#it's a perfect storm really

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

pez dispenser debris for the fic ask thing? 👀

As much as this is my “kill no darlings you will get EVERY flashback” fic, there’s overarching sociopolitical backstory explaining why Izuku and the rest of class 3A exploded in the public eye that I don’t think I’ll ever fully fit in.

It’s a combination of it being more of a meta analysis than anything and also requiring information from a perspective that I know will never appear in the fic. Like, the fic still gets the different moments that make up this analysis, but there’s no explicit connecting thread to show how they all locked together to create this sort of global cult following of class 3-A. I almost put in a little fake news article opinion piece that was meant to sort of walk the reader through why society is Like This, but I decided it was too heavy handed and deleted it.

Everything that I’m going to reference has already appeared in pez dispenser debris to some degree, and none of it will ever actually materially impact the plot. They may receive a little more detail down the line if they’re mentioned in passing in the fic, so out of an abundance of caution, I’ll stick it below the cut so people can avoid this, but I don’t personally consider any of this spoilers.

Izuku and the rest of the class are famous in pez dispenser debris in a way that’s pretty much unprecedented for students. Canonically, not even all might had a name for himself until after his graduation. Pretty much everyone from class 3A are public figures, with Izuku specifically being considered a major global figure.

In my mind, there was this perfect storm right during their second year that catapulted them into fame. The class personally has varying levels of awareness of why they got so popular, but there was this perfect cross winds of societal unrest and fear that made them household names.

There was an approximately one month span in their second year where they were just hit one after another with a major firestorms of events: The UA Sports Festival, the Sidekick Strike, and the Tartarus Prison Break/Desertion of Yokohama.

The UA Sports Festival is the one that the kids attribute this most to, because so many of the news articles that followed referenced their performance in it. But it probably gave them less mileage than what the other two events did.

What the UA Sports Festival did was showcase their skills to the world in a venue designed to show them off. The public was already on edge. All Might had retired, crime rates kept going up, and people were rapidly losing confidence in existing heroes. Class 2A made such an insane showing of skill in the second Sports Festival that it made the public rave about them for weeks after. It was extremely reassuring to Japan that they had such powerful heroes in the barrel and would soon be on the streets. But that attention probably would have died down had it not been for the Sidekick Strike and Yokohama.

The Sidekick Strike actually had nothing to do with them. But it undermined the public’s faith in heroes at just the right time.

The Sidekick Strike is just one of those things that I have no POV that would even tangentially be involved in it so we’ll get a few passing references in media clips and it’ll never be discussed in depth. Which is a shame because it’s such an interesting conflict to me.

The Sidekick Strike was heavily inspired by the 1919 Boston Police Strike. Effectively, it was the height of the labor rights movement, and police officers got together and went on strike to get the police union recognized. They had tried to negotiate and negotiations failed, and so they all walked off the job. The city descended into lawlessness, the national guard was deployed, it was a whole thing. Famously, Calvin Coolidge fired the entire police force over it on the grounds that there was no striking from public safety.

I thought it would be really interesting if there was something similar that happened with the sidekicks. The thing is that the heroics structure as it stands really incentivizes abuse towards sidekicks. We have a society where there’s a decent amount of heroes who are only in it for the fame. A not insignificant amount of money must come from marketing deals. And it’s a ranked system, so they’re all in competition with each other.

Heroes wouldn’t be incentivized to showcase their sidekicks—they’d be incentivized to take advantage of them and take credit for their work.

Like, think about the work-study experiences. Momo didn’t even officially work for the hero she studied with. She wasn’t getting paid. An adult woman used her for a shampoo ad. Who wants to bet whether Momo saw a dime from it? It’s probably very predatory because the nature of the system incentivizes predation.

I thought the underlying legal issues would be interesting and complex. Who owns a sidekick’s image—the agency or the individual? Who gets the proceeds of their brand deals? This all would be governed by their employment contracts, and sidekicks just starting out have very little leverage compared to big name heroes. And those heroes would want to keep their sidekicks names small and theirs big. The rankings are competitive, after all.

It’s a situation where I do think that like. The sidekicks would have a point in unionizing. The use of their image, appropriate compensation, and proper credit for their busts would all be like, very legitimate concerns in a normal employment context.

I see agencies like Idaten settling immediately with the union and having their sidekicks back on the street before the day is out. In my mind, idaten is considered the gold standard for sidekick jobs already, and their employees mostly did it out of solidarity with the people they worked alongside of. Like, Idaten was already doing most of the union’s demands and signed off very quickly on the remaining ones. If it was just about the Idaten sidekicks, none of them would have gone on strike, but they had a lot of colleagues who they depended on in the field who were in terrible situations. What were they gonna say, sorry, sucks to be you, I got a great gig though so condolences? These were the people keeping them alive. They went on strike because they knew Idaten would publicly settle before the day was out and set an example for the rest of the agencies. Hopefully it would help other agencies follow their lead.

But that didn’t happen. Some agencies, like Endeavor’s, fired everyone immediately. And I think a lot of agencies spent a long time picking over every line item in prolonged negotiations. It dragged out.

And that went over fucking terribly.

All Might just retired. Crime is up. And their sworn defenders are bickering over who gets what cut of the action figure line. Like I think the public would have fucking hated this in a post-All Might world. It would have seemed like the only real hero just medically and irreversibly retired and the rest of them are squabbling about whose turn it is in the spotlight.

I also think that the villains would have taken advantage of it.

The Tartarus Prison Break in pez isn’t the one that happened in canon. Here, the League of Villains attacked Tartarus and set everyone loose. In the process, they made a very clear stance: they are going to leave with All for One, and they are not going to attack any civilians. They won’t fight at all unless attacked first.

All of the horrible and sadistic villains they just let go have not made the same promise.

They chose to do this now because of the Sidekick Strike. All their heroes don’t give a fuck about protecting them, so they’re strapped for staffing. So they’re taking back their leader and going back to ground, and the heroes are free to immediately go after and contain all those bad bad villains who just escaped. And those guys are headed to the heavily populated mainland, so better be quick.

The whole world knew that was their explicit reasoning and promise. Because Himiko fucking lived tweeted the escape.

The Sidekick Strike took the hit for a lot of the blame, but I do see all the sidekicks breaking strike lines to go respond to the crisis. But response times were severely handicapped by the fact that most if not all of them were cut off from their agencies. It was just a complete systemic breakdown.

And then there became the question of what crisis do you respond to: All for One’s escape, or everyone else’s?

I mentioned in one of the little fake tumblr posts that the Tartarus Prison Break was seen as Endeavor’s greatest failure. And part of that is because he chose to sacrifice the nearby area, Yokohama, to contain All for One.

I am one of the biggest haters of Endeavor’s later arc, specifically because it required going back on the nature of the abuse he had subjected his family to that was already established in canon, but that’s a different rant. This is not canon endeavor. I hate what they did with canon endeavor.

That being said, I do think that the self doubt weighed on him once he became number one. And this was the moment of his career where it really crushed him.

All for One had escaped. So had every other villain from Tartarus. He should go after the most immediate threats. He knew this. It was basic triage.

But they would never have a better chance to stop All for One.

Prisoners in Tartarus aren’t exactly hitting all their macros and micros or training daily. They are not adherents to the Bakugou Katsuki Fitness Lifestyle. All for One was coming off spending the last few months drugged up to his eyeballs and strapped to a chair in a straitjacket with at least fifty guns pointed at him at all times. The man has not scratched his own nose in weeks. He’s weaker now than he’ll ever be again.

It was their best chance.

If he escaped, and he went back to ground, he’d have the time and space to get as strong as he wanted, and then he’d come back for real. And he’d be coming back for everything.

Stopping him the first time had cost them All Might.

And Endeavor simply was not All Might. And he still wouldn’t be All Might when the next fight came.

It really was the hardest decision of Endeavor’s life. He had to admit to himself that his own inadequacy was going to cost them countless lives. But he thought it was a hard decision he had to make. He was losing the battle for the barest chance at winning the war.

So he made the call that all heroes were to respond to All for One. They had to hit the league of villains now with their full force if they were to stand a chance. They could not afford to divide their already sparse forces. They’d respond to Yokohama when AfO was contained.

He was also the one who made the call to broadcast the warning message that we hear in the Twitter post. He thought it would give civilians their best chance. He didn’t want them to act with the expectation of the heroes being en route.

Of course, that meant that the entire city got fucking sirens going off and a message telling them that the heroes were not going to save them. Which, as you can expect, did not do a lot for public morale.

In my head, Tartarus is like, the equivalent to Gotham’s Arkham. It’s borderline an institute for the criminally insane. You don’t end up there unless you did something super fucked, are super dangerous, and have extreme violent tendencies. It’s exclusively for the most dangerous and indiscriminately violent criminals in the country.

The entire world was watching in real time while the tragedy unfolded. A lot of people were livestreaming after the emergency broadcast dropped, because they didn’t want the government to be able to handwave away how terrible their death was, or because they didn’t know what else to do, or because they just didn’t want to be alone. The full expectation was that it’d be a massacre.

But it wasn’t. Because Class 2-A responded instead.

The Class 2-A defensive efforts were discussed in one of the silly little fake tumblr posts and in the fake twitter post. In those, we find out that 1) Class 2-A, along with Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire responded to the scene; 2) the entire class rolled out of Mirio’s fucking mom van and tamaki and nejire’s cars like they were fucking clown cars; 3) the HPSC claimed it was a legitimate operation blessed and coordinated by them; and 4) a lot of people think this was a lie, in part because videos leaked of Aizawa bitching them all out in the street afterwards. We also see Izuku’s green lightning at the end of the twitter video, showing him responding to the scene just as the first villains hit the mainland.

This fight has a lot of names in the backstory that lives in my head. It’s called the Tartarus Prison Break for obvious reasons. It’s also been called in some circles the Desertion of Yokohama, because of the call Endeavor made.

But it’s also called the Battle of Yokohoma. And it’s ranked alongside the Battle of Kamino as one of the finest acts of modern day heroics. And that’s because of Class 2-A. If it hadn’t been for them showing up, it would have gone down in history as the Massacre of Yokohama.

Like. It kills me that I can’t include the full details of what happened, but there’s just too much to make in a flashback. It’s a fic in and of itself. But it really was the fight that made Class 2-A.

It was the first fight where they were really the only heroes that could be counted on. Granted, they’d had to fight for their lives alone, but this wasn’t just their lives. These were thousands of terrified civilians who all thought they were going to die.

It was the first true test of them as heroes in the world. And they actually rose to the occasion. They didn’t just fight the villains—they realized that they needed to get emergency services working throughout the city if everyone was going to make it. Momo and Tsuyu conducted a mildly hostile take over of the emergency call center so they could coordinate relief. They had fucking Tokoyami and Dark Shadow single-handedly holding the line on the hospital while Kaminari, Shoji, Jiro, and Sato all learned to drive for the Very First Time while commandeering the city’s fucking ambulances. They were fighting and containing villains, performing emergency aid, putting out literal fires, everything. It was the hardest fight of their lives.

There was a hot second where Class 2-A was The Moment. Like. The entire world was watching them during this fight, and they had no fucking idea until it was over. People lost their minds when the first footage made it out of Yokohama of a bunch of teenagers showing up and immediately throwing hands with S-Class villains.

It was global news. Think of the kind of media attention that was received by the search for the Titan, the Tham Luang Cave Rescue, the Suez Canal getting blocked by the Ever Given (rip queen you will always be famous to me), that kind of thing. Class 2-A was fighting for their fucking lives and then found out three days later while they were all still in the hospital that there was a prayer vigil going on in Portugal for them during the battle and CNN had 24 hours live coverage of the fight that had so many viewers it outnumbered the population of Finland. Like what do you even do with that information.

The world expected a massacre. They didn’t expect a bunch of footage of high schoolers kicking the shit out of superpowered murders and personally ferrying the injured to the hospitals they were also defending.

The other part about this fight that really made them permanently part of the public consciousness is that it was not lost on everyone that every single person who responded to that fight did so at the risk of their license.

All of them had provisional licenses, save Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire, all of whom went AWOL from the explicit directives ordering them to respond to the fight against All for One. The operation could not have been less authorized. They had to steal their gear and jimmy the UA fence to even get out. The explicit plan was to steal one of the UA buses and have Bakugou fucking drive them to the fight (he also did not know how to drive but he seemed the most likely of them to break literally every single motor vehicle code to get them there but still be naturally talented at it enough to not kill them) but Izuku told Mirio what bullshit they were up to and Mirio, who was with Tamaki and Nejire when the news broke, immediately decided he would be on that bullshit too and pulled up in his mom van.

In my mind, there were strict rules around provisional licenses and how they could be used, and they broke pretty much all of them to respond to Yokohama. It would have been grounds to revoke their provisionals and permanently bar them from heroics. Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire could have all lost their licenses for helping them and for going AWOL.

The HPSC fucking fell over themselves to legitimatize the entire operation. They knew they were utterly fucked if they didn’t. These kids already had murals being painted of their faces in other fucking countries. There was a little old lady in Kyoto livestreaming herself working overtime to embroider Iida’s face onto a cushion because that lovely young man saved her darling granddaughter from *checks notes* horrible and painful death directly caused by the failings of the current HPSC administration. There were multiple trending posts online agreeing to fucking riot if those kids got in trouble for this.

Every single actual hero in the immediate vicinity of this disaster had responded to fight a villain who wasn’t actually attacking anyone. And then they fucking lost. They publicly broadcast a message saying Good Luck Champs Because We’re Not Going To Save You. It was an actual PR nightmare that they had a bare chance of salvaging if they just latched onto these kids like an aggressive parasite and that is exactly what they did.

They totally knew. Actually, it was a joint operation coordinated by and between UA and and the HPSC. Why would the kids be in trouble?? They had responded because the HPSC told them to.

UA gave it a week of dead silence and then issued a short statement praising the bravery of their students in a recent HPSC approved mission, and then they never said another word about it. They didn’t have any choice but to go along with the HPSC’s story. If they contradicted them, all of class 2-a would find their licenses pulled by the end of the day, and lord knows they wouldn’t wait for the court of public opinion to work its magic and would just all go out and become fucking vigilantes, because why not. Aizawa has aged 100 years since he got this class. Every single day he thinks of how it was a 50/50 shot between him and Vlad.

No one in the class is fully aware of just how famous they were in the immediate aftermath, because the school bent over backwards to try and shield them from it as much as possible. Like, they have an idea, but none of them saw the full explosion firsthand because of just how hard the school worked to keep it from them. Aizawa confiscated the internet router and told them it was punishment for whatever the fuck they did to the buses (thank god Mirio was just as crazy as them because they were NOT GOOD at hotwiring cars) but really it was to try and insulate them from it a little bit. Like. Japan’s Imperial Family wanted to do an official visit. The White House offered to host them. They received interview requests from every major talk show on the planet. Buzzfeed wanted to do a puppy interview with them.

Right now, Aizawa’s terrified for Midoriya’s graduation, but in the aftermath of that, he was breathing into a paper bag about all of them. Society had sort of latched onto them like they were the last life raft on the titanic. All for One was back, and All Might wasn’t, and the heroes had publicly broadcast a message saying they were useless, but don’t fucking worry, fifteen year old Iida Tenya is on the case. Society will be upheld by Kaminari Denki, currently viral for driving a real life city ambulance one hundred miles per hour down the street while screaming “WEE WOO BITCH.” And don’t forget the pillar that will be Mina Ashido, who rushed over to him earlier that day to show him her extra sparkly pink nails. And if you have a major fight that needs to be won? Don’t fucking worry, just send out bone-breaking boy wonder Midoriya Izuku and his equally reckless brother Toogata Mirio, because their dumbasses managed to take down an S-Class villain team that only All Might could defeat the first time around. Don’t worry about the multi week hospitalization they needed after, because that’s an acceptable burden to put on children.

When Aizawa started this job, he promised himself he would never send a student out to die. Some of them would die. But it would be tragedy, not damnation. He’d have given them their best chance. Part of the reason why he made that promise was because he sort of felt like his teacher sent him out set up to die, and it’s only luck that he made it through his first couple of years.

He has gone to the funeral of every single student he has ever had who did not make it. He goes back to their graves every year.

He was fucking petrified after Yokohama that society would push these kids too far too soon. Every single one of his classes before them had gotten the benefit of being practically unknown their first few years. They didn’t have the world talking about them like they were already the top heroes. He was terrified they wouldn’t have the space to learn and grow when they started.

A lot of teachers would have tried to mine the notoriety of Yokohama to hard launch their students’ careers. Aizawa told Nedzu point blank that he would quit tomorrow if he did not help him quash this thing as much as possible, and nedzu agreed.

This world killed its real heroes. It sucked them dry and left them like All Might, and he just needed fucking time. He needed fucking time to let them be kids and maybe they’d survive.

Izuku ended up being the one who escaped the aftermath of everything the least. His Quirk was too much like All Might’s for the world to let go of him easily.

And then Stain got fucking dogpiled by idaten in the aftermath of the Tartarus prison break and implied he considered Izuku the only true hero in the absence of all might and everyone started asking super inconvenient questions like “how does stain even know you exist” and “no really he called you by your actual legal name how does he even know that” and it just. It didn’t help things. Izuku’s suffering.

So yeah. There was just this absolute collision of a total lack of faith in current heroes combined with a huge swell of public trust in class 2-a that led us to being in the landscape we are now. All of the currently licensed heroes said that they wouldn’t be there to save the public, and then Class 2-A immediately hit back that they would be there. Actually, they’ll risk everything to be there. They’ll die to protect the public and they’ll risk the entire future they had been trying to build and they will fucking be there to save them.

There’s a lot of people that never forgave the heroes for deserting Yokohama. And there’s even more people who have absolute faith in Izuku and his classmates because they didn’t. That’s why the world is watching them so aggressively. These kids are the most trusted heroes in Japan right now.

I wish I could fit in more about what happened, because I love this backstory so much, but 1) some of it absolutely requires POVs like Endeavors, which we won’t get in pez dispenser debris, 2) there’s no one POV that could tell the full story via flashback and 3) it’d just be too long of a divergence. Like. It really is a whole fic of its own. I’d love to write it one day but I probably won’t have the time

[imagitory]

Dress Up Time Princess's Shadows of London: Chapter 2 definitely had a few plot turns I didn't love -- and perhaps I'll write about them another day...but these new artworks? These might be some of my favorites in the DUTP catalogue.

[ranticore]

the venerable and esteemed monster hunter/tamer Sir Ambrose Thomas with his helpers. Ambrose promises no less than the best results for any villages or farmers who hire him to deal with their crawling beast infestation. His lovely helpers enjoy the job as well, look how happy they are :)

[nat1nonsense]

“First Day of My Life” - Bright Eyes (2005) // Critical Role - Bell’s Hells, episode 111 “The Nein Hells” (2024)

[marisatomay]

Been listening to books about the Salem witch trials and it’s so weird to me that there’s this prevailing narrative where people think of Salem as “oh they were deluded primitive folk who believed in witchcraft lol” when there are contemporary documents where prominent people said the accusers and the court (which hadn’t followed standard legal procedures even for that time) were committing crimes so grievous it would forever be a stain on New England

[umbracirrus]

WIP Wednesday!!

I left my WIP up to a poll today and at the time I checked, Elyse actually trying to communicate won over the dragon fight, so that's what I'm going to post! :) I might post the dragon stuff later this week or next week.

Tagged by @skyrim-forever @pocket-vvardvark and @madam-whim!! Thank you! I'm going to tag @hircines-hunter @friend-of-giants @oblivions-dawn @illumiera and anyone who wants to share a WIP, though as usual don't feel obligated <3

------

Elyse paced back and forth as she took a few deep breaths outside Balgruuf’s study. She needed to talk to him. It had been on her mind for days now, ever since that brief conversation outside the palace. It was beginning to consume her thoughts almost entirely… and she needed to know. How did he feel about her? Truly?

It almost felt like a childish notion in comparison to everything else which was going on, but she simply couldn’t focus on anything else. People were starting to ask if she was sleeping well from how often she had fallen into a spiral of thoughts which left her staring into nothingness, which was a welcome break from the “how are you feeling?” questions after the incident with Korir, but starting to become a bit too frequent for her liking.

Thankfully, after checking with Proventus when she had decided that enough was enough and that she needed answers for it all, she had found that he had an open hour that morning where he would be in his study. And that was all she needed – a moment alone with him to ask. She knew that she needed to brace herself for whatever his answer would be – whether her feelings were reciprocal or not – and she needed to not fumble on her words when she was to ask.

After another few deep breaths, she rapped her knuckles against the door, and upon being told that she could enter, she counted to four, exhaled, then entered the room.

Balgruuf was simply sat at his desk, a small but neat stack of unopened letters beside a somewhat messier pile of creased and unfolded documents, a quill in his hand, and a bottle of Colovian brandy alongside an empty glass. He looked to have been taking advantage of the quiet time to read and respond to all the correspondence.

“Elyse… is everything okay?” He returned his quill to the inkwell, his brow creasing up in worry. “I wasn’t expecting anyone at this time. Has something happened?”

“Oh, no! No, nothing has happened. I just wanted to talk to you about something, and Proventus said that you should be available. It’s… It’s something personal after our conversation the other day.” Her breath caught at the back of her throat. “I can come back at another time if it works better for you though…?”

Balgruuf reached out for the bottle of brandy and poured himself some, then took a sip as he gestured for her to sit down. “Do not worry, now is fine. Take a seat, I will try to be as open as I can.”

She nodded, then sat down on the chair. It was usually a comfortable seat, but for once, it felt strangely… opposite. She figured it was down to the nerves which were chittering away at the back of her mind.

“What is it that you wanted to talk about?”

"So… A few days ago, we were talking about your past relationships, right?”

He made an affirmative noise as he placed his glass down.

“Well, I… a thought crossed my mind about something that you said after we returned indoors.” She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, bracing herself once more for what she wanted to say. “I asked if you were waiting for the right person, and you said-!”

[utilitycaster]

two relatively brief thoughts I had re: the ask I got last night:

The Apex War especially reminds me how, when I played through Disco Elysium, I told the raver kids to leave (thinking this would let me talk to the computer programmer) and as a result everything with the church questline was closed off. This meant in endgame, when I tried to bring up the hole in reality when talking to your precinct, the internal dialogue said something to the effect of "because you didn't pursue this, you do not know". It really is just...no one bothered.

The Nein rewatch really has put C3 into a new light in that the Mighty Nein kept making bold and game-changing decisions (stealing the beacon last episode being one of the most significant), and I do wonder (and I know I'm not alone in this) if given how quickly they started doing this Matt just...didn't realize that while it did not take long for the Nein to step into a position of decision making, it did take a little time, and Bells Hells might have done better had they not been largely shepherded through the first 50 episodes and then suddenly asked to actually do things of their own (pun unintended) volition.

[skyhawkstragedy]

I think the reason why AI Arena was so well received was because it was well paced and had the cast to back it up. In the same way that a bad cast can ruin an otherwise good twist (like the concept of Camp Comeback sounded good in a vacuum but with a horrid cast like bb21 it was always gonna fail), a bad twist could derail an otherwise good season (like Zombie week). Not only did it keep the houseguests engaged in the game, it never overstayed its welcome, it never felt tacked in or pointless, and most importantly, the cast made the most of it. The Cedric blindside and the last two weeks are prime examples of this. It also helped that the comps were equitable.

I don’t think this type of twist would have succeeded without a cast as engaged and unproblematic as this one. It felt like Big Brother finally got something right, but the stars definitely had to align for it to happen. But a win is a win I guess

[februerik]

[mistborn book 2 spoilers]

I DON'T KNOW HOW HE CAN WRITE INTIMACY WITH ZERO NAKED BODIES SO WELL BUT AHHHHHHHH

SAZED AND TINDWYL I LOVE YOU SO MUCH

[wjplease]

el no sabe

[maxgicalgirl]

It’s been ages since an anime has sunk its teeth into me and shook me like dog with a chew toy but Dan Da Dan is pretty much all I can think about lately………..

[whitepeachrum]

Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

Fandom: Hetalia (personified) Pairing: Arthur x Kat (EngUkr/UkrEng) Content Length: Short (~900 words)

“Darling, are you mad?!” Arthur asked Kat as she ran up to him, drenched from the rain with his closed umbrella in her hands. He must’ve accidentally taken hers. There was no other reasonable explanation he could possibly have for his wife leaving the comfort and warmth of the house to run out to him.

“No, I'm not mad,” Kat blinked at him, confused as to why he’d think she'd be mad—at him, especially.

“It is pouring buckets out there! You should've at least used the sodden umbrella.”

“I’ll be fine,” Kat waved it off. “Plants get rained on all the time, and they turn out wonderfully fine.”

“But you are not a plant, and you are not dressed appropriately for the weather. I wouldn't want you getting sick.”

Arthur quickly took off his coat and gave it to his soaked wife to put on. She tried to refuse it, but Arthur adamantly put it on her as if she were a stubborn child, zipping the jacket all the way up until her nose was covered.

“I told you, I’m fine. You don't have to do all this, honey,” she said, pulling the zipper down a bit.

“I most definitely have to take care of my wife when she neglects to take proper care of herself. I mean, really, Katherine, a tank top in this freezing weather is unacceptable. What else do you suppose I’ll have to worry about while I’m away?”

She grinned at him shyly, her body already warmed by the kind gesture. Arthur pulled out the handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wiped her face dry of any rain. He's so meticulous, Kat thought, and serious too. Eventually, she started giggling when Arthur purposely tried to polish her nose until it became nothing but a dermal desert.

“There. Now you're all dry. Oh—well, except your hair. I suppose… we could just ruffle it up like mine.”

“No! No, no, no. That's alright! I'll dry it when I get back inside. I’m going to wash up soon anyway.”

“Promise me you won't be out alone in the rain again?”

Kat pouted a bit.

“Kat,” Arthur sighed.

“Can I just have five minutes to look for the frogs?” she asked with her hands clasped.

“Frogs?? Did you really just say frogs?” He furrowed his brows. “Absolutely not. I’ll get you one to look at when I get back.”

“Okay, not five. How about… three minutes? I won’t even do the frog thing! Just a little singing and dancing.”

Arthur looked out at the downpour and calculated his best counteroffer.

“Five minutes if you let me dance with you here and then I walk you back to the house with the umbrella covering us both.”

Kat’s cheeks rose like yeast in a bread loaf. She knew exactly how she could get him to say yes.

“Four if there's no umbrella, and I add a kiss.”

“Hmph.” Arthur folded his arms over his chest, tapping on his lips with his index finger as he considered her offer. Kissing in the rain did sound romantic, but he had to make sure she’d stay healthy while he was gone. The thought of her catching a cold without him there made his chest tighten. After all, who else would take extremely good care of his precious ball of sunshine? Alfred?? Yeah, right.

“Six minutes. Umbrella. And kiss.”

“Okay, I got it. Two minutes, and… you don't get to watch me run into the house!”

Arthur laughed at her offer, completely thrown off by how bad it was.

“You really want to be in the rain, don't you?”

“Come on, Arthur. When else can we get a moment like this?”

“It rains all the time, love. You can wait until I’m back.”

“Please?”

Arthur turned his head, ready to say no again, but then his eyes caught a glimpse of Kat’s puppy eyes. No. They would not work on him now. He would NOT fall for those again-

“Ah, screw it. But just this once.” Of course her puppy eyes worked on him. They always did.

Arthur emptied out his pockets onto the table and made sure nothing important got drenched. Kat waited excitedly for him to finish, and when he told her to go, she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him outside to enjoy the cold and unpleasant torrent of raindrops. Arthur gave her a mock glare, baffled that she could enjoy a storm like this.

“What's the agreement?” she yelled over the sound of the rain hitting the pavement with force. Her bangs fell over her eyes, and she moved them away to better see Arthur. He looks like a wet dog, she thought. He wasn't even doing anything. He was just standing there, hands in his pockets, taking the brunt of it and trying to get it over with.

“What??” He cupped his ear to hear her better.

“What did we settle on?”

“Four minutes.”

“Which one was that??”

“The one where you bribe me with a kiss and win me over.”

“You took my offer!” Kat beamed and planted a warm kiss on his chattering lips.

“It was the best one you had.”

[umbracirrus]

Smutty WIP Wednesday 🫣

I said I might, so I will >:3

Here's some smut I wrote for my idiots Elyse and Balgruuf when I couldn't sleep this morning 😎👉👉

----

As his finger slowly dipped into her heat, she bit at her bottom lip as she quietly whined at the sensation. She was no stranger to using her own hands to touch herself, no less over recent months as she came to grasps with how she felt about him, under the foolish notion that he couldn’t possibly love her back given his initial uncertainty and response to the thought of even publicly acting to be together, but the feeling of his hands were something else entirely. His fingers were thicker than hers, and the way in which he gently yet rhythmically filled her made heat pool in her abdomen, no less when they curled within her.

A breathy gasp escaped her as, accompanying the motion with his finger, his thumb began to make a circular motion about her clit, rubbing against her in a way which made her entire body shudder, particularly her legs. The sensations were quick to make her back arch, her hips lifting off the bed as she longed for more, the pent up tension from wanting this for so long enough finally having an opportunity to be let out.

Nothing she had ever done herself lived up to what she was feeling in that moment in time, though she knew that his presence, the warmth of him against her, the sweet talk of how wet she was for him, intensified it that much more. She was completely at his whim, his treatment of her nothing short of all she had ever wanted, and she could think of no better place to be.

Quiet whimpers of “please,” escaped her as she felt her body burning, her voice getting lost against his lips as her hips urged him on. His other hand was so gentle, cupping at her cheek and his thumb wiping away the tears from her eyes as her orgasm rocked through her, tender kisses and whispers of her beauty leaving his lips as waves of pleasure left her breathless.

His fingers slipped out of her as he allowed her a moment of reprieve, an opportunity to catch her breath and loosen the grasp which she had of him, with one hand tangled in his hair having tugged his usual braiding loose, the other having left faint red trails across the skin on his back. From the edge of her vision, she could only watch, almost enthralled, as that hand of his gave his now fully stiff cock a slow and languid stroke, his attention clearly more focused on her than anything else.

Gently, the hand holding her face moved, just enough to brush lightly damp hair that was sticking to her brow out of the way. That was followed by a soft brush of his knuckle against her skin as he looked at her with little more than adoration and affection in his eyes. “How are you feeling?”

“Good,” she replied back as a whisper, the hand resting upon his back now moving to join his own in stroking at his cock. A deep noise caught in his throat as she did so, before she pressed a kiss to his lips by pulling his head back towards her own.

She could feel the way in which he was twitching at her touch, skin taut and heated at her slow motion. “I need you,” she whispered as she continued her ministrations, all whilst opening her legs further for him.

He exhaled quietly against her lips when his hand shifted, enclosing hers within it. “As do I,” he murmured back, using their joined hands to now guide his erection to where it needed to be. The head of his cock brushed against her still sensitive clit, making her bite at her bottom lip, before stopping at her entrance, wet and wanting for more.

After that, his hand released its hold of hers, moving to brace itself upon her hip. But she had to admit that there was something incredibly sensual about him allowing her to use her hand to guide his arousal into her, raising her own hips as she did so, before moving her hand to his backside as he fully sheathed himself inside her with a shuddering moan.

“By the Nine,” he whispered as he remained still for a few moments, before beginning a slow motion of his hips.

[geddy-leesbian]

And now I'm feeling shitty like ppl are going to think im like faking or milking this. Like I thought abt having another "sorry for mistakes, I'm sick" note at the start of chapter 3 but ive done that too many times i feel like i don't have the right to pull that card AGAIN

Because I was so sick before and just kept whining about it forever and i know ppl had to be thinking god this bitch is STILL sick. And now i was barely better and already im sick AGAIN.

It also doesn't help that porphyria is an extremely weird... almost.... dramatic? disease. And even from person to person it varies wildly, i don't get the same symptoms as family members with it

I know it sounss so fake. This morning i was 100% fine, now I'm in severe pain and my head feels weird almosr like I'm disassociating, my foot hurts, my hands might stop working. And it's all bc i went a day without eating and now i have to make sure i eat a ton of carbs or I'll get significantly worse

It sounds like I'm making shit up, but just google acute intermittent porphyria, it's all real, my nervous system can just randomly go from fine to complain fucked in a matter of hours

^ just a random assortment of screenshots because the generalized anxiety disorder and/or porphyria caused heightened anxiety are telling me that everyone is fed up with my bullshit and thinks I'm lying and I have to prove that I'm actually suffering from a real condition that can make me this sick this fast and can come back so soon and I'm not just milking things for sympathy and attention

[sweetened-condensed-rage]

Rewatching Doctor Who and I could go on for so long about why I love Eccleston as the doctor.

[killlerfang1]

Pacing really is the make or break of tv shows because X-Men 97 could have EASILY been a 10/10 for me if it weren’t for the fact the plot and relationships were going at 1000 mph