#its a few towns over? but same county. i THINK.

[kinkiskarma]

noah kahan doing a beer collab w two roads... ct bitches rejoice

[ceilidho]

take me home, country road

[ao3]

You have nothing on your person apart from a hastily packed suitcase and the dress you came into town wearing, on the run from trouble back home. Too bad John's missing a bride that matches your description. Or: the 1800s (mistaken) mail order bride au (chapter 19)

masterlist

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A blood-orange sun hangs low in the sky.

You might think it ominous on any other day, but not this one. What more adversity could stand in your way? 

Instead of sharing a saddle with John, you ride the same horse that Graves rode out of town. Days spent on horseback have finally caught up to you, pain radiating up and down your legs, a soreness embedded deep in your inner thighs, the skin positively chafed from the constant friction. At least you no longer have the handcuffs digging painfully into your wrists, the metal cuffs long since unlocked using the key in Graves’ pocket and discarded, now lost some acres back for the coyotes and the hares to prod at and sniff. 

You drift in and out of conscious awareness, coming back into your right mind every mile or so, losing track of time along the way. Sometimes you blink and trees disappear out of sight, already ten miles back. Scouring the landscape for something familiar only to come up empty. 

Recent events lour over your conscience. It’s difficult not to let it get to you. So much has happened in such quick succession that part of you still thinks you’re dreaming in the abandoned shack with Graves sleeping just a few feet away. 

A distinct sound scrapes against the inner recesses of your mind and eardrum. If you were to look behind you, you’d find the source of it wrapped in a shroud and dragged behind John’s horse. Drying blood stains the fabric. The head, obscured under the fabric, jostles from side to side as it passes over rocks and undergrowth. 

It’s beyond you now though, the future shuttling forward at an unfathomable speed and taking you with it, willing or not. The world hurrying on to repeat its past mistakes. 

So you don’t look behind you. 

“Won’t be much longer,” your husband murmurs from beside you, speaking just loud enough for you to hear him over the influx of thoughts in your head, which rapidly empty out at the sound of his voice. 

“We can stop for a break after?” you ask, turning your head enough for your eyes to land on the hard, bristled line of his jaw. He nods. 

“Just gotta get this part out of the way.”

He says it so casually, like a bit of unpleasantness that has to be dealt with; no way around it. Unfortunately, a body isn’t something that can be just swept under the rug. No matter how much your muscles beg for a moment’s reprieve, you won’t get it until all the loose ends are tied up. 

“How do you know the land around here so well?” you ask as John leads the two of you deeper into the plains.

“The boys and I have been out here before. Grew up in this county anyway; been wanderin’ these parts since I was born.”

You can’t imagine John as a young boy, uncertain of his place in the world. He seems like someone who emerged from the womb ready-made, already able to skin a deer and build a bushcraft shelter by hand. But he must have been young at one point. 

Finally, he comes upon a suitable place to bury the body. 

Deep in the wilderness, he digs a shallow grave with the short shovel strapped to his horse, sweating up a storm before the hole is big enough to bury the body. You dismount your horse and wander off while John handles the burial. 

This is the part where you have to turn away and pretend it isn’t happening. You stave off the urge to plug your ears and close your eyes. Dogear any page in your life except this one. This is the only memory that you want to fade into obscurity, pretend that it never happened, that this was some bad dream that you only half-remember twenty years from now. 

You glance back only once to find John breathing heavily at the edge of the hole, having just hauled himself out. Sweat slicks his brow and drips down the side of his face near his temple, a dark flush spreading over his cheeks from exertion. Even his shirt is damp with sweat under the pits and around the collar. 

You force yourself to look away. Now is not the time for your libido to trouble you. 

Graves’ body lands with a dull thump when John rolls it into the makeshift grave. You bite your lip and let your eyelids slide shut. Then he starts the process of covering the body, shoveling the dirt back into the hole. It takes a while. An offer to help hovers on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t quite make yourself say the words. 

A half hour later, it no longer matters, the hole covered until the only thing demarcating the grave is the layer of upturned soil, slightly darker than the dirt in the surrounding area.

“That’s it,” John announces, making his way back to you with the shovel slung over his shoulder. You can smell the ripe scent of sweat wafting off him even from a foot away. “Let’s head out; we’ll wanna make camp before it gets dark.”

You don’t answer. Not verbally anyway. The guilt almost makes it hard to breathe. In all your stupidity and poor decision-making, you’ve inadvertently made John an accomplice in your crimes; forced him, in fact, to commit one as heinous as the one that had started this whole debacle. 

You travel the next mile in relative silence, scouring the landscape for a neat patch of land to set up camp. The sun plummets towards the ground at a faster and faster pace until it’s tugged below the horizon, vanishing with a green flash. Then it’s too dangerous to keep going, the way back far too dark to keep traveling down. 

John builds a small fire after tying up the horses for the night. The temperature drops exponentially as the sky darkens, the cold sinking low to the ground. You help with gathering the kindling, mostly twigs and clumps of dry grass, then take the packs off both horses to use as makeshift seats by the fire, unrolling the sleeping bags as well. 

It comes as a relief to finally sit down after the fire is struck. Rest is a double edged sword though; the longer you sit with Graves’ old pack propping you up, the more the pain has time to sink its claws in deep. 

In the hours since he shot Graves, neither of you have spoken more than a few words to each other. You certainly haven’t brought it up. The memory of Graves revealing the truth of what you’d done back east to John looms over you. It’s inevitable that you’ll talk about it eventually though. It’s heavy in the atmosphere, almost oppressive; the weight of everything said and unsaid. You can’t take back what Graves revealed to John. At some point you’ll have to face it. 

At what point will you have to beg for forgiveness? It sits on the tip of your tongue. 

The small fire crackles in front of you. Red tongues of flames lick at the darkness, the light extending out in a circle around the two of you. You’re grateful for the warmth though, particularly after spending the previous night in the cold.  

“Nothing to eat, m’afraid,” he says apologetically, brow creasing. “I didn’t exactly pack before coming after you.”

You shake your head. “That’s fine. I’m not hungry anyway.”

In a few more hours, you might work up an appetite again, but for now, you couldn’t be further from it. All you want to do is lie down on your bed back home and sleep through to the next day. 

“Yeah,” John sighs. “Me neither.”

He picks up your hand and holds it in his for a time. It’s strange how such a small gesture has become such an immense comfort for you. You wish you could thread your fingers through his and bring his hand up to your lips to kiss all over, but you’re too tired for a gesture of that magnitude. 

When he lets go of your hand, it’s only to transfer it to your face. His thumb runs over your split lip, pulling away when you wince. “Looks like it’s healing on its own.”

“That’s good,” you mumble. “…It hurt a lot more yesterday.”

John’s nostrils flare. The fire reflects off his eyes in such a way that, for a moment, it almost looks like it’s coming from within him. “I’d kill him again if I could.”

Your stomach clenches at the ferocity behind his words. 

“You—you shouldn’t have done it in the first place,” you croak. “Not when he was—” right, you don’t say. Right to haul you out of town by your hair and drag you back to the scene of the crime, back to pay for what you’d done. 

“Now I ain’t gonna hear you go spoutin’ that horseshit,” he growls, clasping you by the back of your neck and tugging you to his side. It’s so sudden that your butt skids across the ground, raking up a small mound of dirt with the weight of your body.

You look away, unable to meet his eyes even as he pulls you forward until you’re nearly nose to nose. “It’s not—”

“Yes, it is, darlin’. That shit weren’t none of your fault. You ain’t done a thing wrong by keeping yourself safe.” 

It’s almost hard to hear. It’s taken you months to scrub the dirt from your soul, which until recently was raw to the touch and pained you to even think back on. And the hopelessness. And the longing, the irreversibility of it; irreversible in the way that you couldn’t turn your pain inside out. You could never go back to the way things were because the only way out was to keep on trudging forward. 

Like rain in a drought, you’ve been missing someone’s mercy. You’ve been waiting for someone to come and forgive you for your sins; someone to absolve you of them. 

You lean forward, burying your face in his neck. Not making much of a sound except for a harsh exhale, your throat quavering with something unsaid. 

Then you grip him by the back of his shirt and pull him to the ground with you. 

Out in the open like this, John doesn’t dare remove your clothes, but he does reach beneath your dress to pull off your underclothes. He’s silent through it all, eyes fixed on yours. Never wavering or dropping your gaze. It’s intoxicating to be stared at with such a fierce intensity. Vaguely overwhelming, the sensation creeping up your chest and lodging in your throat. 

The light of the fire he built for the two of you flickers across his skin, illuminating his face in shades of orange and gold. 

He holds your gaze when he rucks the skirt of your dress up and crawls down the length of your body until his mouth is level with your center, slick already dripping from your sex. Your breathing goes haggard, anticipating his mouth before it’s suddenly there between your thighs, planting a gentle kiss on your inner thigh before dragging his lips over your sensitive skin until they brush your clit. Your mouth opens to a soundless gasp. Electrical impulses travel up your spine, your arching back following their trajectory. 

He pulls back to stare at your dripping hole. “Missed me, my love?” 

You’d answer if you could form words, but then you realize who he’s talking to and your mind goes blank. 

When he runs his tongue up the seam of your pussy, you jolt, legs slung over his shoulders kicking at the air. He eats you out with gusto, with reverence, sighing into your pussy that it’s been too long, that he’d worried himself nearly half to death over you. 

Rough hands hold you by your waist and pull you down onto his face. Long, crude licks of his tongue, rubbing the flat of it over your clit until you’re a roiling, twisting hotbed of pent up arousal. 

The urge to suppress your noises is almost overwhelming. When you twist your head from side to side, there’s nothing but miles of land; trees and shrubbery and a deep, impenetrable darkness. Not another person around for miles. It makes you shiver when you stare out into it. 

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—” you gasp, chest getting tighter and tighter until you expect it to burst but it doesn’t. It stays all pent up, all itchy and scratchy and you can feel the sweat slicking the small of your back and the blood furiously rushing to your cheeks, heating you up from the inside out. Sweat-laden and flustered. 

Your toes curl in your boots, throat tightening up the closer it gets. All it takes to push you over the edge is John cupping his hands under your butt to tilt your hips up, licking you from hole to hole. The impertinence and thrill sends a rush through your body, the coil in your belly twisting and releasing, core pulsing around nothing. Your body gives a violent jolt when he gives your clit one last wet, suckling kiss.

“Are you comfortable like this, darlin’, or should I wait until we’re home?” John asks when he positions himself over you again, beard still wet with your desire and a big hand cupping the front of his trousers. You stare down at the hair dusting his knuckles and the bulge straining against his pants. 

The shadows make it seem even larger than usual. Your throat goes dry the longer you stare down at where he fists his length through his trousers.

“Darlin’?” he repeats, drawing your attention back up to his face.

“Oh?” you ask, cheeks heating. “I’m, um…I’m quite comfortable.”

It seems absurd to have such a conversation when your husband’s hand is reaching into his trousers to pull out his cock and fuck you with it, but the nervous tickle in your belly is far from unpleasant. 

He’s so careful with you, cognizant that your muscles are already sore and aching from days of being on the road and the abuse Graves put you through. Gentle hands maneuver your legs around his hips and move your hair from your face. Again your belly flips. 

Your grunt is involuntary when he first pushes in, walls stretching around the head of his cock. It hasn’t been long enough for the blunt intrusion to be painful, but it’s overwhelming all the same. You wince and grimace through it all. 

“Easy does it. You’re alright,” John shushes when you whimper, rough hand cupping your cheek. It sends a thrill down your spine, but doesn’t lessen the intensity. 

He stays like that for a time, hovering over you and stroking a thumb over your cheekbone until you relax around his girth, gradually finding your breath again. In and out; one after the other. When he pulls his hand away, it’s to plant his forearms on the ground beside your head and grind his hips forward, taking your breath away. 

“Oh Lord,” you wheeze, then brace your hands around his neck. 

“You’re doing great, darlin’. Just hold on; I’ve got ya.”

It’s nothing like the times before; your arms link around his neck and your breath goes shallow, hitching with every measured thrust. It’s too much and not enough. You feel windswept and battered, bruises smarting now that you’ve had time to feel them, but still you need more from him. 

He works himself into the wet flex of your pussy with slow, heavy thrusts. Taking his time. Not rushing it just yet because though the threat of you being taken from him still looms over his head, he’s sated his bloodlust. His reassurance now comes in the form of your legs spread to receive him and the fat head of his cock fitting snugly in you. 

The heels of your boots press firm against the flesh above his buttocks. Taking him this way with your clothes still on feels debaucherous, filthier than usual; like you were so desperate to have your husband inside you, that you couldn’t even be bothered to remove your garments. 

He must feel the way that thought heats you up because he rasps, “Need a lil somethin’, love?” 

Before you can even answer, he’s reached a hand down and tucked it between your thighs to strum the tight bundle of nerves at the apex of your sex. 

“John—”

Your fingernails must dig into the back of his neck because he grunts. Serves him right, you think, digging your nails in all the harder when grinds a knuckle against your clit and you briefly see stars. 

You’re splintering down to the root, coming apart in his hands like clay; when he says your name, the darkness fades and for a moment, you’re in the light, a shaft of it haloing your face. Chasing it no matter how fast it runs. A hare in a snare, a shadow captured in the palm of your hand. 

It comes fluttering down from somewhere beyond sight. Gasped out in another voice, a truer voice. From the depths of you, true as stone and air. 

“I love you.”

Give it time and it’ll come naturally. Now, it comes as a gut punch. Even John stills over you when he hears the words, and you can feel the shudder that runs through him under your fingertips. There’s no time to sit and talk about it though, not with the frenzy that comes over him, blue eyes glazed over by a manic glint. 

He braces one hand on the top of your head and surges forward, so rough with you that your teeth clack together, eyes rolling back in your head. 

“Say it again,” John growls, leaning down until his mouth is right next to your ear. 

“I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you—”

Then it hits you. A wall of heat. Your belly rolling and cheeks burning, walls squeezing around John’s cock, tighter with every thrust. You yelp when he lifts himself off you to yank the skirt of your dress up higher and presses his hands to your inner thighs, spreading your legs wider for him. Bullies his cock into your channel even as you try to squeeze him out, pounding into you until the lurid torrent of words spilling out of his mouth go slurred and his release floods into you, his hips slapping against yours until he’s emptied the last of his spend into your womb. 

It’s a while before either of you can move after that. Your energy melts into the ground like rainwater, purifying the earth. Maybe life is already germinating beneath you, grass seedlings about to burst from the dirt, flower buds curled up in tight coils until they’re ready to bloom. 

Your hands shake when you lift one up to wipe the sweat from your face. 

When he finally pulls out of you, the feeling of his come leaking down your inner thighs makes you fussy. You lift your thighs just enough to let him pull your drawers back up before lying back down, no energy left in you to do more than that. You only scrunch your nose a little at the feeling of your combined juices already wetting the gusset.

Time seems to come apart and then piece back together. You roll over onto your side and nestle up against John’s chest, staring up at him wordlessly. His eyes stay shut for some time until he feels your stare on him and they peel open, the color of his irises barely discernible in the flickering light. 

“Somethin’ on your mind?” he asks in a tone so devoid of accusation or condemnation that you’re almost thrown by it. He says it like it’s just another day, like something horrible and monumental didn’t just happen. 

It takes you a while to find the words. Even when you do, they come out jumbled and disjointed. “How long have you…—when did you find out?”

“‘Bout what happened back East?” he clarifies, blunt as usual. 

The question makes you swallow impulsively, anxiety secreting from you again. “Yes.”

John looks up into the dark sky, quiet for a spell. “Not until recently. The arrest warrant drifted across my desk probably around the time Graves first stopped by. Wasn’t hard to put two and two together after that—you showing up in a tizzy around the same time as the warrant was issued. General description matched as well.”

You feel a bit foolish in retrospect, certain that you were getting away with it all this time. 

“You know my name.”

“I do.”

“My real name.”

“In a manner of speaking. Got yourself a new last name since then though, didn’t you?”

Your lips pull up at the corners involuntarily. “Yes. I guess so.”

You can almost hear it now. The penultimate note of the overture writhing against convalescence like you might stay this way for a second longer. But it isn’t right to keep feeling the same old pain. At some point, it has to heal. 

“Hey,” John says, giving your shoulder a little shake to draw your attention back to him. The look in his eyes is serious. “This is as far as the story goes, alright?”

You stare up at him silently until you nod against his chest. 

“You’re my wife. End of story. The rest ain’t anyone’s business but ours.”

Off in the distance, an owl hoots, and its call hits your ear as a distant evocation to sleep. You press one last kiss to his chest before rolling off him, letting him put the fire out before the two of you turn in for the night, and then drawing a blanket over the both of you. 

And then, you go to sleep.

[milliesfishes]

Hope you are having a GREAT DAY. Re read your fics multiple times omg. My ideas for requests would be either your take on a verbal fight happening with Billy and then the groveling and making up that comes after

Or reader witnessing Billy getting having to be violent and him worried that they’ll be scared of him now 😭😭😭😭

thank you so much bb love u ౨ৎ꣑ৎyou and billy have a fight౨ৎ꣑ৎ fem reader x billy the kid

Your breathing was heavy, your hair tangled and skin sweaty as the waves of euphoria crashed over you. Tilting your head back, your arm fell over your head, breasts heaving. Billy, who'd been holding himself above you with his forearms, let himself collapse into you, his head resting on your chest.

He was sweaty too, and when he lifted his head, you saw some of his curls were stuck to his forehead. Billy smiled tiredly, taking your free hand and kissing the fingers. Then he rolled off of you, still lying on his side and facing you. Your eyes were fixed on the ceiling, but you could feel his on you.

Billy's arm found its way over you, thumb running up and down a little patch of skin. It was soothing, and you closed your eyes briefly, your heart still pounding.

His eyebrow quirked. Usually, you were so cuddly after sex. But today you were quiet, pulling the sheet up to cover your chest, one arm still flung above your head.

Settling in beside you, he kissed your shoulder, nudging his chin there. "You okay baby?"

Nodding, your eyes didn't leave the ceiling.

Billy sat up on his side, leaning on one arm and looking down at you, frowning. "Are ya sure?"

"I'm fine," you insisted, your hand fisting the sheet over your chest.

He reluctantly relented, despite knowing you weren't being truthful. Billy laid back down beside you, sliding his arm under your body and pulling you closer. Your position remained, keeping your arm where it was and your hand holding the sheet. He propped his chin up on your shoulder, exhaling softly, seeming to decide on telling you something.

"I've gotta leave again in the mornin'," he mumbled, looking over your face to gage a reaction. Your expression was unchanging, but you closed your eyes for a second, nodding.

Then, unexpectedly, you sat up fully, his arm remaining on the bed behind you. The sheet was abandoned, and you drew your knees to your chest, aware that your body was still bare. Your chin rested there, your hair falling over your shoulders and brushing your calves.

Billy watched you do all this before he sat up next to you. He'd known this would upset you. His hand came to your back, rubbing it in slow circles. "I know, I know I just got back, but I...I can't stay 'round for too long. These jobs Murphy's got us doin', they're takin' us all over the county."

You were numb to his explanation, and you turned to him, your legs falling flat on the bed, hands in your lap. "How long this time?"

He hummed, thinking about it, using his fingers to brush your hair behind your shoulder absentmindedly. "A week. Maybe two."

Looking down again, your fingers flexed. "And then what, you'll be back for another day and gone the next morning?" You'd known he was going to leave again soon. It had been on your mind all night. "You weren't even back for half of one this time."

He was surprised at you. Leaving as often and for as long as he did bothered you, he knew, but he hadn't known it bothered you this much. "Sweetheart...y'know this is what I hafta do. I gotta work, so we can really be together someday-"

"And what happens when we are together?" you asked, turning to look at him. "We'll always need money. Are you gonna keep leaving then too?"

Billy's hand fell from your back. "Where's this comin' from baby? You never had a problem with my work before."

"I'm tired of it!" the desperate words fell from your lips before you could think about it. "You leave for weeks then come into town for a few hours. It's the same every time. You ride in, send me a message, sleep with me, and then you're gone again."

Astonished at your outburst, he ran a hand over his face tiredly. "Dunno what ya want me to do baby, I can't control when Murphy wants me to go out."

Your knees bent again, and your elbows were propped up on them, your fingers curled into your palms and resting on your forehead. Eyes falling to the tangled bedsheets, your whisper was pathetic. "What am I doing?"

"Baby-" he shook his head, putting one hand on the side of your knee. One of his legs was bent, his other arm resting on it. "I'm trying, you gotta believe me. This is the best I can do. Murphy's payin' the best money I can get for my work-"

"That's not true," your hands fell from your face. "You told me about Tunstall."

"We've been over this." Billy sounded exasperated. "Can't leave the gang."

"You could though," you insisted, sitting on your knees now and facing him. "You could, and you'd be doing honest work for more, and you wouldn't be away so much-"

"Stop." His voice was firm, final, and you were taken aback. He'd never used a tone with you before. "You know the boys've done a lot for me. I ain't leavin' 'em."

"But you'll leave me?" your words were small.

Billy sucked in a breath frustratedly, shaking his head once, keeping it turned to the side. He closed his eyes and raised a hand to his forehead, rubbing it as he tried to compose himself. "Baby...I ain't expectin' you to understand. You're too innocent, you don't know the things I've seen-"

"Innocent?" The usage of the term was a barb. You looked up at him, your doll eyes worried. "But I'm not...I'm not innocent."

He turned his head back to face you, a confused frown gracing his features. "What're you on about... 'course you're innocent."

"But we've..." you gestured down to the scene, to your bare bodies and messy sheets. His eyes followed your hand, and his face clouded with understanding, moving closer to you as he realized.

"Baby," he started, putting his hand on your thigh. The weight of it was warm. "Makin' love don't take your innocence away. You're mixin' up innocence 'n virginity."

"But..." you shook your head, crossing your arms over your breasts, feeling shy suddenly. "It isn't...it's not..."

"It ain't a sinful thing if you do it for the right reasons," he said gently, rubbing your thigh soothingly. "It's a natural act honey...not a bad thing when it's with someone you love. Like when we do it."

You felt stupid, looking down as it washed over you. It couldn't...it was so confusing. Everyone had always acted like it was some dangerous thing that would make you horrible if you did it. What kind of cruel secret was this? Making you feel foolish, making you feel like you should've somehow already known.

Billy could see your internal battle, and he tilted your head up with his palm on your cheek, his eyes reassuring. "Baby...the kinda innocence I'm talkin' about is in your soul. You're a good girl. Ain't ever done anythin' bad to no one. That's what makes you innocent. And I love that about you, okay? There's nothin' to be ashamed of. Not with me."

How he was saying it made sense, but you still felt embarrassed for not knowing. Your eyes fell from his face. He exhaled softly, seeming to know you were beating yourself up. "It ain't your fault you didn't know. Don't do that."

"I'm innocent," you repeated. "I'm too innocent to understand you?"

Billy winced as you recalled his words from earlier. "That was a poor choice 'f words. You just...you're...you're..."

"What?" you searched his eyes, worried over what he was going to say next.

Billy opened his mouth, then closed it, sighing. His shoulders slumped. He raised both his hands to your face, thumbs stroking the sides of your face, a half-smile turning his lips up slightly. "Beautiful. And kind. And good. You're my angel."

Your eyes pleaded with him. "Billy."

"You really felt like this the whole time?" he asked, concernedly tracing a finger down your cheek. "Musta been eatin' ya up inside..."

"It's fine," you shook your head, wanting to rid yourself of embarrassment. "It's...I..."

Billy sighed, clicking his tongue. The backs of his fingers pressed against your fingers, and he pushed your hair from your face. "All this time...you coulda..."

Could have told him. You couldn't have. Not with him slipping in and out of your life like a needle running out of thread, dipping over and under fabric. He stopped himself before he could say the rest, realizing his mistake.

"I don't wanna leave you baby," he promised in a whisper, looking down into your eyes. "I hate it, you know. Always feel like I'm usin' you, sleepin' with you and then hittin' the road again."

Tears pricked your eyes at his words. Because that was how you felt sometimes too, though you felt guilty for it. It obviously wasn't true. But that didn't erase the feeling.

Billy could see all this on your face, and his expression saddened. He leaned in, kissing your forehead. "'M sorry." He kissed your cheek. "'M so sorry baby." Then your other cheek. "'M sorry." Your nose. Then your lips, capturing them and leaning against you. "Don't deserve ya...I know that."

You sniffled, feeling overwhelmed. Billy noticed, pressing his mouth to yours again, his kiss gentle. He pulled you into his arms, his big hand pressing your head into his chest. It was then that your tears fell, everything swirling inside you like a never-ending storm. His lips dropped to the top of your head. "Kinda man am I, huh? M' sweet baby's cryin' causa' me."

A little sob escaped you, and he tensed slightly, rubbing your side. Now that your tears were falling, it seemed they wouldn't stop. Billy arm remained around you protectively as your body shook. "I know...I know pretty, I know."

"It's been so hard Billy," you choked in a broken whisper. "All those nights in between...some of them we didn't even talk, just..."

Crashing through the door. Kissing, touching. Waking up alone.

He nodded, squeezing you tighter and kissing your head again. "'M sorry sweetheart. 'M so sorry." Billy pulled you away slightly so he could look into your eyes, holding the sides of your face. "'M gonna do better for you. This ain't worth it if it's hurtin' you." He thought for a moment, resting his chin on your forehead as he did. "Maybe I can sit this next job out. Figure out what to do next."

Billy didn't make promises he didn't keep, and this whispered one against your hair lit a candle in your heart. "You will?"

"Yeah," he whispered comfortingly. "Maybe I can..." he exhaled, then nodded. "I'm gonna go talk to Tunstall."

You searched his eyes in disbelief. "Really?"

He smiled fondly, rubbing your cheeks with his thumbs. "Yeah baby. I shoulda done that awhile ago. The boys'll do just fine without me."

"It's a big change Billy," you murmured. Even though this was what you wanted him to do, you were worried about the repercussions. "Murphy-"

He shook his head. "Doesn't matter. He's gotta understand. I got my girl to think of." Billy nudged his nose against your forehead, then kissed it. "I needa keep the girl I got to think of. 'N doin' the long jobs he gives the gang ain't gonna help with that."

You smiled softly, throwing your arms around his neck, holding him close. "You'd do all that for me?"

"Yeah," he breathed, rubbing your back. "I was supposedly doin' these jobs for ya to begin with. But we're gonna change things up. Make it all better."

Billy kissed your forehead as the last of your tears dried. "It's all gonna be better."

come talk about billy here!

[idiotwithanipad]

The Wild Woman (Pt4)

Alison leaves Button House to travel to another town counties away to pick up some new chairs. But when she gets stranded on an abandoned country road, she comes across a strange woman with an even stranger connection to the moon, who happens to remind her a lot of a certain friend of her’s back at home

(TW: Delusion, Angst, Insanity)

Alison clutched her phone tightly in her fist as she clumsily sprinted through the winding road after Riva. Over her panting breaths and groans of effort ducking and dodging each tree limb and overgrown bramble hedge, Alison could still hear Riva's frantic breaths. 

"Riva, wait! He's not- just WAIT!" Alison pleaded through rapid breaths, but Riva didn't listen; she had already gotten at least twenty feet ahead of Alison. 

Riva reached her target, she reached the beginning of this abandoned and unused road. The mossy tarmac faded to potholes and painted lines, the overgrown trees still casting a curtain above, shielding the unnatural stretch of road. 

Alison stumbled slightly and heard a howl up ahead, a drawn out and mournful howl, an underlying hint of hope chorused through its undertones. It took a few agonising seconds before Alison could see Riva up ahead, standing like a dark angel framed by the overgrowth. 

Alison gasped and gulped back air as she approached Riva, who released another howl. 

"What are you doing?" 

"I call for Rogh. Rogh always answer to howl, always ALWAYS!" Riva fretted, her crazed eyes scanning left and right out onto the dark horizon. Alison's gut clenched. 

"Riva I told you before, Rob- ... Rogh is not-"

"Rogh not happy with Riva. Not after last words me give him..." Riva started, her mouth creased into a demented smile, her eyes twitching. 

"He still big sad, so he not answer Riva. May think Riva still big angry. So he get revenge on Riva for her bad words. That why he send you to me..." Riva began to chuckle. 

"Rogh put you up to big joke. Were you part of big joke?" Riva laughed, facing Alison with crazed eyes. Alison's jaw hung useless and her mind went blank. 

"And Shul! Bet he part of joke too! Rogh, Shul?! Big good joke, big good. Where are you? Rogh? Come out from hiding now, Rogh! Enough be enough!" Riva limped forward some more, looking in every direction, laughing. 

Alison could only watch, she toyed with the material on her cuffs, afraid of the moment where Riva would realize that that was no joke, no prank and no Rogh. 

"Rogh, enough play. Need to go find Pin and Kya and Pek and babies, they need feeding about now. They need Fada, Rogh! They freeze without Fada! ... Rogh?" Riva's crazed laughter turned to anguished calls into the night, she trundled forwards like a blind drunkard, unable to find her way home. 

"... Rogh?" 

"Riva. Rogh isn't coming home... I'm sorry..." Alison said, bluntly, but with deep regret. At the mention of her name, Riva snapped her head of matted hair back to Alison, her face still burned into the same expression of dazed hope and longing. 

"Rogh always respond to howl... "Riva let out another silent wheezing laugh, her eyes fixed and crazed. She pointed back to Alison's phone, still clutched in her hands. 

"He in there. So he will soon be here. He just take big long time, big long time... " Riva chuckled, reclining onto the mossy tarmac, curling up like a creature with her back to Alison, her practically skeletal hand coming up to huddle herself. 

"Me wait here till Rogh not angry anymore. Then he come home... Always come home, Rogh always come home..." The last half of Riva's sentence became incoherent, her shivering, chuckling, mumbling warble  became little more than the whisperings of a mad woman. 

Alison quietly rose her phone and pointed it at Riva, who's back still faced her, and took a photograph. She'd need it. Before Alison could tuck the phone into her pocket, she noticed something she'd been dying for for hours. One bar of service. 

"You're home early. Like- well early..." Mike mused, curling his arm around Alison's shoulder and kissing her temple. Alison nodded, half heartedly without looking her husband in the eyes. She checked the time on her watch. 4:45am. 

She hot footed it out of that terrible place as fast as she could, the towing company would return the car to its owner once they were able to recover it from the overgrown ditch it had been left in. The wait at the train station was prolonged and dreadful, the journey even more taxing. And seeing the familiar 'Button House' sign on the front gate was more than welcome. 

"What's wrong? You look terrible, you alright?" Mike asked, rubbing his hand up and down Alison's shoulder as she glanced into the Common Room. 

"Yeah, no- I'm fine. I just need a minute, Mike..." Alison patted his hand and slipped away from him, heading off into the house to search for the ghosts. One in particular. 

Upstairs, the ghosts argued and debated on which channel they should switch to when morning came. Alison stood braced in the doorway, but none of them registered her. 

"Well, y'know, there could be something saucy on at this time..." Julian mused, tugging at his tie. 

"Give over, surely there's an Omnibus of a soap or two on at this hour?" Pat replied. 

"Robin?..." 

"Soaps? Come of it! Soaps are for squares! Where's the fun? Where's the thrill?" Julian spat, waving his hand at the scout leader. 

"Robin?..." 

"Might we see if that David Attenborough is on? He did a segment on birds of prey last week. Rather enjoyable" The Captain interjected. 

"Rogh?" 

The group fell silent at the unfamiliar name and turned to face Alison, strangely unphased by her presence. Julian stood aside and Alison saw him, poking his head out, sitting where he usually sat on the floor at the foot of the small sofa. Robin regarded her with a look of confusion and suspicion; how did she know that name? He never mentioned it to her; he'd given up hope of ever being called that name ever again. 

"Rogh?... That's it? Your real name?" Alison spoke, stepping closer to the sofa and pressing her hands against it's back. Robin gawked up at her, his large brow creasing and falling into a look of shame. 

"I need to see you. Alone" Alison didn't wait for a response and already started off out of the room and down the corridor to her bedroom. The group turned to face the caveman who stroked at his furs and left the floor, making sure to not look any of them in the eye, treading after her with his metaphorical tail between his legs. 

He paused in the doorway and watched as Alison unlocked her phone. 

"... Thought- you go to get chair from-"

"I was. But I got stuck and- I found someone. Someone who knew you..."

Robin paused for a moment, his face frozen in questioning, before he laughed. Only a slight laugh as he flourished his hand. He didn't take it seriously. 

"I been dead a long time. No one who knew me still alive, there no way.. " He smiled ignorantly. 

Alison blinked and turned the phone around for him to see the screen. The second he saw the photograph, he froze, his crooked smile fading into a blank and sullen shadow. For Alison, the photograph was blank, just a picture of the road. But for Robin, it was heartbreaking. 

His lips pressed together tightly and his arms lowered to his sides, his brow arching slightly. 

"It's your sister. I met her on that road, Robin. She died there, I met her. I swear. She's still out there" Alison sounded almost as crazed as Riva. Robin's eyes remained fixed on the phone, for a long time. 

"She showed me everything. I know about your tribe and about your kids. She showed me what happened, Robin. It's your sister, Riva"

But the woman, the sister that Rogh knew was different that this woman he saw on the small screen. The Riva he knew was strong, brave, always ready for a fight. She carried herself with pride and ferocity, a much needed trait for their tribe's women. The woman Rogh saw now, was a burned out shell of a creature. A malnourished, skeletal, frail creature driven to being a crumpled mess curled up on the ground holding onto herself like a child. 

It was Riva, he couldn't deny that the creature on the screen was his sister; the deer skin dress, the long locks of beautiful auburn hair, the feather tucked into it. But she looked wrong, different than he remembered, and his heart cracked. 

"...That not Riva"

[mmoxie]

Part 0 - Preamble.

Wilson Titlee.

You deserve it.

Those three words loomed over Dani as she started up past the automated doors. An old slogan waiting to be remodeled away, lit in the pale shades of orange and yellow comprising the logo above.

Most of a month ago, Dani had turned in a paper application. The woman at the customer service desk- Gina, she remembered- had seemed optimistic.

"Shit, we'll take all the help we can get around here, hon."

And then she waited, frittering checks out of her little nest egg to keep the lights on, renting a stack of tapes every Saturday and sitting by the phone, waiting on any one of a dozen callbacks.

Her fortieth birthday passed a few months back, and she remembered celebrating with a few friends at a seafood restaurant. It wasn't that long ago that she was living her best life between bites of fried flounder and hushpuppies, washed down with the coldest beer three American dollars could buy.

Life was good. She was finally going to finish her degree, she had quit smoking, and her landlord- by all accounts the oldest woman in Erewhon County- had looked her right in the eye after a missed rent check and said the kindest sentence she'd heard in her entire adult life-

"I think I've got everything I need, hon. How 'bout you just keep it all in one piece for me?"

Unfortunately, that verbal agreement didn't stand up in small claims court, and before she could get comfortable in a life without rent, the entire building- built in 1919 as a stopover for riverboat merchants coming inland from the Mississippi- was gone.

Chevette wasn't a bad town, but nothing could stay there anymore. Every time someone built a plaza or opened a restaurant to "stimulate the economy," it inevitably came with the shutdown of beloved institutions like Fiorello's Pizza or the Shoot n' Scoot.

And then there was the Wilson Titlee, proudly serving the same six hundred or so people, week after week. Only grocery store in town. Leftover appendix of a bigger chain that you find all over the state.

It was the only game in town with a paycheck that didn't come out of some sweet old retiree who remembered when a nickel could get you a handful of Atkinson's peanut butter bars.

She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray mounted atop a concrete trash can, then dropped an empty softpack of Pall Mall Blues into the bag beneath.

That was six years ago.

Now in 2014, the place she accepted as a sensible job to tide her over a while felt like a bear trap around her ankle. The news had gone to shit- nobody talked about clones anymore, what happened to Dolly? There weren't any news stories about aliens or fossilized bacteria on Mars, or zoo animals learning sign language or how to skateboard.

It was all bullshit, but she was miserable to realize that she had relied on that bullshit. It was padding in a world that was always rough with her. You could absorb a lot more in terms of trouble and woe if you had a home video of a guy getting his pants torn off by a hungry horse wrapped around your brain.

Couldn't rent from Blockbuster anymore, either. What a world.

"You on the desk today, hon?" Gina asked with a sympathetic grin.

"Nah, no lotto duty today. Some guy from district is coming in, so I'm gonna find some work in the back. Maybe help out in the dairy cooler."

Gina chuckled at that. She always seemed to take Dani's growing contempt for every moving part of the company with a kind of vague agreement, but would never go beyond joking.

There was a time when they talked about other things. There was once an outage at the lotto counter, and the two of them had talked about Heat and Goodfellas for three hours straight. Now it was just the news, the company, and why the company was in the news this time.

Dani had a routine. It wasn't always the same, but it was always something like this:

Clock in.

Wander over to deli.

Get a cheese biscuit and a bottle of sweet tea.

Eat in the stockroom while reading the latest post-its on the wall.

Run freight- groceryside got trucks every single day. She liked the one with the pantry goods best. Nobody else wanted to handle glass pickle jars and forty pound bags of rice.

Work slowly until lunch. Bottom shelf to top shelf. Knees and back hurt too much for any unnecessary bending.

Walk across the parking lot to Shoney's for lunch. Try a wedge salad, hate it, and get a seafood plate.

Walk across the parking lot and clock in again.

Spiritually-mandated paid bathroom break.

Check in on the latest display project. Might be doing something fancy with cans of beans, or filling up a big bin with chips.

Help out until last break.

Smoke.

Check the schedule for 30 minutes to an hour. If anyone asks, there's vacation planning in the future.

Clock out, go home, check on the crock pot, feed Seebs.

This repeated five or six days a week, and then there would be a blessed day or two of rest, listening to the radio in bed and talking on the phone with mom. Maybe they'd have a laugh about gray hairs coming in, or reminisce about going to Action Park in her junior year at Jim Bagby. Her first time on a train, too! She missed trains.

And then Seebs- Sebastian, like that kid from Neverending Story- would lay twenty-three pounds of cat on her chest while she dozed off, and before she knew it, the bear trap would close on her leg again.

All this she could tolerate- maybe in perpetuity- if it weren't for the fact that she saw Office Space in theaters half a lifetime ago.

Peter Gibbons was in her head ever since.

"I'd say, in a given week, I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work."

"And here's something else, Bob. I have 8 bosses right now."

“Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”

When the opening shift lead, the front end lead, the stock crew head, the assistant store lead, the director, the coordinator, the chief merchandiser, and the standards manager had all, in a row, asked her if she had received a certain e-mail about how they were going to "build out" the most recent delivery of barbecue sauce, because if she had, she wouldn't have just merched them right on the shelf...

...It was too real. Too much. She tried to reach for that Peter Gibbons zen, tried to hypnotize herself into a happy place that existed somewhere on the other side of acceptance- and instead just grit her teeth harder, and harder, and harder.

These days, she went home with pain in her neck and jaw from stress alone. She couldn't put up with much more.

One of these days, she was just going to... blow up.

Next->

[allovertheworldblog]

Not finished with Japan?

When I was in Fukuoka I could have taken the ferry to South Korea.

I didn’t.

I’m not sure if I was apprehensive about going to a new country, one I didn’t know much about, or whether I felt I wasn’t finished with Japan.

From Fukuoka I took a bus to Nagasaki.

The bus was up on an elevated motorway at times, so we got good views of Japan from above.

There was an ugliness about the place, the over-planned nature of the countryside, not a blade of grass out of place, every line perfectly straight.

This was something I felt a good few times as I travelled throughout the country, the need to conquer nature, to be the master. 

Nagasaki turned out to be one of my least favourite places in Japan. It was interesting nonetheless.

I think the hostel I stayed in coloured my unfavourable memories of the place.

The bedbugs and cockroach that were among the delights of the hostel didn’t help this.

Like Hiroshima the city was destroyed at the end of World War II by a nuclear bomb, this one was called ‘fat man’, on account of the shape of it. 

The project that led to the creation of these bombs (The Manhattan Project) was one of the biggest, in terms of people employed and the cost involved, ever in the history of mankind. 

The Manhattan Project resulted in two types of bombs, both atomic. The first type was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 1945. It scorched the city off the face of the earth. The second type of bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later on August 9 1945. 

People still question why the Allies needed to drop two bombs.

Some say it’s because the Japanese didn’t surrender immediately after Hiroshima.

Others say that the Allies wanted to test both bombs, in effect 'get their monies worth’.

I went to the Bomb Museum in Nagasaki.

It dealt with how the city and it’s inhabitants were affected by the bomb.  

Aside from the bombing, Nagasaki has reasons of its own to feature in the annals of Japanese and world history. During Japan’s self imposed isolation from the world, until the mid 19th century, Nagasaki was the only port in the county open to international trade.

A small settlement (Dejima) of Dutch traders took over a former  Portuguese settlement.

The Portuguese were kicked out because the Jesuits who followed them introduced Christianity, which in turn led to a rebellion by Christian converts.

The Portuguese were held to have helped the rebels.

A recreation of the settlement looks so different from anything Japanese of the same period.

The former Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank stone building is on a small scale, smaller than provincial, but quite impressive all the same.

After a couple of days in the city I’m ready to move on.

Hearing a few Finnish guys in the hostel talk about the town of Aso, which is in the biggest volcano caldera in the world, makes me want to go check that out.

I get to Aso after two trains, a ferry, a bus and finally a another train.

Before I board the ferry I’ve got some time to sit around the terminal building and gaze in awe at the cloud covered volcano behind Shimabara, a down at heel town.

In the terminal building there’s some kind of gambling place.

It’s full of older gents with small folded up newspapers playing the horses or whatever. 

After what feels like an exhausting day I get to the small town of Aso at 20.30.

[nancypullen]

Checking In

It's been a wonderful few days here on the Pullen spread. Matt has been in town and he's always such good company. We've had a lot of laughs, eaten too much holiday food, and just enjoyed being together. The Edgewater gang went down to Tennessee for Turkey Day, but I've had two calls from our Little Miss and have seen loads of pictures - they're having a ball. They'll be home on Sunday, Matt will fly out this evening, and we'll all brace ourselves for Christmas. We're getting decorated, my cards have arrived, and I'm ready to start wrapping gifts. The mister and I may wander into D.C. and visit the Christmas market, or we may opt to go to Baltimore's Inner Harbor - they do a big German Christmas village with loads of vendors (and German food!). Chestertown, on our side of the bridge, will have their Dickens Christmas festival the first weekend of December. We'll definitely give that a go. Doesn't look like we'll lack for Christmas cheer. I've volunteered to work the Friends of the Library booth at the Ridgley Christmas shindig, we'll see if they plug me into the schedule. I think that's on the 9th. It's tiiiiime!

In other news....I GOT A JOB! The Caroline County Library looked past my pink fluff (and maybe my age) and offered me a position! Yippee! I'll start January 16th, so come on over and see the nice granny at the library, she'll help you with anything you need. I never thought I'd be starting a new job at age 60, but I truly think it's going to be good for me in many ways. I can't just rot in this house. When the offer was made and salary and start date settled, I was reminded that this was, of course, pending a clean background check. Why is it, that even when you know you haven't had so much as a speeding ticket in decades, you wonder if you'll pass the background check? No one has lived a more vanilla life than I have, but what if they uncover that I skipped school in 1980 and egged a rival high school? I'll bet the people doing my background check weren't even born in 1980. What's the statute of limitations of egging? I may also have knowledge of several toilet papering incidents. That's it, I'm sunk.

Moving right along. I've got several artsy projects going. It looks like a glitter factory exploded in my craft room and that makes me happy. Look at these little chests (don't look at my mess).

Those are going to be tooth fairy boxes! My grandgirl and my sister's grandson are about the same age, both in kindergarten and nearing the snaggletooth stage of life. I''ll touch up the paint on these, glue in a little cushion, and place a little scroll inside printed with a poem I wrote for them: The Tooth Fairy Riding a moonbeam, she enters our land With glittering wings and a pouch in her hand Searching for treasure, a fairy's delight, a child's lost tooth, shiny and white. Upon finding a tooth that pleases her eyes, she leaves that lucky child a surprise So take care of your teeth, do your best When one is lost, use this chest Close your eyes, drift and dream She'll soon arrive on a silver moonbeam When you wake, look inside And see what treats a fairy hides

Okay, it's rough, but it'll work for little kids. It's all about the magic, folks. Make as much magic as you can for as long as you can. If it includes glitter, even better. Okie dokie, time for me to get busy around here. There are decorations to hang, things to sparkle, and cookies to eat. I hope you're doing something fun today, too. Whether that means shopping with the crowds or watching Hallmark movies and drinking hot cocoa, do it! Let's make a pact to send 2023 on its way in a cloud of merriment and happiness. The world is insane, bad news blares at us all day, so do everything you can to make your little corner of the world sweet. Sending you love and lots of holiday cheer. Sprinkle it all over! Stay safe, stay well, stay jolly. XOXO, Nancy

[justalittlegreen]

THE ORDINARY MIRACULOUS

Dear Sugar,

I printed out your column, “The Future Has An Ancient Heart,” and put it up on my wall so I can read it often. Many aspects of that column move me, but I think most of all, it’s this idea that (as you wrote) we “cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives.” The general mystery of becoming seems like a key idea in many of your columns. It’s made me want to know more. Will you give us a specific example of how something like this has played out in your life, Sugar?

Thank you. Big Fan

Dear Big Fan,

The summer I was 18 I was driving down a country road with my mother. This was in the rural county where I grew up and all of the roads were country, the houses spread out over miles, hardly any of them in sight of a neighbor. Driving meant going past an endless stream of trees and fields and wildflowers. On this particular afternoon, my mother and I came upon a yard sale at a big house where a very old woman lived alone, her husband dead, her kids grown and gone.

“Let’s look and see what she has,” my mother said as we passed, so I turned the car around and pulled into the old woman’s driveway and the two of us got out.

We were the only people there. Even the old woman whose sale it was didn’t come out of the house, only waving to us from a window. It was August, the last stretch of time that I would I live with my mother. I’d completed my first year of college by then and I’d returned home for the summer because I’d gotten a job in a nearby town. In a few weeks I’d go back to college and I’d never again live in the place I called home, though I didn’t know that then.

There was nothing much of interest at the yard sale, I saw, as I made my way among the junk—old cooking pots and worn-out board games; incomplete sets of dishes in faded, unfashionable colors and appalling polyester pants—but as I turned away, just before I was about to suggest that we should go, something caught my eye.

It was a red velvet dress trimmed with white lace, fit for a toddler.

“Look at this,” I said and held it up to my mother, who said oh isn’t that the sweetest thing and I agreed and then set the dress back down.

In a month I’d be 19. In a year I’d be married. In three years I’d be standing in a meadow not far from that old woman’s yard holding the ashes of my mother’s body in my palms. I was pretty certain at that moment that I would never be a mother myself. Children were cute, but ultimately annoying, I thought then. I wanted more out of life.

And yet, ridiculously, inexplicably, on that day the month before I turned 19, as my mother and I poked among the detritus of someone else’s life, I kept returning to that red velvet dress fit for a toddler. I don’t know why. I cannot explain it even still except to say something about it called powerfully to me. I wanted that dress. I tried to talk myself out of wanting it as I smoothed my hands over the velvet. There was a small square of masking tape near its collar that said $1.

“You want that dress?” my mother asked nonchalantly, glancing up from her own perusals.

“Why would I?” I snapped, perturbed with myself more than her.

“For someday,” said my mother.

“But I’m not even going to have kids,” I argued.

“You can put it in a box,” she replied. “Then you’ll have it, no matter what you do.”

“I don’t have a dollar,” I said with finality.

“I do,” my mother said and reached for the dress.

I put it in a box, in a cedar chest that belonged to my mother. I dragged it with me all the way along the scorching trail of my twenties and into my thirties. I had two abortions and then I had two babies. The red dress was a secret only known by me, buried for years among my mother’s best things. When I finally unearthed it and held it again it was like being punched in the face and kissed at the same time, like the volume was being turned way up and also way down. The two things that were true about its existence had an opposite effect and were yet the same single fact:

My mother bought a dress for the granddaughter she’ll never know.

My mother bought a dress for the granddaughter she’ll never know.

How beautiful. How ugly.

How little. How big.

How painful. How sweet.

It’s almost never until later that we can draw a line between this and that. There was no force at work other than my own desire that compelled me to want that dress. It’s meaning was made only by my mother’s death and my daughter’s birth. And then it meant a lot. The red dress was the material evidence of my loss, but also of the way my mother’s love had carried me forth beyond her, her life extending years into my own in ways I never could have imagined. It was a becoming that I would not have dreamed was mine the moment that red dress caught my eye.

I don’t think my daughter connects me to my mother any more than my son does. My mother lives as brightly in my boy child as she does in my girl. But seeing my daughter in that red dress on the second Christmas of her life gave me something beyond words. The feeling I got was like that original double whammy I’d had when I first pulled that dress from the box of my mother’s best things, only now it was:

My daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought for her at a yard sale.

My daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought for her at a yard sale.

It’s so simple it breaks my heart. How unspecial that fact is to so many, how ordinary for a child to wear a dress her grandmother bought her, but how very extraordinary it was to me.

I suppose this is what I meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.

Yours, Sugar

[paullovescomics]

This interview with Frank Miller is a few weeks old, but a couple of ideas from it have kept popping up in my mind, so I wanted to share it.

The influence that reading Lone Wolf & Cub had on him: If you can find some of his early early work, he was drawing in something much closer to the old Marvel house style. But then there's that Daredevil run, when his lines and figures are suddenly much looser and more expressive. It makes total sense that he got there by being wowed by Goseki Kojima's work. And Miller's cartooning is so much better for it. Even with the exact same scripts, his comics would be much less impactful if he'd stuck with the standard (and, by the lights of the time, more correct) style. It also shows how these different traditions in comics have been influencing each other for much longer than is often assumed. This was the early 1980s. America in general had seen Speed Racer and Godzilla, but I don't think many folks had access to manga. But of course New York City gets a lot of things before the rest of us. I kinda want to go on a tangent about how Japanese stuff was kept separate for a long time because it was considered weird (the Japanimation era), but now it's kept separate because those "weird" elements are now beloved and therefore a distinct and valuable marketing tool. IDK. If you grew up with the attitude of "don't put yer fuckin labels on me, man" you might see something ironic there.

His comment that he got to try that style because comics publishers at the time were desperate. [This one is a real tangent.] A lot of guys my age look back at that era, when you could find spinner racks of comics at lots of grocery, drug, and convenience stores as a time when comics were thriving. It did feel that way to us kids, and I absolutely have fond memories of riding my bike down to the Snak Pak, or the Piggly Wiggly and City Drug downtown, and hunting for comics. (Different stores got different mixes of titles, and sometimes you'd find older issues that hadn't been removed when they went out of date. It had a treasure hunt quality.) And it's true that circulation numbers were higher (but returns could be very high, too). But publishers were freaking out, because sales were going down, and stores were dumping comics for more profitable items. When most shops were mom & pop operations, or very small chains that existed in one town or county, then making room for a low-profit-margin product like comics was okay, because hey they make the kids smile, and it's the type of things people expect to see, and they were returnable so they were low risk, why not stock them? But with these stores being gobbled up by regional and national chains, and starting to apply big retail tools like "how much profit are you making per square inch of shelf space?", comics just didn't make sense. Put in another display of soft drinks, or a rack of sunglasses, or As Seen On TV gadgets, and increase your returns many times over. Had the direct market (with all its considerable flaws) not come along, I think we would have had a fraction of the number and variety of comics -- just a handful of DCs, Marvels, and Archies that could sell enough to justify space at the bottom of a magazine rack.

The idea that there aren't enough young creators making new stuff in comics now -- I don't work in comics so I don't know how accurate that is, but it certainly feels like a lot of the things I see promoted from the big publishers are from long-established names. I think the younger creators are probably doing things in webcomics, and that seems to be a (mostly) different audience from the customer base of comic shops. Would buyers of DC and Marvel be open to open to new takes on characters from younger creators the way we were open to Miller's Daredevil? It's hard to say, because it's such an idiosyncratic audience. Social media would suggest no, because it's full of complaints about anything unfamiliar, but I don't trust social media to be representative. "We are desperately in need of open minds" among all parts of the the comics ecosystem.

[eazy-group]

Visiting Hogwarts and Ancient Abodes: A Castle-to-Castle Trek for Movie and History Buffs

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Visiting Hogwarts and Ancient Abodes: A Castle-to-Castle Trek for Movie and History Buffs

In far northeast England, the county of Northumberland has a higher concentration of castles than any other part of the country. If you’ve seen some of the most popular movies and TV shows of the last two decades—think Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Downton Abbey, Transformers, and the Netflix series The Last Kingdom—you’ll almost certainly recognize at least a few of them. 

I recently hiked from castle to castle on a self-guided trek with Inntravel. I did all the walking, and they handled everything else, including a luggage transfer between hotels so I would only need a daypack to hike. I walked about 30 miles over five days, taking ample time to explore the castles. Along the way, I also made time for a boat tour of the nearby Farne Islands, where I was lucky enough to see seals, dolphins, puffins, and a variety of other marine birds.

If you’re a movie buff, a history buff, or both, this is the trip for you. Here are five of the spectacular castles you can expect to see.

1. Warkworth Castle

Image by David Tomlinson

I started my trip at Warkworth Castle in the town of the same name. Inntravel arranged a cab from the Alnmouth train station, which has connections to London, and set me up at the Warkworth House Hotel, just minutes away from the ruins of a castle that dates back to the 1150s. Today, the site is managed by English Heritage, which occasionally runs events like the Knights’ Tournament to show you what life was like in the Middle Ages.

2. Alnwick Castle (aka Hogwarts)

Image by Inntravel

After two nights in Warkworth, I hiked north through the seaside town of Alnmouth, then inland to Alnwick. It’s basically a pilgrimage site for Harry Potter fans—it plays the role of Hogwarts in the first two films and this is where Harry first learned how to ride a broom. In honor of that bit of film history, Alnwick Castle runs free broomstick training classes daily for all ages (unless there’s bad weather). 

Alnwick—pronounced Ann-ick—has also been featured in Transformers: The Last Knight, Downton Abbey, and many other films. Also worth exploring is the nearby Alnwick Garden (you’ll need a separate ticket), which feels like something straight out of Alice in Wonderland with its leafy labyrinth and hedge-tunnel walkways.

The Percy family, which includes the Duke of Northumberland, has lived in Alnwick Castle since it was built over 700 years ago. The family’s living quarters, the State Rooms, are occasionally open for visitors and are an elaborate sight worth seeing.

I stayed at the Cookie Jar, a posh hotel just steps from Alnwick Castle (yes, your room will have a cookie jar in it). It’s stylish, has an incredible breakfast, and is super-convenient to walk around town. 

3. Dunstanburgh Castle

Image by Inntravel

From Alnwick, I took a bus to the seaside town of Craster. Just beyond the town, the ruins of Dunstanburgh stand tall and serve as quite the backdrop for a nearby golf course. Construction on the castle was begun in the early 1300s. Today, the land is owned by the National Trust, and the property is managed by English Heritage. If you’re traveling with a family and planning to visit more than a few such sites, you could save money with an annual membership, even if you don’t live full-time in the U.K. 

From Dunstanburgh, I hiked onward across beaches with nesting Arctic terns to the town of Beadnell. I stayed two nights there at the beautiful Beadnell Towers hotel, which has an excellent dinner service. 

4. Bamburgh Castle

Image by Inntravel

Perhaps the grandest of them all, the privately owned Bamburgh Castle has changed hands extensively over its 1,400-year history. (You read that correctly. Construction on the castle started in the 500s.) More recently, you may have seen the castle in the opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which was just released in June.

It was also featured in Transformers: The Last Knight and is the real-life inspiration for the Netflix series The Last Kingdom. Bamburgh Castle and Alnwick Castle are separately and independently opened but both are part of the Historic Houses network. So, if you plan to visit other castles, homes, or gardens in their collection, membership could save you a bit of cash.

5. Lindisfarne Castle

Image by Inntravel

The Holy Island of Lindisfarne, famous for the handwritten Lindisfarne Gospels, is only an island during low tide. When the tide is out, you can walk or drive across the causeway. But a far better way to see it is to take a boat tour. 

I walked from Beadnell to the picturesque Seahouses, where I caught a ride with Billy Shiel’s Boat Trips. We saw dolphins and seals on the way there and countless puffins on the way back. On land, you can explore Lindisfarne Castle, which was renovated into a holiday home for the founder of Country Life Magazine. Today, it’s managed by the National Trust and well worth a visit, even if you go only for the stunning Gertrude Jekyll Garden, which is free to visit. 

The island is also the site of the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory, which dates back to the 600s and is where the Lindisfarne Gospels were written. Today, it’s managed by English Heritage, and the gospels can be seen at the British Library in London. I highly recommend adding a day to your trip so you can explore everything here without being on a time crunch. 

Pro Tip for Ultimate Flexibility

If you’re planning to do this trip as part of a bigger tour around the United Kingdom and Europe, you may be able to save on train tickets with a Eurail pass or Interrail if you’re a resident of the U.K. or Europe. While some routes require seat reservations, most don’t, so you can leave your departure date and time open-ended if you fall in love with a place you’re visiting and want to add an extra day or two to your trip without losing your train fare.

Editor’s Note: Inntravel hosted our writer on this trip and Eurail/Interrail comped a train pass to cover her travel expenses.

Source

[sorryiapologized]

County line, I'm counting down mailboxes until my house. This place had a heartbeat in its day.

There aren't the words to describe the ache of nostalgia that gathers in your chest swirling around the pain of trauma until it becomes one all consuming tornado. That's how it feels when I drive back into the small town I grew up in. It's a town I didn't think I'd escape from, a town that became me as much as I became it. When I drive back home I drive backwards through my life there.

My chest tightens as I come down the big hill and see the downtown buildings come into view. I drive past the college I attended. Memories of shame fill my brain as I remember trying to hide the fact that I was a "townie." I felt like a loser compared to all my peers who were experiencing freedom for the first time.

I keep driving north. I go down the hill where my dad witnessed a car crash that left a sixteen year old boy dead. The boy was the same age as me; went to my rival school. My dad stood out on the side of the road and watched the life drain from his eyes. The boy was hit by a drunk driver. My dad called me to tell me he'd be home late. He didn't rush home to his child to hold her. He rushed to a bar to drink away the trauma.

I drive past the grocery store that was just a little too far to walk to when I was growing up. That store was the first sense of freedom I had, the first time I felt pulls in two directions. I could finally drive, I could go anywhere. I had a little bit of money. Unlike my friends who would drive to make-out spots or the one bar in town that let underage kids in, I spent my time and money driving to that store to get food for my family. I paid for my groceries at the self check with my "coin sock." I'd collect every penny I found and hope that it was enough to cover the bread and milk I was bringing home. My dad always said he'd pay me back, but never did in full. He thought I was lying when I told him how much I spent. If I didn't have enough for everything I'd secretly leave my abandoned items at the self-check avoiding the shame and judging eyes of a cashier.

I pass the horizontal road that every public school I attended is on. My elementary school and middle school share a yard. A turn to the right and I'd be back there. A turn to the left and I'd be at the high school where I spent four years worrying about fitting in, fretting over every tiny social interaction. I thought I'd miss school once I left it. I was the kid who used to cry on the last day of school in elementary school because I was going to miss my teachers. On the last day of high school all I felt was relief. A sense of hope burned in my chest, even though I knew I'd spend the next four years in that town, I still held hope that someday I'd get out.

I take the curve under the bridge that my sister used to call "the high road" when we were little kids. Mom would ask us which way we wanted to take back from the store, the high road or the low road. I always said the low road just to be contrary.

A left into the neighborhood. Past the church that looks like a frog. Down the street where I used to speed when I was running late. Past the house where my dad's best friend lived. He died of COVID a few years ago. It finally inspired my dad to get the shot. A left at the mailbox. One year my sister and I made an igloo there on a snow day. When I was four my mom and I used to walk the dog down there to get the mail. I couldn't reach the box back then.

We pull up the street. The street where I learned how to ride a bike. It was a pink princess bike and I hated it. Dad said he picked it out for me because it had animals on the seat. It's the street where I used to go sledding. My dogs would pull me in my little plastic green sled. My cousin once laughed so hard she peed in that sled. Its the street where I'd pull my sister around in a green wagon. Its the street where we'd do our snow dance and pray for a white Christmas. Its the street where I met my childhood best friend. Where we'd play soccer in the road, where I skinned countless knees, where I invented my own version of baseball.

I can no longer park in "my spot." In high school and college I'd park my car on the right side of the driveway. Now my dad's girlfriend has claimed the space. I park in front, where guests used to. The purple bushes that turn red in the fall are gone. The green shrubs where I lost my favorite stuffed animal for years has been replaced. The big tree I helped my dad plant in the front yard was cut down years ago, now. Even the front porch is different. No more hanging flower pots.

The house doesn't smell like me when I walk in. And I don't just walk in anymore, I knock. There are portraits of his girlfriend and her kids up along the walls. The walls that sat bare for years after my mom left. There's food in the fridge, now that a woman lives there again. My bedroom walls are no longer the bright robin egg blue I painted them when I was eleven.

On the outside, the house doesn't look much different. The town isn't much different. But I can hear the heartbeat louder than I ever did when I lived there. It's the same heartbeat that echoes in my ears when the anxiety rises. No matter where I go, no matter how it changes I am still a version of this town. I am a version of this town that does not exist anymore, a version I may only remember. There's an ache in that, an isolation, to know a place that nobody else has ever seen so intimately.

[shwoo]

This map has a lot of issues, so I spent an unnecessary amount of time fact-checking all the shows and where they're located. Places in "italicised quotes" aren't real places. Using the "town, state" format even for big cities to make things clearer. I know probably too much about American geography for someone who's never been there, and I still get confused.

CORRECT

Molly of Denali: "Qyah", Alaska Clarence: "Aberdale", Arizona South Park: "South Park", Colorado The Amazing World of Gumball: "Elmore", California Sit Down, Shut Up: "Knob Haven", Florida Squidbillies: "Dougal County", Georgia Lilo & Stitch: The Series: Unnamed locality in Kauai, Hawaii Napoleon Dynamite: Preston, Idaho Twelve Forever: "Bethune", Iowa Courage the Cowardly Dog: "Nowhere", Kansas Hoops: "Lenwood", Kentucky Bunnicula: New Orleans, Louisiana The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper: Friendship, Maine Craig of the Creek: "Herkleton", Maryland The Loud House: "Royal Woods", Michigan The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends: "Frostbite Falls", Minnesota Ellen's Acres: A hotel outside Tonopah, Nevada Assy McGee: Exeter, New Hamspshire Kid Cosmic: Unnamed town, New Mexico Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: New York, New York Big Mouth: Westchester County, New York The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants: Piqua, Ohio Gravity Falls: Gravity Falls, Oregon Arthur: "Elwood City", Pennsylvania (confirmed by the show's official Twitter) Little Bill: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Family Guy: "Quahog", Rhode Island The Legend of Calamity Jane: Deadwood, South Dakota King of the Hill: "Arlen", Texas (Didn't even look this one up until I needed the city name) Beavis and Butt-Head: "Highland", Texas (The state wasn't made explicit until the 2022 movie Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe) American Dad!: "Langley Falls", Virginia Rick and Morty: Somewhere outside Seattle, Washington

CORRECT, BUT

The Owl House: "Gravesfield", Connecticut (Much more heavily set in Bonesborough in the Boiling Isles, which is not a real place, though a few episodes do return to Gravesfield) Steven Universe: "Beach City", "Delmarva" (The landmasses are a little different in the universe of Steven... Universe, and the state of Delaware doesn't exist, but an official map labels the body of water north of Beach City as Rehoboth Bay, which is a real bay in Delaware, and would put Beach City in the same location as the real-world Long Neck, Delaware) (RIP to everything south of Indian River Bay, though) Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman: Boston, Massachusetts (This is a live action kid's game show with an animated host, so I'm not sure it qualifies as an animated series) Infinity Train: North Branch, Minnesota (The show is set on a magical train that travels through an otherworldly desert. The main human character of the first season is from Minnesota, but she spends almost the entire season trapped on the train, and the other seasons follow different characters, and generally spend even less time on Earth) Futurama: "New New York", "New New York" (New New York City is explicitly built over the ruins of its real-world counterpart, and is basically New York But Futuristic)

IMPLIED

Rugrats: Unnamed city (All indications point to California) Garfield and Friends: Unnamed City (Garfield is very occasionally stated to take place in Muncie, Indiana, where its creator Jim Davis lives, but I don't know if the Garfield and Friends show ever brings this up. I don't think US Acres was ever given a location) Bob's Burgers: "Seymour's Bay" (Evidence points to New Jersey, but it's never made explicit) (I'm finding conflicting things on whether Seymour's Bay is the canon name or an out-of-universe nickname) Jimmy Neutron: "Retroville" (A Texas number plate is visible in the movie, and a line on a map showing a trip the characters take in one episode clearly starts in Texas. Otherwise, the state is never specified)

UNCLEAR

Recess: Unnamed city (One episode has the kids take the Arkansas Elementary School Achievement Test, which is the basis for it being put in Arkansas in this map. Coordinates given in another episode would put the school in Pennsylvania) Regular Show: "City" (A few things indicate California, including the state flag being visible in one episode, but other things contradict this and place it further east) Curious George: "City" (The location was never given in the books, but the show has a line that says that the airport the characters are currently at is in Chicago, Illinois) The Boondocks: "Woodcrest" (The comic strip is definitely set in Maryland, but the show has some indications early on that it's set in Chicago, Illinois, with the exception of an episode where the main characters fly back to Chicago to attend a funeral. Later episodes imply that the show is set in Maryland) The Chicken Squad: Unnamed locality (An episode about a lost phone implies that the show is set in North Dakota. I can't find much more than that) Harvey Girls Forever!: "Harvey Street" (One episode includes a view from space of a bright light on the street, but the location is vague, and looks more like Missouri than Oklahoma to me. A showrunner confirmed on Twitter that this shot did not mean the show was set in Kansas, and that the street is actually "located in the great state of… oops, out of characters!") Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood: "The Neighborhood of Make-Believe" (Disclaimer: I never saw Mr Rogers' Neighborhood because it's an extremely North American thing. But I think the title neighbourhood was literally supposed to be Fred Rogers' neighbourhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while the Neighborhood of Make-Believe was always an imaginary place with no real-world counterpart.) Peanuts: Unnamed City (I'm not sure which Peanuts animated series this is on the map, but the comics never make the location explicit. The closest is a strip from 1957, in which Lucy shows off a trophy that names her "Outstanding Fussbudget of Hennepin County". That would place the setting in Minnesota, in or near Minneapolis. But a later strip from 1963 introduces a character named 555 95472, whose surname has been changed to his ZIP code. ZIP code 95472 is in Sebastopol, California, where Charles Shultz's studio was.) Hey Arnold!: "Hillwood" (There are a lot of indications that the series takes place in the US part of the Pacific Northwest, so Oregon, Washington or Idaho. And at the end of one episode, Helga and her mother are seen driving past a "Welcome To Washington State" sign when returning from out of state. But there are also some implications that it takes place in New York City, particularly with the architecture, and the way the school is numbered)

DEFINITELY INCORRECT

Sniz & Fondue: Unnamed locality (Only source on being located in Missouri seems to be an addition to the Wikipedia page in November 2006 with no edit reason given) Big City Greens: "Big City" (The show is based in part on the creators' childhood in rural Michigan, but the show itself never mentions a state.) (If Michigan gets Big City Greens, might as well give Alabama Phineas and Ferb for similar reasons. Give the south something.) Sheep in the Big City: "The Big City" (Only source on being located in Missouri seems to be an addition to the Wikipedia page in January 2010) with no edit reason given) Daria: "Lawndale" (The setting of the show is unclear, but it doesn't appear to be set in Texas. The setting is extremely urban northeast, in my opinion. In an interview, one of the show creators said that he thought of the setting as being a mid-Atlantic suburb, and gave Maryland and Pennsylvania as possible locations. The idea that the show is in Texas seems to be based on the show being a spin-off of Beavis and Butt-Head, but Daria's family explicitly moved to Lawndale from Highland at the beginning of the first episode.) Chalkzone: "Plainville" (Only source on being located in Wisconsin seems to be an addition to the Wikipedia page in November 2006 with no edit reason given)

OTHER POSSIBILITIES (not on the map)

-The Ace Ventura: Pet Detective cartoon is set in Miami, Florida, and has a lot more episodes than Sit Down, Shut up -The Beetlejuice cartoon is set in "Peaceful Pines", Connecticut, and has more episodes than the Owl House, as well as seeming to spend more time in the real world. -I don't know much about China, IL, but it is unambiguously set in Illinois, unlike Curious George, or the Boondocks. Has less episodes than either of those, though. -Soul Eater is set in "Death City", Nevada, and only has one less episode than Ellen's Acres, with double the running time. -If Big Mouth is a runner-up for New York, Archer should be too. Even discounting the seasons that moved the setting to Los Angeles, or Los Angeles but in the 40s, or a fictional Pacific Island, or space, it's got more episodes than Big Mouth. -The animated show set in the District of Columbia with the most episodes is either Our Cartoon President, or Freakazoid!, depending on how you define an episode. Couldn't find anything for any of the US's overseas territories.

Longest Running Cartoon Set in Each State (based off of number of episodes)

[officialaemondtargaryen]

Never Told You

Summary: Before you move on, you just have one thing to say.

Characters: Eddie Munson x Reader

Word Count: 2k

Warning: Mentions of character death, angst

Author's Note: Surprise! Two fics in two days?! I could not stop thinking about this idea. Sorry to share my suffering with you.

The owners of the Hawkins, Indiana Cemetery refused to allow Wayne Munson to buy a burial plot in his nephew's name. When the ground opened up to hellfire and brimstone and swallowed half of the town, the media placed the blame on the young metalhead; stating that he had opened up a portal to Hell after performing a series of ritualistic murders. They were afraid that a headstone in his honor would attract local Satanists- the other members of his cult- who might use it as an altar for satanic worship.

However, Wayne was a determined man. He went out of state to have a small headstone made, and with the help of a few of his friends from the Plant, nestled it quietly in the woods behind Forest Hills Trailer Park, where Eddie used to play as a child.

You had been back to Hawkins a few times since the evacuation.

It wasn't the same small town that you had grown up in. It was a ghost town. Most of its residents had chosen to flee to one of the neighboring counties or Indianapolis for a taste of big city life. The majority of businesses had closed their doors permanently and graffiti had now littered the abandoned storefronts. Missing person flyers were tacked to every street light and stop sign for miles.

You hardly recognized it in the months that had passed as you drove through downtown. The faces of the folks who had stayed behind were gaunt; frowns and permanently wrinkled in worry and sadness. Most of them were ones whose family members had gone missing and they were still holding a candle of hope that they would return.

One of them was Wayne Munson.

Even after he learned his nephew's fate, he didn't give up hope that maybe the boy had just left; took his guitar and his van and was out there- somewhere- playing music in a new band and making his own way in the world outside of the cruelty of Hawkins, Indiana. As much as you wished that to be true, you knew better, yet you would never fault Wayne for believing.

Forest Hills Trailer park had been abandoned. It was one of the four places that had been hit the hardest by the 'earthquake'. It had also been looted and nearly destroyed. Near the picnic table, there was a small memorial to the victims who had lived there that lost their lives on that day; four people, five if you counted Eddie, all of whom you had known and grew up with living in that same trailer park for most of your life.

You pulled your car over. The gravel crackled beneath your feet as you walked over to the memorial. It was littered with leaves and dead flowers, and as you usually did when you would come to visit, you dusted off the dried petals and cobwebs and placed a fresh rose underneath each picture frame. One for Ms. Debbie who used to babysit you when you were a child. One for Mr. Lloyd who was a kind old man who never turned down a plate of leftovers. And two for Mr. and Mrs. Roots who weren't the nicest neighbors but still didn't deserve what happened to them and their dog Cooper.

Your eyes began to burn as you looked over the photographs of the people that you had once known; the photos, the empty trailer park, all of it a reminder of the tremendous loss that you had felt. It wasn't just the people, the memories, your childhood- it was your home. It hadn't gotten any easier over the last seven months, despite how hard you tried to move on; looking out of your bedroom window at a street you didn't recognize, a neighbor that you didn't know waving as you drove by, trading one small town for another and having this trauma fester in your chest while everyone else seemed perfectly fine...

Eddie's grave sat at the base of a giant oak tree.

The green ivy that was growing up the tree had begun to spread along the headstone, and somehow, made it even more beautiful.

The old tire swing still hung from the largest branch and you remembered the countless nights spent out here with him; playing hide and seek when you were kids, pretending that you were characters from one of Eddie's fantasy books in an enchanted forest. Wayne would come out and set up a tent and you and Eddie would camp out for the night, telling scary stories and making s'mores. When you both got older, it became your spot to hang out and smoke and talk about all of the people that you both hated. You still came out to talk, only now it was less often and Eddie could only listen.

Sometimes it felt like you could still hear him.

You placed the last rose at the base of his headstone before taking a seat on the cold ground. All you could do is stare at his name in front of you; Edward Munson, beloved son, nephew, and friend.

"It's not getting any easier," you whispered quietly as you picked up a dry, brown leaf and mindlessly fiddled with it to keep your hands busy. "I thought that it would, you know? It's been over six months."

The cold, early October wind sent a chill through your body.

"I'm still waiting for you to call," a tear fell to your cheek. "I'm still waiting for someone to tell me that this was all a big joke and for you to bust through the door with that big, stupid smile."

Silence hung in the air around as you waited for a response that you would never get. You chewed on your cheek as you stared at the cold, grey stone in front of you.

"You know I told myself that I wasn't going to come and see you anymore," you admitted. "I told myself that I needed to move on, and my parents agreed." It was almost as if you could hear him chuckling from beyond the grave. He never really got along with your parents. "But I can't do that, not until I-" you paused for a moment and pulled a piece of paper out of your pocket. "I wanted to tell you this before, but I was terrified that you didn't feel the same way. And now I'll never know."

"Dear Eddie," you began, letting out a breath. "Right now, you're playing 'Romeo and Juliet' on your acoustic guitar and you think that I'm studying; I am, just not trigonometry. Instead, I'm studying the way that your hair falls over your shoulders and how your tongue sticks out when you're concentrating on the more difficult chords. You're so fucking cool, sometimes I hate you for it."

"That's not true. No, the truth is that I love you, Eddie." Your eyes burned with tears as tiny droplets fell to the crumpled paper below and left behind damp, grey circles between the lines. "I always have. Ever since I moved into this little trailer park, ever since you came knocking on my front door asking if I wanted to come outside and play. I'm pretty sure that you're my soulmate. You'd probably laugh at me if you knew I believed in stupid shit like that, but it's true. I wish that I had the guts to tell you, but I can't. I'd never risk ruining this. So you'll continue believing that I'm in love with that asshole, Tyler Sneed, and I'll continue to pretend that I am so that you never find out that it's really you. But it is you, Eddie. It will always be you."

You sighed and breathed in deeply, the cold air clearing your sinuses as you reached up to wipe your cheek with the back of your hand. You folded the note back up and sat it at the base of his headstone, next to the rose.

"So now you know my big secret," you let out a breathy laugh and instinctively waited for a response. A frown spread across your lips, once more, when you didn't receive one. "I should have told you that night. You don't know how bad I wanted to. But, there is a small part of me that is glad I didn't. Because I can't help but think that if you felt the same, if we had been together, it would have made losing you that much worse."

As you sat there, you couldn't help but feel the creeping sensation that there was someone there with you; watching.

Behind you, a branch snapped and you whipped your head around as you inadvertently gasped. Your eyes darted from side to side, searching for the source of the sound; heart pounding at the thought that you were not alone. But it was just the wind; the tops of the autumn-colored trees swayed back and forth as if they were whispering to each other.

"I'm not coming back here anymore, Eddie. I can't." Just saying those words caused you pain. "It just hurts too much. I have to figure out some sort of way to start healing, even if it takes the rest of my life to do so. I know that you would want that for me, even though I also know that you're probably getting a kick out of watching me wallow in my misery from wherever you are. You were always kind of sadistic like that." You made yourself smile at that. "I miss you more than you could imagine and I love you."

You stood to your feet and dusted the dirt from your legs. Looking around, you took in your surroundings once more. You knew that this wouldn't be the last time you ever came to visit him, but that it would be the last time for a long time. As you made your way back through the wood, you could have sworn that you heard someone say, "I love you, too". Coming to a stop, you glanced over your shoulder, only to see dried leaves fluttering across the ground. Your lips turned up into a smile as you shook your head and continued back towards your car, and with your head held high and a weight lifted off of your chest, you left Forest Hills Trailer Park in your rearview mirror.

The radio was kept off on the ride home, not wanting to hear anything that was going to remind you of Eddie. You wouldn't be able to avoid it forever, but you were doing better than you thought you would be, and you wanted to keep up that facade for as long as you could. You didn't allow your eyes to linger on the arcade where you spent countless nights trying to beat each other's high scores or the tire shop he used to work at as you drove back through town; they were both shut down now, anyways, as was the pizza place you frequented after school on Fridays.

You'd always have your memories of this place, but it was time to leave Hawkins behind.

As you pulled into your driveway, however, you noticed a familiar figure sitting on your front porch. You bit down on your bottom lip and sighed as you opened your door and climbed out of the car. Just when you thought that you would be able to move on...

"Dustin?" You asked, not having seen him since you moved six months ago. "What are you doing here?"

The younger boy stood up and rung his hat in his hands. He looked anxious, and it worried you.

"Is everything- is everyone okay?"

"Y/N," He began. "There's something I have to tell you."

[t-nd-rfoot]

To Be an Abbott Man // Rhett’s Worst Fear

Family is always a gamble for an Abbott

Summary A few days after leaving Amelia County, Rhett is forced to make a decision.

Characters Rhett Abbott x Maria Olivares

Theme Angst

Warnings Outer Rage spoilers; missing persons; family drama; hints of pregnancy; one too many words italicized for emphasis

Word Count 906

Note Inspired by this post by @sebsxphia ✨ A million thank yous again for this inspiration! Plus dad!Rhett just absolutely makes sense for his canon character arc at some point, he will be ours someday 😭 I just had to give this ficlet its own page for the Outer Range writers to find to properly edit it since I wrote the original so fast, so this is a slightly edited version! And as much as Rhett and Maria deserve happiness, I don’t think their journey is going to be as smooth as we want it to be, so this is how I interpret their season 2 start. Full fic under the cut to avoid spoilers in case you haven’t watched the show yet!

“Babe? You okay?”

That no good piece of shit. How could he leave after everything they’ve been through? It wasn’t enough that he had to bring down everyone with him—he had to abandon them there just as things took a turn for the worst.

Wait. But if he was gone, then he probably didn’t even know the state of things right now.

He didn’t know about...

“Babe?”

The rodeo. The diner. The school. The church. Those are the places he’d check first.

Amy was a smart girl. She wouldn’t just run away like that. She couldn’t.

And it’s not like Wabang was that big, anyway. If she wasn’t there, she’d still be easy to find. She's just a child. She couldn't have gotten far.

“Rhett!”

And suddenly, he was back in the motel. Maria was knelt in front of him, her hands on his forearms, shaking him back into reality, concern painted vividly on her face.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

What’s not wrong, he thought, would have been a more appropriate question.

He whispered, still not meeting her eyes, “Amy’s gone. And so is Perry.”

He sniffed, a wave of emotions rushing over him at once. Anger, confusion, sadness…he didn’t know what to feel first.

Suddenly, a weight fell on his lap, as his girlfriend planted herself there to be able to hold and comfort him as tightly as she could. “Oh, Rhett…” He tried to hug her back as well as he could with the numbness in his arms.

“What did they say? Are they looking for them?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, “wasn’t really hearing much after they told me.” His fingers played idly with the hem of Maria’s shirt.

“Well, what about Joy? I’m sure they’re sending out search parties,” she consoled.

He scoffed. “Fuckin’ great. Last thing my family needs is another fuckin’ investigation.”

Sensing the frustration building in him, Maria got off his lap, and he immediately stood up to pace the room.

It didn’t make sense. Leaving Wabang felt right. It’s what he’s wanted since high school. He finally escaped the burdens of his family and start fresh—a second chance at life and at love, now that he knows Maria loves him back. He didn’t have to worry about his reputation as the Abbott Family Fuck-Up or the Town Manwhore, or whatever it is people called him. He didn’t have to be held responsible for Perry’s messes anymore, or disappoint Royal and Cecilia ever again.

So why did things suddenly feel so wrong?

His eyes finally met Maria’s for the first time since finding out, and that’s when he knew why.

Because he finally knew what it was like to be an Abbott man.

It wasn’t the name or the ranch that made him one.

It was knowing how easily family leaves with no certainty of coming back.

He witnessed it first hand with Perry. Nine months with not a single sign of his missing wife, that even the FBI gave up on it. Sure, the couple had their problems, but no one ever expected her to leave. Even more, no one expected her to not return. And now his daughter, the sweetest child on their side of Wyoming, has done exactly the same, and her father doesn’t even know it. If Rebecca’s disappearance didn’t drive Perry insane already, Rhett didn’t even want to imagine what his brother would do if he knew his daughter was gone too.

Now, he’s played a part in it with Royal. He had his faults, but even Rhett couldn’t deny anymore that his dad did everything he could to keep his family together. He didn’t have to involve himself in their misdeeds—their crimes—but still, he was the one who planned their alibi and did their heavy lifting. All to make sure he didn’t lose his own children. A futile effort, it turned out, since there he was back on the ranch without either of them.

It seemed inevitable for Abbott men to lose their children.

And all it took was one look at the love of his life to make sure the buck stopped with him.

He made his way back to Maria, still sat on the bed, and kissed her. As he pulled away, he knelt down on the floor, and placed a long kiss above her navel. It hasn’t even been a day since they found out, but he was determined to keep his family together no matter what.

“You love me, right?” he asked, looking up at her.

Maria tucked his long strands behind his ear. “Of course.”

He took his seat beside her again, his hand still on her belly, softly stroking it with his thumb.

“And you ain’t gonna leave me, right?”

The tone in his voice caused some worry in Maria. “Rhett…where is this coming from?”

“I just…I need you to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“That I can’t lose you, too!”

“And I’m not going anywhere!”

They were back to square one. Rhett ran his fingers through his hair. “You don’t get it.”

Carefully placing a hand on his shoulder, Maria tried to gauge the cowboy’s emotions. It wasn’t frustration he was feeling anymore.

It was fear.

Rhett took a deep breath. “Rebecca and Amy left Perry. And now, me and Perry, we stood up our dad.” He took Maria’s hands into his. “I don’t wanna know what that’s like. I don’t want you or our baby runnin’ out on me one day.”

A tear ran down Maria’s cheek at his confession. “I promise, Rhett. I’m never leaving your side—we’re never leaving your side.” She grabbed his hand and kissed it, as if she was sealing the promise into his skin.

Rhett studied her carefully. He needed to make sure she was sure, because he knew she wouldn’t like what he was going to say next.

“Even if we have to go back to Wabang?”

Please like and reblog if you enjoyed this! Feedback in the comments are also highly appreciated!

• • • • •

GIF a-writer-and-a-reader

Disclaimer I do not own Outer Range or any of its characters. Please do not copy my work or translate without my permission.

[kaizey]

I think as well its worth pointing out, because theres already been a cascade of usual unfunny jokes from non-speakers listening to De Selby (mostly americans) about "this spelling is so fantasy/weird" or "theres no way thats how its sounds" or "hahah speaking garlic"

Theres all fun and humour to be found in anything, but for alot of us, gaeilgeoirí or neamh-gaeilgeoirí, the legacy and current state of irish is still a touchy subject with affects in the modern day. Especially for many of us who are stuck living in the 6 counties

Please try and remember that this is our language that has existed for over 2000 years, and for several centuries was on its death bed at the hands of the English systematically trying to culturally genocide us into being "non-irish", because its the closest they could see us to being british. The history of the likes of the staute of Kilkenny, the penal laws, hedge schools, tally sticks, An Gorta Mór etc kept An Ghaeilge on a downward spiral until the 1900's. But even today, you already see that as a country, English has cemented its roots into Ireland, and while so many of us still speak our language and work on its growth, more than afew are content to let irish still be treated as a tourist draw or cutural decoration. Like a token "Fáilte" mass printed on trinkets or the names of roadsigns that few know the meaning of anymore, rather than a piece of our cutural soul thats still just hanging on

The case in the 6 counties in the North makes the topic even more personal. How many outside this country wouldnt have known that it wasnt until December 2022 that Gaeilge was officially allowed official status as a language in the North. This menat that it technically officially ended the english-imposed Administration of Justice Act, which meant if you were to carry out any legal activity in irish, filled in legal forms in irish or spoke irish in a courtroom, you would be fined for every utterance. The act was in place since 1737. This is also in a place where for nearly all of the 20th century, especially during the troubles, you could find yourself on the recieving end of a beating or potential murder if you were found to have an irish name or background and were in the wrong part of town. There is a reason so many irish families in the North anglicised their surnames during this time

People outside Ireland can have a romantacism or feeling of fantasy for our island and language, because honestly, yeah, theres a deep, deeply rooted level of awe and wonder woven into An Ghaeilge, with words and ideas that truly arent possible to express in english with the same poetry and feeling as you can when you truly speak Gaeilge ó chroí. But please. Show it the respect it deserves. Learn some of our history and the context for why something as simple as Hozier writing a verse in it means so much. Its a living languge, rooted in the soil of our home, thats had so much stripped of it. But still; Maireann sé fós

Anyway; Stream Unreal Unearth. Keep languages alive. An Ghaeilge abú

On Gaelic vs Gaeilge vs Irish

Since several people have been asking me stuff regarding this today, and with Unreal Unearth adding to the eyes on it, I wanted to lend an irish voice to the pile already saying this, but it can be useful for non-irish people to learn (mostly americans)

Anyway; Gaelic vs Gaeilge vs Irish

Gaelic: This is infact an english word. As béarla, ok? It derives itself from the irish Gael, which itself comes from the old irish Goídel, an adapted word from old welsh meaning "wildman" or "forestman". In our actual language, the word for 'gaelic' is itself 'gaelach'

Gaelic, also, in the broader sense, is more than just language. Its a word covering the Goidelic languages originating in Ireland, and of wider Gaelic culture across Ireland, Scotland and Mannin. These are widely disparate places in our regional cultures, lexicons and yes, language.

Irish: The english word for our language and by far what the majority of anyone here will refer to as our language when speaking about it i mBéarla

Gaeilge: The Linguonym for irish *in* irish. Its by far the second most encountered term youll hear anyone from here use when talking about irish other than the english word. See where the common term "as gaeilge" comes from

tl;dr Youre not technically incorrect for saying Gaelic when referring to the irish language. But its much less accurate than just calling it irish, and in our language, we refer to it as Gaeilge (general pron. Gw-ale-guh)

Anyway, Go raibh math agat and hope youve been enjoying the Unreal Unearth as much as I have. Definitely not emotionally wrecked by it or anything

Slán

[aggressive-positivity-network]

Okay, so you said I could send an ask for headcanons about the childhoods of some specific merc(s)... I think I would really like to read your headcanons about Soldier’s and Engineer’s childhood :)

Thanks in advance and I hope your well.

Ooooh…I’ve been waiting for this! And thank you for being specific and not just saying “the rest of them.” Sometimes I get overwhelmed with nine specific mercs to write for. Your specifics are much appreciated.

****************

Soldier:

Soldier doesn’t talk very much about his childhood - whether it’s because something happened or he just doesn’t remember it, no one can tell. It’s nowhere in his file, either…he refused to do anything except tell fantastic tales of a fictional youth.

However, in a rare streak of almost lucidity, he spouted off the entirety of his younger years, much to the team’s surprise. Usually, if anyone asked directly, he changed the subject.

But now he described everything in vivid detail. And, with a bit of research from Miss Pauling, everything fell into place.

Apparently he had been born in a small military town in Georgia. His father was overseas, leaving he and his mother alone in their small yellow house.

In order to make ends meet, his mother worked at a nearby factory, mostly leaving Soldier to fend for himself and the house.

“Can you be a big, strong soldier like daddy for me?”

Soldier would always agree, finding his own food, his own entertainment, and his own friends. No matter what happened, he never bothered his mom. If anything, his job was to protect her.

That’s why, when his stomach started hurting and his arms and legs ached, he said nothing about it.

When he forgot the chores he was supposed to do and even the names of his friends, he didn’t bring it up.

When he felt tired all the time and some days could barely get out of bed, he just chalked it up to laziness like his mother did.

It turns out the factory they were next to was polluting the water next to the house with dangerous amounts of lead, which soon overcame Soldier’s immune system of steel.

He could barely remember anything anymore, and he became more and more distraught every day. Sometimes he would forget where he was and run outside, then get lost in the woods, only coming back once he remembered where he was supposed to be.

Soldier began to wear one of his father’s old helmets after his mom commented on his red eyes and the dark circles around them. He didn’t want to worry her. Besides, it helped bring back a few memories if he ever got lost again.

Finally, it got to the point where he didn’t even remember his mother, or his promise to her. He began to wander farther and farther away from home.

One day, he didn’t come back at all.

Out in the world with not a single memory to his name, Soldier wandered far and wide. He usually slept in barns and old, abandoned houses, cut off from most people.

Occasionally, he would find a family that wanted to “raise him as their own,” only to turn him away after finding him too difficult to care for.

He had frequent nightmares, ate little due to his unresolved stomach issues, and could barely walk ten feet without forgetting where he was going.

If he accidentally wandered into the same house twice, he would be chased out with either a broom or a gun - usually the latter.

He became “the demon child” in some counties, and “g*psy kid” in others, due to his long, unkempt hair, hidden eyes, and odd habits.

It even got to the point where Soldier couldn’t sleep on anyone’s property because he would be actively fought off like a wolf or a bear.

His only pleasure was an old movie theater that, as he recovered from his lead poisoning, remembered the location of and frequently snuck into.

The only thing that played were romance movies - which, like many children, Soldier hated - and war movies, which he watched over and over again with starving eyes.

Because of these movies, a single memory from his mother’s house came to him. A woman, tall and muscular from hard labor, giving him a shiny badge to hold, asking him to be a strong soldier like his father.

And thus began his life-long dream of becoming a military officer.

He trained according to what he knew from the films…which was mostly running, doing jumping jacks, and occasionally rolling around in the mud.

This only served to distance him further from his fellow human beings, but he didn’t care. Soldier had a mission, and he was going to do it well.

But the biggest change was his hair.

He had started cutting it off with sharpened rocks, but he was always saving up coins he found for a “proper army cut.”

Finally, he had quite the collection in a dirty mason jar, and marched into the barber shop in his town to ask for a haircut.

The manager was appalled, and at first refused, but Soldier stood his ground.

“Civilian, I’ll have you know that by denying a soldier with a haircut, you are denying America one of its best fighters! I can’t curdle the enemy’s blood looking like a hippie!”

After a short yelling match that, of course, Soldier won, the manager decided it would be in his best interest to comply.

He walked out of that shop with no hair on his head, but a huge grin on his face. Next stop, the ranks.

Soldier went from draft office to draft office, applying for and being denied entrance to the army for his obvious lack of mental stability.

This is when the personal retelling ended, since Soldier became very upset by the memory of his recruitment failures, but Miss Pauling concluded that he just bounced from state to state until Mann Co. found him, quote, “sitting in an alleyway, eating army draft paperwork while sobbing uncontrollably.”

Engineer:

Engineer also never really talks about his childhood, but both Medic and Spy (Spy knows everything about everyone on the team) know that’s for a good reason.

He grew up in a trailer community near an almost ghost town in Texas.

His father was an abusive car mechanic with a mean streak a mile wide and a shop full of failed inventions. His mother wasn’t any better - she was bitter and reclusive, only really coming out of her room to pick a fight with her husband.

However, what Engie lacked in family, he more than made up for in friends.

He had a rag-tag, Rugrats-esque team of pals from all walks of life: Rhapsody, the daughter of a struggling porn star; Tom, the son of two farmers wiped out by blight; Cici, an adopted girl that could barely walk into her trailer without a black eye and a string of slurs; Quinn, the nervous child of a single mother that serves as guidance to the other kids; And Fred, who didn’t seem to have any family, but had become a greaser big brother to all of them.

Together, they explored the desert near the trailer park, pooled their resources to feed and support each other, and used their individual strengths to get through each day.

Engineer, whom everyone affectionately called “Big Dell,” snuck parts from his dad’s workshop for his own creations.

By the time he was twelve, he could make a small, running engine for the soapbox cars his friends frequently raced.

No toy, piece of clothing, glasses, or tool was out of his line of expertise.

One day, though, upon finding that some of his parts were missing, Engineer’s dad gave him a terrible beating that broke a few of his fingers and left a huge gash near his eye.

Since then, he refused to fix, make, or even touch a tool.

He wouldn’t tell anyone what happened, but they could make a pretty good guess, since they knew where the scraps and parts had come from.

The whole group was furious with Engineer’s dad - their Big Dell was funny, smart, and was more loving than every family member they had combined. Even Quinn was red in the face.

They wanted to break into his dad’s workshop and destroy all of his inventions, just to teach him a lesson, but they knew Engineer would take the fall for it.

Instead, they rummaged through trash cans, searched their toy chests, and looked under their trailers to find things Engineer could use.

They waited until his birthday to unveil the massive pile of supplies they had stowed away.

Engineer immediately dropped to his knees and began to cry, and everyone else dogpiled him for a huge hug.

As the creme de la creme, they gave him a pair of welding goggles - the same welding goggles he wears to this day, having modified them so they still fit his growing body.

With his healed fingers and renewed spirit, he made each of them a gift: a toy car for Rhapsody, a skull ring for Fred, a full set of candle wax crayons for Cici, a chewable necklace for Quinn so they wouldn’t chew on their collar, and a mini-planter for Tom.

But Engineer was given the greatest gift - confidence in his own abilities and that he can be and was appreciated for more than his services.

This gave him the drive to build bigger and better things, which his friends happily assisted in creating.

Engie’s best memories are with that motley crew of scrawny, beaten-up kids.

But, as he became a teenager, the abuse grew worse by the day.

He was often kept in his dad’s garage to fix cars in sweltering heat and with nothing to show for his work except threats of what would happen if a customer complained.

His mother finally grew bitter enough to pick on him, wondering aloud and pointedly if she had made a mistake by having him, then immediately contradict herself by wailing in his arms about how she’s the most awful mother in the world, and how she would be gone soon, and then nobody would have to deal with her anymore.

Engie grew more and more distant from his friends as they either moved out, ran away, or, in Rhapsody’s case, died.

He thought of just shutting the garage door and turning on a car a couple times, but he would always return to his memories of the hidden cave of goodies his friends had collected or the many inventions they had helped him build.

It just wasn’t worth it.

On a night when his depression and self-doubt was especially bad, he decided to build a personal invention for the first time in years - a small, robotic chicken made out of bent gears and empty oil cans.

He worked on it for a few weeks, but made the mistake of leaving it on a work table once it was finished.

Engie came to work the next morning with his dad ready to chew him out. But, before any finger could be lifted against his son, he was interrupted by a sweet older couple that was having their tires replaced.

“Now, Ethan, ain’t that just the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life?”

“Hm?”

“That there chicken statue over there! It looks like it could very well get up and start peckin’ for worms, don’tcha think?”

Engie looked at the couple, then at his dad, then at his chicken. He slowly lifted it from the table and turned the key.

It started to slowly lean forward, then took a few steps on it’s long, spring-loaded legs. The neck went down, and the chicken’s rusty beak began to scrape at the pavement.

Now he had the husband’s attention.

“Didja build that yourself, son, or did your daddy help ya?”

Engineer looked at his dad for a split second before answering.

“My own sweat ‘n blood, sir. My daddy says I should stop wastin’ time on ugly thing-a-ma-jigs an’ put my hands to somethin’ worth doin’.”

The man smiled. “Well, this ‘ugly thing-a-ma-jig’ shows real skill. We could use somebody like you, once we train you up a bit.”

“Now hold on a damn - !” his father interjected, but was silenced with a cold stare.

“We’ll put ya through a state-of-the-art school, then put ya straight inta the work force. You can build whatever you like…and you’ll have a lot better materials than rusty tin. Whaddaya say, son?”

Engineer just nodded, and the man grabbed his hand and shook it.

“We’ll keep in touch.”

Engineer left that trailer park at age seventeen, leaving his fuming father and drunken mother behind.

He only stopped to visit Rhapsody’s grave before embarking on his new life.

There is still a stone plate with a message carved into it next to the headstone. If you brush off the leaves and dig out the moss, you can see Engie’s parting words:

“A friendship with you and the rest of the gang is the greatest thing I ever built. -Big Dell”