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theroguequeenaniki · 3 years ago

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Questions 2009 -> 2021

This is from my Facebook. It popped up on my memories page thing. I originally answered this in 2009 when I was 15, it’s now 2021 & and I am 27, so I’m gonna do it again. Leaving the original answers. Original answers will be italicized. Commentary on the original answers in parentheses & crossed out? Lol. (I’m not gonna tag anyone, but, like, I guess if you want to answer these random questions from Facebook 12 years ago, go ahead lol)

Questions

Can you fill this out without lying? You've been tagged, so now you need to answer all the questions HONESTLY. At the end, choose people to tag. Don't forget to tag me so I can see your answers! To do this, copy this entire message, then go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, delete my answers, and type yours. Easy! Next, tag people that you think may enjoy this (in the right hand corner of the app). Click publish (at the bottom). Have fun! :) 1.What was the last thing you put in your mouth? My cup with my Big Red in it The straw to my Kate Spade tumbler to drink my HEB Cola Lol.

2.Where was your profile picture taken? I got it off the internet. it's a random anime girl. My bedroom. 3.Can you play Guitar Hero? Never played it. Probably wouldn't be good at it. Not to good at video games. But I am good at Mario Cart, both 64 and the Wii. plus I'm good at some Sonic games. Still never played it. Idk if I’m any good at Mario Cart or the Sonic games anymore, I haven’t played either in years lol

4.Name someone who made you laugh today? Doctor Who TikTok. My cats.

5.How late did you stay up last night and why? Umm, probably about 10:00 cause it took me forevor to get into bed. Uh..Past 4am. Lol. B/c my sleep schedule is fucked. I was in bed by 3am though, but I was playing games & watching TikToks on my phone. Lol.

6.If you could move somewhere else, would you? Yes. I'd move to either New York or Sweden. I don’t know. Part of me says yes. But part of me says no..b/c even though Texas has it’s faults (a LOT of them), I cannot imagine living anywhere else long-term..

7. Ever been kissed under fireworks? HAHA. Yeah right. I've never even been kissed! Still nope. I have been kissed though. He just didn’t kiss me under the fireworks the one NYE we spent together...

8. Which of your friends lives closest to you? Um, I think R, but D might also. D is accross Stasney from me and R is a couple blocks down (I don’t talk to these people much anymore & I’m not going to share their names on Tumblr) Uh. I think Maybe Raven? B/c they’re the only one who lives in the same city still. But, Sarah might technically be closer distance wise? Hold on. Ok, yeah, Sarah’s closer, even though she doesn’t live in this city anymore.

9. Do you believe exes can be friends? It all depends on the situation.(I totally stold M's answer but it's true) (I don’t talk to this person anymore & I’m not gonna share their name on Tumblr) I mean, yeah. Two of my best friends are each others exes and they’re still friends. I haven’t stayed friend with my ex, but, uh, he ghosted me so? Lol.

10. How do you feel about Dr. Pepper? I love it. I still love it. Lol.

11. When was the last time you cried really hard? I can't remember. I don't think it was that long ago, I had a light cry on Saturday, but I don't remember the last time I cried really hard. When we got back from our trip in July. Had a full on breakdown that night. Overheated all weekend. Overwhelmed. Anxiety. It was not a very good vacation..I cry a lot though.

12. Who took your profile picture? I got it off of google. I did.

13. Who was the last person you took a picture of? Umm, either myself, or one of my family members. Aside from myself. I think my dad, on his phone, b/c there was a cicada on his shoulder and he wanted to ask the family group chat if he could keep it. Lol. I take a LOT of pictures of cats though. Lol.

14. Was yesterday better than today? Hail yes! To much drama today! And I couldn't avoid it cause I was in the middle of it! (Oof, what drama was 15 yo Linda dealing with that she couldn’t avoid? Lol. I mean, I guess, Sophomore year was a bit full of drama lol) Anyway, I mean, they were pretty much the same. One wasn’t better than the other. One wasn’t worse than the other.

15. Can you live a day without TV? yeah. Now Music there is something I can't live without! Yep, Do it almost everyday. Sentiments about music remain the same. Lol.

16. Are you upset about anything? Yes. I'm annoyed about something and it's making me upset. (I assume this has something to do with the the drama mentioned earlier lol) Always. Anxiety & depression are a bitch. My rooms a mess & I can’t get myself to clean it. My shelves are still a mess.

17. Do you think relationships are ever really worth it? yeah. though i havent really had one yet. I mean, yeah. Even though I haven’t had one last, aside from friendships, but they’re worth it.

18. Are you a bad influence? I hope not. If so, let me know.(again I took M's answer but it's true) Probably. Idk. Lol.

19. Night out or night in? Depends on what's going on and how I feel about it. Night in usually. I do like going out sometimes, but, like, to dinner. Maybe a movie or a show. But, you know, we’ve been in a panini press, the only thing I’ve been comfortable doing is going to dinner (fully vaxxed & masked). But I also prefer staying home anyway. (Like I usually just go to dinner with my family lol)

20. What items could you not go without during the day? my computer. my book. my journal and a pen. My phone. My journal (b/c I write in it every night, as a diary, 14yo Linda wrote stories). Uh. I didn’t take food or drinks into account in the og, so I won’t in those. But, yeah. My phone & journal. I can go a day without my laptop if I need to. (Went the whole trip in July without pulling it out, though maybe that’s not a good example since my anxiety on that trip was so high..) I want to say a book, but I’ve been in a massive reading slump so...I wish I read as much as 15yo Linda did..

21. Who was the last person you visited in the hospital? I don't remember. I think it was myself.(if you want to know, ask me in person) I honestly don’t know. I don’t remember the last time I was in a hospital.

22. What does the last text message in your inbox say? "Mrbobbybones: wish ted would finally meet their mother already. geez. get to it. However, I see myself in that character more and more each episode." yeah. That's what it says. It's from Twitter. (Huh? and I can’t even go check b/c my inbox doesn’t go back to 2009 on Twitter?? (I haven’t had my account that long) Wait wait wait just remembered I used to get tweets to my phone as text messages lol)

Facebook messenger: “ Cool” From our group chat. Lol.

From actual text messages on my phone: “ heeey! Just put up the Tuesday PDS just for you it’s a big one.” From Phillip Defranco’s text line Lol.

23. How do you feel about your life right now? I'm loving and hating it. but hey nobody gets out alive right? Uh..I mean. I’m alive. I have WiFi. Food. Family. I haven’t seen my friends in 2 years. (Minus Alex, b/c they were here in July to cat/house sit, but I saw them for like, one night..) There’s a lot that could be better. A lot that could be worse.

24. Do you hate anyone? yes!!! Oof. I mean, kinda.

25. If we were to look in your Facebook Inbox, what would we find? some random conversations. most of my convos on her though have been in chat or through comments. Facebook Inbox is now Facebook Messenger. So you’ll find all my Facebook Messenger convos. Mostly our group chat. And side group chats for secret planning (birthdays & stuff). Plus other chats? Lol.

26. Say you were given a drug test right now, would you pass? I better! (excuse me miss 15yo Linda you absolutely could have passed a drug test you ALSO didn’t drink or smoke or take any drugs lol) Yeah. Absolutely. I don’t drink or smoke or take any drugs so, yeah? Lol.

27. Has anyone ever called you perfect before?

Yes. But I can't remember when... Yeah. Pretty sure.

28. What song is stuck in your head? Gee by SNSD(Girls Generation) They're Korean. A few My Chemical Romance songs

29. Someone knocks on your window at 2:00 a.m., who do you want it to be? EDWARD CULLEN! Joke! lol. No I don't know. If it was Edward, I'd call the cops. whoever it is though better have an explaination or they are gonna get hit in the head with my Book of Shadows. (Maybe I wouldn’t mind Edward at my window though? Lol.) Uh. My friends? Lol. Idk if I want anyone knocking on my window at 2am.

30.Wanna have grandkids before you’re 50? I don't know....... Uh. No? Idk. Most likely not gonna happen.

31. Name something you have to do tomorrow? I can't think of anything right now... Eat. Should probably clean my room.

32. Do you think too much or too little? Way to much! lol. Way way way too much

33. Do you smile a lot? i try to. I think I do. I get told that alot in Theater...

I think so

#questions #throwback #is this a get to know me #idk

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aer-in-wanderland · 4 years ago

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omg that ending!!! is it deliberately open-ended or just a homage to the whole series? i'm so confused 😂 what's your take?

The Korean news media is calling it a ‘wide open happy ending,’ which I guess is one way you could describe it. All I know is I spent the better part of the 1hr 20 mins that was EP16 crying my eyes out.

Rang’s sacrifice was devastating and unnecessary narratively if you ask me. I can think of a number of better ways they could have ended his story arc. What’s hard is seeing so many people blaming his death on Yeon and Ji Ah, or worse, saying they should have died/stayed dead instead. Personally I think the fandom should stop arguing over which brother should have lived or died and take a page out of Yeon’s playbook and choose a third option. (I won’t elaborate beyond that because I don’t want to get dragged into a fan war).

I was extremely relieved (though not surprised) that Yeon and Ji Ah got their happy ending. To be perfectly honest though, Yeon losing his gumiho powers and becoming entirely human would have left me a little disappointed. Being a gumiho is so much of what makes Yeon, Yeon. So those last few seconds came out of nowhere and I don’t really understand them but I was really happy to see that for whatever reason he still has some of his powers.

I’ve been trying to find an explanation (preferably from an inside/official source), but from what I’ve seen there’s been no official statement/explanation so far. It could be that they just threw it in there to let fans draw their own conclusions however it suits us, but I’d like to think there’s an explanation and we just haven’t gotten it yet.

One interesting theory I read drew from classic Korean gumiho lore. I guess in Korea there’s a common theme of gumiho wanting to become human. One way they can achieve this is to fall in love, get married, and then successfully hide the fact that they’re a gumiho for the first 100 days of marriage (typically the gumiho is the wife though). If they succeed, they become human. So one fan theory floating around is that Yeon was revived as a sort of half-human half-fox and to become fully human he has to complete this 100 day trial after marrying Ji Ah. That would at least explain the secrecy, which is the one bit I found hard to figure.

Personally, until I hear otherwise, my head-cannon is that since Yeon was revived through Rang’s sacrifice - Rang, who was half-human, half-fox - the life he regained is also somewhere in between. Like, he ages at the same rate humans do but he still has his gumiho powers or something (which was actually true of Rang as well if you’ll recall. If not for the Chinese lantern plant, Rang would have had a regular human lifespan).

Others have offered that he’s human except on nights with a full moon (pretty sure that’s werewolves though), or that his fox bead or some other portion of his power is sealed in the umbrella/sword. Maybe he’s been set a task by the Afterlife Judges in exchange for being resurrected with his same face and memories and part of the deal is that he has to keep his powers a secret? I honestly have no idea haha

*EDIT: Lee Dong Wook explained a number of things about the ending in his 2020.12.23 VLIVE for anyone interested in hearing an inside-take. I also responded to another ask about the ending here. For the record, the 100 days theory has been debunked (I actually didn’t think it was right to begin with haha. It’s just a fun cultural note).

#tale of the nine tailed #ask #kestrel-of-herran #lee yeon #totnt ask #it seems like there's some confusion but I'm not actually saying the 100 days theory is right #it's just one of many fan theories #it's actually wrong according to what ldw explained in his xmas vlive #just fyi

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chidoroki · 4 years ago

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Head empty, pre-TPN season 2 thoughts only.

Normally I don’t even bother with hiding spoilers but since the new season is so close I’ll put everything below a cut (if tumblr cooperates) because I do want anime-onlys to enjoy the season with as little knowledge to what madness is about to happen as possible. This is just a bunch of notes that filled my head over the past couple days.. weeks? A long time.. and if I didn’t write them all down somewhere I wouldn’t stop thinking about them.. so if you understand this whole mess, then kudos to you.

So, here’s your post-season 1/ch37+ spoiler warning.

Demon language:

With Mujika and Sonju making their grand first appearances, I hope actually implement the demon language this time?

The only word spoken in the language in season 1 was the demon god’s name, which was just changed to “Him” (sub) or “The One” (dub), so ignoring it there was fine.

Granted, our demon friends don’t say much in their language during the upcoming arc, aside from this moment in ch48, but I can see the anime passing it off as a mere whisper between the two of them just so they don’t have to worry about it.

I don’t recall any of the GP poachers using the language though.. right? Pretty sure they don’t..

Anyways, all I’m saying is that they better figure something out by the Ayshe shows up way later in future seasons.

Episode count? 24?

Short answer: I don’t think so? Did once, but stuff happened. Anyways..

Season 1 ended in March 2019, which is also when we learned we were getting a second season and once we found later on that S2 was originally going to air in October 2020, I immediately thought we were getting about 24 eps.

I thought with all that time between seasons, 24 eps would be reasonable and that S2 would end at ch101. S1 managed to adapt 37 chapters, so 64 chapters in a season twice as long sound decent enough, right?

By the time we reach ch101, it would give us the demon forest, shelter B06-32, Goldy Pond and the short trip to Cuvitidala. (all of which would make this long wait for s2 sooo worth it btw.)

By this point we learn a bunch about the outside world, Norman being alive, what happened to Phil, and the demon bastard himself.

I bring up ch101 as a stopping point because it’s the last chapter before the two year time skip and.. I honestly can’t see them doing a time skip mid-season?

I mean, they could if they wanted to, I guess? Having everyone age up suddenly between episodes via a montage, a quick summary or even flashbacks of what we missed.. but maybe at the start of a season? Not in the middle.

Right now we know anime original scenes are going to be included into season 2 so I’m kinda hoping that once we do eventually reach the time skip we learn more about the search Emma’s group went on for T7W/golden water/temples.

I counted. If S2 does indeed get this many episodes, ep23 (or 22, if there’s a break in between somewhere or whatever) will land on my birthday and you can bet I’ll be beyond happy

HOWEVER! all the hope I once had about a 24ep season vanished due to the clusterfuck that was 2020. Thanks to the worldwide pandemic, many anime were put on hold and pushed back several months, with TPN airing this month rather than the original October date.

It was a bummer hearing about the delay at first but I never complained about it. I much rather have the studios prioritize their employee’s health over production.

Even if S2 did reach ch101, or even Goldy Pond, they would need to find a ton of new voice actors, and with how the world is working now.. eh, I have some doubts.

Cloverworks also has two other series airing this month aside from TPN so needless to say they’ll be a bit busy, especially if employees are still working from home, social distancing, or however they’re managing to produce these anime.

So, episode count.. 12?

The main reason I have a hard time grasping the idea of another 12ep season at all is because.. I don’t know where it’ll be a decent place for it to stop?

S1 ending at ch37 with the kids escaping? Perfect. You can’t question that decision. But now? When a whole bunch of craziness is about happen? How do you choose another perfect moment to end a season with?

No matter how many anime original scenes they have planned for the demon forest, I believe we’ll at least reach B06-32, which will get us to ch52.

Could they go farther? Sure. Perhaps ending at ch59-60? It would leave us off with Emma & Ray leaving the comfort of the shelter to follow Yuugo into yet another demon infested forest, much like how S1 left off, as the escapees left their once safe, comfortable life into the unknown world.

Or end at ch64? After Emma gets snatched by the poachers? It could work. It would certainly leave everyone wanting more, especially us manga readers because goddamn the GP arc would be SO close!

Perhaps ch74 after seeing Norman alive? Just so it’s not a big darn secret anymore to those who are going into this season blind? (how do people manage to stay anime only? i’m not trying to make anyone feel bad.. i’m just impressed? i caught up to the manga right after s1 because i didn’t have the self control to wait!)

Ending on that chapter would be so bittersweet to me.. because you know what appears in ch75 and it’s literally one of the only things I care about.

S2 preview trailers already teased some of the demon forest scenes I’m most excited about, so the only things left that will truly excite me are Yuugo and that darn outfit. (seriously, whenever we do get to see emma in her gp outfit for the first time, someone better scream at me so i can die from happiness.)

Okay, and all the GP kids too.. especially their trio!

Could they fit the Goldy Pond arc into a 12 episode season along with every other event that came before it? I.. seriously hope not?

Compared to s1, which was very dialogue heavy, GP is about as action packed as we’re gonna get in the near future, and those scenes are going to fly by once they get put into motion.

Quick example (because it was recent and i can’t think of something else atm): the Overhaul arc from My Hero Academia. Off the top my head it was about 40 total ch? That arc took up half of the show’s S4, which was a total 25 eps.

So with the GP ending at ch96, it’ll give us about 20-30 chapters (depending on where you personally see the start of this arc I guess? once yuugo leads the duo through the forest, when emma gets snatched or when the battle actually starts)

If GP were to happen in s2 where there’s 12 episodes.. literally everything would be so fast paced and I don’t want them to rush anything or leave stuff out?

Other options?

It’s very wishful thinking and I would be getting my hopes up for nothing, because I know it won’t happen, but I could possibly see them fitting GP arc if S2 was made up of 18eps?

6 eps for the demon forest, 6 for Goldy pPond, the remaining 6 to accommodate B06-32, Cuvitidala and any other anime original scenes as they wish.

Although fitting about 64 chapters into 12-18 episodes sounds a bit much.. but not really? I seriously have no idea at this point how much story we’re going to cover this season.

Could I perhaps place all my hopes towards a second cour later this year? Like for the summer.. or would I be expecting too much?

This all could’ve been avoided if they just tell us! Seriously, I’ve been thinking about episode count since last year.. and now you have to deal with this mindless chatter of mine.

I’d honestly be okay with another 12ep season though. We waited this long that I’ll just be excited to see all the children again.

Anime-only scenes:

Those 3 days the children spent learning from our demon friends? Yes please! Did you know Emma not only learned how to use a bow and arrow but a freakin’ harpoon as well? Like.. hello?? I must see this!

Perhaps they’ll even adopt some of the extra pages from some of the chapters, like they did in S1 with the flashback of Norman being sick in ep10.

I know this will be such a high hope, but I remember in ch177 how Emma claims that after they escaped, they all remembered how kind Isabella really was, so if they decide to adapt the extras from ch41-42 & ch45, I’ll cry.

And these pages? Cloverworks, please..

I’m literally begging here..

Especially these two! Even though I still doubt we’ll reach Goldy Pond if we get 12eps.. but in the future! Please!

Other random nonsense:

I may or may not get emotional upon seeing Isabella at the very start when she goes to confront Grandma Sarah. If her hair is kept down as it was at the end of S1 then I’ll give the anime staff my sincere thanks.

We only heard 15 seconds of “Identity” and yet it has been living in my head rent free ever since that trailer dropped. I need to hear the full song sooo damn badly, y’all have no idea.

Here’s hoping they don’t cut out the inner monologues again. At this moment I don’t remember any specific ones from the demon forest I want to see but I’m sure they’re present.

I’m ready to die at every cute Chris moment they give us.. and this entire scene where the kids scold Ray.

Literally every scene with Emma & Ray. They’re my top 2 favorites from this series okay? Of course I’m going to fangirl over them. (they already showed the hug in one of the trailers and i damn near cried)

If we see him, (which i’m sure we will, but i still have tiny some doubts) I hope they give Yuugo a fantastic voice actor.

Also, his nicknames for everyone!! Literally everything about that man I’m hyped for.

Again, very doubtful we’ll get GP in a 12ep season, but whenever that arc decides to grace us with its presence, “63194” better play on full blast when ch92-93 gets animated.

Speaking of music, while I’m completely excited to hear the new OST that Obata has in store for us (thank god he’s doing this season again btw!), I hope we hear some of those unused tracks from the first season, specifically “Their Own Thoughts.”

Every time Emma mentions their future, their goals or how her family will always be together, I’ll cry. (thanks demon god and your stupid reward)

Yes I’ll be doing those reaction posts (if you follow me i’m sure you’ve seen them by now) after every new episode as I do with other series I watch.. once I survive the usual long day at work, avoiding anything TPN related so I can watch in peace and quiet when I finally get home.. damn it, im already so anxious, help.

#the promised neverland #chidoroki used chatter

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thecrenellations · 4 years ago

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Return of the Thief Notes, Part One: The Book of Pheris, Volume I

Notes from my first read, October 2020. (Part Two | Part Three | TaT)

Contents: "So, so, so” watch, Costis watch, swearing, trashing the king’s attendants, being objectively wrong, boundless enthusiasm and love

I promise I’ve had more developed thoughts since these often incoherent ones, but I’ve enjoyed having these notes to refer to - for sentimental reasons and for entertainment, so here they are, for others who enjoy liveblogs and/or being whisked back in time to their first read of this wonderful book.

Format: Page number. My thoughts (Context?)

Dedication, Table of Contents, Exordium:

There it is – to Sounis

Exordium – vocab #1

Interregnum?!? Alyta?

Pheris!!!

Yeah I love him from the first page

MOIRA

MOCKING COMMENTS HELP! Gen lives!

A new level of unreliable narrator

Moira, messages of Gods, Pheris, messages of __

Wtf is going on in this study? A zoo?

high king vs great king vs annux?

okie dokie dude

Chapter 1

1. Susa – Costis

2. Infirmity – who gets to be hero/tell story (I started reading right after the book launch, in which mwt spent some time talking about her writing influences and decisions connect to this question - Pheris isn’t her first disabled protagonist and storyteller, of course, but it was lovely to meet him properly directly after hearing her talk about it. Book launch foreshadowing part 1...)

Melisande?

Is this why he wasn’t taught to read?

3. Always the summer

Bees!

4. Hunting cat… hm…

Ok … shrine … 😬

5. Once again we start with a disaster or having to flee

Which Eugenides precipitated

Bite!

Little monster :(

6. Falling…

7. :( :( :(

His purpose? D:

8. YIKES

Chapter 2

9. Hello there! (Gen!)

Massive chair?

10. CRACKED WATER JUG (amphora motif???)

11. Triangle from seal!

Gen that’s rude to Pheris :( (“He will fit in very well with my attendants”)

Wait. This must have happened before ACoK! (nope)

12. :(

Xikander … never made an impression before

How old is Pheris? (lol)

13. Philologos come thru!

Royal closet reappears!

14. Hello weird secondhand scene!

He is Eugenides

Marina…

15. Petrus? GALEN? OH SHIT!

Is this why Galen was called? (nope)

16. Hell yea Petrus

Miras’ golden balls oh no

All these previously unnamed sucky attendants!

17. Ula – goddess of hearth and healing

Ok … Galen … or a god? Eugenides????? (why did these options occur to me before Mr. Shows Up At Your Bedside At Night himself)

18. Finally the attendant floor plans I crave + hunting scenes!

19. EXCUSE ME he slept through Sounis + Eddis wedding!!!

Again – high king!

20. So Ion is beautiful … hmm.

Yeah … Sejanus has facets. I like it.

21. Clearly no one would know what king would do … lol

Don’t mind me just sorting the attendants on a spectrum of awfulness!!!

22. SO SO SO – ION!!!!!

How many fucking attendants are there and how many are on my hit list!

Is “the necessaries” bathrooms or like … him stealing? (just the bathrooms ... the Gen-Pheris parallels were really getting to me at this point)

23. OH MY GOD THE UNIFIED CREST

Also … frogs. Frogs.

24. Big day for Gen huh

Definitely an aura of Something as he writes about Gen

25. HELLO EVERYONE

26. Sorry Kamet, Pheris does the physical descriptions better. They’re beautiful

I’m blacking out at Eddis and Sounis

27. Jesus Christ. The bear.

Cousin time!

Under the table is the new up on the roof!

Uh… twin imagery ….

Gen’s feet!

Jesus. The matching

28. Cleon … wtf? A cousin?

A trial for Sophos?

Show! Us! Sophos’s! Shoes!

29. If u throw things out the air shaft you might hit the king

Was it a chicken?

Lol nvm the guy at night is Gen. That is … very sweet

- Showing up at night

- Accent

- Complaining about Petrus

- Swearing

- One hand

I am judging Costis and Sophos for not describing the paneling in Gen’s room!

Chapter 3

30. Was it a chicken?

An earring huh, good hand huh

31. Literally screaming “NO!” at Gen. Don’t joke about dying! I am killed by Gen on annux day. This is. My boy. Yes he is perfect. Yes he will refuse to get up. I love him. I died on page 31

Philologos is still the best of them

32. Dancing bear indeed

Always the powdered gold

Ruby!!!!! <3

Aww a smile!!! <3

Pheris he likes you!

33. They both love invisibility and lost it … I cry

Erupt like the sacred mountain excuse me!

OR WORSE return to bed! Lol

34. He’s Eugenides when he’s talking to Attolia

Ouch hero talk

! from Irene!

My queen!

Hey Phresine!

They way we do <3 he’s hating it but he’s so comfortable with her

Sister and bro mention! C’mon!

I love them

EYEBROW

35. Honestly that’s a yes (“I have no idea what you mean, my queen”)

It’s so cute they hang out in the morning … like how long was it even since they’ve seen each other lol

:( tough walk for Pheris

Is it prophecy time?

Lol how long does this construction take?!

Also … she’s pregnant, huh? but no one knows (nope)

Is befriending someone weaponized as a prank count for Gen’s enemies to friends list?

Also SHOW ME the magus. I know he’s here!

36. Pheris excuse me, why not recreate this!

Lol cast off language of history indeed

Feel the thrum of the goddess!

EXCUSE ME… a minor goddess? Mystery goddess? Or Philia?

Oh Gen

37. Well, Gen, someone is having a worse day than you.

Damn, how far we come.

Aww Sounis, babe, I love you and so does Gen

[drawing of the four of them sitting in a row]

38. Artadorus???? Pomegranate?

39. HEIRO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A friend! Also lol. Two smiles, for Pheris and Heiro..

40. Yesss Melheret joke in action.

Costis has left tho right?

Jesus, Melheret

SHE GAVE HIM A HORSE (I COULD NOT DEAL with this entire conversation, but then again I could not deal with this whole book.)

41. I love them all so much

“on that horse, you will look like a king” I can’t with her sense of humor

He sure did say that

I feel like I’m missing something with the fight on foot thing … remembering battles?

Helen called him Gen!

Sophos stop talking about yourself and bringing apricots into everything lol

Lol these bystanders don’t know how lucky they are. Nor does Pheris, yet

42. She’s protecting him

Also … Gen … you didn’t want to be a soldier.

43. Guards have capes

2 startled men … hm …

Oh Gen. The fucking brutal echoes…

44. :( :( :(

Gen tell your wife you’re sick!

The attendants are so dumb

45. So, so, so :(

Tell who? Petrus?

Wink!

Yes?

46. Bleeding! Salt! Lemon! Heck no! What is he, a piece of meat?

Oranges?

47. “savoring each bite as if it were my last” ... Same … but with this book

Hmm… Alyta! Goddess of the gentle rain! (despite this “hmm,” I did not put the pieces together)

48. Oh no Teleus! And someone?

Aw he realized <3 lemon water

49. Gen eat your broth lol

50. I love them.

Ion’s really trying to make up for what he did that one time

51. Without the approval of the great goddess HAHAHA

I love them. Cousin time! Growl?

Idk whether or not to be reassured, Gen.

Wow Cleon I do not like that. Also didn’t he die? (...)

Comma (“I am not, Eddis”)

Go smack him!

52. Gen I love you.

Helen I love you.

He’s so bad at self care but I love him

Chapter 4

55. love that our narrator just disappears and reappears

56. Attolia’s brother’s bedroom? Yikes. Ominous. A detail in a story we’ve already gotten, different every time <3

57. fucking attendants. 3 good ones. Medander you were beneath Costis’s notice before but I hate you. Costis didn’t have time for you or Xikos or Xikander and nor do I

58. interesting pawn talk!!!

59. <3 Pheris :(

The Gen comparisons though

:( :( :( :(

60. flamboyance <3

Cemphora bush

Bees

61. I love him

62. I love them

Also lol “Your majesty?”

63. Name … hm … (“I have deliberately omitted [my tutor’s] name here”)

64. more twin imagery I swear

WAIT … it was his birthday! Not just Annux day?!! Gen was born in late summer???

Attendant list thank you

65. laying it all out there, huh … (that one Gen quote)

Lol they’re the same but Pheris likes horses

66. Insellia! Hello nice to meet you

67. Gen that’s mean. (“He is hardly even half of one.”)

68. Coleus leves???

“I am Eugenides.” <3

Gen why

69. Gold cups???? Hmmmmm. Also lioness. Def invoking Costis. (they’re probably not the cups, but STILL)

Earth….

70. Moira! Hi!!! Rainbow shawl!

Like a rabbit!

Pester!

I’m … very sad he uses his Attolian accent with Helen

71. Aaah so good

Mortals

Moira knows another messenger?

Does he think he can’t die in battle?

72. hmm are they WRANGLING?! (Galen and Petrus and my Fire and Hemlock word association)

Kill that pastry Irene I love you

morning training with his … guard? (Is that the whole guard or a guard? Costis senses tingling once again.)

73. Oh gen.

Ouch! (“to send people to their deaths and not risk my own is contemptible”)

Is she implying he’s paying Therespides?

74. Interesting Cleon plan. So many doubles

OUCH. (“Only if he comes back from the dead.” I assumed Lader had died in the war; it’s a different ouch now. I love that they both accidentally say things to each other that poke old wounds, and it’s not a big deal but it’s also not dismissed! Their relationship has come so far, and I love them so much.)

75. Verimius – Lavia – Celia??? Somebody is queer in there!

A GUARD

This scene confuses me. Xortix? Layteres? Aris! but dice thing is less political … so maybe? (just wait....)

76. So many reasons to hate Medander

Hey Costis! You exist! KoA happened!

Gen is just … still so uncomfortable and miserable. He chose, he has people, but still.

RIP Clopius also WHAT

77. Lol Hilarion’s grand statements

78. Yorn Fordad Hello!

Luxurious mustache

The mighty Pents?

Besin Quedue – she’s coming 4 you watch out

79. RIP Baron Hippias

Chapter 5

80. Spring! Plays! Cenna!

81. Oh dear

Oh dear

At least they said he was pretty

83. ?!? :( wine

Uh oh. Stockpiling

85. What even.

AAAAAAAAAH COSTIS

86. Omg Irene. Hissing. I love her.

Also … Gen’s the viper

Also this scene was written by Pheris.

Damn.

87. oh no.

What better man

She fucking quoted Howl. I love them.

Also, bees (this scene killed me)

90. Falling?

Oh shit

Also … Juridius and Pheris, Susa and Costis (comparing demands for information)

93. oh my god (IT’S THE WINDOW SCENE)

Oh my god

94. She! Called! Him! Gen!

I love this and it scares me

Lol Chloe

Irene you learned from her though

95. D:

96. :(

97. water stuff

98. what the heck

OH NO (Quedue scene)

100. yikes

Omg

Wow.

102. yikes yikes YIKES

103. a blade has protruded from his chest (tbt to The Thief)

jesus

106. shit

Did Gen hit him?

108. lol Phresine

109. lol

I want genuinely every character’s reaction to this shit

Chapter 6

111. what the heck Gen.

112. like a god [crown doodle]

114. Perma?

116. Gen. Gen. Gen. Do not.

117. AAAA (god intervention)

122. Juridius to Dite

124. bye Iolanthe and Ileia! Tell us about Caeta and Silla.

125. did not expect so much Ion

Chapter 7

127. Fryst god of winter

She laughed!

They’re so married

128. OH SHIT (Costis ship is sighted and I remember what’s about to happen next)

Interesting timing

He rode the horse home?

131. Beauty and good, beauty and kind

134. The gods’ goodwill

Keep them safe <3

135. Is that his MOM?!! Wtf (it was!)

Pheris steal those earrings!!!

RING! SMASH BOX!

137. AMPHORA EARRINGS (and flowers)

138. I love Phresine

139. Why do I feel like all the game birds are pigeons

140. meanwhile Gen’s been hanging out with Kamet. Shit. I cannot.

WELCOME HOME BOYS!

HELL YEAH KAMET ATTEND THOSE MEETINGS!

RELIUS COME THRU

141. lethium soup! The reversal

Safe for you

142. of course he knew <3

143. Kamet time! I love him. We get to see Kamet!!!

Also … echo of Gen’s notes on Mede

145. very handsome. … gaycostis vindication (referring to @costis’s url at the time and this post. Little did I know what else was to come in the next chapter and then a few months later with the adaptation news...)

Do you know who I am?

Chapter 8

147. Of course he’s a cartographer

A favorite huh

148. of course she didn’t tell us his age!

149. the angsty window staring I crave

Music!

151. adventure, huh

I do have a soft spot for Melheret

152. concerned about amphora gift

153. Glad they can be well and united in spite!! (Gen and Melheret)

154. Pheris loves math and I love him

155. Hello Teleus. Hello olives

Lol Relius is not into math

156. pigeons. Inkpot!

157. yeah honestly. He tortures people. He was NOT tortured by the king

159. lol (“I have noted the elective nature of certain behaviors” ... I love Relius and Pheris.)

160. The Invitation! I <3 it

161. EXCUSE ME WHO

Legarus!

FOLKS HERE WE ARE (I cannot overstate how wonderful it was to read this page. I did not know who the poem was from, and “Someone loves me very much, even with all my faults” is even sweeter to reread, but it’s just ... his confidence is so different from the tentative consideration of a new philosophy of trust and love we see in KoA. And there is subtextual queerness in the books before this one, some more apparent and some more subtle (and what is obvious to one reader may be subtle or invisible to another, in these books especially), and there is the attendant love triangle a few chapters back, but HERE - here, Pheris acknowledges the real feeling and love in Legarus’s disastrous relationship and tells us directly that his lover was a man, here he seamlessly makes it clear how bi and poly Relius is, and he quietly ties these relationships and realities to his growing understanding of the world. It’s not subtext. And there’s a lot more to come, but this page really hit me, and sort of promised the “more to come” while assuring me that what had come before, more subtly, was there. I used to have heteronormative readings of both these books and myself, and when Thick as Thieves brought them crashing back into my heart after years away, I knew better about myself, and I saw that - or the possibility of that reading - reflected in the new book, and it was such a good surprise. It meant a lot, and this page meant a lot, and that is why I’m writing a small essay to accompany this note.)

Lol wow

162. Where are you traveling, man (this question remains)

163. Fuck you, Orutus

164. Stole an inkpot!

165. the map!!! (Kamet’s)

166. I love them!

167. The Math Master hmm

Am I an oracle (Nope! :) )

#there is SOME context #and some rambling #but i'm sure some of it doesn't make sense so i'm very up for explaining anything #return of the thief #the queen's thief #mwt #something i #rott spoilers #return of the thief spoilers

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rokutouxei · 4 years ago

Text

the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

ikemen vampire: temptation through the dark theo van gogh / mc | T | [ ao3 link in bio ]

The challenge seemed pretty simple: to try to befriend the university bookshop’s most sour employee, Theo van Gogh. As a literature major with a boatload of book recommendations on her back, it ought to be a simple task indeed. But as she uncovers what lies between Theo’s pages, the more she finds it harder to become closer to him without having to put the feeling directly into words. What can she learn from Theo about what it means to stay—and how can she teach Theo about what it means to let go? | written for ikevamp big bang 2020!

[ masterpost for all chapters ]

CHAPTER 15 OF 22

So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God,

one of which was you.

- "So every day", Mary Oliver

The new year enters restlessly.

January is generally a busy time for the university—the long holiday break at the end of the year translating to a refreshed, pinpointed focus. The Office of Student Relations resumes its scholarship selection process as soon as the offices reopen. Official enrolment to the university begins in early January. Classes begin in the second week.

Theo registers for the last class he’ll have to take before he can do this thesis—and that matched with the exhibit slowly coming into shape, it feels like the beginning of something ending.

And he’s running right for it.

Theo had a dream, once. Maybe not the kind that she would have expected when she asked him, but a dream nonetheless. He’d always looked up to his brother’s art from when he was younger, long before they thought of university or exhibits or the future. A seed of a dream had grown in him for the longest time—a gallery of artists, a collection of art that make the world shine just a little brighter by simply existing. Every week, every month, every year, something new—always something else given out to the world.

A childhood dream that no longer holds the same glimmer as it did when he was seven years old but—still the same one that lives inside of him if he listens hard enough. The one that led him here.

The one he knows but refuses to bring to light, to give a name.

But it’s here, still.

No matter how hard he denies it.

He used to tease her for being relentless about going abroad, but now that it’s his eyes that are set on something, there’s an inexorable hum thrumming underneath Theo’s plain old daily. This semester, his only classes are on Thursdays. He spends the rest of the week in the bookstore as he always does but—he is preoccupied. Spends afternoons when the bookshop is a little quieter going through his phone looking at potential art space and galleries. Reaches out to his professors when he was taking his specialization classes in museology, art curatorship, and art history, to see if they have any suggestions for where to hold Vincent’s exhibit. And at night, he works with Vincent, stares at the paintings, going through the old ones, looking through the brainstorming notes between him and her, of course, the other artistic brain working alongside them.

All art and wild wonder.

Theo writes pitches. Drafts them with Vincent, pours their hearts into it, revises them, rewrites them, shows them to her, throws them away—and then, when they’re just right, sends them. To every viable email, to every possible lead. Theo has a vision; one that used to be through a curtain of fog, but now clear like the summer sky. Now that the paintings are drying along the studio’s walls, he feels like the impossible is so close to his reach. Even Vincent, who is usually a little more reserved about reaching out with his art, has managed to gather up some courage to talk to some professors, by emails, visiting during consultation hours on his day off.

It’s happening, Theo thinks.

This is really happening.

He won’t tell it to her face, but her company is both needed and appreciated as they maneuver through the process of setting it up. The first half of spring is a blur only punctuated by dinners spent with her, Thursday evenings after classes talking with Vincent, sometimes with takeout boxes sitting in the studio, sometimes out of the house for a breath of fresh air. Theo walks around the topics with a nervousness that only goes away when she is there to mediate. He feels safer when she is there. And so does Vincent.

Theo doesn’t know when he’d started to miss her the way he does now. It was as if he had woken up one day missing the sound of her laughter, the loops of even her craziest insights.

Like the way raindrops continually falling can dig a curve into the sturdiest rock, Theo leans into her with an ease he wishes he does not understand.

He does not know if she knows.

At this point he thinks, it doesn’t matter if she does, because what matters is not what his wants, but hers.

He does not want to be another anchor tying her down.

So instead, he does what he does best with her: talk about books. The time they can spend together on their little dialogues have lessened dramatically, what with unmatching schedules, but they still exchange books; what they lack in time now they have in connection. The slide of a new book is enough to prompt the other; a reference to a previous read dropped into conversation and a nod to each other’s direction. Sneaking what little discussions in the 20 minutes it takes to walk her home. Phone calls when the opportunity—and patience—provides.

This is enough.

One afternoon, he and Arthur are at the bookshop. Theo has his head down on the counter, the book she lent open to one side, while he composes a response to an email on his phone. A potential gallery space responded to him, saying they were open to giving Vincent a discount.

“Nice to see life in your eyes,” Arthur comments, as he returns from shelving the canceled book orders. “I’m impressed.”

“Not flattering considering you don’t take anything seriously,” Theo quips. Arthur crosses his arms over his chest.

“You should really grant yourself at least a little bit of that energy.” It’s friendly advice, but arguably so grating coming from Arthur—who spends too much of his energy on his little whims.

Theo doesn’t even blink when he answers, “My brother is the only one who deserves my energy like this.”

To which Arthur says, tone joking: “And? What about our little miss?”

Theo doesn’t quip his denial fast enough for it to be entirely believable.

The visits to the van Gogh house are scheduled for Thursdays now, after Theo’s classes. Vincent somehow always makes it seem like her presence there gives so much, but really, she only comes to check in on him and see how the pieces are going. Sometimes, they talk about the exhibit’s flow and how one piece can continue the narrative into another. Over the past few weeks, they’ve built a sturdy collection of possible paintings with leading storylines. The exhibit is going along smoothly.

At first, she had some apprehension that Theo would not appreciate her being there often, as being with his brother and being at their house once a week is a little different from their practiced usual at hiding at the Rooftop with only each other—but Theo had softened in the few weeks they’d been jointly working at the exhibit, much to her relief. He buys her iced coffee, the kind she likes; gets her pastries, getting her favorites right; and for most of the time, he’s an angel compared to how he used to be toward her.

She figures it’s because Vincent is there.

It doesn’t take long, however, for her to see a growing imbalance in their little workflow. It doesn’t take long for Theo to try to carry all that can be sorted out on his own.

Vincent pulls you aside one evening, as Theo heads to the kitchen to get you some juice, saying, “I’m worried about Theo.”

He doesn’t need to expound for you to figure out what he means. It’s not that Theo has been sluggish, but it’s easy to see the exhaustion seeping under him, the whirr of stress and anxiety going around his brain non-stop, keeping him up. Vincent mentions fitful sleep, if there is any sleep at all. The dark circles underneath Theo’s eyes might be enough to make a panda bow in shame.

“Is something going wrong?”

“Arguing out the space is taking a lot out of him,” Vincent explains. “You know how spring and summer is graduation season, and so a lot of exhibits are being held.”

“There’s no way no gallery is taking you, even downtown.”

“The current students in the department just have better funding,” he admits, sheepishly. It’s true—the students in the department get financial support for their final projects as part of the university budget. But each student only gets one. Vincent had already tried to set up an exhibit before—but it didn’t push through. The money has since then been spent on things like art supplies and basic necessities. “Besides, you know how the university is with prioritization.”

It’s true. Because of the large influx of students and the limited spaces both within the campus and the city downtown, the university has pretty stringent guidelines as to how to hold a proper exhibit. With all that added to the thing with finances and also building a strong pitch… there’s just so much talking to be done. “Theo’s a great persuader, though.”

“He is,” Vincent agrees. “But every time he misses a mark just a little, he blames himself.”

Which is very Theo-like to do.

Vincent turns to her with eyes filled with concern. “I know I’m already asking you for a lot, but… can you keep your eye on him, when you can? I’m just so worried about him, and you’re the only one I know who can look over him.”

Theo enters the room, all tired eyes and loose shirt and sweatpants, half-meant glaring: “Hondje. Not too close to broer.”

She puts out her tongue at him, but the rule stands: one does not say no to Vincent.

Between books and food, she figures food is the more useful option.

Her classes have a weird schedule, so it’s not every day, but whenever she can, she visits him at the bookstore to bring him food. Arthur mentioned to her—after much prodding and only after she promised to take him and Dazai out for dinner—that Theo had been skipping out on lunch break in exchange for sitting out at the back, so she decided food might be one thing she can do.

It’s not much—she usually catches herself eating in the cafeteria most days, because of her schedule—but when she does make her own meals, she makes a small portion for Theo too. Sandwiches, maybe some soup; pasta, or rice. She brings the same lunchbox she brought that day they were studying at the Little Owl. She doesn’t leave until she’s seen Theo eat.

“Missing me a little?” Theo teases, on the fourth or fifth day she’s randomly come in at Dragon’s Hoard with a lunchbox with a warm meal. It’s been around two weeks since Vincent asked her to keep an eye out for his little brother.

And it’s true, she does miss him a little, because their new schedule this semester has made it so that they could no longer meet on the weekends like they did last time—she has internship work on the weekends for a publishing company—but she’d rather be shot than admit that yet. “No, I just can’t say no to Vincent.”

He hums as he takes a bite out of the small meatball she’d made for their little pasta lunch. Bolognese—her own recipe. “How is the application?”

“Hell,” she says, sighing, as she turns to her box of food. “They added an extra step in, so there’s one more test, and then the final round of interviews. I get that it’s an expensive scholarship but geez…” She shakes her head. “How’s the looking for a space?

“At least five potential places right now,” he answers. When he does, he looks down back at the lunchbox to twirl a forkful of spaghetti. She takes the time to observe the blue of his eyes. “Three is a little more expensive than expected, and two can hold it but with an interruption in the middle of the run.”

And then, quiet. The same kind of quiet they’ve always nurtured between each other, the one where they both get to just let go.

It would be a lie for them not to admit to each other the feeling of hollowness, the one you feel when you’re wrung dry, the not-quite-burnout-yet-but-getting-there exhaustion of just coming at the world, daring it to shoot you down. But at the same time, admitting it feels like some sort of defeat too. They are great at the strategy of not acknowledging the monster that is there, to not give it the power it wishes it wields over them.

What matters is that—even if it is unsaid—they have each other’s backs, and—

Even just that is already enough.

[ 01:37 | coolest person on the planet ] theo u asleep?

[ 01:38 ] when did you change your contact name?

[ 01:38 ] and why are you still up?

[ 01:38 | coolest person on the planet ] readings… just wanted 2 check on u

No response.

[ 01:39 | coolest person on the planet ] i’m sleepy

[ 01:40 ] I’m okay. Go to bed.

[ 01:40 | coolest person on the planet ] hav u even slept this past week?

[ 01:41 ] yes

[ 01:41 | coolest person on the planet ] how many hours

Pause.

[ 01:42 ] 8

[ 01:42 | coolest person on the planet ] …

[ 01:43 | coolest person on the planet ] total or per day

Pause.

[ 01:45 ] Did Vincent put you up to this?

Pause.

[ 01:46 | coolest person on the planet ] u shd take care of urself a lil bit more

[ 01:47 ] and yet we’re both up.

Pause.

[ 01:48 | coolest person on the planet ] i mean it

[ 01:48 | coolest person on the planet ] im ur friend ur my friend

[ 01:48 | coolest person on the planet ] let’s worry abt each other

[ 01:48 | coolest person on the planet ] make sure wr both ok, ok?

He sighs, but the smile creeps up his face anyway.

Closes his laptop, goes to the bathroom to wash his face and—

[ 01:50 | coolest person on the planet ] gnight theo

[ 01:50 | coolest person on the planet ] c u tmrw!

Crawls into bed.

[ 01:51 ] goodnight

#the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart #ikemen vampire #ikevamp theo

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jaxsteamblog · 4 years ago

Text

First Date

Click here to read the full fic on AO3 (brief depiction of graphic violence)

It rained the entire weekend in Hira’a, so Zuko and Katara spent their time at Noren’s home. Katara watched in fascination one afternoon as Kiyi pulled out a broad canvas and she and Zuko sat cross legged on the floor looking at it. Zuko cupped his chin in a hand and tilted his head as Kiyi rattled off math and color theory. Eventually they got into a discussion on brush strokes so Katara got up to help Noriko with tea.

They watched movies, played board games, and helped around the house doing chores. It was the most mundane yet calming experience of Katara’s life.

After the weekend, she returned to school and things settled down a bit. People would ask her about the Avatar from time to time, but mostly the discussions were about the impending examinations.

Rohan sent her a video of Thuy at one of Toph’s matches, and Katara hadn’t seen such an expression of bi awakening since Sokka was introduced to the warriors of the North Pole.

[Do you think she knows?] Katara texted Rohan.

[She has no idea.] They replied.

More videos came as Thuy started her training; the Avatar cycle demanded that elements were taught in a certain order. So earthbending came first, and Toph proved to be a merciless, albeit chaotically so, master.

She called the Avatar “Wet Wipe.”

Katara sent videos back of her mountain of texts, or the weird things she saw happening in the library at 2 AM.

Zuko was less inclined to use social platforms than Rohan, but still managed to contact her just as much. He sent texts of new teas, or random parts of his day while in the palace. Those pictures were always a bit shocking; his long hair fell loose down his back save for his top knot, and his clothing was much more formal.

For some reason, when he sent her a picture of himself in his court robes, it made Katara blush.

Still, they texted in the morning and before bed, which was dancing at the edge of friendship and romance. It was frightening how long Katara would agonize over an emoji sometimes.

As midterms approached, everyone sent her encouraging messages or memes. Rohan was the best at making her laugh, so she had to resist pulling her phone out during study sessions. Thankfully, her concentration had gotten better since she started attending a PTSD group on campus. The exams still stressed her out, and her sleep schedule was still utter garbage, but at least now she had a plan.

After her final exam, she left out a breath and texted Zuko.

[So, date?]

The plan was a movie and then dinner. That way, Zuko informed her, they would have something to talk about while they ate.

“We might miss our show time.” Zuko said and Katara snorted.

“But we will absolutely have something to talk about.” She replied.

“Be quiet!” A man growled and Katara rolled her eyes.

The rope around her wrists rubbed against her skin painfully. When she leaned back, she felt Zuko’s back stiffen to support her. His hands and feet were encased in metal to keep him from firebending.

They had been grabbed in the parking lot. Zuko, lacking any sense of self-preservation, had gone for Katara as two men held her. This opened him up to the woman behind him, who slammed a baton into the back of his head. As he went down, one of the two men who held her dosed Katara with chloroform.

Waking up in the back of a van had been less than ideal.

“Look, you very clearly were not hired by my father, which means that you’re not of any real caliber of kidnappers to keep me here.” Zuko said. The woman who had knocked him out turned in the passenger seat to glare at him.

“And how do you know that, princeling?” She asked.

“Because you don’t know who my companion is.” Zuko said.

Without the full range of her arms, there was very little Katara could do in the way of bending. But she only had a little bit of liquid to work with anyway, so it didn’t matter.

“The Waterbender? We know your little girlfriend isn’t much of a fighter.” The driver scoffed.

Using her fingers, Katara called the blood from Zuko’s head wound. It came as a glob between her thumb and index finger, so she stretched it into a thin thread. Flicking it out, she mimed the act of sawing with her two fingers and the blood acted it out over the rope around her wrists.

It was going to take awhile.

“So what is it that you want?” Zuko asked. “Ransom?”

“Shut it pretty boy.” The woman hissed.

“Oh that’s original. Sure, make fun of the guy with the burn on his face. I know you’re criminals but do you have to be so insensitive?” Zuko retorted. The woman looked perplexed before turning to the driver.

“Did we get the right guy?” She asked.

“Excuse me, I am one in a million.” Zuko said, sounding offended. “I didn’t get this burn just to be treated like a commoner.”

Katara snorted again and almost lost her focus. She was about halfway through the rope and could feel the loosening.

“We know that your sister is going to train the Avatar and we don’t need that psycho corrupting her.” The driver said. “So you’re going to shut up and be a good little bargaining chip or else we kill your girlfriend.”

“Okay so one, she’s not my girlfriend, yet. We were planning on having a nice date, see how things went, and maybe she’d decide to go out with me again. We’re not rushing things here.” Zuko said and Katara smiled. “Secondly, I totally agree with you about Azula. Same page, totally get it. But, and I am not doubting your reasoning skills for a second, how is kidnapping me supposed to change my father’s mind about that?”

“Because if he wants you back alive, he’ll have the Avatar sent elsewhere for training!” The woman snapped.

“Look, where’s the other guy. He’s been quiet, I want to hear his thoughts on things.” Zuko said.

“We’re clear.” Katara said as she cut through the last loop of rope.

“Never mind.” Zuko said and swung up onto a knee. He slid behind the passenger seat and slammed his metal clad hands on either side of the woman’s head. As he heated the metal, she started to scream.

Katara, staggered by her bound ankles, reached out toward the dash. This was another trick she had picked up after her training with Hama and had been used to disable many vehicles during the war. It only worked when people had gotten lazy on upkeep, which was surprisingly frequent among the more far flung troops.

Closing her fists around the water source, Katara yanked her arms back, pulling water and coolant out of the engine. In a quick motion, Katara used the water to peel apart the metal around Zuko’s hands just as she had done to the factory in Jang Hui. Zuko then went to the driver, who had begun to swerve dramatically, and held a blade of fire by his face.

Katara froze herself to the floor of the van to keep from being tossed about while she cut off her last ropes and freed Zuko’s feet.

“Stop the van and we’ll let you go.” Zuko said, his voice low. As the driver seemed to debate the merits of listening to him, Katara went to the woman. She was huddled in the corner of her seat, whimpering and covering her burns with her eyes closed. Pulling water around her hands - making sure to completely discard the coolant - Katara called out the healing energy, making the water glow.

“What are you doing? Get away from her!” The driver said and the van jerked as Zuko brought the blade closer to his face.

“Don’t you worry what she’s doing. It’s leaps and bounds better than what I’m thinking of doing to you.” Zuko said.

Katara touched the woman’s face and she jumped, but didn’t move as the cooling sensation brought relief to her face.

“This will just take a second.” Katara murmured and the woman opened her eyes. She looked terrified.

“I’m a healer.” Katara added and tears welled in the woman’s eyes.

After a few moments, Katara pulled her hands away and the woman brought her hands up, shaking terribly, to her face. As she felt the unburned skin, she started to cry.

“Look,” Zuko said, sounding calmer. “There’s a noodle restaurant there. Stop and let us out.”

“Haruka, are you okay?” The driver asked.

“Y-yeah.” The woman said, still crying.

The driver grunted and jerked the wheel over, coming to a stop in front of a row of shops.

“Katara?” Zuko asked. Katara went to the side door, pulling it open. After she jumped out, Zuko dissipated the fire and followed after. He barely closed the van door before it pulled away, its tires screaming against the pavement.

“Well that was fun.” He remarked.

“Let me see your head.” Katara said with a sigh and Zuko obediently walked to her. She healed him, washing the blood out of his hair before tossing the water into the gutter.

“Hungry?” He asked.

“I could eat.” Katara said and they laughed.

“Does that happen to you often?” She asked as they started to walk to the shop. People who had stopped to stare at the van watched them go.

“Less than you’d think, but more than other people.” Zuko admitted. He reached the door first, opening it and standing aside. “After you.”

Katara walked in and saw steam burst from behind the counter. It was fairly pretty and smelled like warmth.

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#zutara #fanfiction #jax writes #modern au #zutara month 2020 #the fic that prompts built

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miss-lady-uhane · 4 years ago

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Off My Chest Pt.1

I don't see what's so hard about being in a relationship. You are born in to a group of relationships. Your parents, maybe siblings, aunts, uncles, or cousins?

Then immediately you're expected to create more relationships and this time it's with strangers. You're told at a you age to treat others how you want to be treated but who's to say that others will treat you the way you treat them. It's totally uncertain how a person will react to you since not everyone gets along even for the most simple of reasons.

When I was in elementary school I always had the weirdest time making friends and I think it's because no one else was going through what I was going through. At that time I was too young to connect those dots because I didn't even really know what I was going through. I always hung out with my cousin patsy when we weren't in school, mostly because my dad was working and she was also my only cousin who was my age. I think we got along well but we just had different views about things. We both grew up in a Jehovah Witness family, and by that I mean my grandparents were both heavily religious and had 13 kids where majority of them were also heavy in to the JW beliefs. The difference between us was that her dad didn't care about going to church and never let the rest of the family pressure him. My dad was always in the church as a young man but was also a troublemaker and actually was disfellowshiped which means no one in the JW congregation could talk to you because you've basically been banned and the only way to get that back is to do everything you're supposed to do in regards to being a good follower.

I don't exactly know how his obligations transferred to me but we always had to go to church until I was maybe 6-8? And I had to go alone. My older cousins would take me to bible study or come over and study the watch tower. At a young age I started to actually realize how hypocritical that was, why do I have to get dressed up and memorize the Bible when my dad just stays home every night? Boom. All at once I was a bad person even though I never did anything wrong.

As a kid I spent a lot of time with my dad who was really strict. My grandma got me a phone because he would refuse to answer her calls and that was both the best and worst gift. I could have some kind of social life and hang out with my friends but my dad would literally call me every 20 minutes and I'm not exaggerating. It got to the point where I would just turn my phone off even if I knew I would get in trouble.

The constant calling and over-protection along with my dad always being gone for work coupled with moving in to smaller and smaller housing situations started to change me inside. I started realizing that not everything was peachy-keen. My dads best friends who I would go over and hang out with their kids no longer wanted him around which meant I had less and less friends. I started to wonder why my dad was always so frantic and why these people he's known his whole life started to drift away from him. The final time we moved to Pa'anau village which was basically Kauai's section 8 housing changed everything. After a lot of drama and overhearing arguments I realized that we were poor. I was still to young to understand why that was but I wasn't really bothered by it because I still wore the same school uniform, I still saw my friends from school, I still went to the beach every day. The only thing that was different now was that my dad was unemployed because the union does massive layoffs all the time.

I was still in middle school at this time and things started to change a little, people wanted to come to my neck of the woods all the sudden and I could never think of an excuse to tell them why they couldn't. Because my dad is a hoarder? Because I live in the ghetto? Or what else? Because my dad refused to pick me up or drop me off because he was always asleep? I never questioned why my dad was the way he was. I always just thought he was sad and missed my mom. He would cry a lot and have nightmares where he would yell for her and I would go in and wake him up and he would just cry.

I learned a lot about growing up once we moved to pa'anau. I had to clean our apartment all the time or it would be a mess, I did my own laundry. I definitely got in a lot of trouble because of who I was hanging out with in the environment. Living there and going to school in the city really changed who I was as a person.

I never saw myself as a "hot girl" or let alone a "pretty island girl". When I was in chief was I remember being like wow I thought I was a tomboy before and now I don't even own a pair of short hollister jean shorts. Either way I made my own path, I had the typical "text" boyfriend that I never saw in my life. We'd look at each other after our friends would go tell them something we each sent them on a mission to relay. Never really cared for any of that because in reality I was still shooting my guy friends with airsoft guns on the weekends.

After a while I realized that I couldn't just hang out with my two guy friends (Curtis & Treydon) because they too were finding themselves in a whole new world. I started hanging out with girls.. I just always felt like I never fit in. Girls as a whole are hard to get close with because there is ALWAYS drama. I still managed to have a group of friends wether I was unsure of if they really liked me or not we all ate lunch and we all hung out every lunch and found each other in class.

In the 8th grade things started to go for a wild turn. I got in a lot of trouble since my after school friends were those in my neighborhood and most of the people who lived in Pa'anau Village have drug using parents or drug dealing parents. I ended up getting arrested for the first time when I was 11 years old. We were eating ice cream I. Old Koloa Town when one of our friends said hey that couple left their bag should we take it? I remember everyone being scared and not wanting to but before I knew it she grabbed it and everyone just started running so of course I ran. She started opening the bag once we got to a bush covered pond near by and I realized we fucked up. The bag had her cell phone, her engagement ring, wedding band, Movado watch, everything. When they caught us I didn't have anything in my possession but the only thing that linked me was a phone call to my cell phone from the stolen phone. That call was made by a friends boyfriend who thought it was funny.

I'm now an 11 year old on probation. Grounded for life, can't affiliate with those friends, not to mention that we all had a different version of what happened. After this I found out that not only those friends but also our mutual school friends also had it out for me. As some kind of joke while we were banned from seeing each other they made a fake MySpace page where they started flirting with all kinds of guys including my last friend left in the groups boyfriend.

At this point I pretty much gave up on everyone I knew. I didn't want to hang out with them and I knew that I could find better people to be with. 8th grade summer my cousin Levi who was for some reason two years older than me in the same grade invited me to hang out with his friends. They were all way older and looked at me crazy!

A 13 year old? Who brought her here. But I was a balmores and they knew my older cousins really well. This group wasn't easy to get in to but once again I found my way and stuck around.

This all leads me to what I wanna figure out. Why, do I consistently get shafted? My 9th grade year I met a boy, he was quiet and literally said nothing to me. We would pass at school and for the first time ever I was like wow who is that. Fast forward, I find out he's friends with my new older friends because he was a senior which would make sense why I never saw him before. We eventually had small interactions and then one day at a party we hooked up. Go figure. We danced and kissed and I was like holy shit I'm gonna get in so much trouble. After that he literally said nothing to me until months went by and it happened again and this time it went all the way. First of all as I'm writing this why the fuck would he be the one to choose? Fuckin guy didn't do anything. Anyway.

I'm 14 and I've lost my virginity to a senior who also lost his virginity to me. Everyone we knew found out and made fun of him for hooking up with such a young girl. Everyone was so mean to me and he never talked to me again not a single word. Later I find out he was too embarrassed, what a pussy.

Instead of being sad I got really mad and started partying more and being kind of a tease because I thought it was funny that guys would try to hook up with me and I could say no but a girl they knew for years would be trying to hook up with them and the guy wouldn't want to. My way of killing two birds with one stone, getting over a guy and pissing off girls who were being mean to me.

Eventually I had my first legit boyfriend and that was.. a first. Typical I threw away my whole world for him but it wasn't hard since we were in the same group, things continued pretty much as normal minus the fact that I always had a ride now.

A lot of things happened that would need an entire book to fill in order for me to explain my self enstated independence from my dad, moving in with a friend, moving in with my coupons, then ending up in Washington.

I spent the entire time in Washington flying back and forth to California partially to see my boyfriend and partially to stay with friends and party.

My boyfriend and I ended pretty bad. He had developed depression and became a legitimate alcoholic, was cheating on me with multiple girls who I was suspicious of, then finally he was a complete drunk monster and that was the end of that.

Once again I found my way. I stayed in Washington and completed high school where I also met a whole squad of female demons. But yet again I started dating someone I met at a party. I didn't know him at all just what I knew from parties and social media. I figured we would be good friends and have fun and it was one of those things where he just called me his girlfriend one day. This was the biggest mistake I could've ever made. This guy was abusive, mentally and physically. I've never dealt with anyone like that and found myself at my weakest point. He spat in my face, threw my belongings all over the place, cheated on me physically, cheated on me on social media, fought with me publicly and on social media. Ultimately he ended up hacking any kind of internet profile I owned and was trying to ruin my life and I had to go to his house get my stuff and tell his parents and threaten legal action. Worst person ever.

Then right before I move to college a friend of mine was really in to setting me up with someone and I told her sure but nothing official. I hung out with this guy and her a few times and started to like him just because he was a normal guy. Pretty basic, friends, family, a dog. Most of all worshipped the ground I walk on. Everything was pretty easy going he asked me to be his girlfriend and I didn't see why not so I said yes, we dated in Washington for 3 months. I moved to California and we were still together even though that wasn't the plan. While I was there the day before my first ever jiu jitsu tournament I get a call "Keanna I'm so sorry I should've never done that I feel so terrible" the voice was a girl but the number wasn't recognized. It was a friend of my boyfriend, she told me that they went to lunch and after went back to his place. I didn't care much about him hanging out with girls because he had a lot of girl friends and it just wasn't an issue. She said that she wanted to break up with her crazy boyfriend and she saw an opportunity (to cheat) and took it. They went back to his house after having a long talk about how they used to have feelings for each other. The stories after this don't really add up but what I gather is that they went up to his room to have sex or something and she started feeling guilty, because we were "friends" and told him she changed her mind to which he responded "can I touch your ass at least" and she pulled her pants down and he touched her ass. Doesn't make sense yeah? So anyway I'm not really trying to deal with this and I should've broken up with him but instead I call him and I said "what did you do?" He sounds confused so I ask again but this time louder. He panicks and says I don't know I don't know. He ended up telling me and flew down the weekend after because wanted to talk. While he was there I looked through his phone and saw some other conversations he was having and also saw that when we first were hanging out he had another option if I didn't go through. Another option who apparently was in his bed when they were making out and she got her period and bled on him she felt so inclined to apologize. After this I lost my shit and didn't trust him at all and I just wanted him to leave. He begged me to forgive him and promised nothing would ever happen again and like me, I go with it. We end up dating for a total of two years. After he said he wouldn't do anything he really didn't. I still let him do whatever he wanted if he wanted to go to Vegas with his friends or party or go to lunch with girls. I just didn't really care I guess, my friend told me "do what you want to do so I know what you'd rather do" so I kept that. Eventually I was tired of how dependent he was. I had to do everything for him aside from basic chores. I had to file papers for him (e.g work, school, gym) I felt like I was teaching him how to do things and I just got tired of it. I felt like everything was almost too good and too plain because I was carrying the relationship. I was better than him at everything. We broke up and he moved out which was a long process.

During that process I was working my first full time job, had a recently found new best friend, and was spending most of my time with someone from high school who didn't like me but we ended up liking our adult selfs. This person suggested that I start hanging out with a teammate, a guy I knew since the 6th grade, or at least knew who he was. She said she thought we would be cute together and people always made fun of us for being so close. Never in my mind did I think I would date him. I just didn't see him like that. We started hanging out and realized we have a lot more in common than we thought. Everything happened pretty fast and things were so different. For once I was open to the idea of having a "friends with benefits" because I knew this person for a while and knew he wasn't exactly the relationship type. I told him that this could work out as long as he didn't keep me in the dark and was honest with me. After 4 months of us being kind of exclusive kind of not he told me that he loved me more than anyone else and I felt the same way. We were officially official. I felt so close to him in ways I never felt with anyone else. Eventually we had our first issue. I had found out that he had been chatting with our old classmate who lived in a city near by, he was telling her all kinds of false nothings and she asked "aren't you dating Keanna?" To which he replied "ugh". I found out because we were sitting with each other that night and she messaged him, I said ew why are you talking to that girl? And he said they were talking because she lived near by. I messaged her "hey girl. Bryson told me you live in LA we should hang sometime" to which she responded something like "Keanna I'm so sorry I shouldn't have been talking to him I'm so sorry I did this to you" followed with screenshots of their conversation. I was hurt. I freaked out, he left, he came back and squeezed me tight after hours of us fighting and said he was sorry and it would never happen again. A few months go by and we're sort of living together mostly because I didn't want to hang out at his house anymore and my place was cuter. Every morning before he went to work he spent a huge amount of time in the bathroom and I was always kind of like wtf and I don't remember how I found this out but I found out that he was flirting with girls during those hours because some how one of the girls told me and sent me screenshots of their conversations. Once again I got mad and forgave him and months went by. I go away for thanksgiving break leaving him at our place/my place. I come back to beautiful flowers and more attention than I had before. He told me shortly after that break that he wasn't going to be hanging with his old friends because they were bad news and I was pretty surprised. I kind of agreed but I also think.. idk my friends are wild too. Either way things were good. One day he gets a FaceTime call and didn't want to answer it, I copied the number in to google and found a name of a girl I recognized from a while ago at my birthday. I was drunk and he let me send a Snapchat to a bunch of girls I told them "I will ruin your life" the only one who responded was this girl who said "I didn't even do anything" and I thought it was funny. I find out that while I was gone for thanksgiving he and his friend picked this girl up and her friend and brought them to my apartment and they stayed the night. They made a vlog about how they picked them up in my car and how they hung out at my place and slept so long that they missed their flight. The next morning there were videos of my boyfriend driving them back in my car. My heart stopped.

I've never felt so blind sided in my life. I hated him and I didn't want to see him again but somehow he convinced me that it was all a mistake and he already cut all these toxic people out of his life.

He suggested that we delete social media and I remember the exactly message "if you love me you'll do the same thing" and I was like wow, yeah let's do it. That was probably the most interesting time of my life. For once I didn't have social media and I had to answer to everyone as to why and tell them that I am okay and that I'm just taking time off. We ended up moving to LA to be closer to school. His friend moved in from Kauai and stayed only 6 months. Living in LA was an interesting change. We got to eat a lot and experience a different kind of the city.

Lots of little things happened while we were here, we fought a lot about social media. He would reactivate his Instagram without telling me which I felt like was kind of shady since we were doing this together and I didn't know there was that option on the table but I felt like life was better without it anyway. At one point I saw a call on his phone made from Snapchat to a random girl. I asked about it and it got no where but I became very suspicious. At this point my trust level was low as could be but I just thought that the goods were good and that bads were so stupid and avoidable. One day I just decided to look through his Venmo and the first name said "queenturtlee" I was like wtf kind of name is that so I look it up on google and see that it's connected to a Twitter account of a girl asking people to send her money. I reach out to her and ask why she's friends with my boyfriend to which she sends me screenshots of their conversations and once again I am frantic. I screenshot all of it and send it to him, we go through the apologies again. And yet again I believe that he was going to delete it. Half way through living in Palos Verdes, life at this point is a fucking rollercoaster. I haven't told anyone about anything thats happened I haven't opened up or really understand how I feel about it we just keep moving. One night after he was out with friends he was getting texts and calls from a Hawaii phone number which I thought was strange, I look it up on a google and I recognize the name. I start questioning it but I get deflected, it's nothing it's nothing. Once again we move on.

A few months go by and we're hit with an actual pandemic. We leave LA all together to go to Washington temporarily and it turned in to permanently after realizing that life in California just wasn't going to be sustainable. I graduated college virtually, we were living in my grandmas house for 3-4 months. Things were weird. We were managing to stay positive by doing all the things we possibly could to stay active and have a good summer.

Eventually we got our own place, moved all our belongings up, and got a puppy! Things were still locked down but at least we had all of our things and more importantly we had this little fluffy bear.

I've always struggled with birth control because I would get the worst symptoms so a friend told me about tracking ovulation and taking my basal body temperature in place of taking birth control. This method was risky but I felt like it was okay because she does it. One day I felt really sick and realized I didn't get my period, I took 5 pregnancy tests all faded positive negative. This led to me having to take a bunch of blood tests and ultrasounds to find out that I was exactly 3 weeks pregnant.

I wasn't ready and had no intention on having the baby but I had to wait until a fetus was visible to do anything about it. While I'm in this process I get a random message from a classmate I haven't talked to in years. They say "hey girl sorry to message you about this but I was at a family party and there were some girls talking about your boyfriend subscribing to her only fans" I immediately felt my heart drop lower than ever. The girl who was at the party messaged me, she told the girl with the only fans to message me and she did. She sent me everything and I remembered a time recently when I walked out late at night and saw him on Snapchat which is where the messages she showed me came from. So once again I confront him but this time it's different. I'm going through something that I never thought. I'm waiting weeks knowing I'm pregnant feeling nauseas, anxious, and scared. What am I supposed to do now.

After a huge fight, the solution was that he would delete it again and give me his password.

This was probably the worst it ever was. A couple nights I unlocked his phone and then got nervous and locked it again. I wanted to look but I was scared of what I would find. I couldn't sleep every night, I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't know if I could trust him anymore. Everything was so good how was I going to deal with a breakup, a puppy separation, all after moving to a new state. I thought to myself, if I don't look now I'll never know. So I do. I find messages that date back to a year. I find all the extra messages that no one sent me, I find money trails sent to females for nudes or sexual messages. Worst of all I find the girl that I saw calling him a year before when he came home late that one night. He had been talking to this girl the entire time, telling her stories about things we were doing. Worst of all is that he wrote the words "I love you".

I completely lost my shit. I woke him up in a rage showing him all the things I saw asking him how he could do this to me.

I never wanted to see him again I felt like I was going to throw up. I was crying so much I felt like the world knew.

He went to his moms house and I tried to stay out or away as much as possible without telling my family anything. At this point it hurt so much. I love him so much, everything outside of social media is a dream so why would he risk that? I felt insecure. A few days before my surgery he told me that he wanted to be there for me and that he was a changed person and realized how fucked up he was but he didn't want me to go through it alone. I didn't want to go through it alone either, I couldn't stop thinking about what I saw and all the names I read. I felt alone and like I was looking at a stranger.

He came back and we slowly tried to figure out how to be normal again. Since then we've moved on far but I think he moves much faster or at least it seems like it. He is my best friend and someone I care about differently than I've ever before. We make a great team, we support each other and know each other on a deep level. We can be our selves with each other. We know each other more than I've ever known any of my friends.

Today, we are still together. He is still my best friend. Our little fluffy bear is now a semi-huge German shepherd who is the cutest and most well behaved 9 month old ever. We've established ourselves in Washington and he actually got a really good job doing what he went to school for. In regards to loyalty things have been going well so far. It's taken me a lot to get to where I am now, I feel like I lost myself for a long time. I'm trying to work on myself lately and trying to stay focused on things that really matter. Our life is pretty much picture perfect but we're still growing up.

Our most constant argument is always social media, but now it's all over the place. It's me being crazy, it's him being careless. A constant circle of misunderstanding each other and breaking each other down emotionally. Sometimes I wish there was a way to forget everything. I wish social media was as it were before, simple. I wish communication wasn't so aggressive and that there was an easier way to mediate instead of getting a therapist. I don't know I wish there was a way to make the pain go away. To not think about what's made me who I am today.

I think it's hard being in your 20s. Everyone is at different stages of life. They have different priorities. People who you grew up with are now spread across the world and you may go years without seeing someone you consider your close friend.

One thing that's hard for me now is not knowing what's next. I feel as if I've given all of the emotional gas I have and if anything else makes my heart drop I think I'll completely give up.

I wish it was easier to get over a fear but some people including myself need extra support. Unfortunately for my boyfriend, not only does he get to deal with what we've been through but he has to deal with all that I've been through.

I always feel like no one I know actually knew what I went through growing up. Boyfriends or best friends are usually the ones who get to know you best and so far only one person who's not my family knows so much about me. Life has shown me how easy it's been for people to leave me or treat me badly. I know that I am not a perfect person but I do know that I don't deserve half the things I experienced. I blame myself for being too forgiving, I blame the church for teaching me that trait, I blame my dad for making me go and making me think life was different than it was.

At this point I have no one to blame but myself for how things have gone. All I can hope is that all that I have now stays afloat and keeps growing in the positive direction that it has. I can't control everything even though I want to.

#self care #relationships #mental health #exercise #diet #friends #making friends #switching schools

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thankskenpenders · 5 years ago

Photo

Yeah, this is the big one. Grab your popcorn

Sally finally gets a moment to talk to Sonic after being ignored all day, and tells him what’s up. With her being put in charge, and Sonic being her royal consort (basically, the guy who’s committed to marrying her someday but isn’t quite her fiance yet), Sally wants Sonic to stop going on away missions and lead Knothole by her side

Look. Let’s set aside all of our preconceived notions about what a Sonic comic should or shouldn’t be. Ignore the fact that we obviously want to see Sonic go on adventures. Forget it. Let’s look at it from Sally’s perspective for a second

Yes, this is the post in which I explain that “The Slap” isn’t that bad. It’s certainly not great, but it’s not The Worst Thing Ever like it’s been made out to be. I wish I didn’t have to spend my evening writing this, but 15 years of hyperbolic fan outrage (note: some Wikia rando added that “reception” section this year) have forced my hand

First of all, again, Sonic is formally committed to marrying her and ruling alongside her someday. This was established ten issues ago. He was already committed to this. Then, Sonic went and died. Sally still spent an entire year of her life thinking her basically-fiance was dead, and had to deal with shit in Knothole without him as things continued to get worse and worse. No one can just bounce back from that unscathed. After his return, she WANTED to help Sonic and go be a Freedom Fighter on the last mission, but her parents forbade her and the royal guards kept her in the castle. (That SUCKS, but is a whole ‘nother conversation.) She wants to fight by his side and keep him safe, but her parents are forcing her to stay home and be the princess, which only makes her more distraught. Last issue, she broke down into tears when she saw Sonic get shot by M over Eggman’s video feed, and her mother had to console her and reassure her Sonic wasn’t dead

Sally very clearly has PTSD over Sonic’s “death” a year ago. She doesn’t want to lose him again. She’s outright said as much

And also... when she says Sonic isn’t the only hero around, she’s got a point?Sonic barely did anything in the last arc! Tails was the one who outsmarted ADAM. Shadow dealt with Eggman. Bunnie did most of the damage to M and took out an entire fucking aircraft carrier on her own. Knuckles, the Chaotix, Rouge, and Amy took out the robot horde. All Sonic did was land the final attack on M--which, honestly, someone else could’ve done. And he got his arm injured in the process

Add on to this all of the chaos of the last few days. Sally’s barely had a free moment to see Sonic since she found out he was alive. They nearly got nuked by Eggman. They’re being harangued by the paparazzi. It sucks. And hell, it goes back WAY further than this! She spent years as a kid trying to save her parents, and now all they do is belittle her. She found out she had a secret older brother, and then her parents decided he was the more important child. She went through all sorts of relationship drama. She nearly died a few times herself. And now, her parents have decided to leave her in charge of their whole kingdom at a time of war, while she’s still a mess from the trauma of losing Sonic. The idea Bollers had was apparently that Sally had been bottling up her issues for years (which she totally had been), and this was just the breaking point

I know Sonic’s desire to keep being a hero is understandable. I know he’s right. That’s all he really knows how to do, and he feels useless in times of peace. And obviously, we the readers want to see Sonic go on adventures. But Sally’s concerns are valid. We don’t have to agree with her plan to have Sonic rule by her side for her emotions to be understandable

Sally’s been on the verge of a breakdown for who knows how long. She should be mad at her parents, but they’ve worn her down to the point where she thinks she’s unable to confront them. (It would be very, very easy to make a case arguing that Sally’s parents are emotionally abusive. Max especially.) She thinks that Sonic is the one person who will listen to her and have her back. They’re betrothed, after all. This is literally what he signed up for. After trying to get his attention ALL DAY, she finally gets a chance to talk to him. But he wants other things in life, and refuses. In front of a crowd, no less

So she lashes out at Sonic and slaps him

Then they both start yelling at each other and crying. Sally asks Sonic if she’s more important to him than fighting Eggman, Sonic can’t answer, and Sally runs away in tears. For all intents and purposes, Sonic and Sally are now broken up. (For now.)

Should Sally be lashing out at Sonic? No. Could this scene be done better? Oh, absolutely. This is not the direction I would want Sally to go in as a character, and if you ARE gonna have them fight, this wasn’t written with the care required to make fans sympathize with both parties. The fact that we’ve seen everything from Sonic’s perspective with barely any insight into Sally’s certainly doesn’t help. But as the several lengthy paragraphs above explain, this does not come out of nowhere. It’s easy to find lots of fans online calling Sally all sorts of names (sometimes very misogynistic or ableist ones) because they think she just flipped out on Sonic out of nowhere. But she didn’t. Sally having some sort of breakdown had been foreshadowed for several issues, and the reasons why make sense. No, she shouldn’t have lashed out at Sonic, but this isn’t just her going “Oh no, my period! Let’s nuke England!” as so many have made it out to be. (And hell, the comics already had a lengthy history of treating Sally even worse than this, with Gallagher making her the nagging girlfriend who bickered with Sonic all the time and Penders sympathizing more with her shitty dad.)

Again, this was supposed to be a turning point in which Sally bottling up all this crap and carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders finally leads to her breaking. It’s a dramatic low point to build back up from. The problem is that Bollers left the series only a few issues later, and Penders and “Chacon” never did much with this. So in hindsight, many view this as her randomly snapping “for no reason,” because the followup stories that would have explored how she’d been bottling up her feelings were never actually written. But it’s not hard to figure out what’s supposed to be going on in her head if you actually go back and look at the preceding Sally scenes

For the most part, this is just run of the mill relationship drama for Archie Sonic. You see this kind of shit all the time in serialized media. Characters date, but the writers need to keep things ~spicy~, so they break up, see other people... then inevitably end up back together, and the process repeats ad nauseum. You ever watch Scrubs? You know how JD and Elliot are obviously love interests from episode one, but they had to do that will they/won’t they shit for years and have flings with other characters to keep up ratings? Yeah, it’s just that. For Sonic, there’s also the added pressure from Sega, who never allowed Sonic to be in any stable relationship for very long. Several writers have talked about how this limited what they could do with Sonic and Sally. Do I like that this cycle of drama is the norm? No. But after over 200 of these comics, I’m used to it

(And hell, at this point in the comics, they had literally just broken up Bunnie and Antoine, and Rouge was starting to get in the way of Knuckles and Julie-Su’s relationship. Between Julie-Su and Knuckles’ first kiss and them actually dating, Penders had Julie-Su get mad at Knuckles and go out with some random other guy. They do this shit all the time)

The worst you can really say about this scene is that Jon’s art is a little too goofy and undermines the drama a bit. In his own words from his website’s FAQ: “I’m sorry. Like I said, I was an overeager noob and I drew what I was given.” But really, he had been drawing these sorts of exaggerated, frantic expressions throughout the entire issue. Not just with Sally. Look at all the panels of Sonic wigging out in the previous pages. I still think his work is fantastic. If anything, it was a bad call on Archie’s part to give this somber scene to a brand new artist with a very exaggerated, silly art style. He just drew what was in the script

You know what really blows about this whole thing, though? Jon Gray is still, to this day, over 15 years later, getting harassed for drawing The Slap

That is so utterly ridiculous and shitty. People have made up all sorts of conspiracy theories about the slap, saying that Jon had some sort of “anti-Sally agenda” and that it wasn’t in the script. (This is completely false.) People are so stuck in the past and bent out of shape over this one panel in a pretty run-of-the-mill Archie Sonic issue that Jon has to block people who come into his Twitter mentions accusing him of “sabotaging” the series on a regular basis. Y’all, Jon’s a good guy, and he doesn’t deserve to be treated like that

And lord. There’s so much nastier shit within this series. Penders hooking a 15-year-old Sally up with a dude in his 20s (and later saying that he wanted her to lose his virginity to said dude). Gallagher making Barby Koala have a creepy crush on Tails. Penders rephrasing a poem about the Holocaust to be about hedgehogs. Penders having Sally rationalize her dad’s attempt at genocide. (I could go on and on with Penders, can you tell)

This whole thing is just, so blown out of proportion. It’s not a great scene, but it didn’t “ruin” Sally’s character. Neither Jon nor Bollers had some sort of “anti-Sally agenda.” They weren’t out to ruin your fucking ship. And for god’s sake, quit yelling at them about it. This was 15 years ago and all parties involved have moved on. It’s just more melodrama in a series that’s always 90% melodrama

It’s a single panel in a comic about Sonic the Hedgehog. Can we move on

#StH 134 #tkp post #the slap #hall of fame

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cagestark · 5 years ago

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Better Late Than Never//1

And Merry Christmas to YOU

Aka I started another project that I will take twenty years to finish. But @starkerflowers prompts were just too fucking good.

About: With interest in his work waning, famous writer Tony Stark (under the pseudonym AE Potts) changes his entire public relations platform, which includes hosting a meet-and-greet contest where one lucky fan will get to spend the day with him. That one lucky fan is Peter Parker. Peter is 21. Will contain nff, alcoholism, suicide attempts, character death (not major), drug mentions, anxiety, anxiety attacks.

Read here on AO3.

Tony is awakened from a drunken, dreamless sleep by a tub of envelopes and small packages being upended over his head. He jerks upright with a shout from where he was slumped over his writing desk, upending the (empty) bottle of whiskey that had lulled him to sleep. Pepper stands over him, impeccable in every way he is not.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, pushing envelopes off of where they have pooled on his lap. “You could have taken my eye out, Peppercorn. What are you trying to do, perform Lingchi on me? What is all this?”

“Fan mail,” she says. Her voice is stern and unsympathetic. The first time she’d found him passed out drunk over his desk, she had panicked and nearly called for an ambulance. The next handful of times she had just covered him with a blanket and regarded him with sad eyes the next morning when she brought him coffee. But those were ten years ago. Not to mention, all in her first few weeks on the job— “Social media is revolting. You never answer fan mail, you never do Q&A’s, you haven’t done an interview in almost a decade.”

“Fuck this,” Tony mutters, opening one drawer. “Where’s my whiskey?”

“In your bloodstream, I’d imagine. Don’t brush this off, Tony. Sales are waning. We need to make some serious changes in our PR or I’ll be putting in my two-weeks’ notice.”

That gets Tony’s attention. Pepper hadn’t threatened to quit after his last book when he’d killed off one of the most popular characters (one of his personal favorites, may she rest in fictional peace) and the public had flipped their shit. She hadn’t threatened to quit years before that when she walked in on him hunched over his desk with a straw to his nose, three sheets to the wind on far more than just whiskey. She has the disposition of a mountain: unflinching and ever-enduring.

“You mean it,” says Tony.

“I mean it.”

His shoulders sag. He glances around the room: the mess, the junk, the empty alcohol bottles, the half-finished manuscripts. There’s a strange feeling in the back of his throat, acidic, like he might throw up. Or cry. When his mouth opens to say something sarcastic, something about not letting the door hit her on the way out if she expects him to play nice with the media, all that comes out is a broken: “I can’t lose you, Pep.”

She puts a hand on his shoulder. “You will. If you don’t make some changes. Okay?”

Maybe this is what it means to be balanced on a knife’s edge, where one way ends in pain and the other ends in terminal inconvenience. But he knows which one he has to pick. His whole life is just a big inconvenience, but pain? Tony has spent enough time with his hand flat against the stove’s burner to know that he’d rather die than feel it again, rather die than lose one of the only people left who can stand him.

He picks up the closest letter and tears it open, blinking heavily to clear his eyes. Pepper leans down to press a kiss to the crown of his head and then gags. “Take a shower, when you get the chance,” she mutters, smiling.

The letters start off by being good for one thing: his ego. Adoring fans have been writing to his penname and business address for decades since he put out his first super-hero novel, titled IRON-MAN. Pepper has chosen to give him recent fan-mail, considering he’s spent so long ignoring it that if he were to answer them in order of reception, he might encounter fans who didn’t even remember the letters once sent. Or ones who were dead.

They are all variations of the same thing. The handwriting changes, gentle feminine cursive to childish scrawling to neat block lettering, but the message is usually the same. DEAR MR. POTTS. I’VE READ EVERY BOOK YOU’VE EVER WRITTEN. I GOT YOUR NAME TATTOOED ON MY ASS. IRON-MAN IS MY HERO. I’VE NEVER READ PROSE AS LOVELY AS YOURS. WHAT IS YOUR SECRET?

At Pepper’s request, Tony drafts a generic letter to send in response, something about how he can’t respond personally to every letter but he wants them to know that he’s read what they’ve written and ‘holds it close to his heart’.

“It’s good,” Pepper approves. “Sign them yourself.”

“Good?” Tony says. “I was joking—this letter is trash. Anyone who knows me would see this for the sarcasm it is—”

“Then thank God none of the fans know you,” Pepper responds coolly.

She has a point. Tony has existed in relative seclusion since he first began publishing his works at 24. After twenty years, he’d managed to remain mostly anonymous. A pseudonym does most of the work, including non-disclosure agreements for his employees. Any time a presence is required, he sends Rhodey or Happy or Pepper even. Theory pages abound on the internet, sites devoted to finding out who the real AE POTTS is. Even though one picture leaked of him during the early 2000’s (a grainy godforsaken thing that didn’t even show his best angle), there were still some disbelievers. One popular conspiracy theory is that AE is Pepper, considering Tony stole her last name to use as his own.

Maybe that’s why his declining image in the media bothers her so much.

A week later, Tony’s hand has a cramp the way it hasn’t since he was a little boy learning to write his letters. Freehand has never been his specialty—it’s far too slow for the way his mind works, bounding a sentence, a scene, a chapter ahead. Signing so many letters is going to freeze his hand in a claw like position. He’s sure of it.

Then Pepper drops the next bombshell on him: the contest.

“It goes against everything I’ve been working so hard to do for the last twenty years,” Tony shouts at the zenith of their argument. “I do not want to be known! I don’t want the fame; I just wanted the goddamn fortune, is that too much to ask for?”

“Times have changed,” Pepper says through her teeth. She holds her own, spine straight. She hasn’t shirked away from his angry outbursts ever, not even when they were children growing up together in Manhattan. “I’m not asking you to do a 20/20 Special. I’m not asking for an interview on Ellen. I’m asking for you to meet with one fan. Have a goddamn lunch with them. If you can’t handle that, then you can kiss your fortune goodbye. Mark my words.”

Tony marks them. He fucking marks them, okay? When he’s drinking himself blind, locked in his office (good luck getting in now, Pep), they ring around his skull like a dime in the dryer. Sometime around dawn, she picks the lock on the door and mops his brow while he vomits in the tiny trashcan beside his desk.

“I’m not doing this to torture you,” she says with uncharacteristic tenderness. Her hand on his forehead occasionally rifling through his greasy hair is not what’s making his eyes prickle with tears—it’s the vomiting. Honest. He’s not that touch-starved. “You know that, right? I hate seeing you like this.”

“I know,” he chokes miserably, gagging again. So he agrees to the Willy Wonka Initiative. Pepper puts out the word that the infamous AE POTTS will be selecting a single fan to meet face to face. Anyone eighteen or older is eligible to participate, as long as they write a letter explaining why they should get it blah blah blah. A golden ticket might have been funner. At least then Tony might have had an excuse to wear the tacky purple suit and tophat.

In the meantime, Pepper reveals that she’s been having Happy screen his mail to only show him the happy letters—figures. His hate mail isn’t extensive, but it certainly exists, having increased exponentially since he killed off Natasha in the last novel.

FUCKING MYSOGINISTIC ASSHOLE, Cheryl from Newport tenderly writes. YOU HAD ONE GOOD FEMALE CHARACTER, AND YOU KILLED HER OFF. I HOPE ANOTHER WOMAN NEVER LETS YOU BETWEEN THEIR LEGS AGAIN AND YOUR DICK SHRIVELS OFF.

Tony thinks that’s pretty succinct. He posts it up on his desk propped up against the last picture ever taken of him and his mother. Killing off Natasha had been an idea he’d personally revolted against for months. Sure, it made sense that sensitive, strong Natasha would be the one to sacrifice herself in order to stop the villain from succeeding in wiping out half the universe. It made sense for a woman to be the one to give her life to protect others.

After all, hadn’t his own mother died trying to protect Tony?

The weekend after the contest drops on their social media platforms, Pepper texts to tell him that it’s being received far, far better than they might have ever hoped for. Already dozens of letters had been received, letters which must have been penned and mailed just hours after the news had spread.

Joy, Tony texts back.

I haven’t told you the best news, she says. That’s how Tony knows that the next news will be the worst news, absolutely the worst news of all. You get to pick the fan.

“Any letter catching your eye?” Pepper asks him over lunch in his office.

“They’re all the same,” Tony laments. Even his own ego can only take so much stroking. After a while, the fan mail has become mostly routine and lackluster, though he keeps opening it, keeps signing the response letters, keeps sending them out. “I’m going to end up picking one at random, Pep.”

“I don’t care how you pick,” Pepper says. “As long as you do—and as long as you’re ready to suffer with the consequences of your choice.”

“Suffer? God, I love the light you bring into my life. The unending optimism. The unparalleled faith and trust in me.”

Her eyes glitter even as they roll. “If you like me so much, you can buy lunch next time.”

Tony snorts, taking a large bite from his burger. “Gold digger.”

“I’ve seen your taxes, Tony. These days, there isn’t much gold to dig for.”

“Ouch, kill shot.”

The letter arrives only one week before the contest deadline. In the top drawer of his desk are three other letters from potential winners, mostly picked at random, sometimes because Tony likes their handwriting, sometimes because they say something funny that actually makes him laugh. When he opens up the letter from Peter B. Parker, he scans the first lines not intending to be impressed.

Dear Mr. Potts, Peter writes.

I’ve written you so many letters that it should be easy by now. I don’t know why my hands are shaking. Maybe I’m nervous because I know for certain that this one, someone will actually read.

I received my first copy of IRON-MAN when I was eight years old—yes, a little bit heavy for a kid that age, but my parents had just died unexpectedly in a car accident. My aunt and uncle took me in, and my uncle gave me his first edition. Iron-man’s story was one of the only things that got through to me as a kid. His struggle to come to terms with losing his own parents, his loneliness, his fear. The way he overcomes all of that and still goes on to do good…yeah. It meant a lot to a grief-stricken kid. Obviously.

Pretty much every birthday and Christmas, I end up receiving one of your books as a gift. My family and friends know me so well, I have nearly a half-dozen copies of AVENGERS (it’s one of my favorites). The things you write about are so close to my heart, so close to some of the experiences I’ve had in real life. My struggle with mental illness. My abuse and neglect. And the way you write these things makes me think…fear, I guess…that maybe you know something about them too.

I would love to get to meet you and talk about your incredible books. I’d love to get to know you. Not going to lie, as a fanboy, I’d probably be happy to just sit at the same table with you and have a meal. I’ll buy. We don’t even have to talk (okay I swear I’m not as desperate as I sound!). I’m sure you’ve received so many awesome letters, and I know that the fan you pick will be so, so lucky.

(Every letter I write to you, I ask if you could please return my book. It’s been five years since I sent it. I’m sure you don’t even have it anymore, maybe you threw it away from the start. But if you do have it, even if you don’t pick me to win the contest, it would mean so much if you sent it back. When I mailed it to you in Jan. 2014, my uncle was still alive. He’s gone now…anyway it’s one of the only things of his that I have left.)

Your fan always,

PETER.

PS: please disregard the last letter I sent…obviously.

Tony rereads the letter twice. He feels a swirl of emotion in his stomach, not dissimilar to the queasiness after a long night of drinking. This—this is what he sacrificed by being so closed-off from his fans. While he’d known that his fans were real and obviously human, a part of him had never felt the magnitude of it before. These are people with feelings and experiences. This Parker kid (a self-proclaimed fanboy) lost his parents too, and far younger than Tony had. In a car accident.

Maybe Peter hadn’t been there, hadn’t been in the car, hadn’t watched his mother parents go up in flames, but it’s still a tragedy all in its own right. And all at eight years old. Jesus Christ. This kid has been looking up to him for ten years and more, and he had no fucking idea that kind of dysfunctional altar he’d been worshiping at.

Tony goes into the private bathroom connected to his office and gags up—nothing. Drool. But it still leaves his mouth slimy, so he brushes his teeth until he’s spitting pink into the sink, and when he catches sight of the haphazard reflection in the mirror, he pities it. He leans forward to touch foreheads with it, auto-intimacy. Do better, some voice in the back of his head says, but it’s not his voice.

Happy picks up his cellphone on the first ring. Of the ninth call.

“What do you fucking want, Tony?” he hisses into the receiver. “I’m at the movie theater seeing that new Star Wars. You made me go out into the lobby—”

“Then I’m doing you a favor,” Tony says, cracking open the cap on a sparkling water. “Look, I have important questions, I wouldn’t have called otherwise. My fan mail—how much of it has Pepper kept?”

“Jesus, how should I know? Totes and totes full, at least—”

“Brilliant—”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself? I’m missing the movie!”

“Didn’t I say you’re not missing much? I’m asking you because Pepper will make me do it myself: I need you to find specific letters from one fan: Peter B. Parker. Address is Queens, but he could be from anywhere. I’m also especially interested in acquiring a package he sent me in January 2014.”

“Christ, could you be any more mysterious?” Happy mutters. “Text me the details you bastard, I’m not missing another moment of Mark Hamill.”

It turns out that Pepper is not only a saint in all ways previously mentioned, but she is a saint in this as well: his fan mail from the last ten years has been saved and meticulously organized by month and year of reception. Happy comes to Tony’s office in the city the next day with a package, the outside brittle but address clear.

The writing is the same script as the letter newly received from Peter, though the handwriting has become more mature over time. Neater. Confined. No more hasty slant from an enthusiastic hand. The kid’s contest entry is in the top drawer of Tony’s desk—the previous potential winners are now the cherries on top of the reject pile. His stomach is heavy as a stone while he tears open the five-year-old package.

Out tumbles a pre-addressed package that was meant to carry the book back to its owner, back to Peter. Then, one first edition of IRON-MAN, the cover a little tattered, the spine creaky. Also included is another letter, torn from a spiral notebook. He opens it with shaking hands.

DEAR MISTER POTTS

I KNOW THAT GETTING A RESPONSE FROM MY LETTERS IS A LONG SHOT, BUT I’M REALLY HOPING THAT YOU’LL AUTOGRAPH THIS COPY OF IRON-MAN AND RETURN IT TO ME. IT IS MY UNCLE BEN’S…

It goes on to describe how his Uncle’s birthday is coming up and Peter hopes to give the autographed book to his Uncle. Tony reads with a heavy heart, knowing now that Tony hadn’t bothered even opening the package, hadn’t tried to sign it—and even if he had, Ben hadn’t lived long enough to celebrate his next birthday. What a son of a bitch Tony is.

For the first time in three months, Tony goes home.

Most days he stays at the space he rents in the fancy Manhattan building, the one that holds his office and Pepper’s own workspace as well as the other people who work for him (Happy, Beck, Rhodey). The mansion outside Manhattan belonged to Tony’s father and his mother. When his mother had still been alive, it had been a cold place that he had endured staying at for her sake. After his mother had died, it had been a torture chamber, or worse—a stale, suffocating tomb.

Then Howard had died and somehow left it to Tony (probably out of some misguided duty to ‘keep it in the family’). Tony made a personal habit to visit it infrequently and stay there even less often; but Pepper maintains it for him, has it cleaned, keeps it safe. Uses it as storage, Tony knows. For his fan mail.

It takes up three entire rooms, floor to ceiling clear totes labeled with months and years. Just looking at it makes Tony feel small, ashamed of how little he cared about interacting with his fans. It’s no wonder sales were down. Searching for Peter’s letters would be like looking for a needle in a haystack—but he has to do it, and he can’t let Happy bear the brunt of the weight anymore either. This is on Tony.

So he begins pulling totes from the room and scattering their contents on the oaken table and floors of the dining room. Five hours and seven totes later, and Tony still has no letter from Peter.

Pepper finds him at midnight. She comes bursting in through the front door—Tony can hear the sound of the door colliding with the wall from the force she’s used—shouting his name. The hysteria in her voice chills him to the bone. It’s worse than the tone she uses when Tony fucks up; this is the tone she uses when there’s a Tragedy, when something is Wrong.

She finds him in the dining room surrounded by letters, kneeling up from where he was slumped on the floor. He must be a sight, but she is one too, her hair a mess, her eyes red. When she sees him, all the breath goes out of her, one hand clutching at her breast as the other grabs the back of a chair for support.

“Jesus, Pep, what’s happened? Is it your father, another heart attack—?”

“Why don’t you ever answer your goddamn phone, you bastard!” She says through heaving breaths. “You don’t leave the office for weeks and suddenly no one can find you, you won’t pick up your phone—”

It takes a long moment for the pieces to connect.

“Oh Christ,” Tony says, chidingly. “What, you were scared for me?”

She slumps into one chair and puts her face into her well-manicured hands. Tony drops back onto his ass. He’s not a good man, not a sensitive man. The last woman who had cried in front of him was his mother, and look at all the ways he had failed her. But the longer he sits letting Pepper cry, the more it feels like bamboo shoots growing under his tender fingernails. Fuck it. He gets up, knees creaking, and goes to her.

They sit side by side at the dining table no one has eaten at in twelve years. Pepper leans into him, her thin shoulders shaking. Shame makes his own eyes burn, because he thought what did she have to be afraid of? But maybe she saw his car in the driveway of the unhappy home he avoids and assumed that he’d come here to Hemingway himself. Maybe she sat in the drive steeling herself to come into the sight of his body.

“I’m going through the fan mail,” Tony says at last.

“I can see that,” she says. Her scathing tone drips with tears.

“I’m okay, Pep,” he says. He’s not sure if it’s true. He’s not sure if he’s been okay ever since he blinked awake upside down and suspended by the seatbelt in the back seat of his mother’s Cadillac, glass littering the roof (and the roof had become the floor, then, see? Because they were upside down), the smell of gas and smoke in his nose). Maybe he’s not okay. Maybe it’s all a fucking lie, but he’s not going to off himself. Not when there’s a mystery afoot. “I promise.”

She nods, one damp hand reaching out blindly for his. It’s an awkward angle to hold hands at, but he doesn’t complain. And awkward or not, it feels nice to be touched in a kind, even platonic way.

“What are you looking for?” Pepper asks at last, wiping at the wet, swollen skin beneath her eyes.

“Why? You want to help?” Tony asks.

“Might as well,” she says. “I always do your heavy lifting, don’t I?”

With Pepper’s help, they find the first letter. Somehow the Willy Wonka Initiative has reversed until Tony feels like a kid, ripping open chocolate bars, desperate for a glimpse of gold. At dawn, a cry echoes in the dining room startling Tony from where he was slumping against a tote, dozing.

“I’ve got one, Tony!” Pepper shouts. She’s barefoot, her panty hose taken off and folded on the table, her sensible jacket removed and slung over the back of a chair. Her rumpled shirt and tendrils coming free from her ponytail reveal how much energy she’s been putting into this with him—maybe to make up for her emotional outburst earlier, maybe like a mother humoring a child’s singular beneficial interest. “From Peter B. Parker, address is Queens, same as before.”

“What’s the date?” Tony asks. He slips in a pile of letters from last August and nearly breaks his neck. Wishful fucking thinking.

“Last May. Here—”

Tony takes the letter and collapses in a chair, his lower back grateful for the support. He recognizes Peter’s handwriting as he tears the letter open, and he can feel Pepper’s presence over his shoulder, reading along with him.

This letter is different from the others. Tony knows it right away. The first indication should have been the date; Tony’s most recent novel dropped early May of last year. His most controversial work to date, with praise glorious and venomous in kind. Which way did the scales tip when it came to Peter, Tony wonders.

I know that you won’t read this. I’ve written you twice a year since I was ten years old, and you’ve never written back. I don’t blame you. I’m sure you’re busy—I guess I just needed to get these words down somewhere, so that they exist, so that somewhere there is a record of me after I’m dead.

Tony reads the rest in a dazed blur. At one point, Pepper’s hand lifts to press against her mouth, but still they read on, huddled together for convenience and then for comfort.

In the letter, Peter describes the tragedy of his uncle’s death and how he felt personally responsible, and how after months of guilt, when he’d read about Natasha’s sacrifice, he’d decided to take action. Against himself.

If someone’s death can do so much good in the world, Peter wrote with shaky script. Then maybe mine could too. I’m not deluded or anything. I know that I’m not a superhero and that I’m not fighting against some sanctimonious super villain. But I feel like if my death could make May’s life easier, then I have to do it.

“Jesus. Tony, don’t read this—” Pepper reaches out for the letter but Tony nearly rips it in half trying to keep it away from her.

It’s not just for May, Peter admits. I’m ready to stop hurting, too.

Peter signs off, for good. Only it hadn’t been for good—Peter’s most recent letter had obviously proven that, and hadn’t he written it himself? Ignore my last letter, obviously, he’d said. Something must have changed Peter’s mind, but one thing was clear: it hadn’t been Tony. Because Tony had been so self-absorbed, so tangled in his own grief and ego and addictions he hadn’t even read the letter. If Pepper hadn’t saved it, then it might have been destroyed, no record left of Peter’s words at all.

“Tony,” Pepper says. She takes the letter from his fingers and he lets it go. His hands are numb. “This isn’t your fault. Peter obviously was unstable—he’d just watched his uncle being murdered in front of him. No one in their right mind would read Natasha’s death and think that you were encouraging them to take their own life.”

“I know that,” Tony snaps. Lying. Then: “I’m not an idiot, Pep.”

Maybe the biggest lie of all.

#starker #writer!tony #fan!peter #tw: alcoholism #tw: drugs #tw: suicide attempt #cagewrites

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smol-and-grumpy · 5 years ago

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With All My Heart - P.01

This is the epilogue to Dear Dean.

Grant that I shall never seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, or to be loved as to love, with all my heart.

Pairing: Dean Winchester x OFC (Jamie Blum)

Warnings: Flangst

WC: 2645

A/N: This is the first part to the epilogue. You might see some other parts because I can’t stop coming back to them whenever I’m inspired. As always, thank you @themoonandotherslikeit <3

May 2nd, 1946

Hi Sammy,

I’m writing to you on the first page of the new notebook Jamie gifted me.

She’d caught me scribbling notes on papers around the house-- habit I picked up while I was a prisoner in camp, I guess. I just feel like it’s the only way I can tell what’s really going on in my head. I’ve seen things, Sammy, and I’ve done things I’m not entirely proud of.

I remember there was a day when I woke up and my boots were gone. Apparently, if you don’t tie it to yourself at night, you will wake up without them. I’ve learned it the hard way. I spent a couple of days walking bare feet in the freezing cold. I almost lost a fucking toe, can you imagine? I can be thankful that I was an officer and didn’t have to work outside. I walked upon a dying soldier one day, his boots were still intact. I took it from him, Sammy. Of course I waited until he was gone. I still feel bad about it to this day, but those boots were the only thing that kept me from losing my feet. I tied them tightly around me ever since. I know you wouldn’t be proud of what I’ve done, but I just had to survive. I promised Jamie to come back and that promise was literally the only thing that kept me alive.

You remember the feeling of hunger we had while Dad was gone for a long period of time? Where we barely had enough to get by and we ate cereal with water because milk was just too expensive? Now, take that and make it 10x worse. The feeling of hunger in camp is always present. There was not a day, an hour, a minute where I wasn’t hungry. You adjust through time, but the road from being hungry to your stomach feeling numb, that’s the worst.

I don’t even know why I’m writing about camp because it’s basically the only thing I don’t want to be reminded of. Back to the notes, shall we?

There were a couple of notes around the house, that always started with Hi Sammy, but I’ve never gotten around to write more. I just couldn’t, Sam. I didn’t know what to write to you, since I know that you won’t ever get to read them anyway.

On my Birthday, Jamie had the wrapped up notebook in her hand and told me that she wants me to write down my thoughts. It should be some kind of therapy, she said. I know she’s right, but I just couldn’t start to write anything in it until today.

Hope’s sleeping on my arm, by the way, so I’m scribbling in here one armed, hope you can still read it. I know that you won’t, but let us just pretend that you will, alright?

I’m sitting in our study, that used to be Jamie’s old room. There’s a window by the desk, and I can see our garden from here. Jamie’s tending to some crops, leaving me to take care of little Hope. I still don’t know if I’m doing a good job with her, but Hope doesn’t complain, so I’ll take that as I’m doing alright. She’s almost a year now. Her Birthday is a couple of days away, and we invited people to come over. Trenton’s Mom is coming, and some neighbors with their kids. Jamie didn’t want that, though. She said Hope’s too little to know it anyway, but Jameson insisted. Maybe he thought that he could score it with one of the single moms, I don’t really know.

I live in her house now, and her brother Jameson (who’s apparently is a real charmer with the ladies) is living with us. He’s a war veteran, too. He had lost a leg, but he’s cheerful as fuck. I built him a new room downstairs next to the living room, at least now he doesn’t have to sleep on a couch. He helped me build it, too. The two of us were working well into the night every night for two weeks. I also took care of Hope during that time because Jamie attended nursing school in the evenings. During the day, I found work in a nearby Garage. The owner liked me enough to promote me, can you imagine? Me, looking over 20 people? Yeah, you’d have a field day making fun of me.

I went back to clear our old house, Sammy. I took your belongings with me. I hope it’s okay that I kept some things that were hard for me to part with. I gave some of it to Jess. I’ve contacted her after I settled with Jamie. I couldn’t do it before, there was just too much going on and my leg was still in a cast. I’m sorry. She’s doing good, Sammy. Did you know that she too was pregnant? I guess it happened on that last furlong back to the states, huh? I don’t know if she told you or if you held back this big news from me until you were ready to tell, and frankly now, it doesn’t really matter anymore. She had a little boy, he has the same eyes as you. There was no doubt that it’s yours, Sammy. Congratulations!

I felt so proud, but also sad that you’ll never get to see him, never get to see him grow up, and he’ll never know how wonderful you are. His name is Samuel Jr. by the way, but if it’s true that the dead are watching over us, you might have heard it from Jess already. She told me she prays to you every night. We keep in touch and we had them both here for Christmas. We talked about you most of the night (apart from Jim and Jack, Jamie’s brothers who didn’t make it back home). It’s good, Sammy. Don’t worry about us. I’ll promise to look out for Jess and little Sam. You have my word. That’s the least I can do.

Jamie is pregnant at the moment. We’re expecting twins in about a month and a half. I should have known that there were chances that we will end up with twins since Jamie herself is a twin and her mother and grandmothers both were twins. I’m scared, to be perfectly honest with you, Sam. Imagine me with two tiny babies. Yeah, that’s a really good joke, isn’t it? Except it isn’t a joke.. Jamie is freaking out, since her mother died in childbirth, she’s afraid that she’ll end up the same and has written a will and what not. I don’t really know how I can help her get over the fear, since my head is not really the right place for fucking rainbows. It doesn’t mean I don’t try, though. We talk a lot when we get a quiet moment in bed. Her head on my chest, painting figure eights on my skin. It’s good if the subject of the discussion wasn’t so dark.

The girl is fucking huge, by the way. That’s the reason we cleared out Jamie’s parents old room and bought a new, really big bed. There was no way we could have fit in the old bed they had, with Hope occasionally coming in to snuggle with us during the night. Next step would be to clear out Jim’s room. But we’re in no rush. It seems like Jamie needs time, and who am I if I don’t allow her the time she needs to grieve Seeing that I’m still writing to you, I’m not exactly the poster child for it, right?

Should have seen us when we went furniture shopping for a new bed, Sammy. Jamie waltzed through the store, and I carried Hope around. I think we were in there for hours, and Jamie still hadn’t found a mattress she liked. I let her, even if my arms were numb from carrying Hope, but she’s carrying two babies, so who was I to complain, right? The salesman though, he was so sick of us, I could tell. He pulled me aside, asking if I had no say in this. I couldn’t help but laugh. Of course I didn’t have to help Jamie put him into place. I just told him that maybe he should think about women as something else than a homemaker, then maybe we wouldn’t want another salesman about now. We found another sales clerk, the only woman working in there. Mom would have been so proud. It wasn’t an expensive bed, so the commission for selling ain’t that big, but we sure will have to go back there a couple more times and he can be sure that we won’t be asking for him. So, there’s that.

Actually, the salesman asked me if my wife could maybe make up her mind because he could have sold three beds (at least) during that time. I was a little taken aback when he said wife, not gonna lie. I asked Jamie to marry me, I really did. Jameson offered to babysit when there was a fair last autumn. I didn’t have a ring because I kinda spent all my money l on the new room for Jameson and nursing school for Jamie. Plus I gave Jess some, to help her get by with the little one. I gave her your ring which they handed me after they went through your belongings. I was surprised it was still intact. You shielded it pretty good from the blast, Sam. I gave it to her anyway, said that you wanted to propose and as a symbol, she could keep it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jess cry so hard. It’s good Sammy, I’m good with it. The ring was supposed to be hers.

Anyway, I asked Jameson if it was okay for me to ask Jamie, because I was being polite and that’s what they do, right? Asking the dad’s? But since there’s only Jameson, I went along with it. Jameson just bent over laughing, asking me what took me so fucking long and honestly, I didn’t know. It was good as it was at first, but then I thought about Jamie writing to me once that Jim sent her the silk fabric of his reserve parachute so she could walk down the aisle in white silk. Yeah, I thought about that, and I knew that I had to because I wanted to see that, too. There’s no question that I love her though, so.

We were at the fair, and I only had money for a toy ring. You know those from the gumball machines? It’s not romantic at all, I know, but I guess when you’ve been through war together, you can look past that. I got on one knee and she almost said yes. She was beginning to show already, and she said that even if she wanted to marry me, there’s no way the fabric Jim sent was enough to wrap around her so we kinda haven’t set the date yet, but it’ll be after the twins will be born. It kinda gave Jamie some hope and will to get through childbirth, I guess. I bought her gum later too, so there’s that.

Cas stayed in Germany, but not for long if you were wondering. He went back into combat and was leading a battalion in Japan. I wrote to him regularly, because if someone deserves to come back it’s Cas. I was rooting for him. He came back, which I still don’t know how he pulled it off because I heard that 8 out of 10 people weren’t gonna return.

Remember Harvelle? He went back to France and married Lisa. He told me to come visit, but you know me, flying is not really my favorite. I guess I just need time, maybe someday we will. I know Jamie wants to. She wants to visit Jim and Jack, and I really wanna visit you, Sam. I really do. I hope one day I will be able to.

The war is now over, Sammy. Had been for about 6 months. We won, even if we’ve lost so much along the way.

How naïve were we to think that we’d get out of there alive? Remember, they prepared us pretty well, didn’t they? We thought it would be a piece of cake. Go in there, kill some Krauts, come out unscattered, and go home with a fat paycheck for the ‘service’. The moment I saw people being shot at when we got off the landing craft, I knew that this is no fucking piece of cake, and they’d been lying to us all along. But what could I do? You just have to keep on going, keep on fighting for a chance to somehow get back home. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t really fair to lie to us about how big it really was. It wasn’t really fair to let us think that we’d get to go home as soon as we did our deeds. It also wasn’t really fair to think that the war would be over by Chrsitmas and not handing out clothes to shield us from the cold. Nothing was fair, was it?

Well, some of us did get back, but we’ve all lost something in the war. Some a limb or two, some their hearts, and some did lose parts of themselves. We’re not the same person we went in as. We came out broken and bend. We can’t even get it fixed because nothing could fix what we’ve lost.

There’s really nothing I could do other than carry on. I carry on for the ones who aren’t as lucky as me. The ones who won’t get to marry their loved ones, the ones who won’t get to see their children grow up, the ones who had their lives cut short, the ones who got their young adult lives stolen from them, most of all, Sammy, I carry on for you. I’m doing all the things you will never get to do, only because I know that you will come back and haunt me, maybe smack me over the head for being a jerk, if I don’t do it. I’ll do you proud, I promise. It’s the only thing I can do and think about. You were always the voice of reason, weren’t you? Even now if I have to think hard about doing something, there’s a voice in me asking “What would Sammy do? What would Sammy think? What would Sammy want me to do?”

I miss you so much, Sam, you have no idea. If it wasn’t for Jamie, I don’t know if I’d be here. It’s her voice that guides me out of the dark whenever I wake up and think I’m still in Normandy. It’s her embrace that pulls me out of the water around me that threatens to drown me, whenever I have weird thoughts. It’s her, who carries me up to the bed whenever I look too far into a bottle because I can’t shut off the noises of shells exploding around me. I don’t think I even deserve her, but she’s an anchor to me and Jameson. I’m only a little sad that you guys never got a chance to meet, Sammy. If you did, I’d probably be too jealous of the bond you would have. No offense, but I’m greedy, and I want her to myself. I’m just being honest.

Hope’s awake, as you can see from the saliva smeared on the ink. I need to go get something into her belly.

I can’t believe how much I drifted off when all I wanted to say is Happy Birthday, little brother! I love you.

Dean

@dean-winchesters-bacon @beautifulbowleggedangel @flamencodiva @weepingwillowphoenix @adoptdontshoppets @fangirl-and-medstudent-help @liwopanyaasss @mrswhozeewhatsis

#with all my heart #p.01 #dean winchester #dean winchester fan fic #dean winchester fan fiction #dean winchester x ofc #dean winchester au fan fic #dean winchester au fan fiction #nathalie writes

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coolgreatwebsite · 5 years ago

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Cool Games I Finished In 2019 (In No Real Order)

We’re here. The end of the decade. 2019 was a weird, turbulent year for me. Despite my cross-country move already being a year behind me somehow, nothing’s really settled yet. Living situation is still weird, still separated from most of my belongings, I left my full-time QA job for a contractor position at a mobile game advertising company that may or may not convert into a full-time position... everything about what’s going on with me still just feels like I’m completely winging it, and while that’s not a position I’m really comfortable being in for such an extended amount of time, everything seems to be working out okay enough despite it. All this is probably why I spent most of my time playing the shit out of a handful of games rather than playing a bunch of different games this year! Needed some sort of stability. Also when I did manage to pull myself away from the timesink games and play something else, a lot of them ranged from “okay” to “real bad”. But I still managed to play just enough stuff that I liked to where I can put out yet another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2019.

Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst (PC, 2005)

I haven’t bothered to do two thirds of the story quests yet and have barely touched any Episode 4 content so this game technically doesn’t count for this list, but if I left it off I would be neglecting to mention an extremely large portion of my video game playing time this year. I fell back into PSO preeeettty hard this year after the surprise announcement of Phantasy Star Online 2 finally coming to the US. Guess what: game still rules. It feels stiff to play and it’s obviously far less expansive than it seemed back in 2000, but the core of Phantasy Star Online is still as fun as it ever was and the aesthetics are still entirely my shit. I love everything about the way this game looks and sounds, I love stumbling on a weird new weapon, I love participating in the custom seasonal events the server I’m on runs, and I love how oddly relaxing the experience of playing this game and taking it all in is. I will probably continue to play Phantasy Star Online into 2020. I will probably still dip back into it after PSO2 US servers finally launch. If I know you and you want to join my Discord server for PSO get at me. PSO forever.

Cookie’s Bustle (PC, 1999)

You ever play a game that just speaks to you? Even through a language barrier? A game so incredibly out there and bizarre in the exact way you love that you can’t help but adore it despite barely understanding it? Holy moly did I ever find that game. I learned about Cookie’s Bustle through a news story last year about some rare games leaking from a Japanese collector’s stash. Didn’t manage to get it to run back then, but my off and on attempts to get it working finally paid off in March of this year and I’m so glad I kept trying. I knew nothing of this game other than it had a weird name and was about a bear doing sports, and it turned out to be a fully voice-acted and mostly unsubtitled adventure game starring Cookie Blair, a 5 year old girl from New Jersey who sees herself as a teddy bear and has traveled to Bombo World, an island nation once visited by aliens and currently in the middle of a civil war, to participate in the Bombo Sports Tournament. Dead level, I probably shouldn’t have been able to genuinely love Cookie’s Bustle as much as I did. The only context I had for what was happening and what I was supposed to do was provided by a 20-year-old Google translated walkthrough with broken images, the game’s slightly higher than usual reliance on English loan words, and 30-ish years of video games and anime allowing me to halfway pick up on a handful of Japanese words. However, Cookie’s Bustle is dripping with an undeniable and off-beat charm that genuinely transcends language. Even if you can’t understand the words and specifics, you can understand the basic plot, characterizations, and emotions they’re going for. Cookie’s Bustle manages to both be completely off-the-wall bizarre and feel totally genuine and heartfelt at the same time, a balance very few games manage to successfully hit but many of my favorites do. One could say that’s why it seems to have resonated with a decent amount of other people this year, too. Games rarely make me feel sad that they’re over. but when they do that’s how I know they’re one of the good ones. Seriously, go look up a longplay or stream of Cookie’s Bustle if you (understandably) don’t want to go through the hassle of setting it up and figuring out how to play it, it’s impossible not to love.

Devil May Cry 5 (PlayStation 4, 2019)

Here’s something crazy to think about: Devil May Cry 4 came out 11 years ago. Aside from being a potent reminder that time is moving too fast and we’re all going to die soon, that means that there hasn’t been a DMC for over a decade. Devil May Cry 5 does not bare this fact even a little bit. Not only did they pick up right where they left off and manage to make another Devil May Cry game without missing a beat, they made arguably the best Devil May Cry game. I mean I still like the story and single-character focus of DMC3 the best, but DMC5 is the best playing game in the series without a doubt. Nero finally feels like he has a complete and complex toolset, Dante is the most mechanically dense and fun to play he’s ever been, and they even added a new guy that’s... neat to play as, until you start trying to S-rank the harder difficulties. Then he’s kind of annoying to play as. But it’s still cool that they tried something totally different and mostly got it to work! They also did something very stupid that I love and used this game as an excuse to make literally every single piece of Devil May Cry media canon. Like, characters exclusively from the anime and the books show up and act like they’re someone you already know and love? And they go out of their way to explain the most esoteric lore shit possible?? And despite it all they still intentionally give DMC2 as short a shrift as they can??? It’s so dumb, it rules. It’s just one of the many things about the game that show that even with so long of a gap between entries, no love for the series was lost by the people that make it. I don’t think the suits at Capcom expected this game to hit as hard as it did though, because despite there being clear areas where the game could be expanded on with DLC there still hasn’t been anything announced. I hope they’re maybe saving it for some sort of DMC3-esque special edition, or maybe just already working on DMC6, because even after getting all S-ranks I still wanted to play more. The game’s just that damn good.

Hypnospace Outlaw (PC, 2019)

I expected very little from Hypnospace Outlaw. I backed the game on Kickstarter solely because it looked cool and I thought a game about fake GeoCities was neat, and then I immediately forgot about it until it released. Admittedly my lack of expectations stemmed mostly from the fact that it’s kind of hard to set expectations for a game you never really thought too hard about, but even in the brief period of time where I considered it enough to give it money, I never expected it to be much more than a pretty-looking 101 Great GeoCities Jokez delivery vehicle. Boy was I wrong. I mean, it is incredibly good at that, but Hypnospace Outlaw is so much more than a funny period piece. The basic premise is that you’re in alternate universe 1999 and have just become a community moderator for an Internet service provider that allows people to connect to the Internet while they sleep. You’re tasked with browsing the game’s weird fake Internet and issuing demerits to users who violate the five basic Hypnospace rules, but it quickly evolves into something way bigger. Hypnospace Outlaw’s greatest strength is its exceptional ability at weaving together subtle world building, small and engaging character arcs, esoteric microjokes, and a genuine sense of mystery and discovery into an incredibly cohesive and engaging package. It’s as much a game about the people that use and run its weird fake Internet as it is about that weird fake Internet itself. And a lot of the problems both face echo the problems we face with our real world Internet today. When I was mapping out writing this article like a month or two ago I was prepared to go on about how at its core, Hypnospace Outlaw is an incredibly poignant story about how uncaring tech corporations actively harm their users and always have, but then a couple of days ago I read Colin Spacetwinks’ game of the year list and his #1 entry put most everything I would have said about that topic down in a way more eloquent and well-written way than I ever could have. And then I remembered that Friend Of The Site Heidi Kemps covered some of the same angle but from the perspective of the early Internet in an article earlier this year, again way better than I could have. So I highly recommend you read those when you’re done here. What I wanna bring up instead is just how effortlessly surprising and interconnected a lot of stuff in Hypnospace feels, using a mildly spoiler-ish late game example. Two of the first “zones” you’re allowed to moderate when you start Hypnospace Outlaw are Teentopia and Goodtime Valley, which are essentially alternate universe Yahooligans and a little slice of Hypnospace just for Boomers respectively. On Teentopia you’ll see a bunch of kids that are wild for Squisherz, Hypnospace’s alternate universe version of Pokémon, and over in Goodtime Valley you’ll see (much like there was back in real world 1999) a few pages made by religious fundamentalists convinced that everything the kids like these days is the work of Satan. This of course includes Squisherz, and you can find a page by one organization full of crackpot conspiracy theories with flimsy evidence that TOTALLY DEFINITELY backs up their claim. Squisherz contains a wolf, which the Bible warns about many times! This giraffe monster CLEARLY has a pentagram in its design!! And the eye of this snake-like Squisherz is the eye of Horus, an Egyptian occult symbol and NEED I REMIND YOU that Lucifer took the form of a snake in the Garden of Eden!!! It is very clear what this page is goofing on and throughout the course of the game it doesn’t get updated at all, so it’s very easy to laugh at it and forget about it. Very late into the game, you get an optional sidequest. Adrian Merchant, one of the CEOs of Merchantsoft, the company that created Hypnospace, was found out to have logged traffic indicating he was a frequent visitor of a website called Children of HORUS, and a call is put out to investigate what that even is. You can easily find the website, but it asks you for a password if you click the Enter button. Adrian Merchant is consistently portrayed throughout the game as a complete idiot, and the solution to this puzzle has you capitalize on that. Another early game objective ended up with you finding a list of cracked passwords, and one of those passwords happens to be for the instant messenger account of Adrian Merchant. If you can remember that he was even in that text file from forever ago, and then put two and two together that of COURSE that dumbass would use the same password for everything, you just punch in his messenger password and you’re granted access to the Children of HORUS page. It turns out that HORUS is an acronym that stands for Hiding Occult References in Utmost Secrecy, and the page itself is a basic leaderboard with a list of names and two numbered columns reading “Hidden” and “Found”. In that list of names you’ll find A. Merchant, along with the names of various other CEOs and celebrities you might have read about elsewhere in Hypnospace. One of the other names on this list is F. Kazuma, the CEO of Monarch, creators of Squisherz. The funny conspiracy theory website from the beginning of the game that you most likely forgot about was, about this one specific thing, correct. There was an eye of Horus hidden on the snake from Squisherz. Not as any sort of Satanic plot, mind you, but only as part of some weird millionaire dickwaving contest. This dumb tiny revelation is not called out by the game at all and nothing comes of it, it’s just there for you to notice if you’ve been paying enough attention. Hypnospace Outlaw is LITTERED with stuff like this. Weird small interconnected things you wouldn’t expect to be interconnected. Little dumb things you wouldn’t expect to have any sort of payoff but somehow do. And it’s also just as chock full of big things. Having all the pieces fall into place at once to where I was able to access Hypnospace’s equivalent of the dark web was the best sequence in a game this year for me, even beating out the outlandish shit in DMC5. Getting and solving the final case was a rush. Hypnospace Outlaw is full of incredible moments big and small. It’s genuinely engaging and affecting, which is so much more than I was expecting from a game that was pitched to me as “Funny GeoCities Cop”. It almost has no right being so good. But it is. Hell, even the music rules! I didnt even get into that! I don't have enough time or space to get into that now! The music is so goddamn good! I know I started these lists because I had no interest in ranking games, but every year I sort of jokingly-but-not-jokingly say “haha this game sure would be my number one if I did that!” for at least one game. It’s time to fully lean into it. I don’t gotta rank ‘em all, but I can pick a favorite. Hypnospace Outlaw is my favorite game of 2019 with a goddamn bullet.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Etrian Odyssey (Nintendo DS, 2007): Man, this series just started out good, huh? I dabbled with the first two games in college when I got a DS flashcart but never really dug in until EO4, and the first game is enjoyable in just about every way the modern ones are. Definitely more barebones and punishing though. Kero Blaster (PlayStation 4, 2017): This is a game by the creator of Cave Story that does not aim to be Cave Story, and that’s fine! A fun little shooter in its own right, though I do think the shooting in Cave Story felt a little better than it does here. Space Invaders Extreme (Nintendo DS, 2008): I played the shit out of this game in college thanks to that flashcart I mentioned before, but I never finished a playthrough in full until this year for some reason. Still way stylish and way fun! I need to get a copy of the second one... CROSSNIQ+ (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Incredibly chill puzzle game that can be as hard or easy as you want it to be. Almost uncanny in how well it emulates the style of late PS1/Dreamcast games. Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Mario Maker 2 is kind of weird for me. It’s a solid improvement in a lot of aspects, but a clear regression in a lot of others. Also the online multiplayer is the second least amount of fun I’ve had with a video game this year (Secret of Mana swooped in and stole the number one slot near the end). Still, I had a lot of fun with it and I’ll probably end up going back to it eventually. Katamari Damacy Reroll (Nintendo Switch, 2018): The original Katamari Damacy is still every bit as fun and charming as it was upon its original release. This port is weirdly based on the Japanese version with the English text inserted, which means no English voice acting and Wanda Wanda only plays in the multiplayer mode. The Joycon sticks also aren’t the greatest for doing charge rolls. But none of these faults detract too much from the game. Bring on We Love Katamari Reroll! Earth Defense Force 5 (PlayStation 4, 2018): Sandlot somehow keeps finding ways to make each new EDF bigger and explodier, and EDF5 is the biggest and explodiest yet. I think the mission design in 4.1 was more solid overall, but 5 feels the best to play and has the most fun tools. Also the dialogue is the most absurd its ever been, and the final boss goes for it way harder than the series ever has. Pokémon Shield (Nintendo Switch, 2019): This game is honestly just okay, but leaving it off would again be neglecting a game I put a ton of time into this year. Pokémon Sword is fun in the way most Pokémon games usually are, and extremely half-baked in basically every other aspect. I’m still having a good time putting together teams and finding shinies and doing The Pokémon Thing regardless.

And that’s 2019 (and this decade) in the bag! I don’t know where anything’s going from here, but I’m going to ride it out as best as I can! I hope you do too! As always, thank you so much for getting to the bottom of all these words. I’m hoping to be in a more stable place mid-2020, and then I want to get back to all the things I haven’t had time to do. I want to get back to streaming, I want to write more dumb articles like The Best Babies, I want to do it all! I hope I will be able to do it all. Until then!

#article #year wrapup

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let-it-raines · 6 years ago

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Betting on the Bullseye (21/?)

Summary: Emma Swan loses a drunken bet that means she has to ask her celebrity crush - if you can call him that - to be her date to her office’s annual fundraising gala for Boston’s Children Shelter. Killian Jones is that celebrity. She expects all kinds of humiliation and for her dignity to be completely lost all because of the ridiculousness of the situation. What she doesn’t expect is for him to say yes.

What she truly doesn’t expect is to actually like the man.

Rating: Mature

A/N: I think you guys might like this one!

Found on AO3: Beginning | Current

Tag list: @nikkiemms @resident-of-storybrooke @wellhellotragic @bmbbcs4evr @onceuponaprincessworld @jennjenn615 @mayquita @captainsjedi @teamhook @skyewardolicitycloisdelena91 @artistic-writer @branlovesouat @dreadpirateemma @kmomof4 @ekr032-blog-blog @galaxyzxstark @lifeinahole27 @andiirivera @ultimiflos @hollyethecurious @thejollyroger-writer @superchocovian @cs-forlife @qualitycoffeethings @jonirobinson64 @notoriouscs

“Good God, it’s hot in here,” Emma murmurs to herself as she walks into her office, sweat already beading at her forehead. After the disaster with the air conditioner breaking earlier this summer, she cannot deal with this again. “Did they turn the damn air conditioning off over the weekend?”

She’s got to stop talking to herself.

She keeps walking down the hall, flicking lights on as she goes. She couldn’t sleep last night, spending it all staring at her phone and the message Killian had sent her after she’d told him she got home.

Killian:I’m sorry too.

It was only three words, three words that she’s seen before, but for some reason she couldn’t text him back. She didn’t know what to say. It’s kind of hard to figure out how to voice “hey, I’m still really freaking out about everything, but I love you and don’t like arguing with you.”

Okay, so she could have voiced it exactly like that, but every time she went to text those words or three other more familiar words or to press his contact name, she couldn’t do it. She doesn’t know why, but she couldn’t do it. And even as she tried to stay present in meeting Brody (who is absolutely freaking adorable) and checking on Mary Margaret, her mind kept playing over everything that had happened. She’d freaked out. There really aren’t any words for it other than that. She freaked out over all of the little things that have been building up into this one big fear of she and Killian not working out because their lives are so different and three thousand miles apart.

A little voice in her head reminds her that it’s two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, technically, and she knows that little voice is Killian’s. He looked it up. Maybe he looked it up to see how many frequent flyer points he’s been earning lately, or maybe he just full on Jess Mariano’d it. That’s totally not a verb, but it is kind of all she can think about. That and the fact that this good thing she’s got going for her that could end.

She doesn’t want it to end.

Talking to Killian would probably help things not to end…but it also could make things end more quickly. She thinks that may be what kept her, what keeps her from talking to him. It’s not that she’s mad at him or upset with him or any of that despite the harsh words that he said to her too. It’s more than she’s worried that the third party in their relationship, the damn distance, is finally going to be the breaking point. She’s terrified of it being the breaking point, and she has no idea how to handle it. If anything, she’s doing everything she can to avoid handling it.

She ran. She knows that she ran, that she fell back into this old pattern of hers, but she also knows that she had to leave California anyways. She was coming home yesterday regardless of if Brody was born or she and Killian got into an argument. She was always going to come home. Maybe she wouldn’t have spent her night in his guest room and left without saying goodbye, but sometimes she makes dumb choices. She’s human, and she’s not going to always do the rational thing.

Looking back, she can’t believe how much things would have been different if she had taken a moment to breathe.

If they had both taken a moment to breathe in the heat of the argument.

She’s always been a fan of avoiding her problems, avoiding the fact that her parents left her with nothing, avoiding the fact that the first person she ever trusted with her heart betrayed her in a way that she still cannot wrap her head around, and avoiding every little heartbreak in between. Usually she shuts everything out, shuts everyone out, and hides away from it all, never thinking of it again until something triggers the memory. Now, though, all she can think about is Killian and how she should have talked to him, should have never left him to worry like she knows that he did. It’s not the first time that they’ve argued. It hopefully won’t be the last, but she knows that this time she can’t walk around blaming Killian for everything.

Really, she can’t blame herself for it either. She can’t deny that she’s screwed up, that she has things to own up to, but she also knows that she’s not fighting with Killian because of something either of them did wrong besides a few harsh words they shouldn’t have said. It’s simply the circumstances their lives have put them in.

Normally she needs Mary Margaret or David or, hell, even Ruby to drill things like this into her head, but she had a long time to think in Killian’s guest room and on the plane ride home. She may have her own set of issues, but she apparently is starting to figure them out.

Even if she really wants to avoid people right now.

That’s likely why she’s walking into her office before seven in the morning on her first day back at work after her vacation. She doesn’t think anyone in the offices even comes in this early, which is probably why it’s so damn hot in here. That or September is just off to this awful start. She wants fall. Maybe everything will be better in the fall.

Maybe she’ll have talked to Killian by then.

No, definitely. She definitely has to talk to him. She’ll call or text tonight. Yeah, that’s exactly what she’ll do. She’s not going to chicken out. She’s not. She has to call. She knows Killian, and he is definitely waiting on her. He’s always waiting on her and following her lead, and as sweet as that is, if Killian wants something, he should be able to say it without worrying about if it’s going to freak her out or not. So she has to talk to him.

She’s terrified, but she has to talk to him. They’re not going to break up. They’re not. They’re going to apologize and fix things and make it all better. She thinks that as if a band-aid can heal a bullet hole, but if it’s big enough, maybe it’ll stop the bleeding for a little while.

There’s a reason she’s not a doctor. Okay, there are a lot of reasons.

The fact that she keeps repeating things over and over and over again in her head to keep herself from crying in the middle of her workplace is likely another reason. She’s cried a lot in the past forty-eight hours. She sobbed the night of their argument when she was pacing in Killian’s guest room, the room she stayed in when they weren’t dating, and she’d sobbed on the plane even with all of her thinking through things. Maybe because of her thinking through things. The woman next to her likely thought she was crazy. She’s honestly surprised that the woman didn’t ask for a different seat so she can be away from the crazy woman.

Emma surely would have.

Her tears finally stopped when she got to the hospital, only to start again when she saw all of the Nolans in Mary Margaret’s hospital room. It was like a freaking post card or Hallmark card or an entire Hallmark movie. But not one with Lori Loughlin or anything. She’s probably not going to be playing a devoted mother any time soon, which Emma thinks is pretty ironic because she seems pretty devoted to her kids. But they were all so happy, and Leo was fascinated with his little brother, if not a bit jealous when he realized Brody was coming home with them. So obviously she cried. She’s not sure if it was all happy tears or if she was just feeling so damn much right then and there that every little emotion she had ever felt was flowing over until her eyes were more red than green.

She was like a Christmas tree.

And maybe her mind is a little all over the place because she hasn’t exactly slept in two days. She’s had a lot to think about.

“You’re here early.”

“Holy shit,” she gasps, literally stumbling backward and grabbing her chest like she’s clutching pearls or something ridiculous like that as her heartbeat speeds up and Kathryn comes into view with files cradled in her arm. “Kathryn, you startled me.” “Well, maybe if you were in the office a little more, you wouldn’t get so startled about people being here to, you know, do their jobs.”

Kathryn pushes past her, their shoulders hitting, and she turns around as Kathryn walks away. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

Kathryn stops in her tracks, turning around and giving Emma a stare that could melt ice while in a freezer. “I mean,” she snaps, taking several steps forward until she’s in Emma’s face, their noses close enough to touch, “that maybe if you spent time at work instead of traipsing around with your boyfriend all the time, maybe you wouldn’t be surprised that I’m here.”

“I’m entitled to a personal life.”

“Your personal life is on the front page of gossip magazines and in a million articles online. Your personal life is everywhere, and ever since the damn Christmas gala, I’ve had to spend my time answering phone calls on a daily basis asking if I can get them in contact with Killian Jones. Time is taken out of my day to deal with you all the while you suntan on a boat in California.”

“Kathryn,” she begins calmly even as her entire body begins to heat, her stomach swirling in a way that’s totally different than it has been in the past few days, “if you have a problem with my personal life, I suggest you keep it to yourself. I can guarantee you that it doesn’t affect your life nearly as much as it affects mine, and if you’ve got such a problem with it, why don’t you complain to HR? I’m sure they can help you get the stick out of your ass by telling you that I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong here.”

“You’re kind of entitled for someone who literally came from nothing if all of the articles are correct.”

“Well, I may have come from nothing, but look at that,” she says, moving her arms out to the sides to encompass the room, “we’ve ended up in the same damn place. Have a good day, Kathryn.”

She’s absolutely done with that conversation. Kathryn has always been awful and petty, but that’s taking things to new levels. Emma was much kinder than she wanted to be, but she is at work and calling someone an asshole and then slapping her would do nothing but get Emma fired. Her life is a mess right now, and the absolute last thing she needs is to get fired. She’s got savings but…she’d have nothing. Her apartment is crappy, but it still costs a hell of a lot to live without a roommate in the city.

Her job is kind of a necessity for her to live.

She also really loves her job.

That saying when it rains it pours seems to hold true throughout the day. She did take two days off, but there really shouldn’t be that much for her to do, especially since she answered some of her emails last night. Everything is pretty much nonstop, and if it wasn’t for Ruby bringing her a salad, she wouldn’t have eaten all day. She’s not even sure that she ate yesterday, and all she’s had today is some lettuce with a couple of pieces of cold chicken in it. And barely even that. From the way Ruby looked at her and talked to her, Emma knows that Ruby is aware that she and Killian are in a fight. Emma didn’t say anything, but Ruby knows. Either Ruby knows her that well or she’s talked to Killian. She’d bet on both, but if she had to pick one, it’d be Killian calling Ruby to make sure the Emma was okay.

He probably didn’t call Mary Margaret because he didn’t want her to worry.

But her day is pretty much the day from hell, the past few days have been really, and when she gets home, she collapses on the couch, unbuttons her pants, and wonders if maybe she could prove Kathryn right and just not go to work and yet still have a job.

“Shit,” she groans, rolling over on the couch and reaching for her purse on the ground, fumbling for her phone. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”

She was going to call Killian. She is going to call Killian, but she’s not exactly in the best of moods. Being in a better mood would probably help this conversation a hell of a lot, but she doesn’t think she can go another day without at least talking to him. They don’t have to fix all of their problems today. That would be impossible. All she really wants is to hear his voice for a little while and to know that they’re not broken.

They really screwed up a little bit, didn’t they?

She really screwed up.

Taking a deep breath and then three more, closing her eyes and attempting to calm the way butterflies are fluttering in her stomach, she presses down on his contact name and waits as the rings begin. And then as they end and his voice message pops up.

Well, that’s not the way she wanted to hear his voice.

Disappointment washes over her entire body, and she feels tears prickling in the back of her eyes, which is ridiculous. She’s not often ashamed of tearing up, but tearing up over her boyfriend not answering her call when that happens all the time for them, well, she feels a little ridiculous over that. She needs some ice cream or something. Or donuts. She could probably eat an entire box of donuts.

But then her phone starts buzzing on her stomach, a picture of she and Killian from his premiere just a few days ago popping up, and she’s so frantic to answer it that she nearly misses his call from how her fingers are shaking.

“Hello?” Killian audibly sighs, and she does the same, relief washing over her before he speaks again. “Hi, Swan.”

“Hi,” she squeaks, choosing to ignore the fact that she actually just squeaked. “Hi, hi, hi. I’m so glad you answered or called or I don’t even know. I was waiting and missing and didn’t really know and – I’m just going to shut up right now.”

Killian chuckles on the other end of the line, and it lessens the tension she feels in her shoulders, the knots softening even further. “I’m glad you called and glad that I called back. I don’t…God, I’m sorry, Swan.”

“I’m sorry too. You don’t absolutely hate me for just boarding a plane like that?” “I don’t hate you, no. I’d rather you not do shit like that, but I don’t control what you do. That’d be barbaric. I just like when we talk, when you don’t disappear in the middle of the night.” “I know. That was a shit move. I knew it then, and I know it now. I guess I was just upset. We’ve got – we’ve got some stuff to figure out.” “Aye,” he sighs, and she can practically see him running his hand over the hair on his chin in contemplation, “but if you’d let me, I’d like to have that conversation in person.” “Killian, you don’t have to do that.” “I think I do, darling. You’re right when we say we have some stuff to figure out, and while I don’t doubt our abilities to get things done over the phone, especially with the wicked tongue that you have, I do think I’d rather be able to see you while we’re talking these things through. I have a feeling it’s not a one-time thing kind of conversation. It’s going to be more than an hour.”

“I know.”

“And you…you want to have this conversation?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” she insists, messing with the tips of her hair simply so she has something else to focus on. “I know I said I couldn’t do this, and Killian, I’m terrified that we’re going to talk about everything and realize that we can’t work this out, but I think I was – I know that I was spiraling that night. A lot of the things I said were legitimate, but a lot of them were the fear speaking over the logic. I do that a lot”

“It’s okay.”

It’s really not. They both know that it’s not. He should tell her that it’s not, that she hurt him.

“It’s not. I love you, you know? And I know we fight, but this one felt different.”

“Aye, I know,” he admits, and she sits up on the couch, pulling herself into a ball and wrapping her arms around her knees to comfort herself. “It was different. And I love you too. I don’t…could I fly in tomorrow or do you want more time?”

“I’d be okay with tomorrow.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she smiles, feeling better than she has in several days, hope settling somewhere deep inside of her.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

“Sound like a plan, Stan.”

Time ticks by the following day at what has to be slower than a snail’s pace. She goes into work early again, simply because she couldn’t sleep, but it’s only after she’s dropped some food off at David and Mary Margaret’s house. She knows that she’s not much of a cook, but she figures that there’s only so many ways she can mess up bringing over several frozen casserole dishes. Seriously, unless she drops them or buys them expired, she can’t mess that up. A part of her still feels guilty over missing Brody’s birth, over not being there for Mary Margaret and David when they needed her, and maybe a little of her trying to help is to assuage herself of some of that guilt. It’s not really working, but Mary Margaret’s tired smile helps a little bit.

Sometimes Mary Margaret drives her insane with her positivity and her refusal to see the bad in things, but she’s her family. Emma loves she and David – and Leo and Brody too – so damn much that she would do anything in the world for them.

Same for Ruby.

And for Killian.

She’s never had a biological family. Sure, they’re probably out there somewhere, but that doesn’t mean a thing to her anymore. She didn’t get to grow up with the family she always wanted, but she’s glad to have learned that found family is just as good. If not better.

It’s probably why this day is ticking by so slowly. She’s been up for an exhausting amount of time, and she’s anxious to be able to see Killian, to be able to talk to him, and to be able to try to work this out. How the hell they’re going to solve a long-distance relationship, she has no clue.

If Boston and Santa Monica could, like, merge somehow, that would be great. That’d be a funky climate, but that would be great.

“Have you eaten today?” Ruby asks her, startling her out of her thoughts so that she looks up toward her office door. “Because you barely eat yesterday, and Ems, you can’t starve yourself just because you and hot stuff are in a fight.”

“I ate breakfast with the Nolans.” She rolls back in her desk chair and stretches her arms up over her head, the ache pleasurable. She needs to stretch more. “Are you ever down in your office, Rubes? Don’t you have kids to counsel?”

“I am in between sessions, and I figured I had an Emma to counsel.”

Emma rolls her eyes even as her lips tug up on the sides. “I am fine, and, again, I ate this morning. But I really appreciate that you’re the type of friend to consistently feed me.”

“Food is the way to your heart,” she sighs, walking into the room and closing the door behind her. “But seriously, you okay? You’ve been all out of sorts ever since you came home on Monday.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just – we just – Killian and I did get into a fight, but he’s on a plane right now so we can talk in person. The long distance is kind of killing us lately, even with how good this summer has been to us, and I know that things are really only going to get worse with time or when Killian starts working again. He’s picking up a new movie, and I’m so proud of him. I just know that’s going to be months of missing him on top of us already being separated. It’d be different if we lived in the same place.”

Ruby raises her brows, her forehead wrinkling with the movement, before she’s neutralizing her features and looking at Emma with the softest of smiles. She’s channeling Mary Margaret. She has to be. “Have you told lover boy any of this?”

Okay, so Ruby mixed with Mary Margaret. Like a two for one deal.

“Kind of,” she shrugs, lifting her legs up to tuck them into the chair as much as she can. “I mean, I don’t really know how. We talk about it all, but it’s hard. He gave up a movie for me, you know? And I can’t ask him to do that again. It’s one of the reasons I told him to take this new one. He loves it, and he should get to do what he loves.”

“Well, if I can give you some sage advice from someone who has done long distance, it’s that you have to talk. My relationship failed, but as I’ve just learned recently, it failed when we lived in the same damn city too. Vic and I probably aren’t the best match when it comes down to who we are now, and while I don’t get to know the intimacies of your relationship no matter how much I try to get you to tell me about how wonderful the sex is, I have a good feeling about you and Killian, kid. But you gotta talk to him about some terrifying future shit if you’re going to make it work.”

“I know.” She untucks her legs from her chair so she can stand and walk to the other side of the room, wrapping her arms around Ruby in an embrace. “I really hate when you get all wise about things.”

“Well, baby mama wasn’t about to tell you the truth if you’d talked to her it all this morning, so someone has to. I also really wanted you to come get lunch with me.”

She laughs into Ruby’s shoulder before pulling back. “Yeah, let’s go get lunch then.”

-/-

Killian’s sitting outside of her apartment door when she gets home a little later than usual, the sun already beginning to fade away as it shines through the window at the end of the hall. He hasn’t seen her yet, his head still tilted down, hair falling over his forehead as he messes with his phone. He has a key. She knows that he has a key because she gave it to him, and yet he’s sitting on a disgusting hallway floor that probably hasn’t been cleaned in months. If ever. And with all of the things she knows about Killian Jones, one of the most prominent is how he doesn’t like germs or for anything to be unclean.

“You know,” she sighs, pushing the nerves down as she walks toward him, her flats tripping her up for a moment, “there’s this amazing invention called a key. If you have the right one, it lets you into certain rooms.”

His head snaps up to her, his fingers stopping their movements on his phone, and she can’t help her laugh at the way his lips part, surprise very obviously crossing his face as he stares up at her, and she knows if his hands weren’t grasping his phone, he’d be scratching his ear or his chin. It’s just how he is. “Swan.”

“What are you doing sitting on the floor, KJ?”

“Ah, didn’t feel right to let myself in.” He stands from the ground as she unlocks the door, swinging it open eve as her hands shake a bit. She’s not sure if it’s out of nervousness or excitement. “And I’ve only been here for a little while.”

“How long is a little while? Why didn’t you text me that you were here? Didn’t we just talk about this?”

“Well, two hours or so, I’d say. I didn’t want to worry you or bother you at work. If you’ve been anywhere close to how I’ve been today, you likely didn’t need extra worry. I’m, well, I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but for the first time since before we started dating, I’m nervous to talk to you.”

“Killian,” she murmurs, turning around and wrapping her arms around his waist, feeling his warmth even as he takes a moment to return the embrace. But he does, his arms moving around her and his hug so tight that she swears he picks her up off the ground if only for a moment.

“I know,” he mutters into her hair, the vibrations hitting against her skin at the same time she feels his scruff scratch her neck. “I’m sorry. I can’t – I’m sorry.”

“Me too, but we already said all of that.” She pulls back from their embrace so she can look him in the eyes, the blue lighter than the last time she saw him, the darkness no longer swirling. As nervous as she’s been, as anxious as she’s been, she doesn’t think anything really compares to how she’s feeling right now. She should have known that there wouldn’t be yelling. At least yet. She should have known that talking over the phone and making a plan to talk would not have been nearly as fiery as their argument in California. Tempers aren’t hot, so of course they’re like this. It’s Killian. It’s not the others. It’s Killian. “I don’t – I don’t even know how to start.”

“Why don’t we get something to drink and move out of your doorway, and we can talk, okay?”

She fixes them two cups of coffee, the caffeine likely not going to help the nerves that are starting to build again, before they sit down on her couch, her legs curled up underneath her so she’s as small as she can possibly be. It’s silent for long enough for the silence to be awkward, and since that makes her entirely uncomfortable, she breaks it.

“I don’t know how long I can do this long distance thing.” As her shoulders heave, the words finally off of her chest in the calmness of the day, she watches as Killian smiles across from her, his lips turning into one of the brightest smiles she’s ever seen from him. “Why the hell are you laughing?”

“Bloody hell. You just blurted that out like if you didn’t say it within five seconds an explosive would go off.”

“Well that’s how I felt.”

“I know, I know,” he chuckles, waving her away. “I’ve felt the same way. You just amuse me, darling.”

“That’s because I’m so damn funny.”

“I’m aware, but you’re also right. The distance fucking sucks, and I guess I’ve been ignoring how much of a strain that it’s putting on me, which is making me ignore how much of a strain it’s putting on you. I don’t – I mean, I noticed, but I brushed it aside.”

“So did I. And we can’t really do that because then I have meltdowns over missing Mary Margaret giving birth when it really shouldn’t have been that big of a deal.”

“Hey, no, don’t do that. Don’t diminish your feelings, Swan. If I had missed Aiden’s birth, I’d have been beside myself. I realize that I didn’t react in the best way, but I’ve had time to think about it. We’ve both been missing so much of our families’ lives and our friends’ lives since we started dating. You’ve had to miss some bigger, more important moments, and, darling, I am so sorry for that. It’s not fair or easy, but I love you more than anything in the world. I will get my damn pilot’s license if it means that I get to be with you more often.”

“Captain Killian Jones has a pretty good ring to it.”

“Aye, it does, doesn’t it? Seriously, though. I love you, Emma, and I’ve got no idea what kind of timeline we’re supposed to be on, but I don’t think any of that matters. I want to be with you for a long time, and if we’re going to do this, I think one of us has to think about moving.”

And there it is.

There’s the crux of the problem. There’s the entire problem.

“I know,” she whispers, taking a sip of her coffee to give herself more time to think as she watches Killian’s face and the way his eyebrows struggle to stay still. He wants to furrow them, but he’s trying to stay still. “I love you, and I know that if we want to make it work, that we have to think about that. I just…there’s no good option, KJ. If I move to California, I leave my friends and have to find a new job. If you move here, you leave your family and friends and half of your work stuff. Plus, you’re already gone when you’re working all of the time, and Boston would probably be more of an inconvenience than anything. California is better for you.”

“And Boston is better for you.”

“So what do we do?”

Killian shrugs, and her nerves race to new heights, the realization she’s always known just reconfirming itself to her. What do they do? How do they solve this? There’s nothing that’s better for both of them, and she can’t ask Killian to leave his family. She can’t.

“I can’t ask you to leave your family.”

“I’d do it though, Swan,” he offers, placing his mug on the end table. It’s been empty for awhile, but he must have been holding onto it simply so he’d have something to do with his hands. “It’s a hell of a lot more convenient for me to move. My finances are more flexible, I don’t have to worry about finding employment in a certain city, and I can fly back to Santa Monica to be with my family whenever I need. Work for me isn’t always in LA. It rarely is. I can be based somewhere else.”

“What about your house? You love that house.”

“What about it? I can keep it. I’ll rent or buy an apartment here, maybe something down by the harbor, and that way we don’t have to broach the conversation of moving in together if you don’t want to. We can have our separate spaces.”

“Oh.”

“Unless you want to,” he interrupts, reaching his hand across the cushions until it’s placed on her knee, his fingers squeezing her skin. “I just – bloody hell, Emma. I would love to live with you, but I figured it might be too much for you at once.”

“Fuck that.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Fuck that, Killian,” she chuckles, the sound leaning a bit on the sadistic side. “Killian, I know that I’m more skittish than most normal human beings, but disregarding this weekend, when have I ever run from you? I haven’t. Yes, this is all scary as hell, and I thank you for being so considerate with me all the time. But I want you to tell me what you want. I want to know exactly how you feel about things, not how you feel filtered so that you think you won’t scare me.”

He lunges forward so quickly that she doesn’t have more than a moment to prepare herself before his body is covering hers as well as his lips, her breath completely leaving her the moment Killian makes contact. It’s not at all what she was expecting, but she doesn’t mind as she gets to feel the softness of his lips, the taste of coffee lingering on them, mixed with the roughness of his beard on her. It hasn’t been that long since they last did this, only a few days really, but it feels like a lifetime.

“I want to move in with you,” he huskily whispers, their mouths still so close that they don’t completely part as they talk. His breath and his body are warm, and she sinks further into the couch cushions as she blinks her eyes up at him, that light blue turning a little darker. “I think it should be Boston. I really do, Emma. It’s not just to make you happy. I think it’s the best solution for us right now, and maybe one day in the future, we can move back to Santa Monica. We don’t have to have everything figured out, but I think this is a good step. I have been thinking about this for a long time, longer than this weekend, but I didn’t know how to say it.”

“Thank you,” she mumbles before grazing his lips again as her hands trace up and down his back, landing at the dip between his hips and his ass. She’s so damn glad that he spoke to her like that. “Thank you for telling me how you actually feel. We’re partners, okay? It’s not just about me or just about you.”

“Aye, I know. But what do you think about me moving to Boston, about us finding a place?”

“What? This place isn’t good enough for you?”

“Swan.”

“I know, I know. Deflecting.” She moves her hands over his back again, feeling just how real and how present he is even as he presses down on her with their breaths still intermingling. “I mean, I kind of like it. I still think maybe we should be super nerdy and make a pro-con list about things before we pay a deposit, and I’m kind of terrified that maybe we’ll start hating each other if we spend more than a week together with no end in sight.”

“So separate bedrooms then?”

“Definitely not. Wherever we live has to have your mattress, though.”

“That’ll likely stay in the house. We can get a new mattress though.”

“What about mine?”

“Swan, I have every intention of making good use of that mattress in about two minutes, but it either has to go burn somewhere or we keep it in a spare bedroom.”

“I’m not sure whether I want to talk about the fact that you think we’re getting a two-bedroom apartment or whether I want to talk about this whole two minute thing.”

“The two minute thing, and then afterwards, we can talk about everything else, make that damn list of yours so that you can try to convince me that Santa Monica is better for us right now even though we both know that it’s not.”

She laughs as he captures her lips again, and the sound disappears to be replaced by her gasp, everything else drowning out for a quick moment. There’s always been something so intoxicating about him, about Killian, and while some things with them are still new, there are others that feel like they’ve been doing it for years. The way he kisses her, his ability to take her breath away, that’s one of them. She hopes that it never stops, that it never changes. Life is hard, relationships likely more difficult, and it all evolves and changes over time. But maybe some things can stay the same.

Or maybe they can evolve in a good way.

“Has it been two minutes?”

“I’ve got no bloody clue, but I don’t think it even matters.”

There’s a pointed rolls of his hips into hers, once, twice, three times, before he’s actually rolling off of her, a groan emanating from the back of his throat as he stands up, his limbs obviously aching a bit. She’d crack a joke about him being an old man, but she herself feels a little lifeless pressed into the couch, the cushions molding into her body. Killian offers his hands, and she takes them, allowing him to pull her up and onto her feet before he’s dipping his head and running his lips over her wrist, something that always causes nearly every inch of her skin to stand on edge in the best way. She knows that when he does that, he’s saying he loves her. He’s never admitted that in the exact words, but she knows.

She also knows that she doesn’t have as many eloquent and thoughtful ways to express her feelings for Killian, that she tries her best, but she doesn’t have a spot to kiss or flowery words to reassure him how much he’s loved. But she does want to reassure him of that, to make sure he knows how much she is in this for the long haul too, and maybe one day she’ll get better at letting Killian know that he has completely turned her life into something not unrecognizable, but different.

In an infinitely good way.

But she’ll figure all of that out later as she tugs at Killian’s t-shirt until he’s helping her take it off, dark hair covering lean muscles now exposed to her gaze as her nail traces up and down his skin, her eyes not finding his even though she knows that he’s looking at her.

She’s taking things deliberately slowly, savoring it even though every inkling she has tells her to go faster, and apparently Killian feels the same. He’s just acting on it.

“You in a hurry there?” she asks as his hands fumble with her shirt, yanking it up over her head even with the way he’s deliciously trailing his lips against her neck. He’s eager and a bit rough, and her legs are already beginning to lose a bit of their strength.

“Yes.”

A giggle escapes her lips, her breath already uneven, and she pushes his chest to make him move away from the couch. It could work, but she’s got other ideas. “I thank you for your honesty.”

“I would thank you to stop teasing me and to get these bloody pants off.” “So impatient.”

“Again, yes.”

It’s faster after that, the two of them officially stumbling back into her bedroom, clothes hastily being pulled off and dropped to the floor. Killian’s hands land on her thighs, warm and rough, and her stomach twists in anticipation as he picks her up for a brief moment and deposits her on the mattress, his tongue constantly moving against the flesh of her collarbone while she arches her back up, their hips coming together in such a way that she and Killian both groan at the contact.

“You’re a damned tease,” Killian whispers against her lips. She can feel every inch of his skin on hers, the hair on his chest brushing against her breasts and creating friction, and she can feel how he rests heavily between her thighs, gooseflesh rising on her bare skin once more. She’s missed him. She can’t comprehend how she could miss someone so much when she just saw him, but she has. She’s missed him, and she loves him. “A bloody minx.”

“I know,” she manages to murmur right back, hooking her arms underneath his shoulders and running her nails against his back and between his shoulder blades, the muscles twitching with every touch as he grunts in response, slanting his lips over hers until she can’t breathe. She knows breathing is important and everything, but she’s okay with the lack of air for right now. She’s not going to die from it.

She might die from the way when Killian releases her, he moves down her body, tracing every inch of her skin with the softness of his lips and the harshness of his beard, a contrasting combination that causes the pleasure to increase in between her thighs. Then his mouth is on her breast, lips closing around her nipple, and she swears if magic existed, it would feel exactly like that. She needs it to feel exactly like that, especially as Killian expertly works her up, his tongue lavishing her while one of her hands bunches into the sheets and the other into his hair, likely a bit too rough.

He doesn’t stay long, though, her hand in his hair not keeping him there, and he moves down her stomach, kissing and whispering against the muscles of her skin as her entire body hums. She wants to speak, has a million words on her tongue, but all she can really focus on is Killian’s tongue on her inner thigh and the way that he’s nibbling her skin so close to where she’s aching. She’s never been the best with words, but right now she simply doesn’t know any.

Anticipation is building, his breath hot on her flesh, and with her eyes closed to try to calm herself down, it takes her a moment to realize that his mouth is no longer situated over where she wants him and is instead working its way back up her body. Every inch of hair she has is standing up, even the ones on her head, and she imagines it makes quite the look.

“What are you doing?” she whines, opening her eyes so that she’s suddenly engrossed in the deep, dark blue of Killian’s. How many colors can his eyes be in such a short period of time? They’re kind of like magic too, she guesses.

He hums, but he doesn’t say anything, his lashes landing against his cheeks before opening up again. When he runs his thumbs over her cheekbones, all of her focus is pulled away from the way that she can feel his arousal against her thigh, the heat of it likely more than the heat of her skin, but she can’t focus on anything except the softness of his gaze. It’s almost as if he’s memorizing her features, memorizing her, and she does the same for a moment, watching a freckle by his nose.

“When I first saw you on that video, I thought you were so beautiful even in that damn sweater. I can’t – I never could have imagined that you would be the love of my life.”

Well, fuck. That is not at all what she was expecting, and as the tears pool in her eyes, all she can do is kiss him, harsh and demanding mixed in with the occasional soft movement as their tongues tangle together in a warm, wet dance. She pushes him to roll over, whispering words too, and her lips trail along his skin in the same way that his did to hers, making his muscles twitch as she explores him and lets him feel how much she loves him too.

It’s like she’s breathing him in and letting instinct carry her as she moved above him.

“I love you,” she murmurs against his hipbone before she’s taking him in hand and pumping him a few times, the guttural groan he emits leisurely making its way down her body in the form of a shiver until she’s maneuvering herself above him and joining them together on a deep sigh. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

So maybe her words aren’t as flowery, but they get the meaning across.

Her hands find their way to his chest, gripping into the hair, and his land on her hips, helping to guide her as she moves up and down. Her entire body is a mixture of emotion and the haziness of pleasure, each thrust, each push and pull, each trace of Killian’s fingers over her skin making her lose herself a bit more as her stomach tightens and everything else loosens. Before she knows it, they’re moving, Killian slipping out of her for a brief moment that feels like the longest ten seconds in the world, before his body is hovering over hers, lips devouring her, and yet he stays completely still inside of her.

“KJ,” she whispers, and he pulls back to look at her, brows furrowed together as he stares at her again, “are you going to move?”

“Yeah, yeah. I just – ” He stops talking to kiss her cheek, the gesture somehow more intimate than them being joined together in the most intimate of places. “I don’t know. I got lost in my head for a moment.”

She runs her hand across his cheek, tapping her fingers against the skin while she swivels her hips for the lightest bit of friction and relief. “That’s okay if you did.”

“Aye,” he mumbles before fiercely snapping his hips into hers, her body and the bed moving with him as the pleasure resumes more quickly than she ever could have imagined, her hands gripping into the sheets and into his skin simply so that she does not turn to dust beneath him. He’s a man on a mission who’s making her get lost in her head as the bedframe creaks (they’re definitely not keeping this one) and she swears that it almost falls out from underneath them.

Or maybe that’s just her. Maybe her body is so on edge, so ready to fall, that she can do little more than listen to Killian’s whispers in her ears while her legs wrap around his waist and he continues to move with her and within her.

“Fuck,” he groans against her skin, the vibrations nothing with the way that she’s tingling. “You are so magnificent.”

She almost says thank you, really and truly, but then the coil that’s been building bursts inside of her as sweat grows all over her heated skin and Killian’s mouth whispers delicious, filthy, sweet words into the strained cords of her neck as she falls apart beneath him. Even with the slight numbing feeling that she has, her mind not fully there for a brief moment, she makes the effort to move with Killian, to let her hips swivel as his do the same. She can tell that he’s close, the flushed skin and insistent thrusts giveaways, and she tries to coax him through it, to lead him to the end even as a pleasure starts to hum within her once more.

But then he’s falling apart too, his thrusts coming once, twice, three times more, before he groans practically every filthy word she’s ever heard and lands on top of her with a gentle thud, his weight only uncomfortable for a moment as the “I love you” he whispered makes its way into her brain as well.

“We should fight more often if it’s going to be like that.”

“Shut up,” she giggles as she looks up at the smirk he’s currently got going on, his hair disheveled and face still flushed. He’s being cheeky and maybe a bit smug, and she can do nothing put push back his hair, sweat moving back with it as she makes an attempt to catch the breath that’s been so evasive today. “We weren’t even fighting today. That was more…celebratory.”

“Well, my love,” he sighs, leaning his forehead down to rest against hers, nose pushing into her cheek, “we should have this combination of makeup sex and celebratory sex more often.”

“You know, every time we fight you can’t just ask me to move in with you. That would be impractical.”

“Eh, well, I’ll figure something out. And I was so right.”

“About what?”

He moves them as much as he can, the bed squeaking with each thrust of his hips. “We’ll have to get a new bed. This one makes too much damn noise.”

#betting on the bullseye #captain swan #cs fic #cs ff

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kaffeinic · 5 years ago

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60 Question Tag Challenge!

I was challenged by @woo-for-woojin to answer all of these. To be fair, I challenged her first, but let’s not get into the details. Original post of questions by @roseyygf.

1: Selfie.

GAAAAAAAH I HATE THIS ALREADY SMH IM SO UGLY.

Lmao look at my fingers. What the hell is going on there?

2: What would you name your future kids?

I feel like that’s a joint decision, so I can’t say. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll want to have my own kids through childbirth. My family has a genetic disposition to difficulties during pregnancy. I might adopt.

3: Do you miss anyone?

A few people. Some of them I haven’t even met in person. I miss my BFF from school. I miss a few people online that I’ve fallen out of touch with. I’m always missing people. 😂

4: What are you looking forward to?

College, and moving out of my house. I’ve been itching to do both of these for years now.

5: Is there anyone who can always make you smile?

@hoshithehamster, @woo-for-woojin, @a-toxic-galaxy, my BFF from school, and my older sister. Also, I swear, @hoshithehamster and I are literally are always TALKING IN CAPS LOCK BECAUSE WE ARE IDIOTS AND WE HAVE THE WEIRDEST, MOST FUN CONVERSATIONS EVER.

6: Is it hard for you to get over someone?

Once I’ve gone all-in, yeah. When it’s a crush, not usually. I’m really slow to develop a crush on someone. Painfully slow lol. I’m cautious because I’ve been hurt by people in that regard a few times. One incident had me suicidal for a long time.

7: What was your life like last year?

Kind of the same? I didn’t have this blog open. If you had asked this regarding two years ago, I would have said that I wasn’t homeschooling, didn’t know how to play piano much, didn’t have this blog, and was very depressed because of my old schoolmates.

8: Have you ever cried because you were so annoyed?

YES! Whenever I feel stuck and know I have no control of a situation, I get frustrated and find a quiet place to cry.

9: Who did you last see in person?

I’m assuming this means out of my own household. The last person I saw was my older sister and her roommates, who I am really good friends with. One of them loves coffee as much as me and it’s great! I spent the night. That was over a month and a half ago lmao. Before that, I had gone on a date at a coffee shop.

10: Are you good at hiding your feelings?

Yeah. My family gets angry at me if I’m sad or angry about anything, so I hold it all in. It definitely has made life a bit harder. I make people angry when I won’t disclose my feelings to them. I just find it to be better to hold it. I have to be really comfortable with you and really love you if I’ll tell you that I’m sad/angry and why.

11: Are you listening to music right now?

Yeah. It’s Le Pire by Maître Gims. He’s a really great French singer.

12: What is something you want right now?

If this is concerning food, I’m in the mood for chicken right now lol. I need some protein. Aside from food, I’m wanting to get a pedal for my electric piano. I have no sustain and it ruins a lot of songs. 😂 It’s why I have my ko-fi open.

13: How do you feel right now?

Meh. I’m not feeling great. I have some issues with fainting. My blood pressure drops like a rock at times and I feel it coming on, if you know what I’m saying. It’s this kind of lethargic, sick feeling. I’m trying to drink a lot of water, just in case it’s about dehydration.

14: When was the last time someone of the opposite sex hugged you?

When I last visited my favourite coffee shop. For those of you who read Caffeinic, Chan’s character design is a mix of his true personality and a barista at my café of choice. He always gives me a hug when I see him, and when I say good bye. 😊

15: Personality description?

For a quick description, I’d say that INFJ, which is my MBTI type, is really accurate for me. I’ll let one of my friends try to describe me. I’m bad at describing myself lol.

Okay, but my heart is combusting. This amazing hooman, I lob her so much!!!! One of my best friends for sure.

16: Have you ever wanted to tell someone something but you didn’t?

All the time. I’m sure you all have heard Fight Song by Rachel Platten, but that line where she says, “And all those things I didn't say // Wrecking balls inside my brain // I will scream them loud tonight // Can you hear my voice this time?” really resonates with me. It was that lyric that hooked me on this song.

17: Opinion on insecurities?

I think 90% of us have them. They are humbling, which can be good, but I urge you to know your worth. I’m such a hypocrite.

18: Do you miss how things were a year ago?

Not really. Not much has changed.

19: Have you ever been to New York?

No, but I’d love to visit! I’m from the west coast lol.

20: What is your favourite song at the moment?

Ramai by Delia & The Motans. I listen to a lot of different languages in music lol. I have no idea what any of it means, so if it’s inappropriate, I apologize.

21: Age and birthday.

Internationally, 18. May 3, 2001.

22: Description of crush.

I don’t think I have a crush???? Haha. There’s this really kind, pretty hot barista at the café who seems to like me but I’m avoiding relationships, so idk. He has green eyes and black, curly hair. He’s maybe 170-180cm, but I’m not entirely sure. He looks damn good in a button up, I... wow. 🥵

23: Fear(s)?

So many lmao. I’m afraid of some trivial things, like bugs and rollercoasters, but I’m also afraid of some different items, like never having a family of my own, or of not being able to achieve my dreams.

24: Height?

154(?)cm. About 5’1.”

25: Role model?

I don’t think I have one lmao. I just try to be the best person I can be. It’s a goal in life for me to be a truly good person.

26: Idol(s).

Aren’t Idols and Role Models pretty much the same thing..? 😂 To be general, I look up to those who have studied in medical school because I know it’s a rollercoaster of difficulties and debt. I applaud them.

27: Things I hate:

This could be a very long list. Let’s go:

Unnecessary rudeness/bullying

Being forced into things I don’t like and/or am afraid of doing

Being lied to

Being stolen from

Being thrown in awkward situations

Being denied my alone time

When people make a mess that I have to clean

When I cook for people and they don’t thank me. My face just scrunched in anger while I typed this one lmao.

Arrogant/egotistic people

So many more, but I’ll cut it off there. 😊

28: “I’ll love you if...”

OOF. There’s no specific thing someone could do. If you love me, I’ll love you. I don’t mean the “awe ily” kind of love. I mean the “I will keep you out of trouble and protect you and be around you only to enjoy your company because I love you” kind of love. True love. Not that artificial crap.

29: Favourite film(s)?

Room 1408 is really good haha. I also really liked A Simple Favour. I like a lot of movies lmao. Superhero movies are always good.

30: Favourite tv show(s)?

I watched a lot of Black Mirror before we got rid of Netflix. I watch Superstore and Brooklyn 99 like they’re the gospel. I’m always down for Gilmore Girls because it’s a classic. I often watch my old childhood shows like Danny Phantom.

31: 3 random facts.

I’m assuming you mean, “3 random facts about me” lol.

I play piano.

I read “too much.” Let’s be honest, is it even possible to read too much?

I write my own stories and songs all of the time.

32: Are your friends mainly girls or guys?

Oof. My absolute closest friends are girls, but the majority of people I would consider my friends are male.

33: Something you want to learn.

Everything I can about medicine. I’m so interested in it, and I love the idea of fixing someone’s body. I’m fascinated by the weird and/or nasty things about our bodies. I hope that doesn’t sound too weird. I also wanna learn how to use a French press lmao.

34: Most embarrassing moment?

I had been selected to perform in a talent show a few years back for my old school and I got up there, face planting on the floor. Halfway through the song, I froze up and forgot the lyrics. I have never forgotten that.

35: Favourite subject?

Any form of science or Language Arts.

36: 3 dreams you want to fulfill?

Become a doctor.

Write a song that someone can perform onstage.

Clock in my 10,000 hours in piano.

Extra: I want to learn violin so badly!

37: Favourite actor/actress?

Jennifer Aniston or Nicolas Cage probably. I don’t pay much attention to actors. I also love Jeremy Renner’s work!

38: Favourite comedian(s)?

Oh lord, this question was made for me. Randy Feltface, Samuel J. Conroe, TwoSet, Ross Lynch, and many, many more!

39: Favourite sport(s)?

Volleyball, baseball, and badminton. Low/no-contact sports lol.

40: Favourite memory?

I can’t think of a specific one, but my best memories are always those random, funny moments I have with friends. I don’t think I’m ever gonna forget when my friend and I named one of her plants for the first time. I made a plant family tree. Dear lord save my soul.

41: Relationship status?

Single~

42: Favourite book(s)?

THAT IS THE HARDEST QUESTION EVER! How can I be expected to answer this???? 😂 I don’t have a favourite.

43: Favourite song ever?

Is this q&a list crafted specifically for me to not be able to answer any of the questions? 😂 I don’t have one. It changes with time.

44: Age you get mistaken for?

People always think I’m younger than I am, but if they don’t, then they over shoot it. Most people think I’m 16, or as old as 20-22. It’s crazy lol.

45: How you found out about your idol.

I’m going to interpret this as how I found out about my ult bias, who is Chan from Stray Kids. I was surfing SoundCloud and found the 3racha page. There wasn’t much there, but I liked what they had recorded. From then, I saw some of their survival show and may have kind of fallen for Channie and his personality lmao. Whoops.

46: What my last text message says.

This is the one I got while I was answering this specific question. 😊

“I feel that. I do hate unrealistic stories or stories that go on to fast like. I want to read stories where I feel like the reader could be me and not some sort of perfect girl getting the attention of all the people and fell in love withing 3 seconds and marry. I know that there must be some drama and special things to keep the story going and that's OK but I really appreciate stories who are still based more on a normal life. And you really do a good job in writing normal life stories // And tbh no story made me as happy as your barista!Chan story. It really is something different and I love it.”

Idk if the sender would be okay with me sharing that it was them, so I just copied it lol. I truly do love the feedback I get from you guys! Thank you all so much~~!

47: Turn-ons?

I’m assuming - again - that you mean romantically? I’ve always liked someone who has a decent sense of humour. Whenever I see someone working hard at their job/studies, part of me finds it... sexy? Idk. I’m weird. Save me. 😂

48: Turn-offs?

Overconfidence is a big no-no. It’s annoying as well. I can’t stand someone who truly is an idiot. Nothing turns me off more than getting a text that’s barely legible with a million abbreviations. Speak to me like someone with a brain, please. Another big turn-off is someone who is just automatically very sexual. I’m not a super sexual person, and I don’t want to hang out with someone who has a one-track mind in that sense.

49: Where I want to be right now.

The café.

50: Favourite picture of your idol?

But... he’s so pretty? How??

Sorry. I do not own these gifs/photos of Chan~

51: Star sign?

Taurus..? Idk if that’s for horoscopes lol.

52: Something I’m talented at.

Mmmmmm idk. I’m pretty mundane. I read a lot. I really would love to say I’m talented at piano, but I just don’t think I’m there yet.

53: 5 things that make me happy.

“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens...” Sorry.

Classical music

The smell of an old book

Petrichor and/or rainstorms

Playing piano

The smell of coffee

54: Something that’s worrying me at the moment.

Everything?? 😂 I’m worried about affording college tuition at the moment. I’m a senior and it’s steadily approaching.

55: Tumblr friends?

I almost yeeted my phone across the room. This is my question. 😂

@hoshithehamster, my fellow plant mother. I think we are each other’s spirit animal lol. I love you more than you know~! As a side note: She’s model material, I swear! Soooooo pretty, inside and out!

@woo-for-woojin, the most adorable and thoughtful person ever?? Always a pleasure to speak to. She gives the coolest and cutest requests ever, I’m-

@a-toxic-galaxy, one of the first people who supported this blog. I love you so much! We both have gotten a little busy lately, but I hope we never fall out of touch.

@doubleknot42, I guess more of an acquaintance? I still really want to get to know her more. The content on her blog is amazing, I highly recommend.

@ethereal-chanracha, someone who I’ve just recently started talking to. We’ve learned so much about each other in such a short time and I already think she’s so awesome! If you’re down for a good conversation, hit her up.

@palemoonpersephone, a friend I made after writing a post about my experiences at school. She is one of the sweetest, most thoughtful and hardworking people I’ve ever met. She offered to be my friend if ever I need one, and I don’t regret it. 💕

56: Favourite food(s).

Homemade granola (I make it a lot.)

Salad (Don’t @ me. I really do enjoy salad. I’m much more of an herbivore. 😂)

Most types of Chinese chicken

This spicy noodle thing I think I invented?

Italian sandwiches

Any type of spicy chip (Takis, Hot Cheetos, etc...)

Plain white rice

Gochu jang flavoured chicken

Despite this list, know that I’m a very picky eater lol

57: Favourite animal(s).

Foxes

Doggos

CATS

White tigers

HEDGEHOGS OML

58: Description of my best friend.

Y’all probably know who this is, but...

Kind

Attentive

Smart

Pretty

Passionate

gOOFY (like me)

The best plant mother in existence??? Fight me.

Patient

Empathetic

And SO much more~~!

59: Why I joined tumblr?

Initially, just to find cool posts and like/reblog whatever I enjoyed. My main blog, @assainfj, is the same blog I started with lol. It’s now become a place for me to share my thoughts and my writing and to meet amazing hoomans.

60: Ask me anything you want.

YASSSSS PLEASE I love answering your questions~~~~~! Send in as many as you’d like!

I tag: @hoshithehamster • @a-toxic-galaxy • @palemoonpersephone • @doubleknot42 • @ethereal-chanracha & anyone else who wants to do this!

#kpop #fanfictions #headcannons #reactions #ships #imagines #asks #tag #challenge #q&a #questions #answers #stray kids #bang chan #skz #chan

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girlbookwrm · 6 years ago

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AVENGERS: CIVIL WAR

THE MIGHTY PRE ENDGAME REWATCH

it took us two entire days to watch this, back in whenever we were watching this. I’ve got a Bundle of Papers here in front of me, and the CW Bundle is by far the thickest, and that’s with minimal salt content.

Speaking of Salt: The Roommate and I had to approach this as an Avengers movie. Because otherwise the salt levels in this would be toxic, possibly fatal. Even so, ppl with high cholesterol be warned

LET’S DO THIS

1991!

Winter Soldier:

what is this

what is this please

dat beef tho

what is this op sec

honestly

NO mask

SHINY FUCKOFF ARM just HANGING OUT

CCTV???

~ooooooo he’s a ghooooooooooooost~

he’s got an extremely dedicated and very harried cleanup crew is what he’s got

OH! OLD LOGO ILU!!!

LAGOS!!

The Roommate: That’s a lot of sugar

i ain’t judging

what, you think her powers run on optimism?

is there an accent? is there not? Shroedinger’s accent.

droney the drone

sam’s lil sky roomba

i love him

guhhhh this scene every line shows character and growth and i just *clenches fist*

did

did falcon just throw steve

just yeeted him at the enemy?

god i love that

also: has steve bulked up since TWS?

that’s also on Sam, yeah?

CUT THE CHEEEEECCCCK

is this fucking NEUROTOXIN? STEVE WHERE’S UR MASK?

Steve, throwing himself into a room full of an unknown poison gas without a mask: I bet i can survive this

Bucky, in Bucharest: *breaks whatever he’s holding without knowing why*

god i love sam

“I don’t work like that no more” Means ?????????????

PARKOUR NAT

is also BRUNCH MOM NAT

“both grunting” is always one of my favorite subtitles

2 white boys fighting in the middle of the street like it’s a video game

god someone took the murder strut to heart wow that is some. that is some something that’s for sure.

give me even one (1) heterosexual explanation for "your pal your buddy your bucky"

there’s no way that bucky ever said this, right? this is just Rumlow fucking with steve, and the screenwriters fucking with us

because IN CASE YOU WERE NOT IN THIS FANDOM IN 2016, WE ALL THOUGHT CAP WOULD DIE IN THIS MOVIE

WE WERE SO SURE

wow i wonder if that will be relevant to anyone’s emotions here in the year of our lordt 2019

anyway, what bucky actually said was:

“please tell rogers... that he’s a big dumb dildo and he should wear a gas mask and also a parachute.”

listen i love this opening scene but also wanda is not at all responsible for this explosion and the fact that they act like she is undermines my ability to suspend my disbelief.

DIGITAL ENYOUTHENMENT ALERT

also, tony the fact that you are using your literal dead mom as an actual therapist is

wow

BARF feels right to me

too real, tony

it’s too real

how ARE you getting around the strings and taxes tho

Also can i say that i actually love that Pepper’s absence is this profoundly important to the story. The hole where pepper should be is a huge part of this story and i like that. i like that a lot.

WOW THAT EXTRA IS LIKE A MASHUP OF NAT AND WANDA. SHE IS THE GENERIC MARVEL WHITE LADY

more a+ visual storytelling with the elevator

I’m just so mad that they blame wanda and play that straight?

all they had to do was outright acknowledge one (1) time that the media is picking on her because she’s a woman/a foreigner

imagine that speech coming from nat instead of steve

though i do love Steve’s pep talk

again. give me one (1) heterosexual explanation

though why not have Steve say “they’re just bullies, you did the right thing” and hearken back to smolsteeb

The Roommate: Remember how i was mad at his Oscars Velvet Blazer? I am also mad at this sweater.... it looks... so soft... i don’t know if i want it on him or off him... just wanna tuch....... and wear..........?”

Vision’s Ascot is. Something else man.

The Roommate: Why is ross secretary of state?

Me: Why is Trump President

Me: I bet Ross is vegan

the roommate, who has vegan-related trauma: UUUUGGGHHHHHHHH

Nat's reaction to vigilantes: Bitch please. she is Unbothered.

you don’t have to show us footage we’ve got the ptsd nightmares

400 pages in 3 days

[tired american sighing]

we honestly can’t even criticize this plot point anymore just

[my longest and most american sigh]

CLEVELAND!!!

hail hydra continues to be the Most Terrible last words

but WHY does ross have the congressional medal of honor

do you know how HARD it is to get one of those????

yeesh

sassy black friends sassing at each other

is definitely a

thing that is happening rn

Vision: Well Actually

no one cares, vis

ok like

a kid is dead but

3.6 is an okay GPA

maybe all my friends are overachievers

maybe it’s just because most of them are women but like

it’s an okay GPA

i’d have 8000% more respect for Tony if he was more upfront like “look this is on me” especially here

are we supposed to be picking all this up as subtext, actually?

because i know that this movie ALSO had a Troubled Youth ala ant man

and i really do appreciate the Russos for relying on a smart audience but there’s a lot going on

and it’s very obvious to me that they had to shift gears 18,000 times in the script writing phase

so like, you’ve got old man vet steve

but it’s painfully obvious that he missed vietnam right?

it’s painfully obvious

and he’s v egotistical and self righteous too

it IS a battle of the egos

and no one is right

except natasha

Steve: i have to go

me: mood

LONDON!!!!

oh god

oh god no

steve god no steve oh god

gfhskfdjjjksjdjjhrrrrhrhhrhfhh [wailing and rending of garments]

Re Peggy’s age:

SURPRISE IT’S ACTUALLY PLAUSIBLE

so the True Hallmark of a Cap Movie is Peggy telling steve what to do.

so weird to have that in an avengers movie

i do love this. GOOD BRO NAT CONTENT

Um. is vision a minor? is wanda?

again, nat is the only Correct one here

stay together guys

it might be

reeeeeeaaaaally important in

*checks watch*

two years’ time.

~hug~

VIENNA!!!!!

CHAD WICK! CHAD! WICK! CHAD! WICK!

god i love the xhosa in this

There is a level of worldbuilding in this that we p much only get from the russos/markus&mcfeely. i mean -- internal consistency worldbuilding? if that makes sense? we get a lot of visual worldbuilding in black panther, but this is distinctly different and hard to articulate and it has to do with the way they approach things and how they assume audience intelligence

it just works for me

oh no chadwick boseman don’t be cry

Sharon deserves better

than being cockblocked by her own aunt

and also sam wilson (who also deserves better)

cryptid!bucky

Nat did you get that suit from jenny agutter?

LA Brunch Mom Nat

mah girl

she’s just so tired

steve (bless him) is just so exhausting

couples date sam and steve dressed to match

“at the gym”??? really? the arm is... a bit of a giveaway

i do feel bad for zemo in this one specific case

russian IS hard

how. did he get that in there?

Soft Plumboy Bucky

BEEF

Captain’s Log: Buck’s place is a shithole

Sergeant’s Log: Steve’s face is pretty

surprise bitch

“That’s Smart, Good Strategy” is an excellent phrase to use in everyday conversation in order to weed out who Knows and who Doesn’t.

What i have learned from civil war:

Captain America is a projectile weapon

further query:

did bucky ever hurl small steve at assailants?

Bucky: *punts steve down an alley*

Steve, 90 lbs of rage at 90 mph: GET WRECKED

Bucky’s got big tommy wiseau cryptid energy here

And now there’s a cat

bucky:

I love this vampire running and also bucky’s thighs

Steve Rogers: Excuse me sir I need to commandeer this vehicle. YEET.

Bucky Barnes: Excuse me sir I need to commandeer this vehicle. YOINK.

Bucky and Steve: Wrecking your morning commute since 2014

WAR MACHINE!!!

god vis has the biggest dorkiest crush

so vis are you a child prodigy? or? what?

The Roommate, a cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pure: vis have you eaten anything between CW and IW?

Me, sinnamon roll, not to be trusted: *dying* *thinking about how Vision’s got schroedinger’s dick. does it exist? does it not exist? who knows.*

Me: Y. Yes. I th. think he has. eaten something. between now and. and IW. something.

The Roommate: *betrayed look*

Me: DEEP FRIED KEBAB MAYBE? I DON’T KNOW.

The Roommate: *is so disappointed*

BERLIN!!!!!!

Bucky is. So tired. Let him rest.

fucking up the morning commute again i see

u like cats??

I love the ratio of overkill:ineffectiveness with this glass box they put him in.

why did tony bring these fancy pens

the time spent explaining them could’ve been spent doing literally anything else

*i still don’t understand the accords*

GOD STEVE WANTS TO BE AN UNCLE SO BAD

“my fault”

there it is

“truth is i don’t want to stop”

THERE it is

“i thought the accords could split the difference”

THERE IT IS

"no, i don’t.”

THERE IT IS

“IT’S INTERNMENT.”

THERE! IT! IS!

gah.

wanda’s accent et al -- MAKE IT EXPLICIT MARVEL YOU COWARDS

no but really what are the accords

here followed a 20-30 minute convo about the accords

basically the summing up was:

Nat is 100% Right Ross is 100% Wrong Everyone Else is In A Grey Area

look this is actually a really good avengers movie

but

this is a moment when the back catalogue works against them because this conversation is so -- it implies a lot of friendly interactions between these two. they seem to have a relationship

but i keep looking at all the other movies they’ve interacted in like

BITCH WHERE? WHERE IS THE TONYSTEVE FRIENDSHIP? WHERE???

i am anticipating this will cause me A Grief later

The Roommate, looking at Steve in his Grey Shirt and Jacket: Damn, sir. Stop wearing clothes.

“BIRD COSTUME???”

“j a m e s”

big holt talking to rosa vibes there

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

A VAST AND MIGHTY MOOD

Zemo’s plan is so ridiculous i genuinely don’t have time to get into it i still have two pages of notes to get through holy shit.

this fight scene. does things. for me.

hhhHNNNNHGH BEEFSTEAK

(oh tony left with no suit? growth dot gif)

THIGHS

T H I G H S ! ! ! !

CHADWICK!

Sam out here, serving looks, casually modeling

B I C E P S ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

TOO SEXY! *crashes helicopter*

I need twelve more scenes of steve and bucky faffing about in the water.

A more effective restraint than the custom made bucky bottle

(BRIEF 1991)

haaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAa biceps u stop that

Is Tony having a heart attack???

he has no concept of how to treat children because he never was one oh no i gave myself a sad feeling

QUEENS!!!!!!!

“I’m having a big fight in a parking lot with my superhero friends better go pick up a child as backup.” - tony stark

tony he doesn’t have a passport and if he understood what was happening he would not be on your side

Now That’s What I Call Vigilantism.

Why are you bringing a CHILD to a gun fight

Tony’s face, to me, suggests that he knows EXACTLY what he’s doing

also? it’s painfully obvious to me that these scenes were copypasted in late stage when they finally found out that yes they would have the rights to spiderman lol

for some reason they don’t feel the need to tell is that this is avengers compound in 400 point font

i’m so lost

where are we?

without the 400 point font i can only assume we are on mars

THAT’s a fine way to greet YOUR FATHER, WANDA

hawkeye is in fact the team lynchpin

is it

ugh

is it because they listen to him but he listens to natasha

ugh

i bet it is

UUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH

Vision: I have been FALLING! for THIRTY MINUTES!

“i know someone who does”

i’m confused by the cut here, because it seems to imply that Sharon, deliberately or inadvertently, rats them out to natasha?

Birds and raccoons do not get along

steve

steve no

steve

ur timing is shit steve

Scott Lang might be the best thing in this movie

well except for Dat Bone Structure

CUT THE CHEEEEEECK

*costume change in a parking lot to the yakkety sax soundtrack*

Thinking about the coming battle i am forced to concede that Iron Man Has A Point?

“do you really want to punch your way out of this?”

Steve: I ALWAYS wanna punch my way out

god scott’s such a fukkin nerd

tiny quibble but Scott “got punched by hope van dyne” lang would never say that to the black heckin widow

“gimmick”

people in falcon houses shouldn’t throw spider stones, samuel

wanda

those cars belong to people

oh god iron man has a point

LET’S GO LESBIANS! COME ON LESBIANS LET’S GO

*catfight sounds*

“then why did you run?”

dude you attacked me in a catsuit

Tony’s true superpower is that he knows steve, that’s how spiderbabby gets the upper hand

althought god

Tony was pre-gaslighting peter

he was pilotlighting peter

*my longest UGH yet*

“Queens?” “Brooklyn”

MAXIMUM NEW YORK ACHIEVED

ant man is the MVP

hmmmmmm “we don’t trade lives” HMMMMMMMMM

why did that truck explode

also *omg iron man has a point*

tony tedward stark how did you not know how old this child was

also peter stop pretending you don’t know what Empire Strikes Back, AT-ATs and Hoth are.

why doesn’t Vis get more flack for this

hey. hey tony. you know what sam is? A MEDIC. maybe let him LOOK AT YER FRIEND THERE instead of SHOOTING HIM IN THE FACE.

zemo’s plan is noooooonseeeeennnnnnsssse

guh these two beautiful men emoting in different directions KILL ME

this doctor is just like “yup there’s a giant purple robot here seems legit”

natasha is the only one who’s 100% right

did... did the russos kill themselves in this movie? did they cast themselves as dead extras? was this a statement of some kind?

HOW did ross get the congressional medal of honor. H O W.

“you read it”

NO ONE READ IT, IT’S 400 PAGES

tony this is Some Nonsense

ffflslkds he’s taking one of Nat’s guns KILL ME

one (1) heterosexual explanation.

rode back in a freezer truck

got pneumonia

already had pneumonia

and you blew three whole dollars on some slut

(seriously. gimme one. i’m waiting.)

srsly tho, whether you ship it or not, these two are old marrieds

the red star looks weird on his beefcake arm. did they forget to scale it up?

KITTY

listen zemo is just really turned on by cam and he didn’t mean to say that and that’s the most relateable thing he’s done so far.

It’s not just that bucky killed his mom. it’s that bucky killed his mom AND STEVE KEPT IT FROM HIM.

life alert a senior citizen has fallen

T'Challa, observing this White Nonsense™: I truly should... check myself. Before! I wreck myself.

agism is what it is

god this bit

steve dropping the shield

look at him

he is Stick A Fork In Him D O N E

Rhodey really deserves better than this? He deserves development showing the evolution of his opinion between here and IW

i wish we could get more of him grappling with this

that said

gosh wouldn’t it fucking suck if Cap and Bucky got relegated to End Credit scenes in their own got damn movie to make room for Iron Man to emote at his buddy his pal his rhodey?

*looks directly into the camera like i’m on the office.*

Anyway.

Steve rogers: getting the last word in every argument since 1918.

“from the bottom of my heart: My Bad.”

#The Mighty Pre Endgame Rewatch #cacw

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