#if you still want more extra plot stuff

[canthandlethishit]

prompt: timetravel fix it (?)

Damian somehow traveled back in time and meet robin!Jason mistaking him for Dick, after a while he caught up and realized, Jason was headed out to the place he’d be taken and later be killed at the hands of joker, Damian now have to contemplate changing the timeline to save Jason or not

go wild

[kedreeva]

did u read the good omens book? if so, what are your thoughts on it compared to the tv series?

i followed u for the steddie posts but fell in love with ur meta too 💜

I did, but honestly they're separate entities unless I want to steal something specific for a fic. They're both good, for different reasons and in different ways. They are written by different men, literally and figuratively, about different subject matters, for different reasons. You can compare an apple to an apple blossom, but even though one became the other, and came from the same tree, doesn't mean they are the same thing anymore, nor does it mean one is better than the other.

That being said, I've only read the book once, and I've watched the show over a dozen times, most likely because I saw the show first and read the book second. I enjoyed the book, but I think it was probably a better read in its day, by people who were the target audience at the time, and who didn't just read about or know the context, but understood and lived it. I can't be that, I can't go back in time and read the book before the series, I can't go back and read it in a time where it would have meant what it was intended to mean to the world it was born into.

[phoenixcatch7]

The problem I'm having with one of my stories is that it is compelling - but not clicking.

It's a sephiroth gets reincarnated into mdzs. Straightforward. I've got several branching paths: lwj, jc, nmj (my personal fave) and the jade twins (one mind in two bodies). All five of them have great potential, but for some reason my heart is set on sephiroth!lwj, because the aesthetic is sublime.

But! It's! Not! Working!

My main problems are a) despite similar surfaces, sephiroth has fundamentally different morals and life experiences to lwj and lwjs morals are a huge part of his and wwx's stories. B) I can't NOT have wangxian. I don't ship often at all, but when I do I'm pretty set on it lol. I don't want to deny soulmates. Unfortunately I HATE writing romance. C) I do not think sephiroth should be in any sort of romantic relationship at all nor can I see him wanting one. I've read tons of fics where he is in relationships (healthy or otherwise) and they're amazing, yes, but... Under my pen it's just not in the cards. And I do feel pairing him with wwx would just amplify wwx's worst traits, which is the opposite of what lwj does for him.

Everything's in conflict, but the lure of sephiroths second childhood in strict gusu and his complicated feelings about it, wwx being a perfect mix of all his important people with a spine of steel and righteousness that they all lost as everything fell apart, the relationship between sephiroth and his new mother, and how he'd inexplicably lose her too, the white on white aesthetic, the older identical brother, the cruel angels aesthetic with the benevolent demon, the angst of wwx's defection and death, his relationship with qi as a planet's overflowing life force, the tragedy of the mourning angel, monster x monster.... It calls to me.

But there's also the way wwx becoming a demonic cultivator was so vital to winning the war, and the way that affected things, gave him a legitimacy. Involve the silver soldier, and well. Everything else becomes a little extraneous lol. And sephiroth himself is such a big mover and shaker, I don't know what I could do to manage that without wiping out 80% of the remaining jianghu after the burial mounds siege with sephiroth appointing himself king lmao. He's not the kind of person to make small ripples, you know?

And I'd love a twin jades au to sort of turn the chaos inwards a bit (nmj and jgy would be Excellent foils) but again, I can't separate wangxian and imagining scenes feels a bit too close to incest for my tastes, even when it's ONE PERSON in identical bodies!

It's frustrating, wanting to write a non romance fic set in a love story lol. I just. I hate writing romance. But wangxian just don't want to be parted.

But the image of lwj in the xuanwu cave secretly covering a feverish wwx with his wing, only to notice a handful of white feathers pushing through the black as he unknowingly becomes a better person through showing care for other people, shaking his own deep belief that he is a horrible irredeemable creature incapable of love. Caught in an act of love. Hnggh.

Any ideas?!

[goldentigerfestival]

i will never not find it hilarious that they completely forgot to animate patty at the very end of the final cutscene in the last three frames of the whole group

and the dub didn't even give her voiced lines when everyone was shouting they so the localization forgot about her too

[icewindandboringhorror]

Other Misc. Rambling Thoughts on the topic:

(~ !!!!!!!!! if you're just reblogging this post for the Poll section, please reblog the original post without this addition* lol. ~)

(*not that there's anything super personal or weird about the addition, just that it's meant to be kind of casual Side Commentary, not really part of the Main Point Of The Poll, so it would feel kind of weird for it to be emphasized by being included in reblogs unless the reblogs were explicitly about the side commentary, etc..... if that makes sense.. ANYWAY!)

It's neat to read the written descriptions that people are mentioning in the tags, since it's almost like I can see or conceptualize the idea as well, but it's just.. I'm not SEEING it.

Like for example: I can imagine a vase, it's a muted mint green and slightly translucent, elaborate golden birds sprawled down the side in streaks of thin rough watery paint, the base material shimmers gently in the light, there's a small chip where it's cracked on the handle, etc, etc. .. But as I'm thinking about this I see literally nothing.

It seems like perhaps some people can visualize an object first, and THEN describe what they see. But I sort of work backwards. I am building the object in my mind, I can never see it, but it's a collection of concepts. Rather than visualizing all details as a whole at once, I am adding each detail one by one, building onto the IDEA of the thing.

The vase doesn't have a crack on the handle because I just automatically visualized a vase with a crack. It was more that I cognitively understand the concept of a vase, what they tend to be made out of, how they tend to look and feel, the properties they have. So based purely on that knowledge, I can imagine "a chip is something that a vase could have, it would look this way and behave this way" - more like... I'm constructing a bullet point Fact List about the object rather than seeing it.

So if you tell me to imagine an object, I can, in a way, imagine that object in great detail, but it's just.. I'm not SEEING those details, more just knowing it's qualities in a purely conceptual way. Sometimes in the tags when people are like "yeah I can see the skin of the apple, texture, little dots on the surface" it's like… I can imagine that too, I can know it's there, but just with no visual attached.

I guess rather than SEEING something and going ''ah. I know what this looks like because I have seen it''. I more just skip that visual step entirely and go ''I know what this looks like, I just randomly have a list of information about the concept in my mind.'' etc. Maybe similar to how sometimes in dreams, even though a house may look completely different and be in an entirely fake 'dreamlike' environment, you just somehow KNOW intuitively that it's meant to be your childhood home or something. Even when it looks nothing like it in reality. There's a built-in base knowledge of the properties or information of some things within a dreaming mind, etc.

--

This also makes me wonder about like.. how storytelling and myth is so important to cultures all across time. Or how this could tie also into concepts of religion.. etc. etc. If so many people really can kind of conjure these vivid images in their mind, then maybe that's part of why certain things are so meaningful to them? Like a "religious experience" being something you can actually really SEE/feel/lingering with you in your head, rather than just abstract words on a page, detached purely theoretical ideas, etc... hmmm

.

Plus also just for average emotional stuff too, even outside of broader cultural conceptual attachments..

Like, I don't think there's a direct 1 to 1 link (obviously not all people with mental illnesses that significantly reduce their emotional or expressive capacity also MUST have aphantasia or vice versa), but it's interesting as someone who DOES also have a much more lessened emotional range/pretty flat affect/etc. etc. to think like.. Maybe I WOULD be more emotional, in a way, if I could have these vivid experiences..?

Perhaps memories would hold deeper significance if they could really stay with me vividly. Or storytelling would evoke more of a deep emotional reaction to me if I could really picture and feel the things that are going on. If things were more TANGIBLE in my brain, rather than always merely conceptual highly abstracted ideas.

Kind of like, it's probably easier to get over the death of a pet or something, if after not seeing them for an hour you already don't remember what they looked like (beyond just a vague fact list of traits), and you have no vivid memories or mental reminders of them (beyond just factual information stores). COGNTIVIELY you can appreciate the idea of their absence, of course, you still miss them, but there's just no remaining visceral sensory ties. A very "out of sight, out of mind" sort of thing in terms of attachments, memories, emotions, etc. Maybe certain things are easier to "get over", when you're not having constant mental sensory reminders that occasionally rekindle your feelings about the event or etc.??

(like for example, maybe someone could remain angry about an argument longer if they could vividly replay it in their head over and over again. VS just like.. 'Yes I can factually recall the fact I had an argument, and I do have knowledge stored about what precisely was said, but any sort of sensory data such as sights/smells/feelings, etc. from the actual moment of the event are long gone and can never be conjured again in my mind." etc.)

Which again, I think lessened emotional permanence and image permanence in the mind are NOT inherently linked, can all be caused by different things for different people. And, since I can't visualize anything in my head, maybe I'm misunderstanding how it happens and the effect it may have on stuff like remembering things you miss or replaying arguments, etc. etc. But it's still a little interesting to think about, if they could influence each other to some degree.... :0c --

Lastly, It's also weird because I'm actually pretty good at estimating distance and spaces? I can quickly assemble furniture without an instruction manual, pretty easily have a concept of how much space a chair may take up in a room, how two mechanical parts might fit together - BUT, I am literally not actually visualizing anything. I cannot see 3D objects in my mind at ALL. It's like.. just based on the pure List Of Facts About Things Which I Have Observed.. I can intuitively go "oh this works like this/this is this size" just because.. I know it's that size. I don't have to see anything to know..?

But then on the other hand, I'm terrible at directions without a map (I guess because a 3d outdoor environment has WAY more complexity than like.. "Will this square fit into another square?"etc. lol ).

BUT, I also draw/sculpt/etc. entirely without references, and seem to do mostly okay at that..? Like.. I can't even remember the last time I actually used a reference or looked at anything whilst drawing. It's all muscle memory, and me just adjusting as I go until something "looks right" on paper, I never have a set image in my head (or external reference) before hand.. Hrmm....

AND.. I used to say that I had a photographic memory when I was younger, which I know NOW is not true (I always thought it was just an expression, not that people could literally see things in a photographic way). But what I was describing is, I do often associate information with imagery, just... without imagery....

Like "Oh, I know that I took my medicine earlier today because I have a distinct memory, a snapshot of a moment in time, of me rattling the pill bottle in my hands as I looked up at a stop sign while in the back seat of a car". When I say this, I can't ACTUALLY see/feel/hear a pill bottle, or vividly picture a stop sign, but it's more just a factual recall, of. Even though I don't see these things, I know they happened, the information of them happening (me hearing a sound and also looking at a stop sign at the same time) has been stored in my brain as a memory, a collection of linked facts. --

As for other senses, I cannot taste or feel anything in my head AT ALL.. wild that some people mention that. I mean, again, I can have a purely factual recall as if reading a textbook, knowing the information of 'X item typically has X texture, therefore I can imagine what it may be like to feel it' or 'X usually has this taste' etc. - but I can never actually experience those senses in any capacity in my mind alone. I would say audio is my strongest mental sense (maybe a 2.5 or 3 (if it were translated onto the above scale where 1 is most vivid and 5 is nothing)), then visual (4.5 at most, usually 5), and then taste and smell and such are just complete 5, absolutely nothing, I didn't even know people could experience taste or feeling just in their mind alone.. lol...

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

-

(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

[jxwl4k]

The Only Exception

Plot: Bakugou hates everyone but YN, the only one who softens his tough exterior.

Bakugou Katsuki wasn’t known for his friendliness. In fact, the opposite was true. He was brash, loud, and always seemed to have a scowl on his face. Most people avoided him, and that was exactly how he liked it. Except for one person: YN.

No one could understand how someone like YN, always smiling and filled with sunshine, could handle someone as explosive as Bakugou. It didn’t make sense. Bakugou seemed to hate everyone, but for some reason, when it came to YN, his attitude completely shifted.

The moment YN entered the common room, his eyes softened. She bounced in, her usual cheerful self, waving to everyone in the room.

“Hey, guys!” she called out, her smile lighting up the space. Kaminari, Sero, and Kirishima waved back, used to her bright personality.

Mina leaned in and whispered to Kirishima, “Watch. He’s gonna melt the second she talks to him.”

Sure enough, YN walked over to Bakugou, who was slouched on the couch, arms crossed and glaring at the TV. His scowl softened just slightly as she approached.

“Hey, Katsuki,” she said softly, sitting down beside him.

“Tch, what do you want?” he grumbled, but there was no bite to his words. In fact, he shifted slightly, making more room for her to sit closer.

She grinned. “Just wanted to see what you were up to.”

He huffed, his eyes still glued to the screen. “I’m watching a stupid show ‘cause these extras can’t pick a decent channel.”

“Hey!” Kaminari called out from across the room, clearly offended. “This show is awesome!”

Bakugou ignored him, his focus still on YN. She just laughed and leaned into his side. To everyone else, Bakugou was intimidating and aggressive. But with YN, it was like he was a completely different person.

“Wanna get some fresh air?” she asked, her eyes sparkling as she looked up at him.

He glanced at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Whatever. I was getting sick of sitting around with these idiots anyway.”

As they stood up, the rest of the group exchanged knowing looks. Bakugou had always been protective of YN, and while he seemed to hate everyone else, it was clear to everyone that he was softer when she was around.

Once they were outside, YN breathed in deeply, enjoying the cool air. Bakugou walked beside her, his hands shoved into his pockets. His usual tense expression had eased, and he glanced at her every so often as if making sure she was okay.

“You’re the only one who gets away with making me do stupid stuff like this,” he muttered under his breath.

YN smiled, nudging him playfully. “That’s because you secretly love it.”

He scoffed but didn’t deny it. She had a way of breaking down the walls he built around himself, and he didn’t mind it when it was her.

They walked in comfortable silence for a while until YN suddenly stopped. “Katsuki?”

“Hm?” He turned to face her, raising an eyebrow.

“Why are you so different with me?”

The question seemed to catch him off guard, and for a moment, he didn’t know how to respond. His usual bravado faltered, and he shifted uncomfortably. “What do you mean?”

“You’re…kinder. I mean, not to everyone, but with me, you don’t act the same.”

Bakugou looked away, his jaw tightening as if struggling to find the right words. Finally, he let out a sigh. “Because you’re different.”

She blinked, surprised by his answer. “Different how?”

He rubbed the back of his neck, clearly frustrated with himself. “You’re not annoying like the rest of them,” he muttered. “You don’t piss me off. I don’t feel like I have to be on guard with you.”

YN smiled softly, stepping closer to him. “So, you don’t hate me?”

He rolled his eyes, but his lips twitched slightly, like he was holding back a smile. “No, idiot. You’re the only one I don’t hate.”

Her heart fluttered at his words, and before she could stop herself, she wrapped her arms around him in a tight hug. Bakugou stiffened for a moment, not used to physical affection like this, but then he relaxed, his arms hesitantly wrapping around her.

“Tch, you’re such a pain,” he mumbled, though his hold on her tightened ever so slightly.

YN just grinned into his chest. “You love it.”

And though he would never admit it out loud, she knew he did.

[ladycaramelswirl]

Tease

Aaron Hotchner x girlfriend reader

Summary: Hotch is a workaholic and you’re just… helping everyone out (mouth fucking him senseless). Word Count: 1.1k

A/N: reader is kinda bratty 🤭 Hotch is canonically a giggly kisser and weak to teasing, sooo… I did what I had to do. Idc. Porn no plot. warnings/tags: adult content, mdni. Sex in public? Don’t do this at your workplace guys. No use of y/n. Praise kink if you squint.

enjoy 🤍

———————

You wait until everyone’s distracted to slip into Hotch’s office and close the door behind you. He smiles at your presence.

“Hello”, he says softly. 

You walk over to seat yourself in his lap and he wraps an arm around your waist to keep you steady. 

“Want to do something fun?”, you tease, playing with his tie. He looks at you apologetically.

“Honey, I have so much work to do”.

Lying workaholic. He needs a break and you both know it. You give him a playful shove.

“No you don’t. You’ve already finished everything for today. Let’s go home”, you insist. He rubs his thumb against your hips. 

“I know, but I want to get this extra stuff done today”, he says, taking your hand off of his tie to kiss it. 

You take the other hand and palm him through his trousers and he groans. You grin, sliding in closer and grinding against him. He doesn’t do much to stop you, losing himself in the movement of your ass on his cock.

“L-look”, he stammers, his breath hitching in pleasure. “Maybe later we can-“

He stops talking as you unbutton your blouse to reveal your breasts, held in place by lacy black lingerie. He groans into your neck and you grin, feeling his cock swell under your hips. You lean in to put your lips to his ear.

“Want to see the matching underwear?”

His eyes immediately darken in interest, and he practically picks you up and places you on his desk. Giggling, you unbuckle his belt. 

He smiles as he leaves soft kisses down your neck.

“You’re so perfect”, he murmurs into your skin.

It almost makes you feel bad to push his face away start buttoning your shirt back up. He frowns.

“What are you doing?”

You smile at him not-so innocently.

“I thought you had to work?”

He smirks. 

“If you don’t take off your skirt right now-“

A rap on the door makes you both freeze.

“Agent Hotchner? It’s Anderson. May I come in?”, a shaking voice asks.

You look down at your half open shirt and his unzipped trousers. Shit.

You push Hotch into his chair and crawl under his desk. You hadn’t exactly told anyone you’re dating yet and this is not how you want them to find out. So somehow you find yourself on your knees in front of Aaron’s cock, with an agent only 10 feet away. 

Hotch straightens his tie and you settle into a slightly more comfortable position. The precum from when you were grinding on him earlier glistens in front of you. You feel yourself throb at thought of it in your mouth.

“Yes, come in”, Hotch calls out. 

You pull his chair closer into the desk. You know you shouldn’t, but you can’t help but run your tongue up from the base to his tip, lightly sucking the head. Hotch takes a sharp inhale, barely stifling his gasp. You grin as you slowly lower your mouth onto his cock and see him grab onto his desk for dear life. This was what he gets for refusing to go home on time. 

Anderson walks in, his anxious hands fiddling with a file.

“Sir?”, he asks. “I was wondering…” 

You hear him shuffle his feet on the carpeted floor. Hotch furrowing his brows in a desperate attempt at a poker face was probably not helping the poor agent’s nervousness. Hotch runs a hand soothingly along the top of your head, trying to signal to you to slow down. It only makes you hollow your cheeks and squeeze the underside of his cock with your tongue, causing his stomach to flex in restraint. The young agent is still stammering.

“Spit it out Anderson”, Hotch grits through his teeth. 

From his angle, he can see the way your lips look on his cock and your breasts peeking out from your barely-there bra. 

You make sure to catch his eye before taking him all the way all the way to the hilt. It makes your eyes water a little, but the way he has to literally close his eyes to take a deep breath makes it totally worth it.

“I was wondering if I could go home early today?”, Anderson asks. “I know that I’m-“

“Yes. Sure, just go”, Hotch says breathlessly. But your movement makes him frown in an attempt to stifle a moan, which gives Anderson the wrong impression. 

“Sir I know that it’s last minute and I should have asked earlier, but I just want to say-“

You use your hands to move with your head up and down his shaft which causes Hotch’s hips to buckle up slightly. 

“Anderson”, he hisses. “Go. Home. Now.”

The poor agent scurries away, barely remembering to close the door. 

Now without the threat of someone overhearing you, Hotch whimpers, which only makes you move faster. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck”, he whispers breathlessly.

He’s desperate to not make any sounds but he can’t help but let out a soft moan. You feel his cock twitch.

“Sweetheart I’m- fuck- I’m going to come-“, he splutters. “God, you’re so-“

You cup his balls and fuck him so good he sees stars, throwing his head back in ecstasy as his cum explodes in your mouth. He’s gripping his chair so tight to keep himself from shouting out your name. 

When you’re certain he’s come down from his high, you release him. He brushes your hair away from your face and pulls you up into his lap.

“I can’t believe you just did that”, he whispers.

“You liked it”, you smirk, giving him a kiss. He smiles, but doesn’t deny it as he kisses you back.

“I’m going to get you back for it someday”, he grins. 

You raise an eyebrow. He is going down.

“You still haven’t seen my underwear”, you tease. Hotch immediately perks up.

“I’m calling it an early day today! Everyone go home!”, he yells through his closed door. Outside Hotch’s office, everyone looks at each other, confused. They can’t tell if he’s joking and no one moves to get up.

You, however, get up from his lap, seating yourself on his table and bringing your hands under your skirt, slowly peeling off your now soaked underwear. In the process, Hotch catches a glimpse of your glistening cunt.

“If you don’t go home now I’m making you do 2 hours of extra paperwork!”, Hotch barks.

You giggle as you hear everyone frantically packing up their things. 

Hotch watches as you drop your underwear to the floor, followed by your shirt. 

“You’re going to be the death of me”, he whispers. 

“Lock the door”, you tell him. 

He looks at you with a glint in his eye, and you know you’re about to get exactly what you deserve for being so naughty.

It’s really only fair that he makes you come so many times he has to carry you to his car.

————————

masterlist

[cashmoneyyysstuff]

a/n : WAAAHHH another event organised by @queenpiranhadon THE QUEEN HERSELF !! this sm fun, hope yall enjoy !! lovely banner was also made by @queenpiranhadon IS THERE ANYTHING SHE CANT DO OMG.

modern au, fem reader, merman shoto, maybe ooc shoto but ehh were havin fun, shoto is very touchy, mute shoto for plot, shoto iq too handsome for his own good, shotos a prince, shoto is very inlove w reader but its all inoccent, shoto n reader are both in their 20's, reader has a dog ! fluffy fluff fluff, sorta cliffhanger, theres a lot of stuff not mentioned bc i like romance and nothing else, little hints of soulmates, falling in love quickly the events don't play out exactly like the fairytale but it's inspired !

walking on the beach is supposed to be relaxing. and usually, it is. there’s nothing you enjoy more than the sounds of the waves crashing and the wind howling in your ears. inhaling the sea air as max digs into the sand, barking out happily at every new big stick he’d found.

except this time, it’s not a big stick. but a big..person.

a human. person. unconscious you hope, you pray, sprawled out in the sand with clothes absolutely torn to shreds.

so yeah, not very relaxing.

it's been a few minutes since your dog had barked for your attention a little further down the beach. you'd happily giggled at first, thinking your dog might've an extra long stick for you to throw him only for you to see what looked like hair from your field of vision. and then an arm, a leg and now here you were.

anyone's first instinct should be to call an ambulance, of course he could be injured ! so with a start, you grab max by his collar to prevent him from licking off the handsome--you feel a little bad for gazing at him while he's unconscious/dead but you have to be honest--stranger's face off, and pull out your phone to call emergencies.

you look back down to check on him one last time only for him to be wide awake.

"oh, shit !" you squeal with a start, landing right on your ass from your crouched position over him. the man is unmoving at first, but gets up with a light groan. you want to help him, you really do, but you feel like someone's glued your butt to the floor.

this man you thought was dead seconds ago, about to call the ambulance for, has awoken. looking around aimlessly before his eyes land on you. he looks almost..entranced by you.

yet all you can think about is how gorgeous he is. a part of you still feels bad about it.

then he's a hair away from you and you can't breathe. you squeak embarrassingly loud, shooting up to your knees.

"um !" you gasp "hello..?" you back up a bit but he pays it no further mind continuing to blink at you. "are you okay? um--do you need medical assistance ?" from what you can see he doesn't look injured, so you're relieved, but you still want verbal confirmation.

except all he does is open his mouth a couple times before immediately closing it again. you blink at him and he blinks back at you.

"do-are you..okay ?" you ask tentatively, the man is unresponsive and you're seriously getting freaked out. "i- it's okay, we'll get you some help, lemme just.." you readjust to finally move and call emergencies, but something stops you.

a very cold hand is wrapped around your arm. you squeal at the chill, dropping onto your ass in front of the man. again. you don't want this to become a recurring thing at all.

finally the man gives you a response..sort of. he graces you with a shake of his head. his hair flows around softly and some water droplets fly off at the movement. he doesn't want you getting him help ?

"no ?" your eyebrows furrow "you..don't want help ?" he shakes his head again. you can tell he's trying to convey something but he can't seem to get it out. you wonder why he won't speak, and then you realise: he must be mute.

and now it's starting to make a bit more sense. you still wonder why he doesn't want paramedics involved. and you're mind races again, maybe he's a criminal on the run ?!

you blink, being brought back to reality by the handsome man who's sopping wet, freezing cold yet it barely seems to faze him with his grip still on his wrist. freezing to the touch yet you barely feel it with his eyes on you like this. he points to himself, then raises his thumb up. you're so lost in his eyes it takes you a moment to realise what he's saying.

i'm okay.

somehow, the man ended up staying at your house.

you know nothing about him, not his name, his age, though he looks about your age. you don't know where he's from or why he was in the state he was in but somehow he's ended up coming into your home.

you let him look around your house to his hearts content. this man is the epitome of strange, he seemed curious of everything in your house, even the dry clothes and the shower you offered him.

after explaining to him how your shower works, and he'd changed into fresh new clothes, the biggest tracksuit you could find, you find yourself currently looking at him watching tv, seemingly entranced. you've got half a mind to warn him about sitting too close to the tv since he's sitting right in front of it on the floor, but you decide against it

you know nothing about him, but he seems not to know anything..at all.

you don't know sign language, you have no idea how to communicate with him, you wrack your brain, scratching at your head with a huff. the sound seems to alarm him and he turns to you with a cute tilt of his head, you can somehow guess he's trying to ask you what's wrong, his eyes seem to be clouded with worry. you feel your skin heat up.

"i'm alright, thanks." he seems to understand. he nods, it seems his attentions gone from the tv to you as he keeps inspecting you. his sudden rising from the floor causes you to jump a little, eyes wide as he sits down next to you and softly bounces on the couch. he seems surprised by the softness of it as he bounces a couple more times and that does manage to get a giggle out of you.

he looks up at the sound and his eyes are fixed to yours again "nice huh ? i bought that when i first moved here." he nods, focused. it gives you the confidence to continue even though his intense gaze makes you a little anxious. "i slept on this for a while before i was able to actually buy myself a bed." you giggle, suddenly overcome with nostalgia. you'd moved to your small town about a year and a half ago, you were still young, freshly graduated when you decided to leave it all behind. your big bustling town, you're family and everything that you knew. you thought it was time for a new start, as big as your hometown was it felt extremely suffocating. you needed something new.

the first few months were a struggle, something to get used to. but you'd managed. you'd found a yourself a nice job with a nice pay. some nice neighbours and nice coworkers and the sweetest little (?)english sheepdog. said dog had gotten quickly attached to your unexpected guest, excitedly jumping all over and licking him. your guest though startled at first didn't seem to mind. even placing his hand on top of max's head as if to pet him and being surprised by the softness of his fur. he seemed to like soft things.

you shake your head, deciding to focus on your guest. who's eyes have not left yours. you don't know if you can get used to that. "so um..where are you from ?" he perks up at your question. grabbing your wrist so he could softly pull you over your window to point outside where you'd found him. his skin is considerably warmer now that he's not drenched, it makes your cheeks tingle how easily he grabs at you.

"uh, no that's not what i meant," you chuckle nervously, but he's adamant. shaking his head and pointing outside again. towards the sea. the sea ?

"the sea ?" you ask incredulously "you came from..the sea ?" he nods, almost excited that you'd figured it out..the sea ?

okay, there could be a rational explanation for that..maybe his boat got lost at sea..sure it was plausible, but that's never happened in your quiet little town. everything about this man was unusual.

at your doubt, the man's eyes widen just a bit. and it looks like he gets an idea because he starts pulling you over to your bathroom. you're trying to reason with him and get him to slow down, but he seems intent and set on getting to your bathroom.

"hey, what're you--ah !" you cover your eyes quickly when you notice him taking off his clothes, heart speeding up as you squeak "wha-what the hell are you doin' ?!" then the water starts running, and then nothing. you're curiosity peeked, you glance at him through your fingers and don't see what you'd expected. instead you see..scales? and a tail ?

and then your hands fall from over your eyes, and you fully see it. the mix of white and red scales, they shine underneath the light of your bathroom.

a tail.

the man you rescued from the beach has a tail and isn't a man at all.

you've got a merman in your house.

shoto is running late.

usually he's on time, but it seems the universe was against him today. his father had held him back with an endless lecture that seemed to drag on. he'd been more on edge, so to speak, since his son's coronation was approaching, a day he was absolutely dreading and everybody seemed to be on his back about it.

his sister had also held him back earlier. just for a chat she'd claimed, except shouto could tell it was a clumsy attempt to try and get some type of answer out of him, of why he's been sneaking off so often. she had lamented to him about her worries with his fascination of humans and their strange inventions. fuyumi was the only one he'd confided into about his collection of strange objects from the human world. tossed into the sea or scavenged from shipwrecked boats if he was feeling a little risky. however, what had started off as an innocent interest started becoming dangerous, in his sisters eyes, as he slowly started rising up to shore. closer and closer to humans.

she'd warned him to be careful, that humans were dangerous. shouto knew of the tales that were told about humans since he was young, of the unspeakable things they did to his kind. of course he did, but he just had a feeling not all humans could be like what he was told. as usual, he waves her off with the promise that he'd be vigilant as he swims off again.

he hopes he makes it in time.

someone calls for him suddenly and he stops in his tracks, the voice sounds familiar and he recognizes his fluffy haired friend izuku swimming up to him, shoto is tempted to ignore him. but it'd be mean, and unbecoming of a future king of the seas, so he waits for him to catch up. izuku midoriya was his one and only real confidant, his family had worked for his ever since they were both young and even if he was technically his servant, he could confidently call him his friend.

"hello, izuku." shoto greets simply, izuku quickly returns the greeting, before looking around to make sure they wouldn't be heard.

"were you going up to shore again ?" he asks nervously. shoto hums, nodding softly "i am." izuku stiffens, his fins flicker nervously.

"i-i don't know if that's the best idea.. i mean, your coronation is coming up and your father is even more on edge than usual-"

"what he doesn't know won't hurt him. which is why i'm expecting you not to tell him anything."

"of course not ! but his majesty is..." izuku cuts himself off, looking off to the side "i fear he's getting suspicious of your..activities?" he explains, wording it as best he can. shoto holds back the groan bubbling up in his throat: so many worries piling up and so little time.

it's unbecoming of a future king, but shoto decides he'll worry later.

"i'll think about him later." the disdain in his voice is palpable, but izuku being used to it doesn't react. he knows the relationship between the king and his son has been more than strained ever since the queen disappeared. some say she simply vanished, or left of her own volition, while other whispers claim she was instead captured by humans.

but after her disappearance the queen was never mentioned again, neither was the princes older brother, touya, when he disappeared not long before his mother did. the mere mention of them was forbidden, it was wiser to act is if they never existed in the first place.

izuku shakes his head and quickly swims up to follow the dual haired prince, who'd started swimming off in front of him.

both men finally rise up to shore. izuku hides besides a rock protruding from the sea floor while shoto decides to be a little bolder, peeking up to his chest from where he's perched up on the rock as well.

"ah ! shoto, you shouldn't !" izuku warns, but he simply shakes his head "it's fine, no one's here at this time of day." his eyes never leaving the sand in front of them, surveying the area like a hawk. he purses his lips. maybe he had been too late after all. he'd have to wait until tomorrow.

until he spots a mass of fluffy grey and white hairs. both he and izuku shrink back at the sound of a loud booming bark, shoto not as far sunk as izuku. then his gaze locks on to someone walking along with the furry beast.

a human.

the green haired merman has half a mind to warn his friend they should make their leave, however the young man is unmoving, seemingly entranced.

shoto breathes a sigh of relief, you've shown up at last.

it's usually at this hour that you walk along the beach with your companion. shoto's been watching you for a little while now and he's determined a routine. some days you stay longer than usual, but he's content to see you anytime, all the time. you're fascinating, the way you move around with those..legs of yours is something he can't his eyes off of. and you're breathtakingly beautiful to him, though is his father were to see you he's sure he'd think otherwise. he'd been told humans were hideous beasts, but he's never seen anything in all of the seas as beautiful as you in his years of living.

izuku snaps him out of his trance, urging him saying they should be on their way back lest the king get even more suspicious of both their absences. he wants to keep looking at you, forever if he could. part of him even wishes he could walk along the sand with you.

but he retreats after a final look to you, and dives back down towards his home, so far away from you.

he wished he'd never went back home though, when his father had decided to get on his last nerve yet again. constantly nagging, constantly berating him like he knew any better. lecturing him about how his behaviour was unacceptable for a future king.

he knows that, he's heard it all before. as he swims further and further away from home he wishes it could all just stop. this future king talk, the coronation. he wishes it could all just fucking cease.

and he wishes he could be with you above all else. you'd understand, you wouldn't nag him about his duties. hell, you wouldn't even have to know, you'd just see him for him. and that's all he wants.

if only, he wishes.

until he's being lured away by some sea creatures who for sure mean trouble, but they've intrigued him with promises of making his wishes come true. when he's suddenly faced with the sea witch, he knows he should get away and fast, making a deal with her was not advised if you cared for your own life.

..and yet, she says she can give him what he truly desires. and what he desires is a life where he doesn't have to gaze at you from afar. where he can only dream and wish for if only's.

and he can't turn back now.

it takes a lot longer to get used to the fact that you have a merman in your house. you've been glued to the tv in shock for an hour, not processing anything happening on it while the merman in question casually watches, munching on some candy you'd offered him when you'd first made it home.

it's funny, if you think about it a little bit. you're friendly with your coworkers yet not a single one of them has ever been to your house before. and now you've got a fucking mythical sea creature in sitting on your couch eating watermelon candies.

truly hilarious.

you catch a peek at him from the corner of your eye, you're surprised by how easily he's entertained, especially since he's only looking at an informercial but you think you can understand why now. why he seemed so confused, and maybe this was also why he can't talk ? but he could understand you perfectly.

god, your head hurt.

there's a weight against your skull and when you look up from your lap, the merman has his head pressed to yours. you hold back a squeal, because you are beyond tired of embarrassing yourself in front of him, a harsh intake of breath leaves you. he tilts his head at you, you've gotten good at de-cyphering what he means in the two hours you've known him. you sigh.

"i-i'm alright..thanks" you speak sincerely, his shoulders relax but he doesn't lean very far away from you, visibly comfortable being so close to you. "i'm just..in shock..i had no idea mermaids even existed..!" you chuckle, then quickly cover your mouth "merman, sorry !" he doesn't seem to mind, shaking his head with a barely there smile. it's a faint pull of his lips that could've been missed but you'd caught it and your heart hammers in your chest--were all mermen this pretty ?!

"well..um, i bet seeing a human up close like this is pretty surprising too ?" he nods and you laugh. "is it what you expected at least ?" he nods again, but it feels..softer, more personal. like it was directed at you and you only, for some reason. the close proximity between you both seems familiar.

you're everything he expected and more.

"do you..have a name ? ah !" you catch yourself quickly, running off to your room, not before telling him you'd be right back, you barely see him nod with widened eyes. you pull out a random book you left unfinished for..you don't remember how long now.

if he understood you speaking, maybe he could understand how to read ?

it's a possibility and you lose nothing by trying.

you're back next to him and place the book between you both, he leans in closer, inspecting the words on the page with an unreadable expression.

you tell him your name, and start spelling it out with the letters on the page. you hope it works, that'd make it a whole lote easier if it does, so you ask him for his name.

it takes him a second, but soon the dots start connecting, and he slowly points to five different letters

s-h-o-t-o

"shoto.." you sound out, you look back up at him. his face is soft and the small smile on your face makes you smile too "shoto ?" and he nods happily "it's nice, i like it." you admit, his eyes shine brightly and he points to you and nods. you think he's saying he likes your name too, so you thank him with a giggle and your hunch his confirmed when he smiles just a little wider, the corner of his eyes crinkling.

seriously are all mermen this pretty ? it's a little unfair that more mermen don't show up in town.

but you think even if they were to suddenly appear, you'd like shoto the best.

shoto seems to have superhuman abilities, besides the not being human part..

in only a week, he's learned how to write and you've been communicating by passing notes and using a white board you'd gotten him while you were out shopping, you figured it'd be easier and a little less confusing.

he's been here for two weeks now, and it's been fun. so fun in fact you forget he's not human with how easy he's adapted into your life. he goes shopping for and with you sometimes, he loves watching and he likes to take walks with max, the both of them being inseparable. you'd be a little jealous if it wasn't so damn adorable. you're still enjoying your break from work and shoto makes it much more enjoyable, it's nice to have someone else around for a change.

you've..talked, about a lot of stuff with shoto, but one thing he will not talk about is himself, and you've decided not to pry. especially because you hate seeing the conflicted, sad look on his face. he talks to you about his kind, and his friends, but never too much about himself. you don't pry, but it surprises you that even mermaids have baggage.

"is there anything you wanna do today, shoto ?" you wonder if he ever gets bored, he doesn't say anything about it, but you know you're not all that entertaining..maybe you'll take him go kart racing.

shoto stops petting max to grab at his white boards, quickly scratching something down.

can i watch a movie with you ?

your heart stutters. every time you suggest an activity for him to do he always adds you in it. it's stupidly endearing and makes him cuter than he already is.

"but don't you wanna do anything else ? " he tilts your head for you to continue "like..aren't you bored ? i know i don't do anything interesting...you don't wanna do something more exciting ?"

he blinks, and writes down something on his white board that has your mouth go dry.

i like doing anything because you do it with me.

"o-oh.." you mutter, fiddling with the texture of your couch, picking at it softly "that's nice.."

after a moment of quiet he presses his head to yours, as affectionate as ever to get your attention, you blink up at him holding up his whiteboard and a smile forms onto your face.

movie ?

you let him pick this time.

"if you want to be able to live with your beloved.. you must manage to do one thing.."

a kiss. a true love's kiss.

shoto has seen a lot of kisses in the few weeks he's been with you. he remembers the first kiss he'd received was when your elderly neighbour had knocked at your door thinking you were home while you were at the grocery store. she must've thought he was your mate, because she'd congratulated him and told him to treat you nice because you're a very sweet and pretty girl, which he'd intensely nodded at. she'd grabbed him by the shoulder and softly pressed both her cheeks to him, and you'd explained to him that she had kissed him as a sign of politeness. a common human courtesy.

he'd seen kisses on tv, kisses on the street, but none of them compared to the description of a true love's kiss. none of them felt fitting enough.

something on tv catches his eye. the movie has gotten to the climactic scene, a new term he'd learned. and the main love interests are desperately clinging to each other. their lips are touching, but it doesn't look like the kisses he's seen before..strange.

it confuses him, so he taps your shoulder and writes his thoughts down.

what are they doing ?

you clear your throat, your eyes widen. your eyes are so pretty. "they're kissing, shoto.. we've seen that before right ?"

but it looks different.

you hum in thought "well, i guess i can put it like.." you purse your lips in thought, you look so cute when you're deep in thought. "they love each other a lot, so being away from each other made them..um, do that. it's 'cus they care about each other alot..i think."

love..

have you done that before ?

you splutter as your eyes fly across the whiteboard, shoto shuffles so he can sit closer to you. you don't move away, you smell so nice.

"n-no..i don't think i've loved someone enough to.." you whisper, gaze flying from him to the small space between you both.

the sound of the white board dropping to the floor doesn't alarm you, neither does the way his hands slowly reach towards your cheeks. he does nothing but run his hands across your cheeks for a while, simply gazing at you. he presses his forehead to yours and you feel his breath his your face, your eyelashes flutter as his head softly bumps against yours. his nose nuzzles against yours, you're so soft.

you don't have to read anything to know what his eyes are asking you silently, you nod anyways.

shoto doesn't exactly know what love means by humans standards, but by his standards and the little he knows he thinks this might be it as he presses his lips to yours. it's not as desperate and dramatic as on tv, and there's no melodramatic music playing in the background.

but he loves this, he loves you.

you pull away when he presses you back against the couch, and suddenly something feels different. your chest feels warm. you feel loved.

"that..was nice..woah." you breathe, and shoto nods, mirroring the smile growing on your face. what you don't expect is for him to open his mouth and speak.

"it was.." he hums, your eyes are the size of saucers and he huffs out a light laugh "do you think..i could do that again with you ?"

you nod, in a trance, but as he leans in you grip his shoulders. he blinks up at you

"..wait, how long were you able to talk ?" you're unblinking, and it makes him chuckle lightly.

"just now." he answers simply, before you can ask more questions he stops you "i will explain later, i promise." he nuzzles his nose to yours "but for now.." he kisses your cheek "i'd like to learn about this..love feeling.with you." he kisses your other cheek, always adding you in "will you let me ? "

you're willing to let him do anything as long as he does it with you, as long as he keeps adding you in like you're the only one that matters, you want to keep mattering to him. and you want to learn more about your feelings too.

so you laugh, and with a smile, you pull him back into you.

a/n : eeeee i loved participating to this event theheheh ! tumblr quit deleting my drafts but i still had tons of fun ! hope yall enjoy reading MUAH MUAH !!

taglist ! : @queenpiranhadon @starieq @lovelyiida @lady-ashfade @angels-fantasy

@seonne @sweetnans @vexis-world @2melamoo2 @tootiecakes234

@4evapika

[thewadapan]

So why did Transformers One bomb?

Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.

It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.

Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.

Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.

If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.

(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)

We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.

By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?

Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:

they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.

See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)

The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.

So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:

I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."

When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."

I. The One True Origin of the Transformers

Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.

Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.

Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.

Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?

Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.

Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.

All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.

But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.

Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.

Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.

So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.

And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.

By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.

And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.

Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.

For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.

The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.

But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.

The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".

Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.

Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.

II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers

Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.

Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.

Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.

Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.

Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.

And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."

So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.

Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.

That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’

Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.

I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.

My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.

I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.

If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.

Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.

What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.

In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:

I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on — sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.

According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?

III. I did not care for The Godfather

At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:

Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".

(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)

Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.

Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".

Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.

It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.

In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?

Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.

(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)

Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.

As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.

There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.

There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.

As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.

The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!

In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.

The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.

Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.

(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)

There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.

Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.

In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:

As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.

To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.

And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.

IV. No politics means no politics

In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.

Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?

I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.

Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:

One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.

(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)

Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":

He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.

The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"

In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.

Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.

Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.

V. Place / Place, Cybertron

I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.

So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.

It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"

For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.

Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".

Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.

The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.

What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.

The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.

Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.

Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in my to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:

I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."

(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)

This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.

The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.

But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.

"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"

Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.

I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!

At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!

The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.

What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.

I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?

For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.

We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!

It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.

For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.

Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.

(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)

In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"

In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.

Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.

I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?

VI. Into nothing

Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.

I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?

Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.

In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskyist, or Furmanist.

Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.

It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.

There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.

In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.

What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.

If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.

The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?

Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.

I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.

With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.

Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.

That's all any of this stuff is.

All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.

Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.

To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.

I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.

...

Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.

What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.

Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.

VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit

When Eric Pearson came onto the project,

It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.

And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.

Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.

Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.

I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.

Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.

If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!

Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.

The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.

Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!

I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.

[alexisomnias]

— "HEY, HEY CLASSMATE!" . . .

⤷ you’re their seatmate!

angels notes: can be read as platonic or romantic

featuring the DORMLEADERS

RIDDLE ROSEHEARTS

—riddle as a seat mate is kinda a pain in the ass

—Especially during his first year; boy would scold you for breathing too loud!

—Upon second year though he’s a lot more mellowed out

—Your one of the only people who WOULD take a seat next to him, and in exchange he helps you with things you don’t understand.

—He also won’t speak a word if you copy off his homework… just don’t make it too obvious!!

—He’d also save you if your late to class by making up an excuse or such, but shh don’t tell him you know how down-bad he is for you.

LEONA KINGSCHOLAR

—goodluck getting him to even show up to class

—if he does he’s literally only coming for you. he’ll ask you to take notes for him and stuff but wont complain if you don’t

—in the end he does only show up to class because your next to him, so be sure too show up yourself!!

—if he catches someone else in the seat next to you he is LEAVING, or kicking them out, no way is he sitting through the class without you by his side

—he’s not that awful of a seatmate: he’s familiar with the material so if he's in a particularly good mood he’ll help!

AZUL ASHENGROTTO

—boy probably made a deal with some student to ensure he’s always sitting next to you. doesn’t matter what class he’s there

—totally believes in unassigned signed seating so will talk off someone if they take HIS spot next to you

—definitely helps you with your homework. in fact he encourages you to come to him for help (he wants you to know you can use him as a shoulder to lean on)

—also will make up an excuse on why your late, except its hella valid

—probably shares a textbook with you ngl, and definitely shares his notes

—definitely will share his school supplies. need an eraser? he has 3! a pencil? heres a newly sharpened one!

—probably will try extra hard to show off, he wants to impress you

—(he’s also extremely vigilant on whether his handwriting is neat or not when your next to him!!)

KALIM AL ASIM

—he’s such a fun seat mate. though he’s very distracting LMAOO

—definitely gets you both in trouble for talking during a lecture (he doesn’t care though, its you!)

—completely forgets about taking notes because he just wants to chat with you

—probably has been moved in class

—will buy you a thousand pencils so you never have to sharpen one LMAO

—drags you into group projects with him and stuff, he’s pure at heart, really!!

—actually pretty insightful, he’ll exchange answers with you, and go into convo about how you came up with such an opinion or answer

—“hey this is [name]’s seat!” he says to this poor clueless student. he’s your desk warden aha!

VIL SCHOENHEIT

—Vil is actually a good seatmate! he shows up on time, always hands in his work. has academic plot armor (has he ever failed??) and he’s willing to help! though he’ll still make you do it yourself

—he brings you snacks during class! only healthy ones of course, but he feeds you and he’s super sweet about it too! Literally that one friend that always shares their food for lunch

—definitely someone to look up too, and he’ll teach you concepts or help you catch up if you fall behind. He's your personal free tutor, he uses these sessions as excuses to see you, not gonna lie!

—he may occasionally scold you based on how you present yourself, especially if you are lazy with it, but its all out of care! He'll fix it himself anyway. He personally loves running his fingers through your hair.

—not seatmate behaviors :P he cares

IDIA SHROUD

—hes more of a text mate tbh

—bro will send u messages on twstcord and get you caught 😭😭

—he doesnt even show up in person hes just there to listen atp

—even then he ADORES listening to you talk, and although he really doesn't need help with homework since you know he's there?? he'll still ask you to bring homework to him because he's petty and he wants to see you.

—and if he invites you to a "study session" its really just him stammering over his words and playing video games

—oh god, he also imagines physically sitting next to you in class, and reenacting scenes from a shoujo! actually, nevermind... too many people...

MALLEUS DRACONIA

—Malleus finds you interesting. you have enough courage to sit next to him? how interesting

—literally the only one in class who doesn't sit like 5 kilometers away from him. He immediately grows a liking to you because of that.

—he’ll talk to you in class unknowingly getting you both caught LMAO, except your the only one getting in trouble unfortunately.

—he’ll have in dept conversations to you about certain topics, and almost always has an answer to give you in class

—he’s an encyclopedia, and he LOVES helping you! ask and hes already explaining.

—probably gets distracted by staring at you in class. Not sneaking glances, full on dazedly staring at you (in a totally not menacing way). he just likes looking at you! don't mind him!

—a sweetheart really, also super possessive over your seat. he ensures he's always on time to class so he can see you and sit next to you, and he’ll get all pouty if he cant.

[keferon]

You all flatter me! Now I am all pumped up to continue on the TF mecha au train. Ratchlock has me in a chokehold. You can't compliment me like that, It goes to my head! I haven't writen anything in like 12 years 😭. Also Yes yes to all the angst. I thrive on it more then the fluffy moments. Jazz and Deadlock/Drift are lining up nicely for a possible meeting. But first Deadlock WILL bath in blood! Wanna see?

****

Ratchet will not let Deadlock follow him around. Nope. Instead he keeps Deadlock on strict bed rest /he's learning human terms in his free time/ with the oh so sweet promise to weld him to the wall if he doesn't listen. He knows better to not test Ratchet, he'd do it no hesitation. Deadlocks fangs and claws only cause a raised eyebrow and wave of a slipper near well... anywhere in Ratchet's swating or throwing range. Since both of them honor their word/glyphic, they made a deal that if Ratchet comes home on time then in return Deadlock will be on his best behavior.

They use every extra moment together to learn, heal, and plot together. Deadlock's wounds are fully healed by now. He is ready to be the guardian knight he vowed to be for Ratchet. Ratchet's knuckles still ache which makes his hands shaky at times, especially when cold, but his squishy perseveres like a true warrior. Deadlock has learned that revving his engine to build up heat and letting Ratchet rest against his chassis helps with those trimmering aches the bioengineer tries to rub out.

He wants to give any comfort he can to Ratchet while he's working in that cursed lab with those ungreatful sacks of slags. He has photos of each one of those fraggers saved in his proccesor. The list only grows the longer they wait to leave. If he can work around Ratchet somehow, he'll cross them off at some point with a deep satisfaction while doing it. Ratchet has been as sly as a turbofox. He's been sidestepping, talking around, and out ranting the higher ups for a while. Deadlock is so proud of him for not backing down or falling silent. Right now Deadlock has the tv playing a sitcom while tinkering with his long range blaster. His audial fins flick as the door opens and closes. Ratchet looks at the show while shrugs his winter coat off, "So has Sam confessed his undying love to the ice cream vender Carly yet?" Ratchet asks walking over to the lazy-e-boy chair.

Deadlock reaches out and taps his back before he can sit down. "Refuel first." He reminds him before going back to tightening some wires. He smiles at the grumble and is pleased when Ratchet listens to him for once and heads to the kitchen, "and no the episode ended with him getting hit by a waste disposal truck. Now it's a filler episode. Jack is trying to get out of going to an Amica Endura's beach party. He is playing up a illness called the pox."

Ratchet comes back with a warm plate of food. Deadlock nods pleased with the portion. Ratchet rolls his eyes and sits down, "They did that same plot with Raphael four seasons ago." He grumbles and bats at Deadlocks claw when he tries to ruffle his hair, "If they drag this out for three episodes like last time I am popping in a different show." Both are content, they banter and complain about the show while Ratchet eats. When Ratchet reclines his lazy-e-boy chair Deadlock puts his weapon away, "They are transferring some of us to a different base in the morning. You know First Aid. They are putting him on a transport to the sister base north east of here. Called the Alpha Blade Strikers."

Deadlock tilts his helm, "That's the one that was visiting here? The commander of that base is the one you knocked out for slagging you off right? You mentioned the base being cursed." He asks leaning forward a bit, his servos tingling for revenge.

"Yes, same place and person. Don't believe in any of that cursed stuff but a lot of talk does go around about it. Mostly one pacific mecha being the main cursed object. First Aid was stressed to tears about being transferred. He had just gotten comfortable here with his friends. I feel a bit bad for the kid." Ratchet mumbles rubbing his face with his unbandged hand.

Deadlock gives a soft smile, "From what you've told me, he keeps his helm down. I am sure he will find friends or leave when he can. But if you are worried I am not opposed to taking him with us."

"We do not kidnap people, Drift. He wouldn't want to come along anyways. He wants to 'do his part for human kind'. Besides it takes him a while to get use to change and the possibility that we may be hunted down once we leave would most likely send him into cardiac arrest." Ratchet tilts his head back gives Deadlock a stern look, "On the topic of leaving we'll need to do that sooner then planned. Something isn't right, I don't like how hyper focused Pharma has gotten with quintessons corpses. Now he is showing intrest in you. He wants to know how I programmed a mecha to be powered by an AI system so flawlessly. It's driving him up a wall to not know. You know, since a mecha has never moved around without a pilot and can not talk. He keeps begging the higher ups to let him 'partner up with me' or let him take over the 'project' since I am just 'playing around with you'."

"Right fine. No kidnapping the youngling. But do not assume we will be the ones being hunted." Deadlock hums amused but turns serious when Pharma is brought up. That name is at the top of his 'don't let Ratchet catch on' splat list, "But me being 'imprinted' on you is keeping them from letting him get his quintessons gut covered servos... Err hands sorry, on me."

Ratchet nods rubbing his face again with a tired sigh, "I made certain they know you'll attack anything that isn't me." Deadlock can tell Ratchet is fighting a yawn. He lays down behind the chair and rumbles his engine. Ratchet's lips twitch with a smile hearing how smooth it's running now, "Pharma has never been a good listener though. Just be on guard okay kid... he's ploting something." Ratchet mumbles soaking up the heat coming from behind him. He tilts his head back against the head rest looking up at Deadlocks handsome, smug, sharp fanged grin, "He tries touching you, you can kill him. Don't let him into your system. I fear what he'd do. Probably make you even more loony and unbearable." The bioengineer yawns his voice full of fondness that makes Deadlock's spark sing.

Deadlock purrs as he gently pets Ratchet's head with a, claw retracted, digit. Ratchet's eyes grow heavy missing the most feral, down right demonic, energon hungry look Deadlock has at the permission to off Pharma, "He will not harm me. But I can tell he has worn on you today. You are more drained then grumpy, your insults are lacking any heat. Recharge Ratchet. I will reconfigure our supplies and time line while you regain your strenght. Then I'll show you in the morning. You can edit it while you fuel." He chuckles as Ratchet grumbles and mumbles at him. His squishy can't fight the cozy warmth and soothing pets. Deadlock's humming engine makes a familiar white noise that has grown to mean safe to Ratchet. In no time Ratchet is out cold. Picking up a blanket with a careful pinch he lays it on top of Ratchet and follows him into recharge.

-- --

They are so close to leaving. They have a place picked out and a time. Their supplies are packed and hidden away with a close friend of Ratchet's. The thing still keeping them on base is Ratchet's need to clear out all of his research. He doesn't want anyone to have anything of his, to have a chance to twist it into something that would cause more harm and death. It's been a tedious process but Ratchet has been deleting his work bit by bit so no one catches on.

Four days before their chosen leave date Ratchet walks into his lab only to be escorted to a debriefing room. One he has have never been to. Deep under the base. He had tried getting anyone to speak up about what's happening but the escorts, six of them for fuck sakes, don't even look at him. His gut instinct is screaming DANGER the deeper they go. His skin is crawling with uneasiness and he is fighting his fight then flight instincts. He taps at the small circler tracker he has in his winter coats collar as subtly as possible. Hoping it looks more like a nervious tick then a trigger to call for help. Hopfully they aren't to far down for it to work. The group stops at a vault door and Ratchet cuts off a growl growing in his throat when one of the 'escorts' pulls out some heavy duty cuffs. "Tell me what reason you have for those or their not going on Spike." He warns fists clenching at his side. He huffs at the click of a gun and someone has the balls to press it into his back.

The young soldier, Spike, frowns and waves his hand at the others behind Ratchet, "Ratchet please it's just procedure. You have saved a lot of our lives don't make us be rough. We don't want to be. Just put them on so I don't get yelled at later." Ratchet narrows his eyes, frown tightening. Spike groans, "I don't know what they want. No one told us anything. Please I am just doing what I was told."

Ratchet can tell Spike is holding his breath, pleading silently for Ratchet to listen. Ratchet does let a growl slip when the guns barrel grinds into his spine. His head snaps around and he glares hard enough to cause pause, "Cut that out, I know exactly how far to shove that to not kill you but make damn sure you wish I did." He snarls as he holds his wrists up to Spike. The comment earns him muffled chuckles and a few glares. Cuffs on Ratchet walks into the room. Spike shoots him an apologetic look as the door closes behind him. With a heavy exhale Ratchet takes in the room. A concrete floor, circular shaped room with thick metal walls. Cameras line the ceiling edges. His exhale catches in his throat as the metal walls start rolling up to reveal bullet proof glass filled with quintessons in various stages of dissection and tests. "We have another sublevel secret lab bellow our sublevel secret lab. Of course we do." Ratchet mumbles flatly to pissed off he didn't know this base was more fucked up then he thought then to be scared.

Speakers crackle on and an annoying whine comes through, "Not the reaction I was hoping for. Come on Ratch buddy show a bit more emotion then that. Less grump more begging maybe? At least shock." Pharma's voice chimes around him in an irritating way.

"Looks like all of this has been going on for a while. Why bring me into this now Pharma?" Ratchet says calmly since that seems to piss Pharma off more. He looks at his cuffed wrists and his blood runs cold as the hair on his neck stands on end. Goosebumps cover his arms making him shudder under the heavy coat, "I am not here for shop talk."

"Mmhmm, I am going to miss that snarky brain of yours Ratchy. But you did do a lot of things that put the base in danger. Security has taken notice of a lot of data, intel, cameras and video footage being tampered with." Pharma almost has a mocking sing songy tone to him. Strange, Ratchet knows he didn't tamper with anything that would jeopardized the security of the base. Definitely not the cameras or video footage, "You know what you've done and what we do to traitors. I already have received the ok to take over your work. The good commander is allowing me to say goodbye to you since we were such good old friends. Don't worry. I'll take good care of your Mecha." Yeah, Pharma sounds real choked up about all this, Ratchet rolls his eyes.

"Yeah, he'll take care of you Pharma." Ratchet keeps his tone and body language nonchalant as he studies the cuffs. He takes note of the little bit of gap, if he dislocates his thumbs.. "Only thing that's annoying about all of this is I'll be late getting home."

"I swear you are boring me to death on purpose Ratchet!!" Pharma snarls as a thud noise rings through the speakers

"Oh could I be so lucky?" Ratchet sighs sounding hopeful. He stiffens as the room lights turn red and multiple hisses of compressed air being released surrounds him. A robotic voice rings out a warning that the test subjects are being released. Ratchet whips his head around stepping in a circle as snarles and screeches drowned out the warnings. Ratchet steadies his breathing as best he can as his hands trimble and heart beats wildly. Deadlock would be livid if he doesn't go down giving it his all to get back to him. Ratchet would be just as pissed to, "I'll do what I can but you better hurry kid..."

-- --

"You weren't suppose to do that Pharma." A flat voice speaks up from behind Pharma after picking up the chair he had kicked away. Pharma scoffs and grumbles, "You are not even going to ask him what he ment by being late to his quarters?" The chief of security drones on.

"Be sure to capture all angles. I want detailed shots of it all." Pharma growls removings his hand from the release butten he hit hard enough to crack. "You are being paranoid per usual. Don't tell me you never heard the rammblings of a dying man?" Pharma sighs, with a dramatic flick of his wrist he walks out of the room.

"No, but I imagine I will soon enough." The security director mumbles under his breath. Reaching over the chair he resets the cameras.

OH. OH THEY ARE FUUUUUUCKED

OH THEY ARE SO SO INCREDIBLY FUCKED THEY ARE GONNA GET SPREAD EVENLY ALL OVER THE FLOOR AND I WANNA SEE IT SO B A D

Next

[darksturnz]

NIGHTS LIKE THIS

CONTENTS:・teeth rotting fluff-heavy plot (imo) ・star!reader ・mild language ・sleeping in the same bed・artist!chris ・substance use + more (part two here) WC: 2.3k

i highly highly recommend listening to this on repeat, as that’s what i did :,) promise it sets the mood. + heavily dedicated to my literal star @55sturn

The roof of Chris’s trailer creaked as Star stretched out on the patchy blanket, her black hoodie blending into the night sky above. The air was cool, almost cold, but not quite enough to send her shivering. Pine View was never silent, even at night—the hum of cicadas buzzed low in the background, broken occasionally by a bark or the far-off growl of an engine.

Chris sat beside her, leaning back on one elbow, a joint hanging loosely from his fingers. His face was calm, unreadable as always, except for the faint furrow in his brow. Smoke curled lazily in the air between them, dissipating into the starry sky.

“I’m telling you,” Star said, voice animated as her finger traced a constellation, “if aliens exist, there’s no way they’re not watching us right now. We’re like, prime reality TV for them. Chaos, drama, stupidity—it’s got everything.”

Chris exhaled a slow stream of smoke, not bothering to look up. “Pretty sure aliens have better taste than watching us fail at life.” His tone was dry, the corner of his mouth twitching like he wanted to smile but wouldn’t let himself.

Star glanced over at him, her lips twitching into a smirk. “You’re such an optimist, Chris.”

“Realist,” he corrected, passing the joint to her without looking. His eyes were fixed somewhere on the horizon, but she could feel him listening in that quiet way he always did.

She took a drag, coughing slightly before handing it back. “Still. If they’re watching us, I bet they’re rooting for us, y’know? Like… even when life’s a mess, people find these little moments of peace. Kinda like this.”

Chris finally glanced at her, the faintest flicker of something soft in his sharp features. The way her nose crinkled when she tried to suppress her laugh; the way her eyes lit up, reflecting the stars she couldn’t stop rambling about—it was… annoying, maybe, how effortlessly she made the night feel less heavy. But not in a bad way.

“Maybe,” he muttered, almost to himself, before looking away again.

They lapsed into silence for a while, the kind that felt comfortable after months of stolen nights like this. Star broke it first, as she always did.

“You’re extra quiet tonight,” she said, nudging his shoulder. “What’s on your mind? Or are you just too high to function?”

Chris rolled his eyes, taking another drag. “Maybe I like the quiet, Kid. You ever think about that?”

“Nope,” she replied easily, grinning. “You’d be miserable without me, admit it.”

“Sure,” he said, deadpan, though the corners of his mouth twitched again.

Eventually, Star sat up, wobbling slightly as she eyed the trellis below. “Alright, we should head down before I fall asleep up here. You’re terrible at carrying people, and I refuse to be a headline in the Pine View Gazette: Local Emo Girl Plummets to Death Off Trailer Roof.”

Chris snorted. “They’d probably get your name wrong, too.”

Star nudged him with her elbow. “Go first. You’re the guy. Don’t guys like… live for this macho stuff? Protecting damsels in distress n’all that?”

Chris rolled his eyes. “You’re about as distressed as a cat on catnip.”

He swung his legs over the edge of the roof, gripping the trellis. It creaked under his weight, but he made it down smoothly, dusting his hands on his jeans when he reached the ground.

“See?” he called up. “s’fine. Just don’t be an idiot about it.”

Star pulled a face. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Captain Supportive.”

As she carefully climbed down, the trellis groaned ominously. Her foot slipped on a loose slat, and the sound of wood snapping was followed by a startled yelp.

“Chris!”

She fell backward, and he scrambled to catch her. The impact sent them both crashing to the ground in a tangle of limbs.

Star landed on top of him, groaning as she tried to sit up. “Oh my god, I told you this thing was a death trap! Are you okay? Did I—”

“Shut up,” Chris said, breathless, but there was no heat in his words.

He stared up at her, his eyes locked on hers, and for a moment, the world seemed to still. The joint haze lingered in the air, making every detail sharper—the warmth of her body against his, the way her breath hitched slightly, the glint of stars in her wide eyes.

Her voice softened. “Chris…”

He didn’t move, didn’t speak, his gaze flicking briefly to her lips. It was as if gravity itself was pulling them closer, and she swayed slightly, her hands braced against his chest.

And then—

“Chris?”

Lila’s small, groggy voice shattered the moment. They froze, heads snapping toward the trailer’s back door, where Lila stood in her pajamas, rubbing her eyes.

Star scrambled to her feet, her cheeks burning. Chris sat up slowly, running a hand through his hair as he muttered, “What are you doing up, Lila?”

“I had a bad dream,” she mumbled, sniffling.

Chris sighed, climbing to his feet and brushing off the dirt. “Alright, c’mon,” he said, jerking his head toward the trailer. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

Star stood awkwardly to the side, still flustered, as Chris led Lila inside. When he came back out a few minutes later, his face was unreadable again, the moment between them seemingly forgotten.

“You coming?” he asked, nodding toward the trailer.

“Yeah,” she said quickly, following him in.

They collapsed onto the couch with a spread of leftover snacks, bingeing Rick and Morty in comfortable silence. But every so often, Star caught Chris sneaking glances at her, his expression softening just slightly before he turned back to the screen.

Star popped a fry into her mouth, her legs curled beneath her on the couch. The glow from the TV flickered across her face as the absurd antics of Rick and Morty filled the small living room. She stole a glance at Chris, who sat slouched next to her, picking at the crust of a slice of leftover pizza.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the moment on the ground—the way his eyes had locked with hers, the way her heart had flipped in her chest. It was ridiculous, really. Chris was… Chris. Gruff, blunt, emotionally unavailable Chris. And yet, her cheeks still felt warm when she thought about how close they’d been.

“You’re staring,” Chris said without looking up. His tone was as dry as ever, but the faintest smirk tugged at the corner of his lips.

Star jerked her gaze back to the TV, stuffing another fry into her mouth. “I’m not staring. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Right,” he drawled, finally glancing over at her. “Because you’re the picture of subtlety.”

“Like you’re one to talk,” she shot back, turning to face him fully now. “You’ve been sneaking looks at me all night. What, do I have something on my face?”

Chris raised an eyebrow, his expression unreadable as he leaned back against the couch. “Maybe. Or maybe you’re just paranoid.”

She narrowed her eyes, trying to gauge if he was messing with her. “You’re so annoying, you know that?”

“And yet, here you are,” he replied smoothly, grabbing the remote and flipping to the next episode.

Star crossed her arms, leaning back with a huff. “I could’ve stayed home.”

Chris turned to her, the ghost of a smirk still lingering. “You wouldn’t have. You like it here too much.”

Her mouth opened to argue, but no words came out. Because he wasn’t wrong. For all his snark and the peeling wallpaper of his trailer, Chris’s place felt… safe.

“Whatever,” she muttered, grabbing a handful of fries.

They watched the episode in silence for a while, the tension between them softening into something almost comfortable again. But as the credits rolled, Chris spoke, his voice quieter than usual.

“What…what was that earlier,” he said, not looking at her.

Star stiffened, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. “What was what earlier?”

His jaw shifted, like he was debating whether to say it. Finally, he turned his head to meet her gaze, his expression unreadable. “You almost kissed me.”

Her face burned. “I—what? No, I didn’t!”

Chris arched an eyebrow, leaning slightly closer. “You sure about that?”

The air between them grew heavier, the space on the couch suddenly feeling much too small. Star swallowed hard, her pulse quickening as she held his gaze.

“Well, if I did,” she said, trying to sound casual, “you almost…did it back.”

He didn’t deny it. Instead, his eyes flicked down to her lips, just for a second, before meeting hers again.

For a moment, it felt like they were back on the ground outside, the rest of the world fading away as gravity pulled them closer.

But then, from the hallway, Lila’s small voice rang out again.

“Chris? Can I have water?”

Chris sighed, breaking eye contact as he stood up. “Yeah, I got it,” he called, his tone softer than usual.

Star exhaled, her shoulders slumping as the tension dissolved into the air. She stared at the TV, her fries forgotten, as Chris disappeared into the kitchen to help his sister.

When he came back, he sat down beside her without a word, grabbing another slice of pizza.

“Chris,” she said after a long pause, her voice quieter now.

He glanced at her, chewing lazily. “Yeah?”

She hesitated, her fingers twisting in the hem of her hoodie. “Never mind.”

Chris studied her for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then he leaned back, grabbing the remote again. “You’re weird,” he muttered, though there was no edge to his voice.

Star rolled her eyes, pulling her knees to her chest as the next episode started. But despite the casual banter, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something between them had shifted.

Neither of them said anything more about it, but as the night stretched on, Chris stayed just a little closer to her on the couch, his shoulder brushing hers every now and then.

The glow of the TV flickered softly across the living room, the chaos of Rick and Morty still playing, though Star hadn’t laughed in a while. Chris glanced over, noticing her head drooping slightly, her knees pulled to her chest. Her eyelids fluttered shut, the stubbornness that usually lit up her expression now replaced by something softer, more unguarded.

“Star,” Chris muttered, nudging her leg with his foot.

She mumbled something incoherent, barely stirring.

He sighed, dragging a hand through his hair. The night had already been a whirlwind—her almost falling off the roof, the tension of their moment on the ground, and now this. Yet here she was, passed out on his couch like it was her own home.

Chris stood, stretching before leaning down to scoop up the half-empty plate of fries on her lap. He set it on the coffee table, shaking his head. “You really can’t hang, can you?” he muttered under his breath, though his voice lacked any real bite.

Star whimpered lightly but didn’t wake. Chris hesitated, his hands twitching at his sides as he debated whether to just leave her there. But something about the thought of her waking up in an uncomfortable position, complaining about her back for the next week, pushed him to act.

He bent down, sliding an arm under her legs and another behind her back. She stirred slightly as he lifted her, her body instinctively curling into his chest. Her head lolled against him, nestling into the crook of his shoulder, and Chris froze mid-step.

Her soft breath tickled his neck as she adjusted again, snuggling closer, completely unaware of what she was doing. His heart stuttered in a way he wasn’t used to, an unfamiliar warmth blooming low in his stomach.

“Damn it, Kid,” he muttered under his breath, though there was no malice in his tone.

She mumbled something incoherent again, her arm curling loosely against his chest like she belonged there. It was so unlike her usual sharp edges, her endless teasing and snarky comments. Like this, she was… soft. Vulnerable. The part of her she didn’t let the world see.

Chris carried her down the narrow hallway to his room, his movements careful and deliberate, as if afraid to wake her. The soft creak of his bedroom door greeted him as he nudged it open with his foot. Moonlight spilled in through the window, casting a faint glow over the small, familiar space.

As he lowered her onto the bed, she stirred, her head shifting slightly. For a brief moment, he thought she’d wake, but she just sighed, curling into herself instinctively.

Chris lingered, crouched beside the bed, watching the way her face relaxed, her lips slightly parted as she fell deeper into sleep. The faintest furrow creased his brow as he studied her, caught between the familiarity of her presence and the strange, twisting feelings in his chest.

She shifted again, burrowing deeper into the blankets as her arm stretched out toward the space where he usually slept. He swallowed hard, rubbing the back of his neck as he stared at the pillow he always placed between them. The unspoken rule—his own attempt to avoid another awkward morning of waking up to find her tangled around him.

But now, as he watched her, those feelings from earlier returned—the strange pull, the warmth that made him feel more unsettled than he wanted to admit.

Chris dropped the pillow.

He stood there for another moment, his gaze lingering on her soft features before he climbed into the bed beside her. He stayed on his side at first, stiff and unsure, leaning back against the headboard.

But when her arm instinctively draped across his stomach and her head found his shoulder again, he didn’t pull away.

For a while, he just lays there, staring up at the ceiling, her even breaths filling the quiet space around them. The barrier was gone, and something in him—something unspoken—decided it didn’t need to come back.

AUTHORS NOTE: i love him. i literally LOVE him. my sweet angel boy. that’s all.

TAG LIST: @jetaimevous @sturnsblunt @riasturns @ifwdominicfike @chrissturns-wife @mattsmunch @pip4444chris @ribread03 @ariestrxsh @angelic-sturniolos111 @pvssychicken @mattslolita @stvrnzcherries @dottieboo @lovergirl4gracieabrams @bluestriips

[ceaselesswatchersspecialboy]

With the not as he seems au how would the gideon plotline work in regards to Bill's involvement? Also I'm loving your au it's so interesting!

I considered a few options for this, but settled on one in particular. I haven’t worked out everything yet, so this will just be the stuff I have worked out. Being as Gideon’s takeover of the shack and all is how Stan got Journal 2 in canon, and was a major catalyst for the portal, I wanted the Gideon plot to retain that major catalyst factor.

I don’t have too many details yet, but the general gist is that Bill, by proxy, also has a rivalry with Gideon. Although, the main rivalry is still with Stan, and Gideon views ‘Stanford’ as more of the Pines family’s annoying, attack dog — the threat he has to eliminate before he can commit to any scheme.

The reason for this is Bill is a far more active tormentor of Gideon. Gideon bit first and so he bites back. That type of dynamic.

Most stuff at the beginning is the same besides that, although I do have some extra plot lines and also interactions I probably wanna consider.

But Dreamscaperers is where stuff becomes strange. Again, I don’t have all the details right now, but I do have the main catalyst for the plot, which is that Gideon’s summon of Bill actually works. For the first time in thirty years, Bill is in his own body (in a sense), but from Stan and Dipper’s POV, they just watched Ford’s body pass out suddenly without cause.

The other important beats here:

- Bill does not take the deal with Gideon. He claims he already has a deal with Stan that he can’t break, and while that technically isn’t a lie, there’s an array of reasons as to why he doesn’t take it.

- Bill does not stay freed, and once his summoning is over, he wakes up back in Ford’s body.

- Gideon Rises does still happen, Gideon just resorts to TNT earlier.

- Mabel and Dipper start investigating into their Grunkle Ford’s relationship with Bill after Mabel and Soos, like in canon, witnessed the summoning. Between the worrying entries in the journal and ‘Ford’s tendency to don triangular jewellery and the colour yellow, they suspect something is amiss. He suspiciously keeps dodging the questions too. But the Mystery Twins are on the case! Cue Dipper’s Guide to the Unexplained: Grunkle Ford’s Tattoos.

- Stan ends up summoning Bill during Scaryoke, which is why he’s down in the basement initially before coming up to protect the kids. And, like with Gideon, it actually works. It’s only temporary, and Ford’s body always passes out instead of Ford returning to consciousness, but it’s absolutely a step. It’s also the first time Stan sees Bill and hears his actual voice, and he’s laughing for ten minutes straight.

That’s all the rough stuff I have right now! I’m probably gonna work on the finer details some more over time, especially Gideon’s plot as a whole and if Gideon Rises would change much.

And thank you!! I’m glad the AU is enjoyed!

I also do have these very quick doodles I did while brainstorming.

[merchelsea]

sacrifice - lando norris

pairing: lando norris x fem!reader

summary: you and lando have a long distance relationship due to your hard work. you rarely have free time to attend to his races, the only one you actually attend every year is monaco's. you understand things will have to change when lando gets into a crash and that makes you want to be there with him at everytimes.

author’s note: i hate making myself go through this.

word count:

warnings: lets pretend lando crashed duriung the interlagos gp, not the LA one, for the sake of the plot :)

"hey, babe!" you mumbled as you stirred from your nap. originally meant for a quick rest before the race, it turned into a marathon of sleep that spanned the entire duration of the race. checking the timing, you muttered, "shit."

"were you asleep?" he chuckled.

"yeah... I'm sorry babe. I was just trying to catch up on some sleep debt before the race. I am just tired..." you explained with a low rumble. lando always had a away of understanding things. "anyways, how did it go?"

"not so well, i am kind of glad that you didn't watch it, you would've freak out unnecessarely." he sighed

"why? what happened?" you sat up, eyes squeezed shut in alarm.

"it was nothing serious, just a crash." he reassured. the word 'crash' froze you, an unsettling feeling settling in your chest. "I'm fine now; I'm at the hospital doing some tests."

you didn't answer him and he immediately sensed your worry, it was your usual reaction whenever he had an incident. it was your own way to deal with stuff. "I'll have to stay here in brazil for some extra days. we don't want to rush things. everything is alright, but still."

"yeah, I know. how are you feeling? any pain? wasit bad? why are you at the hospital? is there anything they're worried about?" your thoughts rushed out, anxiety evident. you wished you could've been there with him, knowing how much he disliked going through hospitalization alone.

"calm down, baby. I'm fine, no pain. they gave me painkillers for my headache," he began, his voice carrying weariness and sadness. "the crash felt horrible from inside the car, but I've seen the footage, and it wasn't that bad. I don't think they're worried about anything specific, just my racing career," he added with a hint of self-deprecating humor.

"shut up. you know those jokes aren't funny, right?" you retorted, hating his tendency for such jokes. "anyways, I miss you so much. you have no idea." placing your phone on the bed, you awaited his response as you searched for your notebook.

"I know babe, I miss you like crazy too. and i won't be able to be home for some more days, as i told you. i hate it." you both sighed. "but it's okay, i'm glad you weren't here this time."

although you felt the honesty in his words, you could also know that it was pure bullshit. he wanted you to be there more that anything, and the fights you two had over the past weeks showed that clearly.

lando felt your support fading away and, as always, he talked about it with you, but there was nothing you could do, you could not just leave your work and follow him around the world.

your life had to come first. you couldn't be financially dependent. you had never wanted that for yourself.

"I love you, lando. you know that, right?"

"i know. I love you too." anuncomfortable silence lingered, more apparent to him than to you, as you were preoccupied with booking a flight to brazil. "look, I have to hang up to do some exams. I'll call you as soon as I can, yeah?"

"yeah, okay. keep me updated, for the love of god." he laughed and silently hang up.

as soon as you were able to, you called your boss, letting her aware of the whole situation, who, understandingly, granted you a week off, more than you needed. grateful, you expressed your thanks in every single way you could.

as you couldn't just fly there without someone knowing, you called lando's dad to let him know that you were going. he was thankful that his son had found someone who cared so much about him, and as so helped you through everything.

you would obviously be staying at lando's room with him, so you didn't need to worry about that, but there were things you actually needed to deal with and that's where he was an absolute angel, taking care of everything for you.

the flight proved to be torturous; sleep eluded you, your mind consumed by worry for your boyfriend, presently hospitalized in a foreign country that held no appeal for him. the inability to communicate with him intensified your anxiety, and the endurance of such a long flight was a challenge unfamiliar to you.

the only thing keeping you focused on trying to sleep was knowing that you'd see lando soon and that you needed to be sane.

once you arrived in brazil, adam had already sent an uber to pick you up and drop you at the hotel. you were eternally grateful for him. your appreciation deepened when, upon entering the hotel, you found everything seamlessly taken care of, allowing you to reach his son without delay.

he drove you there himself, the casual conversation during the car ride centered uiquely around the topic most dear to both of you—lando's health.

every detail adam shared heightened your awareness; lando was okay, but not as well as he should be. the information failed to ease your mind, creating a lingering unease.

after reaching the hospital, the attending doctor informed you that lando was still asleep but encouraged you to enter. you opened the door to his room, and an immediate sense of tranquility washed over you. lando's peaceful slumber tugged at your heartstrings, and the sight of his features made you want to cry; you had missed him so damn much.

you took his hand, staying by his side as he slept. despite your exhaustion, the anticipation of his awakening kept sleep at bay.

lando woke up and confusedly stared at you for five minutes straight. in his head, he was trying to figure out if you were real or if his desperation had just made you up. you squeezed his hand and that seemed to clear his mind. you were in fact there.

"love?" he muttered, scared of being wrong.

"hey baby" you whispered to him, smiling softly.

"you're here? what are you doing here?" he hurriedly sat up, his expression filled with worry, like he wasn´t the one on a hospital bed.

"i'm here to see you." you extended your hand and let it travel through his face. "got the week off, couldn't leave you alone." his smile was priceless. he rushed his arms around your waist, since you were standing now, and pulled you closer to him, head in your belly.

when he told you he had missed you like crazy, he didn't define it well enough.

he locked his lips with yours as soon as he had a chance. you missed that feeling, you missed it too fucking much. you missed everything about him too fucking much, and maybe this misfortune was just what you needed to realize that something had to change. you couldn't miss him like this all the time.

it was literal hell, for the both of you.

adam entered the room after some time and, from his face, you could see he carried good news.

and you were right. "you are free to leave today, all the exams cameback with positive answers. you still have to stay in brazil, of course, a flight so long could jeopardize your health, so you'll have to stay for a bit longer, but you two can go stay at the hotel for tonight.

you and lando celebrate this little "victory" with each other and then you start talking about going home, anticipating what you'd do.

the room was uncharacteristically quiet as he payed attention to the TV and you lost yourself in your own mind.

"I think I might quit my job." you let out with your head layed in his chest. he twists his head to look at you. "what?" he asks, clearly confused, in his head, trying to figure out where all of this was coming from.

yes, it's true that he didn't like to travel around the world every year and leave you behind, and it's also true that this past year, he felt your support fade away, but he didn't want you to leave your life in second place for him. he knew, and understood, how important for you it was to have your financial independence.

he had started to feel guilty, even though this was not his fault.

you thought and rethought about it during your flight, since it was the only thing you could do. of course you never wanted that, but you also couldn't bare the distance anymore, and his accident showed you that.

you wanted to be there, to be able to celebrate every single one of his podiums by his side and not over the phone, you wanted to be able to hold and support him whenever he needed you to do so.

six years into your relationship, neither of you envisioned it ending anytime soon. if it did, you had your savings, but for now, you craved closeness.

"seriously. i want to be with you. i think i never noticed how affected i was by your absence, but i am a lot." you admitted with a sigh. helistened intently. "I want to be able to be with you."

"are you for real?" he asked, concern in his eyes. "I don't want you to feel pressured to do that. I love you whether you're here or on the other side of the world."

"I know, lan. it's not like I would stop working. I just have to find something within my capacities that allows me to travel around the world with you. and it's not like you're going to break up with me, leaving me with nothing. I have my money."

"it's not like I'm gonna break up with you, period." he smirked. "we're a forever thing."

turning you around as if you were as light as a pillow, you wrapped your arms around his neck.

"I love you," you whispered against his lips.

"I love you too," he whispered back.

[hellfire--cult]

Roe's Valentine's special - Steddie x Fem!Reader

wc: 9.5k

+18, explicit, threesome, p in v no protection, p in a, smut, angst, insinuation of suicide (not reader nor eddie or steve), mention of eating disorder (not specified nor described), cheating (to reader), revenge... a lot of revenge, slightly supernatural.

plot: The past month had been hell for you, and you couldn't swallow how unfair it was that the people that fucked you over lived happily without a worry in the world. But on every valentine's day, there are certain cupids that will help you mend your heart through revenge... and you caught the attention of two of them.

a/n: let's pretend it's still valentine's day, although this is not exactly fluffy, lmao.

If you liked it, reblog, please. Doesn't hurt you to press the green button.

CHAIN REACTION

So let’s recount what happened in the last month.

Your boyfriend cheated on you with his supposed best friend and lied to you even about him being heterosexual when you first met him, so finding him and Chase while going at it like rabbits in the bed you shared for the past two years was not the best sight to ever dig into your skull.

You had to move out, return to your mother’s house reluctantly, and get bombarded with questions about why such a thing happened because if anyone in the relationship would have cheated, she always thought it would be you.

So you moved back out again into an affordable two-room apartment. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t fancy, but it was a roof until you and your now ex-boyfriend figured out how to split up your stuff, but you knew his now lawyer boyfriend would do anything to keep the house to themselves.

And then at work, the position you’ve been working so hard for, learning, studying, and staying extra hours even, was taken by Lydia because she sucked the boss’ dick. She was one of the worst administrators there, so it was obvious how she got that new salary and office.

Worst of all, today was Valentine’s Day… and you were alone. All alone.

“WHY DID THIS HAPPEN TO ME!? WHY CAN THEY BE HAPPY AFTER EVERYTHING!?” You were kicking the pillow of a couch that had fallen off, and you weren’t caring if your neighbors would hear you, or were getting pissed for your rage fit. They might be even afraid right now, not daring to come up to say anything.

You needed to let the anger out. You couldn’t hold it back anymore. It seemed as if life said ‘Let’s fuck this person’s life today.’. They literally went and pointed at you. It seemed like a fucking joke, the kind that leaves a sour taste in your mouth and almost makes you want to puke. 

Your eyes were burning with incoming tears from your anger, sadness, and disappointment, just everything at once. Why did all of this happen to you? What kind of game are the gods playing against you right now? 

Your heart was broken into pieces. Small, fragile, and enough to blow them away with one breath.

“I WANT THEM TO FUCKING SUFFER!” You yelled finally, breathing heavily as your head leaned back so you could stare at the ceiling and close your eyes. You don’t mean it, it was just a spur-of-the-moment scream… was it?

You sighed as you kept your head towards the ceiling. You can fix it. All of it. You will strive for another position, and leave the team management you’re under. You will focus on spending more time with friends. With Robin, Argyle, Nancy… And your mom is not fixable, but you can keep avoiding her just like you are now. 

Everything can be fixed. It can, right? It absolutely can, yes, of course.

Except for the situation you encountered when you lowered your head to see two figures sitting on your couch. Two men. Two gorgeous men. One with long hair, curly, dark, tattooed arms with rather weird symbolisms, and the other had sun-kissed skin, brown and gorgeous hair with some faint highlights, and then you could see all the freckles adorning his skin and face.

These were indeed gorgeous men… now what the–

“WHAT THE FUCK!?” You jumped out of your skin almost, and you immediately rushed to the kitchen which was two steps away, and grabbed your biggest knife, probably dull, but it was still pointy. You turned to point it at them only to see them gone as if you’ve never had two men sitting on your couch seconds ago. You were confused, putting the knife back down on the counter.

Were you hallucinating? Was the can of soup you had earlier expired and you didn’t realize it? Maybe it had fungus? Mushrooms? Or were you so desperate for a good dick that you imagined two men sitting on your couch? You shook your head at your silliness, a small giggle escaping your lips while taking a hand up to wipe a tear away from the past outburst, only for one finger to graze your cheek, making your breath stop completely and for your body to freeze.

“Now now, no more crying.” 

Your head turned only to clash onto hazel eyes, beautiful and silky brown hair, a freckle or two on the side of his cheek... And he was in your fucking house–

“SHIT!” You tried to move around him to grab your knife again, only for your waist to be grabbed and pulled flush against another body, your side, and your shoulder hitting someone’s hips and chest. 

“That is no way to treat your guests.” You gasped as you turned your head to now see the man with long dark hair, curls falling down his shoulders, and deep brown eyes. You were panicking, your phone was on the couch, and you left it so far away! You need to yell, you need to call for help!

“HEL–” A ringed hand flew to your mouth, silencing you from your screams for help. The other man with hazel eyes sighed, shaking his head as you thrashed around in the other man’s grip, obviously too strong for you because he wasn’t moving a single inch.

“I told you, we should have knocked on her door.” You let out a noise of confusion, a ‘What?’ mumbled in the back of the hand that was holding you silent. You heard a chuckle from the man next to you, making you even more confused than before.

“What was the fun in that? I love it when they think we are murderers or burglars.” What the actual fuck? If they weren’t that– Wait, how can you trust them with that? What if they are lying about it in order for you to stay calm?

“For fuck sake Eddie, let her go so we can explain to her what are we doing here.” You nodded desperately at that but the man, whom you thought was the kindest, only pointed a finger at you with a glare. “Yell, and we tape that mouth of yours shut until we finish explaining. Got it?”

You were shaking at this point in fear, tears filling your eyes as you felt helpless, and the man holding you noticed your distress, a soft voice coming from him unlike the teasing one from before.

“We are not here to hurt you, Sweets… We are here to help you, you just have to listen to us for a bit, okay?” The man called Eddie spoke to you, and you were afraid of screaming and for them to do something worse to you, so you nodded in the affirmation that you were going to keep quiet. 

Eddie looked at the other man and nodded as he slowly took the hand away from your mouth, letting you take a gasp of breath as he pulled himself away from you, letting you go completely from his grasp. 

You had to choose. Listen to them and pretend this is fucking normal just so you won’t get killed, or, run for it. Before you could even think, the more tanned man snapped a finger on your face and–

You were sitting on your couch. What? You were in the kitchen– You pointed at it with wide eyes, then back at the couch, and back at the kitchen, and then you pointed at the two men that were standing in front of you. 

“W–What was that? I was standing in the kitchen, and now I’m on my couch… But I was standing in my kitchen–”

“Yeah, it’s freaky the first time, I know… Trust us that we don’t want to cause any harm… not to you at least.” The man you don’t know the name of spoke, making you stare at them only to then look down at the floor. 

“I’m dreaming, aren’t I? This is not real, there’s no way I just teleported from the kitchen to the couch, that is humanly impossible–”

“Good thing we are not human.” And that made you snap your eyes open like plates, looking at Eddie. Not… Human? The other man elbowed his friend in the gut, making you look at him.

“I’m Steve, this is Eddie. We’re Revenge Cupids.” 

You stared at them, just blinking, not a single thought in your head. They are what? Cupids? Revenge cupids? That didn’t make any sense, nothing of this was making any sense in any laws of the universe.

“Yeah okay, I am definitely on drugs or asleep.” At your words, a shadow cast above you only to bend down towards your eye level, making you freeze at the stern look on his face. Eddie’s eyes were glowing in a very unusual color. It was some sort of white, or grey.

“Say we are not real one more time, and we will show you just how real we can be. Okay Baby?”

And that threat felt real. Too real, and now you realize these two men are not human, these two men possess some kind of powers, and these two men call themselves Revenge Cupids, which made absolutely no sense.

“I– Okay– Um… Wh-Why are you here?” Your voice was shaky because these were still strangers in your home, and how can you be calm in a situation like this? Eddie sighed and got up, your eyes following him as he stood next to Steve, who proceeded to speak.

“We heard your plea.” He said in a calm tone and you tilted your head in confusion. Your plea? What plea? 

“I’m sorry?” At your question, now Eddie was the one that talked, surprising you when he called out your name without you introducing yourself.

“You said ‘I want them to suffer.’” 

Your eyes widened at that and your brain rewinded a bit to a few minutes ago. You did say that, yes, you didn’t mean it. You definitely didn’t… right? But what does that mean? Why would that make them appear?

“I– I did say that… but, I don’t understand what it has to do with you both?” This is out of a really bad Hallmark movie because two unknown men are in your living room, and they’re very real and appeared out of thin air.

“Okay, let us explain sweetheart, alright? First off, this is real, what’s happening here, it’s happening. So stop doubting.” Eddie said with a harsh tone knowing that you were still wondering if you were high, and his voice made you straighten up and stare at the two men a little more centered. Steve took a deep breath and started to explain.

“On Valentine’s Day, you have your normal cupids, helping you get the person you seek, all that stuff and happy shit, yada yada. We–” Steve pointed in between Eddie and himself. “We are the complete opposite.”

“Huh? Does that mean… you break hearts?” You asked in a confused tone and Eddie was pleased to know you were cooperating now.

“Yes and no. We are here to mend your heart… through revenge that might break the hearts of the people who wronged you.”

And that… That actually caught your attention. Mend your heart while getting… revenge?

“Wait, what kind of revenge?” You asked, now intrigued and Steve smiled at you, now knowing you were a little interested in it.

“Most people prefer small little acts of revenge. Lots of people pleasers if you ask me, but you can even say no to this and we’ll just erase your memory and we were never here sweetheart.” And you were thinking about it. You are angry, yes, but how angry were you? How unfair did life treat you for this to happen? “There’s no catch? Like… you just help me with these acts and then you’re gone?” You asked and they simply shrugged and nodded at you, Eddie chuckling afterwards.

“Of course, you won’t remember us.” You gave him a little nod in approval and then you squinted your eyes at them.

“Are all revenge cupids in pairs?” You asked out of curiosity, catching the men’s attention, looking at eachother. Eddie shrugged at Steve because you were going to forget it all once they were done, so no harm in telling you anything, right? Steve turned to you and pointed at Eddie.

“I was his revenge cupid… and well… Let’s say–”

“I caught his attention so badly because of my revenge that he was smitten instantly. Weren’t you?” Eddie said with a cheeky smile on his face while Steve rolled his eyes before continuing to talk to you.

“So I hired him as my second hand.” And you were completely stunned. They have feelings so it seems, they’re not just entities, and from what you are listening, they were human once, or at least Eddie was.

“So you two are dating.” You managed to say with a smirk on your face and Steve’s face turned a little pink while Eddie snorted before talking back again.

“We prefer the word… Partners.”

You weighed your options. You could deny this help and keep going just like you were doing minutes ago, or… you can have your revenge on these people that wronged you completely… But would that make you happy? Would that cause some kind of relief in you?

But why the fuck are these people happy when they left you alone and miserable?

So you asked yourself again: Would that give you any sense of relief?

Fuck yes, it would.

“I’m in.” 

The next day you woke up, wondering if everything from the night before was even real at all, but when you saw the two men appear out of nowhere in the early morning already walking around the living room while looking at your furniture with intrigue, you knew you didn’t dream it at all.

So you cooked for them, and they seemed surprised at the gesture since they didn’t have hunger at all, but they still took what you made for them from your hands. It was simple waffles with syrup and some berries. You sat down on the table eating your own plate as you tried to gather your thoughts.

The two men are still here, and you had agreed that they could do acts of revenge for your heart to feel relief once again. To rejoice. And now they were sitting in front of you, already finished their plates long ago. 

“Whatcha thinking Princess?” Eddie asked as he leaned over the table with his elbows on the wood. You looked up to clash onto his brown ones and you licked your lips as you sat straighter on your chair. 

“Well… let’s say I want to take revenge on my mother. What would you do?” Eddie shrugged at that as he went deep into thought about it. Steve was thinking too, looking at the ceiling as if it were going to give him an answer. Then Eddie spoke again.

“Well, once someone told us to make the house of their parents infested with hornets.” And that was a good one…

“Another one asked us for their favorite furniture to burn accidentally thanks to the fireplace.” Steve said afterward and Eddie nodded as if remembering that, a small chuckle escaping his lips. 

They were good… but not enough. They weren’t even directed to the person who caused the actual pain, it was directed to all the material stuff. 

“I developed an eating disorder thanks to this woman. This woman considered me a slut and whore ever since she found out I lost my virginity to my neighbor. This woman that treated me poorly in front of everyone we ever met…” Your words were filled with venom, heart stinging as the two men realized that the broken heart was not recent.

It has been broken for a long while now.

“Then, what do you have in mind?” Eddie asked, curiosity at the tip of his tongue as he saw Steve slowly smirk from his peripheral vision. He knew his partner was intrigued and actually amused at the anger in your voice.

You thought for a while, but you knew what could break your mother. What could break her completely, heart, body, and soul, not caring for the repercussions that could bring because she never cared for yours. A mother who doesn’t care for her child, why would the child respect her? Why would the child care for their mother?

“My mother lives off fillers and surgeries so she could still look young despite the age she has. A cougar that fucks guys her age or younger because it makes her feel… with youth she no longer possesses.” 

“I like where this is going, honey.” Steve spoke as he looked at you with fierce eyes and Eddie was biting his lip at the anticipation of your plan. You looked up from your plate and both men went wide-eyed as they looked at the intensity of your glare.

Full of rage.

“I want everything that she ever did to her face and body to fall apart. I want her to finally look her age, but with the clear evidence that she never took care of her skin. Someone that didn’t use sunscreen at all in her entire life.”

And Eddie’s smile turned into a wicked grin, almost like a Cheshire cat. 

He raised his hand and snapped his fingers, and Steve chuckled wholeheartedly, evilly as he closed his eyes. You were looking at both of them as your heart thumped wildly in your chest, filled with anticipation but no guilt. There was no guilt at all. She never had it with you, so it’s fair you reciprocate the same feelings.

“Oh, she looks hideous honey.” Steve talked, looking back down towards you, snapping his fingers and you saw your phone lit up as it sat on the table. You frowned as you reached for it, unlocking it, and… your eyes widened as you saw your mother screaming at the mirror. The sight of an old woman who lost her youth, no way of faking it anymore. 

She was touching her face, trying to lift it as the skin fell and fell, not staying up at all. The creases all over her face, the facial marks on her forehead, and the corners of her mouth. The sun stains all over her face and neck, and finally… she finally feels what you felt all those years you lived with her. She can finally have a taste of her own medicine. 

And you decided right then that this was going to be the last time you saw your mother, and you didn’t care anymore what could happen afterwards to her, locking the phone and putting it down on the table again. 

Eddie and Steve looked at one another and when they looked at you, their eyes widened, almost in shock as they saw you smiling while taking bites of your waffles, doing a little dance on your chair in victory. You were the first one they ever encountered to not show a single sign of guilt.

And Eddie couldn’t help but bite the side of his bottom lip as he stared at you. And Steve didn’t miss the way his partner was glancing at you, but he couldn’t blame Eddie.

Not when he was looking at you in the same way.

The three of you were walking towards your office building, looking up at the tall structure as you prepared your next target, or well, targets. You still had to think of what to do to them, but some ideas had come up in your mind. 

You had one man on each side of you, both waiting for your response. They had kept an eye on you the past few days, just in case you felt guilt of some sort for what you’ve done to your mother. You even rejoiced when she called you to ask for some money so she could get surgery and your response was:

‘No surgery can help you.’

And that was the same response she gave you when you thought you needed a nose job thanks to her degrading comments. She laughed at you whenever you tried to apply makeup or fix your hair and with the years you understood that she was jealous of your youth. Of your skin.

“How did you become Revenge Cupids?” You asked them as your ideas kept swirling in your mind but they were used to your curiosity by now. They were curious about you too, and for the past few days, they have also asked you about your life, and how you got your heart broken in such a way.

“Well…” Steve began as he looked at you, “You make a bond with another revenge cupid.” You frowned at that, turning your head to look at him.

“A bond?” Eddie nodded and wrapped around your shoulders, sending shivers down your whole body, which you tried shaking away.

“When humans commit revenge, they might impress the cupids themselves. I surprised Steve with mine, and it helped that he was interested in me.” Eddie wiggled his eyebrows at Steve and the brown-haired man only smacked the top of Eddie’s head. “Shit baby, there was no need–”

“And what did both of you do that… caught another cupid’s attention?” You asked this time and the two men looked at eachother for a second, before looking back at you. Steve took a deep breath in and was about to begin talking when your eyes spotted a security camera on the front doors of your building, an idea coming to you.

“Oh… Stevie, I think she thought of something good…” Eddie said with a grin and Steve smiled as he raised his hand, ready to snap his fingers.

“Take me to the CCTV room.” And with those words, you closed your eyes, a snap of fingers happening, and when you opened your eyelids again, you were in front of a massive computer, many monitors around showing all of the security cameras in the company. You turned your head to the side to see the guard sleeping, an eyebrow raised as Eddie chuckled.

“We put him to sleep, he won’t wake up, so you don’t have to whisper Sweets.” You smiled at that, surprising Eddie as well as Steve.

“Thank you… Okay… I need to find that day, the day before the promotion was announced…” And you leaned forward to start looking, only for Eddie to snap his fingers and the video popped up immediately. 

A wicked smile spread on your lips as you saw your boss, who is married with two kids, fucking Lydia without any shame, railing her on his desk. Her moans were all over the speakers, making Steve clear his throat for a second, and then his eyes widened when he heard what you were looking for.

‘You want that promotion, right sweetheart? Fuck yeah, I’m gonna give it to you, oh you are so fucking good–’

“Bingo~” Eddie cooed next to you and Steve leaned closer to you, a smile all over his lips as he planted a soft kiss on your shoulder, making you shiver with a sigh and then he whispered to you.

“What do you want to do with that Sweetheart?” A grin was on your lips and then you whispered your plan to him, making Eddie pout. You giggled at his antics and you leaned to whisper it to him as well, and both men were stunned at what you wanted to do, but oh so pleased.

You changed the camera to the present, seeing your boss on a very important committee, with members of the board from the company and other companies that wanted to seal a deal. You kept changing the cameras, seeing people watching the LED TVs that are in the cafeteria, near the office cubicles, at the reception area…

“Do the honors princess…” Eddie smirked as he pointed at the ‘Enter’ button on the keyboard. And so you raised your finger and pressed the button in a strong hit.

Moans were heard all over the building, the words your boss said to Lydia as he fucked into her, everyone watching it happen, and you quickly changed it to the conference camera. You saw everyone start screaming at your boss, probably calling all deals off, and you didn’t even care if this would make you lose your job. You didn’t care at all if the company went bankrupt. 

You had lost all empathy. 

Maybe they can put another person in charge and it doesn’t go down. Maybe. You shrugged in your mind at what the outcome might be. You saw the men leaving as your boss tried turning off the TV but it didn’t go off. You smiled, looking at Steve who had his hand up, not letting anyone in the building turn off the devices.

Everyone saw it. Everyone was seeing it. Lydia will lose her job. She will be charged with adultery most likely as well as your boss. He will lose his family, his credibility, his company… All because he didn’t give you the promotion you worked your ass off to get for the past year. 

“He tried to come onto me. I guess that because I didn’t give in, he gave it to the person that gave the pussy to him. Resentful bastard.” Eddie and Steve’s jaws clenched tightly at that, and you didn’t ask for it but he twitched his hand again, and your eyes widened when your phone started playing the video as well, and you looked up to see everyone in the company building got their phones infected with it, to make sure absolutely everyone was seeing it.

You giggled with satisfaction as you slapped your hands together, pressing them onto your smile as you looked at all the cameras of people gossiping, screaming, running, just pure chaos as they all went to chase Lydia and your boss. Food was being thrown at them as well as toilet paper and drinks.

Your coworkers were mad, you all worked so hard so that one day you could try to get a raise, a promotion, anything at all, and it was never going to be appreciated. The boss only appreciated a good set of boobs and a tight cunt. And now they all knew. 

Eddie leaned over to you, now completely hypnotized by you, grabbing onto one of your hands to press a kiss on your digits, the index finger that pressed the enter button. You shivered at the action of tenderness, and then you felt your shoulder being kissed again, turning your head to look at Steve’s pleased face.

“Let’s head back. We got one more revenge, don’t we?”

“You guys didn’t answer me the other day…What did you do to become revenge cupids?” You asked as you walked into your old neighborhood with both men walking on your sides again. Steve was the first one to talk.

“I wanted to give my dad my revenge. So, I did what I knew would hurt him the most… I made him get a bad deal, only for his entire company to be stolen away. He didn’t read in between the lines, and gave all rights to a fake firm, losing everything.” You tilted your head at that because it didn’t sound that– Ah… you imagined what happened later on to his father.

“I see… He deserved it?” You asked and Steve chuckled, a somber look on his face.

“Fuck yes, he did.” You held his hand for comfort, stunning him completely at your touch, looking down at your joined hands. Your gaze turned towards the dark-haired man now who was already smiling.

“I made my father depend on drugs in jail. Make him suffer from withdrawal later on… I also made sure he goes back and forth into abusing and withdrawal, and to always have an eye kept on, so he wouldn’t put an end to the suffering.” You were stunned at his act of revenge.

His father would suffer until his last breath… You didn’t want to ask the reason for hatred, to either of them. You weren’t going to meddle in those past stories, but you were certain the people they directed the revenge to deserved it completely. Your hands gripped theirs tightly as you walked towards your old home. 

Eddie and Steve shared a knowing look with a hint of a smirk, looking forward as you guided them. It was the last act of revenge and you were going to make them pay. You were going to make them miserable, till their last heartbeat. You stood in front of your old home, the one you shared with him, the one you two bought together, the one you dumbly let him have full ownership of the home because he said that once you two had kids, it would be directly passed onto them.

That was all a fucking lie.

“He is not inside…” A house that he will keep, a house that you won’t ever enter again, a house he and his best friend, his actual boyfriend, made sure to keep all to themselves… A house you know doesn’t have any kind of insurance because your boyfriend has always been a cheap ass.

“So… what are we doing?” Steve asked with a squeeze of his hand. You let go of both hands and took a step forward, raising your right hand up as if waiting for something to fall on it.

“I will do this myself. Give me a Molotov.” You suddenly blurted out and Eddie and Steve’s eyes widened in surprise. You were… amazing. You wanted to do this yourself. Eddie reached out to you after a snap of fingers, and he placed an already fired-up molotov in your hand. 

“Go crazy baby.” 

And it was all you needed as you leaned your arm back, and threw the Molotov right into the living room’s wide window, the fire instantly catching on the couch. The couch you two once shared, a couch you two cuddled on as you watched movies. The house that holds so many memories, never a bad one, never a fight.

It was in flames, all of it. All your past in flames, all the people that deserved it, got it. 

Eddie and Steve looked at one another, waiting to console you for your possible breakdown. It always happened at the end of the acts of revenge. It is as if there was a bit of guilt, a bit of regret in everything they did… but you–

You laughed openly as you opened your arms wide, twirling around with happiness, and Eddie and Steve just stared at you, scanning all of you, looking at your smile, at the lack of empathy for all the hearts you broke in order to mend your own. You loved yourself, not letting people walk over you, not anymore.

And damn they wanted you. They deeply wanted you.

And now it was the day you dreaded. All the acts of revenge were done, over with. And they had to erase your memory now, leave you alone once more. It’s not like you will remember them, but will you be able to handle the loneliness? 

You three were in your room, both men looking at you with their arms crossed over their chests as you sat on the bed. You were mustering the courage to actually say goodbye to them, but in reality, you just wanted them to just do it. Press the device the men in black used to erase someone’s memory. Quick, easy.

“So… you two are gonna leave now, right?” You questioned them as your eyes went towards their eyes. A small smirk was in each of their mouths and Eddie was the first to walk towards you, sitting next to you on the edge of the bed.

“Well… You see baby…” He held your right hand that was on your lap, pulling it to his lips so he could give you a small kiss on your knuckles. A shiver ran down your spine, making you clench your legs together at the sight and then you felt your bed dip on your left, making you turn your head to see Steve’s face coming close to your face, his breath hitting your mouth.

“Remember what happened to Eddie?” You frowned at his explanation, not understanding what he meant, and his lips hovered over yours. “You caught… our attention.”

Oh… Oh… They wanted you. The both of them, at the same time… And you would be lying if you said you didn’t think of them at night. You would be a horrible fucking liar if you didn’t think of them railing you, fucking you into nothing, a blabbering mess. They intrigued you too, wanting to know more of them, and spend more time with them, you just wanted to do so much more.

You gasped when you felt Eddie’s free hand slowly slide in between your legs, holding you onto your inner thigh, squeezing the flesh there, making you whimper. Steve moved downwards so he could bite onto your exposed shoulder from the tanktop you were wearing. A small moan escaped your lips, and then you felt Eddie dip his head onto your neck, placing a kiss there, making you sigh in bliss. And then, he mumbled.

“Make a bond with us sweetheart.” He said in a sultry tone, making your limbs melt against him, his hand gripping your inner thigh a little tighter. You felt Steve’s lips going upwards to kiss the other side of your neck, and having them both kissing you like this just made you completely dizzy, and happy.

“Bond with us… Come with us…” Steve’s voice was as if you were a snake, and he was the charmer. Your body was on fire as both men joined hands on your lap, letting you know they were more than okay with including you in all of this. Their kisses didn’t stop, Eddie’s lips going towards your ear, biting on your earlobe, while Steve dipped into your neck, right in the union with your shoulder.

You whimpered, gripping their thighs as their joined hands let go of eachother, only to then dig them in between your legs, and their digits pressed on your inner thighs, one on the left, one on the right, and they both spread your legs, slowly. Your breathing turned heavy as your fingernails dug into their black pants.

“We can’t go on without approval Honey… You have to voice it out.” Eddie cooed in your ear, making you whine slightly as a moan got stuck in your throat thanks to him biting under your ear, to then blow cold air on that patch of skin. 

“Do you want this… or not?” Steve asked, placing one kiss on your jaw and… 

These men make you happy… So why the fuck not?

“I’ll bond with you two… Please, I want you both to take me…”  You wanted them to take you away from here, from this world, to wherever they are from. You didn’t care.

You could feel both of them smirk on your skin and the first one to turn your head to look at him was Eddie, a hint of lust in his eyes as his fingers caressed the dough of your inner thigh, sending shivers all over your body like electricity.

“You know how the bonding is done?” You may have an idea of it, but you assumed it had to do with a sacrifice of some sort or–

“You have to do a carnal bond, baby.” Steve mumbled on your skin, giving your shoulder a little nibble and now you understood why they were touching you, grazing your skin, kissing it, worshiping it.

“You have to let us mend your heart… and we can sense that you want us to fix it. Isn’t that right Stevie?” Eddie asked his partner and your head turned to look at Steve who had stopped kissing your shoulder, only to be inches away from your face.

“We sensed it days ago… The way you looked at us, the way you touched us in every chance you got, the way you take care of us and you love it… You fucking love it.” He whispered onto your lips, breath hitting them in the most delicious of ways, and your center clenched at nothing and their hands gripped onto your flesh even tighter as if they could feel what just happened.

“Say you are ours… And we will be yours too.” Eddie purred in your ear, and you didn’t think anymore, reacting by instinct, you pressed your lips against Steve’s, and a hum of approval vibrated in his throat. He kissed you back with an intensity you never felt before. Then you felt Eddie’s teeth nibble on your pulse point, making you moan into Steve’s mouth.

Steve’s fingers in your inner thigh traveled north, moving under your skirt and going towards your dripping cunt that was covered by your wet underwear. You whimpered at the touch, not noticing how Eddie’s hand moved upwards and under your tank top, gripping one of your breasts tightly, making you jolt slightly.

Steve took the opportunity that you opened your mouth, even if little, and his tongue found yours, greedily exploring you, wanting nothing more but to swallow your whimpers as you felt yourself falling more and more into the lust, into the desire.

He cupped you over your underwear, rubbing his palm against your covered clit, and a whine mixed with a moan made you move your hips against him. Your moan was muffled by his tongue and it seemed like Eddie felt left out, and pinched one of your nipples, and with a gasp it made you pull away from Steve’s kiss so you could voice your whimper.

“My turn to taste you baby…” Without needing guidance,  you turned your head and your eyes clashed with deep brown ones, and he instantly captured your lips with his, moaning at the taste of you. He pinched your nipple in between his fingers as he palmed all around it. Steve’s lips latched onto your neck, his fingers gliding underneath your underwear, pulling at the elastic to finally touch you, raw, making you straighten up against Eddie’s touch, hips moving against Steve’s.

Steve moaned at how wet you were, how soaked his fingers became just by moving, gelding them through your folds. His ring and middle fingers found your clit instantly, rubbing circles in slow movements, making you moan against Eddie’s mouth, and just like Steve, his tongue found yours after you opened your mouth to let your lewd sound out.

“Fuck Eddie, you have no idea how wet she is…” Steve chuckled against your neck and you let go of Eddie’s kiss in order to take a breath. You were extremely agitated but they didn’t stop touching. Your eyes widened, throwing your head back when you felt Steve’s middle finger enter you, a groan escaping his own lips.

“Yeah? Then let me feel it.” Eddie smirked as he let go of your breasts, gliding his hand down next to Steve’s who was pumping his finger in and out of you, squelching sounds being heard all over your room.

“S-Steve–” And then you gasped when you felt another intrusion. It wasn’t Steve’s index finger, no. You looked down and both men were now looking at you with smirks and dilated pupils, both hands were underneath your skirt and then they started pumping their index fingers in and out with no rhythm, one goes in, the other goes out.

“Holy shit Steve, you weren’t wrong.” Eddie was stunned by how drenched you were, your juices already coating both his and Steve’s fingers, seeing the white sheer ring of your slick forming at the knuckles. Steve’s mind was already hazing over, and he stared at Eddie’s face with want, and his partner understood completely what he needed.

Your eyes widened when you saw Steve and Eddie coming close in front of your face, their lips joining in a deep kiss, full of teeth and tongue, and the tempo in their fingers went even quicker, making you choke as you thrust your hips back and forth against them. 

The sounds of their kiss mixed with the squelch of your wetness and their fingers, made your belly turn and coil as your climax started to build. Your pussy clenched around them, and they noticed, chuckling into the kiss, and as if they read eachother’s minds, they curled the fingers upwards, and your eyes widened in surprise as your moans only raised in volume. 

“Ed– Eddie, Steve– God, you’re–” You smiled in bliss, throwing your head back as the pleasure became unbearable but you wouldn’t stop it even if the world was caving in. They pulled away from the kiss and Steve desperately pulled your tank top up, bunching up on your collarbone, with his free hand as you kept yourself up with your hands behind you and supporting your weight. His lips latched onto one of your nipples and Eddie clamped on the other. 

Their fingers in you, their teeth biting softly and pulling on your nipples, and you couldn’t wait for them to actually make you theirs. The simple thought of that made your pussy clench and they moaned at the feeling, and finally, their fingers synchronized, going in and out of you, curled up all the way abusing your g spot and that threw you off the edge.

Your mouth fell open as you convulsed underneath them, trying to keep yourself up with your hands as your chest pressed against their mouths because you arched your back, and your hips moved quickly against their fingers as they helped you ride your orgasm out. You were breathing heavily, your body trembling, and their fingers slowly slipped out of you once you stopped clenching on them.

Your body fell against the bed when their mouths unlatched from your chest with subtle pops. They were breathing heavily and both men looked at one another, a smile on their face as they raised the fingers that were inside of you, and Eddie licked Steve’s while Steve licked his. 

Even in your fucked out state, you could see that action. You whined with need as they moaned at your taste. They wanted to dive in, but there was going to be time for that later on. They both turned their heads towards you, and they got up from the bed, Steve held your skirt, pulling it off followed by your underwear, while Eddie took this time to undress himself.

Your eyes had heart eyes, mouth drooling as you climbed further into the bed, taking your tank top off, throwing it somewhere in the room, and laying bare in front of the two men. 

“Aren’t you fucking beautiful?” Eddie’s hoarse voice made you smile as you spread your legs inviting him over, his throbbing cock all the way up, in alert, red tip oozing precum, letting you know just how desperate he was to have you. 

“Well, fuck Eddie… And to think we will have her for all eternity…” You couldn’t help the wide fucked out smile you showed the two men, who were staring at you, drool almost slipping from their lips. 

“And I will have you both…” And that made Eddie growl, his chest puffing out and looking at Steve, as if pleading, begging. Steve chuckled and gave his partner a soft kiss on the lips, but his hand went up, gripping the dark hair, and pulled his head back.

“You fuck her… and I will fuck you.” 

Your eyes widened at that but you were trembling in excitement, ready to go again even if your body was still spasming from your last climax. Steve let go of Eddie’s hair and the latter smirked at him, then crawled on the bed to get in between your legs.

“Hi sweetheart.” He smiled down at you and your arms wrapped around his shoulders, pulling him into a soft kiss. 

“Hi Eds…” A toothy grin spread on his lips and you slid your hand down, gripping onto his dick and a groan escaped his lips as you rubbed the head of it against your folds, coating it and mixing with his own precum.

“Shit.” He cursed and you positioned his dick so it would rest on your cunt, and he moved back and forth, coating it with your wetness as a lubricant. Your clit was brushed every time he pushed forward, making you moan out his name. 

“Eds, please– Please–” And who was he to deny your pretty cries. He grabbed his cock and guided it to your entrance. He bit his lip as he slowly sank into you, both of you letting out strangled moans of pure bliss and you felt so full. So fucking full.

You must have imagined it through your lust and your mind becoming cock drunk, but you felt as if your chest was lighter. It wasn’t your chest per se, but it was like inside. You couldn’t think much because Eddie decided to move, making your moan finally come out of your mouth.

“Pay attention here baby. Just let yourself feel.” His face was sweaty, his eyes dilated from pleasure as he thrust in and out of you, and the wet sounds made it all the more pornographic. You felt his movement grow faster and then he was balls deep inside of you, making you throw your head back in bliss as your nails dug into his back.

“Eddie! Fuck!!!” You could feel him in your belly, you were sure that if you pressed there you would be able to feel the tip of his dick inside of you. Just the bump of it and it thrilled you. His skin started slamming against yours, and you let go of him so he could hold himself up with his hands and arms so he could slam deeper into you.

“Fu–” And his movement stilled for a few seconds as his eyes widened and you wondered what happened to him, only to then see the most beautiful face he ever made since you met him. His face became flushed, red on his cheeks, eyes glossed over, his hair falling down on the sides, and there was a different sound of squelching, you maneuvered yourself the best you could to look behind Eddie, and a smirk spread on your lips.

Steve was now completely naked, his cock a little thicker than Eddie’s but Eddie’s was a little longer. Both of them, you wanted inside, but for now, this will have to do. You can take Steve later on. The brown-haired man had his index and middle fingers inside Eddie’s hole, using the lube you used for your toys that sat on your vanity.

Of course, he didn’t miss that.

“Fuck her and my fingers. Now.” It was a command and you couldn’t wait for Steve to treat you that way as well. You bit your lip as Eddie moved again as strangled moans were caught in his throat, moving inside of you, to then pull back to engulf Steve’s fingers inside of him.

Steve’s patience though, was running thin. His hand wasn’t enough. He had been stroking himself watching Eddie fucking into you, but he wasn’t going to cum on his hand. There was no way. He hissed when Eddie clenched on him because you clenched on him. It was a chain reaction. He knew Eddie could take it, even with no preparation or just one finger, just as Steve could take him. 

He slid a third finger inside and Eddie’s eyes widened, stilling his hips all the way inside of you, a whimper escaping your lips as you felt his tip brush your G-Spot. Steve’s pace increased, not letting Eddie move as he pumped his fingers in and out of him, Eddie moaning with his eyes wide as Steve started scissoring him. 

“S-Stevie– Steve, please, more, more–” And seeing Eddie in this state was making your hips roll against him, making him groan and whimper, his arms trembling slightly and your hands went to his face, rubbing his cheeks, cleaning a bit of his sweat off with a smile on your lips.

“Steve… He is so beautiful…” At your words, Steve chuckled and pulled his fingers out of Eddie, a sigh escaping from the man who was whining on top of you, still inside of you.

“And you haven’t seen nothing yet.” And Steve had already coated himself in the lube, and he gripped Eddie’s hip, rubbing the tip of his cock against the small hole, and then you saw it.

You saw how Eddie’s eyes widened, and you could see the strangled choke as his mouth fell open, and then it shut, a whimper trapped in his throat, biting his bottom lip as Steve sunk inside of him, slowly, yet a satisfied groan escaped Steve’s lips, smile on his face as he closed his eyes at the feeling.

There it was again, the relief in your chest. A warmth that slowly started spreading all over, and you didn’t know if to tell them, to warn them. It didn’t feel bad, it was feeling good, like a breath of relief. You didn’t notice your eyes had glossed over, a tear slipping out of the corner as Steve bottomed out into Eddie.

Eddie was breathing heavily as Steve leaned forward to press soft kisses against the inked skin, and then he looked over his shoulder to see your face. He smiled fondly, despite what you three were doing. Eddie looked up and smiled weakly at you, leaning down to press a soft kiss on your lips before talking.

“Your heart… is mended.” 

And then Steve leaned over Eddie’s body, holding his waist, and he reeled back, only to plunge back inside of him, and thanks to that, Eddie went deep inside of you as well. The three of you moaned out, feeling whole, complete, full. You never felt this happiness before, it was as if everything in your life finally made sense, for once.

Steve’s thrusts became rough as his fingertips dug into Eddie’s sides, and Eddie was trembling on top of you as his hips moved inside of you thanks to Steve’s movements. Your cunt clenched around Eddie and he whimpered, his ass clenching around Steve’s. The latter man growled thanks to the stimulation, and a loud smack was heard across the room, Eddie jolting with a gasp.

“Move those hips, Eds. Fuck us.” Steve groaned out and you couldn’t help but guide your hand in between you and Eddie, your fingers finding your clit to rub circles on it, twitching at the sensation.

But then the air was knocked out of your lungs when Eddie started swaying his hips back and forth, thrusting inside of you, and making Steve’s cock thrust inside of him. He was doing it at a fast pace, choked-up moans escaping Eddie’s lips as he felt himself lose his mind to pleasure.

Steve was moaning behind, one of his hands holding onto Eddie’s ribs so he could move his waist freely, and he ran his other hand through his hair, feeling pleasure he hadn’t felt before, and he knew Eddie was feeling the same because of how cockdrunk he was right now. He can’t wait for his turn next time.

You couldn’t hold it in, it was too much, everything was just too much, but yet it wasn’t enough, and it will never be enough most likely because you will never get tired of these two. You were meant to be together. Your pussy clenched as you started trembling under Eddie, whimpering, whining, tears falling from your eyes.

“I’m– I’m going to cum– I can’t– I can’t hold it–!” You warned them and Eddie cried out when you clenched on him, and he once again clenched around Steve.

“F-Fuck, Steve, I’m going to cum too, I’m–” Eddie moaned out, his hips stopping the movement he was railing you with. Steve felt the coil in his stomach too, his balls tightening, and he smirked in bliss as he grabbed Eddie’s waist once more and started slamming himself inside of him, in order to make him bounce into you at each thrust.

Eddie leaned down so he could kiss you, but your lips never touched. It was just tongues swirling around, lips grazing every now and then as you inhaled his moans and he inhaled yours. 

And then, everything was white. You almost bit your tongue when your second climax hit you, without warning, your belly exploding as you clenched tightly around Eddie’s cock, which was still pistoning inside of you thanks to Steve’s thrusts. You were speechless, choked up, drool falling off the side of your mouth as you spasmed under Eddie.

Eddie was whimpering as he felt your clenching around him, and he gurgled a moan as he spilled inside of you, his ass clenching onto Steve. His arms trembled to keep himself up, his body fired up thanks to his climax, and Steve moaned loudly, his hips stuttering with one final thrust as he slammed himself inside of Eddie in one final thrust, making Eddie do the same with you, and his cum filled Eddie’s insides.

The three of you finally unclenched with one another and you thought you were going to die, not feeling like you had enough air coming inside of your lungs. Eddie was over you, trying to keep himself up in order to not crush you, but he was losing the battle. He looked over his shoulder towards Steve.

“S-Stevie… You need to get off or I’m gonna crush her.” Steve had his forehead pressed on Eddie’s back, trying to catch his breath. He nodded at that, and he left a kiss on his lover’s skin before pulling himself up and retreating so that he could pull out from Eddie.

A wince escaped from the long-haired man, and when Steve was out, he felt all of his cum dripping down from his hole, making him shiver. He slowly pulled out of you, making you snap back into reality, making you realize that this really had happened, and it made you whine as he left your cunt.

Eddie plopped right next to you, breathing heavily, and Steve crawled to lay on your other side, his chest going up and down from trying to get the right amount of oxygen back into his lungs. You felt Eddie’s cum coming out of you and onto the sheets, but you didn’t care. You really didn’t. Not when these two were right next to you.

“You okay baby?” Steve asked and you were about to answer, only for Eddie to interrupt in a hoarse, spent voice.

“Me or her? We have to get some personal nicknames for the three of us.” You couldn’t help but give a weak chuckle, your body sinking into the bed as both men turned on their sides to cuddle up to you, wrapping their arms around you, enveloping you like a cocoon.

“What… now?” You managed to breathe out, and Eddie kissed your shoulder as he rubbed circles on your arm.

“Well, you come with us now.” Eddie explained, but that did nothing for you to understand.

“Where?” And Steve smiled, his hand raising up and you knew he was going to snap his fingers.

“To our home.” 

And with a snap, the house became empty. Furniture gone, pictures erased, and no sign of a human ever living in that place. Your mother never had a daughter. Your name was not in the registry of your company. And your ex-boyfriend forgot he ever cheated.

But everything remained. Your mother could not bear her face, and nothing could fix her. The company eliminated the tyrants, and it was now a workplace for people who put their all into work. And your ex was left alone, without a home, without furniture, without anything at all. 

And a year later–

“I HOPE THEY ROT IN HELL!” A cute blonde with a ponytail screamed in the middle of a field. She was screaming with all the capacity her lungs allowed her, letting all of her pent-up anger out. 

Three figures emerged from the woods, two men, and one woman. The three of them were holding hands as they slowly approached the young girl who was already scared out of her mind but instantly calmed down when you sweetly smiled at her.

“Chrissy, right?” 

“Y-Yes?”

And you knew she was going to cooperate, filling you with joy, but a small hint of a wicked smile formed on your lips as the girl explained what happened to her, and it wasn’t just you who felt that joy.

They both smiled as they looked at you, your first task and job on this new Valentine’s Day. You could feel their pride as they looked at you, as you talked to the girl whose heart had been destroyed just like yours once had. You could feel what they felt and they could feel you as well. That was something new.

A constant chain reaction.

End.

a/n: fuck them fluffy fics

[trendywaifus]

↳ dramatic irony

an: this is pretty long so buckle up. i hope the pacing is okay too. if you have questions or thoughts about this, feel free to lmk and ill be happy to answer it for you. sorry it took a bit to post, i was trying to tweak stuff (still am so bear with me). i’m surprised i made the smut part pretty tame too.

records: spider devil, real name: unknown — spider–woman from planet “new babylon–18”, a dystopian planet that’s currently being overrun by devils who were once humans. for one to be become a devil is unknown.

featuring, spider–woman! kafka x spider–woman! reader

cw: strap use, cursing, teasing, penetration, petnames, praising, porn with plot, slight brat taming, spanking

NEUVA YORK

EARTH -928

“ are you seriously stopping to smoke in the lobby while miguel is waiting for us? you could of done this outside!” you coughed, lazily waving the thin clouds of smoke away from your face. your fellow spider colleague, who’s tall frame was resting against the pillar, blew out another small puff of smoke from her pink glossy lips. it amazed you that she gladly took the trouble of pulling up her mask just enough to smoke a cigarette—in a lobby full of different spider people with sensitive noses.

on cue, a series of coughs and complaints about the smoke erupts.

“ knock it off lady, this suit isn’t smoke–proof! “

“ smoking causes cancer, y’know! “

“ smoking is not allowed! this is a spidey smoke—free society! . . .is it? “

“ you need to leave! “

“ alright, alright. i’m done, people. “ she sneers, throwing the cigarette butt in a trash nearby. the spider–women casts you a little smile before pulling her mask back down. “ let’s go darling, i’m ready.” she saunters towards the exit of the lobby with you following behind. she stops at the doorway before looking over her shoulder. “ and for the itsy bitsy spider who sounded confused about this being a “ spidey smoke free society ” the lobby goes quiet. “ . . .it’s not. i don’t see a sign that says it is so i’ll do what i want~”

a loud ooh burn echoes through the wide space as you two walked out.

“ i guess you could say, she smoked them! hahaaa,”one of the spiders laughed then stopped awkwardly when they noticed nobody was humoring them. “ ok, i’ll just go swing around and rethink my life now. “

“ i can’t believe you did that. “ you grumbled, walking along one of the steel pillars, careful to not bump into the other spider members passing by. she laughs huskily, lightly nudging you with her elbow. “ oh come on, doll. technically i’m right. also, i’ll admit that the lobby wasn’t an ideal spot to smoke but i was a lil’ bored and wanted to see their reactions. “ you sighed exasperatedly. you know her enough now to find her reason to be typical. she’s a flirty yet calm, mysterious character who enjoys playing around and watching people squirm for her own entertainment.

it reminds you of a certain women you once knew. if it wasn’t for the little extra rasp in her voice and contrasting mannerisms you would of said it was her in disguise. because spider society and multiverse theory actually exists, you’re starting to think the spider–woman beside you was simply an alternate version of her. you cringed at the thought. hopefully not. you want to avoid old memories. you haven’t seen her without her mask and she hasn’t told you her name (more like she’s been avoiding it!). it could be any woman behind that mask.

yeah, she’s innocent until proven guilty.

after several long minutes of walking through open areas and closed spaces, the dark, ominous setting grows familiar. “ aaand, we’re here. “ she mumbles, crossing her arms with amusement as she sees miguel’s large silhouette standing on the small platform above with his back towards you and her, peering at various holograms.

“ you’re late. “ miguel grunts irritably, turning around to face the two of you. “ forgive us, mr. huncho man. i had to smoke. ‘can’t go on a mission without a smoke.” she admits bluntly, turning her head to wink at you and you roll your eyes. he sighs with annoyance and pinches the bridge of his nose. “ ¿por qué elegí a estas personas? creo que podría perderlo. . “ he mumbles under his breath.

“ english please, mr. huncho~ unless you can speak chinese. “

miguel grunts again, waving her off, “ enough, i’m going to talk about the mission now. “ he returns his attention back to his holographic computers and begrudgingly pulls up multiple holographic images of a huge, otherworldly tree that had vast amount of long, lanky branches. “ this phenomenon is called the imaginary tree that sits right outside of the multiverse. it’s something we discovered because of the spot’s wild dimensional rifts. one of our most important equipment was caught in one of the rifts during our recent emergency mission.—“

you him cut off, tapping your left foot, agitated,“ so let me guess, you want us to somehow go to that big ass tree that sits right outside of multiverse to find a singular equipment of ours that happen to be important? do we even have the technology to go outside—“

“ por dios, can i please finish? please? “ he growls, slamming his palm against the keyboard. “ sure, mr. i have anger issues for life.” you huffed, earning a chuckle from your partner.

“ i heard that! ugh, anyways, we learned that the leaves on those branches holds some sort of universe to them. our equipment is in one of these universes and after some time, we were able to trace and pinpoint which one it’s currently in.” miguel types for a few moments before another set of photos appears on the holographic screen. the first two pictures showed a sea of stars, planets, and stars painted on a specific leaf, and then the last two showed a planet that looked similar to earth. “ it’s on this unknown planet. — “

“ alright so what does this missing equipment look like?— “

“ i was getting to that, cállate! “

miguel smoothes his hand over his face before he resumes typing. after a few moments, two more photos of an orange cube that looked hilariously similar to a rubix cube flashes on the screen. “ pfft. . .” you stifled back your laughter as you stared at the orange, shitty looking cube. is that one of our most important equipment that was lost in some unknown universe and planet? a fucking shitty version of a rubix cube? “ why are you laughing? what’s so funny? “ miguel asks grumpily, already awfully annoyed at your disruptive behavior.

“ who made the design of that? “ you burst out laughing, hunching over as you held your stomach. “miguel, you really wanna make us get a damn rubix cube! do we have to solve the puzzle to activate it?–“

“ that’s enough! just get the damn thing! here, take these! “ he throws you two a pair of watches similar to the gizmo. you swiftly caught it and analyzed the exterior design. “ put that on your other wrist. this is for you to specifically travel outside of the multiverse to that universe. it’ll also help you locate the lost equipment and since those devices are only the beta versions, i urge you to finish the mission as quickly as possible. if you’re in trouble, i will personally come as back up. any questions? “

you raise your hand up, miguel sighs,

“ yes, you. what is your question? “

“ it’s not a question but—“

“ no, don’t even finish it, just go. “

you pouted and walked away. the taller woman giggles, sending miguel a lazy wave, “ see you soon, mr.huncho~ “

“ yeah, yeah, adios. remember what i said! “

UNIVERSE—???????

PLANET ??????

TIME: ?????

“ this earth looks beyond better than my earth! ” you said jokingly, gracefully jumping onto one of the highest buildings in a random area. the city’s architecture was beautiful and futuristic. no brick or wooden structures, the exteriors seem to be made up of some sort of metal. digital billboards were everywhere, causing the lights to contrast harshly with the night sky. do they ever get tired of ads constantly in their face everywhere they look?

“ i get you darling, if we weren’t on an important mission, i’d explore as i please. this planet is better than mine just from looks alone. it’s practically a hellhole there. “ she chuckles, her heels clinking against the metal surface as she walks towards the edge. you take off your mask to feel the wind brush through your hair. you breathe in, the air even smells fresh and clean. “ i don’t think you’ve ever told me about your home planet. you said you were from new babylon. .19? “

“ 18. “ she corrects you softly, voice barely under a whisper as she stares at you for a few moments. noticing the change in her voice and the staring from the corner of your eye, you cast her a side glance. thanks to her mask, you can’t tell the expression she has on right now. “ you okay? are you staring at me? is there something on my face?“

she leisurely walks over to you and gently lifts your chin up, making you look up at her. “ darling, did i ever tell that you have such pretty eyes? “ the tangible softness and smile in her voice made your stomach flutter. did she? she did compliment you a handful of times during your last three missions with her but you don’t recall her ever saying that. “ um, yes? no? i don’t think you’ve ever told me that surprisingly. .” you replied shyly, averting your gaze somewhere else, embarrassed by her white slits fixated on you. chuckling, she retracts her hand away and brushes past you. “ now you know. “

“ y-you’re so weird, you know that? and you still have to tell me more about your home planet! “ you yelled, hurriedly slipping your mask back on to follow her. “ i know and yes, i’ll tell you more after we’re done. right now, we have to go find and retrieve our missing cube. take a look at the device he gave us and find the radar. “

you did so, observing the unnecessarily confusing button layout. “ i don’t think that man ever told us how to properly work this thing. “ you muttered, messing around with the buttons until you luckily got to the radar screen. “ got it! “

“ good girl. now, according to the radar, our objective isn’t too far from here which makes our job easier. follow me and try to keep up, will you? “ she teases, gracefully jumping off the building and web swings away. you sighed, copying her actions and followed her not too far behind. as you swing through the bustling streets of the city and occasionally glancing at the billboard ads, there was one particular one that caught your eye. your heart drops at the sight, you nearly lost your momentum.

it was a wanted poster of a beautiful purple—haired woman who wore a low messy ponytail. she had sunglasses resting above her pupil-less eyes. “ black–spider. .” you mumbled bitterly. what bother you the most was not her identical features but her smile. that eerily familiar smile of hers made you rip your attention away from the billboard and continue following your partner ahead of you. so even in this universe, she’s. . .

“ you okay back there, doll? you’re awfully quiet.” her concerned voice comes through the intercom of your gizmo. it took you a moment to respond. “ yeah, i am. there’s so many ads, i-i kind of got a little lightheaded from trying to look at them all! “ you laughed nervously, she merely hums, not really buying your excuse but decides to brush it off.

“ we’re here by the way. it seems to be located in that museum over there. “

there was a large museum at the end of a deserted street near a semi–active highway. “ a museum? why would something like that be in a museum? “ you mused, landing ontop of the roof with the older woman. “ it seems like someone had an interesting eye of treasure. wait. .look, over there. “ she points over towards the entrance where two guards were laid out unconscious.

“ no way, that means. .”

“ mhm, we’re not the only ones looking to take something from here. be on high alert. for now let’s split up, “ she unclamps her weapon strap and pulls out her m-10, “ make sure to stay hidden until you can locate the cube. “ you squinted at her weapon. “ you want me to stay hidden but you’re going to use your gun for a stealth mission—“

she pulls out a silencer from her pouch and winks at you before firmly twisting it on the barrel. “ so what were you saying, darling? “

“ never mind, i’ll go find a vent now. “

you two swiftly departed and after ten minutes of searching, you managed to find a closed vent on the right side of the museum. “ thank god. “ you used one of your clawed fingers to tinker with the screws until you got them all loosened. after cautiously setting the metal screen to the side, you crawl inside with ease. as you moved further down the vent, you hear muffled sounds of voices; one sounded like a man and the other, a younger girl.

“ hey. “ your partner’s voice abruptly comes through the gizmo. “ yeah what is it? so far, i’m hearing two people. one a male and the other, a—“

“ i know i saw. but there’s actually three. the third one,” her voice turns strangely serious, “ which is a woman, departed from those two earlier. that little girl had told her the location of the cube we’re after. i’ll deal with those two to distract them. the cube is somewhere near the right side where you are, it’s in one of the rooms. i’m going to assume you’re still in the vents so do your best to quickly find the right room before she does. use the radar to guide you with diligence. avoid her at all costs, only interact with her when you absolutely need to. why i’m stressing this to you? it’s because i have a hunch that woman has similar abilities like i do. once i take care of those two, i’ll come straight to help you. do you get me? “

“ yes, i do. i’ll do my best. “ you say, nibbling on your bottom lip as anxiety pours into your veins.

“ good. i know everything sounds pretty worrisome right now but i promise it’s going to be okay. be careful, darling. “

the intercom blinks out leaving you alone to your thoughts. you inhale and exhale a few times to recompose yourself before continuing to crawl through the narrow space. “ to think about it now, that was the first time i ever heard her sound so. .serious. “ you muttered, glancing down at your watch to keep track of the radar. despite that woman being the way she is, you noticed how little she seemed to care about herself. she’d be quick to throw herself into line of danger for the hell of it. it was as if she did not have a lick of fear of death. but overtime, as you two completed missions together, she became a little more cautious and suspiciously protective towards you.

“ i really do want to know more about you and i will.” you vowed, stopping at a particular vent and peeked through the screen. “ that’s it! “ you cheered, observing the orange cube that was placed in a protective glass at the middle of the wide, spacey room. you slide the screen to the side and before you can jump down, the sound of a door creeps open and heels clanking against the tile floor bounces off the walls. “ oh shit, she’s. . .here. . .” you trail off in shock as the familiar woman you seen from the wanted poster approaches the display.

“ there it is. “ the magenta–haired woman drawls, her voice strikes a strong sense of deja vu in you. “ so my suspicions were right. .” your heart skip a beat as you watch the woman carefully take the protective glass off the display and sets it down on the floor. she grasps the cube in her gloved hand and analyzes it with a soft hum. “ elio wanted me to get this? how boring. “ with a heavy heart, you slowly crawled out of the vent while still remain attached to the ceiling. “ if i can get it with my web—“

from the shiny reflection of the cube, the woman catches a glimpse of you on the ceiling, and chuckles lowly. “ i can see you up there, little spider~ “ she swiftly pulls out a similar weapon like your partners and shoots at you. thanks to your spider senses, you were able to dodge swiftly and land down on to the floor. “ we can talk about this! there’s no need for the unnecessary violence!” you shouted, running around and dodging as she continues to rain bullets at you.

“ why not? i’m just simply following a script~ and you better be careful little spider, you don’t want to run into another spider’s web. “

“ excuse me, what—nngh! “

just like that, your body is restrained by thin, purple threads. where did they even come from? you tried your best to struggle but the more you did, the more tighter the threads became. “ don’t struggle now, it’ll only get more painful for you. “ she taunts, slowly approaching you, one hand holding the cube while the other was slightly clenched, purple threads emerging from her gloved fingers. how did she do that so fast? wasn’t she just shooting at you just a few moments ago?

“ i swear we can talk about this, um. .um, “

“ kafka, the name’s kafka. “ kafka smiles at you, now in front of your restrained body. “ so that’s your real name(s). . “ you said without thinking, sounding baffled and hurt. kafka raises a brow, her smile not faltering. “ i don’t know what you mean by that but yes it is. anyways, little spider, you wanted this right?“ she gestures towards the cube in her hand.

“ y-yes, kafka. that’s what i came here for. it’s technically ours so i’m basically here to get it back.”

“ ours? i see. sure, you can have it back but on one condition, dear.”

“ and what’s the condition? “

kafka’s smile turns into a smirk. “ i want to see your face. “

looking at her with wide eyes, you spat, “ see my face? what does that even accomplish for you? “ she doesn’t react to your aggression and sighs. “ look, we don’t have much time. do you agree to the condition or not? “

“ f-fine, fine. just do it already. “ where is that woman when you need her?

kafka reaches her hand out and carefully peels the mask off your head. her face twists into shock, red lips forming into a small o. why did she look so shocked to see your face? “ well? “ you raised a brow. her eyes softens and you felt the threads slightly loosen up around your body. “ I knew i recognized that voice from somewhere. elios never told me you’d be the one i’d unmask. this is a surprise for me.”

growing anxious from her calculating gaze, you turned your head to the side, nibbling on your bottom lip. a distance sound of heels hurriedly approaches the room. “ it seems like we’re out of time. so one more thing, darling, “ kafka coos, firmly grabbing your jaw to force you to look back into her eyes. “ you have very pretty eyes—“

“ that’s enough. “ sense of relief rushes through you when you see your partner hold the pointed end of her submachine gun against kafka’s head. kafka calmly puts her hands in the air, letting the threads to dissipate, and allowing your aching limbs to move freely. “ keep your head forward and give me what you have in your hand and give her back her mask. “

“ yeah, yeah, i was just about done with her anyways. here and here, sweetheart. “ kafka hands her the cube from behind her back and you you’re mask. “ by the way, you sound very familiar, i wonder who you are, hm~” even when kafka has a barrel pressed against the back of her head, she still has a relaxed smile on her face.

“ oh please. you know exactly who i am. you should also know what will happen if you disobey the next set of orders i give you. i haven’t killed anything in a while so i’m trigger happy right now and if you even think about attempting your spirit whisper on us, you can say bye to breathing. “ she nearly growls, lazily throwing you the cube after you put your mask back on.

“ how scary, you really are me. fine, i’ll be obedient. oh! I want to ask this, what did you do to the other two in the lobby? did you. .persuade them? “

“ oh, you know me so well. “ the other supposed counterpart says sarcastically, “ now, I want you to walk out that door with your arms up and don’t look back. i wiped your subordinates’ memories so they’re still waiting for you in the lobby. go ahead and walk. don’t look back unless you’re ready to eat a bullet~“

kafka simply chuckles and follows the orders that was given to her. she saunters towards the doors, taking several steps before she stops. “ one last thing, i promise. since you’re me, look out for her, would ya? you know who i’m talking about. “

“ no comment. “

kafka’s shoulders shrugs as a another chuckle escapes her lips and she walks out the door. your partner sighs heavily, putting her m-10 back into her strap. “ now let’s hurry up and return back. i’ll be right behind you. i had enough of me for today. “ you quietly nodded.

NEUVA YORK

EARTH-929

“ so is kafka really your name? “ you asked softly, fiddling around with the cube in your hands, staring off towards the futuristic scenery on a sky–scraper. kafka stands beside you with her arms crossed. “ yes it is, darling. i didn’t tell you because, well, to avoid things getting complicated between us. I guess it doesn’t matter much now though. “

“ it did get complicated for me but why would it be for you?”

kafka sighs, “ just like any other spider–men and spider–women here, we lost someone precious to us which is what they call it our canon event. the person i lost whom i loved was you. “ you peer at her with wide eyes, nearly dropping the cube in your hands. “ me? i know typically a spider loses a gwen, mj, peter, or family member but, me? is that why you act so. .weird around me? “

“ what, weird? you mean me complimenting you and whatnot? darling, you may not be my (name) but it doesn’t change the fact that i find you very beautiful~ you may look similar to her but your personalities and style makes you two completely different people in my eyes. admittedly, i fell in love with you, the you standing right here beside me. the you who i have a second chance to protect. “

you stand there in silence, processing her words. the kafka standing beside you was different from the one in your universe. the one who apparently didn’t trust you enough to tell you her real name, the one who disappeared without a trace. “ it feels so weird to be told this from you, well not you.— “

“ let me guess, an alternative me in your world?“ kafka inquired, you nod your head meekly. “ yes, but she was black spider—well she called herself that but the norm here is black cat apparently. she was very hard to catch but she always knew how to attract me. there was some instances where we fought together for a common goal and through that we’ve got closer, well by closer, i mean. . “ your cheeks turn red from the sudden flashbacks rushing through your head.

kafka laughs at the shy tone of your voice, “ so it was like that, huh? lucky me. “ you rolled your eyes, pulling your mask off due to it getting embarrassingly stuffy. “ a-as i was saying, one thing led to another and something came up. “ you frowned, “ a group called pteruges-v devils, a group of wannabe devils appeared out of no where and after i took care of them with her, she. .completely disappeared without saying a word. “

she hums, “ pterugues-v devils. .even in your universe, they’re such a pain to deal with. “ you perked up, looking at her in confusion. “ you have that group in your universe too? “

kafka snorts, “ a group? they’re a literal race. well, they were once humans who turned into devils. “ okay, that’s interesting. “ how does that work? “ you asked skeptically.

“ humans who dedicate their lives to pleasure and destruction turn into devils. “ she explains simply.

“ and you fight these devils daily? “

“ yes that’s right darling. it gets pretty tedious after a while but i’m just doing what i can for my home world and to pass time. but as for the situation with that alternative me in your universe, i have no doubt in my mind that she left a letter behind for you somewhere. that’s something i would do if i had to leave with the intention of never coming back. “ you hope so. closure is nice for a change.

“ i’ll make sure to look around for a letter when i return back to my universe, kafka. thank you. “ albeit you can’t see her, kafka smiles behind her mask and pats your head, your chest tightens with warmth. abruptly, you gently pushed away her hand, causing the taller woman to emit out a confused hum. “ by the way, i haven’t seen your face yet. i mean, i technically did but i wanna see you. “

after a moment of silence, kafka merely shrugs. “ of course, doll. “ she slowly takes off her mask and almost immediately, light purple tresses flows down her shoulders and stops just above her breasts. she managed to fit all that hair under her mask, what was her secret? her face was fairly the same much like the two kafkas. the only difference between her and them was her hair being a lighter purple and her eyes were purple and pink with black slits as pupils. nonetheless, she was still stunning. “ and you say i’m the beautiful one. “ you snorted. without thinking, you reached out to touch her cheek. chuckling, kafka nuzzles against your palm, her lips stretches into a grin, showing off her fangs.

“ fangs. .that’s. . .actually hot. “ you mumbled, (e/c) eyes subconsciously flickering towards her eyes and parted lips. she gets the message and curls a strong arm around your frame, pulling you closer to her. “ mm, i’m flattered. “ she smirks, leaning down to kiss your nose, cheeks, and finally your lips. her lips were slightly chapped but felt perfect against yours—they always did.

“ you think miguel knows we‘re back? “ you asked between kisses. kafka hums, “ mhm, maybe. “ she kisses the side of your mouth and down your jaw, your breath hitches. “ do you want to stop and report back to him, babydoll? “ god, you’re starting to feel things when kafka calls you petnames like that. “ unfortunately yes, and actually after that, do you want to. .have a glass of wine with me at my place? or my universe? “

she pulls herself away, purple eyes twinkling with anticipation. “ i prefer vodka but sure. “ your nose crunched up in disgust, “ ew, vodka? yeah, i did not expect that from you but then again, you are pretty crazy. i guess that runs in the dna. “

kafka rolls her eyes with a smirk, “ runs in the dna? ironic coming from you, darling. but you know what?”

“ what? “

she tilts her head, leans close to your ear, and purrs, “ but you love it. “

you groan, lightly smacking her shoulder before pulling yourself away from her. you turned around to hide the flustered look on your face, missing kafka’s warm smile. “ l-let’s go report back to miguel, i can already hear him cursing at us in spanish with a constipated look on his face. “ you stretch for a bit and slip your mask on. “ then after that, we can relax at my place. make sure to not get lost behind me, yeah? ” just like that, you dived off the sky scraper, free falling. kafka chuckles, watching as you casually twist your body around and give her a cute little wave.

“ i can’t wait for the others to find out more about you for themselves. but for now, i get to have you all to myself~ “ with a snap of her fingers, her mask that she had hand in her hand, disappears and reappears back on her head, masking her. she dives off the edge, intending to catch up to your figure falling down ways below her.

|—|

“ we’re back, mr huncho~ “ kafka announced, walking into his little lair with you side by side. miguel parted his mouth to lecture you two about being late again until you held up the cube for him; his mouth closes and he simply sighs. “ good work, you two. how was the mission? did the device i give you cause any hinderance? “ he asks, taking the cube from your hand with one of his red spiderwebs.

“ not at all! it worked pretty well for us, miguel. thanks for lending it to us! it helped a lot! “

“ you’re welcome~” lyla reveals herself in front of you, booping your nose with a holographic finger. “ lyla, i missed you! where were you when miguel was cursing at me in spanish! “ you pouted.

“ okay, no i did not—“ lyla gasps at him and miguel loudly grunts, teleporting in front of him with her arms crossed. “ while i was away giving a tour guide to one of our newest members, you were giving one of my favorites a hard time? how dare you! “

annoyed, miguel skims a hand over his face and waves her off. “ we’re not doing this right now—you two, give me back the beta devices so you can go. “

“ yeah ladies, so i can annoy deal with him! “

“ oh dios mio, que alguien me mate ahora. “

NEW YORK, UPSTATE MANHATTAN

EARTH—2024

TIME: 11:50 PM

“ not the reaction i was expecting for but did you see his reaction when lyla got in his face? he was so over it! “ you laughed, sliding one of your half open window up so you can enter inside, kafka follows behind. “ mhm, that man is certified sassy. i’m almost jealous. “ she crosses her arms, looking around what she assumes to be your living room. two small, black settee sofa and a small brown wooden coffee table at the middle with record player on it. not bad.

“ i’m going to go get the wine from a small wine cabinet i have in the kitchen and i’ll see if i can find the vodka. i think i have an untouched bottle my friend gifted to me. “ you said, taking off your mask and tossed it on the kitchen counter as you entered into the kitchen. “ wine cabinet? i didn’t know you had it like that, doll. “ kafka joked, sitting down on the sofa and props her leg over the other. she takes off her mask and sets it aside her. gloved fingers runs through her purple hair to push back the hair away from her eyes.

“ well, my friend’s friend, who’s a researcher, gave it to me as a gift for contributing to their research. I promise i’m not rich like you think i am. i was just very lucky and was only able to get a job because of my ex—ugh, it’s hard to explain and it gets kinda complicated. “ you sighed, opening the wine cabinet to grab a bottle of wine and luckily a bottle of vodka after searching for a bit. “ don’t worry, i’m all ears darling, you can explain it to me while we sit and drink. “

you grabbed two glasses and poured the drinks. “ no, no, i’m being serious kafka. i’ll try to summarize it. “ careful not to spill the drinks, you slowly walked back into the living room and handed her her drink and plopped down next to her. “ alright, talk to me. “ she drawls with amusement, bringing the glass of vodka to her lips. “ so, i met my ex back in high school who at the time, was my friend. her name was himeko. “ kafka abruptly coughs, nearly choking on her drink. you throw her a concerned look. “ what? are you okay—“

“ no, no, darling. it just went down the wrong hole, that’s all. “ she clears her throat, sending you a shaky, tight–lipped smile. you merely blinked at her. “ okay? anyways, through her, i met her former girlfriend, topaz and i became long–term friends with them until college. topaz’s step–father, adventerine, was the ceo of a popular bank called bust. he had connections because of his status and one of his connections was to a ambitious research company that he was funding. the same company where topaz’s friend, asta, is a lead researcher at. “

you stopped to take a long sip of your wine, the bitter yet addictive taste of wine flows down your throat. kafka hums, lazily swirling the drink in her palm. “ what is this research company about? “

“ it’s called astral wonders, it’s a multi–layered research company. one section of researchers focuses on aerospace, second section, aeronautics, third, computer science, and the last one, biology. i was a part–time researcher in the biology unit where i met my. .former mentor at. “ kafka raises a brow at the sad tone of your voice. something definitely had happen between you and former mentor.

“ anyways yeah, after topaz and himeko broke up during college, me and himeko got close. we ended up getting together after college and dated for three years. the first year of us dating, i graduated with a biology degree and wanted a job fast. during that time, me and topaz wasn’t really on good terms so himeko managed to convince her to land me a spot at the research company and the rest was history. .with a few twist and turns. but, that’s a story for another time. “

“ can’t wait to hear that one, doll. i’m sure you’ve been through a lot while maintaining your spidey identity. i can see in your eyes that have strong sense of who you are. “ kafka smiles, taking one last sip of her vodka and places it on the coffee table. “ what’s with you and my eyes? “ you inquired, taking a sip of the wine. you were starting to feel tipsy. kafka lets out a low chuckle, she reaches her hand out to touch your thigh, causing you to freeze up.

“ come closer and i’ll tell you, i promise i won’t bite~” kafka purrs in a raspy, seductive voice. your body grows hot when her gaze looks you up and down with roguish intent. she beckons you closer with a finger and you lean your body towards her without hesitation. “ i’d be mad if you didn’t,“ you mumbled, taking it upon yourself to close the distance until your lips are brushing against hers. “ now tell me why you like my eyes. “

you swear her pupils dilated when you said that. “ they say that the eyes are a window to a person’s soul, “ she started, snaking her hand under your knee and propped your leg over her lap. you place a hand on her shoulder, ready to pounce on her lap. “ and to put it simply, those (color) eyes of yours hold so much transparency to them that i can almost see what you’re feeling, yet when i try to pry deeper, i simply see a reflection of myself. your soul is rightfully guarded and that’s what i like. “

“ how poetic, kafka. “ you whispered, holding back a soft groan as her lips trail down your jaw. kafka giggles, kissing at your heated skin. “ on my lap, darling. “ she says, tapping your knee. you quickly shifted on her lap, straddling her. her dark purple, gloved hands hooks themselves on your hips. your lips fully presses against hers and thread your fingers in her purple hair. you were quick to deepen the kiss, tilting your head. kafka’s tongue skims along your bottom lip, you open your mouth just enough for her to slip inside. the strong taste of vodka fills your tastebuds as her tongue swirls with yours, eliciting a moan from your throat. you’re starting to feel even more intoxicated.

“ ‘want you. “ you breathed, after breaking the kiss too soon for kafka’s liking. her hands explores up your sides then back down until she stops at your thighs and squeezes them through your spandex tights. “ oh, i know, babydoll. “ she stands up, easily lifting you up with her and instinctively, you wrap your legs around her waist. “ where’s your bedroom? or do you want to continue here? ‘doesn’t matter to me~ “

“ my bedroom is just around the corner through the main open doorway. “ you whispered, burying your face into the crook of her neck. she follows your directions and a minute later, your back hits the sweet surface of your mattress. “ doesn’t it feel illegal that we’re gonna have sex and we’re not even from the same universe? “ you asked between kisses, kafka draws out a long hum before simply saying,

“ there’s no rule saying we can’t so i don’t see any wrong in having some fun. “ she helps you undress out of your suit and you try to do the same for her but she stops you. you give her a puzzled look. “ no need, darling. this suit is tech. “

“ what? “ you watch in awe as her suit loses form, leaving glitchy led screens in its wake similar to miguel’s suit. “ how did you get your hands on that?”

“ it’s a secret~ “ she replies smugly, enjoying the appalled expression on your flushed face as your eyes scanned her now naked body. you clicked your tongue, you really need to stop being attracted to crazy women. her hand dips down your stomach and plays with your clit. a soft moan erupts from your throat. “ fuck. .”

kafka buries her face into the crook of your neck and drags her lips downward, sharp fangs gently grazing your skin. a shiver runs down your spine. “ usually i’ll be back home after a mission and relax with a glass of vodka but i’m pleased i get the chance of spending my night fucking you, doll. “ she pulls away to hold intimate eye contact with you, her lustful gaze made your heart wanna explode.

“ sh-shut up and get the strap before you drive me crazy. there’s a black box just under the bed where i have it inside.“

“ anything for you, sweets. “ kafka purrs, removing herself off of you and gets on her knees to search under the bed. she finds the box with ease and pulls it out with the help of her spider web. she examines the box and takes off the lid. “ mm, interesting. “ the plastic cock was thick and about six inches, and the design was black with purple webs engraved on it, nearly identical to her own suit. kafka already knew where this was from and she couldn’t help but feel a sliver of something—something she hasn’t felt for a long time; jealousy. “ at least she has taste. “ kafka scoffs, standing upright to put on the harness.

“ did she ever use this on you? “ she asks strangely, brows slightly furrowed with a little frown on her face. “ no, she never got to use it and neither did i. “ kafka’s face visibly lights up, her lips stretches into a dark grin, inducing an odd sense of excitement in you. “ good.“ she positions herself between your legs as they hanged off the foot of the bed. “ i hope she doesn’t mind me seizing the opportunity to fuck you with her—well, technically my cock, hm? “ the fat plastic tip broadly strokes your folds, causing you to groan.

kafka holds your hips in place, watching you squirm with a sly expression on her face as she teases your pussy in broad, languid strokes. “ mmph, stop teasing me, kafka, “ you moaned, attempting to lift your hips off the mattress for more friction, she holds you back down. “ no can do, babydoll. “ she croons, running the mushroom tip down to your entrance and slowly slips inside then immediately back out. you grit your teeth, agitated.

“ oh my fucking god, i said—ouch! “ you gasp loudly as she smacks your ass. the stinger lingers while she props one of your legs on her shoulder. “ watch that mouth of yours. be nice and i’ll consider giving you want you want. “ kafka rasps, and goes back to her previous actions, shallowly thrusting into your cunt with no intentions of going deeper. waves of pleasure washes over you agonizingly slow, making you increasingly frustrated. you bite the inside of your cheek, holding back a snarky remark.

“ please kafka, i need it—you, please. m’sorry for cursing at you, i didn’t mean it. “ you whimpered, cutely jutting your bottom lip. kafka peers down at you, observing your face for any signs of deceit. her eyes softens ever so slightly when she sees the raw desperation in your eyes. “ atta girl. it wasn’t so hard now was it? “ her hips thrusts forward, pushing the rest of her inches inside of your drooling hole.

a throaty moan escapes your lips as her thick length fills you up. kafka delves down until she’s face to face with you, pushing your bent leg against your shoulder, rocking her hips back and forth. “ be as loud as you want, i wanna hear your pretty voice, baby. “ she whispers softly, peppering your face with kisses. you held onto her for dear life as her cock splits you open, deliciously hitting against your sweet spots.

“ fuck, it feels s’good! “ you whined, closing your eyes in pleasure as kafka speeds up her pace. she squishes your cheeks with her fingers, making you adorably pout. kafka tsks, “ open those pretty eyes, let me see em’ again.” you tentatively open yours eyes and looked straight at her. “ good girl~ “ she kisses your pouty lips, continuing to fuck her length into your sopping pussy.

tears fills your hazy (e/c) eyes. “ is my baby crying? “ she asks teasingly, slamming her hips into your ass and then grinds. “ can’t help it. .” you mutter back, tears running down your squished cheeks. kafka was quick to lick them up, relishing the salty taste. “ don’t worry, you look even more adorable when you cry. “ she coos, releasing your face to give your reddened ass cheek a little smack. this time, you moaned, gummy walls fluttering around her.

“ ‘think i might cum. .! “ you babbled, holding on to the older woman’s body for dear life, digging your nails into her back. “ you think or you know, darling? “ she groans, fucking you nice and slow, each drag of her cock has you writhing in pleasure and you’re on the verge of seeing stars.

“ i know, i know—!“ you let out a strangled moaned, legs trembling as you cummed on her strap. kafka brings you into a sloppy kiss, sucking and nibbling on your swollen bottom lip, careful to not draw blood. she slowly rocks into you, whispering sweet promises against your lips as you rode your high. “ you did so well for me, darling. “ kafka gently slides your leg off her shoulder, allowing it to dangle off the bed while you lay there exhausted.

“ but was slapping my ass like i’m some little kid necessary? “ you grumbled, sending her a weak glare. kafka laughs, caressing your tear–stricken cheek with her thumb. “ yep, mama has to put her baby in check when she’s gets out of line—“

“ please don’t you ever refer to yourself as mama and never say that again. “

|—|

NEW YORK, UPSTATE MANHATTAN

TIME: 7:57 AM

(BONUS)

you groan, drowsy eyes slowly flutters open as the warmth of the morning sun hits your bare skin. sitting up, you stretched your stiff arms. “ damn, i’m thirsty. “ you yawned, mouth dry. suddenly, an arm loosely curls around your waist, making you flinch. “ if you want a glass of water darling, i can get up and get it for you. “ kafka drawls, drowsiness evident in her voice. she peeks up at you through her unruly purple locks, casting you a lazy smile.

“ o-oh, you’re still here, kafka. “ you said, surprised. she hums, reaching out to grasp your hand, brings it up to her lips, and kisses your knuckles. “ why would i not be? i wouldn’t leave just like that unless something or someone requires my time. “ you giggled, already knowing who she’s directing her shade at.

“ nonetheless, thank you, kafka. for everything, really. you done so much for me and i can’t thank you enough for it. i wouldn’t have gotten so far in the spider society without you. “ you smile brightly at her. a light blush stains her creamy cheeks. has she also ever told you that you look like an angel when you smile?

“ aw, isn’t that adorable. but you’re welcome sweetheart. like i said, anything for you. and if nothing comes up later, i can look for the letter with you the other me could of possibly left behind. “

“ i would like that, my spidey in crime. “