#it's just a different age cohorts thing

[zahri-melitor]

Thinking more about Tom King; I do wonder how much of how he’s viewed on tumblr is a result of the following two facts:-

The majority of the DC comics fandom on tumblr does not have personal memories of 2001

The majority of the DC comics fandom on tumblr is not prepared to give government security or intelligence the time of day as having a necessary purpose

It sounds a bit ‘you don’t know what you’re missing’ but fundamentally I think part of the problem is that you’re (generally) too young to appreciate many of King’s fundamental storytelling elements, because you’re too young to remember or care about the topics he keeps going back to interrogate.

And this is something that comes up in conversations I have with friends who are school teachers and university lecturers all the time, because September 11 for the majority of their students has now moved from category 1 here to category 3:

Core ‘where were you’ memory (people born early 90s or before)

Foundation of their childhood status quo (mid 90s to mid 2000s; maybe as late as 2007-2008)

History (late 2000s onwards)

They’re the ones at the forefront of talking about this with their students, and it’s moved from ‘default background for undergraduates’ now into ‘history that has an effect on the present’. They’re now too young to have soaked in the exhaustingly omnipresent US patriotism of the culture of the 2000s. And so the reaction of current students as a cohort to things heavily based or reflective on this period is fundamentally different to someone who lived through it.

A similar, earlier comparison would be writers who frame everything through the lens of the Cold War as an analogy for their writing. I’m a category 2 for the fall of the USSR, and I grew up with that dividing line; there was a lot of media made in the 90s that still premised the Soviets as existing into the future (very early 90s stuff that hadn’t been fixed in time) or that frantically had had a word find-replace for “Soviet” to “Russian” but the general attitude hadn’t changed (good comics example here is go read any of KGBeast’s appearances around Knightfall in DC comics; they’re really struggling with what to do about him). There was also even more media that still wanted to hammer Cold War themes but invented new fake countries to overlay it onto and to discuss as being the background of proxy wars, so they had the out of ‘this isn’t a real place, it’s Markovia/Kaznia/Pan Balgravia or Qurac/Kahndaq/Bialya’.

Many of these got further use for decades up until the present, partly because Central Asia has remained a hotspot for conflict for decades as a result of the fallout of the Cold War proxy conflicts, and partly because shoving extra expy states into Europe means you can play with the politics without having to be exact.

Because to me, this is what I see King doing to the present. And why it sticks out is that most people aren’t harping on the themes constantly anymore like they were 20 years ago. But for King it’s a well he keeps going back to because he was so heavily involved in it and didn’t really get the chance to start processing it until he left the CIA around 2010 and started working his feelings out in stories.

Because yes, at this point he’s beating a dead horse, but there are also incredibly successful writers of military thrillers who are STILL writing veiled ‘it’s the Soviets’ or ‘it’s the Arab Terrorists’ plots and selling. There’s clearly an audience for it. The audience just is an aging one.

And as someone who does remember the period, some of his work is extremely ‘oh god I remember’ and some of it is genuinely well thought through analogies interrogating the topic. Media and storytelling are frequently in conversation with the world and with themes the writer cares about. And I think we can all tell how large some of this loomed in Tom King’s life.

[katakaluptastrophy]

This is your semi-regular reminder that for all that he very much leans into being 'just a guy', John Gaius is a horribly unsettling and disturbing eldritch entity who has not been entirely human for 10,000 years:

As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you... I hid you in me. And when we were together... I became God..

We're repeatedly told how uncanny Alecto was. And how terribly ordinary-looking John is...but how deeply, deeply upsetting his eyes are to behold. They're repeatedly described as "monstrous" (on one occasion, directly before John jokes "I'm not a monster"), as well as "terrible", "like dead planets", "primordial", "chthonic", "inconceivable", and "deeply fucked up".

There are multiple descriptions of how his down to earth persona suddenly falls away and he can be seen as something infinitely more awful:

"terrible divinity clung to his skin"

"It was the first time that he had seemed at all mortal. Humanity touched him briefly, like a passing shadow"

"He was no longer human. He was immortal again"

"He was always somehow more alive than everyone else around him, and yet dislocated from what you considered living. A man-shaped eclipse."

"The Emperor of the Nine Houses - the Resurrection - the First Reborn - sat at the end of the table, his plain face splattered with gore, and his eyes were the death of light."

There's one moment in particular where Harrow perceives him as something vastly beyond human:

his great immortal age - of an enormous distance between you, of an ignition too bright for you to conceive. You were an insect standing before a forest fire. You were a cell holding a heart.

(Though of course Harrow herself is far from metaphysically straightforward - in the River, Gideon says "You were a sigil: you were an intermingled fire...you were a hunger without a stomach...")

When John describes Resurrection Beasts to Harrow - although we do not yet know that this is a confession of murder and of a sort of cannibalism by a part man, part planet - he is "lit from beneath by electric lighting, the gleam in his eyes black and wet. You caught him moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue."

Even when he's not obviously being an eldritch thing, his very normal crown of foetal bones moves on its own, and the white rings in his eyes are described as flickering. Even blithely sitting in a Cohort Admiralty meeting munching peanuts, John is in constant, unsettling motion.

As if that doesn't already sound unpleasant enough, it seems rather like there is something physically discomforting about making eye contact with John. Looking on those white rings is likened to "dying" and "a migraine", and described as "scalding".

It still hurt you a little, to look into his terrible eyes... You had never become used to it.

Making eye contact with John doesn't just cause physical pain. It also seems to open you up to some degree of suggestion or compulsion. Here's Gideon's description of making eye contact with John:

God looked at me...and held my gaze. It was this that pinned us in place. When those white rings hovered on someone else, the blood rushed back to your brain; when they flickered back to me, I went white and blank again, mute and stupid, a floating outline... Those white-ringed eyes closed, and your heart almost relaxed in your chest.

Which seems to place two incidents that otherwise might be explained as Harrow's difficulty refusing the man she has been raised to worship as god in a different light:

It still hurt you in an undefinable way, to see him lowered so: as though he offered a compliance test where you ought to flatten yourself in front of him as low as you could go. The white ring around his pupil was so white.

He looked at you as though he were glad to see you... some nameless softening in his face and those white-tinged, primordial eyes. He reached out for your hands. You could not refuse him, and in any case had no choice of doing so; your body reacted long before your mind did, and the meat of your meat and the flesh of your flesh belonged to God

I don't think we're nearly frightened enough of John... Or of the prospect of John and Alecto - the man who became god and the god who became man - reunited (even if at odds) in ATN...

[olderthannetfic]

hi, as someone who is tragically gen Z and only ever read AO3, can I ask: what was so great about LiveJournal? Like, I know that there were fics posted there (and I've even read about the "purge", so I get why it isn't used anymore) and that it was sort of a forum-type thing. But what I don't understand, wouldn't Tumblr fill in the latter function? How was that site any different? I see a lot of people reminiscing about it and I'm confused

--

A big factor in LJ's greatness is timing and nostalgia.

It was genuinely great, but it wasn't quite as great as all of the Lo, shall the Golden Age ne'er come again? posts suggest.

LJ arrived at a pivotal time in the development of the internet both in terms of technical stuff and how many people had access. Many fans who are now in their thirties to fifties first discovered fandom through LJ and many were at a time in their lives when they were feeling energetic and up to making lots of new friends—and to figuring out how to make a site work for them.

I got on LJ in 2002 when it required invites. Fandom arrived in droves in 2003, first via coordinated campaigns to get invites to key people and then when LJ opened up free account creation to everyone. Back then, LJ's features sucked. It was impossible to search properly, among other things. At its height (2005-7, let's say), there was a reasonable site search, and fans had developed all sorts of community resources for finding each other.

People often remember this phase but not the early days of suckitude.

This development parallels how Tumblr used to not have that private chat feature and how a lot of fuckyeah[whatever] type tumblrs have helped curate the site and make it much more usable for fans. Fandom draining away from LJ after strikethrough also parallels people draining away from Tumblr after the purge.

There are people who talk about Tumblr the way my cohort talks about LJ...

And to the shock of no one, they are people who came of age on Tumblr, who found fandom via Tumblr, who were on Tumblr during pivotal times in their lives and ones when they had energy to make friends and figure out how a site worked.

Those same Tumblrites are now making all the same geriatric-sounding posts we LJers do about how other sites lack the required features to be good for fandom while missing that 90% of tumblr's "features" at its height (2012-2016, let's say) were actually fan-created and were basically the same as any fandom newsletter or links page or all the versions of this kind of personal curation stretching back to long before the internet existed.

What life phase you hit a site at matters.

--

With all of that said, no, LJ was not a forum. It was a blogging site with threaded comments.

The key point to understand is that conversation was always happening in a specific person's space. Unlike on a true forum, people were in the comments on a particular post in a journal owned by another fan. (On a forum, there's the first post in a thread, but it's still more of a communal space with less of a hierarchy.)

Overall, the LJ format can have a feeling a bit like you're over at someone's house for tea. There's more of a sense of intimacy and also behaving yourself in front of community members.

Tumblr being obscure and impossible to find anything in does give it some of the same vibe relative to Twitter, but it's still part of modern social media that tries to shove every rando into the face of every other rando.

But it wasn't just vibes: LJ also had robust privacy features where you could lock a post to this or that group of friends. You could moderate your comments section properly. Tumblr has far fewer controls to force people to behave or leave on a technical level.

--

The biggest thing many people miss about LJ is the threaded comments. At least by late LJ and on Dreamwidth, you can expand and collapse threads, making it far easier to deal with a massive comments section. But more than that, things are properly threaded with multiple levels of hierarchy that are all easily visible in the same place.

On Tumblr, it used to be extremely difficult to find all of the actual commentary on a post. Nowadays, it's far easier, but you still have to scroll chronologically, and multiple versions of a post with a long chain of commentary may be much more divorced from each other than what would happen in a LJ comments section.

--

But could we use Tumblr pretty much how we used LJ?

We could.

I do.

--

The key things that people tend to miss about LJ, aside from the younger and more excited version of themselves or the friends they've lost since then, are:

Heavily text-based

It may sound odd on the modern internet, but there are a lot of people whose brains don't like or handle an image-heavy site well. They were everywhere in SF book fandom. They were everywhere on the early internet. Today, they're hanging out on Dreamwidth and still going to their SF cons. They're usually not on Tumblr.

You could follow the discussion

Threaded comments help, but a lot of it is about having some place you can check for updates. It wasn't actually that easy to follow big LJ discussions unless you were subscribed to comments and reading along as things were happening instead of coming along after the entire mass of comments had been left.

The tone of the discussion is intellectual and one's enemies are "idiots", not "problematic"

All this requires is a penchant for longwindedness and an itchy blocking finger to remove anyone slinging ad hominems from the comments section.

On tumblr, it's as simple as conversations happening in the replies on a popular account and that person not tolerating suibaiting and threats.

(And make no mistake, a lot of LJ discussion was in the comments on popular accounts, not spread equally between everyone's.)

It does require that multiple people like that tone and want to engage in that way, but lots of people do want to.

--

These days, I interact with tumblr by checking my askbox and reading my activity page. The vast, vast majority of my posts are ones where I'm the OP, so if I block someone, they're booted from the discussion entirely.

For me... yeah, Tumblr functions almost exactly like LJ.

Also like LJ, while I'm hosting the conversation, if you hang around, you'll see the same people again and again in the comments. They may or may not also host that kind of conversation in their space, and there's a larger pool of lurkers who have some notion of which people count as regulars. Other people are watching from the shadows, enjoying or deriding the takes of the usual crowd.

People presumably do like reading my lengthy commentary or they wouldn't be here, but my tumblr wouldn't be popular like this without a healthy pool of other people who chime in regularly. It's not just that there are more people: it's that you see the same people over time. There's a bit more sense of place and community than on some parts of the internet.

--

So, in my opinion, the failure to just recreate LJ fandom on Tumblr was a skill issue.

Threaded comments were great, but LJ culture came from mailing lists, and mailing lists had the same issue as tumblr with the diverging threads.

We solved that back then by clipping out only the parts we wanted to respond to (you'd write "snip" around the quotation to show it was incomplete). We solved the smaller LJ issue by linking to other posts we were referencing and doing discussion link roundups. We solve it on tumblr by, again, linking to what we're talking about and even quoting multiple reblog chains in our own reblog of just one chain.

--

Tumblr's technical features and even general crap-ness aren't really the problem. 90s and early 00s sites regularly went down for periods of time unthinkable today.

The missing piece is people.

When one is in an active fandom with others who curate or with friends who let one know what's up, a site with imperfect features is easy to figure out and retrofit for fandom's needs. When one already feels out of touch and is between fannish passions—or at least fannish passions anyone else cares about—seeing the potential in a new site is hard.

--

Threaded comments are different and better.

LJ's built-in way to see everyone's blog in your own style was better. The automatic timestamps and the ease of seeing a paginated archive of an entire blog was better than tumblr's endless scroll and lack of clear date labeling. But some of that can be fixed with xkit or knowing your way around tumblr well.

A lot of it is nostalgia for the lj era and a refusal to take the time to figure out how to use tumblr in an oldschool internet way.

--

So by all means, people, weigh in about what made LJ great or how the culture felt at the time...

But if I see one more god damn response going "You can't have a conversation on tumblr!" in reply to my tumblr, which contains nothing but conversation, I am coming for you.

[hwaslayer]

wildfire (cs) | four.

—spotify playlist | series masterlist

—summary: assistant professor in bioengineering, incredibly attractive, lonely and divorced; that’s how most people describe san. but despite the events that have happened in his life, san has a lot going for himself. he’s a successful, sought out professor due to his brilliant contributions to science at just an early age of 32. he worked hard to get where he was now; head deep into his research, his publications, building his lab and creating a name for himself. everything was good and smooth sailing— until it wasn’t. because when he meets you, a bioengineering grad student interested in rotating in his lab, he finds himself ready to risk all the blood, sweat and tears he put in throughout the years just to keep you close— his need for you spiraling out of control like a wildfire.

—pairing: asst. professor!choi san x grad student!f. reader

—genre: (18+ - minors dni) strangers to lovers, grad school au | fluff, angst, eventual smut

—word count: 5.4k

—chapter content/warnings: cussing, mature language/sexually implied content, oc is getting whiplash from prof. choi's lab culture lmao, very vague/general descriptions of mice research work, prof. choi to the rescue fr,  lots and LOTS of tension, yes i promise the ending counts as foreshadowing because shit will hit the roof in 5!!

A couple of days later, you and Sunwoo are finally putting the newly built behavior rig to use. A couple of days later, you find yourself becoming way too distracted by Professor Choi.

A couple of days later, Sunwoo is asking you to text your professor about some mice issues?

"Can you do me a favor?" Sunwoo pouts. "Pretty please?"

"What?" You tease and cross your arms.

"Can you take a picture and text it to Professor Choi? Ask him if it's okay to move forward with the vet's recommendations for the mice?"

"Text him?" Sunwoo looks at you and nods, flashing you Professor Choi's number on his own phone screen.

"We usually text him if it's something really urgent and needs his attention."

"You guys don't just do this in a Slack chat or something?"

"Trust me, he's probably the worst with Slack. I don't even think the guy has it downloaded on his phone so it's easily accessible." Sunwoo chuckles. "Y/N, I promise. It's fine. I'm not setting you up for trouble." You let out a small sigh and pull out your phone to take pictures. You're not really sure why you're hesitant, it definitely was a thing in Professor Bahng's lab, too. You're probably just used to the older cohorts of professors that required everything to be sent through email, Slack maybe. The new wave? Definitely a bunch of texters.

you: hi professor choi, this is y/n! i'm with sunwoo and he asked me to send this picture to you of one of our mice. the vet said he's really sick and we should go with a different treatment plan for it. it'll cost a little more if we do, but it should help get the mouse back on track. can we move forward?

San is paused mid-workout when he gets your text, sweat dripping down from his forehead when he zooms into the picture, analyzes a bit and lets out a sigh.

prof. choi: yes please!

you: got it!

prof. choi: could i trouble you and sunwoo to make sure there aren't any other sick mice?

you: of course! sorry about that. ☹️

prof. choi: all good, it happens! no need to apologize for anything. thank you. ☺️

prof. choi: also, can you have him charge it to our outreach account? he'll know and could probably pass along the finance info to you.

you: of course!

prof. choi: 😬

"He said it's fine and to charge it to the outreach account." Sunwoo raises his brow.

"He answered you already? I thought we'd have to make rounds in this room before he responded."

"Yeah?"

"Jeez, what's the trick? I feel like I have to bombard him sometimes."

"I literally just got here, I have no trick." You laugh.

"Sure." Sunwoo laughs and shrugs it off. "Anyway, sounds good! Thanks. Let's go take care of these mice and make sure the rest are fine."

"He said that, too."

"Figured! Always gotta be one step ahead of him. That's the only way to survive here." You laugh and follow Sunwoo deeper into the mice room, looking through the rest of the mice to make sure none of them are as sick. You help him wean a couple and split them into different cages, the last half of the walkthrough consisting of making sure everything else looks good. When you get back to the basement, you spend a bit of time helping Belle before starting on the first half of your behavior experiment with Sunwoo. It's a lot of work spent in a dark room, surrounded by bright computer lights— time moves quick, but your energy drains quicker.

When you finally catch a break after the past few hours of working alongside of Sunwoo, you wander down the halls to head to the bathroom and get a snack. You freshen up after relieving yourself, feeling a bit icky after being in a stuffy room, the stuffy basement, all afternoon. You prance over to the vending machine down the hall, grabbing some peanut m&ms to munch to satisfy your sweet tooth. Just as you turn the hall to walk back towards the office, Professor Choi walks out of one of the rooms, damn near colliding with you once again.

"Woah, hey. Sorry." He says, his arm out in case of any minor collisions.

"You're good, Professor Choi." He smiles, eyes shifting down to the bag of m&ms in your hand. 

"Sweet tooth?"

"Need some sugar. Been cooped up with the rooms with Sunwoo."

"You're gonna take a break, right?"

"I will." You give him a toothless smile. "Sorry about texting you earlier. Sunwoo said it was fine, but I don't know. I still feel bad somehow." Professor Choi laughs before shaking his head.

"It really is fine, I promise you Y/N. Especially in that case. You can text or call me for emergency purposes." You pause, unsure how to respond. "I mean it."

"Okay, okay." You chuckle. "I will." He smiles at you before clutching his laptop close to his hip and checking his watch.

"Good. I'll see you later, gotta run off to prepare for this symposium with Professor Bahng."

"Symposium?"

"Mhm. He's leading one next month."

"Are you doing a talk?" He nods.

"Yeah unless he boots me out of the agenda for whatever reason." You giggle and shake your head. "You'll be there whenever it happens, right?"

"Yeah, of course. Can't miss that."

"Good answer." He smirks. "And Y/N?"

"Mhm?"

"Hope that's not gonna be dinner for you. Don't skip meals on me, please." You silently nod, waving him off before turning on your heel to head back to your desk.

That same evening, you have never been so grateful for having listened to a professor. It was such a tiny detail when Professor Choi told you to save his number for emergency purposes, and here you are experiencing said emergency purpose. 

You were wrapping up your behavior experiment in one of the lab rooms, excited to finally leave the small room and the darkness behind. You had set your mice down on the cart, taking a few notes on an index card to jot into your lab notebook later on— which, you probably shouldn't have left your notebook in the office area in the first place. You needed to reference something mid-note-taking about the mouse's behavior, but you couldn't. When you decided to run out and grab your notes, the door handle flew off and locked you inside.

Fuck.

You tried your best not to panic, but the room felt like it was closing in on you with how small the space was. How dark the room was, felt like it was getting darker by the minute despite the computers giving off light in the far corners. Trapped between these behavior rigs and the gazillion computers, microscopes and lasers. There was no way to re-attach the handle, or so you couldn't see any possible way, and there was nothing that could help you unlock the door from the inside. The worse part of it all is that none of your texts or calls to Sunwoo are going through due to the sucky ass service in the basement, and you know he's busy doing some neuron culturing off in the wetlab room nearby.

He's definitely not checking his phone, and he's probably not going to check on you anytime soon.

Your mind immediately goes to Professor Choi next. It could be a long shot, but you decide to pace the room, hoping the call could go through at some point. This could be considered an emergency purpose, right? He wouldn't think you're silly for contacting him because of a door handle, no?

You definitely should save the facilities and security numbers, too.

"Hello?"

"Oh. Hi!" You're wide-eyed when the call actually goes through in this one spot of the room, Professor Choi's sultry, deep voice picking up on the other end.

"Hey Y/N. Everything alright?"

"Um, no? I'm kinda embarrassed to say this but I'm stuck in the W072 behavior room. The door knob inside flew off so I can't even open the door." He smiles to himself before letting out a small breath.

"Sorry, yeah. That door's been having major issues. I'll have to ask facilities what's going on with that. I'll be over in about 5 minutes."

"I'm so sorry. I really am embarrassed, I hope I'm not pulling you from—"

"You don't need to worry." He chuckles. "You're not pulling me away from anything. I could use the break anyway. Be there for you soon. Hang tight for me, hm?" You bite onto your bottom lip and nod as if he can see you.

"Mmkay. Thank you."

"You're welcome." And with that, the call ends. You're awkwardly sitting on the computer chair in the dark room, nothing but the sounds of computers whirring in the background; sounds of the mice scrambling around their cages, a little desk lamp and the computers the only source of light. You barely have service down here, and you're eternally grateful the call actually went through to Professor Choi's phone. 

You'd be stuck here until Sunwoo decides to randomly pop in, if he randomly pops in. Until who fucking knows when, really.

Professor Choi arrives within that 5 minute mark, and he startles you by the way he swings the door open. He's wearing a Stussy shirt and jeans, sporting that same, dimpled smile of his that you're finding is becoming a weakness for you. 

"Hey you." He says. "You okay?"

"Yeah, thank you." You stand, the broken door handle in hand. "Uh, I have this?" He laughs before wedging the small trash can in between the door frame and the door itself.

"Let me see." He says, gently taking the door handle from your hand. You watch from behind as he crouches down to see if he can temporarily re-attach the damn thing. I mean truthfully, he is also trying to look useful and attractive in front of you somehow. Even though he doesn't know what the fuck is going on. "Uh." He hums, making you giggle.

"Maybe you should leave it for facilities." He turns to you with a playful glare.

"Saying I can't fix it?"

"I mean, doesn't look like it." He playfully tuts and stands, setting the door handle aside. "We might both get stranded here."

"That wouldn't be too bad, now would it?" He looks at you with such a shit-eating smirk, it causes you to shy away and release eye contact before you break. "But, you're right. There are things I'm better off with and that's not fixing door handles." He pouts and you shake your head.

"We can't always be great at everything, Professor Choi." You tease.

"Yeah." He lets out a small laugh. "Were you finished in here?"

"Uh, yeah. I just need to put the mice away." You lazily point at the cart behind you with a few cages sitting on top.

"Let me help."

"Oh no, I promise, I'm okay."

"I wanna." He slips on some gloves and starts dragging the cart towards the opposite end of the behavior room where the mice are housed. They sit behind blackout curtains and on ventilated shelves, some sitting a bit higher up that require a small step-stool to reach. You start setting the cages into their open spots in the middle row, but the last three need to be placed on the very stop shelf. "Where do these guys go?"

"Up there." You point and he smiles, grabbing two of the cages for you. 

"Got you. Careful, your head. I'm gonna reach over." He says from right behind you, his long arms reaching above to slip them into the open slots. You freeze, eyes watching him grab the last cage and slip it onto the shelf. "Good?" You turn to face him. He's still standing in the same position, not giving you much room to work with in this tiny corner.

"Mhm." You look up at him and god, does he like looking at you from this angle. "Thank you, Professor Choi."

"You're welcome." He matches your soft tone. With how close you are, you can smell his cologne lingering in the air. 

"You're always coming to my rescue."

"I don't mind. I'd do it again if I needed to." He ticks his head to the side. "Gotta give Sunwoo a little talk about not taking care of you properly."

"He's doing a very good job, I promise." You don't know what the hell comes over you, but you tap him against the chest lightly— and you almost lose it. First, out of embarrassment, but second, because of how firm his chest felt. You knew he worked out, but damn; you were wondering how well built and toned he actually was. He doesn't do anything, though. He's still looking at you with a small smile etched on his lips. You can tell he's having a slight internal debate on whether or not he should also tease and play around. 

He knows he can't. Doesn't mean he won't.

"Oh yeah?" He starts as he steps a little closer to test the waters. His eyes are flicking across your features as if he's trying to study you and study you well. It's a bit obvious he's itching to do something— brush your hair back, put a hand on your waist. Something, anything—

"Yo, you all good in there?" You hear Sunwoo's voice at the door, causing you to abruptly step aside and wipe your sweaty palms down your pants. "Oh shit, woah! Professor Choi out in the wild! What's going on?" Sunwoo fully steps into the behavior room and places his hands on his hips, San giving off a hearty laugh at his comment.

"The door handle flew off." Is all you say while pointing at it sitting on the edge of the table. "I tried calling and texting you but none of them went through. Professor Choi had to come save me." Sunwoo nods nonchalantly. Luckily, it doesn't seem like he thinks anything is strange or odd. Definitely didn't catch you two being only inches away from each other, damn near pressed up against one another. You're curious as to what Professor Choi would've done next, and now, you may never know.

Welp.

"The hell did you do?" Sunwoo laughs. "Just started and already breaking things?" He teases.

"You know that door's been an issue since forever." San chimes in.

"I know, I'm just teasing." You roll your eyes. "Anyway, are you all good in here?"

"Mhm. I uploaded everything onto the server."

"Sweet. I'll take a look in a bit." You watch Sunwoo as he starts to leave the room, grabbing your notebook and laptop from the other table before following suit.

"Thank you again, Professor Choi." You give him a cute smile that he finds himself admiring, being last to leave the room.

"Of course, Y/N. I'll come save you any time you need me to." You let out a small laugh before shaking your head and catching up to Sunwoo. He bites onto his bottom lip as he sheds off his gloves and tucks his hands into his pockets, letting the both of you be as he heads back into his office. Once he's inside, he lets out a hefty sigh and pinches the bridge of his nose because fuck.

He needs to control himself better.

"Fuck." He finally says outloud, slightly stressed over you and those pretty eyes. 

Pretty lips. 

Pretty smile. 

He plops back down onto his office chair, shaking off the thoughts before proceeding to check his inbox and review his final draft of the progress report. He needed to find any distraction right now; his thoughts, judgment even, slowly being clouded by you.

—FLASHBACK

"I think I'm getting this all wrong." You rest your head on the library table, reviewing your journal club presentation lazily.

"Why do you think that, Y/N? The way you interpret the paper is gonna make sense to the lab. Journal club is meant for you guys to build off of it and have a discussion." Jiung continues to work on his homework across from you.

"I know, I'm just nervous for some reason."

"Then just send your email to Professor Choi to see if he'll go over it with you. Give you peace of mind." You sigh.

"Yeah. He's probably gonna be so done with me after the past few days." Jiung snorts.

"Imagine if he hadn't saved you." His laugh grows. "How the fuck would you have gotten out?"

"I'd like to believe that Sunwoo would have at least checked on me." He nods.

"Yeah, maybe. Glad you're okay, though. What did Professor Choi say?" You shrug, completely [and obviously] leaving out the details about the close moments you've had with him.

"Nothing. He just came to get me and that was it." Jiung nods silently, giving you the opportunity to type away on Outlook to send Professor Choi an email.

From: yn@atz.edu To: choisan@atz.edu Hi Prof. Choi, Do you have some time to go over the paper I chose for journal club on Monday? I just want to make sure I'm getting the format and processes right. Here's my presentation attached. Best, Y/N

You minimize the window and continue to work on other things, hoping you can meet with Professor Choi and talk about it soon—

To: yn@atz.edu From: choisan@atz.edu Sure! We can go over it tomorrow if you'd like? 11am good?  - San

"He responded." Jiung hums as a response.

"Nice. What did he say?"

"We can meet tomorrow to go over it."

"See, that's good! I'm sure it'll be fine, but at least you can get Professor Choi's input for your first journal club." You nod.

"Yeah. Hopefully it is fine."

—END

You take your knuckles to the surface of Professor Choi's door, giving it a good two, three soft knocks before you hear a faint 'come in' from the other side. You swing the door open, finding Professor Choi diligently typing away as he sits at his desk. His brows are tightly knit together, and he's wearing a simple white button-up; but today, he's got black glasses sitting on the bridge of his nose.

"Hey Y/N." He says. "Sorry, give me a sec. I just need to respond to this email really quickly."

"No worries." You sit on the couch. "Take your time." His lips curve into a small smile just as he types away, then clicks to send it off. 

"Alright. Hi." He smiles his usual, dimpled smile, black strands framing his forehead. "How's it going?"

"Good. How about you?"

"I'm alright, can't complain." He chuckles. "So, you wanted to talk about journal club? I checked your powerpoint and everything seemed fine. What's wrong?"

"I just feel like I'm not getting it right."

"Why do you think that way? You know, journal club is for us to discuss the paper as a lab. You don't have to get everything right, Y/N."

"But, still." You pout and San almost melts into a puddle in his seat. Fuck, he thinks. This is gonna be difficult. "I just wanna make sure I'm at least getting the process or the concept of the paper correct." Professor Choi stands and walks around his desk and it's your turn to internally lose it. He's got on black slacks but they fit him so well— his outfit fits him so well, you don't think you've ever seen someone built so.. perfectly.

"Wanna walk though it?" You barely hear the question as your eyes continue to [subtly] glaze over his figure, and he surely catches on.

How much more obvious can you be?

Well, how could he not know how attractive he is? Him and his friends are a consistent, hot topic on campus.

He's so damn fine. He knows it.

"Y/N?" He leans back against the edge of his desk, snapping you out of your thoughts. He's got a leg crossed over the other, arms crossed tightly against his chest. His head is tilted while he watches you, an amused smirk tugging at the corner of his lips while you shift your eyes back up to meet his. You're sure you aren't seeing things. You're almost positive Professor Choi's subtly feeding into this,��right? "Lost you there?" 

"Yes. Sorry." You purse your lips together. "Got distracted."

"Hm." He hums, licking his lips. "Over what?"

"Nothing." You smile and shrug it off like it's nothing even though it clearly isn't. He knows, and he's not entirely mad about it one bit. It's a relief he's not the only one; question is, who's gonna be the first to break? San knows he can't, and it's a game he hates to play. 

Doesn't mean he won't.

"Didn't seem like nothing."

"Swear." You stand to walk over to the whiteboard on his wall, grabbing a colored marker to start doodling out your thoughts for the journal club paper.

"Lying to me again?" He teases.

"I would never lie to you, Professor Choi." He chuckles, coming behind you as you continue to write. 

"That's nice to know. I hope you know you can tell me anything, though." You pause, letting his words marinate. No, you don't know that. You don't think you can tell him how fine he is or how much you wanna jump his bones, not at all.

"I'm just confused." You continue your writing. The statement goes for a couple of things: the journal club paper, some of the data that you and Sunwoo have from recent behavior work, Professor Choi himself. "I need to know if I'm understanding it correctly." You point to the board, slowly turning over your shoulder to look at him. "I don't wanna misread anything." He subtly bites onto his bottom lip before stepping closer and taking the marker from your hand, drawing a huge circle around your writings.

"You're not." And for San, that statement can also go for a couple of things: your overthinking, the way you feel silly for questioning your understanding of the paper, you. "If it's one thing I can tell you Y/N— it's to not overthink and question every little thing. You'll waste time doing that when you've had it right all along." He looks at you and gives you one final reassurance: "You're not misreading any of this."

"Okay." You respond softly, eyes shifting to his lips and back up to his almond-shaped eyes. For some reason, this no longer feels like it's about the paper. For some reason, it feels like he's telling you he's on the same page, like he wants you just as bad as you want him. For some reason, you no longer feel like you're just delusional and in your feelings— even though, everything about this is completely wrong and against the code. It could fuck everything up for the both of you.

But, you don't care. 

He doesn't either.

"So, tell me again." He clears his throat. You watch his adam's apple bob when he swallows, capping the marker as he sits back on the corner of his desk and looks at you. "What's your understanding about their process?" You continue to write on the board, explaining your understanding of the paper. Professor Choi continues to sit closely behind you, nodding in agreement as you talk him through it. He saw your presentation and he didn't find any flaws with it; he's not sure why you're second guessing yourself when you did everything correctly.

You've done everything perfectly.

"Y/N." He says lowly, almost near your ear. "You've got it down. Don't second guess yourself."

"I can't help it."

"Trust me, don't. You'll make it more complicated than it needs to be. That was perfect. Your presentation was great."

"Should I fix anything?"

"No."

"Professor Choi. Are you lying to me now?" He chuckles.

"Is that what you think of me?" He's fighting with himself, closing his hand into a fist to fight the urge to tuck your hair behind your ear. He continues to keep his eyes on yours, though. "You know I could never do that."

"I'll take your word for it." In the end, you've gotten the reassurance you felt like you needed, you yearned for. But, in the end, you've also grown more confidence— enough to believe that Professor Choi was in the same boat as you. Because he is, he just can't say it out loud right now. This has nothing to do with the lab. His work. Your rotation, your projects.

This is all about you, and just you.

"Good." His tone drops before he checks his phone. He lets out a sigh, a small frown growing on his lips. How the hell did 30 mins go by so fast? "Shit. I gotta run to another meeting." He says softly, eyes quickly shifting around you facial features. "Is it okay if we continue this on the phone later? Just to make sure you've got everything before journal club on Monday?"

"S-sure." You quickly look at his lips, back up to his eyes. "Yeah, sure."

"5pm okay for me to call?"

"Dinner time for you?"

"Mm, not really. Dinner is whenever I feel hungry." You chuckle and nod. "What about you?"

"I can eat after."

"Okay, 5pm."

"Thank you, Professor Choi."

"You're welcome." He smiles toothlessly, watching as you carefully walk past him and grab your things. Again, he fights the temptation to pull you by the waist and press you flush against his body—

Doing things only he can imagine in his head.

"Are you walking out or are you doing a Zoom meeting?" San forces himself to snap out of it, lowly clearing his throat as he walks around and plops onto his computer chair. 

"Zoom. Talk later?" You smile before waving, leaving San to his peace. The tension in the room feels like it's finally gone, finally been lifted. He almost felt a little suffocated in his own office while having you there— but it's only because of how you make him feel, and now obviously, how he makes you feel. He lets out a hefty sigh, taking off his glasses and rubbing at his eyes before hopping into the Zoom call about budgets and the status of his current grants. 

The meeting goes on for so long, it feels like. The whole afternoon is a drag and San feels exhausted by the time it hits 4pm. He's skipping out on the gym today, still a little sore from yesterday's workout. As soon as he wraps up his last meeting, he packs up and leaves, saying goodbye to the one or two heads still lingering in the office area. 

He still has enough groceries at home to make it through to the weekend, so he doesn't take any pitstops on the way home. He lets out a huge sigh when he finally pulls into his garage and parks the car, stepping out of his shoes and setting his bag aside in his office. He jogs upstairs to take a hot, steamy shower— enough to help relieve the stress from the week's activities. He throws on some flannel pajama pants and a white tee, heading back downstairs to throw some salmon and vegetables in the oven before cooking rice. 

While waiting for his dinner to finish, he settles back down in his office and pulls up your contact info from the text thread just as it's about to hit 5pm. He leans back against the chair, listening to the phone ring on the other line.

"Hi." You pick up so sweetly and it immediately brings a smile to San's face despite his long afternoon.

"Hi. Still a good time to talk?" You sit on your couch, presentation popped up on your laptop. 

"Yeah, it is." 

"How was the rest of your afternoon?"

"It was okay. I just finished working with Belle on a few things after our meeting."

"Is that going well?"

"Yeah." You chuckle a bit. "I really like working with Sunwoo and Belle."

"I'm glad to hear that. That's all that matters." He pulls up your presentation, clicking through it as his eyes skim each slide. 

"How was yours, Professor Choi?"

"Ah, well. Really long. But, it's over with." He laughs. "So, I'm skimming through your presentation and everything looks fine. I think the one thing I'll say is, maybe you should add another slide to talk about the results that didn't pan out well. I know we typically don't do stuff like that, but it helps us discuss what went wrong and what they should've done to get the end result they wanted."

"Oh, yeah. I was thinking about that but wasn't sure if I should."

"You definitely should. Remember what I said about not second-guessing yourself?" He says in a light-hearted tone that has you rolling your eyes and holding in a big smile.

"I know, I know." 

"I think the only other thing I'd add is a slide on Figure 2 and 3. It isn't much, but it does relate a lot to what we do in lab. Think you can handle that?"

"Yeah, I can."

"Yeah?" He repeats, sinking into his seat with his legs spread. "Good." He hears you typing away before you sigh, pausing the conversation for a brief moment while you gather your thoughts and take notes.

"What else are you doing this evening, Professor Choi?" You finally break the silence after a few.

"Hm." He hums. "Just talking to you." You can hear the smirk through the phone, see it even. You bite your bottom lip and shift your position on the couch, heat rising to your cheeks— pooling at your core replaying the deep tone he speaks in.

"Nothing else?"

"Don't really need to do anything else while I'm on the phone with you, no." You sit on his statement, hand toying with the string from your sweats. He doesn't need to do anything else because he's on the phone with you? You take it as a compliment, one that has your heart beating through your chest, palms all sweaty again. He was going to be the death of you.

"Y/N! Let's go! I'm hungry!" You hear Felix from the other side of your door, and San does, too. He lets out a silent chuckle, a little sad he's gonna have to let you go eventually.

"Is there anything else I should do?"

"For?" He questions because his mind is running through a million thoughts at once. You are very much talking about journal club, but he's very much thinking about other things; ways to push you and him forward.

"The slides."

"No. That's all, Y/N. It's perfect."

"Thank you."

"Y/N! Please! They have the best menu tonight, we need to go before everyone gets there!" Felix whines, making the rest of your friends laugh as he pounds on the door. "What are you even doing anyway?!"

"I gotta go." You sigh and shut your laptop. "My friends are about to bust my door down." He chuckles.

"Well, hope the call helped, Y/N."

"It did, Professor Choi. All of this did. Thank you again."

"Course. Have a good night." 

"You too." San subtly nibbles on his bottom lip as he hears you breathily respond, the tone and sound of your voice immediately doing things to him. He clears his throat to rid himself of the thoughts, to rid himself of the feeling, distracting himself with the unread emails sitting in his inbox and the random announcements for the week.

Well now, Namjoon's sudden group text with him, Jongho, Christopher, Mingi and Yeosang.

namjoon: my brilliant, all-star fellas

chris: oh lord, what is it?

namjoon: 😀 need ya'll to attend the happy hour event

yeosang: to babysit? yaaaay love this time of the year...... !!

namjoon: lol no, just to hang out! please 🥹 gotta show the students we're involved in student life esp at the start of the new quarter. you know this!

jongho: they run around in our labs and play w/ our equipment

jongho: how much more involved do we need to be exactly

san: 🤣 what're the details again? sorry i totally glazed over that email. it's probably in my trash bin actually

namjoon: all that energy put into announcements just for you to trash it 🫤

namjoon: tomorrow, starts at 7pm at the monroe bar

san: i'll be there

mingi: same

yeosang: 🫡

jongho: 👍🏼

namjoon: knew i could trust my boys!

jongho: make the dean give me and san some real estate

namjoon: putting my phone on dnd now 😅

namjoon: jk yes don't worry, i'll work my magic ok. give me a bit of time, but i got you. 

namjoon: thanks guys, have a good evening!

San lets out a breath when he sets his phone aside and runs a hand down his face, mustering all the energy he has left to get his dinner together and onto a plate. He can't, though. His thoughts are too stuck on you, and the way you look. The way you act around him. The way you sound on the phone.

With how big the welcome back happy hour event tends to be, there's no doubt you'll be there with your friends. And as much as San is excited to see you outside of the lab, enjoying yourself in a bar with your friends—

He knows it's equally, incredibly dangerous for him.

—taglist: @asjkdk @interweab @woojirang @svintsandghosts @cheolliehugs @persphonesorchid @mxnsxngie @jycas @cowboydk @vcutparis @chngbnwf @struggling101 @sanhwalvr @angelqueendom @barbielibra @brown88 @choisansplushie @yunhoswrldddd @hyukssunflower @vickykazuya @lucid-galaxys-world @jaytheatiny @pommelex @thespiffynerd @vixensss @santineez @nopension

[ev1lde4d]

however i do feel a bit insane

i love my friends the kids shows were right friendship CAN save the world

[multiwreckedmess]

Kinktober Day 3

Prompt: Hate Sex Pairing: Designer!Hyunjin x femCoder!Reader WC: 2260 Summary: Hyunjin wants one thing from you, stop calling him “pretty boy”, he can’t help he was born beautiful. This is a work of fiction, it does not represent Hyunjin or any Stray Kids member. On top of this it is an 18+ work. For my comfort and boundaries please if you are under age do not interact with this. 

I feel the need especially with “rougher” prompts like this to put the disclaimer - fanfic should NOT ever be used as a guide to relationships or sex. ESPECIALLY SEX. Again, it’s fiction. Stuff gets glossed over for the sake of a good story. Please PLEASE please again, not fact, not a guide, just a fantasy. TW/CW under the cut.

Warnings: reader implied/is a bully, older reader (age gap not specified), name calling (”slut”, “dumbass”, “asshole”, creative insults around genitalia, gendered/misogynist insults), crying during (reader), PWOP, cum in mouth, unprotected intercourse. I’m also going to call out, sort of dubcon-y as most hate sex is.

 Pretty boy was not a compliment when you said it. Always laced with venom or a sneer. It was as though you’d branded Hyunjin as worthless with two words. Only good as a person to look at. Objectified and demeaned. Even he couldn’t deny that he was in fact a very pretty man. Long brown hair, full pouty lips, deep irises, with a slender yet muscular frame. Not exactly effeminate but not exactly masculine. A beautiful human no matter how you slice it. Which is why your nickname angered him so much.

 It wasn’t easy for you either. Years in the tech field had hardened you. It was a man’s world and you were used to the bro code that had been instilled in you from the early days of voice chat. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, bully or become the bullied. The tech sector was the same.

 Hyunjin wasn’t even in your cohort but you hated him from the moment you saw him. Fresh intern class filing into the large hall for their orientation. You’d hoped that he’d get eaten alive, the soft sensitive looking man thrown unceremoniously into the pool of piranhas. Instead he was gifted to the design department, a soft job for a soft kid. What was worse was his lack of coding knowledge, mostly having worked in print materials the world of internet and tech was foreign and frustrating. Worse still was that despite this he was good at his job, rising through the ranks to be your equal, forcing the two of you into the same project groups quarter after quarter. Any rank you could pull, you did, age included, and he seemed to take it.

 He hadn’t meant to follow you into the windowless supply closet. It just so happened both departments were in dire need of different items. Somehow you’d been conscripted into packaging fancy boxes for capital contributors and design had sent a large order to the floor’s printer with no paper nor ink to spare. The door opening startled you, locking eyes with him as you stare at each other for once devoid of the low boiling slurry of distaste and distrust. Quickly the moment snaps.  Returning to the status quo you sigh, “oh, just you, pretty boy.”  “Stop calling me pretty boy.” Hyunjin states simply. He doesn’t want to make it a huge fight, trying to assume only your best intentions. Part of him figured this would be the only private moment he’d ever have with you, so might as well make use of it.  “Why? It’s true.” You shrug, busy peering in drawers and boxes for your extra packaging supplies. “You’re a very pretty man who is younger than me. A boy. A pretty boy.”  “It’s dismissive. I’m more than that,” the tension strains his voice. “You know I’m more than that. I put in work, effort. I have a passion. Just because I can’t translate it to whatever arcane language you use doesn’t-”  “Listen pretty boy,” you stand up and sneer at him, eyes locked and narrowed. “If I could afford to be as lacking as you, I would. The world has taught you that all you need to do is the bare fucking minimum and doing anything more is considered a large effort. So, pretty boy, count your blessings if I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”  Hyunjin sucks his teeth, a snort of disbelief escaping. “The only people who have ever called me pretty have either wanted to fuck me or be fucked by me so which one is it for you?” His eyes narrow and study you as he steps closer. Your pulse quickens, blood roiling. How dare this brat? How dare he challenge you.  “Neither,” you answer him with daggers in your eyes.  His lips twitch at the corners. “Are you sure about that? You’re barely breathing right now. I wonder if I stepped closer,” his voice trails off. “Or maybe brushed against you, by accident of course.”  “Even HR couldn’t mediate the amount of lawsuits I’d hit you with.” He’s right. You hold your breath as he gets even closer, just staring. You start to dodge around his side but his body blocks yours, shoulder sinking into his chest as he backs you against the shelves, forcing you to tilt your chin to look up at his face. The way your body so quickly betrayed you was concerning to all the ideals you’d upheld for years, tingling and burning endorphins flooding you with dizzying speed.

 Slowly he leans his torso forward almost nose to nose, hands holding onto the shelf and caging you in. “Bet you’ve just been waiting for someone to do this to you, slut.”  The sting comes before the sound, your hand crossing his cheek as swiftly as the word leaves his mouth. “Call me a slut again.”  “Slut.” He hisses, leaning into you. There isn’t quite the surprise to dull the pain of the hit this time, his body is ready for it as you wind up and slap him again. He half smiles, half smirks, tongue bit between his teeth.  “Fuck that’s hot,” your tone is hushed, almost reverent, a revelation as more for yourself than for him. Your lips and tongue clash and fight for dominance as he claims your mouth with his. It’s more a battle than a kiss, both of you unwilling to break first, chasing the other, gasping and groping like teenagers at each other's bodies.  He finally breaks, lips pink and puffy and shining with saliva. The clink of the metal buckle of his belt has you practically dripping. Forcefully he spins you and shoves you, face into the roughly coated cinder block wall.  “Gonna fuck you like the bitch you are.” He mutters, plosives laced with venom. You moan pathetically as his arm presses to your mid back.  “Give it your best shot pretty boy, this making your micropeen hard? Can’t get laid so you have to fight your way into a quick fuck?”  Hyunjin laughs, cackles, harshly grabbing your ass. “Could ask the same for you. Truly I can’t imagine anyone wanting to stick their dick anywhere near your cobweb cunt. Should I check? Should I check to see?”  “Go ahead dumbass, if you can even find it.” You hiss. “All talk no-”  A rip of your stockings and cool air hitting your soaked panties halts the verbal sparring match. Pushing your panties aside he sinks a finger into your hot core, gasping together. “Who’s all talk now? So soaked I slipped right in. Dumb needy hole trying to milk my finger. Gonna thaw you out ice princess.”  You hope he does. Dragging your torso down the wall, your back arches into him, pushing his single digit deeper, wiggling your hips. The swish of his pants crumpling to the floor  “I’m waiting, pretty boy, or is it already in and I just can’t feel it?” Your negging continues, heart fluttering in anticipation. Everything he does is just out of your range of vision, you have no idea what to expect. Even in your heavy petting you hadn’t grabbed for him.  Finger withdrawn he drags the head of his cock along your slit. Hyunjin knows what he’s about to do is mean, he’s felt how tight you are. For a second he considers properly prepping you, stretching you out nicely before abusing your hole. Poised at your entrance he grabs a fistful of hair at the nape of your neck, lips pressing to the shell of your ear. “Ready princess?”  “On you pretty boy,” you sneer in response.  The blunt pressure of his thick member ripping through your walls twists your stomach. Filling you in a single push, Hyunjin muffles your scream with his lips. It steals your breath as your body fights the intrusion. Your legs alternate kicking and shaking below you, suddenly happy to have Hyunjin’s weight pinning you up to the wall.

 “Dumb slut, do you want to get caught? Screaming like that you’ll let the whole company know you’re bending over like a bitch for me.” Hyunjin chides, holding still inside you. His harsh words soothed by his hands, gingerly fixing your hair to the opposite shoulder. Arms wrapping around your chest and waist he holds you close, face buried in your neck.  “Big right?” The soft words are muffled by your skin.  “Mhmphf.”  His teeth run over sensitive spots along your neck, sending you shivering and shuddering in his grasp. “Good right?”  “Yeeehsthhh!” You lisp and writhe.  “Embarrassing right? Getting run through by some kid like me. Gonna slut you out princess.”  Turning your head so you are nose to nose you growl, “shut up and fuck me, pretty boy.”  Hearing his nickname he laughs, blood boiling a bit harder, and unceremoniously pulls out. A pitiful whine escapes your lips with the loss of pressure in your gut. Before you can scold him again he pushes all the way to the hilt again, hearing the air catching in your throat from words lost to pleasure. Each thrust is slow and torturous, felt to the fullest by your walls hugging him in. Despite not working hard you pant like a cat in heat, overwhelmed by the ache of your cunt.  “Afraid you’re gonna cum first?” You jab between groans, frustration clouding your senses. He’s just too slow to build past the agonizing beginnings of your orgasm.  “‘M being kind, can’t have you passing out on me.”  “Bold of you.”  Sucking a small bruise into your neck he buries himself deeply inside of you. “If you insist.”  Instead of withdrawing again his hand skims down your belly to your mound, long thin fingers circling your clit. Each passing swipe coordinates with a shallow thrust, just enough to stimulate you inside and out. All you can do is take what he is giving you, body giving up to his ministrations.  “Shit I think-” you gasp and shake, “I’m gonna cum.”  “I bet you are.” Hyunjin sneers, “and who is to thank for that?”  “You. You are. You.” You burble.  “Who?” His grasp harshens, hips snapping harder.  “HYUNJIN. Fucking asshole. You. Hyunjin. Fuck.” You cum violently around him, walls of your sex baring down on him as a fresh wave of arousal coats the both of you. You cry out, fat tears welling in your eyes as overstimulation hits you like a train, moans turning to choked sobs as you try to catch your breath.  Both of you are sweaty, you shake. Hyunjin maneuvers the both of you to your knees on the ground, your body leaving a shine to the wall where it was pressed. He pulls his slacks under your arms to cushion what they could from the cement. “I made you cum, your turn.”  “Wha?”  His hand comes down hard on your ass, snapping you out of your lusty haze. “Fuck yourself on my cock.” The demanding and demeaning tone has your blood rushing even in your sensitive state. With a sniffle you start moving your hips back and forth, each slide making a grotesque sloppy slick sound. Hyunjin pushes back his sweat and hair from his brow, eyes locked to where he disappears inside of you. “Cunt looks good hugging my cock like this.”  If he’s all about visuals, you’ll be a feast for his eyes. You gorge yourself on him, taking your time like he did to you. Rolling your hips decadently and letting your greedy pussy work itself around him. Hyunjin tries to keep his hands from you, to make you do the work, to take a small petty revenge for the multitude of emails politely thrown back to him by you. He can’t, finally folding, grabbing fistfulls of ass and hips and thighs. He joins you, bent over and caging you again like an animal. Together, writhing as one, grunting as one, your chemistry has never worked better. But it can’t last forever, you can feel his thick muscle seizing inside of you, lower abs and thighs tensing against the cleft of your ass.  “Where,” chokes in a stuttered hurried whisper. “I’m gonna-”  Summoning strength you push up, righting the both of you, pulling him out. It’s the first good luck you’ve gotten of him, flushed red and sweaty and fucked out. He’s impressive for a skinny guy, thick and veiny and heavy in your hands as you continue to stroke him out of habit. Fingers covered in slick release precum flows freely from the tip. “Mouth. Hurry.”  Standing shakily he leans back into the wall, “gonna swallow like a good slut?” Holding the head of his dick to your tongue he pumps pointed down your throat. Your tongue flexes against the underside, massaging the ridge. Hyunjin can’t believe his eyes, you kneeling in front of him, defiantly staring him down as you wait for him to cum. Almost daring him to spill his load anywhere else. With an airy whine a globule of release hits your tongue, hot and bitter. Hyunjin’s hips kick forward, fucking his palm and the top of your tongue, pushing his cum deeper into your throat and making you gag. “Shit,” he hisses as you gag again, another string shooting directly into your throat. Palm to his hip you slide his cock further back, using it to force the bitter seed into your stomach. “Holy shit you’re really-god your throat-that-keep that.”  Gulping the last down you pull from him grimacing and wiping your face. “Two words; pineapple juice, pretty boy.”  “That’s four.”

I always get carried away lmao. This is definitely towards the rougher end of my comfort zone with characters. I can’t help be aware of the fact that some people do take fanfic as a guide to what to expect or hope for with their relationships so it’s a little difficult for me to push that to the back of my mind.

[artbyblastweave]

"If they put more superheroes in Fallout I'll talk about it more."

🔥 The Silver Shroud?

The Silver Shroud falls somewhere on a spectrum between genuinely really conceptually interesting and borderline meanspirited to me. As I've mentioned briefly before, the paradox of superheroes in the Fallout universe is that they aren't a fundamentally weirder class of person than any of the other 1950s genre pastiche archetypes that we're expected to take seriously, but the flip side is that superheroes would match with the rest of the Fallout idiom so perfectly, and are so modular in terms of what other genre elements they can incorporate into their own genre, that they could easily become the most overbearing element of the Fallout setting if steps aren't taken to keep them siloed. Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 share a throughline in that they both silo superheroism by portraying it as the product of arrested development.

Kent Connolly is a sad, sad guy, with good reason. He's been trying to keep his hobby alive for centuries- terminals in Fallout 76 reveal that he's been adjacent to attempts to make superheroes a real thing for over 200 years, and it has never, ever worked over the long haul, and yet he keeps on trucking, trying to make everyone else see what he sees in these characters. The Shroud is a significantly different archetype of pulp hero from the ones who show up in Fallout 3- rather than a pastiche of the bloodless, stakeless four-color capes of the golden age, he's a more directly a pastiche of The Shadow- the 1930s radio-show proto-superhero who was significantly more willing to use gun violence as a conflict resolution tool than his successors would be. This dovetails with the gameplay loop- In Fallout 3, the entire point of the superheroes is that they're engaging in a significantly more limited playfight compared to what the Lone Wanderer gets up to on a typical Tuesday, but the Sole Survivor, when adopting the Silver Shroud persona, doesn't really have to change their MO at all in order to embody the (admittedly somewhat exaggerated and retroactively attributed by later writers and audiences) retributive ultraviolence of the Shadow's pulp archetype. They're doing their normal thing in a funny voice. And the extent to which you're just doing your normal thing is what really puts the screws to the idea that doing it in a costume is actually adding anything here. You are, at best, making a slight detour to slightly brighten a shut-ins day, and that adds a fundamental air of sadness to the entire outing. But at the end of the day, you do briefly embody the archetype. You do kick down the door and save the hostage from the gangsters. And as a result it does end up briefly straddling the line between deeply silly and deeply cool. The other thing about The Silver Shroud is that in a roundabout way it re-enforces my standing theory that Fallout 3 was originally meant to take place within living memory of The Great War. Of the three Fallout games that directly feature living superheroes, two of them- 4 and 76- are associated with characters who were directly enmeshed in pre-war pop culture. The Mistress of Mystery and her cohort adopted the superheroic aesthetic because it would still be legible to a plurality of survivors; Kent Conolly's rock to roll uphill forever is that he's one of the only people left to whom any of this means anything. But in Fallout 3 the two superheroes just sort of....materialize, after 200 years, with their shticks fully formed. Furthermore, in the Hubris comics office in downtown DC you can find a pre war letter to the editor extolling the relatability of the fictional AntAgonizer, and doing so prior to starting The Superhuman Gambit gives you a unique option for talking down the real one. My strong suspicion is that in an earlier draft of the story, The AntAgonizer was written as a pre-war character who sent that letter to the editor herself as a teenager or young adult, and adopted the AntAgonizer persona after living through the war as a coping mechanism.

[patricide-doll]

A Jason Grace Analysis 

While my Jason fics relies on mainly interpretation and headcanons, this one’s mostly going on the limited list of Jason’s life from the books. YOU’RE ALLOWED TO DISAGREE WITH ME,JUST DO IT RESPECTFULLY IN THE COMMENTS. be nice pls.

Spoiler alert 🚨 (for PJO, HOO and TOA)

Jason Grace is a character who was, in a way, screwed over by Rick during his writing of Heroes of Olympus and eiDzgventually Trials of Apollo. His story was very sad, but never explored to its fullest potential and in some cases didn’t make sense. He’s a character who is seen as ‘boring’ by the fandom, which , in a way, makes sense. Uncle Rick didn’t do him justice, so I’m here for a Jason Grace analysis.

Firstly, Jason’s incredibly depressing life. Because I do not know what vendetta that Rick had against my boy, but I would argue his story is the most tragic of everyone in the books. Yes. Even Nico. 

Jason’s mother was an unhinged alcoholic who was obsessed with fame. For the first 2 years of his life, he was basically looked after by his sister, who was also a young child. As hard as Thalia tried, she probably wasn’t the best caregiver on account of her age. His mother was unstable, which has got to leave some scars, even if you’re a young kid, because you still know what’s going on to some extent. And Jupiter seemed to leave the family to their own devices after a while, not even staying for a kid. So Jason has been basically abandoned, keep track of how often that happens. 

Then Jason was abandoned again, this time by his mother, left as a sacrifice for Hera. And he wasn’t sacrificed just anywhere, he was left at the Wolf House, where Lupa tested him to see if he was ‘pup or food’. So Jason, at two years old, was tested by a Wolf Goddess, a ruthless one at that, who threatened to kill him if he didn’t live up to expectations. Just a great environment for a toddler to live in. And while the time he spends in the Wolf House is unspecified, the general consensus is that it was for a year or two. This is more of a headcanon, but the implications of ‘pup or food’ could show that he stayed with her longer than the average Roman demigod. In SoN, it’s shown that most demigods do their Wolf House training for like, a week. And the training sounds harsh when Percy, age 16 does it. So imagine a 2 year old, going through that, constantly. Then he is off to New Rome. 

In HoO, it’s pointed out that Jason has 12 lines of his forearm for his years of service in New Rome. 12 lines representing 12 years of service.

Jason has been serving 12 years of military service since he was around 3. So that means that this literal infant is just… in the military. How does that work? Was baby Jason just running around in little armour? Was he doing the same drills as other kids when he was much, much younger? Also the fact that in Camp Jupiter, you train for 10 years, then go to live in New Rome. But Jason has been serving for longer than that, with 2 extra years. It seemed like he wasn’t going to retire anytime soon in the books, so that also adds some mystique to his character that was never explored.

Then we move into the other things at Camp Jupiter, which is that Jason was treated like a statue or a star, instead of a person. Hazel says that he is ‘more legend than boy’ which is so sad! This kid, this 15 year old is seen by those around him as a hero, a legend to look up to. Did Jason have any other friends? While Reyna seems to be close, Reyna had a crush on him, and while he didn’t know that, it must have made the friendship a bit… different. Jason isn’t specified to have any other friends in the books, probably because everyone was to in awe of his status as a Son of Jupiter. And while Jason may care about the rules, in Roman terms he was a very radical person. He was just trying to live a calm life, to not be known only as the Son of Jupiter. He joins the least respected cohort. He tries to take less important quests. But it doesn’t work, because he does get assigned big quests and while he is in the 5th cohort, people still treat him like a legendary hero instead of just a guy. And while the phrase ‘victim of nepotism’ is quite controversial, I think that Jason actually fits that bill.

Then we come to SoN. You know that tweet that’s like: hey we’re calling off the search party. we found a different guy out there we like more. That’s what Camp Jupiter did to Jason. Again, he was abandoned, this time by his own Camp. Like I know 8 months is a while, but oh my gosh, do we have to elect a new praetor? There’s also a contradiction. Percy is a Greek demigod, which isn’t a thing the Roman’s really like. Yet after a couple weeks at Camp, he’s already a PRAETOR? While Jason was put down for being ‘unrecognisable as a Roman’, they elected a very Greek person as a praetor? He was immediately accepted into the highest position of power? Also the fact that Jason wasn’t looked for. At all. While CHB was scrambling to find their boy (as they should), no one in CJ cared? Like, aren’t they the ones with the giant searching eagles? It seemed like everyone forgot about him, with him being missing not being a huge thing for most people (except Hazel and Reyna to my memory, fill me in if anyone else gave two frogs) and that’s gotta sting. The knowledge that your entire camp not only replaced you, but didn’t bother to look. 

Jason also had amnesia and never regained huge chunks of his memory. That must be horrible, to have parts of your life gone, to not remember much. While Percy got everything back, Jason got so much less!

Jason goes on the quest, then comes back. He goes to CHB, goes to school. He starts having a normal life. And he gets broken up with, making him genuinely sad. And while I know that Piper had no ill intentions whatsoever when she broke up with him, that also could count as an abandonment. Because they don’t really keep in touch in the book, they seem to go their separate ways. So kinda half of an abandonment, even though both parties weren’t in blame.

Finally we have his death. While Thalia got turned into a tree by Zeus, a slightly caring act for a god, Jason died. This could be because Jupiter is crueller than Zeus or it could be because of the cycle of patricide, with Jupiter killing his father, who did the same to his father. Maybe it’s because of his paranoia. Maybe it’s because Jason called Jupiter unwise, but it still counts as an abandonment. The god saved Thalia (she could be seen as non threatening, not a killer. Not someone who could carry on the tradition of son killing father) and abandoned Jason, left him to die the ‘heroes death’. 

Jason’s life has been one big struggle and rejection. 4.5 times, he was abandoned, left somewhere by someone. Left to die in the end. He was a child soldier, meaning that he was a kid that never got to be a kid, just a tool for the gods, for years and years. And he struggled with making friends, making new rules, trying to push the camp into the future. Seen as unroman, even Reyna says it. That’s an awful life, one that Rick Riordan never explored and one that’s contradicted at times.

Jason was a character that Rick dropped the ball on so hard.

Because, while his life is incredibly difficult, it has so much potential for storytelling, that Rick  dashes on the rocks, leaving the fandom with a character who people acknowledge as weak and boring.

So, in the fandom, Jason is regarded as having no personality, or being a knock off Percy. So, Jason not really having a huge personality, as a kid who trained as a soldier from a young age, makes sense. He was spending half his childhood trying to survive so trying to figure out what MBTI type he was may have fallen low on his list of priorities. Then he got amnesia, and sent on the Seven quest. So Jason not having time to develop a sense of personality makes sense, buts here’s the catch. It’s never explored. Rick never, ever explains why that might be happening, which could make for a compelling story arc. Rick never expands on the child soldier thing at all, which sucks because instead of Jason having an identity crisis about Greek and Roman camps, he could be really weird since he’s a child soldier. (I’m aware that they’re all child soldiers, but I refer to Jason as child soldier since he was just a baby when he started)

And the seeds were there. For example, the scene with Jason being wary about Nico and not wanting to rescue him, that could have been Jason being taught that practicality is key. That some people are expendable. He could have learnt that from the ARMY THAT HE GREW UP IN. That could have been a plot point, that Jason struggles with taking breaks or knowing that’s he’s appreciated, that his childhood was abusive and not normal, that life isn’t a constant battle for survival. That could have been his arc! All of the pieces were right there! Rick, dude, you’re a great author, but you fumbled so hard on this one!

And also the fact that… unpopular opinion time….

Jason wasn’t stronger than Percy, but he should have been.

Jason has been in the army since he was a toddler, and I know that Percy’s really powerful, but come on! Jason being this really nice, really powerful kid with super strong powers and no social skills could have slayed. Maybe this is the inner Jason stan in me, but I personally think that Jason should have been stronger than Percy, simply because it makes more sense. Jason has been training for ages and ages, he single handedly fought a Titan at younger than Percy (around 14 or 15) so it seemed like his powers were muted by Rick. This could probably be because the PJO fandom is like a toxic TikTok boy mom when it comes to Percy (I can be like this too), making him centre stage and getting annoyed when he isn’t. Percy is meant to be the strongest, which isn’t bad, in some situations it just doesn’t fit. Or maybe Percy’s just wildly OP.

This is not to say that in the book Jason was weak, but people treat him like that.

And Jason’s really sad life is never explored! He should have been struggling with 1500 mental illnesses at once because that constant abandonment? The stress of everyone’s expectations? Trying not to die at like 4? He’s neither the eldest nor a girl, but he’s got so much eldest daughter syndrome and is burnt out gifted kid syndrome personified. And it’s hardly touched on! 

There’s also the fact that’s a really small nitpick, but, the fact that Jason only has 1 single lip scar? That shows that Rick wasn’t paying attention to his own character. Jason trained with the Wolf Goddess then was in the army, he should be covered in them.

In conclusion, Jason’s very sad and tragic story was hardly utilised and the very interesting parts of his character were not used in a way they could be. But don’t worry Jason. While Rick Riordan may have flopped you, you are one of my favourite characters.

Peace ☮️

[witchofthesouls]

Wait something funny just occurred to me. In the AU where the kids get cyber formed but remain on the edge of being adults, someone would have had to give them the Cybertonian version of The Sex Talk.

Would it be Ratchet, giving them the strictly medical side of things, or would it be some bot, talking about the experimental/exploring parts?

(I genuinely believe Ratchet would have an aneurysm of some kind at the prospect of it. But let's pretend)

I have to name this verse properly because Tarn isn't here, but it will eventually lead the D.J.D. to Earth. I'll keep the soulmate au tag until I can figure out something.

Ratchet does have an aneurysm because he has set ideas on what is and isn't 'appropriate' from Functionist-held Golden Age Cybertron, but he also carries a lot of guilt from out-surviving almost all his friends, cohorts, and students...

And it's all being dragged into the mud by the Jasper trio, who gives no quarter on crushing his prejudices and fears. Even Raf, his favorite, casually steamrolls over it with the draconian and American mindset of giving no fucks.

Team Prime had harmless thought exercises of what their charges' Cybertronian frames would be like... and none of them were remotely correct!

Because Miko is a Seeker femme, Raf may or may not be a type of Predacon, and Ratchet can't get proper readings on Jack's base-coding, Ratchet sits them all down because they're not sparklings or mechlings with sealed plates but full-framed mecha with total access. He gives them the reproductive talk, especially since Seekers and beastformers go into reproductive heats, but humans don't have that. He's trying to be mindful, and Ratchet is going through the different sexual methods and the variations of parts. Of course, Raf has to interrupt because the draconian mech has two spikes and no receptacle, and he would like to know about any necessary care.

All in all, it's really Ratchet having another fit because his weird humans are now weird Cybertronians of yore/throwbacks. And the ex-humans are taking it rather well, but Jack, Miko, and Raf had literally lifetimes to explore sexuality: as humans, human-hybirds by exploring their heritage as well as alchemical concoctions and very curious lovers.

This, however, did kickstart the path of Ratchet teaching Miko his medical knowledge as she doesn't want the results. She's burning to have the technical skills and knowledge of the processes. Ratchet does pass on his skills to Raf and Jack, but Raf prefers the science as Jack is more fascinated by procuring research material. Miko literally bullzoned her way to become his student. The howling matches they had shook the foundations of the base, but she got her way because she deliberately aimed at his vulnerable parts. ("You'll leave us one day to go back to Cybertron! And you're refusing to tell me how to properly care for myself!?") Ratchet is highly concerned about how voracious Miko's appetite is for that knowledge.

She yearns to become a Tsunade/Unohana terror among them because they have a strong suspicion that if their status is revealed, then they'll become targets. She'll become a Cybertronian Bloodbourne horror if it means she'll never be trapped like what happened to some of her kin.

[jollmaster]

is It alright if i ask to get some information about how Sheol work? Like the holidays, the royal duties, how the aristocracy work and the different types of Spheres?(Like how the wives work in different things like Naamah working on music, Eisheth her Temple ecc.)

Love your work♥️

hello and thank you! 🖤

sorry for late, but finally I gathered and translate all information you want!

royal duties

• Lucifer fulfills the classic role of ruler-guardian (he monitors the order of all lands and sometimes travels around them; however, in recent times it's much more common for guests to come to him rather than for Lucifer to leave own manor)

• his wives are in charge of global spheres: co-rulership, religion, war, arts

• roughly speaking, they are sort of like chief ministers who are actively involved in their duties

• Lilith helps with state affairs, Eisheth is in charge of temple management and spiritual practices, Agrat leads own cohort and commands the army of spirits and demons, Naamah organizes festivals and patronizes musical art

aristocracy

• Ars Goetia are in fact the greatest feudal mages, like tevinter magisters or evanuri in Dragon Age

• they borrowed titles from humans: demons have own words and definitions, but for convenience in communicating with mortals Ars Goetia uses something familiar since early Middle Ages

• in fact, the aristocracy in Sheol are younger gods/deities

• they are prayed to, worshipped, asked for help, and offered gifts (something connected with their spheres of patronization); kings and princes, in turn, protect their subjects and assist them

• for example, Sabnock is responsible for towers and fortresses, Crocell patronizes bathhouses, Ose is the lord of madness and sanity at the same time

• their spheres of influence sometimes overlap due to various aspects

• younger demons consider it an honor to serve them and to be their sacrificers; imps almost fight over the mere right to feed lord's dogs or sweep their yards

holidays and festivals

• once a year, during the period of greatest influence of one of the higher demons in the underworld, a fierce festival is organized

• of course, only after solemn ritual processions and temple services; the main celebration is held in the Eishet Zenunim's temple

• everyone is allowed to have fun together, sinners too ofc

• type of event depends on the Ars Goetia demon in whose honor it is held: there will be no mass heavy drinking at the festival in honor of Gaap (only beer!), for obvious reasons, and at Zepar' festival it's practically forbidden to come without a lover/spouse/just a couple

• when the festival is dedicated to one of warlord demons, like Agares, there's a big tournament

• tournaments participation is allowed for all, and death is considered an act of honor, like sacrificing oneself in the name of gods (if no one died, there was no tournament)

• no one looked on in amazement at count-governor Glasya-Labolas when he chose a fighter who had lost half of fights in a tournament, took into service and eventually made him his chief huntsman because this fighter tamed hellhounds: everyone was surprised with the fact that fighter was a young imp

• the most important person at these festivals is the king/prince/governor in whose honor they're held

• they also invite the best protégés of Goetia nobles (Velvette never misses an opportunity to go out in public when Ose wants to break his recluse)

• festivals are held alternately for each of the higher demons, over seventy years a complete cycle is formed

• also underworld celebrates temporary events on an ad hoc basis; it's usually timed to coincide with the end of some mass shitstorm like plague epidemic (finally those mortal assholes are getting sick and dying less often)

• the Governor's hunt in the forest of self-murderers is held when the constellation Sagittarius is at its most influential; count-governor Glacya-Labolas takes the lead of a big hunt

• during this holiday demons and imps hunt sinners who were turned into beasts during the process of decay

• don't forget about beginning and end of fertile season: yes, they live underground, but they have local harvest periods too

• cannibal town holds a mass feast every year after Extermination (hurray, a lot of meat)

• for obvious reasons Sheol don't celebrate human or christian holidays

• when Charlie was young, she was at one of the festivals, and prophet Camio told her that she would become a holy virgin goat-mother

• Charlie laughed for a long time

[heartfullofleeches]

I frickin LOVE the extreme size difference between kraken and clownfish reader! Please, sir, can we have some more??

A living, breathing human. One you at least assume to be. It's really hard to tell since it's been so long, and their current situation.

After exploring the ruins of the latest in numerous ship cracks in the region, you swam up to the surface to experiment with your new toy in its proper environment. As hard as you tried, instruments just didn't play well underwater. On land you discovered the horrific aftermath of what you thought to be a natural disaster, a visceral sea of crimson and improvised weapons strewn across the shore as far as the eye could see. There wasn't a remain in sight of what caused either beside the rotting wood of a ship and a single leg peaking from the intact helm of the ship. It twitches as a broken spear washes onto shore and sticks its boot.

Saving your shock for a better time, you rush over to help the survivor. It takes all of your strength to pull the wheel off their crushed limb, prolonged by moans and pained breaths causing you to let go out of fear of hurting them more. You pull them as close to the water without submerging them to check their injuries. Their pants leg was dyed red, but upon rolling back their sleeve there's sickening relief that the blood was likely from the shed around them, and their leg wasn't irreparable despite the bruising. Their forehead was spilt open, and their body was covered head to toe in smaller battle wounds, but they would live.

You tear off the driest part of their shirt and wrap it around their head. Hissing in pain as you tie it tight, the human's eyes flutter open. They fall on you momentarily, but their focus swiftly draws elsewhere - passive confusion soaring to unbridled fear. You don't have the pleasure not opportunity to ask them what's wrong.

A tendril locking around your waist and arms, you're dragging back into the sea - hurled through the tides so rapidly your vision temporary goes black before fading back into the murky blue depth of the ocean. The tendril is so thick it completely immobilizes you all the way down to your tail; left hopelessly to flail and scream as you're pulled down to the sea floor and back at the mouth of the ship. Through its smile of minced flesh and pointed teeth, you realize it was not the ship looking down on you, but the glowing eyes of your captor. Released from its tendrils, the chance of your escape is greatly weakened as the beast takes you in its enormous hand instead.

"Little one, it hurts me so to see you in cohorts with the enemy...."

The best approximation to your scale would be the time you entertained a group of children on a cruise ship. The smallest, friendliest one of the bunch had the most adorable doll you had ever seen. It fit snuggly in the crook of their arms and was no longer than their torso, waving to you as the ship passed by. Somehow, you were even smaller than that to this creature. Its single hand fit perfectly around your midsection with room to spare. One bite and your head would be taken clean off. If you could've grown pale in the gills you would have.

"please don't eat me...."

Can something thing big even hear a feeble little thing like you? You're probably part of its dessert, not even the full thing. The Kraken's tremendous laughter answers your question in one way or another.

"Eat you? Eat you? Even frightened you put on the best performances, my love. Why in the seven seas would I eat my mate? It's true you be on the smaller side, but you have done what no other creature has done in ages. Make me laugh."

You now know the source of those distance chuckles after every show. Back then you used to write it off as another mystery of the sea.

"I made my peace washing you from afar, but seeing you continue to play with our food broke my heart in two and left me no choice but to claim you now. I do care for you, but you will need to earn my forgiveness if you want your freedom. I pray you have your best material in memory."

[katakaluptastrophy]

There's so much going on at the end of the anniversary dinner.

There's Cytherea saying the dinner was "useful" and affectionately referring to the Fourth as "the children", when it of course transpires that the dinner was useful for identifying who to murder first, and when she will hunt and torment those children just weeks later.

Then, as the Fourth's whispered conversation about biceps grows in volume, this happens:

Their hisses carried. Abigail, who was standing nearby deep in conversation with one of the Second, reached out a hand to touch Isaac lightly on the shoulder in reproof. She did not even turn around or break off talking. The Fourth adept winced: his cavalier had a hard, resentful, told-off expression on her face.

The Fourth seem particularly upset by Abigail's silent warning. And with good reason. Isaac is the Baron of the Fourth. We know from the Cohort Intelligence Files that his father's title was held in stewardship. We also know that Abigail managed to get them rejected from the Cohort on age grounds, despite the fact that when they applied they were several years older than Judith was when she joined up. Which raises a interesting question: what is the Houses' definition of legal majority and does it differ by House? Did their rejection on age grounds perhaps have something to do with their education on the Fifth? Would they have been eligible on the Fourth, but were still considered children and in education on the Fifth? Regardless, at 13 Isaac is holding the title of Baron and Jeannemary is his cavalier primary. They are there formally as House scions in contention for Lyctorhood. They are, we have to assume, at this point in some legal way adults as far as the society of the Nine Houses is concerned. And there is Abigail - Abigail Pent, Lady of the Fifth, the House at that moment apparently actively annexing the Fourth - treating them as if they are still children and under her authority in public. Of course they're upset.

This isn't to say that it wasn't an otherwise prosaic family interaction and that they don't have a loving and very familial relationship with the Fifth - we see them bobbing around after Magnus and in and out of the kitchen before the dinner, happily acting like the Fifth's children. But the casualness with which Abigail shushes Isaac is inescapably, for all of them, also political.

And Cytherea immediately picks up on this. It's what seems to provoke her moment of candid reflection on House politics to Gideon:

Dulcinea murmured, “Oh, Gideon the Ninth, the Houses are arranged so badly … full of suspicion after a whole myriad of peaceable years. What do they compete for? The Emperor’s favour? What does that look like? What can they want?

Cytherea perceives this interaction as political. As evidence that she's right - that the whole system is broken. She sees competition in Abigail's parental gesture, and suspicion in the frustration of teenagers who want to be grown ups. And she kills them all.

And there's two rather awful thoughts that follow from this.

The first is the extent to which Jod's shitty system poisons things. Abigail Pent, who just wants to nerd out about ghosts but is very good at whatever job she sets herself to, has a marriage with a man that she loves as an equal...and over whom she holds life and death authority three times over, as his feudal lord, as his boss, and as his necromancer. He dies because he is her cavalier, even though it's suggested that his cavaliership was in part Abigail's gesture against having to participate in the whole system in the first place and evidence of her plans to escape it. And despite the fact that they clearly loved the Fourth as their own, every gesture of that love was also inescapably part of a political manoeuvre set in motion by previous leaders of the Fifth to draw the Fourth further under their control. And with Isaac still, at least on paper, holding authority in his own right, prosaic parts of that relationship suddenly become matters of state and not the teenage drive for independence. And Cytherea looks at this and, for all her hatred of Jod, is unable to see him as the poison at the root of it.

Worse, we don't know what happened next. We know eventually the Fifth went to the Facility, but what did the Fourth do? Did they make up, and say their fond goodnights? Or is part of the Fourth's hysterical grief as they try to summon the Fifth's ghosts at the crime scene because they slunk off after this, and it was the last time they ever saw them alive?

[brinabees]

Wild and Eager

4.7k of dbf!Joel Miller x f!reader. 18+

Summary: You’ve had a thing for your dad’s smuggling partner for years, despite (or maybe because of) his fearsome reputation. A deal gone wrong strands Joel at your apartment after curfew. Will this finally give you a chance to push the boundaries with your dad’s closest friend?

Set pre-show/game in the Boston QZ, Tess doesn’t exist, sorry Tess I love you. 

Content: 18+, unsafe sex, too many pet names, age difference

Notes: This is my first real go at fanfic, so be gentle with me! I also can’t be arsed to proofread, so sorry if there’s any mistakes.

Fucked. That’s what you were. Totally, irredeemably fucked. Why? Well, it’s all because of Joel Miller. Your dad’s favorite “business associate” (read: smuggling partner) and the most devastatingly sexy guy you’ve ever laid eyes on. He and your dad have similarly unsavory pasts, so when Joel first arrived at the Boston QZ he fit right in with him and his smuggler buddies. Most of the other guys your dad works with always give you the creeps, but not Joel, with his unruly, dark curls and surprisingly soft, brown eyes. No, Joel did not give you the creeps, despite what little you knew of his tumultuous past. As far as you’d gathered, he’d survived as a raider, killing indiscriminately and taking whatever he needed. Your dad had tried to shelter you from the worst of his own misdeeds, but you knew the truth. Your dad and his cohort were all the same, all comfortable taking any life that got in their way. 

That’s why you typically kept your distance from anyone who worked with your dad, a distance your father was only too happy to enforce, always wanting to protect you. But, as soon as Joel came into the picture, you couldn’t help yourself. Suddenly, you’d linger outside closed doors when they were having important “business meetings,” hoping to catch the sound of Joel’s deep voice. He seemed to be a man of few words, but when he did speak, no one else dared interrupt or challenge him. You lived for those moments, when the whole room went quiet and you could take in the sound of him. When your dad and his buddies would hang out in the kitchen afterwards, drinking home-brewed beer and sharing stories of past triumphs, you found reasons to join them. Of course, your dad never liked you hanging around these men, and usually he ushered you out as soon as you’d gotten the glass of water you didn’t really need or the canned food you weren’t actually hungry for.

And so it went. Anytime Joel was over at your shitty QZ apartment, your world suddenly revolved around him. Catching glimpses of him, listening to him talk, finding any reason you could to be near him just for a little while. As far as you could tell, your infatuation wasn’t returned. Joel rarely spoke directly to you or even acknowledged your existence. Whenever you tried to catch his eye, he always found something else to look at. You figured he probably didn’t think twice about his partner’s young, sheltered daughter. 

So there you were. Totally infatuated and totally fucked. 

All that changed one night, when your dad and Joel burst into the apartment mere minutes before curfew. They both looked like they’d been through some serious shit, their clothes torn and their skin bruised. 

“What the hell happened to you two?” you asked.

“Deal went bad, don’t worry about it honey.” Your dad’s shutdown was as swift and final as always, and you knew you wouldn’t get anymore details from him about what really went down.

Your dad turned to Joel and clapped him on the back, thanking him for presumably saving his ass.

“Joel, it’s past curfew and with our luck today, I think trying to sneak past FEDRA maybe isn’t the smartest move. You can crash on our couch tonight,” your dad offered.

It was like a dream come true! Joel fucking Miller, in your apartment for a whole night. You felt giddy.

Your dad and Joel took turns cleaning themselves up in your single, cramped bathroom, before you all sat down to eat. Rations distribution hadn’t been kind that week, so all you had were a can each of baked beans and sliced peaches. Hardly a culinary match made in heaven, but it was all you had. The three of you ate in silence, all too preoccupied to hold a conversation. The two of them were likely thinking of their deal gone wrong, but you had other things on your mind. Well, other thing. All you could think of was Joel. How close he was sitting next to you at the small, round kitchen table, his knees nearly bumping yours. How he commanded the room with his presence even while not saying a thing. How he was covered in bruises and had a small cut on his left cheek, wounds you wanted so desperately to soothe. How he smelled, like leather and sweat and smoke. You wanted to bottle that smell and spray it on your pillow every night.

After you all finished eating, your father announced he was turning in early after his rough day and went to his bedroom. That left you and Joel alone. You’d never been alone with him before, and it practically made you gasp. You stood awkwardly from your seat at the table and then, feeling bold, brushed your hand over Joel’s shoulders as you passed him. A quick touch, easily dismissed as accidental, and yet, Joel’s hand immediately shot up and grabbed you roughly by the wrist. For a second, you both just stared at each other, the most eye contact you two had ever made. You felt a throbbing between your legs, induced purely by this one act. 

But, then Joel moved your hand off his shoulder and dropped it at your side. The loss of contact made you want to cry. You’d been too forward, touching him without preamble or permission, and now you’d gone and made it awkward for the both of you. You practically ran out of the kitchen to your room, where you grabbed an extra pillow and a spare blanket for Joel to use. 

“Here, you can use these, hopefully the couch isn’t too uncomfortable for you,” you said as you laid everything out on the couch. He grunted in what you assumed was thanks, and you turned around and went back to your room to get ready for bed. You didn’t know what was going on with you tonight, but even after the complete failure of the shoulder graze, you still felt driven to take advantage of this rare time alone with Joel. So, rather than dressing in your usual, frumpy flannel pajamas, you put on a baggy t-shirt and your sexiest pair of underwear. They were just plain black, but sexy was a relative term when you’re trying to find underwear in the apocalypse. You took a check look in the mirror, noting how the shirt was just a little bit too short to cover your whole ass cheeks. Perfect. 

You left your room and headed to the bathroom to brush your teeth, making sure to saunter right past where Joel was now sitting quietly on the couch. After you were finished, you asked him if he needed anything else before you went to bed.

For a long time he didn’t say a word, and you were about to turn on your heel and go right to bed, accepting that your meager attempt at seduction hadn’t done the job, when he finally spoke.

“I can’t have what I really need.”

Well, that stopped you in your tracks. What the hell did that mean? When he didn’t say anything more, you gathered your courage and asked, “and what is it that you really need?”

Joel stood, took one glance at your dad’s closed bedroom door, and walked over to you, stalking like a big cat hunting its prey. He crowded your space and then some, forcing you to step back until you felt your back hit the wall. You’d never been this close to him. His scent nearly overwhelmed you, and your breaths were coming in quick, sharp gasps. 

“What do I need? I need for my partner’s daughter to stop staring at me all the time.” Your heart fell. “I need her to stop trying to touch me. I need her to stop walking around in nothing but her panties like a slut.” At that, you gasped. 

“But most of all, I need this girl, but I can’t have her” he said, stepping closer, so close that your chest was touching his. Your heart stopped. Surely he wasn’t really saying he needed you, that was ridiculous. But the hard press of his erection against your lower stomach told a different story. 

You stayed that way for a while, chests rising and falling as you both breathed each other in. Finally you gathered enough courage to respond, “why can’t you have her? She’s right here for the taking.” He released a rough groan. 

“You know why baby girl. Can’t be messing around with my partner’s innocent little daughter.”

“One second I’m a slut, now I’m innocent, make up your mind.”

“You’re an innocent, acting like a slut to try and get what you want.”

“What we both want,” you argued. 

“Your dad would kill me. Rip my guts out and string them up as decoration.”

“So, you’re scared?” At that he growled. Good, you were getting him riled up, just like you wanted.

“Baby, I’m not scared of anyone, including your old man. I just can’t go messing up my business for a quick lay.” 

“Oh, so it’d be quick? How disappointing.” Another growl left his lips. He raised his arms, putting his hands on the wall on either side of your trembling body. 

“You better stop teasing me little girl”

“Or what, you’ll punish me?” This was going better than you could have dreamed. 

And then he slapped you. Right across the cheek, which now burned in his wake. As you recovered from the shock of it, you noticed Joel staring at your father’s door, as if he could will him to sleep through the noise. When no light turned on, no door opened, you could see him breathe a sigh of relief before turning his gaze back to you.

“See what you made me do? Almost made me wake your dad and have him catch us like this. Doubt I’d get a word out before he ripped me off you.” You didn’t disagree, your dad was exactly that protective. 

“Go to bed, baby girl,” he said, almost softly. But you shook your head at him.

“What about what I need?” You’re all I can think about some days, Joel.” You figured it was time to lay it all on the line. “I ache for you. Want you so bad it drives me crazy.”

He groaned audibly, before tipping his head down and resting his forehead against yours.

“You’re really that obsessed with me, huh?” His tone is bordering on mocking. But you had no more shame, nodding your head in affirmation immediately. “Bet you’re up late every night, stuffing those pretty little fingers into your cunt, wishing they were mine. Wishing they were my cock.” You nodded again, blushing.

“Want you so bad, ever since the first time I saw you,” you said breathily. You could see him raise his brows. You were barely 18 when he first came to the QZ.

“Naughty little girl, lusting after your dad’s friend for so long. Tell me, sweet thing, are you a virgin? Have you been saving yourself for this dick?”

You hadn’t. You’d had a one night stand with a childhood friend from just before the outbreak, who you happened to cross paths with after the world had already ended and you’d both grown into curious teens. You both seized the rare chance at some intimacy in this messed up world. But, would Joel be mad?

“No... I did it once, with a friend. I’m sorry Joel.” Your words were almost whispered, treading lightly with this beast of a man.

But his face softened a little at the sound of his name on your lips, and Joel brought his hand to your cheek almost gently. 

“No, pretty girl, don’t apologize. I’m not mad. Just means I gotta work a little harder to make sure you forget him,” he said with a smirk. You thought it wouldn’t actually take very much work for you to forget your single stumbling night in the dark... Not when Joel was like this, so hungry, so possessive. It made your core ache with need to see him so unleashed. He hadn’t even kissed you yet and he already had you panting with his words alone. “I like it when you say my name,” he whispered directly into your ear. His intentions of restraint were nearly forgotten in the depths of his need for you. 

“Joel. Can you kiss me already?” 

“I make the demands here, not you, baby girl. Don’t make me punish you, we can’t afford to wake your dad now, can we?” he said, throwing a glance at the still closed bedroom door. You nodded your head no. “Gotta have some privacy to do that,” he said with a wicked grin. You dearly hoped he’d let you find out what kind of punishment he had in mind for you. As much as you wanted to push his buttons, this really wasn’t the time for that kind of fun, so you resolved to let him lead. 

“I’m sorry Joel. I’ve just spent so long waiting for this.”

“I know, I know.” His hands landed on your hips and skimmed their way up your sides. You shivered at the gentle touch from such a rough man. His hands fell back to your hips and suddenly he was gripping you tightly, so tight you thought you might find bruises the next day. It was only a fraction of his true strength, you knew, and the thought of that made you so wet. Between his dirty words and his captivating hands, you knew you had likely soaked your underwear. 

And then, finally, finally, he was kissing you. His lips came down on yours with a bruising intensity, as he brought one hand up to cup the back of your neck. You released a moan at finally getting what you wanted, no, needed, so badly. Joel fucking Miller was kissing you. And he was kissing you well, slipping his tongue between your lips and tangling it with yours. You felt emboldened enough to slip your hands around his waist, sliding one down to grab at his ass. He grunted in surprised approval. 

Suddenly, he pulled his lips from yours and grabbed you by the shoulders, guiding you towards the couch. He sat down and gestured for you to climb into his lap, and like a good girl you proceeded to straddle him. You could feel his hardness pressed right against your core and you were dying for more. No one had ever made you feel like this. You ground your hips down into his, drawing moans from you both. One of Joel’s hands on your hip guides you to press even harder into him, while the other reaches up to toy with your breast. He cups his hand around it and squeezes gently, before bringing two fingers to pinch at your nipple through your shirt. You gasp in pleasure at the slight pain.

Feeling wild and eager to please, you brought your own hands down to the hem of your shirt, knocking his hands aside so you could pull it off over your head. You knew it was a stupid risk, that your dad could wake up and come outside at any moment, catching you straddling his best friend in nothing but your panties. You almost thought Joel would chastise you for taking the lead again, but he was too busy staring at the bounty of your tits revealed right in front of his face. That look alone made it worth the risk of getting caught.

He nuzzled his face between your breasts, inhaling deeply through his nose. You gazed down at him in awe, still half unbelieving that this was really happening. He turned his head from side to side, his nose and lips touching each breast in turn, a sort of gentle motorboat. He seemed to luxuriate in the scent and feel of you, finally getting to revel in this forbidden fruit. He’d noticed you right away when he first came to the QZ, the shy but mischievous daughter of his new smuggling partner. Noticed you, and promptly filed you away in his mind as “untouchable.” 

Well, he was certainly touching you now. His hands roamed across your back and then down to grip your ass, while his mouth began leaving open mouthed kisses on your sternum. 

He pulled away just long enough to say, “Lemme see how bad you need me, pretty girl,” and then his lips were at your nipple and his fingers fell to the top of your panties. Sucking and biting at your sensitive nub, he simultaneously slipped his hand into the waistband of your underwear and down to your dripping pussy. He gathered the moisture there with his fingers, before taking them out and bringing them to his mouth. He slipped two fingers into his mouth and tasted your essence, his gaze never leaving yours. 

“Fuck, you taste so damned sweet. If we had the time and the privacy, I’d lay you down and eat you out like a feast, really make ya scream.”

“Joel, please,” you begged breathlessly. “I need you so bad.”

“Aw, does my sweet baby girl need her cunt stuffed full of my dick? Is she really just a cock hungry little whore?” 

Your already inflamed cheeks flushed even redder at his words, but you nodded your head, too far gone to care about anything as silly as dignity. You had wanted this man for years and now finally you were going to fuck him. Who needs dignity when you’ve got dreams coming true right in front of you? 

“Get up, darlin’, and take off those panties for me”

You practically leaped off his lap with eagerness and immediately slipped off your panties. You dangled them loosely from one hand, putting the other on your hip as you watched Joel take his time. He leisurely unbuckled his belt before unbuttoning and unzipping his jeans, slipping them down low just low enough to allow him to free himself from his briefs. Your mouth hangs open at the sight of him, long and impressively thick, with a pronounced head even wider than the shaft, a slick of precum already trickling out. You were by no means an expert, but you pretty much thought Joel Miller’s dick was fucking perfect. You were so busy staring, you barely noticed when Joel reached forward and snatched your panties right out of your hand, before bringing them up to his nose and inhaling deeply. He groaned at the scent of you and then dropped your panties to the couch in favor of grabbing you by the hips and bringing you back down to straddle him, skin to skin. 

You could feel the hard length of him nestled right against your pussy, lightly nudging your clit in a way that made you want to fall apart for him already. You rose up to allow him access to your entrance, but Joel quickly pulled you back down, muttering, “Not yet, baby girl, gotta get you ready for me first.”

“I’m ready now, Joel, please,” you whined. But he just gave you a dismissing look and directed your hips back far enough to give him access to your dripping cunt. Without preamble he inserted one finger deep inside you, making you moan. “More, I need more Joel.” Not one to disappoint, he added another finger, pumping both in and out of you at a steady pace, curling them towards your g-spot. Your head fell to his shoulder as you writhed in pleasure, and Joel’s lips found your neck, suckling lightly. “No marks, Joel, my dad’ll see,” you managed to get out while his fingers continued driving you towards oblivion. 

“Gotta mark what’s mine, baby. But fine, I’ll just have to mark you somewhere a little more private.” With that, his lips made their way to the underside of one of your breasts, sucking harder and nibbling lightly with his teeth. “I’m the only one who gets to see you here, got it? You’re mine now.” You nodded fervently, tipping your head back to look him in the eye once more. “My best friend’s daughter, all mine, practically begging for my cock.”

“Give it to me Joel, I’m ready, I need it.” His fingers pumped more furiously in and out of you.

“Fuck, baby, is that right? You ready for me?”

“Yes, yes, god, please!” you begged, louder than you should have given your dad was sleeping only a door away. 

Suddenly he was wrapping his arms around you and flipping you over, crushing you into the couch cushions with the weight of his body. Then he sat back, admiration in his eyes as he gazed down at you. He fisted his dick with one hand and began to rub the head up and down your wet slit. Everytime he grazed your clit, your entire body seemed to jolt with pleasure. 

“Joel, I swear to god if you don’t put it in right now I’m going to tell dad you were fucking with his little girl.” You’d had enough of his teasing.

“What did I say about giving me orders? Naughty little thing, I really will have to punish you next time.”

“Next time? How’s about you get the first time going before you start worrying about that,” you let out with a giggle. 

“Fine, little minx, I’ll give you what you need so badly.” And then he was notching himself at your entrance before pushing in completely in a single, rough thrust. You felt so utterly full. 

“Fuck, Joel, your cock is so good...” You were babbling nearly incoherently by then. When he began thrusting in long, deep strokes, you could feel the head of his cock drag across the most delicious spot inside of you, over and over. You could feel yourself building towards climax already. 

“Tell me, did that boy make you come?” Joel asked as if he already knew the answer.

“No, no, I’ll only come for you Joel, it’s always been you.”

Joel picked up the pace, slamming into you rough and fast with every thrust of his hips. The sound of skin slapping together filled the room, all worries about waking your sleeping father forgotten. Still inside you, Joel sat back on his knees and reached his hands around to cup your ass, lifting it into the air so he could piston his hips into yours even faster. 

“This ass is all mine, pretty girl,” he said as he kneaded your cheeks with his hands. “Wanna see my girl come for me, but only when I say so.” He took one hand off your ass in favor of stroking his fingers across your clit, rubbing little circles. You could feel your peak approaching, but held yourself back from falling over the edge. You wanted to be good for him.

“Joel, please, I’m so close.” Your words came out in a soft whimper.

“Alright baby girl, come all over this cock.” His words were all you needed, and suddenly you were freefalling into an ocean of pure pleasure. This put any climax you’d ever given yourself to shame. Joel just kept fucking you through it, still stroking your clit as you fell apart around him. 

You came back to yourself slowly while Joel continued to hold you up and fuck you like a rag doll. You could tell he was no longer concerned with your pleasure, fucking you just like he wanted regardless of your oversensitized pussy. It turned you on, to see him so lost to his own desires; a predator gone feral. 

“Come inside me, please Joel I need you to fill me up.” You weren’t quite sure where that reckless desire came from. You knew you’d regret it in the morning, but at that moment you were too lost to pleasure to care. 

“Fuck, filthy girl, you know I shouldn’t.” But you couldn’t stop begging for it, desperate to feel the hot rush of his seed spilling inside you. “Just this once, wild girl,” he grunted out. He couldn’t deny the thought of coming deep inside you turned him on to no end. 

His thrusts began to lose their consistent rhythm, though they remained rough and deep. With a last guttural moan, he thrust in once, twice, three more times and then you could feel the warm rush of his cum inside of you. It felt so right, even though it was a stupid risk, even though it was your dad’s off-limits friend. 

Joel shuddered one last time before letting go of you, your ass hitting the couch as his softening cock slipped out of you. He gazed down at your used pussy, a devilish grin crossing his face as he watched a trickle of his cum leak out of you. Not wanting any to go to waste, you brought your hand down to your cunt and swiped through the mess you found there. After scooping up some cum, you brought your fingers up to your mouth and licked them clean, making a show of it. 

“Fuck me, you perfect, naughty little thing,” Joel muttered almost to himself. As you both came down from the high of your lovemaking, you remembered where you were and both glanced in panic at your dad’s bedroom door. Thankfully, there were no signs of his waking, and you silently thanked the universe that he was such a heavy sleeper. Joel tucked his cock back into his briefs, pulling his jeans back up around his hips.

As you both sat side by side on the couch, Joel rested his head in his hands and whispered, “Fuck, we should not have done that.” That had your head snapping up instantly. He regretted the best sexual experience of your life?

“What happened to there being a next time?” you said timidly, trying to hold in your emotions which would surely only scare him away. But you felt like he was ripping your heart out of your chest. 

“That was just dirty talk, darlin’, you’ve gotta forget about this. This, us, can’t happen again.”

“Why not?” You could hear the desperation creeping into your voice but were powerless to hold it in. 

“You know why baby girl, can’t go fucking my partner’s innocent little daughter, let alone knocking her up.” You knew you were stupid for thinking it, but you’d really hoped he might see you as something more than just his friend’s daughter. But there it was. All you were to him was a quick forbidden fuck, never to be revisited. 

“Fine,” you said, glancing down at your still naked body. Suddenly you were cold, the Boston chill seeping back into your bones. You picked your shirt up off the floor and tugged it over your head before standing and searching the couch for your panties. “Where the fuck did my underwear go? The least you can do is help me look for them. If dad finds them he’ll have some fucking questions.” But Joel just shrugged his shoulders, glancing around half-heartedly.

You knew you were about 5 seconds from breaking down and you didn’t want him to see you cry, so you gave up looking for your underwear and stormed off to your bedroom, shutting the door and climbing into bed. As hot tears began to flow from your eyes, you realized you could still feel his cum dripping out of you.

______________________________________________________________

Back in the living room, Joel still sat on the couch, thinking about what the fuck he’s just done. He fucked his best friend’s little girl. Fucked her hard. Came inside of her. And fucking loved every forbidden second of it. Jesus christ he was so fucked. Despite his harsh dismissal of you, his own resolve was crumbling as fast as it had when he’d seen you in nothing but that shirt and those panties. Those panties that he now slipped out of his pocket and brought to his nose once more, inhaling your musk. 

Yeah, he was fucked. 

[ladystoneboobs]

@sunflowersansa, #catelyn was raised to be hosters successor for almost a decade wasnt she?

the annoying thing is we don't have an approximate age for edmure, nor any age for cat when minisa died (in childbirth with a last, stillborn son, not edmure). i've seen fanart depicting him as anywhere from a toddler to a younger teen/tween when catelyn and lysa were teenagers. but i feel pretty confident in my estimation of ~7/8yrs age difference between eldest sister and baby brother, and not just bc of symmetry with the next generation. my reasoning is thus:

we all assume catelyn had some grooming as an heiress, rather than it just being a nominal status in early childhood. how much training can one really give a 3 or 4yo, y'know? we know rickon never had any manly lord lessons from ned since he was still so young when they parted. if she was closer to 7 or 8 when edmure came along, that leaves more realistic time for education, and a sizable number of years with only daughters for hoster to try to accustom himself to lack of a son and make do accordingly. even only 1 or 2 years of rulership lessons would still matter when minisa's death left hoster more dependent on her as not just hostess but later a trusted confidant of a sort until she got married.

ned thinks of edmure as "the boy" in his pov when hearing of the mountain's first attacks in the riverlands. we know ned's not great with keeping up with ageing from his earlier comments about tommen, and he surely hasn't seen edmure in many years, but this tells me that when they did meet at riverrun, edmure was not that close in age to himself, catelyn, and lysa. (i think it's less likely to see someone as frozen in childhood if they're anywhere near your age cohort.) ned could still be wrong about edmure's age thinking he couldn't possibly be at least 25 and any green knight younger than that was still a boy or youth, but that miscalculation makes more sense to me if he was around ~26 rather than a fellow thirtysomething or a guy pushing thirty.

we also know that edmure acted as brandon's squire in his duel with littlefinger, which i read as more someone playacting at some squirely practice when not yet consideed old enough to be anyone's assigned squire, with the informal nature of the duel which meant lightly-armored littlefinger having no squire of his own, and brandon having an actual squire who likely could have been present. so that lines up with a ~10yo edmure to 15yo littlefinger, 16yo lysa, 18yo catelyn, and 20yo brandon. (this is admittedly the most subjective point and i wouldn't consider it strong evidence if not consistent with the rest.)

catelyn doubted her memories of her mother, including her appearence, which in this world strangely devoid of portraits, still makes me think she was quite young when they lost her. so, yeah, not a large gap between edmure's birth and minisa's death in her next childbirth. if catelyn was 8/9 or even 10 when her mother died and she became de facto lady of riverrun, that could line up with the lannister twins losing their mother at 7 and not having strong memories of joanna.

idt catelyn really did think of riverrun as her birthright when her brief time as conscious heiress was a small fraction of her life, with at least 6yrs knowing she'd move away to be lady (consort) of winterfell instead and the rest of her life living out that responsibility as northern wife and mother. but it must still sting to be used to such a position of importance in her earlier time in riverrun and have no real authority when she returned to live there again as an adult, especially when edmure still seemed to act (to her) like the baby of the family not entirely matured into the authority he held all for himself. there's a part in her time in renly's camp when she thought robb was years younger but still knew what he was doing more than the southern king and his knights of summer playing at war. i'd imagine a simaliar feeling whenever edmure annoyed her. that's another difference between robb and edmure, that robb was a dutiful eldest sibling like his mother, formerly catelyn's baby but never anyone's baby brother. while edmure, even if he was (my by headcanon) a few years older than renly and unlike renly was meant to be a male heir from birth, was still a youngest child of 3 like renly.

[oddballwriter]

I’m still thinking about love children for reader and different OI characters (specifically Nathan and Anselm sooo…

Wilhelmina Vogelweide (or Mina for short)

She’s definitely a Vogelweide let’s put it that way

Mina is a strange little girl. Not like creepy-little-girl, but she’s strange and vaguely unsettling to be around if you aren’t seasoned to being around her. Think Jane Doe from Ride the Cycle and Emily is Strange mixed together with a light pinch of Wednesday Addams

Anselm gave her a vintage porcelain doll when she was younger and now she carries it around everywhere. Her name is Gertrude, by the way. Mina doesn’t have that clingy separation-anxiety-like bond with Gertrude like most children do with their favorite toy, and will leave Gertrude if an occasion calls for it, and is very aware that she’s just a doll, but she still carries her around the mansion and estate and talks to her. She also doesn’t do the thing that kids do where they frame their thoughts and feelings as if it’s the toys. Ex. “Gertrude doesn’t like this.”. Instead she will sort of use Gertrude as a means to think over something. Ex. “Gertrude, do you think I should play outside even though it’s overcast today? *Looks at Gertrude in silence for a brief moment* You’re right. It might rain and these are my favorite dress shoes, and your curls will undo.”

However, if there’s a cohort of Anselm’s she doesn’t like then she’ll play the part of a creepy little girl for her own amusement. Anselm finds it amusing too and has even had some of the furniture in the mansion made with features where things look like they move on their own so that Mina can say “Gertrude thinks you should leave.”. It’s a bonding thing for them so you let it slide.

You do have some stuff that you’ve implored so that Mina has “normal” social skills. It’s not really anything too major. You just have it that she has playdates with a few kids from various cohorts and other such people that her and Anselm haven’t scared off yet so that she can develop her social skills and also play with kids her own age for a change. She can’t talk to Gertrude and “play with” more like bully Andre forever. And the staff of the house don’t like it when she follows them around while they’re trying to get stuff done.

She does pretty great. She shares, plays fair, and is nice to the other kids but she’s still Anselm’s little girl and you’ve noticed that she’s picked up a few of his (all be it kid-friendly and watered down) habits from what you’ve seen when she plays with her toys alone. Thankfully there’s never been an incident where someone got on Mina’s nerves.

She also has a few more unique interests than most children. Like her interest in diseases and various unsettling human body facts that feel vaguely threatening when she says them. But you just guess that the strangeness just runs in the family.

She does have an actual nanny, but she’s more of a “We’re going to be busy for a bit. Make sure she doesn’t do anything bad or gets herself hurt and keep her entertained till we’re done” along with the occasional overnight babysitting when you and Anselm head off somewhere.

Her nanny is a university student named Taylor who’s just trying to pay for her classes. She thought that being a nanny would be easy and perfectly normal. It is easy since Mina can mostly entertain herself and just needs supervision, but she’s seen some weird ass shit. But hey, at least she’s not the nanny to an irl Veruca Salt and now you and Anselm are contributors for her financial aid.

Athena Bateman

Surprisingly not a snooty little tech brat

Nathan definitely had a basic yet effective parenting strategy but is still very… him

You insisted that the AIs stayed away or had minimal involvement with raising Athena and Nathan begrudgingly agreed to it. He also agreed to move away from middle-of-nowhere, Alaska since you said that she won’t get any “proper” social skills by being there with only her parents and some robots. You had to fight him on that a little but thankfully he caved around her early toddler years just before her development called for interactions with other (real) people. The new house was still rural but as long as Athena was around people it was perfect regardless.

Nathan did program some nanny stuff into the AIs but other than that you and him are her caregivers and parental figures.

She had a good childhood. She had all the toys and things she could want, even inspiring a brief idea in Nathan of expanding BlueBook into having a branch in toys.

She definitely got Nathan’s smarts and skipped a few grades but she wasn’t as snooty about it as her dad is. Shes more like a “Isn’t that neat?” rather than thinking she’s above people

Athena does enter a phase when she becomes a preteen though. But instead of having a “I’m not like other kids” phase, she develops a “I want to be like other kids” phase. Nathan hates it because it’s so different from how he sees the world and carries himself but there is literally nothing he can do. And he hates that too.

Her phase consists of getting braces instead of an Invisalign when her teeth started getting a bit off because “normal kids have braces”, she also insisted that she redo her room to “be more like other kids” (with her own personal flair for course) because the way Nathan had it made from when she was a kid didn’t look right to her (she even called it “A different version of a sad beige house.” to Nathan’s face), and further more snuck into his office and reprogrammed the AIs to no longer have their nanny stuff and basically leave her alone because other kids don’t have AI robots just walking around in their house. She has a point in that and also Nathan was impressed with her work on taking that stuff out that he didn’t reinstall it.

It does cause them to fight a little. You eventually come in and talk with her about it and why she’s so adamant about it. It’s a bit sappy but you help her vocalize that it just makes her feel too different from the rest of her peers and that she genuinely feels weird about it rather than it being a issue with some form of bullying. She genuinely just wants to have a normal teenage life without being “The daughter of tech giant Nathan Bateman”. After that Nathan sort of respects her choices more and lets her develop her own identity with that.

She’s still a huge nerd like her dad though and that’s really sweet. She may have that idea that her dad is “the lamest person on the planet” like most kids do but they have their moments.

She’s definitely going places in her life and you and Nathan can see that and you’re both proud of her and will continue to support her. Even if she’s also developed her dad’s weirdness.

Just last week she programed and made a tiny robot whose only job is to grab her anything that she doesn’t feel like getting up and getting for herself.

It’s really funny. She’s named him Alfred Bot and you’ll be sitting in the kitchen and this tiny robot arm on wheels just rolls in, extends to grab a bag of chips from the counter and a can of soda from the fridge, and roll back into Athena’s room. Could she just ask one of Nathan’s to do that? Yes. Will she ever? No. Never. That’s his one job and she wants to keep it that way otherwise he has no purpose.

[saddest-girl-in-the-whole-world]

Sigh. Thinking about how gideon really desperately wants to have some sort of identity she can cling to and to feel seen.

Like in her childhood she had nothing, nobody really liked her, everyone was creeped out by her being the only one to survive the nerve gas and the only person that is roughly her age had this specific role carved out for her as the reverend daughter.

The way she wanted her mother or father to be someone important, the way she decided to swear her life to the cohort and climb the ranks, the way she goes from being unhappy about her position as a cavalier to talking about her duties as a cavalier, the way the only thing she ever wanted was for harrow to eat her and, most importantly, the way when she finds out that her dad IS important? She just happily accepts a completely different name, title and life mission. She is going to be "God's cavalier" she is "the emperors construct" she is Kiriona Gaia!!! Everybody sees Kiriona Gaia, but that just means that less people than ever before care about Gideon Nav, the saddest girl in the whole world.

She is so lonely, she only ever had Harrow to look to and now she is gone too. Ever since she was 10 she thought Harrow hated her, like yeah hell is other people but hell is also being 10, confused, alone, and the only thing that you know is that your name is Gideon Nav and Nav is a Niner name.