#it feels pertinent in that people are still doing the whole

[neuloef]

believe it or not, artistry is about development and growth as much as it is about expression and creation, especially beacuse sometimes there is creative expression in growth

[roosterforme]

Explicitly Yours | Bob Floyd x Reader

Summary: When Bob met you, he fell for you hard and fast. He thought you might be his perfect match, the one that would make his days feel full instead of lonely. He never would have dreamed you had a secret. But secrets are known to be revealed at the most inconvenient of times, and Bob's surprised hesitation could cost him the thing he wants most.

Warnings: Smut, oral, fluff, angst, misogyny, language, mentions of adult film industry

Length: 11k words (what have I done?)

Pairing: Robert "Bob" Floyd x Former Pornstar!Female Reader

This was written for International Bob Floyd Fucks Month hosted by @attapullman. Check my masterlist for more! Banner by @thedroneranger

Bob was fresh off of a long deployment when he returned to work at North Island on Monday morning to find he would begin training as part of a new taskforce. He was tired and antsy, still overstimulated from being around so many people on the aircraft carrier, but he was also realizing how lonely he was. 

He'd arrived back to a sterile, empty, dusty apartment, slept for two days, and now he was back to work. He couldn't even have a cat or a houseplant. He really would like to have a cat or a houseplant. Mostly he thought about how nice it would be to have a girlfriend. A sweet one who would wait for him to return home so his apartment didn't feel so sad. One who didn't mind that sometimes he preferred it to be quiet. One who would let him dote on her a little bit when he was home.

When he was told to report to Classroom Six in his uniform instead of the tarmac in his flight suit, Bob knew it was going to be a long day. That idea only grew as soon as he walked in and was accosted by his friends. "You're back!" Natasha screeched, streaking across the room like a brunette cannonball and slamming into his arms. "It's not even fair that we weren't deployed together. I missed you!"

"Missed you too, Nat. Thanks for all the emails."

Then he felt Bradley, Jake and Javy all jostling him around until his glasses were crooked on his face. That's probably why he did a double take when he saw you. There was no way you were that beautiful. His glasses must need to be adjusted on his face. But he was wrong. You looked the same after he pushed his wire frames back into place. 

He swallowed hard and whispered, "Who's that?"

The guys all looked at him with matching smirks, and Javy told him your name. "Civilian. She's Warlock's new assistant. Got reassigned from a different department last week."

"She's real cute," Jake added. "And she looks so familiar."

"Why does she look so familiar?" Bradley asked, and Bob realized that the whole group was staring at you where you were conversing quietly with Warlock. "We've been trying to figure it out for a week."

You didn't look familiar to Bob. You just looked pretty with bright eyes and a friendly smile, both of which were trained on him now. Of course you were looking his way now, because everyone had mussed up his hair and wrinkled his uniform. He didn't mind so much that you caught him staring, because you were the kind of woman who must get that a lot.

"Lieutenant Floyd," Admiral Bates said as he stood, and Bob saluted his superior officer immediately. "Welcome back."

"Sir," Bob replied, doing his best not to let his gaze drift back to you. "Thank you."

Then Warlock called the room to order, and Bob ended up sitting in the front row, directly across from you. Barely six feet away. You were so pretty, it wasn't even funny. The curve of your face and your neck and the way you moved were mesmerizing. Smooth and fluid. Confident. Beautiful. You kept Warlock on task and seemed to have all the pertinent information about the class memorized. But all of it was lost on Bob, because he was way too distracted. 

By lunchtime, he had sweat through his undershirt, and he was sure his uniform shirt wasn't looking much better. The way you turned to look directly at him with a slightly guarded expression when you stood made him blush. It must be obvious to you that Bob couldn't keep his eyes off your face.

"Hi," you greeted. "Lieutenant Floyd."

Bob swallowed hard before something that sounded vaguely like Hello came out of his mouth. 

Your smile was tinged with a little sadness as you stuck out your hand. "I've been looking forward to meeting the last team member. Welcome back from deployment, Lieutenant."

And then you were walking away, but Bob was still sweating.

--------------------------

For the next four days, Bob got there early to ensure he had that same front row seat. He had a full blown crush. Heart pounding, palms damp, unable to focus on anything other than his crush on you. When he wasn't at work looking right at you, he was daydreaming about you. When he wasn't daydreaming about you, he was asleep and having actual dreams where you were his girlfriend. In one of them, you gave him a back massage, and he woke up with an erection. 

He could barely even look at you for the nauseous feeling that took up residence just below his pounding heart, but he couldn't look anywhere else. He'd never been like this before. Sure, he'd been attracted to many women in the past, but this was something else entirely. 

"But why is she so familiar looking?" Jake asked Bradley at lunch. "You sure you didn't fuck her?"

"Oh, I think I'd remember fucking someone that looked like that," Bradley replied with a chuckle. "Wait... did you fuck her?"

"I don't think so?" Jake replied, looking a little panicked. "She's not the one I went home with on my birthday, is she? Because you know I can't remember that night. And if I fucked her and can't remember it, then I deserve to be executed."

They both erupted into laughter with Javy, and Bob felt deflated. One of the three of them was definitely going to ask you out sooner rather than later, and instead of getting an occasional guarded glance in his direction, Bob would have nothing.

That night at the bar, he sat with his cup of peanuts and talked with Nat about work while everyone else played pool. "I guess we have another week or two of lectures ahead of us, but I can't wait to get back in the air."

"Yeah," Bob replied, glancing around the room in case the Hard Deck was your Friday night scene. It wasn't really his, but he came for his friends. And if he got to spend another week or two in the classroom, he wasn't going to complain; there would be no way for him to look at you when he was in the cockpit. 

"Bob!" Javy called as if he'd been trying to get his attention for a few minutes. He was waving a pool cue. "Take over for me. I need to go shoot my shot."

As Bob stood, he watched Javy head off into the crowd toward a woman who looked like you. He did a double take, his heart leaping up into his throat as Bradley started to push him closer to the pool table. Javy saw you. He was going to ask you out. A feeling of devastation filled his lungs, but then the woman turned around, and it wasn't you. Her smile wasn't nearly as pretty, and she didn't have the same eyes. 

Relieved, Bob sank the seven ball before running the table like he was some sort of pro. But he knew deep inside that he was going to have to ask you out himself or miss out on even having a chance with you. 

Every day the following week, he tried to give himself a pep talk. He could do this. Even if you said no, it would be fine. It would be good practice for him. But he knew it would not be okay. He liked the sound of your voice and the way you moved, and he thought about you in every room of his apartment doing a wide variety of things. Some of them made him blush.

He couldn't tell if it would be worse to never even try or to have to live with himself after you looked at him and said you weren't interested. At least if he kept things quiet, the guys couldn't find a way to make fun of him. And although they all liked to talk about you at lunch, to his knowledge, none of them had asked you on a date. Maybe they were as intimidated as him.

On Wednesday, you dropped your pen, and Bob picked it up for you. He got a "Thanks, Lieutenant Floyd," in response along with a cautious smile. Then on Thursday, he helped you move the projector before class started, and you said, "Thanks. You're a lot stronger than I am." He felt like he floated to his seat after that. 

On Friday, disaster struck. You were organizing your stack of notes at the end of the day when Bob stood. But then Bradley was there, leaning on the table in front of you after everyone had been dismissed. "Hey, so the guys and I were wondering if you ever made it out to the Hard Deck on Friday nights? I'd love to buy you a drink."

Bob nearly collapsed back into his seat as he watched your eyes searching Bradley's face like you were trying to tell if he was lying. "No, actually. I play Dungeons & Dragons most Friday nights."

A strangled sound escaped Bob. "You play D&D?" he asked before he could think better of it. 

"Yeah," you replied easily, giving him a little smile. "Been into it for years."

"Me too," he added, and you set down everything you'd been holding. 

"It must be hard to be part of a campaign when you deploy on occasion?" you asked, and Bob was convinced he wouldn't notice if a freight train was about to hit him. 

He nodded and took a step closer, watching you stand up. "It can be, yeah. But I've been in the same campaign for a few years, so I'd like to think I'm an integral enough part of it that everyone else doesn't mind waiting for me."

You laughed. It was so pretty. "I'm sure they don't mind one bit, Lieutenant Floyd."

"You can call me Bob," he blurted out, eyes going wide as you licked your lips and grinned. 

"Okay. Bob."

He could do this. He was already part way there, he thought. Just a little further. "Maybe you and I could get coffee this weekend and talk about our characters?"

When he was met with silence and your softly parted lips, he wanted to disappear. But your expression was trained on his face, and even though you still seemed a little hesitant, you asked, "Like a date? Because I'm free on Sunday."

-------------------------

You were laughing so hard, you had to set your coffee cup down next to your scone, and Bob was basking in the sound of it. "No, Bob! That's why I made my character a Rogue! Because I could never be such a scoundrel in real life!" He just listened to your laughter taper off while he grinned in the middle of the crowded cafe where you only seemed to be focused on him. 

"Well, that's why I made mine a Sorcerer. I don't know if you knew this about me, but I can't actually cast spells."

You started to laugh again. "Could have fooled me." But he must have been looking at you for too long, because you brought your hand up to your lips and asked, "Do I have crumbs on my face or something?"

"No, your face is perfect," he replied without considering his words, but your look of slightly embarrassed delight outweighed the tinge of mortification he felt.

You searched his eyes, seemingly always trying to gauge his sincerity. Then you surprised him when you said, "You're really sweet. It's refreshing." 

Bob looked down at his hands, unsure how to respond but pleased nonetheless. "Will you let me take you to a movie? Or dinner? Or both?"

"Yes."

The following morning at work, you were as focused on Bob as he was on you. The sweaty palms and erratically beating heart were back, only exacerbated by your alluring gaze and the promise of a second date on Thursday night. You agreed to dinner at an Italian restaurant, and Bob was already excited. 

"Why are you acting so strange?" Nat asked at lunchtime. "You're like both weirdly quiet and also talking so much?"

Bob laughed and said, "I went out on a date yesterday." And when he said it was with you, her eyes went wide. "We're going out again on Thursday."

"Bob!" she gasped, and now all of the guys were looking at him, and there was no way he would ever recover from this as Nat told them he got coffee with you.

"Welcome to the big leagues, buddy," Jake drawled, while Bradley glared at him. "Just wish I could figure out why she seems so familiar. Like it's just stuck in the back of my mind somehow. Like I know her."

"None of you know her as well as Bob does," Nat said with a laugh that made him smile. Before you and he parted ways at the coffee shop, you'd squeezed his hand in your smaller one, and it was already one of the sexiest moments of his life.

"Fuck you, Bob," Bradley grumbled. 

But it didn't matter. Bob really liked you and the fact that you talked about your Dungeons & Dragons character for a full hour. And your pretty face and your laugh. And the way you seemed interested in what he had to say. You were checking off all of the boxes for him. Smart, funny, kind of nerdy, interesting. He wondered how many dates he should take you on before asking you to be his girlfriend.

On Wednesday, as soon as Warlock dismissed everyone, you handed Bob a folded up note.

I can't wait for dinner tomorrow night. Here's my number.

He waited until he was home and sitting on his couch before he texted you. Less than a minute later, you responded. And that's how he spent the rest of his night. He didn't even eat until after nine, too wrapped up in what you had to say. Those intrusive thoughts and daydreams and real dreams about you in his apartment were starting to seem like they could be a reality. That's what he wanted. He could already picture you on the couch, wrapped up in the afghan his mom made, watching a movie with him. Or in his kitchen, helping him make dinner. 

He fell asleep on the couch in his uniform, too absorbed in this conversation to even go to bed properly. But that was fine, because suddenly it was Thursday, and not only would he see you all day at work, he'd get to eat with you and learn more about you.

Once again, Bob slid into that front row seat, and you had to work at keeping the smile from your face all morning. When you did look his way, he felt his breath catch in his throat. He was sure he'd pass out if you kissed him, and suddenly that was the only thing he could think about. Warlock talked about aggressive maneuvering, and Bob thought about your lips. Warlock talked about safety protocols, and Bob thought about your lips touching his.

It would be a miracle if he made it through dinner, but he had to try. You stood and started walking out of the classroom at the end of the day, but you turned back and said, "I'll meet you there at 7:30."

Bob offered to pick you up, but you said you'd drive yourself, and now he had more than two hours to kill. He took a long shower and fixed his hair before dressing in the outfit that Nat had pre-approved for him. He made sure his glasses were straight and that he had his credit card. The only other thing he could do was hope the conversation would come as easily for him this time, as it had over coffee.

He shouldn't have been worried about that. What he should have been worried about was the way his heart stopped when you walked through the front doors of the restaurant and directly for him, wearing a pretty blue dress with your face all made up like he was someone to impress. 

"Hi, Bob," you whispered. Then you kissed his cheek at the same time that he started to turn his head, and his lips nudged yours. He stood there shocked as you slipped your hand into his, and you started to tug him toward the waiting table when his name was called. 

His ears didn't stop burning the whole night. His brain kept circling back to the idea of another kiss. An intentional one. A kiss after a second date was not something he'd ever attempted before, but he was going to do it tonight. Based on the way you were looking at him, he had to. 

"Do you want more wine?" you asked, holding up the bottle. 

"Yes, please," he replied, because that would definitely help his cause. 

You smiled as you poured him some. "You have lovely manners." When you set the bottle down, you added, "And really pretty eyes."

Bob counted to three and then said, "I know we didn't even eat dessert yet, but I really like you. And tomorrow is your D&D night, but maybe you'll let me take you to a movie on Saturday?"

After dinner, in the parking lot next to your car, Bob kissed you. Intentionally. The first tilt of his head was hesitant, and when his lips met yours, he started to get nervous and pull away. But you let your fingers tangle in his hair, and you chased him for another kiss. "Which movie are we seeing?" you asked as you rubbed your nose gently along his.

"You can pick," he replied before kissing you again. "I just want to be around you." And then his hands found the small of your back and you inched yourself closer until your chest was touching his and your knee was bumping his leg.

You were smiling when he finally pulled his face away from yours. "I'll text you my address and the movie I want to see."

Bob smiled, too. "And then I'll pick you up, and we can go to the theater."

This was probably the best week of his life. He watched you pull out of the parking lot, and you waved to him through your window after you blew him a kiss. He went home and thought about what he might be able to cook for date number four. Perhaps you'd want to do the movie on Saturday and then have dinner at his place on Sunday? He'd figure it out. Either way, he was excited for more. 

"A third date?" Nat asked on Friday when everyone was taking a break in the classroom. "Damn, Bob." 

He eyed you where you stood talking quietly with Warlock, and you glanced his way, a soft smile on your lips. "I really like her. She's different. In a good way. And she makes me feel comfortable."

Nat rubbed his back in slow circles. "Make sure you put your arm around her during the movie. She might be expecting it. But if she doesn't snuggle against you, then you should remove it."

He nodded and swallowed. "Right. I can do that. Is it too soon to invite her over to my apartment for dinner?"

"I don't think so," she replied softly. "And maybe you should buy some condoms."

Bob's cheeks immediately flushed, but he didn't mind too much, since it was just Nat. "I don't think I'm ready for that yet."

"She seems sweet. Just tell her what you're feeling when the time comes."

Now everything was making Bob a little nervous as he drove through your neighborhood on Saturday night. He passed modern beachfront house after modern beachfront house, and then his GPS told him he had arrived. He saw your car in the driveway, but the house was gorgeous and must be worth a ton of money. Maybe you had a roommate? 

He parked his old truck and headed up the sidewalk with butterflies in his stomach and a bouquet of flowers in his hand. You opened the door before he even knocked, and then you were in his arms and invading his senses. "Are those for me?" you asked, kissing his cheek and poking the flowers. 

"Yes," he whispered, silently begging you to let him hold you for a few more seconds while he caught his breath and got himself under control. You turned him on in every way, and he'd never encountered this before. 

Your soft voice next to his ear as you chuckled and said, "Thanks, Bob," was not helping. You led him inside, and your house was incredible. There were no signs of a roommate, but there was a view of the ocean from the windows along the back of the house. He watched you bend in your little dress to find a vase for the flowers, and he felt completely overwhelmed. 

"Ready to go?" you asked, reaching for his hand a minute later. Your eyes were eager and sincere as you gazed up at him. Your fingers were laced with his, and Bob realized if he wanted to get to the next step with you, he needed to get through tonight.

"Yes." He kissed your lips softly, and you leaned against his arm as he walked you out to his truck. 

You spent the drive to the movie theater telling him all about your Friday night playing Dungeons & Dragons, and of course Bob felt more relaxed. He bought the tickets, and you got the popcorn, and when he put his arm around your shoulders, you snuggled against him, so he kept it there. By the end of the movie, the empty popcorn bucket was on the floor, and you had your palm resting on his thigh. 

"Did you like it?" you asked softly while the end credits scrolled. 

"Yes, I liked it," he promised, accepting another of your kisses.

"It's still early. Want to grab a drink somewhere?"

Bob really only knew one place, because he spent an awful lot of his free time there. "Should we hit up the Hard Deck? And then I can take you home and hopefully get another goodnight kiss?"

You had one eyebrow raised as you considered him. "Even after the third date? You're not going to try to make a move?"

Embarrassment flooded his cheeks as he muttered, "Not yet." And then your lips were all over his like he'd answered your questions correctly, even though he felt like his thoughts on the matter were actually probably wrong according to most people.

Eventually the two of you made your way to the bar, but visiting the Hard Deck was a mistake that he didn't see coming. You were tucked perfectly against his side as Bob walked across the parking lot and listened to you tell him how much you liked working for Admiral Bates. Then you ordered two vodka sodas, and Bob had to pluck your credit card from your hand to keep you from paying for them. 

"Hey!" you complained, but he just smiled. 

"I'll give it back later." He was rewarded with another kiss on the cheek, this one very close to his lips. 

"Well, look who's here," Jake drawled obnoxiously over the music from the jukebox and the noise from the crowd. "Bob and his friend."

You rolled your eyes and laughed, but you kept one hand linked with his as the drinks were set down. "Should we say hi to your friends?" you asked, and Bob nodded even though he really wanted to just find a small table on the other side of the room. But Nat looked excited, and the other guys looked annoyed, so Bob thought a short detour might be fun.

"Hey," Bob greeted everyone as you sipped your drink. 

"How was the movie?" Nat asked, elbowing Bradley in the side before he could say anything.

"Pretty good," you replied. "You know, for one of those Academy Award bait films." 

Bob laughed and looked at you. "I liked it a lot, actually." Or maybe he just liked sitting with his arm around you for two hours at a time, but he wasn't going to say that in front of everyone else.

Javy tapped a pool cue on the ground and asked, "Do you like to see a lot of movies?"

You nodded with a bit of an apprehensive look on your face that had Bob just about ready to pull you over to the table that another couple was vacating. "Yeah... I like films," you replied softly. 

And then Jake's jaw dropped open and he slapped the edge of the pool table. "Oh my god!" His green eyes were wide as he looked you up and down from head to toe with a smirk that made Bob want to stand in front of you. "That's why you look so familiar! You're Roxy Luxxe."

"Oh, fuck," Javy said as he dropped the pool cue on Nat's foot, and Bradley choked on his beer. 

But Bob just stood there and watched your posture stiffen and the look of apprehension on your face grow. "Who?" he asked softly, but you wouldn't meet his eyes.

"She's a porn star, Bob!" Jake said a little too loudly as he hooted. "A very memorable one, too. Played up different movie genres. Everyone I Did Last Summer. Sisterhood of the Traveling Sluts. Laid in Manhattan. Some real classics!"

"I retired," you said firmly, holding eye contact with Jake even though your voice sounded strained. "I left the industry five years ago."

"Guys," Nat said with a warning tone as she looked at Bob who was frozen in place, his head swarming with wild thoughts. An adult film star? You? But you worked at Top Gun and played D&D and liked scones. You went on three dates with Bob of all people.

Now Nat was physically moving Javy, Bradley and Jake back toward the game of pool, snapping her fingers at them as they continued to ogle you in your pretty dress. "So..." you whispered, turning toward Bob, looking anywhere but at his face. "That was... yeah..."

He had no idea what to say right now, and the longer he went without saying anything, the worse he felt inside. You used to have a job making adult films? Bob couldn't even handle watching those without blushing and stuttering. You must have had sex with dozens and dozens of different men and probably women too, and Bob suddenly realized he could go home and watch them for himself if he really wanted.

"Right," you said, finally looking at him as your eyes started to fill with tears. "Well... no hard feelings, Bob. I'll see you at work on Monday." Then you set your drink down, covered your mouth with one hand and made a beeline for the door.

Bob looked at the drink in his hand, and then at the one you set down. He left his on the table next to yours and followed you out to the parking lot. He looked around, calling your name and checking to see if you were by his truck, but you didn't respond. You were gone. 

Roxy Luxxe. That name was made up, and he didn't think it suited you as well as your real name. That one was perfect, and he liked it. He liked you. He could drive back to your house, but if you didn't want to talk to him, then what was the point? He'd already embarrassed himself by clamming up. But even worse, he thought he might have embarrassed you. 

"Damn it," he muttered, angry at Jake and all of them for making you feel small, and angry at himself, too. He got in his truck and drove himself home.

----------------------------

Well. You got three perfect dates before it all blew up in your face. Three amazing dates with Bob who was going to look at you like you were no longer worthy of his time now. Sure, you would have told him eventually. After another date or two, you would have brought it up in such a way that perhaps could have been a little bit more flattering or at least slightly tasteful. But of course you should have been expecting this. It wasn't the first time. Getting older only did so much for your face, and it didn't matter how much you changed your hair and makeup: Once Roxy Luxxe, always Roxy Luxxe.

You really thought none of them recognized you. It was almost refreshing that Bob had never heard of your alter ego. He probably never saw a single video of you having sex with Sam Slick or Dickie Divine. He didn't know exactly what your tits looked like, because you'd never taken your shirt off for him in person. He didn't know how you sounded when you faked an orgasm. As you ran down the block and got an Uber, you could hear Bob calling for you.

You weren't ashamed or embarrassed. You were not. This was your life, and you made every decision along the way for yourself. Nobody else. You put yourself through school. You bought the house of your dreams. You had an amazing job at Top Gun now for fuck's sake. But Bob was the first guy you met in a long time who made you think you could have a relationship with someone who wouldn't judge you for your past.

You walked from your Uber into your house and kicked your shoes across the entryway. More tears were filling your eyes, but you didn't want to cry again. Not over this. "But he was sweet," you whispered to your reflection in the hall mirror. His friends were kind of assholes, but he wasn't. Even if he didn't want to be with you now, which was understandable, those three dates were something else. Dungeons & Dragons discussions and coffee and pasta. 

You sighed wistfully at the flowers in your kitchen. Maybe a few more years and you'd look even less like Roxy Luxxe. That might make things easier to navigate. You made yourself a cup of tea and grabbed some crackers and sat out on your back deck where the moonlight reflected off of the ocean. The way Bob had wrapped his arm around you during the movie made it easy to imagine him here with you, keeping you warm. Instead you grabbed a blanket and snuggled in as you thought about how he would have been an excellent boyfriend. 

"You win some, you lose some," you told the night sky. If he was bothered by your past which you had designed so you could have a future, then he wasn't the one for you. You fell asleep outside in your dress, and the rising sun eventually woke you up. When you stretched and stood, the chilly air sent you running inside and toward your shower. 

The memories of last night were hanging out in the periphery of your mind. Going to work tomorrow was going to be awful. If you didn't like Admiral Bates so much, you'd request to work under someone else. But then again, why should you have to go to work feeling bad? Yeah, it was going to sting to see Bob, but it was still your job, and you deserved to be happy. 

You showered and took your time until all of your skin felt fresh and new, and then you threw on some oversized sweats after you moisturized. After breakfast, you could see if one of your friends from D&D was free to hang out. You were finally just about to check your phone to see if Bob had attempted to reach you when you heard a knock at your door. 

Bob's truck was parked in your driveway just behind your car. You could see it through the front window. According to your phone, he tried to call you twice, and he'd send you a handful of texts. But now he was here and knocking again. It was obvious you were home, so you wrenched your front door open and stood before him with your chin held high.

"What do you need?" you asked, already feeling weak at the sight of his pretty blue eyes and his glasses. 

"Hi," he said softly, just staring at you. He looked exhausted, like maybe he hadn't slept. Then he fumbled around in his jeans pocket and pulled out your credit card. "This is yours."

You plucked it from his hand and started to close the door. "Thanks for returning it. I'll see you at work."

Then he said your name. Your real name. "Wait. Please?"

You pressed your lips together. "What do you want, Bob?" 

The soft rise and fall of his solid chest held your attention while he started stuttering. "L-Look. I'm really sorry about last night."

You nodded. "Me too." It wasn't like you wanted to know, but you couldn't stop yourself from asking, "I take it you went home and looked up my videos?"

His eyes went wide as you crossed your arms over your chest. "I didn't."

You actually believed him, but you felt like making yourself hurt anyway. "Your friends have all seen me naked. Watched me getting fucked."

He seemed surprisingly calm as he half shrugged and kind of nodded. "So what?"

As you shifted your weight from one foot to the other, you said, "I'm not ashamed of anything I've ever done, okay? And I would have told you about it after another date or two... before we slept together." When he remained silent you added, "I started out in the adult film industry when I was eighteen. I quit when I was twenty five. I just turned thirty last month, and I guess I was silly for thinking enough time had passed. But last night was a prime example of why I haven't even tried to date anyone. Ever, really."

Bob was gaping at you now. "Not ever? But you're... you're so..."

"I know," you said, cutting him off before he could finish. "I'm hot enough to do porn, but nobody wants to date me." 

You started to close the door again, but he scrambled. "N-No, that's not what I was going to say. I was going to say you're flawless. A-And I shouldn't have let you leave the bar like that last night."

Your fingers loosened on the door, and soon it was drifting away from you, opening wider for Bob as he stood there with an eager expression. God, you just really liked him. And he seemed like he was being sincere. "What would you have done differently last night?" you whispered. 

He started to reach for you before tucking his fingers in his jeans pocket. "I would have taken your hand in mine as soon as I saw tears in your eyes." You bit your lips as he added, "And I would have told you that I like you so much. And if you wanted to leave, then I would have driven you home right away and walked you to your door."

He liked you so much. If there was a chance that Bob could be the kind of guy who still liked you with your past as Roxy Luxxe but also wasn't just trying to get in your pants and meet her for himself, then you wanted to give him a shot. "What would you have done after you walked me to my door?"

He was breathing deeper like he was nervous, and you wanted to touch him. "I would have asked you for that goodnight kiss that I'd been hoping for all day."

You were rushing for his arms, clearly surprising him in the process, but he held onto you as you gave him just the softest kiss. "I would have let you have it." Bob's hands found their way to the most respectful spot on your back, and you kissed him a little deeper. 

As soon as you broke the kiss, his fingers flexed against your back, and he said, "I want to go on another date with you. A bunch more. But I want you to be sure about me. I don't really care about Roxy Luxxe. I'm sure she was lovely, but I like you." You laughed. You couldn't help it. And he smiled as he asked, "Maybe you can think about it today and let me know at work tomorrow?"

"Okay."

He nodded and let out the breath he was holding. "Okay. I'll see you tomorrow."

Your back felt cold where his hands used to be as you watched him walk back to his truck. He waved to you as he pulled out of your driveway, and you waved back with a different feeling in your heart than you had twenty minutes ago.

---------------------------

Bob was disappointed to find he would be in the air on Monday. When he arrived on base, he changed into his flight suit instead of his khaki uniform, wondering what that would mean when it came to seeing you. He'd slept poorly, wondering what your answer would be, hoping you'd say yes to another date.

"Hey, Bob," Jake drawled as Bob zipped up his flight suit. "How was your night with Roxy Luxxe?" He had a devilish smirk on his face, and Bob's skin was crawling. All of the other guys were looking at him now, and he knew his face was beet red. 

"I guess she was as good as she looks on film if she rendered you speechless," Jake added with a laugh. 

"Whoa, no," Javy said, shaking his head at Jake before looking at Bob. "Cut it out, man."

Bob counted to five, took a deep breath and then raised his forearm, and at least Jake had the decency to look panicked. Bradley stepped into the fray as Bob used his arm on Jake's chest to push him back against the lockers. Sure, Jake was more muscular, but Bob was no slouch, and he had a couple inches on him. "Don't call her that again. Don't even talk about her. While you're at it, don't look at her either."

Jake raised one eyebrow and nodded slightly, and Bob released him, walking right out of the locker room and making a quick detour to the classroom. But you weren't there. He ran his hands through his hair before he headed outside to find Nat. 

"Hey, there you are," she said gently. "You okay? After the bar and everything?"

"I'm fine," he replied, still looking around. "Have you seen her?"

"Mmhmm," she hummed, pointing behind Bob, and he whirled around in time to see you walk out of the tower with Warlock and Cyclone. You looked as pretty as you always did, and Bob found himself wanting you the same way today as he had last week. All of the daydreams about making breakfast together after holding you in his arms all night were still there. So were the thoughts about you snuggled up, laughing on his couch. But now he could also imagine taking walks on the beach where you lived.

Your gaze met his, and he watched you excuse yourself from the admirals before heading his way. Nat squeezed his bicep, and muttered good luck before making herself scarce, and then Bob was standing there with you a respectable three feet in front of him. 

"Lieutenant Floyd."

He smiled softly. "Good morning."

"So..." you began, looking down at his boots and pressing your lips together. "I'm free on Wednesday night. Or pretty much all day Saturday." Your eyes trailed up his body until you were nervously examining his face. "What did you have in mind for our fourth date?"

He felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. He'd been so apprehensive, afraid you were going to tell him to beat it, he hadn't bothered to come up with an actual date idea. "Cooking dinner at my place?" he blurted out.

You nodded like that sounded good to you. "Wednesday night then?"

He couldn't remember if he already had plans, but if he did, he'd cancel them immediately. "Yes. Wednesday. The day after tomorrow. Wednesday."

Your soft laughter filled him up as you turned and started to walk away, giving him just one word. "Wednesday."

--------------------------

You showed up to Bob's place with just a bottle of wine. He promised to take care of the rest. An hour later, a completely homemade pizza with fresh mozzarella and herbs was baking in the oven, and you had your arms draped around his neck. His lips tasted like the pinot noir the two of you had started drinking while you made the pizza, and his body felt strong and sure. As of right now, you thought you'd made the right choice by coming here.

"I really like you," he whispered for the third time this evening, and you believed him. You liked yourself. Why shouldn't he? 

"I like you, too, Bob." You reached up and adjusted his glasses before letting your fingers trail back through his hair. As his hands slid slowly down to your hips, it was easy to imagine how he might be in bed. Authentic. Meticulous. Earnest. Just like he was at work. The thought thrilled you to no end, but you were also afraid of the way you'd feel afterwards if you rushed it just to get the first one out of your system. So you let him hold you like you were important. 

The timer buzzed, and Bob laughed as you jumped further into his arms. You buried your face against his neck. "It's not funny." But you were laughing, too, and his lips met your hair. "Okay, it's kind of funny."

His stomach was growling, so you slowly pulled yourself free of his arms so he could put on his oven mitts. "Looks good," he remarked, but your gaze was fixed on him. "What do you think, Honey?" 

Bob's eyes went wide as he set the tray down, like he couldn't believe what he'd said. Your heart was absolutely thundering in your chest. "Looks good," you whispered in agreement. You hadn't looked at it. You were sure it was fine. You'd eat anything anyway. But he called you Honey, and you didn't mind it one bit.

You shared the pizza side by side on his couch along with the rest of the bottle of wine, and Bob listened to you tell him about your friends you meet up with on Fridays. And then he told you about his deployment as he finished the last few drops of wine. 

"I never really talk about this with anyone but Nat. This is nice," he said softly.

"Is it lonely?" you asked, your voice barely a whisper as he set down his glass and looked at you. 

You didn't want to rush him, because you could tell what he was going to say was important. And it was. His voice was a little rough as he looked at you and said, "Somehow it's lonelier when I come home. It's worse than being on an aircraft carrier in that I can't really have anything for myself here. There's nothing waiting for me. And a lot of the time, I feel like it would be too much to ask someone to do that. To wait for me. It would be a lot for someone to accept."

When you crawled onto his lap, he didn't stop you. And when you tilted his face up to make him look at you, his cheeks flushed pink, but his hands found your hips again. "I understand exactly how you feel." 

Then you kissed him, and you didn't stop for probably hours or maybe days. It felt that good. When you ended up beneath his warm body, you were so happy he came to your house on Sunday morning with your credit card. "Bob," you whimpered, and that seemed to bring him back from wherever his head was while he kissed his way down your neck and along your chest. His hair was a mess from your fingers, and his lips were a little puffy from the kisses, and you were pretty sure he wouldn't let you down again even if his friends were idiots.

You'd broken the spell, but he didn't seem to mind as he stood and pulled you to your feet. "It's getting late. We have work in the morning. Let me walk you to your car?"

At this rate, you were afraid you'd let him do anything he wanted, because he held your hand the whole way there. And he kissed you just right and told you he'd love to spend part of Saturday with you.

"Come over," you told him, and he promised he would.

----------------------------

It was chilly as Bob watched the sunset over the ocean from your back deck, but his body was warm from the combination of having you and your fleece blanket wrapped around him. You fit perfectly in his arms. Frankly, you seemed to fit pretty perfectly in his life. He wouldn't mind spending all of his Saturdays like this, listening to your gaming recap from the night before while you occasionally kissed the side of his neck. Your fingers were laced with his, and when you asked if he wanted to share a bottle of wine you got when you were in Napa Valley, he responded with a different question. 

"Is there any chance you'd want to be my girlfriend?" You shivered in his arms, so he wrapped you up a little tighter. "I can't stop thinking about you being the one waiting for me to get home from a deployment."

You didn't speak right away which made him apprehensive. He'd somehow been the one to push things too fast. This was something he'd never managed to do before. You tightened your grip on his hand as you said, "Bob... people are going to recognize me. It's going to happen sometimes, no matter what I try to do about it, and I-"

He cut you off with a kiss. "I don't care about that, Honey." Then more kisses. The bottle of wine in your kitchen was left forgotten as you carefully slipped one leg over Bob's lap and sat straddling him. You kept the blanket wrapped snug around both of you, your body nestled against his as your foreheads met. "I just really like you."

The sun had disappeared below the horizon. Everything was pink and purple and dusky and dreamy as your cheek nudged his glasses making him smile. "If you think you can handle being my boyfriend, then I'm not going to try to stop you."

Heart pounding, he asked, "So is that a yes?"

"Yes." Your kisses were slow and soft, and Bob kept chasing the smile on your lips, because he couldn't get enough. With his eyes closed, all he could hear was the ocean below and the soft sounds you made. All he could feel was your body everywhere. You smelled familiar. You tasted good. 

As you ran your fingers through his hair, your other hand trailed down to his shoulder, along his bicep and then across his chest. When Bob dared to let his hands dip from your waist to your hips and butt, you scooted a little bit closer. He realized when your fingers skimmed his abs that he had an erection. 

Embarrassed, he tried to break the kiss and move his hands, but as soon as he started to move, you pulled away first. In the dying light, he could see your wide eyes and the alluring rise and fall of your chest. Part of your lace bra strap was showing, and your nipples were obviously hard. His cock throbbed in his jeans as you asked, "Do you want to stop?"

He knew you could read the desire on his face. When he started to shake his head, you rubbed yourself against his jeans where he was hard for you. "No," he grunted, head tipping back as he panted. "I don't want to stop."

"Good," you whispered next to his ear, lips barely grazing him. "Neither do I." You took his hands in both of yours and brought them back up to your body, encouraging him to touch every curve.

He gasped your name as he watched you slowly rolling your hips against him, seemingly in no hurry as you bit your lip. When he reached for the hem of your shirt, you didn't stop him, and he tossed it aside. Your body looked magical in the twilight, and as he reached for your bra clasp, realization hit him. 

You were used to a certain caliber of partner for these kinds of activities. Standards he probably couldn't meet. "You're hesitating again," you whispered, voice breaking a little bit on the last word. "If you don't think you want to do this with me, I completely understand, Bob."

It was getting difficult to read your expression in the darkness, but when you stopped touching him and pulled your arms to your sides, he started to panic. "It's not that," he promised. "But you've been with... p-professionals. Guys who know what they're... doing." He ran his hands through his own hair. "And I'm not the most experienced. I've only had two partners."

"Oh, Bob," you moaned, and his cock ached at the sound. He wanted you. His whole body was screaming for it, and then he watched as you unhooked your own bra and let it slide down your arms and fall from your fingers. Your body was flawless, back arched, every curve designed to make him crazy. He made a sound somewhere between a groan and a whine as you leaned in closer and kissed him. "You'll be so much better."

Your bare skin was everywhere as the blanket slipped from around you. Bob's hands splayed across your back to keep you warm, but the supple feel of you had him thrusting against your core as he gingerly ran his thumb along the side of your breast. "So much better!" you whispered before pulling his bottom lip between yours.

He was still a little nervous, throbbing against you in his pants like a teenager as he cupped your breast in his rough palm. When you trailed your lips down his neck, he said, "I just want to be good enough for you."

Bob was thankful it was dark and you couldn't see him blushing as you nipped his earlobe and giggled. "Bob. You're better, because you're real. And you're turning me on, because we're not faking anything." You moved your right hand down between your bodies and squeezed his cock through his jeans as you sucked on his neck. "There's nothing fake about this."

He was gasping as he reached for your hand. "Honey." He couldn't take too much more teasing, or at this rate, he'd finish before his pants were off. "Can we go inside?"

You were off his lap and reaching for him with both hands, pulling him to his feet and closer to you. "My bedroom sound good?"

"Yes." 

It was honestly difficult to walk. You led him through the sliding glass door and inside where the soft lighting somehow made your topless body look even more stunning. You brought him down the short hallway to your room, walking backwards and looking up at him with a smirk as you unzipped his jeans. He made another unintelligible noise as he watched the way your breasts swayed and bounced with each movement. 

Your bedside lamp provided the only light, and Bob was still looking around, trying to get his bearings, when you pulled his shirt and undershirt off. "Oh," you gasped, running your palms up his flat stomach to his slightly broader chest. "God." He couldn't fathom that you liked what you saw and felt enough to leave you panting his name, but you definitely were. Then your hand was down the front of his unzipped jeans, and he grinned as you tried your best to wrap your hand around his length, your eyes growing wide. "Bob."

And now he wasn't really nervous, because this actually felt really easy and good with you. You were giving him all the queues that you wanted more. You were kissing him as you stumbled to the bed. You were trying your best to get your hand around his cock, but you couldn't. He picked you up and hauled you up to the pillows, and you squealed. All he could see was your beautiful smile as you kissed him over and over, only pulling away to run your nose along his cheek and whisper his name. 

He watched you shimmy out of your yoga pants and underwear and push them aside, and it was no wonder you were able to make a career out of using your body the way you did. But if most of that was just acting, then he wasn't going to let you down now. He watched as your head tipped back, and you pressed yourself up against his hands when he gently squeezed your breasts. Mesmerized by all of this, he let his hands drift down over your ribs and along your sides until he was met by your hips.

Bob worked his hands slowly back up your body and down again, pausing to press his lips to your breasts as you arched for him again. You felt soft, and you were sensitive, running your bare foot up and down his leg as you whimpered. When he squeezed your hips again, he let his gaze fall below your belly button.

His voice was soft and deep as he asked, "Is it okay if I taste you, Honey?"

You instantly spread your legs a little wider, grabbed him by his hair, and said, "Please."

---------------------------

Bob's hands were huge, with thick veins and graceful, calloused fingers. All he was doing was touching you and kissing you, and you were very fucking worked up. This was already a treat, just being with a guy who wasn't grabbing at you and trying to shove his cock in your mouth. But it was more than that. It was the soft tone he used when he said your name and the way he was looking at you. 

Gentle but strong. That was how you'd describe your newly minted boyfriend. You smiled at him as he stroked his fingers down your sides. You hadn't had a boyfriend in years, and Bob was so sweet and handsome, it was absolutely outrageous. 

"Is it okay if I taste you?"

All of that and he wanted to go down on you? "Please." Your voice was needy, and your body was so ready for him. You eased your thighs further apart so he could see all of you, and you let your fingers tangle in his soft hair. You were so excited, and when the wire rim of his glasses brushed the inside of your thigh, you shivered with pleasure. 

Then his lips met your pussy, and you almost went through the fucking ceiling. Those big hands were at your waist, holding you in place on the bed as he licked up along your slit, slowly tasting every inch before he hummed softly. You wanted to watch, but you could barely lift your head off of the pillow as he licked up again and again before kissing your clit. 

When you managed to prop yourself up on one elbow, you got a great view of his big cock hanging out of his unzipped jeans when he lifted his head away from your body. "Does it feel good?" he asked, and you laughed. He pulled away from you further, concern on his face as you started to reach for him.

Your nails scraped along the day's worth of stubble on his cheek as you sat up and kissed him, tasting yourself. You licked at his lips and chin, cleaning up the wetness before you whispered. "It feels better than good."

A few seconds later, you were on your back again, legs over his shoulders as he ate your pussy with fervor. All of your nerve endings were singing his praises. He had you spread with his rough thumbs, and when he looked up at you, even his nose was wet. Your hands were fisted at your sides while you gently rolled your hips against his mouth and whined at the perfect feel of him. "Shit. Fuck," you gasped. He sucked on you with just the right amount of pressure, and your toes were literally starting to curl. "Bob!" 

All you got in response was another hum of pleasure that made you squeal followed by some seriously lewd, wet sounds. His broad shoulders pushed against the backs of your thighs, and you felt him teasing at your opening with the tip of one finger. Tongue circling your clit, he glanced up at you over his crooked glasses. His cheeks were pink, and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead as you reached for his hair again. "I want you to fuck me."

"Okay," he agreed, nodding his head like he hadn't brought you close with his mouth. He looked a little dazed and pussy drunk, and you thought you could fall in love with that expression on his handsome face. 

"Come here," you whispered, kneeling so you could kiss him. "You taste like me," you added, licking his cheek and chin. "And I love it."

"Honey," he growled, and when you looked down, you could tell he was aching. You pushed him onto his butt and helped him the rest of the way out of his jeans and snug briefs, his thick cock bouncing for you. Then you looked at him there in just his socks and glasses, and your entire body clenched with a need you'd never known before. 

You took his cock in both hands, leaned down and kissed away all of his precum while every muscle in his abs and both legs tensed up. "Holy shit," he gasped. When you tugged on his shoulders, he moved with you, covering your body with his own. His weight and warmth against your bare skin felt essential to your happiness, and when you kissed him, he said, "And you taste like me." 

His cheeks flushed a pretty pink as you ran your tongue along his lips. You couldn't get enough. He shifted his body slightly, and his cock came to rest on your slick clit, making you moan into his mouth. You arched away from him, moving your hips back and forth a few inches at a time, using his body to bring yourself pleasure as you clung to his arms. "God, Bob. You haven't even been inside me yet, and I'm a mess." 

The veins in his neck and forehead were more prominent as he panted, a bead of his sweat rolling down to the tip of his nose. You licked it away as you shifted your hips so he was positioned at your entrance. He was thick, and even though you were soaking wet now, you had to use one hand to help guide him. You shook your head from side to side, your body taking him slowly. He buried his forehead to your neck, and the bite of his glasses against your collar bone kept you grounded. 

"Honey," he moaned, clutching at your hips as he finally, finally bottomed out. You were completely full, already clenching around him softly and enjoying the rough feel of his trimmed hairs against your clit. He thrusted a few times like he couldn't help himself, and you kissed his forehead. "Am I hurting you?"

His neck was a little slick against your fingertips. You'd been fucked too rough or without enough lubrication to the point of it being painful several times before, but this was the exact opposite. "Bob, you feel incredible." He lifted his head and kissed your lips, rewarding you with another thrust. Your legs tangled with his as you pushed his hair back from his forehead and kissed him harder. 

His lips found their way to your neck and breasts, and his thrusts started coming quicker, but every smooth movement left you gripping at him, your body begging for more as you whimpered and whined. He murmured your name against your skin, sucking on your nipples until you were seeing stars. And each thrust filled you somehow better than the last. And every movement left you grinding your clit up for more. 

You were going to come. You were going to come so hard. You could feel it. The buildup was delicious. Lips and stubble and glasses on your breasts. Hands on your hips. Bob everywhere.

"I'm not wearing a condom. Honey," he panted. "I'm not wearing a condom."

"It's okay," you whined loudly, suddenly gasping and clawing at his shoulders for leverage. "You can come wherever you want."

He chose inside you. And you came, hard and long and loud, hands on his face while you kissed him. You knew he was going to be so much better. You called it from the start. From when he surprised you by asking you out for coffee. He was immediately better than anything else you anticipated for yourself, and even when he fumbled, he recovered. You ran your lips along his cheek and back to his ear and whispered, "You're so much better than faking it."

He rolled both of you onto your sides, facing each other while he was still deep inside you. "Please don't ever do that. Fake it," he said, voice deep and raspy as he ran his rough palm along your cheek. "I want to know I'm good enough for my girlfriend." 

You smiled and tucked your head under his chin, and he wrapped his arm around you. His skin was warm beneath your lips, and his words were soft and gentle. When he climbed out of bed, he asked where he could find a washcloth, and he came back with it a minute later, ready to help you get cleaned up. He even held your robe out for you and waited while you used the bathroom, but you did that quickly, finding you wanted to be right next to him as much as possible.

Bob looked delicious in his briefs and undershirt, and you wrapped your arms around his waist as you asked, "Do you want to go back out under the blanket? With the bottle of wine? We could look at the stars. Listen to the ocean before bed."

He kissed your forehead. "As long as I'm with you."

-------------------------

Six months later...

After eight weeks away, Bob was excited to get home. He really hoped this was the start of his deployments feeling lonelier than the time between them did. Especially since he was going home to you and the house where he moved all of his stuff as soon as you asked him to live with you. He couldn't wait to hold you all night and hear all about your Dungeons & Dragons campaign and ask how you'd been enjoying work.

As soon as the aircraft carrier started docking in San Diego, he was at one of the lower railings along with the other aviators, and he spotted you immediately. You were bouncing around at the front of the crowd shouting his name and waving like a lunatic, and he had missed you so much. "Hey, Honey!" he shouted, and you just jumped higher. 

"Damn, Floyd. That's your girl?" asked one of the guys he'd flown with.

"Yeah," he replied, never taking his eyes off you. "That's my girl."

Six and a half minutes later, he was practically running down the long ramp with his duffle on one shoulder to the spot where you were waiting for him. 

"Bob!" you screeched as he scooped you up in your tiny dress and kissed you until you were as breathless as he was. "I missed you. I love you so much, and I missed you."

"I want to go home, Honey," he said, kissing you again. "Take me home."

"Gladly," you gushed, grabbing his hand and leading him toward his own truck. "I have big plans for your big cock," you announced to everyone around you, and Bob felt his cheeks warm up. "Well, and the rest of you, too. We can make a pizza together and eat out on the deck."

"Anything you want," he promised, tossing his bag in the truck bed and pushing you against the door. "And I love you, too." 

You only let him kiss you for a few seconds, before you were pushing him away. "I know you do. Let's go home." You held his hand on the short ride, and when he pulled in the driveway, you yanked him right out and led him inside the house. 

This felt incredible, knowing you wanted him as badly as he wanted you, running hand in hand to the bedroom. Then you stopped short and turned to face him as he bumped into you with a laugh. "You know how you're kind of your alter ego right now when you're in your uniform? Lieutenant Floyd?"

"Yeah?" he whispered, leaning down to kiss you, but your lips curled into a smile as you backed away.

"Well... I thought you might like to meet my alter ego?" you asked softly, easing that little dress up to your hips and along your torso before pulling it over your head. You were standing there in the tiniest black thong and bra set known to mankind. "Do you want to meet Roxy Luxxe?"

Bob just nodded and reached down to palm himself through his khaki pants as he gaped at you and grunted, "Uh huh." If Roxy was just a playful extension of his girlfriend, then yes, he wanted to meet her. 

You bit your lip and coaxed him toward the bed, running your hands down your body to your hips where you played with your underwear. "Good. Because she wants to meet you, too. And she wants you to know she's only going to be available exclusively for Bob Floyd's enjoyment."

---------------------------

Thanks for reading this long one-shot! I wanted Bob to get to fuck a former pornstar, because nobody deserves such a treat the way Bob does! But then I got attached to them and had to make it special. Bob and the artist formerly known as Roxy Luxxe are adorable together. Thanks to @mak-32 @beyondthesefourwalls @thedroneranger and @sylviebell for your help!

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[writingquestionsanswered]

I don't know if this question will make sense or if it's too vague, but here goes: how do I get my OCs to feel more like blorbos? With my favorite characters from books/movies/etc, I go feral about them, I want to put them in jars and poke them with sticks and see what makes them tick. But with my original writing, I'll have ideas for stories but despite following all the traditional advice for fleshing out character motivation, flaws, etc, I keep finding myself horribly bored with my own characters. This might be too vague to answer because what makes a blorbo for one person won't necessarily be the same thing that makes another person go feral, but I was wondering if you happened to have any thoughts on what keeps my OCs feeling so un-blorbo-ish? Thanks!

"Blorbo-izing" an Original Character

Quick question to start with: have you ever cast your characters with real actors or models, or commissioned an artist to create character art of your character? I feel like it's a fairly common thing for writers to do these days, but I'm still always surprised by the number of writers who don't do this.

I have a post about casting here (Guide: Casting Your Characters) but here I'll just say that, for me, casting or getting character art made is an essential part of "blorbo-izing" my characters. I spend lots of time creating and fleshing out my characters before I ever cast them or have character art made, but they almost never feel completely real to me until I have a visual representation of the character that exists outside of my own head.

Outside of that, I thing it's a really good idea to do some character development exercises that go beyond the scope of your story. Some of my favorites include:

Character Interview - imagine that you’ve pulled your character out of a story into the room and now have the opportunity to interview them. What questions would you ask them? What do you want to know about them that you don’t already know? What do you think the reader would want to know? What might be pertinent to the story that you haven’t thought about yet?

TV Crew follow around - Imagine you’ve dropped an invisible TV crew into your story’s world to follow your character around through an average day (even if it's anachronistic). Follow them from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed that night. What are they like when they wake up? What is their morning routine? What do they eat for breakfast? How do they get ready? What do they do throughout the day? Who do they interact with? What else do they eat and drink? What do they do for fun or relaxation? How to they make money or meet their basic needs? What is their bedtime routine like?

Letters or Journal Entries - Look at your character's back story, off-screen events, etc. and find something for your character to write about in a journal entry or a letter to another character. What would they say about this event? How does it make them feel? What do they think about it?

Use Your Character in a Writing Prompt - Look at some writing prompts and do one using your character as the main character. You can keep it within your story's world or plop them into a whole different world. Whatever works for you and your story. This is about getting to know this character in a different context than the events of your story provides.

Create a Character Mood Board/Aesthetic - Mood boards go a long way in mentally fleshing out a character for me. Being able to have a visual representation of their style, their vibe, things that are important to them, etc. really turns them into real people in my mind.

Create a Playlist for Your Character - I think playlists can also be a really great way to mentally flesh out a character in your mind. Sometimes, just having a particular song or a playlist of songs that makes you think of them gives them some dimension they wouldn't otherwise have.

I hope that helps!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

♦ Questions that violate my ask policies will be deleted! ♦ Please see my master list of top posts before asking ♦ Learn more about WQA here

[buckychristwrites]

About You | Day 10 | j.t.

Summary: Your job? Pop culture journalist for The Independent. Your assignment? To write a profile on the cocky footballer that you're publicly feuding with.

Word Count: 7.2k

Warnings: Cussing. Enemies to lovers

A/N: i regret everything nothing

Masterlist | About You Masterlist | Main Blog

Quiet music filled your flat to keep your mind focused. Without it, the silence would eat you alive. It felt like there was so much to do. Your hair was done, which was one step to check off, but now it was time for makeup. The counter in front of you was a wreck. Eyeshadow palettes, lip sticks, foundations and eyeliners were scattered across every possible surface. Despite the fact that you spent your whole day watching tutorials on how to actually apply semi-decent looking makeup for an event at this scale, you just weren’t getting it to your liking. Either the eyeshadow didn’t blend properly, or the eyeliner would mark in a way that you couldn’t fix. It just felt like every time, something had to go wrong.

With a sharp exhale, you wiped it off again to start over for the third time.

The pounding in your chest only increased when you looked at the clock. Time seemed to be going by quicker than you would’ve liked. Briefly, you considered phoning Keeley for help, but nixed that when you remembered that she would be busy setting everything up. No sense in interrupting her for something so minute.

Another thought popped into your mind: Ring Jamie? 

Of course not. The emotional support would be everything you needed. But the call from the night prior was still haunting you. It had been wildly unprofessional for you to call him in such a way when you were still writing the profile about him. It seemed that too often lately did you forget that the only reason you knew him so intimately at this point was because you were doing your job. With the ever growing feelings growing inside you (that you were reminded of every time you heard his name or saw his face) it became more and more pertinent for you to remember how journalists were supposed to act under these circumstances. And calling the interviewee to comfort you over your self esteem issues was not it.

Putting your utensils down, you stood up and examined your makeup. It had taken forever, but after intense inspection, you gave it a just barely passing grade. For a second, you picked up your brush again.

“Maybe I could fix- no,” You declared, dropping it back down. If you tried to fix it, it would only end with you starting over. There was simply no time for it.

You abandoned the makeup to give yourself a hard glare through the mirror. Leaning in, you rose a finger to the glass.

“Do NOT give Jamie all of your attention tonight,” You angrily told yourself. “You’re going to be a GOOD journalist and dance with fucking hot men all night and maybe makeout with someone. Or whatever people do at these things.” Pulling your hand away, you crossed your arms over your chest, which was covered with a fancy, expensive strapless bra. “You’re going to look amazing. You WILL NOT ogle over the one man there that you cannot have.” Pause. “Well, I guess you really can’t get with anyone on the team, can you?” You pinched your chin in thought. “NO FOOTBALLERS AT ALL THEN.” You shook your head in disgust at your reflection. “Fuckin’ slut, that’s what you are.” 

As slowly and carefully as humanly possible, you slipped the dress over your hair and head before pulling it down your torso. When you looked in the mirror, you didn’t recognize yourself. It was hard to believe that just the night before, you were worried about looking horrible. But here you were, completely done up to the nines, excited for people to see you. What a weird turn of events. You were never excited for people to see you. It’s crazy what a nice fitting dress and some makeup can do for a person.

Glancing at the clock again, you jumped back into action. Phone thrown in your tiny handbag. Shoes grabbed from the bottom of your closet. After you slipped them on, you gave yourself another once over before pointing at yourself again.

“Don’t even THINK about Jamie Tartt tonight.”

Eyes narrowed, you let the glare linger for another few seconds before rushing out of the bedroom. You grabbed your keys and the press pass, then made sure you were all ready before walking out the door. 

Your eyes were glued to your feet as you slowly walked down the stairs. You weren’t used to wearing a dress like this, and you were desperately afraid of falling. Even when you were graciously at the bottom and walking through the lobby, you were still staring at your shoes. When you opened the front door, the crisp, cool air felt amazing against your skin. Maybe a walk would be perfect. No one had to know, especially not-

You looked up to find Jamie Tartt’s wide eyes staring at you.

“Woah.”

The air was forced out of your lungs. 

He was wearing a simple tuxedo, black dress trousers and a button up with the red suit jacket thrown over his shoulder, being held up by his left hand. The white button up hugged his arms so perfectly, as if he was a statue that had been sculpted that way. His long hair was slicked back. A bowtie was perfectly tied around his neck, forcing you to wonder if he did it himself or if he had help. Behind him was a black car that you had never seen before, a driver waiting patiently in the driver’s seat.

“Jamie Tartt,” You said in a scolding voice that did not, in any way, match your expression. “What are you doing here? I told you I would drive myself.” He didn’t answer immediately, his mouth busy being slightly agape as he stared at you. He took a few careful steps forward, his eyes wandering up and down your body. You had never been more aware of his gaze as you were at this moment. The pit in your stomach grew with every moment that he was silent.

“Fuckin’ hell,” He said, shaking his head. “You’re gonna make me punch more men for you tonight, aren’t ya?” He swallowed hard before meeting your eye. “Stunnin’... just doesn’t sound like the right word to describe the way you look right now. I don’t think that word exists, to be honest.” You suddenly felt bashful, the familiar warmth returning to your cheeks.

“You didn’t answer my question.” He cocked his head to the side.

“I had a feelin’ you were gonna try walkin’,” He told you. “So I figured I’d make sure meself that you didn’t.” He lifted his eyebrows in a way that begged you to prove him wrong, but you couldn’t, because he wasn’t.

How could he read your mind? How did he know you so well? Did he know that you had told yourself not to think about him, too? Because he had also ruined that.

“Right, let’s get goin’, yeah?” He said, turning and opening the door for you. You gave him a shy smile as you walked over. When he offered you a hand to help you in the car, you felt like you were going to pass out. His fingers were toasty against the cool, early evening air. He shut the door before walking over to the other side and letting himself in. The minute his door was shut, the driver took off. 

You looked out the window as the car went. It was the perfect temperature inside, but it was that moment that you realised you never grabbed a shawl or anything to keep you warm once the sun went down. Silently, you cursed yourself.

“What’s your favourite part of these events?” You asked Jamie, turning to face him. He laughed.

“Going home after, no question,” He admitted. This made you laugh too. 

“How can you hate these things?” You asked him. “Everyone will be so excited to see you, I thought that would make you feel good.” He shook his head.

“That’s why I hate these things.” His eyes met yours. “A whole night of having to ask people for money ‘cos I’m famous and that’s the only sell I have, but that’s what makes them donate. Being bothered by girls who want The Jamie Tartt. People talkin’ to me like I’m worth somethin’ just ‘cos I can play football. Can’t I just be normal for a minute?” You pressed your lips together in a straight line.

“I’m sorry.” It was the only thing you could think of to say. He looked at you before waving it off.

“S’alright,” He said. “It’s gonna be a good time. Just too bad I can’t get drunk.” You remembered the match.

“Oh right,” You said. “The match tomorrow night.” He nodded. 

“Won’t stop me from sneaking a drink or two, though.”

The car started to slow down as it joined the line of cars waiting to drop off at Nelson Road. You peaked over Jamie’s shoulder, shocked at what you saw. 

The entrance was decorated so nicely that if you didn’t know any better, you wouldn’t have ever guessed you were going to a football pitch. Tall flowers and trees were suddenly surrounding a red carpet that led into the entrance. The place was packed with photographers, who were all parked in front of a backdrop that had logos of several businesses, charities and the AFC Richmond one, where they waited for the next star to pose in front of. 

“Keeley and Rebecca really popped the fuck off,” You said into Jamie’s ear. 

“Looks fuckin’ amazing.”

The car pulled up to where the red carpet began and came to a stop. Jamie looked over at you, giving you a tight smile.

“Ready?” You felt like you lost the ability to speak, so you just nodded in response. It didn’t seem he thought about it for a second before placing his hand on your thigh and giving you a supportive squeeze. 

Your heart jumped to your throat.

The second the door opened, the flashes from the paparazzi filled your vision like lightning. Jamie climbed out first, his hand leaving your thigh and the comfort going with it. The sound of screaming and cheers, plus the increase of lightning flashes towards the car, let you know that all eyes were on him. Hesitantly, you scooted towards the door, but you were frozen where you sat. Jamie’s frame hid you away from the cameras, and you wished you could stay behind him the whole night.

When he noticed you weren’t coming out, Jamie turned back around. You stared up at him.

Fuck, he is handsome in that suit.

He leaned towards you, his voice quiet. “I’d be honoured to be the only person who sees you tonight.” He looked deeply at you. “But I believe we all deserve a look, don’t ya think?” It took a few seconds, as you were stunned by his words, but you eventually nodded. He offered you a hand, similarly to how he had before, and you took a deep breath. He wrapped his fingers around yours before smiling at you.

“That’s a good choice, love.”

He turned just in time to miss your eyes widen at the now second time he called you that. 

Stepping to the side, Jamie helped you climb out of the car. The camera flashes were even brighter outside of the car, but when you peaked at Jamie, he was looking around as if this was just another day. How did someone get used to this?

You made your way down the carpet, Jamie following behind you. Just over the noise, you could make out someone calling your name. You had to look over the shoulders of some tall men, but you finally spotted Keeley making her way towards you. She looked gorgeous in an indigo ball gown style dress, her hair curly and sleek. You could tell she was sporting some high heels, though you couldn’t see them, just by the way she was running/hobbling towards you. Grabbing your shoulders, she planted a kiss on both of your cheeks.

“You look so gorgeous,” She said as she pulled away. “I’m so glad you could make it.” 

“I wouldn’t have missed it!” You exclaimed, pulling away to look at her. “And you look absolutely beautiful, Keeley. This is fucking amazing.You did a wonderful job on this!” She leaned in.

“Just wait until you see the party area,” She said, smiling wide as she went to greet Jamie with a hug and kiss on the cheek. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw Roy Kent approach. In a surprising turn of events, Roy was wearing a black tuxedo with a black button up underneath. 

“Roy,” You said in greeting. “Looking as handsome as ever.” The actual surprise of this moment was him actually smiling at you before leaning down and kissing your cheek. 

“You look lovely,” He said, lowering his voice before adding, “Tartt picked a good one, didn’t he?” All of the blood in your body rushed to your cheeks as Roy turned and gave Jamie a hug, as if everything was normal and he hadn’t just left you absolutely stunned by the whole interaction. 

“He’s had a few drinks already,” Keeley whispered to you as the both of you watched her boyfriend, who was laughing at something Jamie said. “Makes him a little nicer, doesn’t it?” 

“So much nicer!” You exclaimed. The men made their way to the photographer area, leaving you to watch Jamie’s receding back as he went, him turning back once to give you a supportive grin. You nervously returned it. Keeley’s name was called in the distance. 

“Sorry! I’ll see you in a bit,” She said, giving your hand a squeeze before rushing off. 

You felt like a lost puppy, suddenly alone as you looked around. Sighing, you took out your phone and press pass. That must mean it’s time to get to work. You began to walk around, looking for a friendly face, but one found you first. Someone in the distance called your name. When you turned, Sam Obisanya was waving to you. 

“Hey!” You called, pushing through a crowd to make your way towards him. He raised his arms out to you, and you allowed yourself to be enveloped by them. 

“You look absolutely beautiful, my friend,” He said, shaking his head. You popped your leg out of the slit, making him laugh loudly. 

“Would you care to give a comment on what you hope to accomplish tonight?” You asked, lifting your phone. He smiled as if confused before answering. 

“I hope that we as a team are able to make change for the homeless youth of our great city tonight,” He said. “We have the power to make a difference, and I am proud to play for a team that uses that power.” You stopped recording and pulled your phone away.

“That was lovely, Sam. Thank you!” You were quite surprised when he laughed.

“Sorry to laugh,” He said, waving his hand. “I just forgot that you were a journalist.” When your eyebrows knitted together, he elaborated. “I have just come to think of you as one of the team, since you are always around, and you do not treat us like most journalists do.” You grinned widely at him.

“Richmond has definitely made an impact on me that I won’t ever forget,” You told him. Looking behind you, he bumped your hip with his own before nodding in that direction.

“Some more than others, yes?”

You turned to see Jamie posing for the cameras with Roy, Dani and Coach Beard. He had put his jacket on, and now you could see the black collar against the red jacket. You stared for a beat too long, and when you turned back to Sam, he was smiling at you in the way that you had seen too often from too many people now. 

“Be nice, Sam,” You warned, rolling your eyes playfully. “Shouldn’t you be schmoozing someone for money or something?” He laughed as he walked away, giving you a salute before turning. You watched him go, shaking your head before turning around and making your way to…wherever you ended up next. You looked around, trying to find someone who wasn’t busy talking or having their picture taken. You found it incredibly rude when journalists interrupted conversations for a soundbite, but you wondered if that was just how things had to happen. 

“Looking lovely, as predicted,” A voice from behind you said. You turned to reveal Isaac, who was smiling down at you. You leaned up and kissed his cheek.

“Isaac! You look so proper!” Indeed he did, with his bright royal blue suit. He posed for you, and you appeased him with a photo. Switching back to the recording app, you lifted your phone. “Would you like to comment on what AFC Richmond is doing here tonight?”

“Homelessness is bad,” He said simply. “Homelessness as a youth is worse. Please donate if you can.” 

“Simple, but to the point,” You remarked. “Thanks, Isaac.” He nodded, smiling before turning and walking off. 

You made your way inside, following the directions of the well dressed stadium workers in order to get to the correct area. You thanked every one of them as you made your way. When the directions led you towards the pitch, you grew sceptical. But once you opened the door to let yourself out, you swallowed all doubt, your mouth falling open.

In the middle of the pitch was a large, low step patio that was so large, it had a bar top, a DJ booth, a dance floor, and dozens and dozens of tables and chairs. Three sides were covered with white tent walls, while the side facing you was completely open, more red carpeting laid out from the door you stood at to the patio. The stadium lights were turned on as the sun was going down, but the lighting inside the tent was a deep red. Enough to see, but dark enough to create a mysterious ambiance. Even from a distance, you could see the star decorations hanging from the ceilings, and plants scattered throughout. It was so elegant, you couldn’t stop staring.

As you slowly made your way across, you made out silhouettes inside already. Music got louder as you approached. You were careful when you stepped up to not fall. The red lighting looked even more insane when you were standing in them. You hoped Keeley was getting paid so much money for this, the tiny fucking genius. 

You made your way to the bar and ordered a drink. While you waited, you looked around, bobbing your head to the music. None of the people around appeared to be people you knew, though it was harder to tell. The bartender smiled at you as she placed the vodka cranberry on the bartop and slid it towards you. 

“Thank you!” You said, tipping the drink towards her before taking a sip. A little strong, but still good. Part of you was incredibly thankful for the open bar. 

“There ya are.”

You turned to see Jamie walking towards you. His jacket was once again off and thrown over his shoulder. It was as if your mouth just couldn’t help but break into a smile when you saw him. Maybe it was the alcohol. You had, after all, just had a very large sip, and though there was no way it could already be making you tipsy, it still had to be the cause. That could be the only explanation. 

“How was interviewing?” You asked him. He blew a raspberry before leaning on the bartop.

“I ain’t doin’ any of that,” He said. Your eyebrows hit your hairline as the bartender approached him. ��Double whiskey please.” You leaned towards him, taking a sip from your drink.

“First of all, Keeley will kill you if you don’t do any interviews,” You said to him quietly. “Second of all, did you forget you have a match tomorrow?” He blew another raspberry.

“When in Rome,” He said, clinking his glass against yours before tipping his head back and drinking half the glass. He exhaled happily when he brought the glass down from his mouth. “What’cha drinkin’?” He peeked into your glass. “I can’t tell from the fuckin’ lights in here.”

“Vodka cranberry,” You told him, taking another sip. He looked surprised.

“Look who’s gettin’ drunk tonight,” He said. “It’ll be my turn to drive you to your flat tonight.” You took another large gulp of your drink. He went to do the same.

“Technically, to return the favour entirely, you’d have to drive me to your place and host me.” He paused, the glass just on the tip of his lips. Without taking a drink, he lowered the drink.

“Would you be walkin’ naked around me house too?” He asked jokingly.

Was it the drink in your veins or the confidence the dress gave you? You weren’t sure, but something caused you to say. “Would you want me to?” 

The tiny smile on his face disappeared, and his expression became unreadable. When he took a step towards you, your breath got caught in your throat. He opened his mouth to speak when-

“Jamie!” You both turned to see Keeley storming towards the both of you, shouting your name as well. Jamie stepped away from you as you chugged the rest of your drink. She stopped in front of the both of you, looking distressed. “You won’t believe who is here.” You and Jamie exchanged a look before turning back to her. 

“Who?” Jamie asked. 

“Shandy!” She exclaimed, her face so sullen that you were also upset about this person you didn’t know. “She got her invite before I fired her, I couldn’t stop her from getting in.” She looked around. “I’m worried she’s going to do something horrid. You know what she did to my office.” You stared between the two of them, waiting for elaboration, but it never came.

“Can’t you have security remove her?” Jamie asked, looking at you with a look of apology for the interruption. Keeley was shaking her head, but from her face, it was clear she wasn’t really listening to him. 

“Help me find Roy, please,” She said, grabbing his sleeve and dragging him away. You watched her back and Jamie’s slouching shoulders disappear into the crowd. Your heart was still beating out of your chest as you were desperate to know what would’ve happened if Keeley hadn’t run over. What was he about to say?

You shook your head as you remembered what you had told yourself in the mirror. This night isn’t about Jamie. Don’t even think about him.

“Can I have another please?” You asked the bartender as you turned back around. She quickly obliged, another being placed before you in no time. This time, you grabbed your drink and began to wander. 

You had a bit of a sway to your step as you walked around, sipping your drink. The crowd out on the pitch had grown significantly since you had initially made your way over, especially in the bar area, as everyone was just starting their alcoholic journey of the evening. The dance floor was lacking, as again, most people weren’t drunk enough to feel in the mood. But as you finished your second drink, you found yourself setting the empty glass down and making your way over. You didn’t recognize the song playing, but you liked it enough to join the handful of people and begin to dance yourself. 

You turned to see Dani Rojas creeping over, swaying his hips and smiling at you.

“Dani Rojas!” You yelled, throwing your hands up. He mirrored you, shouting your name back at you as the two of you danced like old friends and goofballs together. Quick to join was Collin, who was followed by Isaac. You laughed loudly at them, clapping your hands at the way they danced. Richard and Bumbercatch were watching from the sidelines, each with a beer in hand, but it didn’t take them long to join, either. Normally, you would feel silly, dancing like this. But with the team dancing however they wanted, you suddenly forgot that there could be anything worth getting embarrassed about. 

When Coach Beard joined, everyone cheered loudly. He threw his jacket to the side and began to dance wildly. Even Roy, who was even more inebriated than before, came over and danced, though not as intensely as everyone else. Seeing him reminded you of Keeley, which reminded you of Jamie. When you looked to the side of the dance floor, you saw Jamie watching the team dance party. He had another drink in his hand that he had finished off as you began to break from the dance circle. 

“Havin’ fun?” He asked with a smirk as you approached. You took the glass from his hands and set it down.

“Be more fun if you joined,” You told him as you took his hand and pulled him to the dance floor. It took him a second to relax, but soon enough, the two of you were dancing together while amongst the team. You couldn’t help but laugh, and he was doing the same. It definitely was the alcohol that made it seem like the music was filling your veins.

When the song changed to a slow one, everyone groaned and began to evacuate. As you turned to leave, Jamie grabbed your hand. His eyes were anxious when you turned to meet them.

“Dance with me?”

Your answer was immediate.

“Sure.”

He led you to the middle. He placed a hand on your left hip, his other cradling your right one. You folded your fingers down to cover his. You knew you’d heard the song before, the beat familiar as you swayed along with him, but you couldn’t for the life of you remember the name.

“Did Keeley solve the Shandy problem?” You asked him. He was so close that you were able to talk to each other without yelling.

“I don’t think so,” He said. “She didn’t want to cause a scene by gettin’ security, but she also doesn’t want to confront her and cause a scene. It’s a mess.” You nodded. 

“I hope she’s able to figure it out,” You told him. “She did an amazing job on all this. Be a shame for someone like Shandy to ruin it for her.” He nodded in agreement. 

The alcohol was starting to take effect now, your head feeling lighter. You wanted to lay your head down on Jamie’s shoulder, but decided not to. A strand of Jamie’s hair had fallen down his forehead from the dancing. He showed no indication of knowing it was there. You picked your hand up off his shoulder and tenderly brushed it back into place, letting your fingers swipe gently across his forehead. His eyes never left your face as you did this. 

“There,” You said quietly, once you were satisfied. “Not a hair out of place now.” You giggled at your joke, but all he shook his head slightly.

“You really have no idea what you’re doin’ to me, do you?” He asked in a whisper. When did his face get so close to yours? Or was it always that close? It wasn’t until now that you noticed his warm breath on your face, smelling of spearmint and whiskey. 

“What am I doing to you, Jamie Tartt?” 

He opened his mouth to speak, but then, Keeley appeared on the stage and grabbed the microphone.

“Good evening everyone!” She said excitedly. “Thank you so much for joining myself and all of AFC Richmond for out first ever Charity Gala!”

Jamie and you watched her for a moment before realising that the two of you were still positioned to dance, the only movement being your held hands had fallen to the side. He reluctantly pulled away from you, turning with his hands in his pockets. It had to have been the night air that made you suddenly so cold, and not the void Jamie’s absence left.

You put a hand on his bicep, making him lean his head towards you.

“I’m going to get another drink,” You told him, mouth almost against his ear. “I’ll be right back.” He nodded, seeming to be frustrated and unable to make eye contact with you. Feeling slighted, you made your way through the crowd towards the bar. There, sitting at one of the stools and facing the stage, was Roy Kent, sipping on a whiskey. His eyes followed you as you took the spot next to him and hailed down the bartender.

“Are you two ever going to admit your feelings or am I going to have to watch this sadness forever?” He asked through slurred words. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Roy,” You said to him, looking away from him as the bartender handed you your drink. 

“Please,” He said, shaking his head. “Anyone who has eyes sees how the two of you look at each other.” You shrugged casually, taking a large drink from your cup.

“I look at him no differently than I look at you,” You declared. His eyebrows shot upward.

“Well, you better hope Keeley never sees you lookin’ at me then,” He said. “She’s got a mean punch, that one.” You rolled your eyes before walking away. 

Keeley’s speech was over, but you couldn’t find Jamie. Not on the dancefloor, not by the bar, not at the buffet tables. On a random chair that you almost blew passed, you found Jamie’s red jacket. With a smile, you grabbed it and threw your arms through the sleeves, your drunken brain taking considerably much longer to do so than your sober brain would. Inside was a pocket large enough to fit your small clutch. Feeling incredibly accomplished, you continued on. You found yourself wandering outside, continuing to sip on your drink as you peeked at every face in an effort to find him. 

“You okay?” Sam asked when walking passed him just outside the door you had come out from. Normally, you’d have no issue asking Sam for help, but he had an unfamiliar lady on his arm, making you smirk at him.

“Nope!” You said, raising both hands up. “Perfectly fine. Go on with your evening.” He winked at you before turning and walking off with his lady friend. You proudly watched him leave before turning. Initially, you planned to go through the designated entrance, but when you looked over, you saw the tunnel that went directly to the changing rooms. Before walking on the grass, you slipped your shoes off and carried them in one hand, your drink in the other. The grass felt amazing against your feet. Or was that just the alcohol talking? Probably.

The lights were on when you entered. It was so blissfully quiet as you wandered around, reading every name placard. You paused at Jamie’s locker in the corner. When you looked away, you saw the yellow Believe sign hanging over the door to the coach’s office. You stared at it for a while, it making you feel some type of way. Maybe that was the point of it. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw movement in the boot room, which did not have the lights on. You opened the door and went to the right side of the shelves where you found Will the kit man, folding kits and setting them out.

“Will!” You exclaimed. He jumped, whirling around to face you. You lifted the hand that held your shoes in question. “What are you doing in the dark? Why are you doing the wash? It’s a party!” He looked embarrassed at the fact that he had been caught. 

“I just was getting this done right quick,” He told you. Taking the opportunity, you sat down in the corner between the open cubbies and the wall. Though you couldn’t see the door, you could still see out the window into the changing room.

“Well, I’m just gonna have a sit and then I’ll be out of your hair,” You told him. Another sip of your drink went down your mouth. It was obvious that Will was anxious by your presence, so you decided not to say anything more, instead just enjoying the quick break before heading back out. You hummed one of the songs that had been playing earlier while finishing your drink. Will looked at you out of the corner of his eye. This almost made you quiet down, until you noticed that this seemed to calm him. 

From the other side of the door, you saw it open, and in came Jamie, glancing around as if he was looking for someone. Will turned to look as well.

“I should probably-” You went to rise but froze when another figure had followed him in. It was a beautiful girl with tan skin and long, beautiful hair. She was wearing a long, one sleeved, hot pink dress with a deep cut for cleavage and an opening around her midriff. You had never seen her before. They were talking, but there was no way for you to know what was being said. 

“Will,” You said in a quiet voice. “Who’s that?” 

“That’s Shandy,” He told you. “She used to work for Keeley. Always flirted with Jamie when she saw him.” He shook his head. “She is awful, that one.”

Your heart fell into your stomach when you saw Shandy approach Jamie, her arm wrapping around him. From your place on the bench, you couldn’t tell where his hands were. Your brain was screaming at you to look away, but you just couldn’t.

Will sat down next to you, placing a hand on your forearm. He said nothing, but he didn’t need to. As you turned to him and opened your mouth to thank him, the door to the boot room was thrown open, bouncing against the wall before the soft close mechanism kicked in. 

“You ever had your cocked sucked in here, Tartt?” Shandy asked as she pulled him towards the other side of the shelves, opposite of where you and Will sat. You lowered yourself down, suddenly feeling incredibly sober. She turned to face him, getting incredibly close. “I hear a lot of magic happens here… let’s create our own. What do you think?” You could see Jamie from the other side of the shelves thanks to the open backed cubbies, and you could see the tension in his jaw.

“Shandy-”

She grabbed his shirt, pulling him closer. 

“Jamie, Jamie, Jamie,” She said as she untied his tie until it was out of the neat little bow. She held both ends in her hands, pulling him closer to him. “What can you do, Jamie Tartt? What makes you special? Besides your lovely face and sexy body?” She began to sing. “Jamie Tartt dodo dodo dodo, Jamie Tartt dodo dodo dodo, Jamie Tartt dodo dodo dodo…” She was centimetres from his mouth as she whispered, “Jamie Tartt.” When she planted a deep kiss on his mouth, you felt the urge to cry.

It was the fact that he didn’t push her away that made the tears spill over.

You looked down at the floor, finally deciding it was time to look away.  Will’s hand squeezed your arm, reminding you that it was there. The weight of Jamie’s jacket seemed to increase at that moment, but you didn’t want to risk moving to take it off. The sound of them kissing was so loud. Why was it so loud when two people kissed? It was so tempting to interrupt them. To shout, or kick something over. But instead, you sat still. Who were you to do that? Just a stupid girl who read into things too hard. The only plus side to this was now you could tell Roy that he was wrong all along.

You looked around for an exit when you spotted the door just across from the shelf that hid the two of you. Nudging Will, you pointed towards it. A lightbulb seemed to go off in his head as he slowly stood and made his way over. He did his best to not let it creak, seeming to be successful when no changes came from the other side of the shelf. The sight of the hallway on the other side of the door was a welcome one.

Slowly standing, you began to tiptoe across the floor.

I LIKE BIG BUTTS AND I CANNOT LIE. YOU OTHER BROTHERS CAN’T DENY THAT WHEN A GIRL WALKS…

You stared wide eyed at Will, who met your gaze with an equal look of terror before fumbling for his phone, the source of the intrusion. It was too late though, for the kissing sounds had stopped. Your eyes closed.

“Who the fuck is in here?” She demanded as she rounded the corner. Her eyes fell on Will and you, her expression a mix of anger and disgust. “Who the fuck are you two?” Followed behind her was Jamie, who’s eyes fell on you, changing his entire expression. You let your arms fall limp at your sides. 

“Absolute fuckin’ perverts,” Shandy shrieked. “I’ll be callin’ security on the both of you.” Rolling your eyes, you turned and walked out of the door, Will still holding it open as he had just gotten his phone to stop ringing. 

Though your brain was feeling sober, your body hadn’t quite caught up, for it was stumbling down the hall of the Nelson Road stadium as you tried to escape. It felt like the air was a gas that was suffocating you, crawling into your lungs and not allowing oxygen to enter. When you pushed the door open to the outdoors, you almost fell onto the sidewalk, but you caught yourself on the wall. 

Give yourself a second, you told yourself. Just breathe.

Slowly inching up the wall, you were standing straight again. You continued to hold the wall and get your breathing under control for a minute before you let go and began to walk. In. Hold. Out. In. Hold. Out.

The cool sidewalk felt amazing against your bare feet, spare the occasional pebble that would dig into the soles. It didn’t matter though. You’d walk through a thousand pebbles right now if it meant you got home faster.

Far behind you, that familiar Mancunian accent yelled out your name. You stumbled into the road despite the sign saying Do Not Walk. A car slammed on their breaks, blaring their horn, but you continued to walk as if nothing had happened. He yelled your name again, this time a little more forcefully, which suggested he was running. Tears began to fill your eyes once more.

Please, You begged. Please, not now.

“Hey.” His voice was right behind you. A hand grabbed your bicep, causing you to instinctively rip it from the grip. When you turned, Jamie’s face was a mixed bag of emotions; Guilt, confusion, desperation. He said your name again, this time a whisper. “Please let me explain.”

You tiredly shook your head. “I just want to go home, Jamie.” It made you furious that your words were still slurring. When you turned to leave, he ran in front of you to block your way.

“Please!” He exclaimed, choking up. “I wanted nothin’ to do with Shandy. She was all over me-” 

“It’s really none of my business,” You said, waving your hands while stepping backwards. “I’m just a journalist who is writing a profile on you. What you do outside of work, and what I do outside of work, doesn’t affect the other at all.” He feverishly shook his head.

“You have to know that you’re more than that,” He said in disbelief. “You can’t possibly still think that’s the only way I view you.” He ran a hand down his face. Your head fell to the side. 

“I don’t know what I think, Jamie.”

You walked around him and continued down the sidewalk. For a minute, you wondered if he was going to let you go. Which would be worse? If he followed? Or if he didn’t?

“At least let me give you a ride,” He called out, weakly.

“We’re already almost there,” You yelled back. “No point in going back for the car now.” 

You kept walking, and though he didn’t say anything, you were painfully aware of the fact that Jamie was following you. You had to give him props for not letting you walk home, drunk and alone. But you couldn’t possibly deal with the night’s events through the drunken lens. You needed a shower and sleep, and then maybe sober you would be able to deal with it. 

When your building came into view, a sign of relief tumbled from your lips and fresh tears streamed down your face. You picked up the pace to get inside, throwing the door open and rushing up the stairs. The sound of the door opening a second time alerted you that Jamie was not going to stop outside. He was taking the steps two at a time to keep up with you. 

When you reached the door of your flat, you quickly grabbed your little purse from the jacket pocket and searched for your keys. Jamie was a few feet away, leaning against the wall. 

“You can go now,” You said exasperatedly. “I’m clearly home safe.” He said your name in a low tone, pushing off the wall and taking a step towards you. More tears streamed down your face.

“I don’t want to leave ya like this,” He said. “Please. Please, let’s just talk this out.” You finally got a hold of your keys, throwing the one to your flat in the lock.

“Please, Jamie,” You whispered. “I just want to go to bed.” The door unlocked and you stepped inside. 

“I don’t even like Shandy!” He exclaimed. You were full on crying now as you dropped your shoes on the ground.

“I’ll see you at the match,” You said in a broken voice. At this, he went to step forward, his own face beginning to crumble, but you were too quick as you closed and locked the door. In the safety of your own flat, you allowed yourself to break, your hands pressed against the door as you released every emotion you had been holding in between now and when you saw Jamie and Shandy. You turned and let your back hit the door, sliding down and curling into yourself. 

It was there you sat, your knees to your chest and head cradled in your arms with quiet sobs into Jamie’s jacket being the only sound for a long time. Eventually, you got up and dragged yourself to the bedroom, where you left the dress and coat abandoned on the floor, and curled into bed for a night of restless sleep.

If only you had listened to yourself. If only you hadn’t thought about Jamie.

[beanghostprincess]

I just thought of this so you have to, too.

Buggy being genderfluid but the Roger crew not really giving a flying fuck about it. Who cares how you dress so long as you're still you? Yeah, sure, go apeshit, just be loyal, strong, etc. You're one of Us and your pants or lack thereof doesn't impact that.

The crew disbands.

Shanks and Buggy get smth of a culture shock once they are no longer in that protective bubble. Buggy is getting hateful looks, comments, snide remarks. Shanks is at his side, completely taken aback and honestly pretty pissed. Buggy, on more Femme days, faces more animosity, misogyny, and it's astounding to the former apprentices who different men and women are treated. And if you can't tell by a glance, people can get so upset?? What the hell????

Buggy refuses to be anything but themself/himself/herself, depending on the day and vibe. Shanks refuses to comply with this newfound social expectation to be rude and mean for no reason to innocent people.

The Grandline is the most progressive of the seas, due in part to the natural insanity it breeds. The Blues aren't as open, but the East is the more chill of the four. Buggy chooses there for many reasons, but the Big Top and crew is open to any sea. There's an information network, smuggling division, crowdsourcing area, etc.

Shanks will drop tips at places he visits for Buggy to get a foothold if they don't already exist, and Buggy will drop tips for Shanks regarding pertinent information for adventures, expectations, and etiquette.

It's a good dynamic. They go for years like this.

Buggy's stint in Impel Down was.... not fun. Aside from the misgendering, general torture and absolutely overwhelming energy there, it was stifling.

Marineford was a hot mess, but by the end, Shanks offers Buggy a ride to the Big Top's docked location, and on board, he just leads Buggy to this little chest in his cabin. Says, "here, take your pick. You wear whatever is most comfortable for you." There's a dress or two, a few skirts, tops, pants, shirts, and while most of it is in different sizes, there's belts and loops. Buggy bites back tears when they find their old skirt. They'd left that one on the Oro. How did Shanks even get this??

The time skip goes down, and by the time Cross Guild is running, Buggy has had to decide between masquerading as a Cis person or just... being themself. One morning, they wake up and everything feels too TIGHT, too STIFF, too much and she's left eying her leotard, half skirt and thigh highs.

...

Well. If she dies, might as well die authentic.

Crocodile and Mihawk nearly do a spit take when she struts out of her tent or into the announcement hall. She is a bit nervous by this, but she has COMMITTED.

It... also helps that so many of her men are singing her praises and Ritchie is bouncing happily, Mohji and Cabaji are smiling, Alvida is giving an approving nod-

She's happy. She's not going to let fear rule her, even if she can feel the gazes of two very powerful men tracking her every breath.

((They're not mad, they're fighting every urge to swoop her into a kiss and maybe more, but also the fact that WHO GAVE THE CLOWN THE RIGHT TO BE SO HOT??? IT WAS BAD ENOUGH BEFORE, NOW THIS????? they're not good at flirting, they cannot HANDLE this-))

I adore this. Buggy being genderfluid is actually so important to me as a genderfluid person-- My beloved. The concept of cold reality suddenly hitting them both (because they were so, so supportive back at the Oro Jackson) when the crew disbands is so good. Shanks is extremely protective of them when that happens, refusing to let anybody talk shit about Buggy. It's just so sweet of him. Tbh, it hurts so much to think about Buggy having to hide that part of himself,,, But then they come out to Mihawk and Crocodile and it's not only that they support them but they also absolutely love them. These two men are having a whole crisis over a clown again (as usual). But yeah, it's actually really sweet to see Buggy finally being free with them in that way,, Thinking thoughts about Crocodile going full mafioso with money and buying Buggy all the clothes she wants (he does it more for himself and Mihawk but yeah).

[singswan-springswan]

I just had a fever dream about Jason so y'all gonna have to suffer through me ranting about it buckle up.

literally I just gave him bird wings

In this au he's an "avian" which is not a human... or maybe it is? Anyway just people with bird wings so like. think partial wing au. These "avians" are really rare and I guess functionally they are humans except for the obvious; no powers etc. Maybe they can have kids with humans too idk I'm not worldbuilding 😭

The avian peoples can hide their wings away and shapeshift into humans ig. Their ability to do so varies from individual to individual. Some can do it at will, others have to be triggered to pop them out or bring them in.

Jason can summon his wings at will but he's always had a hard time shifting back to human especially if there's some kind of stressor present. Sometimes he needs to meditate in order to put them away.

His wings were super pretty when he was a kid. When he gets his full plumage it's very light and majestic and glossy and mostly white, with very subtle accents of grey. Sometimes even gold if the sun hits them right. Think marble angel statue etc. Jason is very proud of his wings. He doesn't keep them out all the time, but they sure come in handy during patrol.

He's delighted to be Robin because of the bird theme. Dick is super mad about it.

Jason is kidnapped multiple times for his wings. As you can imagine, there's a big black market for avian products. Probably why there are so few of them :/ anyway he's a scrappy feller so obviously he manages to escape every time, and his efforts improve after all the Robin training. Intrigue about the newest Wayne boy with the pretty wings is borderline vicious. Where did Bruce find such an attractive avian child? Most everyone who recognizes Jason as Bruce's kid ask to see his wings

He likes to wear them around the house because he likes to show them off and he feels comfortable in the Manor. Bruce and Alfred help him preen while he reads or talks about his day and it's great bonding time. Bruce always tells him his wings are beautiful and he should be proud of them and it makes Jason happy. Also, before coming to the Manor Jason had already had a few run-ins with traffickers and is super hesitant to flaunt his feathers but Bruce makes his promise to never lay an unwanted hand on Jason and promises to be gentle with his wings and he is and he's very respectful and treats Jason's wings with reverence every time Jason asks for help taking care of them ouagh. He has a few feathers lying around the house in his study and on his nightstand next to the framed picture of his two sons.

All the Titans compliment Jason's wings and he's blushing so hard the whole time it makes him dizzy

The wings add another layer to the "Robin is magic!" theme

When Jason and Dick get on less hostile terms, Jason makes jokes about Dick being a Flying Grayson despite not being an avian. Dick never takes it well because he's still salty about Jason stealing Robin but at least he's stopped attacking him for it

The "Little Wing" nickname is so much more pertinent now although it serves less as a symbol of Dick's acceptance and more just emphasizing the obvious

Oh no! Jason gets murdered!

The Joker beat him to kriff, but he absolutely desecrated Jason's wings. I'm talking mangled mutilated every bone broken feathers torn out shredded and bloody poor Jason :(

Bruce frames the few feathers he has and cries over them a ton like the unhealthy coping mechanism walking that he is.

Jason never summons his wings after crawling out of his grave. Obviously there's not much to shift into there and he subconsciously knows that exposing himself as an avian is dangerous when Bruce isn't there to protect him

The Lazarus pit heals the scarring on his wings. It takes a while for the feathers to grow back in. The colors change

His new plumage comes in red (womp womp) and Jason is so upset about it because he loved his pretty white feathers that looked like they'd been dipped in champagne and looked innocent and safe. Now his wings are much bigger and scarier and he feels like a different person. Talia tells him he's being dramatic (he is) but also she helps him preen when he can't bring himself to and she teaches him how to fight with the different weight. She also tries to train him to have better control over shifting in and out of them with little success. Maybe it's a classic case of "needing to find inner peace first" lol

Over the course of his time with the League, hints of black begin bleeding in like ink. It looks kinda creepy and Jason hates it even more but Talia teaches him how to use the intimidating factor to his advantage.

Damian draws him whenever he gets the chance. He thinks he's being sneaky.

When Jason decides to go back to Gotham and be a little menace Talia asks him what he's going to call himself. By that point, the black is more prominent, but "Red Hood" still feels aesthetically appropriate.

The Red Hood doesn't show his wings though. It's just a personal poetic symbol for Jason. Keeps him focused on what he's lost and what he's fighting for in the end etc.

His plan proceeds pretty much as canon, everything goes smoothly, Batman's getting thoroughly obsessed, Black Mask is losing his marbles, even that new Replacement Robin is lying low with an up and coming serial killer on a rampage in the Alley.

Then a particular run-in with Batman changes things. Unbeknownst to Jason, Batman's been going down a check-list trying to gather every possible drop of information about Hood (as he does), and of course he has to check if Hood is an avian. like. as an afterthought. They are a pretty rare species, but it's worth checking anyway. How's he going to do that? Glad you asked

Apparently there's a specific move to trigger an avian into revealing their wings. Probably some kind of nerve strike. Bruce learned it while he was in the League because why not. In the middle of his fight with Hood, he manages to sneak the move in, and boom, suddenly Jason's wings are out in all their glory.

As part of the shapeshifting physics we're going to pretend that the wings can pass through clothing. As long as it's flush to the skin. Maybe. So Jason's wings appear beneath his jacket and they're huge and he is very much thrown off balance and caught off guard and of course feeling significantly violated.

Bruce never told him he could do something like that. He's flabbergasted. It's the perfect opening for Batman to subdue him. Which uh.

Of course Batman only knows the Red Hood as a mass murdering crime lord/Rouge adjacent so he's not super gentle. And he knows about the vulnerable parts of an avian's wings do you see where this is going

Jason goes into survival mode because he's high on adrenaline and feeling extremely vulnerable and remember how the Joker treated him? Jason apparently has trauma about other people touching his wings now. He was fine with Talia because he knew that not only did she have no intention of hurting him but she was actively trying to help (in her own weird way). Batman is a different story. They are in the middle of a fight after all. So Jason kinda panics and can't focus on shifting his wings back in meanwhile he's scrambling to try and fend Batman off and protect himself but now that he's off his game Bruce easily overpowers him

Batman gets his wings tied up somehow and it takes everything in Jason not to devolve into a crying pleading heap of feathers. He's lashing out while Batman tries to sedate him. This isn't going the way Jason planned. Eventually Batman has to hold him down because he's thrashing so hard and wow that doesn't resemble the fearsome crime lord from the rumors

Batman ends up grabbing his wings to avoid being bludgeoned and Jason breaks a bone or two in one of them. He fully shrieks at that point. He's always been sensitive about his wings and hated having them restrained and he's scared and irrational and the trauma has him in a stranglehold. Part of it is the fact that Bruce is the one responsible for hurting him. If nothing else, Jason could always count on Bruce being respectful of his wings, so to have him break a bone (never mind that he doesn't know it's Jason) is really rattling

Bruce meanwhile is doing his best to arrest this helmeted freak who thinks it's funny to cosplay as his son's murderer and unwillingly having his heart strings pulled because not only is this villainous man apparently an avian (just like his son) but also Bruce feels slightly bad about using his knowledge of avian vulnerabilities to take him down. ouch. His protective dad mode activates in the subconscious when Hood's desperation to escape becomes glaringly obvious. Batman has to stop himself from asking who hurt you. Wrong thing to say when he is in the process of hurting the crime lord in question

Jason manages to escape somehow. idk exactly. He's resourceful. Anyway he makes his getaway by a hairsbreadth leaving Batman mildly baffled and even more determined than ever to hunt down the Red Hood. He will need to alter parts of his plan. He can't keep running into Batman if Batman's going to force his wings out again. Of course, Talia taught him how to fight with them, but neither of them realized how difficult that would be when fighting Batman dredged up all the trauma yikes

Batman manages to find Hood again and tries to confront him. Jason does not let him get close tells him to stay the heck away and shoots at him to drive the point home because kriff if he's going to repeat that awful experience from last time. He had a Shadow help set his wing and he complained to Talia about it over the phone. after crying. ugly crying. He didn't leave his safehouse for a few days and spent the whole time eating ice cream and crying and reading macbeth.

Bruce updates the file on Red Hood to include his avian species. Tim saw it and said wow how many avians do you find in Gotham what if it's Jason. Bruce did not find that joke funny, Tim. (to be fair, Tim was running on fifty hours without sleep and at least one mug of coffee brewed from Redbull) Bruce goes to bed that night crying holding one of the feathers he kept from Jason's white wings

When the reveal finally comes, I'm thinking it's some ridiculous scenario involving Jason getting knocked out and Batman having to save him and Bruce naturally takes advantage of this opportunity to kidnap Jason and bring him back to the Batcave. He takes the helmet off too. Tim says wow no kidding huh. Then he has to punt the helmet before it can blow up in Bruce's hands because Bruce is well. He's having a moment.

Jason wakes up with his wrist cuffed to his cot in the Cave medbay. He freaks out. He shifts into his wings on instinct and tries to fly away before realizing the bed is too heavy to let him. His weapons have been thoroughly pillaged. He's having another panic attack. rip. Bruce is there and Alfred convinced him to change out of the Batman suit but he's there and he's also having a nervous breakdown. The first thing he does when Jason calms down (gets lightheaded) enough to stop trying to break out of the cuff by brute force or knock everything within range over is apologize for breaking his wing. Jason's having a bad day. He's already got head trauma from whatever knocked him out in the first place and his plans are in shambles and by God he is not supposed to be in the Batcave with a weirdly watery eyed Bruce. Jason just uh. stares at him.

Tim hears the noise and comes rushing in with Alfred at his heels. Tim's doing damage control analysis. Alfred is openly crying and all just "Master Jason" blah blah "it's so good to have you home" he goes to hold Jason's face like a baby and suddenly Jason feels like crying too. His plans are ruined.

Tim's like good now that you're awake what the heck happened to your wings. Jason threatens to slit his throat. Bruce is now also crying because Jason may look different but there's no denying that this defensive rough around the edges street kid is his kid and oh no he broke his wing :(( Jail for father jail for one thousand years etc.

Dick shows up. Bruce called him to inform him that they'd apprehended the Red Hood and that he was in need of medical attention so naturally... they brought him to the Cave (Bruce has a soft spot for avians and he knew that if he handed Hood over to the authorities he would have been taken advantage of). Dick said what the heck is wrong with you Bruce I'm on my way. So he rushed over thinking he was going to walk into a chaotic atmosphere and he wasn't wrong but he wasn't expecting so much crying to be involved. He also has a mental breakdown. You know how it is. Lots of hand tremors. Screaming. Big ugly sobs. Glaring at Bruce demanding to know why he didn't think to tell him his little brother was back from the dead???? *horrified* what happened to your wings? because Jason's wings somehow look even creepier in the light

Jason keeps trying to shift them back in but he can't focus. He feels very exposed and obviously upset. His beautiful perfect plans are ruined :(( He had so many wonderful plans :((( He was going to break the Joker out of Arkham :((((((( And force Bruce to murder him :(((((((((((( looks like that's not happening anymore

Dick attaches himself to Jason with an octopus hug despite Jason's insistence that he will snap Dick's stupid neck. Tim sees his chance to make the situation worse and joins the hug. Jason half-heartedly attempts to push them off

Eventually they remove the cuff even though Jason makes repeated death threats and as soon as he's free he bolts. Doesn't leave the Cave but he needs to get away and gather his wits so he finds a perch near the Cave ceiling (one of many Bruce installed for him back in the day) and refuses to come down. That's fine. Everyone was trying to process the fact that he's alive anyway. Bruce sits on the ground far below and waits the whole time.

Jason is forced to come down by his need to pee. Also Alfred made tea and biscuits and despite Jason's vendetta, he did miss his family. Conversations are had. They fight and say mean things and Jason still can't pull his wings back in but they've reached a consensus. Bruce is in awe the his baby is back. He's willing to do anything to keep him this time around. He tells Jason that his wings are still beautiful (again, sorry for hurting them that one time), and for every bone of yours the Joker broke I'll break one of his just say the word Jay-lad. Tim pipes up didn't you already do that? Bruce says he'll do it as often as Jason wants lol. This man is so unstable. Jason is very touched. He maintains that the Joker is better off dead, but then he can't really hurt people if he's in a body cast so... sure he'll take the win.

When Jason works up the courage to go into the Manor he sees all his old feathers lying around and it makes him oddly happy. He wants to find it weird, and he definitely makes fun of Bruce for keeping them, but secretly he's so touched and he likes having them so he can still see his pretty white feathers.

Jason gives the best hugs. Okay I know Dick is famous for his octopus hugs but Jason's hugs are objectively the best in canon because it feels like Bruce but without the weight of transaction or expectation PLUS Jason has wings now so imagine getting the best hug of your life and then being cocooned in warm fluffy wings on top of that I would die.

Cass comes home and everyone's like ooh update Red Hood turned out to be Jason! This is your little brother btw and she's like ??? yeah I know. They freak out. How did you know Cass. She says dude look at him. and they reexamine the whole Red Hood scheme (aborted) and the fabricated rivalry with Batman and the speech pattern and the strategic maneuvers and the iconic dramatic flair and they're like okay yeah that makes sense. But you never met him Cass you had no point of reference. FOOLS. MUST THE GODDESS JUSTIFY HERSELF TO YOU??

Anyway everything is fine and Damian joins the family and he makes so many paintings of Jason and his portrait is the first one they have framed with Jason and his new wings. Happily ever after

[crimeronan]

It feels unlikely given the way you structure the series but it would be SO funny to me if Willow properly stumbled into their not too long before the dying basilisk situation and for whatever reason happened to Be There.

Like imagine you're a bitter anarchist young adult who's been reluctantly drawn into the web of the entirely too kind Empress and you still really don't trust her or her overly aggressive bodyguard, and then you all stumble into a dying basilisk, a creature that you narrowly avoided being killed by at school that one time and then the Emperor's Coven carted them away and they were clearly terrified.

And then you react first, of course you do, why would the Empress and her stooge care about a member of what your research since you dropped out suggests is an extinct species (and you figure the Empire probably is the reason they aren't and not for anything good). Of course, what you don't know so that the Empress is only slower to react because of her extremely pertinent to this bizarre situation PTSD, and it's a moot point because she does arrive at your side a moment later.

Having presumably never gotten a coven mark, you know some healing magic, but not enough for a situation like this, and it's all you can do to buy the basilisk a minute at a time—and then the Empress calls her mom??? The human one????? And you write her off as useless right now because what help is human going to be here but then the human offers VERY specific guidance that helps you save the basilisk's life.

So now you know that 1. The Empress knows her human mom, 2. The Empress' mom knows exactly how to save a basilisk's life, 3. The Empress is genuinely as compassionate as she seems and oh now that you're able to think about it that complete loss of composure seems REALLY out of character for her; did this strike some sort of personal note?

Now for all her cleverness, I don't think Willow is the sort to be able to extrapolate anything beyond that given her limited knowledge of Luz's life compared to someone like Raine, but! I think it's possible Luz in her panic could let things slip about the Grimwalkers still.

On the one hand, Willow is an unknown who Luz doesn't trust yet and normally Luz is good at secrets.

On the other hand, Grimwalkers are possibly the only thing where Luz is LESS likely to tell Hunter than she would a whole lot of other people she knows, AND we've seen with Eda that Luz gets a lot worse at compartmentalizing information when she's Doing Rough which. Damn she sure is doing rough here, isn't she?

SHE SURE IS DOING ROUGH HERE.

i love all of this. LOVE the concept of willow as a bystander like "well, this is some out-of-touch rich people nonsense. can i actually do something useful here or"

willow, arriving at the correct conclusion pretty much immediately: ....your human mom knows a basilisk already??

camila, who probably isn't even here yet but has materialized out of thin air for the bit: AHAHAHAHAH NOOOOOO. I'M JUST. A MAGICAL CREATURE.... ALL BY MYSELF.....

[choicesficwriterscreations]

January MC of the Month: Nora Rose

Please welcome January 2024's MC of the Month! Each month, we highlight one MC or OC on our Meet My MC / OC List. They are selected randomly on the Wheel of Names, and eligibility requirements can be found here. We accept MC / OC profiles on an ongoing basis. Please feel free to send yours in!

This month’s MC of the month is…

@inlocusmads's Nora Rose

More below...

In your own words, tell us what you like most about your MC / OC.

The thing I like the best about Nora is how she has a killswitch alternative to any plan she comes up with. Even if it is something as simple as coming up with dinner options. She has this interesting perceptive ability that's akin to playing 4D chess, but at the same time, she has elevator music running in her head.

At the same time, she's sometimes terribly wrong and isn't afraid to acknowledge that. The things she's able to do today - from keeping a level head and a calm composure in the hardest of situations come from her childhood where things were hard, and she had to grow up quite quickly. A lot of times, she'd have to think on her feet, run through options, remember new stuff, and be able to work with her constraints, not just pertinent to her job but in her adulthood as a whole. Her capacity to be able to stand up on her own feet came from so many instances where she couldn't even get off the floor or look straight ahead. 

Nora's also a slow learner but an avid one nonetheless. She was kicked out of so many schools when she was young, mostly because of her not being able to focus properly or standing up to her bullies (something the school calls ‘stirring trouble up’), and it kind of stunted the faith she had in herself. She had to build up an open mind to be able to differentiate between what is good and bad for her. She had to learn how to carve out her own path, despite dealing with so much grief she could never move on from. All of these things stuck to her when she grew up, which made her more aware and sponge-like to gather the mental ammunition needed to face all kinds of problems. 

Nora's far from what she pictured herself to be as a kid, but she's kind of bittersweet about making it this far. Optimistic that if she just doesn't think too much about stuff, the space and time around her would heal even the bloodiest of wounds, but also disappointed she can't deal with things more openly and faster, like in a brawling match. But I'm happy for her, given the circumstances she was in. Nora's always had this ability to chew her way out of things - by hook or by crook. If she can't decode a lock, she'd just give it a slight nudge. If the nudge doesn't work, she'll just straight-up shoot at it and deal with the fallout later. Her main motto is to “just keep going”. 

Do you feel your MC / OC is like you at all? How are you alike or different?

I'd say I took a lot from my experiences growing up and gave them to Nora - dealing with people at school, understanding where she truly “belongs” (before she realized that was a load of bull and she should just stop tunnel-visioning a perfect outcome and instead think about laying down a different road to her path). Nora and I share this trait where we can't sit still, but if something's up, we'd spend hours at the same place, even if it involves doing absolutely nothing. Plus, it takes both of us ages to respond to a message. Nora more than me, for sure, and half the time, she's just bored of the routine email chore (not a good sign in her line of work, but she manages.)

That's where the similarities stop haha.

She's a tough person. She throws a good punch, having undergone a lot of physical training to qualify for her NYPD officer job and more recently, for her private eye job (Mafalda had some strict requirements). She's also a great problem-solver as aforementioned. Besides the usual differences in physicality and all, she doesn't get startled easily - as in, the world could possibly end tomorrow and she'd still be at her desk, responding to a two-year old email. Her self-assurance at that instant (not anytime or anywhere else) but at that very instant is so strong, it is honestly remarkable. 

Nora also enjoys doing things on her own. Whether it be making dinner from scratch, down to the bread-baking, deducing information (without relying on scraping the bowels of the internet) or stitching her clothes if they don't fit her. It was one of the only lessons her mother taught her before she passed. Which is also the reason why she doesn't like frozen food. More on that later. 

What is most important to your MC / OC? What is their motivation in life?

Vengeance. 

Just kidding. 

It is actually vengeance. I don't know how else to put it. 

Nora's been wronged by a lot of people in her life. From losing her mother because the hospital in charge neglected her to losing her father also because her co-workers neglected him, she went through pretty much the same neglect-arc in school and college. She was always dismissed as a “traumatized kid” half the time and the other half the time, people didn't listen to her when she'd say, for example, report a bully for what they did or critique a faculty member for showing their bias. It resulted in a lot of things that went wrong in her life - from not having a good support system to being an actual orphan when she was barely thirteen. 

This kind of manifested in horrible ways when she was a kid. She suffered from a lot of anger issues and would immediately resort to physical violence if she were confronted. It isn't fair to blame her either, because she was so helpless. She'd wanted someone, just anyone to listen to her - to be there for her. This desire to help her child-self developed well into adulthood. Nora began building back the stability she never had. She's still doing it. She allows herself optimism even when she doesn't believe in anything. She puts her faith in the arbitrary workings of the universe so there's less burden to carry on her shoulders. Even though the things she tells herself aren't all perfect, they would be something her younger self would have appreciated so much. 

Taking revenge for the child in her to rest easy, for the teenage girl in her to find joys in stupid things such as trashy television shows and emo music and for her to be at peace in her own skin without wanting to explode every five minutes has always been her plan ever since she grew up. That and simply because she uses it to feel more proud of what she does. When something isn't getting anywhere, she's like “Yeah well, f it, we'll get it done. A setback ain't shit.” It was always about the “we”. 

Nora is also driven by the motivation to finish something as fast as possible. Everything is like cross-country running to her because she relishes in the satisfaction of getting a chunk of time just to herself right after getting something done. Which means she's either very good at jumping through hoops or crashes and burns. If something takes longer than her intended expectations, she'll drop it in an instant or table it until she gets her motivation back to finish it. It resulted in a lot of half-completed, archived projects but a few she's proud of, including having made her own quilts and bedsheets for the winter. 

This mentality is something she can never get rid of. At school, she was either the best player on her soccer team or the absolute worst. (Hey, at least there's no in-between to her.)

What are their biggest pet peeves/dislikes?

She hates frozen food with a burning passion. Being from a Chinese household, her parents, in the few good years they had with her - taught her the importance of a home-cooked meal or just any cooked meal. Nora, being the impressionable naive child she was, caught onto it and developed this visceral hatred for frozen anything. While she digs the convenience, she isn't a fan of how it tastes either - apart from her family values. This seeps into how Nora sees everything. She's the weird survivalist aunt with a shotgun in her closet because her personal goal is to make everything she consumes. From food, down to the clothes she wears or the curtains in her window, everything has to have had her work and hours put into it. 

Nora is also not a fan of people who don't listen first and just yap, yap and yap. This is why she often got into “creative differences” with her co-workers in her precinct. This is also the reason why Mafalda gives Nora full control of the wheel when she isn't there at the Agency, because the fewer people yapping, the happier Nora is and the better she works. 

As for visceral dislikes, boy oh boy does she have a lot:

Starting strong with the NYPD because they suck, point blank, period. She also thinks there's a special place in hell for people who just assume a lot and can get away with baseless accusations. She can understand broken promises - after all, people move on sometimes, and it's hard to keep track of them, but she draws the line at a proper betrayal. Words don't matter much to her, but actions do. Nora also isn't a fan of people who jump to the easiest conclusion just because it's easy. She’s seen a lot in her life not to automatically red-flag them. It’s worse when it comes from authorities, y’know people you’re taught to trust.

Also, people who gate-keep their expertise. She’s come across so many pretentious people who’d rather let an important investigation hit a dead end than worry about spilling their “trade secrets.” Kind of a niche dislike, but if you’re running out of time and your only hope banks on a mystery novelist’s ability to describe what he saw and tell the truth like his characters would have done, you too would be frustrated if he’d rather drink his coffee when he knows he’s purposefully jeopardizing the investigation’s momentum. And that’s just one of her ‘good’ experiences. Nora loathes academia and wouldn’t touch it even with a six-foot pole.

If your MC / OC could change one thing - anything - what would it be?

Be blessed with a readable medical textbook so she could diagnose her mother earlier than her doctors ever can (and) get magical surgery skills to revive her dad after he got stabbed. 

She still regrets not being able to do anything because she was “just a kid”.Nora has learned to cope with it, knowing she can't do anything about it but she still has this itching feeling of what if things had turned out for the better. It's this heavy rock she's gonna have to deal with for sometime now. 

Nora has this tricky relationship with her heritage. She isn't a fan of how different she is compared to the rest of her family and how they'd ostracized her after her settling down far from home. She wants to be able to change that aspect but knows it is too late to repair the damage. If she could go back in time and “pick a side,” she wouldn't have to feel the FOMO.

This regret of hers, however, is attributed to her never feeling she belonged somewhere among her family. Someday, she'd have to find her own family, own circle of friends, and culture to build. Someday, she'll learn that she's as valid to celebrate her heritage as her Aunt Mei or Uncle Tommy. That there aren't true extremes to anything there's no “one way” to be something, but until then, she's going to angrily sew back some loose stitches and groan about not being able to speak Cantonese as fluently as her relatives or being a “true” New Yorker. 

Also maybe her hair. (Also it is so hard to draw her hair consistently.) Sometimes it gets in the way. And maybe fix her eyesight without needing contacts or glasses. Automatically give herself 20/20 vision whenever needed and blur her eyes out when she doesn't want to.

What is your MC / OC’s favorite quote or song?

It's hard to pick one song, because Nora listens to anything and doesn't really have a music ‘taste’ as long as the song she's listening to has some spunk to it. Something she relates to would be I Talk To The Wind by King Crimson. Combined with the slow pace and the lyrics that basically put her life as a picture, it's a bop.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about your MC / OC?  (It can be why you created them, how they’ve inspired you, or you could write a little blurb as if it is coming from your OC - an acceptance speech. :) )

I've struggled a lot with naming characters before but Nora's was the only time I knew her name wayyy before I could give her a personality. I was like “yep she's Nora, she's definitely one, yep.” and somehow I didn't anticipate how much she'd like, write herself and the story just writing itself. It literally popped into my head as outlandish as it may seem. And somehow that process worked because I don't ever run out of new headcanons to add.

Nora's also the first character I've created a 100k-worded introduction for (which will never see the light of day and is chucked into my files). I honestly expected her to just be fleeting. I'd make up something about her character, and I'd leave it at that, but nope. 

She's the most organized person in the universe. Her clothes never had a chance to get folded since 1999. She is so methodic and yet will pull off stupid shit like kickboxing a door because she doesn't want to open it. Nora is the character to every character but she stops charactering if she's in front of any screen with something playing on it. She can calculate the angle she needs to throw something so it can hit something, but she fails at basic math at the checkout line. She's masterful at cooking up a storm in the kitchen but enters her flop era when she forgets to take her stuff from the oven when the timer beeps.

Honestly, Nora was such a good lesson in writing as well because people are not always black-and-white. Sometimes, their strengths are their weaknesses. Sometimes the things they are chasing after work against their benefit. Maybe their opinions are skewed after all, even though the narrative conditions into believing that they're the Hero character. They should be allowed to be terribly piss-pathetic poor at something before learning to solve the problem, and sometimes it's okay if they're just bad at something if they can improv a way forward.

Plus, she's cool and stuff. Sometimes. 

[pochapal]

32! Do you like HS^2?

i...genuinely do! i think sometimes there's a half-conception that based on the mere premise of my fics that i don't like postcanon all that much (omelette route was misconstrued as an epilogues fix-it fic in certain circles and pickle route is still sometimes seen as a "better version" of hs^2) even though everything i write is in direct conversation with and comes from a place of admiration for hs^2/the epilogues.

with hs^2 in particular i think it had some really electric ideas that we only got to see the very first brushstrokes of (thinking most pertinently here about whatever was going to go down on deltritus that we never saw) that, if they'd been able to get off the ground, probably would have eclipsed the epilogues as the most interesting part of homestuck. from the bits we saw the meat timeline stuff was definitely the weakest. outside of the jade/altcallie possession chapter a lot of that half of the story was fairly unsurprising character-driven extrapolation of the same angst we departed the epilogues with - and i largely agree with @hms-no-fun that some kind of timeskip here would have helped it feel a little less repetitive (although arguably there might have been? three years definitely passed with dirk et al but it was very up in the air as to how long it had been for the pursuit spaceship crew). i get why that never happened - both meat and candy were being told in tandem and candy ended on a buildup to an immediate conflict that needed to be followed in real time versus meat's meandering slingshot towards something more nebulous, so for the sake of structural symmetry that limited things a little.

i think i'm more amenable to a lot of hs^2's storytelling decisions because i wholly and entirely loved the epilogues from the getgo and it was so good to see that theme/tone be carried through to a more "traditional" mspa space, even if i wonder if the comic form damaged the story more than it helped it. i remember a lot of people getting weirdly mad whenever we'd get an extended prose scene instead of visual panels despite hs^2 being a continuation of the text-based epilogues. then again, the mainstream hs fandom as a whole fucking sucked when it came to postcanon and that's even more evident in how they've collectively memoryholed the whole thing so talking about audience reception is maybe not the most useful thing to talk about here lmao. idk i think people forget that homestuck is largely a story about people who suck and then who get better from sucking. it's just that nobody really likes it when that lens is turned inward onto the alphas/betas who outside of a small handful of exceptions in canon never really had any ethical issues that caused problems for them and others so i personally think it was very interesting and refreshing to explore how the kids' complacency wrt their baggage and trauma allowed them and their world to backslide so disastrously! roxy lalonde enabling jane's fascist ascension is fascinating storytelling actually! (side note: read through shadowed eyes)

hs^2's original characterwork is probably where the story shines the most. the fucked up dynamics between the theseus crew was super fun to read because there's honestly nothing more enjoyable than Supremely Divorced people deciding that makes them irredeemably evil now. the egbert gender stuff was really nice! i particularly enjoyed how, even though it came after the june egbert renaissance, it still managed to be its own unique take on egbert's gender arc that i think really encapsulated the originality driving the project. also forever shoutout to the candy kids my beloved candy kids my children who i will die for - for me in particular hs^2 was a fun time because i was developing my own versions of harry/vrissy/tav for pickle route in parallel to hs^2 and it was so enjoyable seeing all the overlaps and divergences with each upd8. also yiffy fucking rules on every level and even though she never got to be more than a promise she sure was one hell of a promise.

that said i do not think it's that surprising that hs^2 ultimately died before its time. the conditions of the story paired with the most demoralising and vicious iteration of the fandom meant the odds were stacked against it in a big way. you can particularly see the strain of that starting to manifest in the final ~6 months worth of upd8s where people were leaving/being pushed out of the project and every part of hs^2 was a completely hostile environment and the quality of the art and storytelling began to get a little shaky - which i can't really blame them for all things considered! it's hard to want to make the best version of a story possible when the overwhelming reception is a bunch of sanctimonious redditbrained weirdos screaming that you're evil and foul for making characters in a piece of fiction do unexpected and surprising things and also being sympathetic to trans women. there were of course issues with the production conditions of hs^2 that would have probably led to some sort of reckoning at some point, but it's very obvious that the traumatic pressure cooker of a fanbase that wanted nothing more than the death of this project and the ruination of everyone that worked on it threw this whole thing off the rails much faster. despite that, you still have to infinitely admire the team for daring to make something challenging and original in a sphere dominated by people who are content to regurgitate the same babybrained 2013 content ad infinitum - for just a brief moment, homestuck was truly allowed to be the literary masterpiece it's been all along. now people just treat it as more fandomslop to consume and that's perhaps the biggest shame of all.

in the end i think hs^2's legacy is best felt in the places haunted by its premature absence. i'm talking about the comic itself of course but also other spaces and people and projects. stuff that really engaged with the meaty thematic frameworks being thrown up in postcanon that now no longer have a mirror to talk back to - stuff like pesterquest and godfeels and the aforementioned through shadowed eyes that all massively are in conversation with the deeper artistic and philosophical principles underpinning this era of homestuck. if anything else hs^2 will continue to serve as a useful prerequisite for getting into some of the best stuff homestuck fans have ever made. we might never see what could have been, but at least the torch is still being carried by people who care.

[olderthannetfic]

I've read through the End Racism posts (not all, but a good part of them) and think the people behind it do have good and honest intentions, and that a lot of things are being blown out of proportion. I don't necessarily agree with some of the ideas regarding out of archive harassment and AO3's responsibility, but I can see the thought process. Same with a lot of other things. I'm very wary of Stitch being cited, but can likewise understand why people may not fully clue into why there are.... so so so many issues with that. If you haven't been hyper involved in fandom (included those you're not in) you miss things. Which is a whole other issue lmao. But overall, I don't think anyone is being malicious

That being said, there's a lot that seems.... overly optimistic? Or perhaps very central to where the creators behind End Racism are from and their own biases and education. People have brought up HOW on earth what is or is not racist (beyond the incredibly obvious examples) can be decided, or how you can know who's writing a fic and why (is it a racist bigot, someone writing about their own experience as a POC, or someone who doesn't know something?) and the answer, as another anon mentioned, is never really stated. Because there isn't an answer in many cases, but that hasn't been acknowledged

I also worry about the insistence (in some responses to questions and in notes I've seen even in the asks you've received) that a diversity consultant will help as much as people seem to think. Yes, it's a step forwards.... but a diversity consultant cannot be an expert in EVERYTHING. I suppose the argument is "get more diversity consultants to volunteer" but that still causes it's own issues. I was in a server with someone who frequently read over fics as a sensitivity reader, and was extremely well educated and respectful. But even they flat out said they made a hell of a lot of mistakes once they stepped out of what they knew, and wouldn't give feedback on certain things. I worry a diversity consultant would be, well, very american centric, and while that isn't necessarily a bad thing, people have brought up how it could be, and those concerns are being completely brushed to the side.

I think there's just SO much to this, and so much more complexity than they're willing to admit. Again, other anons have brought this up, but there's a ton nuance in this. We're talking international views on majorly complex issues, with endless cultural lenses, people writing and reading from countless backgrounds, and so on. It really just feels like they don't want to even acknowledge that

I don't think most behind it are trying to actively push for censorship, or are operating in bad faith. That's my impression from reading on my own. There have been some individuals around tumblr that have been horrific about it (the anti-semitism that came out is.... something), but overall I think there are good intentions. But so many pertinent questions aren't being answered, and the very valid concerns people have brought up have been ignored.

I support the idea behind it, and having a diversity consultant on staff certainly isn't a bad idea, but the way in which they're going about things, the concerns they're ignoring, and the dismissal of people who are raising said concerns as racists is. huh. Well, it makes me wary to actively support.

--

[belle-keys]

Whats classic books you find underrated?

Oh, another question I love! This one is a little bit harder because most classics books (especially by white English-speaking writers) get their clout and more. But still, there's some books that I wish would get more mainstream hype.

Beloved by Toni Morrison. I know she's extremely popular in the US and that she has a whole-ass Nobel Prize. She's one of the greats! But I still want to hear this book in people's mouths more when we discuss the most exceptional modern classics.

No Exit by Jean-Paul Satre. Really encapsulates everything pertinent about existential thought. Gave us The Good Place. "Hell is other people". Amazing.

A House For Mr. Biswas by VS Naipaul. Appreciated in nicher circles, I guess, but I'd love to see a Trinidadian author (yes, I know he was like, evil, but still) get more flowers on a mainstream level.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. Stop leaving my girlie out of the Brontë conversations, please and thanks!

A Separate Peace by John Knowles. Is this the original dark academia bildungsroman? Donna Tartt what are you doing on the floor?! Anyway, I feel sorry for people who didn't read this as a kid or adolescent.

[21milespastblue]

a snippet of something i'm working on, jjk fic that takes place sometime after hidden inventory but before premature death. stsg are fucking, but not in a "relationship." this is supposed to be toward the end

------------

"Is everything alright?"

that's what satoru would say if he didn't know suguru as well as he did. he didn't need to ask if everything was ok to know that they weren't and he didnt need to hear suguru deny that anything was wrong. its enough to just lay there next to suguru and feel his breathing, see the squint of his eyes toward the ceiling. he could see the light pallor on his face, literally see the shape of his soul shift and scoot, like it's trembling, scared.

satoru inches even closer to suguru. if he could, he would sink into suguru's skin, stitch them together at the epidermis. since he can't join them at the cellular level, he settles for his legs tangled in suguru's, one arm over his rising and falling chest and the other bent so it can careen through the soft locks of suguru's hair. he presses the gentlest kiss he can muster, resisting the urge to try to consume suguru whole, onto the skin where his neck and right ear.

suguru hitches himself deeper into satoru in response.

"What's this for?"

he wish he could bite into suguru sometimes, suck out whatever was worrying him or ailing him the same way he consumed curses. so much power, that satoru would readily give for and to suguru and there's still so little he can do in the face of the thing that nudges and rips at the edges of suguru's being. he gnaws suguru's neck.

"And that was for?"

"You think too much, suguru."

"Someone has to think enough for the both of us."

satoru's mind flashes; suguru's tone was hardly mocking, chock full of latent affection and an edge of sarcasm, but the images flood satoru's find before he can think. a body in his arms, people, warm bodies behind him; blade in his chest, suguru running toward him; a knife in his neck. the feeling of death, the novel feeling of lying in a pool of your own blood. then complete and utter bliss, apathy. suguru. suguru, suguru, suguru.

"...My immense contribution to thinking aside," suguru moves to pet satoru at the sound of his hurt tone, "...it's not a big deal, you know? You know you don't sleep always well, we both don't, and our techniques are--well." satoru nuzzles his head deeper into the crook of suguru's neck. he feels stupid all of the sudden, thoughts in his head that come out of his mouth even more jumbled.

he knows he can always rely on suguru, and suguru has always relied on him. it just felt pertinent in this moment, to say it with suguru next to him. suguru should know what he means, he knows him better than he does himself. he's his best friend.

suguru gives a low chuckle.

"Now, you're thinking too much, satoru. Stop spouting obvious things, close your eyes, and go to sleep."

satoru wretches his way out of the suguru and sits up now, invigorated. suguru can hear the sly smile on his face, imagines the wry lines of mouth pulled upward, can feel them when he leans down and kisses him on the forehead. his fingers rake over the sides of suguru's face. for the first time in weeks, suguru is totally and fully submerged with satoru's bedtime ritual for him and he smiles for it.

no being pulled away, passing out from pure exhaustion, no emergency missions, or miles between them.

satoru continues his raking with tender hands; "i'm not sleeping until you sleep. and i'll talk about obvious things however i please."

satoru can still feel, see, something that gnaws at suguru's soul, but it's not trembling anymore, not anxious, the perimeter reverberating, as if humming. he decides to push it aside, content to have suguru in his hands (he's had him in his hands all night, he just can't ever stop asking for more), to talk him to sleep. he hopes that suguru can feel everything, he means everything he feels for him through his hands, hear it in the soft fondness of his voice, the things he would never say, that are embarrassing and weird, even for two teenage boys who are fucking without cause or reason. he hopes he felt it when he was inside him earlier, when they were kissing, the second their eyes met upon their reunion after several weeks. some part of him insists suguru will always know, but another part worries that suguru for all his attentiveness, principles, and poise, still misses things. satoru can't say the most important thing of all.

fingers rake again.

"Where did we leave off last time? I was telling you about the new digidestined! now, like I said before, these new kids don't know half of the shit Tai and the other ones went through-"

"What about the Digimon Emperor?"

"I got ahead of myself last time, I really shouldn't have told you about him, didn't even explain the new cast--ah, what the fuck, so Ken, crap, I mean, the "Digimon Emperor" lives-"

[kikokus]

Trafalgar Law Character Study, Part 16/? (Dressrosa, Part 6)

So. It’s been…just over eight years. But I’ve had some requests to continue the analysis posts I’d been doing way back when and since I’m finally caught up with the manga again it seemed like as good a time as any to start doing that!

[Part One] // [Part Two] // [Part Three] // [Part Four] // [Part Five] // [Part Six] // [Part Seven] // [Part Eight] // [Part Nine] // [Part Ten] // [Part Eleven] // [Part Twelve] // [Part Thirteen] // [Part Fourteen] // [Part Fifteen]

The first thing I want to say is that I haven’t gone back and read all of the previous posts in this series so just a general warning that there might be questions/speculation within those that we actually have concrete answers to almost ten years later so if something doesn’t quite match up with canon that’s probably why! Most of the actual character-related things about Law should still be accurate, though…

Oh boy I picked a good group of chapters to come back to, huh? Let me just say that reading these in real time was…an experience…a very stressful experience…so back then the last thing I was worried about was character analysis but looking at it years later there’s actually a lot of important things that happen! 

The first of which is that obviously we know by now that this isn’t what Cora wanted at all, but Law’s spent so many years convincing himself that it is that this…specter of Doflamingo that’s been haunting him is almost more powerful than the real thing and that’s caused him to combine Cora’s wish for him to be free with Doflamingo being defeated to the point that he can’t separate the two any longer.

This whole section is to set up Law’s reveal that he also carries the Will of D but it’s still kind of amusing to have him asking these seemingly random questions about Luffy during the middle of a literal life-and-death battle. There’s also this running theme with Law where despite the fact that this is something both he and Luffy share, he always seems to place more importance on Luffy than himself. Obviously we know that he has no idea what the Will of D actually is so I think this is more just based on his own personality, but it’s interesting nonetheless. 

Somehow I still see people discussing whether Law’s any good with Armament Haki when he’s using it right here and certainly not at full strength but it’s very interesting that Doflamingo becomes one of the few characters in the entire series to know this about Law. Law’s never really flaunted the D initial like a lot of others that have it but that seems to mostly be due to his family wanting to keep it a secret and not based on his own feelings, though this scene in particular I think is meant to mirror the reveal of Doflamingo being a Celestial Dragon because that was something Law could never have accounted for but now he’s got an equally pertinent piece of information to catch Doflamingo off-guard.

And while it doesn’t exactly work as intended, Law was trying to distract him enough to get Doflamingo to make a mistake and that’s exactly what happened so if nothing else he gets a good hit in. Still, for all of Doflamingo’s denial that the whole ‘fated enemies’ idea isn’t true, he’s getting very defensive about it so it makes you wonder…

So Law’s not…wrong about this, since Cora overhearing his full name was what seemingly first got him interested in this whole quest to save Law so in that way it could certainly be looked at as a catalyst of sorts. And it’s also true that Cora probably wouldn’t have been able to kill Doflamingo despite going so far as to point a gun at him, but I do genuinely believe that—in a different series where the narrative would allow such a thing—Law would have killed Doflamingo here.

I really like this group of panels because Doflamingo is seeing Law as he was the first time they met: as someone so angry and disenchanted with the entire world and so resigned to their fate that the only thing that registers is this compulsive need to cause destruction. At the time Doflamingo had said he saw himself in Law because of that, but now that it’s being directed solely at him I’m sure the impact of that is quite different. It’s also a bit of a sign for us as readers to connect the two since Law’s grown and changed a lot from that time and he attributes it mostly to being ‘saved’ because of Cora but this shows that side of him that was created out of losing everything and everyone he loved all at once is still something he can bring out under the right circumstances.

Doflamingo actually says a lot of things in this part that are kind of an insight into what Law’s thinking, and this is one of them. Law’s usually a lot more calculated and careful with his plans, but because of Bellamy deciding to distract Luffy he’s completely alone and has pretty much no tricks left so the only thing he can do is throw whatever he’s got at Doflamingo and hope something works.

This, however, isn’t exactly accurate. I do believe that if all of Law’s initial plans had come to fruition that he would have been content with Kaido taking care of Doflamingo in his place (since, in the end, he’s at least accepting of the fact that Luffy’s the one to do it) but for a variety of reasons that…didn’t happen, and with him being by himself in this position and being so close I think he does let his emotions get the better of him in the end. 

Law’s still so calm and rational here and I think it’s because he’s resigned to whatever’s going to happen, but this is an interesting comment because Doflamingo loves trying to make people feel guilty for things that weren’t their fault and he’s attempting to blame everything that happened in Dressrosa completely on Law giving that letter to Vergo instead of any other Marine. But this is the first time that Doflamingo acknowledges that what he did to the Riku family and the country as a whole was a ‘tragedy’ and you can tell from his reaction that he didn’t even realize he’d done so until Law pointed it out.

Looking back at this now it holds a bit of a different connotation but in this moment Law was fully prepared to die and content with that in terms of him feeling as though he’d achieved Cora’s goal (even though he really hadn’t). However, it also still holds true in the present because while his own goals have changed drastically, everything is still being done with Cora in mind…though now it feels far more like a tribute as opposed to the pure revenge it became up until the end of Dressrosa.

Doflamingo’s fully capable of using his ability to kill but he prefers a gun instead and once again we get the mention of lead bullets so between those (twice in this arc now) and amber lead Law’s having a bad time with that particular element. I won’t get too much into how Doflamingo considers the executions he’s done as mercy killings and the only way for people to ‘atone’ for the sin of having the audacity to stand up to him, but I’m still amazed that Law was already almost running on empty and got his arm chopped off and he’s somehow conscious and coherent at this moment.

I have no idea how Law managed to get a tourniquet for his arm with everything going on but in this instance Doflamingo’s completely right: Law hasn’t been living for himself for a long time and everything he’s done has been with this singular goal in mind to the point where he really can’t pull himself away from it.

Considering the repetition that Law has some higher power looking out for him that happened throughout his flashback, I’m inclined to think this is actually foreshadowing that Law’s going to get out of this somehow even though reading it week by week it…didn’t exactly seem like it at the time… Doflamingo’s got some real guts still trying to get Law to make him immortal after everything, though.

Look, Law flips him off in the very next panel, but this is as blatant a ‘go fuck yourself’ as he could have ever given. Earlier in the arc he claimed to not care about the people of Dressrosa but now that Doflamingo’s been trying to guilt him into feeling responsible for their plight he’s using that as part of his way of firing back at Doflamingo for things that were done entirely by his own hand. At the very least, it’s good to know Law isn’t blaming himself for any of it.

Besides the callback to him doing this when we first met him, what’s really important here is that even facing certain death (and at this point I’m inclined to believe he did think it was certain, but I’ll get into that more in the future…) he’s trusting not only in Luffy but in all of the Strawhats to see the plan through and succeed. That’s a lot of faith to have in people he hasn’t known for very long and speaks to how he truly views them and what he thinks they’re capable of.

Doflamingo gets careless when he’s angry and I think this was Law’s final Hail Mary in the sense that if anything was going to save him it was Doflamingo’s rage making his aim unsteady. It’s also somewhat ironic that Doflamingo is listing all of these things that were born from Cora’s love for Law and Law’s desire to acknowledge and remember that as if they’re something he has ownership over and is solely responsible for when that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

This has nothing to do with Law himself but let me tell you that this image of Luffy only noticing the state Law’s in because there’s so much blood on the roof that he literally slips on it has stuck with me since the chapter came out and it’s so visceral and such a visual indication of how intense Doflamingo’s rage was in that moment.

‘He really seemed to trust you’ just hits me in the gut because once again Doflamingo’s up to his old ‘make someone else feel guilty’ tricks (and for Luffy it would hit especially hard given what happened with Ace and how he feels about not being able to save the people he cares about) but also it’s just…true. Law trusts Luffy so much and even at this point some of the fandom was convinced he was going to betray the Strawhats when that shouldn’t have even been a consideration any longer.

And again we get the idea of the Strawhats being able to work ‘miracles’, though in this case it’s simply Doflamingo mocking Law’s words and not putting any belief in it himself, but this was…probably one of the worst chapters to have to wait a week for the continuation. The one bit of hope we get is Law’s single speech bubble at the end telling Luffy to listen to him but that was…very little to go off of…

Well, that seems like a great and happy place to end this part! I hope you enjoyed (?) and please do feel free to like and reblog; especially after so long I’m not sure how many people are still around who want to read something like this so it helps inspire me to keep going!

[mindibindi]

hey! sorry for bothering you, but i as a fellow x-phile i would like to ask how credible it is that gillian anderson and david duchovny hated each other back in the day? there are probably quotes or something but i can't really judge anything this late after the fact. i did watch the show when it aired but i was too young to get into internet culture. anyway, i'm hoping for some wisdom from fans who remember this. :) thank you!

Hey Anon,

It’s no bother and thanks for the ask. And actually, after the fact is a good position from which to view this matter since, as we all now know, Gillovny’s story has a happy ending. I was around for the original run too but internet culture was very different then. Not everyone was constantly online, I certainly wasn’t. The internet was expensive and hard to access so I got a couple of hours per week tops, which I mostly used to read fanfic. (Fanfic for this show/ship was basically my fanfic writer origin story: I was like WHAT OTHER PEOPLE DO THIS TOO???!!! And btw: readers complain these days about the pressure to respond to fanfic. Back in the day, you had to compose a whole fricking email if you wanted to badger your fave author for more. And there was certainly no easy kudos button option to make you feel like you’d done your bit to encourage community. Anyway.)

There were fan sites, message boards and lots of different fanfic archives. And sure, there was some gossip but it still mostly came via old print media. Pre-social-media, there wasn’t a direct line to celebrities or any great expectation placed on them interact with fans in regular, intimate ways. The advent of social media has created these parasocial relationships in which (some) fans think they know or have a right to far more than they do. Back in the day, and istg this is true, I posted a picture of DD with Blue in the surf on some now defunct message board. The moderators removed it and v kindly said: nope, against our guidelines, no images of private moments taken without the person’s consent. I mean…. talk about boundaries! My baby fangirl ass was properly chastised and learnt a valuable lesson. I think we can learn a thing or two from early internet culture and original fans, some of which are still knocking about this site.

Anyway, all of this is to say, I don’t have any special insight here. The only people who know in any great detail what truly went on in DD and GA’s relationship is them, and maybe a few people in their immediate vicinity. But XF fans are lucky enough to stan two very honest, emotionally thoughtful people who have shared with us some of the challenges they faced during the show’s original run. And, for better or worse, when people tell you who they are, I tend to believe them. Yes, there are other fans that can probably provide you with quotes and timelines and (wild) speculation, but I think I know enough to give a fairly objective opinion on what I think actually occurred. For me, the most pertinent quote here is Gillian’s characterisation of their relationship as being like “a forced marriage”. I take this to mean that, like any marriage, there was great intimacy, respect, cooperation and commitment. Maybe even love. But there was also a lack of choice that caused tension, despite multiple positive relational elements.

“Tension” is a word that has also been applied to their late-90s relationship and I think it’s probably more accurate. I don’t think they HATE hated each other. But I think they probably had fleeting moments of feeling: OMG this person is getting on my last sane nerve, I cannot stand to be around them another fricking second. I think the protracted and concentrated intimacy of their circumstances gave rise to SOME super understandable negative feelings that ultimately, did not define the true nature of their relationship, either then or now. I don’t think those feelings were all there was, even back then. I don’t think these two were epic lovers any more than they were bitter enemies. I think they were just two human beings attempting to function under super intense scrutiny and an extremely gruelling work schedule. And that at times resulted in tension or irritation which they found ways around. Talking to each other only as Mulder and Scully may sound terrible to some but I think it’s a rather ingenious way to conserve their energy for their jobs. It shows an incredible commitment to their characters, to the show and to the contribution the other was bringing to that celebrated dynamic. They knew it was important so that's where they focused.

We have all had times in relationships where we’ve needed some space, even from someone we like, love, respect and value. If anyone was struggling to understand this dynamic between DD and GA then recent experiences of lockdown should have provided some insight into this kind of intense forced intimacy. Now, I have never been married but I’ve lived with people and that experience will make you loathe how a person walks, breathes, sleeps, eats, does the smallest, most insignificant things. It’s not the permanent state of your relationship. It’s just a passing reaction. It does not matter how much you might like or appreciate this person. In one bright flash, they become the most infuriating person to ever walk the planet. Then you go into another room or go to work and the feeling fades. But what happens when you can’t get away, you actually can’t get the sort of space a healthy relationship needs? We all saw how lockdown increased the pressure on all relationships, especially partnerships and marriages. There was pressure within and without and people reacted naturally to profoundly unnatural circumstances. That’s all that happened here.

Now, it must be pointed out that even during periods of the original run when their relationship was supposedly suffering, there is footage of them having fun on-set and ruining takes by making out. This supports the idea that any “hate” was an understandable but impermanent reaction for both. Actually, I think it is highly admirable that they were able to collaborate together and remain individually sane while experiencing such relational tension. It shows incredible personal fortitude and professional commitment. They stayed focused and pragmatic and, to me, there is never any indication that their personal struggles impacted the final product. In fact, I believe they actually enhanced Mulder and Scully’s relationship in those middle years of the original run when they too were experiencing some growing pains in their relationship. I’m thinking of the raw emotion in that end scene of “Elegy” and the palpable impatience and antagonism in “Gethsemane”. I’m thinking of the division and sadness in the hospital scene in “The Red and the Black” and throughout “The End”. Like Mulder and Scully, David and Gillian have some fundamental similarities and some very distinct differences. For the first few years of the series they were living very different lives. It took them time to attune to each other, just as it took Mulder and Scully time to fully absorb the many intricate dimensions of their relationship. As DD and GA grew older, their lives became more similar and their understanding of each other likewise grew. And honestly, I think it’s somewhat hypocritical and inhuman to appreciate the many complex beats of the M/S relationship as it plays out on-screen, but then judge their real-life counterparts as they tread an equally complex path towards true understanding, appreciation and love.

I haven’t watched TXF in years and in my recent rewatch, I was surprised actually at just how combative this relationship could be. I had only remembered all the sweet, shippy bits! But (and I should not really have to point this out) that's also what is so compelling to watch. The conflict. The contrast. The difference (not just in height, although their physical difference does act as a powerful symbol of their mismatched but ultimately complementary dynamic). The difference and yes, even at times tension, between David and Gillian only adds to a dynamic that so many have tried and failed to emulate (RIP to any reboot of this show. This show IS DD and GA’s chemistry. End of.). I can’t be mad or disappointed about Gillovny’s 90s tension, so carefully navigated by both actors, because fuck me does it work for the MSR angst! D’you think we’d have so many delicious angsty fanfics if these two had been sunshine-y, tension-less best buds every step of the way?? Not only is some tension an understandable human reaction that I believe they have every right to, it adds dimension to an epically URSTy relationship that could have gotten boring (and kinda did towards the end, let's be real). There is an added, honest, brave truth to the moments of impatience, frustration, disagreement and division in the M/S relationship because DD and GA experienced these things themselves in the context of their equally intense working relationship. I think the actors continued to mine their own tension and express it through Mulder and Scully, which again is a super creative and healthy way to protect their working relationship and serve the M/S relationship. A relationship in which they were invested, but also a relationship that was central to the show and important to so many fans.

In time, the more intense M/S moments lost their bite. The relationship became softer, less combative, more appreciative. The LA move decreased the actor’s isolation and gave the show a new tone. Gillian is on record saying how strange it was for her when David disappeared in later seasons. And we all know the story of the 10 min post-"Existence" embrace (if you don’t let me know). So this story has a neat and satisfying ending even if Mulder and Scully never really got theirs. As evidenced by the second movie and reboot, nothing was destroyed. The chemistry remains (even if it’s not served by quality plot, development, context and characterisation). These human beings and artists did their best under difficult circumstances. They protected the work, the characters and their relationship. In fact, I would venture to suggest that the wild appreciation they show for each other now, the enduring chemistry we see on-screen and the palpable enjoyment they feel at the other’s presence any time they get the opportunity to reunite is in part due to how they navigated their early years as mismatched colleagues thrown together and expected to work closely under immense pressure. Thanks to David and Gillian, hate never took root. And now, in DD’s words, all that’s left is the heart.

[balanceoflightanddark]

How do you think the Gaang would react if Iroh was forced to face a war crimes tribunal for his actions during the war, particularly his actions during the Siege of Ba Sing Se?

Hmmm. Now THIS is an interesting question, particularly because what the Gaang sees of Iroh might not mesh well with what the world sees of Iroh. Zuko would probably fight tooth and nail to get Iroh out. Obviously. That's-that's in the character's DNA. Aang and Toph both had a heart-to-heart with Iroh, so they might not necessarily know him all too well from his "Dragon of the West" days. As for Katara and Sokka, they'd probably be the only ones who would be on the fence initially since they didn't really have too many good experiences with Iroh personally (aside from the "always did the right thing" from Katara bullshit), but I could see them being convinced by Aang since he was mostly right about Zuko's capability to turn over a new leaf. So as a whole, they'd probably be aghast at the idea of Iroh being put on a tribunal. Probably would argue that him freeing Ba Sing Se during Sozin's Comet should speak to his character.

Here's where things would get murky. They're not gonna have a war crime tribunal unless they find people to testify against Iroh. And Iroh HAD hurt a lot of people, particularly in the grueling 600 Days at Ba Sing Se. Sieges are by their very nature, nasty conflicts. Particularly since the zone they occupied was the Agrarian ring, which would've cut off both soldiers AND civilians from food since...well, that's how a siege works. Cutting off the city's food supply. While we don't have exact details, we also know that in general, Fire Nation military leaders don't have a lot of concern for civilian livelihood and there's nothing suggesting that Iroh would've been any different from this point in his life. So I could imagine there being a slew of civilians from Ba Sing Se and beyond, as well as Earth Kingdom soldiers reading a laundry list of what Iroh pulled.

Now comes the big question: with this in mind, would the Gaang still support Iroh? Sure, maybe Aang and Zuko since they're firm believers in second chances. But what about Sokka or Katara who didn't know Iroh personally like they did, but did know how bad the war affected the Southern Water Tribe and thus could sympathize with those Iroh hurt? Toph I can see being the most torn of all since while she would acknowledge that Iroh is not some monster, she also didn't think too highly of the Fire Nation as a whole. Remember, she was the one who thought they were all evil from birth (at least initially) and advocated for Ozai's death along with the other members of the Gaang. This is a hotbed for controversy amongst them all.

The only one I haven't mentioned yet though is Suki since I'm fairly certain she'd be dead set on Iroh seeing justice. Unlike Toph, Suki never really got to know Iroh and probably would've only had Zuko to vouche for him...you know. The guy that burned down her village. Besides that, she'd probably would've heard stories about the Dragon of the West and probably saw the full brunt of what the Fire Nation was doing in the Earth Kingdom since she and the rest of the Kyoshi Warriors were helping civilians getting out of harms way. Out of all of them, she'd probably be the biggest advocate for Iroh seeing justice. Which would put her at odds with Zuko, obviously. Though it would be an interesting position for the rest of the Gaang since Suki has been a trusted ally and since she'd be the biggest spokesperson for the Earth Kingdom among the team, her position would mean they can't just rule out Iroh walking.

I think the answer will boil down to whether or not they feel that justice is or is not due. Is there justice for punishing a man who regretted his ways? Would it be fair for the people he hurt to let him walk free? These are all pertinent and interesting questions not just for Iroh, but for the Fire Nation as a whole. Where does one draw the line at reconciliation and justice? Sure, the Fire Nation as a whole aren't irredeemable, but they hurt countless lives. Particularly those who stood to gain the most from it, like Ozai, Iroh, Azulon, or Sozin (not counting Azula or Zuko since...well they were kids and neither were initially in line for the throne). Now for me personally, I don't think Iroh had done enough to justify him walking free. But I'm not a character in the series and that's ultimately for the Gaang to decide.

[taxevasiontactics]

The Godmother's Godchild [5] - ...Make for Such Great Falls

Synopsis: You just knew the good times wouldn't last, but you didn't think they would come this quickly. Getting hit with multiple problems in a row, you find yourself starting to thrive. It is, after all, your job to deal with major problems on incredibly short deadlines.

Warning: (Graphic?) Depiction of a major injury

For the better part of your month allowance, you work.

You don’t make any more visits out of the cottage save for necessities. Even when you need materials for some concoction, you go out, you get what you need, and you come back. The inspiration for “improvements” strikes as often as it had before, but you cannot bring yourself to care beyond “good enough”. You hate the idea of leaving behind the quick friendships and bonds you’ve made here. Still, the month wears on and your time runs thin.

You dread it. You fear it. You languish in it.

You wake up with a dry throat and a stuffy nose. The world outside is a dusky grey, even if your phone tells you it’s your habitual 6 AM. Beside you, your lazy, feline housemate continues to snooze away on the opposite pillow. Your tired eyes slide to the date, recognizing it as the end of summer. Your judgement day is drawing ever closer. Still, you have many projects to do; so, you drag yourself out, have your breakfast of quick cereal, dig out another can of tuna for the cat to have when he wakes up, and head out into the gloom. Time is of the essence, you tell yourself. Let people know that you’ll be leaving soon.

You decide that the pizzeria will be the easiest to knock out first (see: the bandaid that will probably hurt the most, thus pertinent to rip it off the fastest) and work on until the fog burns away from the warm noon sun’s rays. The phone is ringing off the hook when you come in, smelling like the forest and dirt between your fingers.

Nobody is manning the front where its shrill bell calls, not until you hear Gustavo shout from the back that he’s “COMING!” like the caller can hear him through an unanswered receiver. The place is a mess of soda boxes, napkin boxes, pizza box boxes, and a multitude of other little things you don’t have the brains to pick through mentally. A whisper of a smile runs across your mouth. You’re going to miss this place when you go, wall stains and all.

“Hey! Welcome back!” Gustavo shouts as he comes out of the kitchen. “Haven’t seen you in forever!”

He’s quick to pick up the phone, waving at you to sit down between writing down lines of the order. You look around at all the boxes and shift your bag against yourself. You feel bad, just standing around when there’s all of this work lying around. You hear Gustavo click his pen again, sigh, and stretch. He almost asks you if it’s “the usual, again?” before you interject.

“Do you want some help with putting all of this away?”

His eyebrows go up. “Are you sure? There’s a whole lot, and they’re heavy. But I don’t think Peppino or I will say no!”

“Hell, sure, better than sitting on my rear while you run around and make me sweat just watching.”

He gets a kick out of that. It doesn’t take very long for Gustavo to get through the delivery orders in the oven. You’re put to work, following him back through the kitchen door with a moderately heavy box. Peppino is there with his back to you both, still preparing toppings with a multitude of knives.

“Afternoon, Peppino!” You call across the kitchen.

“Mmhm,” he mumbles back. “Salve, salve.”

You frown. You were expecting some sort of ribbing on the way through. Gustavo leads you to a storage room half packed with disorganized junk. The other half is free for you to attempt stacking your boxes neatly. For the most part, it works, though you feel your Tetris skills protesting the rust. You finish up in no time, going for more boxes.

“What’s up with him?” You ask on the way back.

The shorter man shrugs. “Just tired, I guess. I told him to sit down for a bit, but… you know how he is by now, huh?”

“Yeah.”

You both continue to haul inventory, stack, and go back for more until the available storage space is all filled up. This, unfortunately, leaves no room for the soda fountain’s refill boxes. You and Gustavo pick them up anyways, taking them to the kitchen.

Your senses prickle from a new smell when you next pass through. It’s not the sauce. It’s not the toppings. It’s a warm, metallic scent that sets your mind on edge even when it’s masked by spices. Gustavo clicks his tongue to get the larger man’s attention.

“Hey, Peppino?” “Huh?”

He’s still chopping away, cleaver sharp and gleaming as he brings it down on the counter with a hard thump!

“Where do you want these?”

“What, where do I want what? What are they?”

“The soda refills.” “What? Oh. Over there, why not.”

Peppino turns, waving his stump of a left arm through the air towards another door. Blood splatters across the countertop from the meat around his radial-ulnar and it keeps running red rivulets down the limb. A steady stream drips onto the floor from where the rest of his wrist and hand lie in perfectly sliced sections on the cutting board, oozing a pool of the iron-rich sanguine. You drop your box on the nearest surface and rush between metal tables to get to Peppino.

“Oh.” He finally catches on when he looks at what was once his hand, face blanched. “My arm. My arm-!?”

Gustavo shouts in alarm behind you. You grab what you hope is a clean rag, snatching Peppino’s limb and pressing the fabric tightly against it. You jerk your head towards the lobby.

“Gustavo. My bag is in the front, go grab it and bring it here.”

He’s out the door in a moment. Your mind is coasting on tight rails as you coax Peppino into dropping the cleaver to hold the rag for you. Stop the bleeding. Stabilize, then repair. Within moments, your bag gets tossed onto a nearby counter. You rip it open, racing in measured, confident digs to find what you need and get suitable substitutes for what you can’t. He’s a breath away from fully panicking, muttering faster and faster under his breath an incoherent spew of words. You spare a moment, leaning into his view.

“Hey, Peppino, look at me. Look at me?”

He’s still staring at his stump, watching the rag slowly becoming more and more soaked.

“I need you to look at me. Alright? Just for a sec.”

You get what you need and set to work. He listens to you now that you’re moving more, attention drawn from the source of stress. Ok, you can work with that – you keep talking, your mash slowly becoming the green paste you need.

“You’re doing great. You’re doing great, just keep holding that on your arm. Positive pressure, ok?”

“I really did it this time,” he rambles, “this time I-“

“No, no, you’re doing good! Keep holding it, you’re doing great.”

You finish in record time. You’re thankful that Peppino cut himself in such even sections; you hurriedly paste his hand back together on the cutting board, piece by piece, with thick, creamy salve and white wrapping. You keep talking. He’s doing great. Just a little longer.

You feel the skin starting to mend when you pick the severed palm up and line it up with Peppino’s raw limb. You wrap it back on as securely as you can, all while the meat and bone and flesh zip right back up like interlocking puzzle pieces coming into place. The contact you have with every cut as they mend is not unlike feeling a bubble bath’s bubbles pop and reform into plain water, or sectioned slime closing back around the divisions. You finish up and step back with a deep, rib creaking breath.

Peppino is left with a fully bandaged hand, while yours are as bloodied as can be. He stares blithely at the once-was stump currently in the process of reconstructing dermal layers, tendons, marrow, and muscle. You’ve never been on the receiving end, but you imagine the sensation is confusing.

“There!” You laugh, breathless. Your hands are still, even if you are rife with adrenaline. “You, uh, shouldn’t use that very much for the rest of the week. It’ll hurt like hell if you move everything around while it’s still doing its thing. Just so you know. Doctor’s recommendation.”

You go to wash the tacky, drying red from your palms as Gustavo steps in, presumably to chew the man out. It’s not the first time you’ve been put on the spot like that, but it is the first time you’ve done it for someone you know. Your mind tentatively steps back into normality as the atmosphere relaxes from shock to relieved frustration. You scrub out where it’s caked between your nails.

Gustavo finishes his rant behind you as the oven timer dings. You move out of the way as he pulls the delivery order out, boxes them up, and heads out to the vespa. He leaves you with Peppino, who has been silent ever since you finished. He mulls over something in the back of his mind, mouth working over itself until he chooses to drop a single, penny-quiet word.

“Thanks.” “You’re welcome.” You toss the paper towels. “It’s my job.”

You go back for the box you had thrown on the counter in your rush, putting it in the corner Peppino had pointed out beforehand. He cleans up the spilled blood and tosses out what he had been chopping beforehand. You don’t want to know how much product had been wasted during that fiasco, but you lost out on a couple key ingredients yourself.  You’ll have to go back into the forest later and hope that they’ve regrown since harvest. In the meantime, you grab the second box; the one Gustavo had abandoned.

“I wanted you guys to be the first to hear it.” You shove it in a proper looking place. “Work called. I’ll be leaving to go back home sometime in the future.”

Peppino scoffs, though it’s more to fill the air than disbelief. “Well, I didn’t know we mattered so much. When?” “Probably towards the end of the year, or the beginning of the next. I still have to call back and set a date.” “Well, when you leave, I wish you the best of luck, and good riddance.”

“Come on, don’t act like I’m already going!” You protest. “I’m not gone yet!”

You wished you spent more time here instead of hiding in the cottage this whole time. However, you see an opportunity present itself yet again. You turn, leaning so very casually against a wall. “And, you know, I better make good on the time I have left.”

“Oh, no no no.” Peppino wipes his hands on a towel, thumping it on a counter and rounding the worktables with a accusing finger. He comes into your space, doubt and suspicion written plain on his face. “I’ve seen that face too many times, you’re up to something. What? What crazy thing are you going to suggest this time?”

“What, I fix your hand and you still don’t trust me?”

“You fix my hand and I trust you less! I can never tell what you want out of something, so what do you want?”

“The same thing I’ve always wanted,” you answer, pushing back against his presence with your own. He takes a step back. You eat the distance up and fill the space with another. “A little bit of food in exchange for my help. You’re suffering from success, I have idle hands and want to enjoy this place a little longer. I think it works out, don’t you?”

Peppino’s mustache scrunches up into his nose as he thinks it over. He doesn’t have to pay you, but you would have unrestricted time to bother him as much as you please. He needs the help, but you’re you.

You waggle your eyebrows at him and break the argument in his mind, forcing a loud “bah!” straight from his gut as both of his arms are flung into the air from exasperation. He winces, cradling his injured hand after the whipcrack motion.

“Fine!” he shouts. “But only when we absolutely need you, then I will call you in.”

“Sure.”

“And only one meal every time you come in!”

“Fine by me.”

“Then I owe nothing to you afterwards, capeesh?”

“Unless I save your life.”

“Yes, unless you save my-“ Peppino scowls. “Enough of that. You didn’t just come here to tell us you were leaving, were you?”

You make vague hand gestures to the entire kitchen. He sighs, fixes his hat with the good hand, and opens the fridge doors.

“You tell me to rest my hand, you’re working here soon, so you learn how by making your own pizza. Start with the dough in that bowl and I’ll guide you from there.”

---

You would dub the next six days as “hell week” if you didn’t enjoy the people working by your side. Peppino, true to his word, only calls for you when he absolutely needs you; unfortunately, with his hand still out of commission during the healing process, he needs you every day. Every lesson you get from him is a trial by fire. Overcoming the obstacle of sucking at something new is a process you’re abundantly used to by now. You make plenty of mistakes. You learn plenty more.

You relish the rush of getting it right.

“’Stavo need a large-“

“Coming through, here’s your box!”

“You two, another order!”

In the kitchen, you quickly adapt to the controlled chaos. Dough flies back and forth. Sauce splatters with wild yet deadly accuracy. Toppings and cheese are portioned, scattered, and slammed into the oven all while you weave between, under, and sometimes over Gustavo and Peppino. Even the telephone’s constant ringing becomes a welcome sound, signaling a new challenge for you to undo.

Similarly, for the next six nights Peppino sees to it that your dinner is covered. Mostly by leftover pizzas that were defects, but on Saturday night Gustavo makes something from scratch. It’s a bit of a tradition, you figure as you watch the man walk to the back and start up a new pot of something without any further elaboration. Your temporary boss comes to you with his bandaged hand and shakes it in front of you.

“What do you think, eh?” He does it again, showing off his range of mobility. “I think it’s good enough now to go to work.”

You tilt your head and hum. “I’d have to take a look to be sure.”

“I can move it just fine!”

“Sure, but I still want to take a look.”

Peppino grumbles yet obliges you all the same. You guide him to the counter, gingerly unwrapping the work you’d done at the top of the week and have monitored closely since. With each layer unwrapped, you congratulate yourself on a job well done. The salve has done its job and fixed him up, leaving behind clean, faded lines of scars where it had knit together muscle and bone.

“Yeah, actually,” you mutter, “I’d call that pretty good. Flex your hand for me?”

He does so, twisting and turning it with a pleased smirk.

“Wiggle your fingers too?”

He does that too, thick phalanges rasping against each other. You note that the hair on the back of his knuckles hasn’t quite grown back where he’d chopped them up, but that’s a given.

“Looks good to me. Does it feel weird or uncomfortable anywhere?” You slip from the seat to grab a cup of something to drink. Peppino makes a noise in the back of his throat behind you. You can hear his meaty hand slapping against itself as he flexes the palm a few more times in quick succession, testing it.

“Numb,” he answers. “A little.”

“That’s to be expected, but if it stays numb for a few more days, you should tell me.”

“What, so you can poke and prod at me more?”

“So I can give your nerves an extra boost to heal,” you crack back, sarcasm deflected. “Drink?”

“Cola.”

Gustavo comes out with a nice one-pot of pasta in meat sauce seconds later, happily announcing his arrival before you can all dig in.

The busy times are not to last, however. Sunday is a day of rest and cottage work. Your phone doesn’t display the affectionately named “Hookup” contact you’d set for the pizzeria on Monday, nor do you find hell on earth when you visit on Tuesday. As quickly as interest came, it dries up and dies; this is good for Peppino’s rest, terrible for Peppino’s wallet, as he complains to you over the counter. You put your heads together while you eat, but neither of you can come up with anything.

“Guess we can wait until tomorrow,” you mumble.

“So we will.” He slumps on the counter, pulling out a book on woodworking, of all things. “A domani.”

---

You barely have to search to find the source of your sudden lack of work. The very next morning, you find posters plastered in town, pasted on with old fashioned glue-and-roller glee en masse. Walls upon walls of posted paper greet you at every turn in town. Everywhere they can legally be placed you see advertisements for an instant, fuss-free, cheaper pizza delivery service. Automated perfection. Whoever put these up even tagged the grocery store, something that Pamela shrugs at when you ask her.

“They paid Mrs. Bradbury some very good money,” she answers. The register’s bell rings and you see a flash of fresh printed paper in the till. “For advertising space! Out here!”

You can only assume that the other store owners were given the same treatment, money for advertising. Still, the posters can’t reach more than a hundred people a day – tops – and it won’t do better than your word of mouth. Not to mention, Peppino’s place is the only competitor. It doesn’t add up, in your head.

“Do you have any idea who it was?” You take your groceries off the counter, one bag over either arm. “Any name, face…?”

“Not a clue! Some guy in a trench coat and hat, which I thought was super suspicious, you know. But you know, when money comes along for something easy…”

You nod in understanding, bid her farewell, and get on with going home. Whoever put those up is either in for major disappointment or is just extremely petty when it comes to rival businesses.

You call your “Hookup” the moment you get into the truck, setting your phone on the dash and driving away. Your favorite Italian answers – just as you’d hoped.

“Peppino’s Pizza, how can I-“

“Peppino!” You hear him sputter on the other line, script interrupted. “I found out why we’re getting zero business! Some schmuck is undercutting us. And they have instant delivery! The most irresponsible use of teleportation I’ve ever seen-“

His voice takes on an incredulous, accusing tone. You can practically hear him wave his hand in the air, pacing behind the front counter.

“What? What?! How do you know this? Did you see them?”

“No, but there were posters plastered all over town, you just could not miss them. Pamela told me someone, didn’t see who, came in and paid Mrs. Bradbury for the wall space.”

“Maledizione, non riesco mai ad avere una pausa…”

“No idea what you said, but that’s what we’re dealing with. I don’t have any bright ideas yet, so…”

You squint at the front of the cottage, trailing off. There’s a strange structure just off the road in front of it.

“Actually, hang on a second.”

“What is it? Is there something wrong?”

“Just- just one moment. Hang on.”

The truck rolls to a stop, you throw it into park, and you marvel at the sight.Piled up outside of the fence is bushel upon bushel of tomatoes. So many tomatoes, you can barely see the red fruits peeking out of the top box. So, so many tomatoes, you can smell the summer ripeness captured in their slightly firm, juicy skins. So, so, so many tomatoes, you nearly miss the note tacked onto one of the boxes right at your eye level. It’s written in a child’s hand, jagged yet on the cusp of neatness.

Dear Doctor,

You still can’t tell if the kids in this town have forgotten your last name again or they’ve all mutually agreed to just call you by that.

Thank you for all your help with the fields. We are sorry that the tomatoes came late. We think that giving you the best tomatoes instead of just the first ones is a good thank you. We hope you like them lots and lots. They grew very well because you helped us.

Love,

The Anderson Family

And Marnie and Agatha

You sigh, folding the note up and sticking it in your pocket. You love those kids. You really do. What are you supposed to do with all of these tomatoes, though? You can’t use it. You couldn’t possibly cook down and can all of these tomatoes by yourself.

“Hello?” Peppino reminds you of his presence through your phone’s speaker. “What is it?”

“Well-“ You grunt as you attempt to move the precariously stacked boxes to the ground, tucking your phone between face and shoulder. “I don’t have an idea, but I have recently come into possession of many, many tomatoes. You wouldn’t know how to get rid of, say…” You pause, huffing. “Three hundred pounds, give or take?”

Peppino goes quiet on the other end for a moment, thinking. You hear him drumming his fingers on the countertop, murmuring in Italian, and moving some papers around. Whatever he finds, though, it has him sounding hopeful once he speaks up again.

“If you haul it all to the restaurant, I can do something about it.”

You grin. “Great, time to work some magic!”

“Don’t bring your crazy magic things in here! I have pots already! Plenty of pots! And regular stoves!”

“Too late!”

You cackle and hang up. Of course, you won’t actually bring anything but the usual bag and yourself. You gird your loins (and your back), preparing to lug everything into your truck.

---

Offloading everything was a cinch between the three of you. Getting to work was harder, though now you’ve all gathered in the back for an unofficial-official meeting over coring, cutting, and dumping a third of the tomatoes into a big pot to cook down for sauce. It’s the most immediate way to use up a big portion of them without waste. This was also the extent of the head chef’s creativity when it came to getting rid of the red fruits.

With so much time left to do menial tasks, brainstorming is a natural consequence of conversation.

“Ok, how about specials?” You take a gulp of water, fanning yourself in the hot kitchen. “We can run specials, every time I get a new batch of produce.”

Peppino frowns. “Specials, as in special dishes?”

“Right. The posters only extended to pizzas, very plain pizzas. Pepperoni. Cheese. One or two popular toppings. That’s it.” You dump another handful of tomatoes into the communal pot, bumping elbows with Gustavo. “Sorry.”

He shrugs. “That’s alright, keep telling your idea.”

“Anyways, if we stand out, we have a chance to get some customers back. I could put up posters-“

“We don’t have money for advertising space,” Peppino counters.

“Ok, then I’ll try and spread the word again! We do specials, we make the pizzeria stand out, and people come order them with a pizza or two to go. How’s that sound?”

He goes through another three tomatoes in lightning quick cuts before he stops and sighs. You reach out for another fruit and core it, as does he. “Whatever I come up with will not be so creative,” the man grumbles. “It won’t even be edible.”

Gustavo clicks his tongue and swats Peppino’s arm. “Don’t say that! You’re a great chef! People wouldn’t have been calling for a month if you weren’t, and we like your food!”

“Yup,” you agree. “It’s what kept me coming back, I will attest. You don’t give yourself enough credit.”

“Then why would they stop? It cannot all be just about the money, or the delivery time, or the- the- the-“

His hand waves through the air, searching for a word but finding none to pull. He sighs, goes for another tomato, and cuts it just as clean as the others.

“They stopped for one reason or another, and some special food will not bring them all back.”

“Doesn’t have to bring them all back,” you answer. “Just enough to keep things going.”

The next hour is dead air, filled only by kitchen fans humming, knives rasping against tomato skin, and the dull thump, thump, thump of quarters (or thirds, Gustavo and Peppino bickered about it in the beginning) falling into the pot. You help them lift the giant pot onto the stove and snag the lighter as Gustavo turns the gas on. He gets a step stool, you wash your hands, and Peppino scowls at the remaining bushels of tomatoes. With one large hand rubbing his chin, you practically hear the rusty gears turning in his head.

“Alright,” he mutters, “I’ll try.”

You don’t get any explanation of what’s going on as he experiments with a few of the thicker, fatter heirlooms. It’s not what you usually use in the restaurant, that honor is reserved for the humble roma, but the big fruits he picks from the bunch get sliced, tasted, and graded by some scale in his head. The phone rings for another order. Gustavo leaves to answer. You step in to stir the pot in his stead.

Out of the corner of your eye, you watch the chef go for one of the many blocks of mozzarella in the fridges - as well as flour, egg, and breadcrumbs - before he slips a shallow pan of oil onto an adjacent burner to yours. You have a faint memory of watching diner cooks work back in the city. Mozzarella sticks were one of your favorite treats after a shift. Cheap, filling, and plentiful when you were a regular. He starts to cut them into roughly equal slices to the tomatoes from earlier.

“What’s going on in that head, Pino?” you call over your shoulder. “Looks like mozz discs, to me.”

He scoffs. “Pino?”

“It gets tiring saying your full name all the time. Work with me, here.”

“You have to say the full name of the cheese, at least. Fried mozzarella is what it looks like, but this is not the only part of the dish.” He finishes, starting to bread them. “Have you heard of a Caprese salad?”

“Sure have.”

“If they want something special, they will get something special. I am doing it differently!”

Your brow shoot up. Wow. Frying the cheese, stack between refreshing tomatoes and basil leaves, serve drizzled in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Crunchy. Juicy. Snappy. It’s a hit combo. Gustavo comes back with an order ticket; just in time to leave the sauce to simmer. You abandon the pot to help and time passes in a blur. By the time you’ve sent him off with all boxes strapped to the vespa, Peppino is busy with the last touches to his creation.

Good gods and every other higher power listening, watching him plate it up with as much care as possible does something for you. It’s not just the careful way he arranges the slices of deep fried mozzarella and tomatoes, nor is it the way he tears apart the basil so delicately. It’s not even the loose, easy way he shakes out the dark and light dressings in generous swirls. It’s the small glimpse of a confident man doing exactly what he’s always wanted to.

A fond warmth blooms in you. He has a real passion for the art. When he’s focused like this, all the anxiety melts away into a pervasive desire to get the job done right. He presents the dish by sliding it your way, grabbing two forks as he follows it over. He hands one to you, and you both dig in with a delicious **crunch** of tearing a fried piece apart.

“Holy shit,” you mumble around a mouthful. “Holy shit.”

It’s good. It’s really good. It’s better than what you thought.

“Peppino, I’m not joking, this is genius.”

He frowns, rocking his hand back and forth. “Salt. I could have salted it after frying.”

“Yes! Ok, salt after frying-“ You go back for another bite. “-and box it up. We could put the dressing in little cups for delivery?”

“That’s easy, like the sliced peppers.”

“Yeah!”

He’s excited as you talk over the little details. The delivery method. The plating in the box. How to keep the fried things crispy and hot. The minutia are more or less accounted for and the tester plate emptied by the time Gustavo gets back. He laments at not getting to try any, so Peppino goes to make another round of it just for him.

The anxiety creeps back now that he is no longer occupied by the testing phase. You see him stiffen up and slouch back into his usual frown. You lean in on his space, lifting your brows. What's got him down this time? He sighs, flipping the breaded cheese over.

“I only hope that the customers like it.”

You huff. “They will. I’m sure of it. You’re a good chef.”

-----------------------

turns out switching to full time when you're used to part time makes you very, very tired. yayyyy more free labor. at least he seems to trust you, now.