Kajganich, I am a creator and one of the showrunners of the AMC show The Terror, and I’m here in the studio with executive producer and co-showrunner Soo Hugh.

Soo Hugh: Hello!

DK: And we welcome today the author of the sublime novel The Terror, on which our show is based, author Dan Simmons, calling in from Colorado. Welcome, Dan! Hi! 

Dan Simmons: Hi Dave, thank you. 

DK: So let’s start with the very beginning. This was a mystery from actual naval history that you decided to transform into a novel that was crossed with Gothic horror. Can you tell us a little bit about where you got the idea from this, how you went about preparing to write it, anything that can give us insight into how you blended all of these remarkable genres into this incredible book.

DS: I’ve known since I was a kid that I wanted to tell a story about either the North or South Pole. And the reason is in 1957, 58, when I was very young, actually I was just a fetus, they had the international geophysical year, and that really caught my imagination. Now the international geophysical year saw cooperation between American and Soviet scientists, it was the height of the Cold War, that’s the first time they submit(?) a permanent base at the South Pole, and I fell in love with Arctic stories. I had one book left on a book contract with a publisher I really liked, and we hadn’t decided what that book was, and I wanted to write a scary story about the Arctic, in this case the Northern Arctic, and that happened because I was doing a lot of research on Antarctica and just couldn’t figure out what the macabre, Gothic, scary part would be. I wanted to put it in, but I didn’t think they’d go for, you know, an eight foot tall vampire penguin. 

[laughter]

DK: You might be surprised! 

DS: There was a footnote on a book I was reading about the Franklin Expedition, which I had never heard of, and I decided that’s what I was gonna write about, and it had a tremendous amount of the unknown that I could fill in, that’s what novelists love. And so I told my editors excitedly that this was what I was gonna do, I would call it The Terror after the HMS Terror that went with the Erebus, got stuck in the ice, all the crew disappeared in history… And they said no. 

[laughter]

DS: ...it was the first time the publishers did that. I said, “Why not? I think it’s gonna be a pretty good novel.” And they said, “Look, nobody’s interested in a bunch of people that’ve been dead for 150 years.” 

SH: That sounds like some of our meetings.

[laughter]

DS: So I did what maybe you do, in such a meeting, I just thanked them, and I liked them all, and I had a good dinner(?) and I said goodbye, and bought back my last book on the contract and went out and wrote it on spec. 

SH: Well why don’t we take a step back, Dave, and why don’t you tell us about how you found Dan’s book and that experience?

DK: Sure! Dan, you might remember some of these steps from your side of it, which is that originally this was auctioned by Universal as a feature, and I sort of tried to get the rights and was a bit too late, and tracked them down to the producers at Universal who were running the project and got myself hired as the screenwriter for a feature adaptation. By the time I was ready to start actually committing an outline to the paper, Universal had let the rights go because there was a competing project. It was interesting to sort of rack up reasons why people wanted to make it but didn’t feel that they could pull the trigger, and we were so grateful when AMC finally called us back and said, “Look, we’ve figured out a model where we can do this as a limited series,” it really felt like ten episodes was a great length for this, because we could blend genres in a way that, you know, we could unpack sort of slowly, more slowly than a lot of shows would’ve done, and drive the plot as much as we could, like the novel, with character choices and decisions as opposed to just horror kind of entering the frame and taking over for one set piece after another. So it was a long journey, getting this to AMC, but at the end of the day I think we found the right home for it.

DS: I can no longer imagine a two hour version, feature film version of this story, and I can’t imagine a second season of this story, I think it was just right.

SH: It does feel like we did a ten hour cinematic novel. 

[audio from the show]

Crozier: Only four of us at this table are Arctic veterans. There’ll be no melodramas here--just live men, or dead men. 

SH: Dan, Dave and I talk about how addictive the research gets for this when you start going down the rabbit hole, how did you approach the research?

DS: I think most novelists run into that, but since I write a lot of quasi-historical novels, at least set in history, I get totally addicted to going down the rabbit hole. Readers say, “Well, Simmons’ book is too long, and the descriptions of things are too exhausting,” but I watch your characters go on deck and there are all the things and views and everything that I tried so hard to describe and then people tell me, y’know, “talky, verbose,” and in print I have to do it that way, but you just pan the camera a little bit. 

DK: You have words, we have images! For every thousand of yours, we get one!

DS: Yeah.

SH: But I remember this passage in your book where it talks about all the different ices, and you vest it with so much psychological import. We talk about that passage a lot in the writers room, it was one of our highlights, of this is how you do great descriptive writing.

DK: And you made so many parallels between things like the environments of the ships and characters, you built a kind of code book for the show without realizing you were doing it, which is making visual metaphors out of a lot of these things that would normally just be exposition or historical detail.

SH: Well especially between Crozier and the ship, I mean when you hear about Crozier’s relationship with Terror, and you have so many amazing passages about, you know, the groan of the ship and how it, y’know, and you cut to a scene with Crozier and how you feel that the bones of Crozier is embedded in the ship, and we really took a lot from that. 

DS: Well I noticed that on one of the episodes where Lord Franklin [sic] is trying to get back in touch with Crozier, you know, trying to be friends with him again, I think it’s a brilliant episode you guys wrote.

[show audio]

Franklin: You’ve succeeded in avoiding Erebus most of the winter.

Crozier: I’m a captain. I’m--I’m peevish off my own ship. I leave it and I hear disaster knocking at its door, before I’m ten steps away.

DS: And that was beautifully written, that. You got so much of Crozier right there.

DK: It was a pleasure to write these characters on the backs of your writing of these characters, because you really--I mean, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, as you know, from having written, you know, a whole long string of historical books, is to make these people’s psychologies feel as modern as they must have felt in their day, while still being able to articulate some of the blind spots of being from the eras they were from. 

I’m curious from sort of a history nerd point of view, if people watch the series and like the series, and read the book and like the book, and want to know more about this expedition, what’s the first book about the Franklin Expedition you would point people to? What was most helpful or most interesting in your research? 

DS: I apologize, I can’t think of the name of it, but it’s a collection of stories about both the South and North Pole, and so it’s a short section on the Franklin Expedition, but it didn’t make mistakes, and most of the other books that I read, uh, keyed, and videos for that matter, like PBS did a story about the Franklin Expedition, but they keyed off a 1987 attempt by several doctors to figure out what happened to the crew, and they exhumed three crewmen’s bodies from the first island where they stayed the first winter, and those crewmen had only been on the ship a couple of months, but they decided because of a high lead content that the lead had poisoned them and then made them stupid, and made them paranoid and everything, but they didn’t compare that test of lead with any background people in London at the time, and later they did, so I didn’t believe the lead thing.

DK: Well that’s the fascinating thing about a mystery with this many parts and pieces, kind of in flux, is, you know, you can create all kinds of competing narratives about it, and what’s fascinating about writing a fictional version is you can’t have that kind of ambiguity, you have to make a decision. I think people will enjoy very much ways that the show and the book have a similar point of view, and also ways that they diverge in their points of view, because there are so many ways to tell this story--

SH: Well you know how much we invest responsibility in the audience as well, right?

DK: Sure.

SH: In terms of your book and our show as well, we’re not against interpretation, that there’s a responsibility on the audience’s part to put together--we’re not gonna hand feed them. There’ll be some people who put more of an onus on Franklin, and others who would say, “You know, if I was in that position, I probably would’ve made the same decision,” “Oh no, this definitely killed the men,” “No, this killed them!” and that dialogue is exciting, you know, when you read fans talk about your show and your books and really smart, insightful ways. 

[show audio]

Franklin: Would it help if I said that I made a mistake? 

Crozier: You misunderstand me, Sir John, I--I only meant to describe why I brood, not that I judge.

DS: I don’t worry about who or what my reading audience is. People ask me about that and I don’t imagine a certain reader. But I’ve always tried to write for somebody who’s more intelligent than I am. My perfect reader would be just smart as hell, speak eight languages, you know, have fantastic world experiences, and I want to write something that will please that person, and I think your show does the same thing.

DK: Well we were--that was our motto! We wanted to be sort of the dumbest members of our collaboration and there’s a sort of horrifying moment when you realize that’s come true. 

[laughter]

[show background music]

DK: Tell us a little bit about why you made the decisions to tell the story in the order you told it, and whether you sort of felt like there was anything from the way you had told it that we were--or a missed opportunity. We’d love to know sort of what your experience of that was. 

DS: I don’t think there were any missed opportunities in terms of not adapting my way of telling it, and I can’t remember all the reasons for why I broke it down that way, some of them were just very localized to, you know, when I was writing that particular bit. But I do know that it gains a lot by being told chronologically the way you’re doing it, so for me that seems now the logical way to tell it again.

DK: Have you ever read the novel in chronological order? When we hired writers for the writers room, we gave them a list of what the chapters were like in chronological order, and I think we asked half the room to read it in your order and half the room to read it in chronological order so we could have a discussion, a meaningful discussion about whether there were things about telling it without being in chronological order that we wanted to embrace or not. It was a fantastic experience and I wonder if you’ve ever read your chapters in chronological order? ‘Cause it’s also a fantastic book!

[laughter]

DS: I haven’t read it that way, they were that way in my mind before I started getting fancy and breaking them up and moving them around in time and space, but I would love to have seen that experiment.

DK: The reason we can get away with it in the show is because there is a loved book out there that people trust, and you know, it is a classic in this genre, so I mean this is a perfect example of, you know, the amount of gratitude we owe the book, because we got away with a lot of things that maybe we wouldn’t have been able to get away with because you came before us. 

SH: And speaking of those rabid fans, Dan, it’s been really interesting reading audience reactions to the show from people who’ve loved the books and who just naturally will compare the two, and we’ve been heartened by just how supportive our fans have become--are of the show. There is this controversy, some people like our choice to give Lady Silence a voice and some people feel it was sacrilege to your book, where do you fall on that? DS: At first I was surprised. In fact when you were hunting for an actress for Lady Silence and I read about that, it said somebody who’s fluent in this Inuit language and this Inuit language, and I said, “What the hell?”

[show audio]

[Silna speaking Inuktitut to her dying father] 

DS: Having seen her with the tongue and heard her, and knowing the different reason they call her Lady Silence, it all works for me and I was also surprised when Captain Crozier could speak fairly fluent, you know, dialect, ‘cause I had him just not understanding a thing.

[show audio]

[Crozier speaking Inuktitut to Silna in the same scene as above]

DS: I love it when readers get rabid about not changing something from a book, and I have to talk to them sometimes, not ‘cause I have a lot of things adapted, this is the first one, but I love movies. They say “Aren’t you worried it will hurt your book?” and first I explain Richard Comden(?)’s idea that you can’t hurt a book anyway, except by not reading it, I mean the books are fine, no matter how bad some adaptation becomes. Books abide, and so I wasn’t concerned. With the changes that I see, I get sorta tickled, whereas some readers get upset, and they just have that set. So I think that the vast majority of viewers haven’t--well, I know the vast majority haven’t read the book, haven’t heard of the book, probably, they’re gonna keep watching because of the depth of the characters, and that’s based on the first two episodes, and I agree with them completely.

[show audio]

[Silna speaking Inuktitut]

Crozier: She said that if we don’t leave now, we’re going to “huk-kah-hoi.”

Blanky: Disappear. 

SH: We get asked a lot of questions about the supernatural element of the show and the way a monster does or does not figure in the narrative, and seeing our episodes, did it feel surprising or did it feel faithful to the way you imagined it as well to your book? 

DS: It was surprising to me at how well it was done, because it’s hard, I know, to show restraint in a series like this, and certainly in a movie, but it’s hard to show restraint at showing and explaining the monster. 

[show audio]

[ominous music, Tuunbaq roaring, men screaming]

DS: The way you did it in the first few episodes to me were just lovely, just, you know, a hint of a glance at something and then you see the results of this creature, so that’s what I tried to do in the novel, one of the reasons I moved around through space and time, part of what I wanted to do was not cheapen the story and not cheapen the reality of these poor men dying by just throwing in a monster, and so I tried to do it in a way that would not disrespect the true tale, and I believe you’re doing it the same way I tried. 

DK: The way you incorporated the supernatural into the book, I mean, I was a fan of it when I first read it. It was jaw dropping the way that it fits so well on a level of plot, on a level of character, and on a level of theme. So when we got the green light to adapt it I was so confident that we were going to be able to do something with it that would be able to be nuanced because the bones of it are so organically terrific.

SH: It helped us know what we didn’t want to do. That formed so much of our conversation, of “this is what we do not want, this is what we do not want,” and slowly you whittled down to getting down to the essence of what this thing had to be.

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq growling]

DK: Another character from the book that really stands out for fans that they are wondering what in the world we’re doing with is Manson. [laughter] And I was curious what you made of the fact that he is pretty invisible in the first three episodes of the show, and that some of his plot beats have been given to a character called Gibson, who I don’t remember is--I don’t think he’s featured very much in the novel. And I wondered if that caught you off guard or if you sort of intuitively had a sense of what we were doing in making that change? 

DS: Any discussion of Manson to me leads to Hickey converting him to his future, his tribe, the tribe he wants to have, group of worshippers, that I think Hickey wants to have, but he does it by sex below decks. Hickey’s not gay at all, he’s a manipulator, to me, and he was manipulating Manson who was big and dumb, in my book, he’s manipulating him by this sexual encounter. But I was curious whether you were worried about showing that?

DK: Well, we weren’t worried about showing characters having same-sex affairs or relationships. We wanted to make room in Hickey’s character for actual affection, or if not affection then companionship, or some kind of connection.

[show audio]

Hickey: Lieutenant Irving! I was hoping we’d meet. 

Crewman: Mind the grease there, sir. 

Hickey: I wanted to... thank you… for your help. For your discretion, I mean. 

Irving: Call it anything but help, Mr. Hickey. Please. I exercised clemency for a man abused by a devious seducer.

DK: We wanted to make sure that Hickey had access to command in some way that a steward, an officer’s steward, would be able to provide him, that an able seaman wouldn’t be able to provide him, and that was really valuable to us in terms of charting out all of these character stories, was how does he know what he knows about how command is dissatisfied or where the fractures are if he can’t see them from where he’s sleeps in his cot in the forecastle. 

SH: I mean we know that there were relations between the same sex on ships, it just was part of this world. Not to belie that there was serious consequences for it, but you know, we have 129 characters, and we wanted them to feel fully fledged and rich, and, you know, passions do naturally develop and have no characters engaged in sexual relations would have felt just as odd and perhaps even more controversial, and when Irving discovers Gibson and Hickey, his shock is from such a subjective point of view of his moral center. It’s not the camera’s perspective, right? Our camera’s very neutral in that scene. It’s Irving, that character at that point in the show, that is infusing a sense of horror, that’s his horror moment.

DS: I’d like to add that it’s not the gay connection that would cause criticism, but I was flayed alive because the most openly quote “gay” unquote character, that is, Hickey, you know, maybe hunting for affection but definitely hunting for power, he’s the only one they said in reviews, and he’s a killer and a bad person, so I’m homophobic, but I was flayed alive for that. The word homophobic appeared in about 80 reviews. Nobody mentioned the purser, who uh--

DK: Right, Bridgens and Peglar.

DS: Yeah. I thought he was a fascinating character. I loved getting glimpses of him in the series because he’s super smart, he’s super wise, he’s probably wiser than any of the commanders, ahd he’s obviously in love with--who is it that he’s in love with in the show?

DK: Peglar. 

DS: Yes, that makes sense. And, uh, so Peglar says, you know, “Is this another Herodotus?” and, “No, I’m giving you Swift now,” he’s educating the man he cares for. 

[show audio]

Hickey: I understand you cleared up our “association” for Lieutenant Irving? Gibson: You spoke to him.

Hickey: Mhm.

Gibson: Directly?

(beat)

Christ, Cornelius, I’d reassured him.

Hickey: Cornelius Hickey is a “devious seducer.” That was your--that was your reassurance? You’ve got some face, you know that? 

DK: We wouldn’t have dramatized Hickey’s story if we weren’t also going to pull in Peglar and Bridgens’ story, because we knew that people, you know, are predisposed to sort of make that kind of quick assumption, and we just wanted to make sure that the show didn’t have that blind spot and reflected the book, which also doesn’t have that blind spot. 

SH: We had those same questions with Lady Silence, and I’m sure you did as well. When we meet her, she’s a frightened young woman who’s about to lose her father, and that’s a universal character moment that anyone can relate to, and the otherness is sort of--is secondary, but then once--in the end scene of 1.02, when she’s sitting there grieving her father and then you have that language barrier with everyone else, we worked with Nive on this because we wanted to make sure the language itself was as accurate as possible, so when you say disappear making sure that the disappear in our language means the same thing as disappear in her language. I think whenever you have characters that feel othered in most media and you’re bringing them into your show, Dave and I also just wanted to make sure we weren’t swaying on the pendulum on the other side and being almost too careful about touching them, and with Nive I think when you have an actor of that talent, she was strong, she was representing a voice that she felt very confident in, and that was very reassuring for us.

DS: And it works well, and when her father’s dying, she throws herself on his chest and says “I’m not ready, it’s too soon, I’m not ready,” and I love that in the show because if she’s gonna become a Shaman he’s dying you know it’s not reached that point of education yet where she feels secure and later on you know beyond what we’re discussing today she becomes to me in the show I see her as more and more majestic.

SH: I do love the word majestic ‘cause I think it describes pretty much all of our characters. I agree, I do think there is something very sublime about who they have become at the end because when you go through that much trials and tribulations, it’s this beautiful human spirit to endure. 

DS: I think that’s one of the central themes of the story that you’ve brought out so clearly. In most post-apocalypse, you know, terrible situation movies and shows, everybody turns nasty as hell, they start shooting each other, it’s just like WWIII when they should be helping each other survive, and I found even though there was controversy, even though there was opposition in this story, people opposing against each other, still that they rose to the occasion. And that is so rare I think in much media these days or even books where the characters are themselves and they do the best they can, and when things get bad they rise to the occasion.

DK: The first conversation you and I had about the book, you know, I was basically pitching you sort of what I thought thematically the book was about, and I talked a lot about, that in a disaster like this, a kind of moral emergency, that we would get a chance to unpack what is sort of best and worst in these characters’ souls.

DS: I confuse readers often when I was on book tour for this book, and it was a long time ago, I’ve written a few million words since then, but I confused people by saying that if you want a theme for the survival story of The Terror, it’s love. It’s love between the men. And just unstinting love. And this came out in a piece of dialogue, in the first two episodes.

[audio from the show]

Franklin: I’ll not have you speak of him uncharitably, James. He is my second. If something were to happen to me, you would be his second. You should cherish that man. 

Fitzjames: Sometimes I think you love your men more than even God loves them, Sir John. 

Franklin: For all your sakes, let’s hope you’re wrong. 

DS: That to me was right the theme I was working with, and with Crozier who shows it a different way, with Fitzjames who’s struggling to show leadership, and between the men despite their hierarchy and the British hierarchy, the rank and lieutenants and so forth, eventually they come down to loving the men they try to save. And I found that lovely. 

[The Terror opening theme music plays]

DK: Thank you so much for listening to The Minds Behind The Terror, join us in our next edition when we talk about episodes 4-6 with the additional guest Adam Nagaitis phoning in from London. We will see you soon!

[preview snippet from the next episode plays]

DS: I’ll confess something else to Adam, the first time I watched it, I thought your character was a good guy because he jumped down in that grave to put the lid back on.

[laughter]

[quirklessidiot]

Title: filthy rich [3/3]  Pairing: millionaire!sakusa kiyoomi x y/n [filthy capitalist au] Genre: mystery, major angst ahead, thriller, mafia!au-ish

Synopsis: Just run, Y/N. Don’t look back.

Warnings: dark and yandere themes, toxic relationships, mentions of violence, shady business, class differences, mentions of rape, smoll breeding kink, unwanted pregnancy, mentions of abortion, and sakusa being a manipulative bastard 

Notes: 

Im disappering again for a week or two so as a parting gift, here ya go, im starting a bokuto fanfic soon and posting the reboot of notice me soon too hnnng thanks for the wait guys uwu

A sorta realistic take on a yandere is harder than it looks kssjdn omg anyways here yall go the long awaited last chapter of filthy rich. I’m not sure if I should put like a one shot sequel but so far im marking this series completed. Thanks for sticking by!

previous || series masterlist || blood son [sequel;one shot]

You run your hands through your hair and shut your eyes tight, the quietness and stillness of your shared apartment was something to bask on before you put on a fake mask of happiness. It had been exactly two months since you found out about the birth control switch and the medaide agenda. 

In the span of those two months, you had grown more observant towards your boyfriend’s actions and you knew that it wouldn’t be anytime soon until he actually notices that you were onto him. 

You let out a shaky breath as you recollected some weird things you’ve seem to have noticed, how his brows would furrow when he’d receive a call indicating that something was up and it was serious or how you visited your ex-boss one time a week or so ago along with Kenjiro since you wanted to see how he was doing.

“...Well, he just didn’t come home and sold the place. Apparently he was in a rush to move or something because of family matters so I didn’t exactly see him.” the neighbor gossiped to you two.

“Y/N?”

You jump on your spot as you hear that dreadfully familiar voice.

“Hey,” You greet, walking up to him, you decide to do your usual hug but stop when you notice a small red stain on his necktie, the tie is dark blue and although it wasn’t obvious from afar, it definitely was up close. Your brows are furrowed together, this time in pure curiosity, “Did you get hurt? It’s unlike you to get messy.”

You notice the quick shift of attitude in his eyes, you were seemingly getting good at observing his emotions these days and it looked like he panicked for a second there.

Odd.

“A friend of mine had gotten hurt a while ago, you remember Atsumu Miya?”

A vivid image of a blonde man crossed your mind, he was another conglomerate friend of your boyfriend, another person to be weary of to add to the list, “Oh, is he alright?” you asked, trying to keep it casual as you untie his tie for him as usual.

“Yes. He’s awfully clumsy. You don’t need to worry.”

“Oh…” You mumbled, “by the way, I visited my ex-chief.”

“Ex-chief?”

“Mhm.” you hummed, “You know, my boss from before? Me and a few co-workers decided to visit him since he was a really good boss. Turns out he just left without telling anyone, poor man.”

“Sounds unpleasant. Did you know why he quit?”

“No.” You shrugged as you take the tie out and place it on the side, “He suddenly just quit his job and moved, neighbors said it was also because of family matters. It’s kinda weird because as far as we knew, he didn’t have a family.”

“Would you like me to look into it?”

You almost stiffen when he slithers his arms on your waist but you didn’t want to give away any suspicion, “No. I don’t want to pry. Hopefully he’s enjoying his retirement.” You sighed, turning towards him with a tight smile, “Now what would you like for dinner? I was thinking Mediterranean? I need to lose some weight since I’ve been feeling bloated for a while.”

He leans in for a soft kiss on your temple, “Mediterranean would be fine. Would you like anything else? We could order more.” he hummed, his lips slowly started to dangerously hover on top of yours.

“No, it’s fine.” You give him a quick peck and wiggle your way out of his arms, your stomach doesn’t feel well these days. Whenever you were near Sakusa you had the urge to throw up your innards despite having an empty stomach.

You don’t notice the dangerous gaze on your behind as you pick up the phone for your take-out.

Sakusa hasn’t felt you in a long time and it’s driving him insane, he wants to feel your heat, your body, and everything in between. He wants to fill you up and see you pregnant with his children. He wants everyone in the world to know you were his and his only.

Yet he can’t do that.

You’ve ignored his affections these past few weeks and it had been driving him insane to the point where he had to ask one of his men to put an eye on you to see if you had been cheating on him or seeing someone else.

Yet you hadn’t.

Your routine was the same old one and Sakusa is digging his nails deeply into his skin in his office one day with his tie uncharacteristically untied. Miya Atsumu sits across him, taking a sip from his flask, “Ya look like shit.” the blonde points out.

“Fuck off, Miya.”

“Heard from your cousin that you’re not getting laid by your girl these days.”

“You better be thankful that you’ve got men behind you or I’d be shooting your fucking brains out for saying that.” Sakusa spats, his dark gaze pointedly looking at the blonde across him.

“You should just find someone else then and not yer prude of a-”

“Keep telling me ideas like that and maybe I might just shoot you and chop your body up until it looks fuckin’ unrecognizable.”

Atsumu raises his hands up, signaling that he was giving up, “Gee, omi-omi. I was just giving my advise. It’s so easy to drop her.”

“I don’t want to drop what’s mine.”

“You’ve got issues.” He chuckles, “Haven’t you been switching out her pills and fucking her raw for the last couple of months? I bet yer ass you got her pregnant on that before but ya just don’t know it. Getting her pregnant would definitely secure her spot in her life. Woman’s nuthin’ without ya.”

“She’s...she’s not showing…”

“When was the last time ya two went at it?”

“Two months ago.”

“Ya poor boy.” Atsumu sighs, shaking his head, “Ya sure you don’t want to take a break from being a loyal boyfriend for one night? i bet Y/N wouldn’t notice.”

“And no one would notice if you fucking disappeared. I’ll make sure of it, now get out.”

You may not have been the sharpest tool on the shed but you know that someone’s been tailing you these past few days, you’re not stupid. You could only come to the conclusion that it was Sakusa who was doing such things but you couldn’t get why.

Something just didn’t make sense. It felt like you were missing an important piece in the puzzle, med-aide and the switch of your pills and now a hidden tail?

You furrow your brows together in deep thought  as you sat down next to a teenage boy on his phone, you decided to take the bus today to the grocery store, surprisingly the one tailing you wasn’t around today.

Your eyes slowly shift towards the boy’s phone, it seemed like he was playing a video game.

An otome game, to be exact.

You felt your lips twitch up, you remembered those games a lot growing up. The graphics seem to have massively improved now by the looks of it, “...That looks interesting.” You tell the teenage boy who turns to you in surprise.

“Oh, thanks.” the blonde replied quietly.

“Is that a new otome game?”

“Kind of.” He blinks, his gaze returning back to the screen,  “It’s sort of a remake of the yandere simulator from back then.”

You feel your shoulders tense up.

“A yandere?”

“Yeah.” The blonde nods, “The girl’s awfully creepy in the game, she stalks him, does things to get him. The player has to catch her in the act and evade her at the same time.”

“Oh…” You blink, “I-uh, this is weird… but what’s a yandere again?’

“It’s someone obsessively in love with you. They’ll do anything to have you stay by them.” He says, pushing on a button but suddenly the screen turns red and you feel shivers run down your spine as you hear him curse and the words ‘you’re caught’ appear on the screen.

“W-what happened to your character?”

“He died. Nothing much.” he mumbles, “If the Yandere knows they can’t have you, they’ll kill you.”

You immediately went pale as soon as you heard that. Maybe, just maybe you were being paranoid. He wouldn’t go to that extent, would he?

“How did your character escape the yandere in the game?” 

“Well, I haven’t finished the game yet but based on some anime’s and manga’s I've usually read. They either killed to get away or they moved so far away where they wouldn’t be seen so I think the creator might have the same ending.” The blonde said, he slowly looked to your side, “You’re looking awfully pale, ma’am. Are you alright?”

“Yeah, j-just remembered a horrible game I played back when I was your age.” You gulped in, “Nightmares, you know? The yandere tried to get my character pregnant and tried to get in her way of moving out of the country.”

“Sounds like a very realistic one.”  He mumbles, “What did your character do?”

“I wasn’t able to finish it.” you whispered, loud enough for him to only hear, “I couldn’t really find a way out.”

“The developers of the game must’ve made it hard for you. Maybe your character should’ve ran away,” he advised, “Or better yet, you should’ve killed him.”

“I-well, I don't think there were options like that.”

“Well if I were you and there was no option for killing, I’d run. Far, far away. Change my identity and all that.” he exits the game and stuffs the phone back in his pocket, you get a good look of his cat-like eyes and immediately feel a shiver on your spine with the next words he say, “I mean its a game but you wouldn’t wanna loose and get your character killed, right?”

“R-right.”

The teenage boy hops down without even saying goodbye and you have a scary realization that you can’t break it off like you originally had planned. You needed to run, run far as you can and get lost.

The words that the teenage boy says echoes in your head for the next few days, from that point on, realization dawns upon you that, nothing is certain now. You couldn’t trust anyone, you couldn’t let friends and family be involved in this. Sakusa Kiyoomi is a powerful man so you needed to be careful with how you were going to disappear.

You continue to act nonchalant and the same as you try to lay out your plan but you knew that you had only a week or so to complete this for it to successfully work.

Sakusa Kiyoomi wonders what he should do to save the relationship, he’s tried everything in the book that he could think of but you remained the same. Was this the end of the relationship? For real?

He could never stomach the idea of having you leave him.

It’s eerie that day, something felt different when he came home to an empty apartment. It looked the same yet something felt very, very different. Apparently the apartment guards said you were here since your car hadn’t left the driveway and they hadn’t seen you go out.

He checks out your side of the closet, your clothes remain there untouched and your toiletries were there too. He scans the fridge for your notes but nothing is stuck there. He suddenly feels like something cold was dumped on him.

It couldn’t be, right?

Right?

He runs to every room, checking every nook and cranny and when he finally reaches the last room which was the bathroom, nothing is there.

Everything was in its place except you.

Where were you?

Your bank account remains untouched, your wallet and phone was left in the apartment. It was as if you were returning home, the very least. Komori tells him to calm down, saying that they’re letting the best people find you around the city, they don’t rule out that someone might’ve had the audacity to touch you.

Whoever took you would be given hell to pay, that’s for sure. Was it the triad? Kkangpae’s? Or opposing yakuza’s? Oh, they’ll definitely have their heads on the platter if they tried to harm a single hair on your head.

Sakusa doesn’t even hesitate to notify the police about you already despite the memorandum that twenty-four hours is needed to consider a person missing, it's nothing a little money can fix.

“I hope we find her soon.” Your aunt sighed, “I’ve notified her parents about it. It’s definitely weird that she’d leave all her valuables behind.”

Hinata and Natsu sit there next to their mom, completely sad and worried, “I’ve hired the best people for it already, obaasan. We’ll find Y/N.” Sakusa replies yet his thoughts are in a complete frenzy now.

And find you they did.

No stone was left unturned. He made sure of it. Yet after a month of relentless searching. Nothing came up, it seemed like you had just vanished and Sakusa Kiyoomi had turned the whole underground world upside down for you but nothing came up.

Some say that you disappeared and ran away but that was immediately ruled out, no security cameras saw you in and out during that day and it would be impossible for you to just leave without security cameras on you. The guard had exclaimed that despite the blackout that day, the generators only took a few minutes to power up so they’d definitely catch you on camera in case you ever exited the building (along with the guards since they knew exactly what you looked liked) plus the clothes and such were still there, left untouched.

Some said you died, it was definitely impossible for you to just vanish without a single trace after all since everyone was looking for you.

Yet no one dared to say it in front of the boss, not if they valued their life.

The billionaire had dried out his connections to find you. What good was it to be the most powerful and richest man in the country if he couldn’t find you? Life had no meaning now, you were gone. It felt like a part of him was ceasing to function.

Sakusa Kiyoomi was a dead man walking now.

Unknown to the whole world, you’re in a small town with little to no signal. Your hair is chopped unevenly and your skin is darker from the repeated exposure under the sun, your life is simple and mundane now yet you’re happy.

For the first time in months, you actually felt free.

You shut your eyes tight, the events that transpired this past few months replayed  in your head. Your escape was definitely done as carefully as you can and you didn’t even know if you’d succeed since you weren’t a master in that sort of thing.

You recalled that it was a week before you ran away, a few days after you met that kid in the bus. Someone from the electric company had come to inform you that there was a scheduled black out in the city that day during the afternoon and you felt something bubble up in you. That was the day you’d put your plan into motion.

You knew that the longer you delayed your plan, the harder it would be to escape.

You had a few minutes to actually put your plan to work. The camera’s on the hallways would cease to function for a few minutes according to the guard downstairs as he did a protocol on the building (apparently the generators were quick). So that morning after Sakusa left, you placed only a few clothes and the stash of money you had been carefully hiding in a garbage bag and chopped your hair short in an uneven manner. Burning all the remaining hair on the fireplace and the black hair color that you use with it. The maid uniform that you stole on your floor and a fake name plate that you made was on and you were good to go.

The minute the black out started, you took the garbage bag and walked out. Taking the stairway used by the caretakers, you made sure to just look down and never directly up at the camera’s pretending to work.

When you finally made it out of your building. You let out a stiff sigh and put down the bag, it was only the beginning. If you thought the same way as Sakusa Kiyoomi, you could only imagine that you needed to be more careful from this point on.

You take the newly bought duffel bag that you strategically hid behind some boxes. Thankfully when you had placed it yesterday afternoon, it hadn’t been touched. 

You put on a pair of shorts and a baggy shirt with cheap shades and stuffed the maid uniform in the duffel bag along with your belongings in the garbage bag. You take the other route that led to the busy streets. It was easy to look like a tourist and seemingly blend in the crowd, from that point on, you only had one destination in mind.

When you were younger, you vividly remember an acquaintance telling you about this small town outside of Tokyo where her grandparents were from. It was only an hour away via plane and when you went down another few hours via bus yet if you took the bus route all in all, it would take a few days.

Since it was far, only a few busses actually went there and since you had to leave within the day, you decided to just take the bus nearest to that town and take another bus when you arrived there.

The plan smooth-sailed from that point on.

Except for one minor detail.

You open your eyes and look down at your now small bump. The monster who almost had you trapped left a parting gift, you grip your garden hoe tightly.

A big part of you wanted to kill it.

Yet every time you try to, you hesitate.

The moment you arrived here, you had to pretend to be a weary and poor widow. You just didn’t expect to be a weary and poor expecting widow. You let out an uncharted sigh at the thought, it was hard enough to be alone here with little to no money. 

This child had the demon’s blood in it.

Yes, you may have gone free from his cage but in truth with his seed growing in your stomach day by day, you started to feel quite the opposite.

taglist [thanks for your support ilyasm skkss im so sorry for updating late too :(]

@maraudusk ;; @iamnotobsessed  ;;  @ssuna ;; @weebartistinc ;; @aomineavenue ;; @tsukkismamagucci ;; @onlyshinji ;; @ichiraku-verse ;; @watevermelon ;; @victoriasee ;;  @caramelcandescence ;; @n-nara ;; @bloody-bella ;; @ricefarmerkita​ ;; @paripedia ;; @srhlsx ;; @craftyfawns ;; @kepchups ;; @soggycardboardd ;;  @vinnieluv ;; @dinablossom ;; @yourstruly-01 ;; @shinhiromi ;; @dinablossom ;; @kneecotinee ;;  @vicassa ;; @ahoeforshouto ;; @benimarus-main-mop​ ;; @atsunakaashi​ ;; @myaaa-xoxoxox​ ;;  @newfriendjen​​ ;; @usedcoupon​

@kn0xiousnight  

[can’t tag you guys uwu just make sure ur tags are open :<]

[kim-ruzek]

Girl Crush

Summary: This time, Sylvie does not laugh at the bluntness of Kim’s words, instead blushing a fierce shade of pink. She was only half looking at Kim when she said those words, but now Sylvie looks at the other woman more directly. She is greeted by Kim looking at her—although, maybe staring would be more accurate. It’s an intense look, a look her friend has never given her before, a look that says that maybe Kim doesn’t want to be just her friend tonight.

Or; at the end of 3x23, Sylvie doesn't go home with Roman-- but instead with Kim. And gets the fucking she deserves.

Warnings: Smut, smut, smut. This is just my excuse to give Sylvie the orgasm she deserves and the one she clearly did not get with Ratman. And so there's also Roman bashing bc Roman is trash.

Word Count: 4.5k

Read on AO3

Notes: For @gilbxrt-blythe bc Abby started™ something in my mind on Sunday, thus leading me to writing this all yesterday bc,,, our girls deserve so much better than Sean Roman and this fandom needs more wlw content. Let's save our darling girls!!

Someone’s hooking up tonight.

Chili’s words go around in Sylvie’s head all night. Largely, she ignores them—or rather, tries to—just focusing on the beer she’s sipping faster than usual and the joyous atmosphere in the bar but there’s those moments it creeps into her thoughts.

Her PIC is right about one thing, the thing she said about volcanoes. The firehouse has been so tense of late and she can tell that a weight has been lifted off them, and Sylvie thinks that’s quite like a volcano. But she—perhaps, stubbornly—refuses to admit Chili might be right about the hooking up part.

If anyone was to know Sylvie’s thoughts, know that she’s trying, more vehemently that she should, to deny that, they question why. To which Sylvie would just claim that it’s because she hates gossiping about her co-workers, people who are her friends are family, and that she doesn’t like speculating on their sex lives.

Sylvie even tried to insist this to herself, not that it works. How can it when she can feel her toes curl slightly at the thought of just... Throwing everything to the wind and just enjoying some pure, unadulterated primal ecstasy. That she finds herself subconsciously looking around the bar, as if she’s trying to find a suitable candidate.

She has always felt the weight of her friends’ turmoil so heavily. Empathetic to the core, her father said, when he grinned at her becoming a paramedic, telling her it’s what she was born to do. She likes it, she does. She likes caring about those important to her, to care about anyone who’s a decent human—and even those who aren’t—but it gets tiring, feeling the weight of their unhappiness on her shoulders.

It’s not even like she was directly wrapped up in the drama going around in the house, but it was so intense—a volcano getting ready to burst. And something tells her that she won’t be able to shake it off with just getting drunk amongst her friends.

“Hey, Brett,” Sylvie looks to her left, seeing Sean Roman slip into the seat beside her. The paramedic smiles at him, ever polite, turning so she’s more face on to him. He was close to her before she shifted, and she thought that would be annoying, if he wanted to converse.

Only, Sylvie quickly gets that he doesn’t have talking on mind.

The patrol officer is quick to close the space between them again, shifting himself and resting a hand on the back edge of her seat. She could get away if she wanted, but it gives off a certain trapped vibe, a vibe that shows exactly the kind of intentions Roman has.

There’s a twist of uncomfortableness in her stomach. Roman is sort of attractive, she guesses, although she doesn’t know if she’d fully trust her taste in men yet; there being too many wrongly stacked choices compared to the right. But even if he was the hottest specimen she had ever seen, there’s something off putting about his approach, leaving her with the impression he doesn’t want her to move away from him.

But there’s that volcano inside her, wanting to explode, and the alcohol is already coursing through her veins, so despite the sober parts of her brain metaphorically screwing up its nose at the officer, Sylvie doesn’t attempt to move again, instead leaning on her arm, interested in whatever he has to say.

“I’ve got a few more interesting stories like that, if you want to hear more?” Roman smiles hungrily at her, his eyes making her feel like a piece of meat. He had just finished telling her an amusing story from patrol and she gets the impression that’s his hook, and that now he’s trying to reel her in.

“The bar’s a bit loud, though. So we should go back to mine,” There it is, the beginning of the reel. He’s looking hopeful at her, and there’s an attempt to look appealing, sexy. It doesn’t work, but Sylvie finds herself shrugging, thinking that she could do a lot worse that Sean Roman.

“Hey, Sylvie. Roman.” Before she can agree, Kim appears, seemingly out of nowhere.

The brunette is on the other side of her, her arm lightly touching her as she greets them. In a way, Kim is affectively penning Sylvie in like her partner did, but it doesn’t make her stomach twist in that same uncomfortable way. There’s some meaning to that, she knows, but she doesn’t bother to reflect on what.

“Hey, Burgess.” Roman seems irked. He’s looking at her rather rudely, and Sylvie doesn’t like that. She cares about her friends and Kim is one of her first Chicago friends who doesn’t work with her. So she grins at her a little wider then she already would, wrapping her arms around the other officer.

“Hey, Kim!” If Roman picks up on the pointedness in Sylvie’s tone, he doesn’t let on.

“Hi,” Kim smiles at her again, repeating a greeting before continuing and Sylvie must be a little more tipsy than she thought because her mind is immediately drawn to how pretty Kim looks when she smiles. “Chili had to leave early and asked me if I could drive you home instead. She said sorry, but there was a cute guy who she needed to know a bit better,”

Sylvie knows instantly that Kim is lying. Chili asked no such thing, considering she wanted to get absolutely wasted tonight and had no intention of driving herself home, let alone Sylvie. This lie is an anchor, a get out of jail card, a bailout. For who, she doesn’t know—doesn’t think that she’s too drunk to need it, but she takes it anyway.

“Oh, she promised she wouldn’t!” Sylvie goes along with the lie Kim has spun. “I’m sorry for inconveniencing you,”

“Eh. It’s no problem.” Kim shrugs her off with a wave of a hand.

“I was actually about to leave myself. I can take Brett, you can just relax. That way I can continue telling her some patrol stories,” Roman inserts himself back in the conversation but Kim has no patience for him.

“We’re partners, I can tell her the stories. C’mon, Sylvie, let’s go.” Kim gently encourages Sylvie up. There’s a disappointment at not being able to expend all this tension away, but girl code is more important, and girl code is telling her to go with Kim.

“We have to walk around the block—I don’t actually have my car, so we’ll have to call a taxi.” Kim tells her when they leave Molly’s, arms linked. Neither of them are anything more than tipsy, but Sylvie finds herself giggling at her words.

“Then why did you drag me out? Was a guy bothering you?” She asks.

“Oh, trust me, I did that for you. You’d regret that so much tomorrow. The guy’s my partner and all, but he... I was on patrol with his ex. Going there—that wouldn’t give you any sort of satisfaction.” Kim explains, and Sylvie widens her eyes, giggling again.

“Really?” The irony of Sylvie spending the evening denying that she cares about gossip saying this, leaning in with intrigue, is not lost on her.

“Jenn didn’t say anything outright but... I asked why she got engaged so quickly and she expressed that he—her fiancé—is very talented with his tongue, if you get what I mean. I inferred the rest. A man who won’t eat out his girl is not a man worth your time.” Kim says very manner of fact, and Sylvie laughs at it, the brunette joining in shortly after.

“It’s the truth!” Kim insists through her laughter. They’ve walked around the corner, now, Kim quickly dialling for a taxi through her laughs.

“My ex fiancé never did.” Sylvie confesses when their laughter died down. Kim lifts an eyebrow.

“Never?”

“Never. He said it was disgusting. Didn’t stop him wanting me to suck him, though.” Sylvie can’t help the bitter edge to her words, thinking about Harrison and thinking about how she could waste her time on him. Kim, evidently, thinks the same.

“Life is too short for those kinds of men.” Kim says. Her words are assured, confident, just a statement and Sylvie just hums in response, thinking that Kim probably never wasted years like she did.

“Hey, Sylvie. I don’t mean that like... You deserve so much better.” Kim picks up on her sudden drop of mood. “I don’t know why we lower ourselves for arses like that, but you deserve so much better. Better than people like Harrison and Roman.”

“So do you—if your exes never..?” Sylvie quickly adds on and Kim lets out a snort.

“Oh yeah. I’ve dated my fair share of arseholes.” She nods. “I don’t know why they’re like this. You’re so pretty, I don’t know how anyone could want to fuck you and not completely worship you.”

This time, Sylvie does not laugh at the bluntness of Kim’s words, instead blushing a fierce shade of pink. She was only half looking at Kim when she said those words, but now Sylvie looks at the other woman more directly. She is greeted by Kim looking at her—although, maybe staring would be more accurate. It’s an intense look, a look her friend has never given her before, a look that says that maybe Kim doesn’t want to be just her friend tonight.

It deepens Sylvie’s blush.

The air between them immediately shifts, and it feels almost so natural, Sylvie finds herself questioning whether the air always felt this thick and charged. The air is heavy, and there’s this certain kind of electricity between them; an electric energy of sorts that reminds her of when she was eighteen and her friends and her caught a ride into the nearest big town and snuck into the club—and of Sylvie waiting outside for her friends after and sharing her first—and only—kiss with a girl.

“That’s cos we’re women, though? We know what we want.” Sylvie tries to push all those thoughts aside.

Tries to ignore what she feels building in the air—because surely, it’s just in her mind? Just because she was thinking about throwing caution to the wind and having a night of passionate, explosive sex—and tries to not focus on how pretty Kim looks, how she looks like she’s the best and worst decision she could ever make wrapped up in one.

On how Kim is looking at her with such intense eyes, almost hungry eyes, eyes that says she wants to be one of those men.

“That’s not just why. I wouldn’t just eat you out until you come screaming because I’m a woman, I’d do it because I want to make you come undone at my doing—like you deserve.” Kim’s words sends pulsating throbs through her body, and she can feel herself getting turned on, her body feeling like Kim has just found the secret code to her with just her words. Sylvie stares at Kim, with shock.

“You... I... What?” Sylvie splutters, unsure of what exactly Kim is saying.

“I’m just saying. You’re hot, Brett. I can see why Roman tried.” There’s a pause. “I’m not trying to ruin our friendship. Tell me if I’m wrong, that I’m not picking up on some things and I’ll shut up and just get you home. But if I’m right, I’ll fuck you right.”

“I...” Sylvie is facing Kim dead on, now, the space between them feeling like too much, electric and heavy. It’s dark, the only light being the street lamp. But it catches the side of Kim’s face, lighting it up in such a pretty way and it stirs something deep and primal inside her.

The dark, positively hungry eyes Kim is looking at her with doesn’t help, either. It’s not like earlier, with Roman, it doesn’t make her feel like a piece of meat. It makes her feel like she’s the world’s most precious delicacy and that Kim would give her left arm just to get a taste.

“You’re right.” The words are barely out of her mouth when Kim is closing the space between them. One of her arms slips around the blonde’s waist, pulling her flush to her, the other gently resting on the bend of Sylvie’s neck as she kisses her.

Kim’s lips are soft, her touch gentle. The kiss starts off slow, although Sylvie wouldn’t have thought it with the way her body immediately responds, aching and her heart beating. But then Kim deepens the kiss, encouraging her mouth to open wider, slipping in her tongue. Sylvie responds eagerly, her arms wrapping around Kim, practically grabbing hold of her so she can return the kiss more fiercely.

If this was a preview into the abilities of Kim’s tongue, Sylvie doesn’t think that she’ll have to work her long before—to use Kim’s words—Sylvie’s coming undone at her doing.

When the taxi arrives, honking it’s horn on the two, busy kissing each other like they’re the only people in the world, the alcohol running through their veins and their and respective tiring days edging them on, making them so filled with want for this, they pull apart, out of breath, chest heaving.

They share smiles, little light-hearted giggles as they pull apart, climbing into the taxi. Kim opens the door, grabbing at Sylvie’s hand as she does so before moving swiftly out the way so she can climb in first.

They don’t make out in the taxi. They’re not even jammed up too close together, their bodies just turned towards each other. They are close enough for them to still have their hands interlocked, although it’s more like their arms at places and for their feet to lightly tap at the other’s, playing a footsy kind of game but they’re friends, they shared a taxi before, they’ve even had this ease of physical contact before.

Sylvie would almost wouldn’t be able to tell that the line between friends and lovers had been blurred for tonight, if it wasn’t for the electric energy between them, from how Sylvie’s just waiting until they can get back to hers, and how whenever Kim moves her fingers up and down her arm, gently running against her skin, it feels like little shocks.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been to yours,” Kim says as Sylvie leads her up the stairs. They’re deviating between holding hands and not, joking around as they make their way. Sometimes Kim’s spinning ahead of her, their hands dropping from their grip, and sometimes Sylvie is.

“We have only known each other a year and we have busy jobs.” Sylvie points out. Kim sticks out her tongue playfully and Sylvie has to stop herself from capturing it, and kissing Kim again. “This is me.”

Sylvie goes in first, opening her front door and placing her keys in her pot. Kim follows, and Sylvie watches as the brunette kicks off her shoes immediately, shrugging off her coat. For someone who’s never been here before, Kim fills the air with a confidence and it only fuels Sylvie’s need, her own confidence as the volcano erupts.

With a swift kick, Sylvie shuts her door and then her hands are on Kim, pulling her close. She grabs her hand, stopping her from moving further away from her, pulling her to her and capturing her lips in a kiss.

“Hm,” Kim moans against her, kissing her with a casual, yet urgent force. The melodic hum is tinted in amusement, and she pulls away briefly, to Sylvie’s disappointment. “So, we’re going straight to this? Aren’t even going to ask if I want a beer?”

Her words are said in an amused tone, but Sylvie still finds herself blushing, cursing herself slightly.

“Oh. Right. Sorry. Do you—” She’s interrupted by Kim kissing her.

“You’re so easy to tease. Don’t worry, I don’t want anything to drink. Eat, maybe.” Sylvie goes to panic again but then she sees the glint sparkling away in her eye and she blushes, getting the play on words.

“Hm, well there’s only one thing on the menu if you’re,” she pauses, “Hungry,”

Sylvie could swear that Kim licks her lips but then the brunette is kissing her again and all thoughts go out of her head, the only thing on her mind being the taste of Kim and getting her to her bedroom as soon as she can.

Neither of them are determined to disconnect from one another for long, not even in the interest in getting to her bed unscathed from injuries. Kim hits into the sofa and Sylvie nearly trips over something she left on the floor, but the two stay touching, kissing each other hungrily and needily.

Sylvie would love to say that she savoured the moment Kim took off her top, but any clothes removed is done hastily, urgently, the clothes feeling too much, too intrusive. All Sylvie can do is give Kim a quick, appreciative look over after she tosses off her top.

Although, she thinks, that could do more with that Kim then helps her get her top off, and rewards her with her lips on her neck immediately after.

“There,” Sylvie manages to gasp out, pointing at which door is her bedroom’s, as Kim pushes her up against her wall, attacking her neck, nipping and sucking at the flesh. She’s going to have a mark there tomorrow, but tonight, tonight she doesn’t care, just tilting her head aside for her to have more access, her hands just grabbing at Kim as she does so.

Despite the urgency to get this far into her apartment, Kim has apparently decided they don’t need to finish the stretch right now, focusing on kissing along her collarbone, back up along her neck and jawline, stealing kisses from her lips before heading back down. She doesn’t go too far down with her kisses, but it’s enough to send Sylvie’s mind haywire, especially when she brushes along with her teeth.

All Sylvie can do is grab at Kim’s hair, the other hand resting on her waist, running up and down her back with her nails and moan at the kisses, grasping at her. One of Sylvie’s legs loops around Kim’s in a kind of way, pulling her lower body closer to her own, in the perfect place for Sylvie to grind against, needing to alleviate some tension.

It’s only when Kim’s hand snakes away from it’s current position and runs along the waistband of her jeans, deftly undoing her button and slipping inside does Sylvie gasp, pushing at Kim slightly. Kim’s hand is still cold from the cool Chicago night air, and Sylvie can feel the cold as Kim runs her hand against the cotton of her panties, lightly brushing over her throbbing clit.

“Bedroom. Kim, bedroom,” Sylvie gasps.

“Hm. Impatient, are we?” Kim grins at her, and Sylvie can’t help comparing it to a wolf looking at it’s prey. The brunette is so sweet and kind, Sylvie never would’ve guessed that she was like this—so confident and devious—in the bedroom. Or, rather, the hallway. But Sylvie wouldn’t have it any other way.

Kim steps away from Sylvie then, and she immediately misses the warmth of her body, and her hand's presence from where it was so close to where she wants—no, needs—her. She’s going into Sylvie’s bedroom, beckoning the blonde to follow.

Sylvie is starting to rather feel like putty in Kim’s hands, and she’s never been a passive participant in her sex life—well, except when she lets men (Harrison) rule how she should be—and she’s not about to start.

She follows Kim on through, and she already has an advantage knowing the layout of her bedroom. Sylvie’s hands are on Kim again, and she’s leading, practically pushing, Kim to her bed, the brunette having no choice but to lie down on it, Sylvie immediately straddling her.

“Not a very good cop, are you?” Sylvie teases her, and when Kim goes to protest, she grinds down slightly, knowing exactly where it’ll cause friction. It has the desired effect, Kim moaning, her eyes fluttering shut slightly. Her hands are resting of Sylvie’s hips, and they go up then, stroking at the soft skin of her stomach.

“Bra, off. Now,” Kim says, running a hand along the edge of the bra. Sylvie grins wickedly at her, wondering why Kim ever thought she still had the upper hand, to doll out an order.

“Yes. That’s a good idea.” Sylvie shifts down Kim slightly, resting more weight on her own kneeled legs, allowing for Kim to sit up. The brunette clearly thinks it’s so she can help Sylvie with the bra, but Sylvie catches her hands, stopping her, and instead undoes Kim’s bra.

Sylvie’s never been intimate with a woman like this. There’s been those dreams—day dreams and actual dreams—that she spent a while trying to ignore, and thinking she’ll never act upon. But she’s never, physically, been with one and whereas her confidence has gotten her this far, she falters as Kim takes off her bra.

There’s that hesitation, that hesitation that she wants Kim—needs Kim—that this is exactly how she wants to explode tonight, but there’s that knowledge that she’s inexperienced in this, hitting her as she’s confronted with Kim’s naked chest.

“Is this too much?” Kim picks up straight away that Sylvie is having a moment, her eyebrows furrowing, turning concerned. “We can stop or just make out. Whatever you want—consent still applies with two women, y’know, and I won’t mind.”

Sylvie looks at her, Kim’s voice so gentle and caring, her big, brown eyes only filled with concerned, and something inside her throbs and Sylvie’s hesitation wears off as she realises that there’s nothing to be intimidated by, and Kim won’t mind if she has to guide her a little.

“Nah, I’m just taking your beauty in.” Sylvie jokes, before adding more seriously, “This is exactly what I want, Kim.”

“Good.” Kim smiles. “Because I’m feeling that we should even things here.”

Sylvie should’ve know that Kim would take off her bra as soon as she could, the brunette raking her eyes greedily over her body. She grabs at Sylvie’s thighs, positioning her in a way that she can sit on her and they can kiss with ease.

Kim doesn’t spend long kissing her lips before she’s travelling again, her fingers gently tracing patterns on her back as she kisses down her neck, collarbone, going between kisses and nips. Sylvie tries to adjust herself so that she can kiss the dip of Kim’s shoulder as she does so, but Kim tries her hardest to stop any attempts, not wanting to be restricted in her own explorations.

When Kim’s mouth gets to her chest, she pauses. Sylvie has barely any time to wonder what will happen next when Kim’s hand is palming one breast, making her gasp in surprise. The brunette lifts her mouth from her body, instead taking advantage of her agape mouth, kissing her deep. And then she’s moving them, laying Sylvie down, shifting who’s winning this lustful game of cat and mouse they’re playing.

Kim doesn’t straddle her like Sylvie did earlier, just making them vertical, Kim between her legs. She’s squeezing her breast again, and then her mouth is around the other’s nipple, rolling her tongue around it, and Sylvie lets out a loud moan she’d almost be embarrassed about if it didn’t feel so good. Kim works her like this for god knows how long before switching.

And then Kim is once again pulling away and Sylvie pouts, to Kim’s amusement.

“Don’t worry, baby,” Kim coos at her. “I’m just taking off your jeans so I can fuck you with my mouth.”

Sylvie never knew hearing Kim swear could sound so hot.

“Your jeans too. I was you as naked as I am,” She doesn’t know how she still has brain power to compose thoughts, focused so much on the needy ache in her body.

Kim steps off the bed so that she can shimmy off her jeans. Her panties match the bra she was wearing and Sylvie couldn’t even describe how much that made her desire spike. She wonders if Kim was working today and if she changed before going to Molly’s—curious to know if Kim wore such lacy stuff to work.

Surely not? Sylvie sure as hell doesn’t, let alone wearing a matching set.

“Like what you see?” Kim flirts before climbing back onto the bed, immediately getting to work on helping Sylvie get off her own jeans. There’s a moment when they’re off that Sylvie gets momentarily self conscious of her near-naked body, but then Kim’s running a finger along her panties again, pressing down on her clit through the fabric.

The sound it elicits from her is a mix between a gasp, moan and whine.

“Kim,” Sylvie practically begs as she releases the pressure, resuming to gentle barely there strokes as she returns her mouth to her breasts, collarbone and neck. Kim seems to get the message because then she’s—with skill that makes Sylvie wonder just how many times Kim has done this—hooking her fingers around her panties and taking them off.

She doesn’t hesitate to resume her actions, now without the fabric in the way. Kim dips a finger inside her, her thumb brushing against her clit with differentiating levels of pressure and Sylvie can’t help but shut her eyes and moan at the sensation, Kim working her with her talented fingers.

“You’re so wet,” Kim whispers into her ear, nibbling against her jawline before adding another finger. She laughs hotly against her as Sylvie tightens, squeezing Kim’s fingers. She’s just about used to the feeling, and the motions, a pressure inside her building, but then Kim’s pulling them out and she’s whining.

And then Kim’s pulling away from her, and Sylvie just about opens her eyes, lifting up her head, in time to see down her body, looking devilishly. And then Kim’s licking her and it’s everything she’s wanted, needed, and her head is falling back down. Kim works her with her mouth, and all Sylvie can think is about how indeed, Kim is mightily skilled with her tongue.

The tension in Sylvie builds quickly, fast approaching her orgasm, Kim lapping at her and using her fingers to add that extra sensation, rubbing and pinching, alternating between making she’s in place and fondling her breasts and Sylvie’s gripping at her covers, gasping and whining as she writhes, overwhelmed at the sensations.

All thoughts have left her mind, and all Sylvie can focus on is the quick approaching climax, not caring about how lost in it she must be—not caring how loud she’s being, how unfiltered and uncontrolled she is, just focused on how good Kim is making her feel.

And then she reaches her climax, Kim is taking her over and she gets her wish—it’s everything Sylvie has needed, and she screams, full of ecstasy, her body overcome with sensation, toes curling as she comes around Kim’s tongue, the brunette continuing to lap at her, guiding her through her orgasm.

“That...” Sylvie pants as soon as she can. “That—exactly what I needed.”

It’s not perfect grammar, but she thinks Kim gets it, if how she smiles and moves so she’s cuddling against Sylvie, is any indication.

[kindahoping4forever]

Under The Christmas Lights // Ashton Irwin

Cass and I are having a blast so we hope everyone has been enjoying Hoe For The Hoe-lidays as much as we are. Her Cal blurb for the day, Baby Please Come Home, is up at @cal-puddies​ and it is one of my favorites from her, so you should definitely check it out if you haven’t already. (And as always, links to all of this week’s blurbs are in the event masterlist below!) Stay tuned tomorrow for our last set of blurbs and our grand finale on Monday: a galaxybrain co-write I guarantee you do not want to miss.

Extra thanks to Cass for helping me figure out what this story wanted to be. The overall concept remained but the structure, character details and tone of it took on a life of its own and morphed drastically as I was writing it. 

Warnings: Established slow burn with Neighbor!Ash, mentions of quarantine, a healthy helping of thirst and sexual tension, implied consensual voyeurism and exhibitionism, mutual masturbation

Word Count: 4048

Hoe For The Hoe-lidays Masterlist

Masterlist // Taglist and Ko-Fi linked above

Let  me  know  what  you  think!

"Quite the festive display you have there."

He stops at the end of his driveway, popping an earbud out as he turns towards your voice. Your next door neighbor, Ashton, stands in his yard, looking at you expectantly as you sit on your front porch, gesturing towards the freshly hung Christmas decorations all along his house.

"Oh thanks! I'm actually not even done. Waiting on a few more pieces to be delivered, really trying to merry things up, you know?" He answers, turning to collect today’s mail.

"Oh really? Everything's already so bright and eye-catching… up so early too," you punctuate your evaluation with a sip of coffee.

He smiles at you and you’re almost embarrassed to say you feel your heart skip a beat. You admit you had a bit of a crush on him when you moved in last year and for a while it seemed plausible you could’ve ended up more than just friendly neighbors. But that hope was yet another thing 2020 took from you.

Even though you were home more because of quarantine, you understandably had to interact with him less and less; gone were the days of “accidentally” baking too many cookies and walking over to offer him a plate or hoping your mail gets misdelivered so he’ll have an excuse to come visit you. These days, your visits were relegated to socially distanced greetings over the backyard fence and happenstance meetings like this.

“Yeah… I know it’s early in the season but I thought after the year we’ve all had, a little extra Christmas cheer couldn’t hurt,” he shrugs. He looks like he’s about to elaborate but then he feels his phone vibrate in his pocket; he apologetically but sincerely says, “Have a good night” and then scurries back to his house before you can get another word in.

It’s another couple of weeks before your next encounter, one night when you’re bringing the garbage can back up the drive and you hear Ash’s voice greeting you from his side of the fence.

“Those decorations certainly escalated, didn’t they?” You ask, amusedly peering up at his colorful house; the flickering icicle lights on the trim were a new addition, along with a big glowing snowflake and star sitting on his balcony.

“Does that mean you like it?” He laughs delightedly, walking up his own driveway. Your brain involuntarily appreciates how he looks with the lights reflecting off the dark wool trench coat he’s wearing; his hair is a lot longer than the last time you saw him, beard much darker and fuller. He looks good. You try not to think about it.

“Very pretty… not anything I would put up, but it suits you,” you comment, hoping your tone landed on the right side of the line between flirty and rude; you’re so out of practice at this, you’re not quite sure.

He takes it in stride. “That’s fair,” he chuckles. “No decorations for you this year?”

“Oh, I’ve got a wreath on my door,” you gesture. “May or may not get a tree. Little touches like that, things just for me; that feels appropriate but full on decorating this year… it just doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel true to what we’re all experiencing.”

He furrows his brow. “Do you think my decorations are dishonest?” He asks, looking interested in your perspective.

“Not yours specifically, lots of people in the neighborhood are doing the same thing, some started even earlier than you did,” you carefully try to explain. “It just feels like surrounding ourselves with these crazy festive decorations… it’s like we’re working very hard to convince each other, maybe even ourselves, that this year isn’t any different when that couldn’t be farther from the truth… it is different and it feels weird not to acknowledge that.”

You look up, hoping you haven’t offended him, that you don’t see like too much of a grinch; you find yourself surprised at how relieved you feel when he nods thoughtfully as he considers your point of view.

“I actually agree, people are definitely using the decorations as a bit of a coping mechanism,” Ashton states, leaning on the fence as he ponders. “But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I know for me, after spending so much time being upset that I was trapped in my house this year, I figured I should do what I can to make my house feel happy for once. Especially if I’m gonna spend Christmas alone in it.”

You marvel at how despite the heavy turn the conversation has taken, his face never darkens, his warm and cheerful aura never falters. “Oh. I actually hadn’t thought of it like that,” you admit, playing with the drawstring of your hoodie, wondering why you care that you’re feeling vulnerable around him. “I’ll be alone this year too. I guess it just doesn’t feel like Christmas to me so I don’t like reminding myself that it is that time of year. If that makes sense.’

He gives you a sad but empathetic look. “I totally get it. I felt like that for most of the year… birthdays, seasons changing… I didn’t want to admit any of it was happening,” he shares. “But I don’t know… not to seem like I have it all figured out, but if we can’t change how we react to the environment we’re in, I think there’s something to be said for changing the environment itself. It’s important to acknowledge what you feel but also letting in even a little positivity can do wonders.”

You offer him a soft smile, letting him know you appreciate his encouragement. “Even just seeing the wreath on my door every morning is a nice moment,” you confess.

Ash smiles back and you feel warmer than if you’d gone inside and cozied up in front of your fireplace. “See? A couple strings of lights, a little tree. Maybe break out with that big yellow Minion you put out on your lawn when you moved in last Christmas,” he teases, lightening the mood.

“OK, first of all, it’s not a Minion, it’s Woodstock from the Peanuts, thank you,” you laugh, shaking your head. “I’m surprised you remember that.”

“Well, it was quite the first impression,” he shrugs and you can’t help but notice how broad his shoulders look in that coat.

You lay in bed that night, the night’s events on a loop in your mind; you ended up standing outside and chatting over the fence for more than an hour. It was nice and stirred a sense of normalcy in you that you hadn’t felt in a long time. It stirred other feelings in you as well but you knew there wasn’t any sense in dwelling on that since it’d be a long time before either of you would be able to do anything about that.

A few days later, you hear a muffled murmur that sounds a lot like your name while you’re washing dishes; you look out the kitchen window to see Ashton waving at you from his patio. He’s shirtless and sweaty, having clearly just finished his afternoon yoga session. Not that you had taken to timing your kitchen chores to coincide with his workouts.

You signal to him to give you a minute and then you head out the backdoor to chat. “What’s up?” You say as casually as possible, willing yourself to keep your eyes trained on his face and not the sweat dripping over his defined muscles or how low his athletic shorts are hanging.

“Your house is looking nice,” he gestures at the colored lights you recently hung around your window frames. “Little touches, just for you, like you said. I like it.”

You beam at him, impressed that he remembered your words from the other night. “You were right, I do feel a bit brighter having put those up,” you share, stuffing your hands in your hoodie pocket to keep from fidgeting, thinking about how much you’d like to brush the curls out of his eyes.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he replies jovially. “I actually have something for you.” He gestures for you to back up as he ducks inside his backdoor, retrieving the package off his kitchen table; he walks back out and smiles when he sees you’ve also turned around so he can surprise you. He sets the box over the fence and returns to his patio; he waits a beat longer than necessary to give you the all clear, he had to give himself a second to appreciate your ass in those leggings.

You spin around and see a box containing an inflatable light up Minion wearing a Santa hat. “Are you kidding me?!” You burst out laughing, picking up the gift to inspect.

“Figured Woodstock could use a buddy,” he laughs, shrugging. “Ordered it when I came inside after our talk the other night, just in case you changed your mind about decorating.”

You feel yourself blush. “Wish I could offer you more than a smile and a thank you,” you blurt, before realizing how forward that sounded. “I mean, like a hug or dinner or something…” You laugh nervously and look to see him trying and failing to hold back a devilish smirk.

“Well. When the time is right, I’d love to take you up on that offer… for the hug or the something,” he flirts.

The next day, you make Christmas cookies and leave some in his mailbox when he goes for his morning run. When he comes to tape a thank you note to your front door, he catches a glimpse of you through the window, decorating the tabletop Christmas tree you bought for yourself and you share a nice moment.

You gave him your phone number that time pre-lockdown when he went out of town and you watered his lemon tree; he finally starts using it, texting you on and off throughout the day and it’s nice to feel like you finally have someone to share with.

It’s when you’re in bed at night, texting away, that you always wish you could share even more with him. Your phone says he’s typing a response and you turn over to stare across the room at your bedroom window, the one facing his bedroom window. His curtains are drawn but you can see the soft glow of a bedside table lamp illuminating the room; you wonder what color the lamp is. Wonder if he sleeps on the left or right side of his bed. Wonder what he’s wearing while he’s typing his messages to you. If he’s wearing anything at all. Wonder if he wants to ask you the same thing. You lay there, wondering, until your phone buzzes again and the cycle continues.

You carry on like this for the next couple of weeks, collecting feelings and building tension. A few days before Christmas, you hurry outside to collect the packages that were just delivered by the mailbox, rushing to bring them in before the holiday Zoom party you have planned with friends.

You stop to text your pals you’ll be a few minutes late when you hear a sharp gasp behind you. You turn and see Ashton at the end of his driveway, eyes poring over you in the fitted green velvet wrap dress you’re wearing.

“You sure cleaned up for the mail delivery?” He jokes, trying to recover how clearly affected he is by the sight in front of him. You realize it’s the first time in months he’s seen you in anything besides hoodies and lounge pants.

You laugh, walking to the fence. “I have a Zoom party to attend but I didn’t want these boxes sitting out here all night,” you explain, instinctively starting to touch your face out of nervousness before stopping yourself for the sake of the dark red lipstick you have on; you’re not used to wearing makeup these days.

“Well… you look fuckin’ incredible,” he breathes, making no attempt to disguise the way his gaze is travelling up and down your body. He runs his hand through his hair and clears his throat, willing himself to move on. “I won’t keep you, then. I just wanted to ask you something.”

You lock eyes with him and feel your heart speed up; usually you’d have a quippy reply to shoot back to him but today, all you can think of is the heat you feel between the two of you. Instead, you nod attentively, trying your best to act like your mind isn’t distracting you with daydreams of walking around to his side of the fence and leaping into his arms.

“I know we’re both alone for the holidays… wish I’d thought of this sooner, so we could’ve done something about Christmas, actually… but say if we were to properly quarantine - you know, like, no outside contact at all quarantine - would you want to spend New Year’s together?” He’s speaking quickly, rushing it out as if he’s afraid he’ll lose his nerve and yet he presents his proposal with an assurance that almost hypnotizes you.

You can’t keep from grinning ear to ear but you still try to play it cool. “That could be fun,” you answer, grateful. You joke, “God, I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at a party for New Year’s, what do people even do to celebrate at home?”

Without missing a beat, he suggestively replies, “I’m sure we can think of something.”

You have fun with your friends on Zoom but in the back of your mind you can’t stop thinking about the way that Ash looked at you, the honest hunger in his eyes. You keep your curtains open much later than usual, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, wondering if the lights around the window will catch his eye and he’ll stop to try and catch a glimpse of you.

New Year’s can’t get here fast enough as far as you’re concerned but time feels like it’s moving slower than ever. Christmas finally arrives and you wake up bright and early to Zoom your family to open the presents they sent you. Afterwards, you decide to give yourself the gift of going back to sleep; when you wake up a few hours later, you tidy up the living room, gathering the trash bags of torn wrapping paper and ribbons to take out to the garbage.

You step outside and note Ashton isn’t on his patio like he is most mornings; you’re just about to head back inside when you hear a warm “Merry Christmas” from over the fence.

You turn to see him wearing a smile brighter than his extravagant Christmas lights display and yours combined. “How’s your morning?” He asks earnestly.

You smile back. “It’s good! Slept in a little, Zoomed with the fam. Lowkey but nice.”

“Ohhh. That’s why you weren’t at the window this morning,” he muses. You look at him quizzically and a sheepish look washes over his face. “I’ve maybe noticed that you seem to like tidying up the kitchen around the same time every morning… maybe sometimes when I’m ready to start my stretches, I’ll check to see if you’re at the window yet. Maybe sometimes if you aren’t there yet, I’ll wait.”

You feel yourself flush, flattered. “Here I thought I was being voyeuristic when all along you’re just an exhibitionist,” you smirk.

He chuckles knowingly. "And you're leaving your curtains open all hours of the night for aesthetic reasons?"

You're surprised you don't feel embarrassment, just a sense of pride and overwhelming desire. "You're welcome," you say coyly.

Completely devoid of self-consciousness or hesitation, Ash says seriously, "I'd give anything to come over there and kiss you right now. Touch you. Just feel you."

Your breath catches but you manage to get out, "Six days. Just gotta get through this week. Somehow."

The interaction plays over and over in your mind throughout the course of the day: the confident way he told you he wanted you, the way his gaze seemed to devour you entirely, the simultaneous relief and ache you felt knowing that the yearning that’s been threatening to overtake you has him floundering too.

Six days is a long time, especially when you’ve not so much as grazed another person since the beginning of the year, not to mention you’ve been waiting to get to this place with Ash for over a year.

The idea enters your mind while you’re cleaning up your dinner dishes, peering out the kitchen window he’d freely admitted to using to perform for you. You slip out to the garage, finding the box with your usual Christmas decorations much more easily than you expected. You glance at his living room window, ensuring he’s occupied before heading up to your bedroom to set your plan in motion.

You add as many strings of lights to your bedroom window as you can fit: colored ones, white ones, blinking ones, the ones that get slowly brighter and then dim back down. You stand back and nod to yourself, pleased with your work. You’d certainly call this eye-catching.

You feel more excited than nervous when you see it’s already around the time that Ashton usually heads upstairs for the night. You see the light in his room go on and you wait impatiently, just long enough for you to wonder if you didn’t go far enough with your display. You jump as your phone buzzes on your nightstand with a text message.

“Feeling extra festive tonight?”

You chew your lip, weighing how to play this. “Wanted to be sure I had your attention.”

He types for what feels like a lifetime but all he ends up responding with is: “Oh?”

You push yourself off your bed and go stand in front of your window, responding, “I think I’ve figured out how we get through the next week.”

You see him through his window, shirtless and in his boxers, laying on the bed with his phone. He reads your message and runs his hand over his beard, lost in thought; his head turns towards the direction of your house, pondering, when he notices your illuminated figure. You see him sit straight up and stare in disbelief as it dawns on him that you’re standing at the window, dressed in a lace lingerie set that has him almost feeling dizzy from how fast the blood is rushing to his cock.

He walks over to his own window, needing a closer look; he groans as he takes in every detail: how the red color of the bra and panties contrasts against your skin, how the black lace trim accentuates your curves, how the strappy detailing of the underwear present you as a Christmas gift meant just for him to unwrap. The lights around your window cast a glow around you, making you look like even more of a holiday fever dream come to life.

His eyes meet yours and you hold his gaze as you run your hands slowly down your body; you start by trailing down your neck to the straps of your bra, tracing along the lace outline with your fingers. You give your breasts a firm squeeze as you run your palms over the cups, stopping to use your thumbnail to tease your nipples until they poke through the thin material. Your fingers dance down your torso, swirling around the lines of your belly, pulling at the waistband of your bottoms. You tauntingly skip over your hips entirely, moving to caress your thighs.

Your phone buzzes again and you pause your show to reach for it. “Wish it were me,” Ash’s confession reads.

“In my mind, it is,” you reply, sitting your phone aside to dip into your panties. You lick your lips, in awe of how aroused you are, how aroused you’ve been since you decided to create this situation.

Ashton gulps and if he wasn’t so blinded by lust, he would’ve laughed at how audible the sound was in his ears. He wants to text you back, wants you to know how he’s dying for this week to pass so he can ravish you with the attention you deserve, the attention he should’ve given you a long time ago. But he also doesn’t want your hand to stop moving inside your underwear, so he waits.

You spread your wetness around, teasing yourself slowly. You considered bringing your bullet vibe to the window with you but you figured you were going to be overwhelmed enough and you weren’t going to need any help getting off. You close your eyes as you trace around your clit, not allowing yourself to put much pressure on it just yet, not willing to risk having this be over too soon.

He sees you throw your head back in pleasure, eyes fluttering shut, lips swollen from sucking them between your teeth and he can’t take it anymore. He pulls his cock out through the hole in his boxers and starts stroking, exhaling in relief at how instantly good it feels; he spits in his hand to ease the friction at first but it only takes a few tugs for precum to start trickling from his tip. He groans and pumps faster, knowing this won’t take long.

You press a fingertip inside yourself and moan a lot louder than you expected; you open your eyes and notice his stare remains unwaveringly focused on you, only now his hand is working his cock. He moves rapidly up and down his shaft, seemingly unconcerned with taking it slow. Part of you wishes his movements would slow down so you could get a better look at his dick but you also love that he’s seemingly so turned on by the thought of having you that he needs immediate gratification.

He tries to keep up with you, matching you stroke for stroke as you continue working yourself up, hand speeding up inside your panties, hand pawing at your clothed breast. His rough grip catches on one of the veins running down his cock and he chokes out a strained curse; he notices your mouth keeps forming a perfect O shape as you react to your self pleasure and he lets out his own whimper as he imagines how heavenly your sounds must be.

“I can’t wait to hear you when I make you cum for me.” You softly whine as you read his latest text. You’re nearly there and your head is spinning at the deliberate nature of his words: “When” he makes you cum “for him.” You rub hard at your clit and feel that familiar burning ache building in your core. You swear your wetness increases tenfold as you feel the pulsing begin.

Ashton’s cock leaps in his hand as he witnesses your body tense and shake as your orgasm washes over you; he notices your lips murmuring something and the thought enters his mind that you could be saying his name. He hopes you are.

You’re still waiting for your heart rate to settle, realizing there’s no way it will as long as you’re watching Ash pull at his cock like that. One hand flies over his length, the other firmly clutching his balls; his hips start to move, fucking into his hand as he nears the edge. You’re captivated watching his abs tense, fluttering with intensity until suddenly they’re being coated with cum. The ropes streak his skin and you decide it’s too soon to text him to share how badly you want a taste.

He hangs his head in exhaustion, briefly ducking away from the window to grab a tissue off the dresser; he cleans himself off, tucks his cock back in his boxers and finally looks back up at you. You smile softly at each other, though you’re not sure of the tone; it’s not exactly shy and it’s not entirely wistful. Whatever it is, it’s nice. Hopeful? Satisfied. For now.

You text him, “It’s after midnight now. 5 days.” 

You see him shaking his head, smiling as he types. “Still too far away. Same time tomorrow?”

You grin, shooting off your response before blowing him a kiss goodnight. “Still too far away. Meet you here after yoga tomorrow.”

————-

Taglist issues again so my apologies if you get notif’d more than once (or not at all)

@mymindwide​ @suchalonelysunflower​​ @pxrxmoore​ @loveroflrh​ @ghostofmashton​ @sexgodashton​ @feliznavidaddycal​  

@castaway-cashton​ @ashtonlftv​ @cashtonasfuck​ @megz1985​ @ashdork-irwin​ @angelicfluffs​ @findingliam-o​ @youngbloodchild​  @irwinsbetch​ @everyscarisahealingplace​

@wiildflower-xxx​ @metalandboybands​​  @realisticnotes​​  @makeamovehemmings​​ @golden166​​ @burstintocolor​​

@mfartzzz​​ @babyoria​​ @petunias-pet​ @youngblood199456​​ @notinthesameguey​​ @seanna313​​  @zhangyixingxing1​​ @stardust-galaxies​​  @zackoid​​

@lovelybonesetc​​ @xsongxbirdx​​ @justhereforcalum​​   @ashtonangst​

@laura66sos​​ @calumrose​​ @karajaynetoday​​  @pilunb​​ @jazzyangel242​​ @babylon-corgis​​  @heyheyhaleyd​​ @calmsweetcreature​​

@spicycal​​ @talkfastromance4​​  @holystxne​​

@meetmedowntown​​ @myloverboyash​​

@irwindoll​​ @cheekysos​​ @carrielfisher​​ @lukedorkyhemmings​​ @creampiecashton​​ @lovelywordsblog​​

@trix-arent-for-kids @uh-huhh-honey @tobefalling @aladyofalbion @likehuhdude

@curlycalums​​  @cxddlyash​​  @reddesert-healourblues​​

@fedorable-killjoys​​  @iamcalumswhore​​   @i-like-5sos​​   @Too-et-moi215

@photochic18  @kouska901 @Indermeow  @dantord

[ingek73]

Juneteenth

STORY by Team at Archewell

Jun. 16, 2021

YOUNG POETS OF GET LIT SHARE POWERFUL WORDS TO COMMEMORATE THE DAY

In honor of Juneteenth, we, at Archewell, connected with our friends at Get Lit and asked them to share poetry to honor this important day. We hope their poignant words allow you to reflect on the significance of this newly declared federal holiday in the United States and its impact across this country and around the world.

AND HOLD, AND HOLD

CORTUNAY MINOR AND TAMIA JACKSON

WHY THEY WROTE THIS POEM:

“When I wrote this poem, just a few weeks before June 15th, Juneteenth wasn’t yet a federal or national holiday. It wasn’t something I’d given much thought to, but when I had recognized that fact, it wasn’t information, it was confirmation. At first, I was upset about it. My immediate thoughts were along the lines of, ‘Where are our fireworks? Where’s our three-day weekend?’ But in reflection, I realized that this was demonstrating continued deference to a supposedly superior entity. Juneteenth isn’t the ‘Black Independence Day,’ it’s the only Independence Day. To have that nationally recognized feels amazing. But whether or not the date is printed in every calendar does not validate this holiday. We do.”

WHY SHE ANIMATED THIS PIECE:

“This poem, especially for Juneteenth, really inspired me. The color palette expresses the somber yet hopeful emotions that happen when black freedom is discussed, and what it means to be a Black individual in America. This poem as well as the visuals really emphasizes the impact that Black people have by simply existing, and the importance of our breath. We know that as long as we’re still breathing there can and will be change, and ultimately full freedom.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cortunay Minor (she/they) is a performing artist who specializes in Stage Acting and Spoken Word Poetry. They are currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Theater from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. The theme and goal that Minor tries to hold in the heart of their artistry is liberation, be that emotional, intellectual, or otherwise. Expression and education are two of the most fruitful paths Minor has found that achieve that liberation, and she is immensely grateful to be able to participate in a craft that allows their simultaneous occurrence.

ABOUT THE ANIMATOR:

Tamia Jackson (animator) is a rising senior at the Rhode Island School of Design, receiving her BFA in Film/Animation/Video with a minor in Literary Arts and Studies. She has always been passionate in art, animation, and storytelling. She loves bringing stories of lesser voices, such as BIPOC, low income, female, etc., into a visual and cared-for light. Though not all of her stories or animations revolve around such identities, it is important that she shows diversity so that many people can relate and find comfort in the characters or art piece. Not only does Jackson enjoy spreading her own voice, but she also loves bringing others’ stories to life.

AND HOLD, AND HOLD

‘Holiday’ meaning ‘Holy Day’ meaning:

every second is sacred/every hour hibernates

within the spirit, huddled beneath the bosom.

To breathe is to commemorate:

inhale – exhale – cradle the thought – hold – and repeat.

When daybreak demotes breath to subconscious action,

the diaphragm still submits in reverence, still remembers that

This is Divine. This

is where jubilation begins:

in the suspension of

breathe in – breathe out – take maybe – and

forever hold the moment,

where the deferred dream stopped shriveling,

wavered in anticipation, remembered that expansion

can be soft,

recognized that it didn’t want soft

expansion.

Bodies were policied out of possession, but

the Black individual liberated their own being,

hollered themself out of state-sanctioned silence.

Words ignite, but presence sustains; this intake/expel maintains us

here

the dream explodes. The spirit absorbs the remnants and outpours,

‘holiday’ meaning ‘Holy Day’ meaning:

I hold this day as sovereign. Meaning:

I hope this day knows its home is in these lungs,

is in this breath, is in the repetition of:

inspire – expire – immortalize the memory – and hold – and hold – and release

POPLAR TREES

CYRUS ROBERTS

WHY HE WROTE AND DIRECTED THIS POEM:

“It’s easy to say “slavery was an atrocity and we need to do better” but it’s much more difficult to say “slave masters ripped babies from their mothers and used them as crocodile bait for sport.” In the average American lexicon, phrases like ‘Never Forget’ are commonplace but are rarely attributed to periods of fundamental, ongoing violence of a racial nature for the simple fact that our pain makes the people who benefitted from that pain uncomfortable. For me Juneteenth is a day of mourning; the Confederate holidays still celebrated today seem like a gruesome counterbalance. So this is my eulogy to both the country and my own being that could have been.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cyrus Roberts (he/him) writes, acts, and directs across poetry, theater, and film. While his work has been commissioned by organizations like Toms Shoes, Adidas, and March For Our Lives, he also enjoys working on cool independent projects, whether he’s self-publishing poetry compilations, creating movies with friends, or acting in his own plays. Roberts is currently a senior in UC Santa Barbara’s BFA Acting program. Look for him in the upcoming film Summertime, directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada. His assistant director on the project was Mattie Kranz.

POPLAR TREES

Before you there was me. But before me there was (Nina Simone audio: “black bodies swinging”). And that was the gentler time period. Everything base within you, reflected in your actions. Please don’t censor me when I mention how you wrangled our teeth from our mouths and used them to seduce your own illnesses into submission. Or how you took an interest in the skin that had a monopoly on sunlight and then took what you wanted underneath the moon. Or how you used our babies as crocodile bait and our skin as shoe leather. Look right into the eyes of our demise and try to say those times are past, that I’m being rash, that I’m being bad and so full of woe and I should be glad I’m writing this on my MacBook Pro. Yeah? Who am I to complain about slavery? Because it ended, right? On June 19, 1865, Union Army general Gordon Granger made his way to Texas and proclaimed slavery’s supposed fall and us colored folk supposed to have a ball? I mean it was two and a half years after Lincoln already announced it, but we needed a white man to tell other white men what another white man already said. I mean that is until that white man found himself dead and Reconstruction found itself at a head and chain gangs, sharecropping, Jim Crow, private prison options, perc popping, bodies dropping, cops still stopping, guns cocking to ensure that (Nina Simone audio: “black bodies swinging”). Every 19th of June we celebrate the end of chattel slavery and every 20th we’re back to fighting its descendants. Private prisons / a cop’s knee is a modern lynching / it ain’t my decision to get busy dyin’ or busy living / I paid attention, to all the digitized depictions / all the people packing up pensions while we’re backed up by the system. Put your back into the system, this is wack how mother’s missing their babies kisses and I’m supposed to be celebrating? I’m sorry. Will you forgive me, I’m jaded. My grandmother looks at me and says confidently that I made it. That she can’t possibly imagine the life that I’m living, I owe a debt to her generation, and I hope that I pay it. I just get so angry, hazy laughter at the thought of thoughts and prayers ending enslavement. So after you hear me, I’ll forgive you if you’re jaded. But you still need to know the history to have an appreciation. It’s no mystery why it’s a mystery present in our education, presently the gatekeepers keep us from it and it’s heinous. On Juneteenth, Americans across the nation eat red foods in honor of the blood spilled before and during emancipation, we celebrate the secondary, pushed-to-the-side independence day, but you don’t have to know our proclamations of jubilation for us to be heard. We will be heard in our voices screaming thanks that we are not treated as herd. We dance and we sing hymns of freedom. Freedom: absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government. Are my brothers and sisters in jail cells free? When there’s a glaring loophole in the 13th amendment smiling from cheek to cheek I’d imagine there’d be some incentive to ensure our purity is never free. And how can I be free when I can’t sleep because my dreams keep whispering I can’t breathe. Regardless of that fact, progress is still being made. But I fear progress is just an exchange of chains for other chains. Same way they changed our names for other names, I rest a bouquet on the graves of enslaved, singing regardless this day. In the hopes that I never again have to see (Nina Simone audio: “black bodies swinging”).

UNTITLED

SIERRA LEONE ANDERSON

WHY SHE WROTE THIS POEM:

“When writing this poem, I really made an effort to think back to my ancestors. What was their impact? Who did they inspire? How did they carve the path for the road I now choose to take? This poem is about legacy. I am calling back to the ancestors before me to give me the strength and courage to be the ancestor I want to be to future generations.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sierra Leone Anderson (poet) is a youth activist and professional spoken word artist from Los Angeles. Rooted in liberatory joy and armed with ancestral truth, Sierra Leone aims to bring light to the power of language, empowering Los Angeles youth of color to recognize the quantifiable influence of their voice. She has placed both second and first in Get Lit’s annual middle and high school Classic Slam respectively, co-wrote an article for the political column of USA Today, and has shared space with several influential changemakers including Dr. Melina Abdullah (co-founder of BLM-LA) and Cecily Myart-Cruz (president of UTLA). Her other organizing work includes collaborating with Students Deserve LA to make Black Lives Matter in and beyond schools. She is currently a ninth grade student at Girls Academic Leadership Academy and an avid lover of trashy teenage dramedies.

Her director and editor is Lukas Lane, an award-winning filmmaker and founding member of Literary Riot (started in his junior year of high school), and he is currently attending UC Berkeley.

UNTITLED

Every generation, the world gives birth to a new fleet of freedom fighters.

I am one of them.

I stand on the shoulders of tired women.

I dance in the footsteps of Pan-African poets, liberation fighters, and Black writers

who grew fires from a pit hungrier than a stomach. They call my name and I call theirs.

Malcolm X. Phyllis Wheatley. Maya Angelou. Sojourner Truth. Audre Lorde. Ida B. Wells.

Your resilience rivers through me. You are my founding fathers. The blueprint to a world we need to be brave enough to see, to seek.

Let us imagine a world in which we know each other’s palms

and never the fist. Not unless needed. Not unless united together.

Let us be the drum and not the war.

Let us know each other’s names and not the languages we cry in.

Let us be, let all us be more than a slave’s wildest dream

Let us beam past blueprints and what-ifs and start becoming the now we want to see, the now we want to be

Trees growing so far past the Earth, Allah would mistake our bodies for angels.

When I die, I want to ripple through lifetimes. I want my name to graffiti the mouths of the next 10 generations.

I don’t want to be forgotten. Or remembered for the way my feet wouldn’t stop running.

I wanna grow roots in this soil, in this American skin. Join the forest of my ancestors. Let my grandkids climb up my branches and tell stories of school.

And before the first pulse of morning, I want them to drip from their homes and gather at my roots.

I want to tell them my name before I forget it.

I want to tell them that morning is coming. And will always come. And will never wait for when you are ready.

I want to tell them that there is a point far beyond this tree, this forest, this temporary point in time, their bodies, their fears, their fathers, their memories. Where the sun is eternal and smiling. Where freedom rings and is never silent, never out of reach. It is called horizon. And it is right there.

[ughhheragain]

Driven crazy | c.e. | HC

•• ask - i want to request Chris getting jealous&overprotective over his younger costar; he would notice how guys would always check her out even if they were with their girlfriends. He complains abt it to the other cast members & they tease him saying hes jealous but he just says hes overprotective since shes younger. She oblivious to the stares she gets&one day Chris kinda yells at her about it?? but like huh why is it her fault and hes yells out “well why do you have to be so beautiful all time!"

•• warnings : i actually made a second ending with a twist so lemme know if u want more ;)

• this movie was the first that would allow you to play alongside amazing and experienced actors such as Chris Evans and Ben Affleck

• now, of course the first few days on set were quite nerve wracking given that everyone already seemed to know each other pretty well

• but Chris as down-to-earth as he is didn’t waste any time to come introduce himself to you and show you around since he had the occasion to shoot a few scenes already

• he was pretty impressed how far you’ve had come already given your young age and that progressively pushed him to want to protect you

• as the day passed, he noticed how the guys on set would look at you, with desire in their eyes and that would start to trigger him a bit

• at first he’d remain silent, thinking that it wasn’t his place to say something because you didn’t owe him anything after all

• but, comments and comments would progressively add up and that would start to affect him

• even more given that you seemed to be completely oblivious to them, always acting all innocent and shit and that would drive him crazy

• on one afternoon, he eventually got fed up and went to meet his co-stars in the lunch room

• asking them to be serious for a second because there was something he needed to get out of his chest to get this over with

"Alright, so that’s about Y/N."

"Oh, Y/N," one would say which initiated the others to chuckle in unison, making Chris even more frustrated than he already was.

"Yes, Y/N," he had said which such a stern tone that everyone got silent. "I don’t like how you all look at her like she’s a piece of meat."

"Oh, you’re jealous?" "How cute, Evans got a new prey," another one would say which made his blood boil at the sound of the term the guy had used.

"Oh, come on Jim, you got a girlfriend for fuck’s sake and so do you Doug," Chris exclaimed but didn’t seem to make much impression on the guys who were still cracking inside jokes. "You can have her if you want, Evans. She’s all yours."

"Yes, promise we won’t lay a finger on her."

"The fuck you won’t, yes."

"Hey, hey there, no need to be agressive pal, we got it, you wanna have her all to yourself, we’ll respect that." At this point, Chris was fed up with their seemingly unreceptive attitudes.

"Good. And it’s not like that, she’s just- too young to be treated like that. Someone has to protect her," Chris let out which surprised himself.

"Ah, and that someone is you, right Captain?" his co-star joked but Chris was already leaving the room, clearly upset, "Oh, fuck off Jim."

• all he wanted to do in those situation was to grab you by the arm and drag you into his trailer and just let it all out

• tell you how upsetting it was to see this perfectly innocent look you’d always stick on your face when people would compliment you

• tell you that he had noticed how you’d glance at him knowing damn well what you were doing to him

• because ofc you had noticed his jaw clench and his arms cross on top of each other when you’d get compliments by all those men

• and you might have been enjoying it a little? maybe too much?

• the comments about your body, the makeup you’d have on that day or the clothes you would be wearing would put him in such a bad mood and he’d find himself clenching his jaw and fists without even realizing

"Ah, look who’s there," Chris heard a cameraman say to another to signal him of your presence. "Damn."

"I know right? Look at those legs."

• now Chris had also heard the guys and had turned around mid-task to witness you walking to your trailer in the fancy black dress you had been dreaming and waiting to wear for years

• but that’s at the sound of this words that Chris finally had had enough and just lost it

• he let go of whatever he was supposed to be doing at that moment and made his way to your trailer

• once he got at your door, he stopped to knock, almost impatient to just vent it all out to you

"Come in," you said with a sweet voice as you were looking at your reflection, trying to see if your makeup needed any final touches.

"We need to talk," Chris announced with a serious tone that made you turn around within a second to face him. He was visibly upset given his arms crossed on his chest as he was leaning against the wall.

• curious to hear what was so important to say that he had taken the time for a one-on-one meeting, you got up and walked closer to face him properly, ready to listen

"Sure, what’s up, Chris? Did i do something wrong?"

• the way you said his name almost made him forget his train of thought but the way you asked what you had done wrong so innocently helped putting him back on track

"This."

"This?"

"Yes! you always do that thing where you act so innocent and oblivious to things that are about you."

• at that point you were confused, like really

"Chris? I really don’t know what you’re talking about here."

"For real? Don’t you see that they want you? Are you really that stupid? It’s blatant and yet you don’t see it?"

"I- uh- well, is it my fucking fault though?" at this point you also had had enough because women being sexualized from a young age had always been a revolting and infuriating subject that you were trying to battle against day after day so this being brought up had just led you to snap, which took Chris by surprise but wasn’t enough to keep him from saying the next words.

"Well, why do you have to be so fucking beautiful all the time? - If you didn’t look like that then they wouldn’t look!"

• oh boy

"Is my fault if men just can’t keep it in their fucking pants? For real Chris this is disappointing, if I knew that that’s how you think then I would never-" you said about to turn around in disbelief but a firm but gentle grip on your forearm stopped you mid-track.

"Wait, I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. At all. It’s not your fault at all I just said the wrong things but i’ve just been on the edge lately," Chris admitted as he locked his gaze in yours and regret could be detected in his eyes which made it impossible for you to be angry at him.

"Here," he added in the lowest but also most reassuring voice you’d heard in a long time, before pulling you into his arms.

• the hug was amazing you couldn’t deny that

• there was something about being enveloped in such big arms that were soothing and made you feel at peace as if you were shielded from any negativity our world holds

"Again, I’m sorry," he whispered as he laid a kiss on the top of your head before bringing back another subject with a giddy smile on, "And by the way, what was it that you were about to say back then?"

🦋 Alternative ending (might make a smutty part 2 for it just let me know!)

"We need to talk," Chris announced with a serious tone that made you turn around immediately to face him. He was visibly upset given his arms crossed on his chest as he was leaning against a wall.

• curious to hear what was so important to say that he had taken the time for a one-on-one meeting, you got up and walked closer to face him properly, ready to listen

"Sure, what’s up, Chris? Did i do something wrong?"

• the way you said his name almost made him forget his train of thought but the way you asked what you had done wrong so innocently helped putting him back on track

"This."

"This?"

"Yes! you always do that thing where you act so innocent and oblivious to things that are about you."

• at that point you were confused

"What are you talking about?"

"Don’t you see how the guys talk to you? about you? the way they fucking look at you?"

"I-I’ve never really gave it any attention to be honest," you had declared knowing damn well what reaction you were about to get from him.

• and boy you were right

"Really? Are you fucking kidding me? Don’t you think I’ve noticed how you glance at me when they’re all drooling over you?"

• you had chosen to remain silent and instead raise a brow and look him up and down with a defying smirk forming on your lips

• that was the last straw

• Chris marked a pause to look you straight in the eyes, trying to see if you were being serious or if he had lost his damn mind

• the boy was done with all these emotions fr

• that’s when you had decided to bite your lower lip that he understood what you were doing

• so he took a step closer to you and he immediately looked more intimidating than usual but you weren’t about to let him know

"So think that this game’s funny? Playing with my mind like that amuses you? That’s your thing, you’re the kind who like to tease, uh?"

• at each words, he’d take a step forward and you backwards until you’d finally hit the wall against you, trapping you between it and Chris’s body

"Come on, now, say something now that you have what you wanted," he said with a deep voice that sent shivers down your spine.

• his face was now so close to yours you could feel his breath

• but, this little distance had made you unable to speak and his eyes now had that dark tone that turned you on but also intimidated you so fucking much

"Cat’s got your tongue now?"

"I-I don’t know what you want me to say, Chris," admitting that made you frustrated because now Chris knew how he made you feel and that gave him power over you and you both knew it.

• and you were fucked

• but then, you felt his hand find its way to the side of your neck while his other arm hovered over you, allowing him to lean over you and support himself on the wall as well

"Then don’t say anything and let me lead cause I’ll give you something to say."

[pinkanonwrites]

love me, please love me

Akaashi x Reader

Happy belated Valentine's day! I wanted to write a bittersweet piece for the occasion, but I caved right at the end and made it 100% sweet instead. Basically Akaashi is a delight and I wanted to see him pine, and pine hard. I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!

(also the song title is from a song of the same name by Michel Polnareff, which I highly recommend listening to in order to get that yearning vibe)

Akaashi had already decided by himself at an early point in his professional career that writing romance, for all intents and purposes, was easy.

Sure, there would always be details and characters and overarching, more interesting plot to work out, but the overall premise was always the same. Two characters with undeniable chemistry, kept from admitting their true feelings because of Person X or Situation Y, rinse and repeat misunderstandings and 'almosts' until the manga was ready to end. Maybe even leave room afterwards for a cute, episodic spin-off.

Easy.

The real world, however, rarely offered such simplicities.

For example, Akaashi was in love with an office worker whose desk was once across from his, and he was pretty sure they didn't even know his name.

It's not like he'd known he was going to fall for you. How could he have? There was no chorus of angels, no heavenly light from above as the world seemed to fall into slow-motion. No. On his first day in the office you had been late, stumbled in with messy hair and a haphazard stack of manuscripts that you smacked down onto your desk, and had nearly tipped your overfull coffee mug all over the floor. He could hardly call it a good first impression. And yet…

The other workers on your floor seemed to hold you in a very high regard. He'd barely been there a week when one of his concerns had been directed to your desk.

"Ah, excuse me. Takaoda-san told me you could help with this?"

Your attention snapped up from your screen to Akaashi and the folder tucked in his hands. Noticeably confused for a split second, it took a moment before realization dawned on you.

"Oh! You're the guy who just joined! Kashi-san, right? Yeah, I can help you with that!"

You didn't even give him time to correct your butchering of his name.

Not only had you solved his problem, you'd scooted your chair to the side a bit and motioned for him to drag his own over and seat himself beside you, carefully walking him through the entire process.

"There you are! I'll just email this over to you so you have the file on your computer then."

"Yes, thank you very much."

"No problem! If you have any more questions, I'd be happy to help you out."

Your kindness, it seemed, extended to the other members of your office floor as well. Not a day would go by without Akaashi seeing at least one person hunkered down beside you at your desk in various states of disarray, waiting for your kind and composed words to soothe their frazzled minds. Clearly you were a cherished member of this office.

He was sure that the warm stirrings beginning in his chest were no more than admiration at that point.

Mostly sure.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As his status with the editing company and his understanding of the industry began to rise, Akaashi was swiftly moved up to higher departments and higher pressures, longer meetings and tighter deadlines. He no longer spent as much time on the main floor where he'd started. But he still noticed you.

You'd been the first on the floor to cheer for him when it was announced that he'd be moving to his own private office. You patted him on the back and wished him well with a big, bright smile that made his stomach do something funny he tried to ignore. Occasionally you bumped into each other in the elevator, the break room, in meeting rooms as clusters of overworked people filed in and out.

And sometimes, on darkened evenings when he was leaving the building in the dead of night, he'd see you still sat at your desk. Alone in the office space, you continued to tap away at your keyboard. He'd never considered that for all the time you spent helping others with their problems, that was time unspent solving your own.

"Kashi-san?"

He faltered a bit under your tired gaze, lurking in the doorway of the floor, having finally caught your eye. He didn't even remember to correct you, again.

It didn't matter that much, though. Not when his body was already moving without him thinking, standing at the side of your desk and placing the canned coffee he'd just bought from the vending machine on its corner.

"It's almost 10. I'm surprised you're still here."

You blinked, then laughed, a sweet melodic tune. The coffee clutched in both hands, you looked up at him so sweetly that his heart hammered in response.

"Yeah, there's a lot to get done."

"Please be sure not to overwork yourself. You're a vital piece of this company."

I will, thank you… Hey, have you eaten?"

He startled, checking his watch. "N-Not since lunch."

"Let's grab something. My treat. Consider it a thanks for the coffee."

"Ah… if you insist."

Not that he needed much insistence.

And so began a comfortable pattern as late night dinners between the two of you became all the more common. It was rare that a week went by that didn't end a long and tiring day with ramen in a cozy booth, or snack foods scarfed down outside a 24-hour convenience store, your smiling face all the warmth he needed to stave off the evening chill.

Perhaps this was where he'd first realized, when you'd held a napkin out to him to dab away the teriyaki sauce smeared at the corner of his mouth: A sudden, longing lurch to do the same, to cup your cheek gently in his hand, to run the pad of his thumb over your soft lower lip. He walked home in a daze that evening, dusted with snow and brimming with warmth and confusion.

Realistically he knew that office romances weren't uncommon. He'd read enough manga and watched enough dramas to know that. And yet, he couldn't shake the concern so easily. What if your bosses found out? What would your co-workers think?

...What if it didn't work?

The only glimpses of yourself he'd gotten outside of a workplace environment were those short, shared meals. How could that be enough to judge whether you two were really meant to work well together? Was it worth risking the fallout?

No. Certainly not. Not for a silly crush. Akaashi could wait this out, he should wait this out. Keep his distance and wait until the butterflies faded and the fires died and he was left with the same feelings he'd felt for you in the beginning, appreciation and the occasional concern.

He would be fine.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On the dawn of week three of minimizing contact with you, Akaashi Keiji was decidedly not fine.

He hadn't realized how dependent he'd become on your presence until it was unceremoniously torn away from him. Is a grown man meant to crave another person's voice so much? Their smile? Their laugh? He felt like a schoolboy again, flustered and frustrated and brimming over with emotions he wasn't sure how to outlet.

On Tuesday morning you'd come in early, clearly dressed for a date. Takaoda confirmed his suspicion a moment later when he complimented your outfit.

"I've got a blind date tonight, actually."

The butterflies in Akaashi's stomach choked and died, falling like stones into the pit of his gut. He nearly shocked himself with the single word that screamed across his rushing mind, that he didn't dare speak aloud.

No.

He felt like a jerk. He felt like a coward. He felt like a horrible, selfish child. But when you saw him standing in the hall and lifted a hand to wave, Akaashi ducked his head and hurried to his office, pointedly and obviously ignoring your greeting.

Well done Keiji, surely they would return your feelings now.

Very little got done that day. And as the clock ticked ever and ever closer to 5pm, Akaashi knew he needed to make a choice. And he knew he needed help making it.

Lifting his cell phone, Akaashi called the one person he knew could give him an easy answer.

"Hey, hey, hey! Akaashi! How are you? Aren't you at work right now?"

"Yes, Bokuto-san. However, I had an important question I was hoping you could help me with."

"Of course! Must be real big if you're calling me about it, huh?"

"Yes, it is."

Faced with the possibility of finally having an answer to his concerns, Akaashi found himself at a loss of where to start.

"Bokuto-san, have you ever had feelings for someone but weren't sure if telling them was the best idea?"

"Oho? Romance questions? Now I'm real interested!" He could hear Bokuto's big, silly grin even over the phone. "Well yeah, some of the cheerleaders are pretty hot. And you remember that guy at the ramen place who always gave me extra coupons? Pretty sure he could've been my soulmate!"

"Bokuto-san, I believe my situation is a touch more serious than a waiter who gives me extra coupons."

Bokuto maturely responded by blowing a raspberry into the receiver.

"Well, if it's that serious why haven't you asked them yourself? You've gotten this torn up about it to call me, so it must be the real deal."

"It really isn't that easy…"

"Isn't it? I mean, they either like you or they don't, right? If they do, great! If they don't, well then you can just start getting over them faster."

Akaashi found himself struggling for a reasonable response to that.

"Hey, all I can say is, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take! Someone famous said that. Shakespeare, I think."

"Wayne Gretzky."

"Bless you."

Sighing, Akaashi glanced at his watch. You would probably be leaving soon. You might even already be out of the office. "...Thank you, Bokuto-san. If you'll excuse me, I need to catch an elevator."

"Sure thing bud! Lemme know how it goes!"

Click.

Akaashi's office door swung shut alongside the soft click of Bokuto hanging up. He skittered on the tile, trying to right himself as he sprinted around the corner, stopping only for a second at the window to the office floor. No one there.

He was probably too late already, why wouldn't you have left early on the night of your date? You worked so hard every other day, surely you would take the few extra minutes to prepare yourself. You were smart like that. Smart, and beautiful, and considerate, and there was no way Akaashi was going to just let you walk off with another man, not without even trying…

Around the corner, standing at the door to one of the elevators, there you were. Why did you look so… grim?

"Oh, hey!" You forced a smile onto your face as you gave him a little wave. "Clocking out on time? That's not like you."

Akaashi opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He tried again, clearing his throat hard.

"Oh, damn. Here."

You pressed a half-empty water bottle into his hands.

"Were you running? You're wheezing like crazy."

Staring down at the bottle in his quivering hands, his mouth moved before his mind could work.

"A date!"

You froze, finally focusing up on his face, staring so, so deeply into his eyes. Or maybe you were just looking at him normally. He could no longer tell. "Oh, yeah. I had one. He had to cancel."

The water bottle clattered to the floor as he gripped both your hands in his.

"Would you consider dinner, then?... With… me? Not like we usually do, this one's…. It's…."

Your hands were so warm. You could probably feel how sweaty his were. Gross. He should probably let you go before you got creeped out or-

"A date?"

"....Please."

A giddy, boisterous laugh bubbled out of you, one he had only heard after you'd downed a few drinks yourself. You squeezed his hands tight, giving him a smile that washed his anxieties away like chalk beneath the rain.

"I'd like that."

"Ah. Yes. Shall we go then?"

"We shall." You hooked your arm around his elbow, giving him a playful grin. "Lead the way, good sir."

Akaashi had already decided for himself at an early point in his professional career that writing romance, for all intents and purposes, was easy.

Living it, though? That was much harder. But he couldn't find it in himself to mind.

"Oh! Takaoda finally told me I've been getting your name wrong this whole time? Why didn't you say anything? I feel like such a jackass!"

"There, uh, a good time to mention it never seemed to come up?"

"Well I have a lot of making up to do, don't I Akaashi?~"

"I'm looking forward to it."

[kyoko0001]

I was gonna ask for advice on 私に薬の主人を呼んではいけない but in typing out my question I answered it for myself and just wasted so much time 😅

I decided to say fuck it to the hella long chapters and post them in shorter segments to make the editing process easier for me and my co-author. 30k word chapters are just totally unmanageable and are a habit I want to get out of. That being said we got 2 out of 3 chapters that would have been chapter 13 written out and just need a good edit before posting. I'm hoping the feedback from those will light a fire under my ass to start making steady progress again because it's good for my mental health and I need the social interaction. I do still have a question!! Any of you guys ever make the jump from writing Fanfiction to actually publishing any type of original work? Most of my AU fics are inspired by dealing with my own shitty mental health and I want to work towards starting a new piece when I finish the drug lord AU. I am so touched by the feedback on this AU and hearing how the readers relate to different characters and enjoy seeing a story focused on addiction/mental health issues! I feel like I am making a little bit of a difference for people like me by discussing these topics in a way we don't often see in traditional fiction in a way that doesn't demonize Fai but hold him accountable for how he affects people anyways. That being said I have a 'new' idea I have been wanting to work on for a while but I don't want to write it like it's fanfic and work it into something publishable. I would like to learn more about how to structure a novel so its formated semi-correctly so I have less to fix when I look into the publishing process. I am not looking for advice on the publishing process itself so much as how to get a story ready for looking into that process. More specifically...

What's a good length for a first novel? I've heard between 60-80k words but that is.... so short compared to most fic! how do you get anything done in 80k words?

How much do you think about adding diversity in the type of characters you write and accurately representing them in your fiction? I feel like that is something really important and it's one of the scary parts of stepping into original fiction. How do you make sure you're writing what you know and telling your own stories but still being thoughtful while creating depth in characters that don't share you're lived experience?

Are there any bad writing habits most people writing fic have that I should try and unlearn now?

How the hell do you create compelling original characters? Fanfiction is easy because you just figure out what an already established character would do when put into your specific plot/setting. Do you start with designing characters and create the plot for them or do you come up with the plot/setting and create characters based on the goal of the plot? I have always come up with the plot and slipped in whatever pairing seemed to fit that plot best but IDK if that's the way to go with original work.

If anyone wants to let me pick their brain as to their experience and process I would really appreciate it! Shoot me a message! For now, I plan on getting chapters 13-15 posted for 私に薬の主人を呼んではいけない since I broke 13 into more manageable parts to speed up the process. We have the entire fic plotted out and outlined a good portion of that on paper!! but I have been trying to keep the chapters so they match the master outline and I need to just adjust my outline so the story actually gets written.

(I know some of you asked if I would publish the drug lord AU and just change names and such but this piece is way way to tied up with CLAMPS characters to just swap names. I would have to reset the story in the US and change a handful of people's genders because all the pairings are gay and as much as I enjoy my little gay drug ring in this story to make it publishable I would have to ruin everything I love about this story to make it marketable. Plus its already 200k words and we aren't even halfway done. I am barely done setting up the world-building introducing my characters and I am far too passionate about not only the plot but with Kurogane and Fai as the main characters to butcher it.)

[rinharu-purple]

Lucien: MLQC’s Mastermind

Yes, I said that Lucien is the creepiest LI in my opinion, and I wouldn’t choose him in a million, billion years. BUT, Lucien is by far the one person, who is pulling the strings and is the driving force of the MLQC universe. He is the only person who acquires all the information from all sides and is connected to every important actor in the story. Therefore, Lucien has become the second LI I’ve started to follow more attentively. Mind that the ranking ist 1) Gavin 2) Gavin 3) Gavin 4) Lucien ;)

In my manifesto, why Gavin is MC’s choice, I’ve already mentioned briefly, that Lucien has the strongest EVOL among all the characters but is also the strongest character (it’s not the MC or the Black Queen, let’s not fool ourselves)

The Machiavellian

Before we talk about Lucien’s part in the MLQC universe, we should first look at him as person and observe the elements that make up his personality.

In the game, all our guys have their personal priorities. Gavin and Kiro are on the front line, fighting for peace and prosperity, Victor, well...I don’t think that he cares for anything else besides MC, maybe his position. But with Lucien, his priority is not a person or a concept, but rather a philosophy. Lucien wants to see the next step in human evolution and is determined to take any measures necessary to see it to it’s end. Other guys can not stand oblivious to other things that come up their way in achieving their goals but Lucien only has his eyes on the prize and to him nothing else matters, no one else matters and no ethics matter. 

Machiavellianism denotes cunningness and claims, that those dark triads use whatever means necessary to gain power. If we consider the choices Lucien has made throughout the story so far, we can clearly find his manipulative ways in getting other actors to the positions of his conjecture. He lies to MC and hides his personality as Ares, penetrates Black Swan to use their facilities, but also uses LFG’s resources for his R&D projects all the while concealing his true nature. 

Another trait of a Machiavellian, is that he is charismatic and friendly, all the while displaying no emotions. I think, there can be two possible reasons as to why Lucien has limited display of emotions. The first possible explanation has something to do with his parents passing and the trauma he suffered afterwards. Among all LIs Lucien is the one with the most loveless childhood and teenage years, the most important years in developing one’s psychological traits and during those years Lucien received alongside with Kiro the most blows. That resulted in him losing the connection to his emotions as a defense mechanism. 

Another possibility might be him losing the connection to his emotions as a result of a chemical reaction in his brain due to excessive testing Black Swan objected him to. Lucien’s EVOL was created in a lab and he was the first man-made Evolver. Lucien is called various times a psychopath, because he shows signs of psychopathy such as lack of remorse, empathy or compassion. It is said that that kind of behavior might occur due to a misconnection between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the amygdala. Considering the fact that Lucien’s parents were killed right in front of him and that he was both physically and psychologically abused for the coming years, this might have led him to experience an imbalance in his chemical balance. One might argue, that his altruistic actions in the orphanage are an evidence for his compassion, I think it is yet another disguise for his unethical ways of reaching his goals.

The Orchestrator

In all honesty no one is actively seeking alliances and keeps tabs on other’s actions for their agenda like Lucien does. Maybe Commander Leto but he mostly fails in drawing others to his side, because he is not able to speak in their pendants’ language or resonate with their perspective. Lucien, on the other hand, is gifted with an extraordinary ability to observe his surroundings and companions, making it very easy for him to talk to them in their terms and desires. Lucien doesn’t show much empathy, UNLESS, it contributes to his cause, in that case he can perfectly put himself in other’s shoes and plays them in such a meticulous way, that they join him willingly.

That is how Lucien directs MC successfully in entering the Black Cabin or in understanding the evolution core.

Lucien is not exactly a piece on a chess board, but is a player, who knows all the pieces very well, knows the rules of the game, has observed many games and took notes of how they all has turned out and therefore knows what kind of a game he is going to play. Just watch closely. how he co-operates with Kiro and the Black Queen. He knows that Kiro is using Black Swan for his goals, much like he does, so he uses his hacking abilities to access to information. The Black Queen is the initiator of everything in S1, so he makes sure to stay close to her. He knows that Victor is searching for MC and trying to understand the Evol gene, there he has an investor. 

The Cool, Calm and Collected Type

in the MLQC universe, everyone loses their composure at one point or another, because...who wouldn’t? Time and space warps constantly and people are also changing their stances depending on the time-space constellation they find themselves in. 

MC loses her cool almost on a daily basis, Gavin was in a constant haywire in the Daybreak era, Victor literally threw people into black holes in CH11 and freaked out as he saw the Black Queen for the first time and Kiro walks around in a bipolar state. So, everybody is pretty unstable due to understandable conditions but we never see Lucien lose his cool and this is one of his best qualities. 

Here is the thing about Lucien. This guy is always at least one step ahead of everyone and he achieves this by two simple rules: 

1) Acquire all possible information

2) Observe everyone and everything at all times

Why am I saying this? It lies in the basis of anxiety and angst. We humans tend to feel uncomfortable in the face of an uncertain situation, meaning in the wake of the unknown. MC is constantly anxious, because she doesn’t know what is going on, why is everyone after her, why is she blessed with the unconditional affection of 5 equally attractive men? (ehm, but not quite equally ehm *Gavin* hihi, sorry, Gavin-stan gotta Gavin-stan ^_^). Anyway you get the picture. Gavin went haywire in CH22 because he was pushed in a tight spot and therefore had angst. Same goes for Victor in CH11 his mind went blank as he saw history repeating itself and then in CH18 when he saw with his own eyes what could the girl of his dreams might become.

We don’t see Lucien in such deadlock situation though do we, and I think it is mainly because he is always prepared for every possibility and he can calculate them meticulously, because he possesses the largest chunk of information and also keeps tabs on everyone and everything that’s going on. So, when a crisis occurs he doesn’t freak out, sure he gets surprised at times, because the outcome of a a certain situation is the possibility, which he calculated to be no higher than 1% and yet there it is. But since he’s already took this into consideration, he has a plan. Combine this with his knowledge about the persons and organizations involved in the matter, then you have a calm Lucien, who is in control of the situation. Thus, he is calm. You can actually also bind this behavior of Lucien with that of a predator, whose movement are languid, is non-reactive and doesn’t mind turning his back to his opponents, since he doesn’t perceive them as a threat.

If this wasn’t enough, Lucien manages to joggle all of this without exposing himself. Even in the last stage of the play he never gets caught. Unless he willingly exposes himself, as in the case of revealing Ares to MC. MLQC actors can usually see through each other and use their weaknesses to meet their own ends. MC is obviously Gavin, Kiro and Victor’s weakness and their opponents can see this pretty easily. IT’s not quite the same with Lucien though and he doesn’t let himself be blackmailed or threatened by any weakness. He always keeps his cards close to his chest. 

Considering the fact that Lucin is the least outstanding LI, this is pretty impressive. So I guess this makes him the embodiment of the phrase “still waters run deep”.

The Renaissance Man

Lucien is a man of science and aesthetics. Explaining phenomenons with associations and loading them with philosophical substance. He doesn’t necessarily perceive things bluntly as they are, but interprets them in a meaningful way. The way he associates MC with a butterfly, how he wants to entrap her in ajar, so she wouldn’t get away, alas taking the only resource of color in his life away. Not only that, but he can also break down the matters at hand to its fragments and can therefore work his way up from there. He is blessed with a strong deduction ability, so he can connect the dots easily, come to a conclusion and act accordingly. No doubt that the other guys have very good deduction abilities, but because Lucien always has a bit of an information more than them, he can find the solutions just a little bit faster in my opinion. 

Reading is a necessity for his guy much like eating and drinking, Which is why we see him reframing events in the context of a certain story he’d read at some point in his life. With time, I will add here some of his quotes about certain situations to explain what I mean. Or even better, if you have some, that are evident in you opinion, you could add them in the comments. I really enjoy reading/hearing Lucien’s philosophical, scientific explanations to certain moments in MC’s life. They are always to the point and helpful.

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

So this is my very first analysis on Lucien and I have to admit, I still have  so many material to check on him, so if anything is missing please bear with me here :)

I was watching Joe’s Twitch while I wrote this, so there are many spelling, grammar mistakes, which will be corrected gradually.

This post will get better and better, scout promise!

[queenofwiltingroses]

Screw the Audience

One of my favorite shows’ creator was once asked who their target audience was. He answered the target audience was himself. He tried to make something he would like. He tried to tell a story he wanted to be told. 

Since learning this, I’ve been able to tell when a show is telling the story the writers wanted, and when a show is telling the story the writers think the audience wanted. And let me tell you: the show the writers wanted is always better.

This applies to storytelling of all kinds, not just television/streaming shows. If you’re telling a story, tell the story you want to tell. Don’t worry about what the audience wants because everyone is going to have a different opinion. You’re never going to please everyone 100% of the time. The only person whose opinion matters is yours. As long as you’re proud of your work, then you have told a good story.

Of course, I’m not saying ignore others’ writing advice completely. A lot can be learned when it comes to character creating and world building. But say, for example, the audience really wants “x” ship to be canon, but you were really pushing for “y” ship. It’s your story. You decide what’s best. 

Stop reading here to avoid tangent. 

I always contradict myself with this piece of advice because there are times when I think to myself, the fans could have written this story better than the actual writers. Ex: Disney Star Wars; the last two seasons of Voltron: Legendary Defender; some aspects of Harry Potter; the last two seasons of Star vs. the Forces of Evil; etc. I realize those examples are a matter of opinion, and that’s totally okay. But please hear me out. What do all those examples have in common? They were trying to please the fans.

Disney Star Wars never had a set plan in mind for the trilogy. They were just listening to feedback from each movie prior and going off of that. 

Voltron: Legendary Defender kept dismantling their plot and rebuilding it into something different every time they received criticism. One season you’d think you know where it was going, but by the next season they’d change it again. “Oh, you this is about racism? Nope! It’s about genocide. You were right the first time: the Galra are bad. But we only changed it so Allurance can happen! But since the fans still want LGBTQ+ representation, let’s make another mc married to guy who had less than a second of screen time!” 

J.K Rowling is changing stuff about Harry Potter and its characters twenty years after the final book was published because fans were upset it wasn’t representative enough. Yes, representation is important. But fake/bad representation is worse than no representation. Here’s a piece of advice: know the sexualities and ethnicities of your characters before your final draft.

In 2018, co-creator of Star vs. confirmed on his tumblr that production of the show was being completed as the season went along. In an interview with kidscreen, creator Daron Nefcy said that working on the show as it airs allows the writers to get “instant feedback” and “see what works for people”. What ended up happening was a number of plot points from previous seasons were contradicted and forgotten, resulting in fans being more confused and discouraged than satisfied. Lesson: By trying to please the fans, you’ll end up discouraging the fans. Blue order made a really good video on what went wrong with this show. It’s over two hours long, but it’s definitely worth it. The video is well researched and well written. The whole time I was watching it, I kept flailing my arms and yelling, “Exactly!” 

I realize not everyone is a part of these fandoms, but I’d say there’s a good chance everyone’s in at least one of them. And if you’re not, you at least see my point. When a writer stops telling a story they want to be told, they wind up telling a story nobody wants to be told. 

Okay, this post ended up being a lot longer than I initially intended. Please forgive the fact that I basically went on four different rants about what went wrong with some of my favorite fandoms. I promise I did it to prove my point, and not just to vent. 

[c-grace]

Since there are loads of [unnecessary] opinions on how Aloy looks, which I, frankly have nothing to complain about. I still believe she is very beautiful and her looks makes sense, not to mention the original model is stunning.

So lemme just take some time to write out this scenario I thought of that I found very cute and emotional, idk 'bout everyone else but it did make me cry when I thought of it.

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POV: You and Aloy are both outsiders, but you were cast out from being a "defect", the both of you only got to know each other during the last few years before the proving.

A little something I wanna mention, this is sorta a Y/N fanfic but without the Y/N, so wherever you feel like you need to add your name in the dialogue, you can do that but I did it so that there would be no need for the name. I hope you enjoy~

T.W: Slight mention of death and injury.

Aloy × F.reader/G.N

Also this has song lyrics in here, if that's not to your taste, I'm sorry but I couldn't think of anything else

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"Oh! I found something!"

"What? What did you find?"

"Tada! Another audio file!"

I lifted the device and showed it to Aloy and waved it with satisfaction. "And here I thought you found something useful." Aloy grumbled.

"It's important to me, you know how I love to study the old ones' musical pieces, especially the singing, they all sound.....I don't even have words to describe them." I held tightly onto the device. Using Aloy's focus I scanned the device and played the audio, and without a doubt, it was a musical piece.

"You sure love music, huh?" Aloy smiled and eyed me for a moment, "Yes, all the pieces from the metal world have a certain, essence to them, it feels like it's calling out to me." But that joy was cut short once I remembered of the proving.

"But then, with the proving coming along, the matriarchs might not let me visit any ruins and I won't be able to study them anymore." I huffed and kicked a rock away.

"Who cares? I'll take you to see more of the ruins, they didn't care for us for so long. What is it to them that we see who the old ones really were?" Aloy never understood, nor took high regard to any of the tribal laws and I do agree with her but I have no one other than her to accompany me to explore all these new wonders.

I believe Aloy can do whatever it is that she wants, no one, not even the matriarchs will be able to stop her from going to where she wishes to go. I only have her and if she were to be cast out once again just because of me, I don't think I would like that all that much.

"Thank you Aloy, oh that reminds me, I learned this song, I want you to hear it."

"Can't wait to hear it then. I can't believe it's tomorrow, how are you taking to it?" She looked at me worried and I could get where it was coming from. I get anxious quite often, taking down a watcher, without any preparation, will make me sick to the stomach. "Yeah, I've given myself a 'pep-talk and I think it's working, I don't feel too worried about it now."

"Thats good, alright, I think it's time we leave, Rost said he needs to meet with me." She stretched her hand over to me and I held on firmly, it was calloused yet warm, I felt safe by her side.

The both of us went on our ways and I made it back to the little tent that I called my study and home, I have journaled all the music I have found and dated every one of them. So far, I have recorded 12, 5 of which were addressed to someone else, it was as though they had sung while they mourned for them, wishing they could be with them and the rest were of random order but interesting nonetheless.

I set the recordings aside and tried to make myself fall asleep, the proving was not too far from now. I didn't train my whole life for it but rather, I just wanted to belong somewhere. Aloy is.....different, to her, the tribe means nothing but a means to know more of the world, she said it herself, she wishes to know why she was cast out and never once thought of the tribe in good light.

I had no sense of conflict in me, unlike Aloy, I liked to keep to myself and I ran away at the sight of the tribe members because I was afraid. I was afraid of how they would treat me but that sense of fear became a threat to me.

I learnt how to live on my own, I knew why it was that I was an outcast. My parents didn't want me, said that I would often act strange and I never understood why, till one day the matriarchs marked me an outcast and left me on my own. It was a little over 3 or 4 years ago, where I met Aloy, we grew close.

I never told Aloy, why I was cast away, I didn't want her to be burdened. I kept to myself but this time, with these songs I wanna let her know, all these withheld emotions are making me feel like I could rot from the inside. I am in a way excited for the proving.

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"Aloy! Watch out!"

'I didn't think it would come to this, no, please, stop this.'

"Stay where you are, I'll come to you, alright?!" She shouted but the sound of blasts had muffled all the sound around me. The proving was going well, with Aloy and I being named braves but the celebration was cut short when all of a sudden, intruders had marched in and openly attacked everyone on sight.

"Kill all of them, don't let anyone of them come out alive!" The invaders sounded.

I frantically grabbed my arrows and shot at a few of them, two had missed and the rest 4 had all landed a hit, killing them on contact.

"We can't hold them!"

Aloy had been covering for all the braves and took a stand at holding them down, I decided to let myself all out and help Aloy and guided the remaining to the exit but not many made it.

"I'll hold them down, go! Make it to the slip-wire! Vala! You go too, I'll cover!" I directed all of them, Vala looked reluctant but went on ahead. "There's more of them!" I heard Bast shout and I whipped my head and shot my arrows, this time, all of them landed.

Vala and Bast had got caught between the shots, I watched their bodies hit the floor and a look of dread had washed over Aloy but I could feel the anger that brewed within. She shot them down, all of them.

But it wasn't long before a man had grabbed her by the neck, and something in me snapped, all I saw was that Aloy was in danger. My body moved on its own and I had grabbed my dagger and drove it into the man's side, he screamed but he lifted his arm and thrust it to my gut, sending me straight to the ground.

Before I had lost my senses, I caught a glance at Aloy who had laid on the ground, at least, no longer choked by that man.

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"A-Aloy! You're awake! You're awake...Aloy..." It hadn't been too long since the attack but my injuries are far from okay but at that moment, all that mattered to me now was Aloy. She awoke but her face was pale and her breath, uneasy.

"No, no, no......ugh, I—I have to get out of here..." She clutched on to the side of her head. "Aloy, I'll gather your armour and Focus, just wait here, I'll co—"

She grabbed onto my hand locked her fingers around mine, her hands were shivering. "Aloy?"

"You're alive, I...I thought I lost you..too...." She whimpered, I crouched down and held on to her hands softly, "You can't take me out that easy." Slowly caressing the side of her face, I smiled meekly.

"Rost...he saved me...but."

"He didn't make it Aloy. I don't know what happened either, you'll have to talk to Teersa."

"Where are we?" Her feeble voice asked, "We're inside the sacred mountain, I'm not sure why, I was nursed outside the mountain, they didn't say much when I asked if I could see you." She nodded and slouched down. I went on ahead and brought in her focus, there was another focus with it but I just handed them all to her without questions.

I quietly left the mountains and waited outside for Aloy. It took a while but she came out with Teersa.

The two walked to the rest of the matriarchs, they were talking amongst themselves and it was then I heard that Aloy had been bestowed the mark of a seeker, Lansra did not take to highly of this decision and made some unwanted remarks to Aloy.

I glared at her, hoping that it would do something but she huffed and grunted, walking on just fine.

The rain had poured on harder with time, it felt like it was meant to weep but was choking instead, an odd feeling but that was how I had felt.

"Aloy, of the Nora? Or would you rather prefer, Aloy, a seeker from the Nora?" I tried to put a little lightness to the heavy air around. "I don't think I like either of them." She made a face at my names.

"Alright, then....Aha! Aloy.....despite the Nora?"

"That sounds better." She smiles wide. "Listen...I need to go, I need to find out who those killers were and why they came here, which means that I need to leave the sacred lands." Her smile drops and she looks at me apologetically.

"No no, you have more to worry about than me, it's alright, I can hold my own." I reassured her but her look of response was doubting all of it.

"Aloy, go, I know how much this means to you. I would only be a burden if you were to worry about me. I want you to go out of this place, I know you've always been curious about the lands beyond." There was so much I that I wanted to convey.

So much that I wanted to ask but I pinched myself to not do that.

"Before I go, I wanted to hear that song you wanted to let me listen to, at least let me hold on to that." She pleaded and held on to my clothes. "I-I don't know Aloy, right now, if I did that, I would appear more—"

"Here, you can just record it on my focus."

She removed her focus and placed it in my palm, I looked at the device and glanced back at her. I heaved a sigh and excused myself from the area.

'Am I seriously doing this now? Yes, c'mon me! You can do this!'

There goes my heart beating

'Cause you are the reason

I'm losing my sleep

Please come back now

There goes my mind racing

And you are the reason

That I'm still breathing

I'm hopeless now

I'd climb every mountain

And swim every ocean

Just to be with you

And fix what I've broken

Oh, 'cause I need you to see

That you are the reason

I started to cry at thought of having to let go of Aloy, she would be far off and I would be here, possibly just waiting. I wouldn't have the slightest clue where she would be, but I would hold strong, not only for her but for myself.

I won't have any more music files for me to explore so this was the last of all of them. Before I stopped recording, I quietly whispered, "I...I...love you, I love you Aloy and I hope you will be safe. I may or may not be here when you come back but if it weren't for you giving me a reason to be here, I would have never bothered going on with that life I had..."

"And I would have lost myself if it weren't for you."

At the familiar voice, that was none other than Aloy's, I had lost all reason and the shock had gotten me wailing silently.

"I'll be back, you are all that I look forward to when I return." She grabbed my face and pressed our foreheads together. "You sang well, I didn't know I meant that...much to you..." She whispered.

"You are the reason I'm even here. Come back safe, Aloy-despite the Nora." I clutched on to her clothes.

She placed a gentle kiss on my forehead and went on her way, she didn't turn back and I looked at her back, fading off.

'I'll be here, Aloy.....my Aloy.'

•END•

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Alright! Phew, that was done. I have never written a one-shot ever, I don't even know the word count cause I was just writing without thinking too much.

Anyway, it was more emotional in my head so I did cry a little but it's pretty meh on paper 😂

Aight, this distracted me from all the bs of the world, I hope it distracted some of y'all too.