#its all over my twitter feed and i laugh at every single post about it im not kidding

[akimojo]

i havent even gotten into the ffvii remake yet and im completely out of the loop on rebirth, but cloud in beach wear riding on a segway has to be the funniest goddamn thing ive seen all year

[arcanadreams]

That time you and your demon boyfriend went viral

hi yes hello obey me fandom!! my name is Gabbi and i have never played a single second of the actual game but i have read enough fanon content for the past year to have this idea swimming around in my head and now i am finally letting this accursed thing out of my brain and putting it in yours

also i’m only doing the brothers because any more than that and i’d have an aneurysm probably. oh and shoutout to @obeythebutler and @beels-burger-babe for inspiring me with their works to feel brave enough to write for this fandom

Lucifer:

You and Lucifer go viral on Asmo’s Devilgram story!

You’re in the kitchen helping Asmo with dinner duty and singing along to one of your playlists of human realm music that you like to show him.

Asmo starts filming your cute little dance while you stir the pot on the stove because you are just adorable!

About ten seconds into him filming, Lucifer appears in the doorway with quite the stern look on his face. You know, the one that comes right before a “MAMMOOOOOON” and strikes fear into the heart of all those with functioning eardrums. That one.

He opens his mouth, presumably to tell y’all to shut the fuck up, but then there’s a lull in the music and the eldest can hear your voice ever so slightly above the song’s vocalist and he freezes.

Man stops in his tracks like someone just smacked him in the face with a midair volleyball.

Asmo can be heard stifling a laugh behind his phone.

Lucifer’s face gets so soft and he almost, almost, loosens his metal-rod-through-the-ass posture before you notice him and give a little wave and ask if you and Asmo were being too loud like the considerate darling you are.

Lucifer clears and his throat and says something like, “No, you aren’t. I was just coming to check on how dinner is coming along,” and leaves, after which Asmo immediately presses the post button.

Screenshots of Lucifer’s heart eyes for you go absolutely viral because every demon on Devilgram goes absolutely feral for seeing the eldest demon brother lose his dignified composure. It becomes a meme template. “Get you someone who looks at you like Lucifer looks at MC” and “me at the delivery demon when he shows up with my spicy bat wings” posts become commonplace. (Asmo thinks the memes are totally worth getting strung up with Mammon for laughing at them.)

Mammon:

Much like Lucifer, you and Mammon end up going viral off Asmo’s Devilgram. (Noticing a pattern here?) 

He pulls a silly prank on your asses and honestly I don’t know how you fell for it. But hey, they say “idiots in love” for a reason, so...

You and Asmo are sitting in the common room of the House of Lamentation just chillin. Well, he’s chillin, you’re on the floor studying for an upcoming exam.

The video starts in the middle of a conversation you and the avatar of lust were having.

“No, Asmo,” you say. “Mammon and I don’t use pet names for each other.” Now that’s just a darn lie, and every demon and crow within ten miles of Mammon and you together knows it.

“Really? I find that very hard to believe, MC.~” 

You sigh in response to Asmo’s teasing. “Okay, he has a lot for me but I’m just not much of a pet name person, y’know?” The rest of the exchange goes like this:

“Oh, I totally get it.” *pause* “Hey MC, what do human world bees make again?”

“Honey.”

Cue a sheepish Mammon sticking his head in the doorway at the bluntness of your tone when you answered Asmo.

“Yeah, babe?” he looks like a puppy left on the side of a highway oh my god hUG HIM-

Asmo turns the camera back to his smug ass face and in the background you can be heard tripping on the damn carpet trying to get up and hug your mans. (”MAMMON GET OVER HERE SO I CAN HUG YOU” “W-WHAT? I THOUGHT YA WERE MAD AT ME?!?!?!?!”)

Leviathan:

Streamer Levi? Streamer Levi.

You guys go viral the first time you make an appearance on one of Levi’s weekly (insert cool Devildom streaming service name here) streams. 

It’s completely unintentional. You had been asking him for weeks to play with him on there, but he’s the avatar of envy after all. He doesn’t like sharing his partner, even if it’s with random strangers who have no real access to you.

However, he has his stream on a Thursday instead of a Friday one week, and you come into his room carrying dinner because 1) You didn’t realize he was streaming and 2) No matter what he was doing, the boy needed to eat. It wasn’t unusual for you to bring him dinner, so you had no idea why he was blushing and stammering even more than usual this time in particular. Boy was speaking in beached whale trying to tell you what was wrong.

Then you notice his screen. Oh! “Hi chat!” You wave, setting Levi’s food down on his desk in front of his keyboard. “M-MC!” He full-on whines, slamming a hand over his mouth afterwards when he remembers his viewers could hear that.

Honestly, they’d meme the fuck out of him if it weren’t for the fact that they are FINALLY SEEING HIS HENRY!!! THE MYSTERIOUS MC!!!

Chat is bombarding you with questions while you make Levi eat dinner. And by make him eat dinner, I mean literally feeding this man forkfuls/spoonfuls while he games because you love how flustered he gets when you do that. 

Does it impact his score? Absolutely. Does he care? Not really when you’re pampering him like that.

You start answering chat’s questions about you while he’s chewing so he can’t tell you to stop LMAO-

You’re a natural on stream. The VOD becomes the most popular on Levi’s account in a matter of hours and soon cute highlights compilations of you and him on that stream start making the rounds on Devildom Twitter.

Satan:

There was buildup to Satan going viral, similar to Levi in a way. 

Satan does have a Devilgram, but it’s basically a white woman’s Instagram with added book reviews for variety. Unless you’re a reader his account is pretty boring: candles, books, fireplaces, and cats.

However, after you two started reading together fairly often he began posting pictures of your legs draped over his while you sat together. They’d always be captioned with vague ass pretentious literary criticism. 

This goes on for months, and he gains a lot of (horny) followers after the leg pics start up. He doesn’t really get why but you both joke that it’s because you have some damn nice legs and I mean neither of you are complaining about the new following.

You two go viral when he finally shows your face, entirely by accident.

The post is a video, which is already strange for him and grabs attention. In it, you’re scoffing and reading an excerpt of a book, mocking its understanding of female anatomy.

“I’m quoting here, Satan: ‘her breasts bouncing around like giant pacmen.’ I’M SORRY?? THAT ISN’T HOW BOOBS WORK SIR. WHY ARE MEN ALLOWED TO WRITE?” 

(fun fact that is a very real quote from a very real book I really read last month pls save me)

Originally the camera is focused on your body, with your head out of frame to protect your privacy, but your righteous anger made Satan laugh. Like, a real laugh. The one that makes you and everyone in earshot wonder if he truly was never an angel cause he sure as hell laughs like one but anyway-

When he threw his head back, his DDD angled up just a tad without him noticing, and your face was in view for like .2 seconds. Screenshots of it are making the rounds on Devilgram almost immediately: FINALLY THE LEGS’ OWNER HAS BEEN FOUND.

Satan apologizes profusely but you honestly find it funny and you two opt to just start taking selfies while reading with both of your faces in them from now on. 

Asmodeus:

I’m gonna be real with you: you and Asmo go viral all the time. Pretty much everything Asmo posts can be considered viral because of his social media following and his status as one of the seven avatars of sin.

However, there are some fairly cute highlights to be pointed out among the times you were both featured in a post that blew up.

Your favorite is probably that time Asmo livestreamed on of you guys’ ‘Nail Nites,’ as you call them.

You’re both on the floor, doing your nails and kicking your feet back and forth while talking to chat. A lot of the questions are about your relationship, and there’s a lot of flirting back and forth between the two of you.

A particular clip of the stream does blow the fuck up on Devilgram, though, when someone screen records it and posts it with a bunch of heart emojis edited over it.

“’What colors do you think best describe each other?’ Ooo, that’s a good one, chat!” Asmo claps his hands together excitedly, making sure to be  careful of his nails.

Pretty much everyone expected you to say pink, but you surprised both your boyfriend and your viewers when, after a pensive few moments, you replied with “Hmm...probably yellow or orange.”

“Can I ask why, darling?” Asmo tilts his head in confusion. I mean, yeah, those colors look good on him, but he doesn’t wear them often so he’s wondering about your thought process. 

“Well, in the human world those colors often represent happiness, optimism, and positivity. You’re always the cheerful presence I need in my life when things get hard, so you have the vibe of those colors.”

Asmo proceeds to burst into tears and hug you, messing up both of your nails and prolonging the stream since you both have to start over. But neither of you particularly care. 

Fun fact: Asmo has the clip that demon made of that portion of the stream saved on his DDD and watches it whenever he feels sad.

Beelzebub:

Beel and you probably go the most viral out of everybody. Like this moment is an entire phenomenon across the Devildom internet. 

It’s a video, or well, multiple videos, taken at the end of a Fangol game that Beel’s team had just won. Everyone is cheering and going crazy, yourself included, and you just really wanted to congratulate your boyfriend.

So, like the rational person you are, you elect to climb up onto the railing of the bleachers and wave to get his attention. 

You were absolutely fine up there, and sat all comfortably motioning Beel over to you. He notices, of course, and jogs over, standing right beneath you and looking up. (Back where you were sitting, Mammon is screeching like a hyena in heat and Belphie, who is laying down, has one eye open to glare at him. The youngest knows Beel would never let you hurt yourself; you’re fine.)

A bunch of assorted demons at the game has started filming while you were sat atop the railing since you were rather noticeable. Therefore, there’s a shit ton of different angles of the adorable events that follow:

You slide off the railing, landing right in Beel’s waiting arms bridal style. You’ve got this brilliant smile on your face as you pull his helmet off. None of the DDDs filming can hear it over the crowd noise, but Beel asks you why you just went through all that trouble and you tell him it’s because you wanted to tell him how proud you are.

Soft boy’s chest puffs up and he smiles this big cheesy smile at you reach up to run a hand through his hair. You feel him practically purr at the contact, and with a laugh you pull him in and plant a big ole smooch on him.

The crowd, at least those of them that can see, scream. Everyone is running high on adrenaline and happy emotions; something that cute causes a ruckus!! When you pull away Beel proceeds to put you on his shoulders and you celebrate with him and the rest of his team.

The videos of you two being adorable go completely viral and there are some threads dedicated to stockpiling every single angle taken of the event. Beel is completely oblivious to the attention but you have a lot of them saved on your DDD.

Belphegor:

If you think Belphegor has any sort of social media presence whatsoever then you are sorely mistaken. (Well okay he actually does run some anonymous troll accounts to meme on Lucifer’s posts but that’s neither here nor there-)

Therefore, naturally, you two go viral off of Asmo’s Devilgram. 

Okay so someone in the obey me tag the other say headcanoned that Belphie will go out of his way to nap in ridiculous places and my brain really took that and RAN WITH IT.

So what happens is that Belphie will fall asleep in the fucking weirdest places. I’m talking on top of the fridge, underneath the dinner table, on top of bookshelves...you name it, he has slept there, no matter the effort it takes to get there in the first place. 

And, ever since you two started dating, you would join him. Sometimes it involved putting yourself at risk of great bodily harm, but the little smile he gave when you he saw you fucking scaling the countertop to reach him made it worth it.

So anyway, since Beel adores the both of you to no end, he takes pictures whenever he sees you two napping together, whether or not it is in a crazy place. He sends these to the family group chat because he thinks they’re adorable.

Over a span of weeks to months, Asmo has built up a stock of images of you and Belphie cuddles up in seemingly impossible places. Once he has about ten or so, he posts a compilation of them to his Devilgram with some cheesy ass caption like “The things we do for love <3″.

They become a meme SO QUICKLY. Like UNBELIEVABLY quickly. 

The picture of you and Belphie sleeping on top of a bookshelf, in particular, is a big hit. Memes abound.

“If my girl doesn’t climb up a bookshelf to cuddle my ass, she don’t love me.” “Get yourself a partner who scales bookshelves just to be with your ass.” Etc etc...Belphie doesn’t give a shit but you laugh at a lot of them so he sees that as a good outcome.

[comfyswitcherblanketfort]

please please a part 2 of that gamer!geralt au, them doing something like Q&A

Nonie, I hope you know what you signed up for. This got out of hand lmao. like 2.4k of Q&A kind of out of hand. 

Warnings: swearing, talk of drinking to excess, kinda spicy questions, lil kisses, idk how but I meant for this to be goofy and horny and it got kinda soft? what’s new?

____________

“Holy shit,” Geralt sat staring at his phone as he mindlessly stirred pasta.

“I swear to god, if you found a way to burn noodles-” Jaskier turned away from the blender to wave a wooden spoon covered in pesto puree.

Geralt shook his head and held his phone up to him, scrolling through the replies to a tweet as he did, going on for ages as Jaskier’s jaw slowly got closer to the floor.

“What are those for?!”

“I put up a poll for a boyfriend Q&A or a game review and not a single person has voted for the game review.” Geralt was still scrolling through questions people wanted answered as he watched Jaskier’s face go from shock to confusion to a smug grin. 

“They love me,” he sang, kicking his heel up as he turned back to the pasta sauce.

Geralt rolled his eyes and started screenshotting some of the less invasive questions, shaking his head and muttering, “Course they do.”

-

Geralt pressed record, waited a moment, and heaved a dramatic, long-suffering sigh, “You guys literally didn’t even give me a choice on this one,” he reached off frame and scruffed Jaskier, plopping him down on the couch with him. 

Jaskier didn’t stay where he was put for even a moment, using his momentum to bounce up onto Geralt’s lap with a shit-eating grin, “Oh? Are we rolling?”

Geralt dropped his forehead to Jaskier’s shoulder, stifling a laugh, “This is gonna be a long one.”

“Yeah, it is,” Jask agreed, then turned to the camera, stroking Geralt’s hair, “My fans want more!”

“OH-kay,” Geralt manhandled Jaskier to sit next to him which earned him a pout and a leg draped over his lap as he continued his intro, “I’ve got a bunch of questions from twitter. I didn’t even have to confirm which video we would do, you guys just went straight for the kill. I picked a few, Jask picked a few, neither of us knows which ones the other picked.” he turned to see Jaskier wiggle his eyebrows at the camera, “Why am I thinking you picked the raunchy ones?”

The brunet pretended to be offended before he smirked, “Only a few.”

Geralt rolled his eyes. “Of course,” he nudged Jask with his shoulder and opened up his phone to his screenshots, “Okay! First up is AdamSandlersBitch, nice name. They asked what Jaskier’s favorite gaming console and game to play is.” he turned to Jaksier with raised eyebrows.

His boyfriend cringed, “My.. my phone? I don’t know? I play a lot of Candy Crush while I listen to podcasts?”

Geralt smiled sweetly, “Wait what about Stardew Valley? I thought you started that?”

“I did!” Jaskier brightened up for a moment before he deflated again, “But I got confused and then the ADHD made me bake cookies.”

“Those were good cookies. I’ll play with you if you want?” Geralt’s normal ‘streamer dude’ persona melted away while he played with the rips on Jaskier’s jeans. 

Jask leaned forward and kissed his temple, “I’d love that.” 

Geralt blushed, even after years, Jaskier’s affection still caught him off guard. 

“Mkay! My turn!” Jaskier flashed his devilish grin and read, in his most obnoxious voice, “Dwn2Clwn said ‘do you two live together? Have you said ‘i love you’? And who tops?’”

Geralt’s mouth twisted into an upside-down U as he stared at Jaskier in muted surprise, “Honestly, not as bad as I expected.”

Jaskier looped his arm around Geralt’s, “I’m starting off easy.”

Geralt let his mock-disapproving gaze linger just a bit before he answered, “The living together is kind of new-like a few months. This one said ‘I love you’ on, what? The fourth date? Fifth?”

“Fourth.”

“No, it was the fifth, Eskel locked himself out on the fourth. Remember?”

“Shit you’re right,” Jaskier gave the camera a stern look, “In my defense, we’d been friends for a good four years before this. I wasn’t just confessing my love to a tinder date - though I have done that before.”

Geralt nodded, “That was very amusing.”

Jaskier tapped his nose, “Don’t avoid the last part, darling.”

Geralt huffed and stared down the camera, and, in the most matter of fact tone possible, said, “We switch. Compromise, folks. Can’t have one person doing all the work all the time.”

Jaskier nodded sagely, patting Geralt's chest, “We got a pow-”

Geralt clamped his hand over Jaskier’s mouth, 100% sure he was going to say ‘power bottom pillow princess’, “Nope. I’ll get demonetized for that.”

“But not who tops?” Jaskier asked through Geralt’s fingers.

He just shrugged, “I don’t make the rules.”

Jaskier tapped his phone and raised his eyebrows, telling him to move to the next question. 

“Mis- Mischanication? Shit I hope I said that right, Mischanication asked, ‘would you ever get a pet together?’ We did! Her name is Roach and she’s a little shit! I told Jaskier not to feed her, but he did, now we have the snuggliest, crankiest cat I’ve ever met!” 

Jaskier had gotten up to pluck Roach from her perch on the windowsill when Geralt had read the question and plopped down with her as Geralt finished his proud speech, “She’s not a little shit! She’s just delicate! Isn’t that right, darling?”

Geralt scratched under her chin and cooed, “You are a nasty little dragon baby, aren't you?! Just a little garbage child! Yes, you are. We love the tiny demon beast.”

“Geralt!”

He snickered and kissed Jaskier’s hair, “Next question, love.”

Jaskier grumbled something about positive reinforcement as Roach scampered back to her cat tree and he unlocked his phone for his next tweet, “This darling wants to remain anonymous,” Geralt gave him some serious side-eye at that, “they said ‘I think I’m in love with the flower twink, where can I find one of my own?’”

Geralt frowned at the camera and pulled Jaskier onto his lap, holding him close and snuggling into his chest, almost growling, “Hands off.”

Jaskier giggled, brushing Geralt’s hair out of his face as he talked to the camera, “You heard the man. Unfortunately, I was not mass-produced and I’ve been spoken for.”

Geralt looked up at him with what could only be called suspicious puppy eyes, “You picked that one just to sit in my lap didn’t you?”

“Yes. And because I want to change my socials to ‘flower twink’.” 

“Do it,” Geralt kept Jaskier on his lap as he swiped to his next question, “Eggsfuckingsuck - heh, my dad hates eggs- Eggsfuckingsuck says, ‘what is the most embarrassing thing you’ve caught each other doing/saying?’ Oh boy, do I have a story for you!”

"Oh I couldn't say the thing but you can tell this story!?" 

"...you have a point... Check my insta stories. I'll put it there after I post this." 

Jaskier nodded, ever so pleased, and turned to the camera, "Our dear Yennefer of sorceryglammour once beat Geralt at trivia night when the theme was 'video games'." 

“We did shots before we went to the bar and she goaded me and Lambert into a chugging competition before the round started. I’m telling you, she planned this. Yen is ruthless.” Geralt desperately tried to justify his defeat but Jaskier was having none of it. 

“She’s mostly harmless, plus I have video evidence from that night. You weren’t that far gone.”

“Pull it up! Let’s settle it.”

Jaskier patted Geralt’s head like one would a toddler, “I’d have to get my old laptop out. Later, darling.”

Geralt had a smug look on his face, “That means he doesn’t have it anymore.”

“Next question!” Jaskier squeaked, not at all changing the subject. 

Geralt shrugged, “If you admit I won that one.”

“It’s not a competition!” Jaskier laughed, looking down at him with that stupidly smitten look on his face.

“Hmmm…” Geralt tilted his chin up defiantly, “if you say so.”

Jaskier kissed him, lingering a little bit more than could be considered chaste, “I do.” 

Geralt looked up at him, batting his eyelashes, “Fine then, next question.”

Jaskier handed him his phone and he read it off leaning his head on Jaskier’s shoulder, “CountryBumpkin42 asked if we play any instruments. I play the recorder very poorly, but Jask plays everything.”

“Not everything, but yes, I could cover a Trans Siberian Orchestra song if I had a pedalboard with enough loop settings.” Jaskier preened. 

“And more,” Geralt added, counting on his fingers as he spoke, “In this house alone he has two pianos, three different types of guitars, a drumset, a violin and fiddle, a flute and piccilo, an oboe, a mandolin, a lute, bongos, saxophone, clarinet, tambourine, trumpet, and xylophone. Did I get them all?”

Jaskier glanced from side to side with a guilty look, “Ah… no, I bought a bass sax that showed up last night.”

“Oh, did Thursday at 3 decide they wanted to switch after all?”

“Yeah! She got the third chair as a freshman on a loaner instrument! I’m very proud!”

Geralt seemed to remember they were recording and turned back to the camera, “J teaches music at the university and does private lessons.” 

“It’s how I can afford such a pretty trophy boyfriend,” Jaskier teased, ruffling Geralt’s hair and earning a little chuckle.

“Mkay, what do you have next?”

Jaskier smoothed Gearalt’s hair back down as he read the next question, “3R4108F6!J asks if we have any cute nicknames for each other.”

Geralt’s eyebrows nearly flew past his hairline, “J has a new one for me almost every day.”

“Its true,” Jaskier nodded, “I am a slut for cute nicknames. This morning was Ger Bear, one of my faves. I called him Thumbs for a bit, I lovingly call him Dumb Fuck rather often.”

“And he is Dip Shit, it’s balanced. I usually just shorten names? Jask or J is usually it, right?” Geralt asked, shifting so Jaskier was sitting on the couch between his legs and they were both turned out toward the camera but very much still cuddling. 

“And when I’m being childish I get Alfie. But Geralt is much more deliberate and specific with his nicknames. It’s a bit of a friendship level up when he uses nicknames.”

Geralt frowned at him, “I do that?”

Jaskier giggled, “You never noticed?”

He tilted his head, giving Jaskier a quizzical look, “Not at all.”

Jaskier cupped Geralt’s cheek, “You’re so cute.”

Geralt blushed again, leaning into the touch just a tad, “Who’s turn is it?”

“Yours,” Jaskier hummed, pressing a soft kiss to his forehead. 

“Okay,” Geralt blushed even more, “I had this one as an alternate, but uh, Yen asked what we’d name our first kid?” 

Jaskier leaned into Geralt’s shoulder and hummed as he thought for a moment, “I always like Blake or Spencer, but I seem to remember you saying something about old world traditional names?”

Geralt nodded, absentmindedly running his fingers up and down Jaskier’s arm, “My grandma was hoping each of us boys would be a girl and wanted mum to name us Cirilla every time. I quite like it, but I’m rather open as long as I don’t know someone with the name. I really like Eric?” 

“Oo, I like Eric.”

“But you like the neutral names.”

“I do, but it’s your hypothetical kiddo too.”

Geralt gave him a little squeeze, “There’s time for that later. What’s your next one?”

Jaskier snorted when he looked at his phone, “What are your guys’ love languages?”

Geralt just looked down at Jask, completely entangled in his arms, then up to the camera, “I’m gonna hazard a guess at physical touch.” 

“Yeah, I think that’s a safe bet,” Jaskier giggled, “I haven’t taken the quiz in years, but I was that and gifts.”

“Oh, yeah. Physical touch and words of affirmation. I got like a 0 on acts of service and gifts, but I really like giving gifts.” 

“Mhm, yes you do,” Jaksier wiggled his eyebrows, then turned to the camera, “I also had no idea you could have different giving and receiving languages till I met this one.”

Geralt nodded then turned to him with a slight frown, “you know I really thought your questions were going to be more graphic.”

“Oh, honey I saved the best for last,” Jaskier winked. 

“Fuck me,” Geralt grumbled before reading off his last question, “Cali852 asked what we did for Pride.”

Jaskier’s eyes lit up, “Oh Pride was fun. We watched the parade, of course, then Yen did our makeup and… and where did we go after that?”

Geralt looked like he’d been waiting for this, “We went to a club, where you ordered three kamakazis, knocked them all back, danced for twenty minutes, then I took you home.”

“N-no… we went to the beach, didn’t we?”

“That was the year before. We were going to go to the drag show at our regular bar too, but someone had just finished grading finals and went a little too hard.” 

Jaskier grinned, “Speaking of finals, time for the last question. I had a different one in mind but if the thing I cant say from earlier would get this demonetized then that defintitelyi would. So we’re going with ‘what is the wackest placy y’all banged?’”

Geralt snorted, “Shit who knows anymore?”

“Well there was the boat?”

“Or the train?”

“Nah, too standard. What about the cabin?”

“Heh, no I think your o-”

“I don’t have tenure darling,” It was Jaskier’s turn to slap his hands over Geralt’s mouth, “The answer is a dilapidated structure my parents still try to call a cabin out in the foothills.”

Geralt laughed and pulled his hand away, “Okay, that can be the answer.”

“Is that it? Now we just say bye?” Jaskier looked between Geralt and the camera.

Geralt shrugged, “Yeah. You wanna say the thing?”

Jaskier wiggled with a little pride and excitement, “Don’t forget to like and subscribe! Bye Fuckers!”

They both waved for a couple seconds before Geralt got up and turned the camera off. He popped out the memory card and was going to immediately start loading it onto his computer but Jask hooked his finger through a belt loop as he walked past and tugged him back down. 

“I’m tired. Snuggle with me.” 

Geralt hummed, “We just snuggled that whole time.”

Jaskier heaved a dramatic sigh, “I know and this is exhausting. I don’t know how you talk to a camera all day.”

Geralt stretched to set the chip on top of his laptop before collapsing back on top of Jaskier who had stretched the length of the couch, “Are you making fun of me?” he teased. 

Jaskier cupped his face between his hands and pulled him up for a deep kiss, “Oh never.” 

[kinktae]

beyond the story: bitchin’

Hi friends! I hope you are all staying safe and healthy during these tough times! I really wanted to put something out there as a thank you to just how much support Bitchin’ got. You guys really are incredible. So, although this story has come to an end, I wanted to properly close the Bitchin’ chapter by giving you all a behind the scenes look at Bitchin’ and everything that went into writing it. This includes hidden easter eggs, backstories, alternative plot-lines, and a short drabble of the Bitchin’ cast 10 years after the story’s end.

Without further ado, please enjoy and thank you again for all your love. You have all of mine.

CHAPTER ONE – PARTNERS

Ah, yes, the start of this whole wild ride. I’ve always loved the whole nerd/popular person trope in fanfics, so it was only a matter of time before I tried my hand at it too. One thing I was adamant about was not making this a “popular person turns nerd hot/confident/better” fic as its kind of one of my least favorite cliches. With that in mind, and knowing that I was going to allude to TATBILB’s contract, I decided that I wanted Y/N to gain as much from the deal as Jungkook did. No blackmail, no just agreeing for the hell of it – Y/N was going to further herself and her dreams given the opportunity.

The beginning of the chapter is where the two are most separated and dissimilar throughout the whole story. It wasn’t that they were fundamentally different, it was that they approached life differently. Y/N was frustrated at how superficial Jungkook seemed, because she believes there is much more to life than just kicking your feet up and cracking jokes.

On the other hand, Jungkook didn’t understand why Y/N was so tense and on guard. To him, life was meant to enjoy and not take so seriously. Which makes sense, given that he grew up with minimal rules and minimal worries (bare minimum partners wassup !) 

“So, do we have a deal? Partners?” There was mischievous timber to his words, the kind that made you feel as if this would all later come back to bite you in the ass.

Pushing that pestering thought away, you took his hand into yours, holding his eyes as you gave it a firm shake.

“Partners.”

God, this bit. I knew from the minute I wrote it that I was writing the ending of bitchin’ along with it. I knew this was exactly how I was going to end this story, bc the word partners has multiple means right? In chapter 1, this meant business partners, but in the final chapter… it means life partners. Idk, I’m just still really happy with this writing decision :D

CHAPTER TWO – THE CONTRACT

Dearest Yara. We meet her in chapter two don’t we? Yara is completely based off of my irl best friend Yara who is a writer and who helped me A LOT with this story. She was my biggest supporter throughout figuring out this crazy plot. It was initially only about seven parts, but with her help I managed to bump it up to 10! Everybody say thank you Yaraaaa.

You were angry, that much was evident to her. Yara was sat in your shared dorm’s living room, a thick blanket engulfing her small frame. You briefly glanced towards the TV, it was tuned into MTV, the familiar music video of Every Breath You Take by The Police playing, before directing your glare back onto the copper-haired girl.

The song reference is a direct allusion to writer Yara’s fic, which is one of my favorite fics by her. She was actively writing it around the start of our friendship so it only felt right to pay respects to her. The introduction of her character felt necessary imo bc I wanted to make sure Y/N had a life outside Jungkook. Plus, I got to use the scenes between the two girls as a way to reference the music and culture scene. Yara is especially a fan of the powerful women in the music industry at the time, i.e., Madonna, Annie Lennox, Cyndi Laupner, etc.) Yara is a raging feminist and believer in sexual freedom and libery for women, we do in fact have to stan.

“How old do you think your sister is?”

“Hey, don’t sass me. For your information, Lyanna still has all her Care Bear tapes. She threw a hissy fit when my mom tried to give them away last Christmas.” Yara recalled.

Lyanna is one of writer Yara’s past pseudonyms. She always used to joke about how whenever she read it, it was confusing because there was Y/N, Yara and Lyanna, which were technically all her lolol.

FUNNY STORY ABOUT THE CONTRACT I INSERTED INTO THIS PICTURE… Twitter found it and made it into somewhat of a meme because no one knew it came from a fic rip. I was actually rly embarrassed and even wrote some posts about how much twitter scared me on my blog LMAO. but THEN weirdly enough, I actually stumbled upon a small community on twitter who actually found my fic and would TWEET ABOUT IT!!! LIKE REACTIONS TO EACH UPDATE!!! I wish I could go back in time and remember how giddy I was the first time I found a tweet about my fic. The fanfic community on twitter gave me a new love for the site (which I had previously had removed myself from because of its toxicity) and I have met so many wonderful people because of it. People even made themselves a little twitter group chat to talk about my fics, and now we are all friends! I miss posting a chapter of bitchin’ and refreshing my twitter feed as all my mutuals would post memes and live tweet their reactions. God that made me so fucking happy.

CHAPTER THREE – THE ROLLERSKATING DATE

I love the bickering in this chapter, because unlike the bickering in the first chapter, it’s actually less hostile and more playful. Y/N is slowly letting her guard down to the very persistently charming Jungkook.

“Woah. Family of six, huh? So you have siblings then.” He noted.

“Yep. Three.”

“Tell me about them.”

Looking up from where you were slipping on your second skate, you met Jungkook’s eyes, surprised to see genuine interest in them.

I actually originally had Y/N brush him off here. I was going to wait until the drunk party scene for Y/N to open up about her family and relationship with her sisters. But then I kind of thought to myself… Why? Y/N made peace with it and doesn’t hold onto those insecurities anymore. And objectively, Jungkook hasn’t proven himself to be a bad person so… I let Y/N open herself up to him.

“Then there’s the twins, Rosa and Lia.”

“Hold on. Twins? Wait… did they go to our high school?” Jungkook asked, his interest in this conversation doubled.

“Yep. They were two grades above us.” You confirmed.

“Oh shit, yeah, I remember your sisters, they were mad hot.” Jungkook let out a low whistle, before stiffening, flashing you an apologetic look. “Uh, in a totally non-meathead way.”

You offered the scared-looking boy a small smile, shaking your head.

Some of y’all notice but, Rosa and Lia are a blatant homage to my name: Roselia. ACTUALLY some form of my name can be found in every one of the rewind series fics, including upcoming ones. I’ll give a cookie to whoever can find every single mention hehe.

“I told you it was dumb.” You laughed nervously.

It wasn’t that you cared much about what Jungkook thought but you had a feeling a guy like him, who was popular and carefree, wouldn’t be able to sympathize in the way you would like him to.

“No, I’m just… surprised, that’s all.”

Jungkook certainly was surprised. You had built up quite the impression on him from the very moment you two met. It was hard to imagine that the girl who was so unapologetically herself was ever unsure or insecure.

Somehow, the idea tugged at his heart, as if he understood you more if only just a little.

From the get go, Jungkook was extremely drawn to just how confident and secure Y/N was in herself. I knew I wanted Y/N to be unapologetically sure of herself and in her abilities. Something I didn’t want, however, was for frat boy!jungkook’s only personality traits to be liking sex and being a cocky bastard (although I am a big consumer of that trope heh). Jungkook is actually canonly incredibly insecure. He lacks a real sense of self, which is why he is so desperate for Kiri back. His relationship with Kiri at that time was a big part of what he thought was himself. He has somewhat of low self esteem tbh which is why he’ll go back to a woman who treated him unfairly. That’s why he comes off the way he does in the first chapter and why Y/N thinks he has a big ego... he’s overcompensating. He finds it so endlessly fascinating that Y/N, in all her confident glory, was actually once super insecure. He admires her all the more once she opens up about her past.

“Oh, Rosa is an intern for our hometown’s newspaper but between you and me those assholes don’t even let her write. She does coffee and burger runs for men in charge. And Lia sells ice cream at the mall.”

“What about your brother?” Jungkook asked.

“He’s training to be a cop just like my dad.”

“And your mom?”

“She works at a convenience store.”

All their careers resemble people in the latest Stranger Things season (Nancy, Steve, Hopper, and Joyce). Fun Cameo there.

“What’s wrong?” You wondered, following his eyes.

“October 16th, 1985. 6:48PM.”

“Yes. That’s today’s date and time. What about it?” You pressed, growing confused.

“Remember it.” He warned.

“Why?”

“It’s when I fell in love with you.”

This iconic line I actually got from the real Jeon Jungkook himself. While Jungkook wasn’t actually in love with Y/N here, it certainly was a cute way for him to express his admiration for her.

OH HERE’S A FUN FACT: the hickey scene at the end of this chapter where JK and Y/N kiss for the first time was actually supposed to be Yara giving Y/N the hickey like the best friend she is. Ultimately I went with JK giving it for... smut purposes... ≖‿≖ 

CHAPTER FOUR – THE HALLOWEEN PARTY

The decision for Y/N to be Freddie Krueger came from me planning to be him for Halloween. And I was! JK as Glen Lantz just followed naturally. I’ve seen some great edits of him as the character. Truly chef’s kiss.

I really liked that Jungkook came over to the girl’s dorm to get ready. I didn’t want a scene where Y/N was thrown into a situation she was uncomfortable with which is how much Nerd At A Party Scene go so made sure Jungkook stayed by her side throughout the part, going out of his way to introducing her to the people he cared about.

Tae’s character came in when I realized I needed a way to actually put Y/N’s event in motion. He was the missing link and BOY did you guys eat his character right up huh. Love that for me.

Another thing, the confrontation with Kiri was so hard to write guys, I reeaaaally struggle with girl conflict. GIRLS SHOULD SUPPORT GIRLS. However, not everyone gets along in real life so I went with Kiri being more along the lines of petty rather than outwardly a cunt to Y/N. Realistically, Kiri is popular and well liked among the greek life so being unkind to someone she hardly knows wouldn’t make sense. There’s definitely tension between these two but I tried my best to steer away from the typical cat fight/revenge porn/public humiliation trope most movies seem to follow.

CHAPTER FIVE – THE FIRST TIME

Introduction to Erik!!!! It was really important to me that Y/N had a life before Jungkook. That's why I wrote in Y/N having a fiancé. She’s not opposed to love, she just has reshifted her focus. She knows what she wants and is choosing to focus on that, which why when she realizes she’s falling for Kookie she’s so hesitant to admit it because she’s fallen down that road before. Even though Jungkook treats her with respect and acknowledges the parts of her she’s most proud of, she just isn’t willing to possibly give up her passions for love. Which is why she doesn’t immediately confess to him, even once she’s sure she loves him.

“I’m serious, nerd. You’re like… um… the sun!” Jungkook marveled, eyes growing full as the realization dawned on him.

“The sun?” You laughed.

“Yeah, like… you’re this bright, beautiful thing that seems like it’s here in front of me but is really light-years away.”

Jungkook was drunk, and although you were sure he was making more sense in his head, you couldn’t help but feel your face grow hot, unsure of how to react to his drunk analogy.

“You’re the sun, Y/N. You make the world turn for you. Never orbit for anyone else.”

And suddenly, you were kissing him, for no other reason other than you wanted to and that it felt like the right thing to do.

No real commentary here. Just love this bit. It’s probably my favorite interaction between them two ‧⁺◟( ᵒ̴̶̷̥́ ·̫ ᵒ̴̶̷̣̥̀ ) 

“Also… She’s, uh, currently dating Eunwoo.” You told Yara.

Your best friend blinked, silence falling over her.

“Yara?”

“Good for her.” She perked up almost forcibly. “Let her put up with his annoying ass.”

Yara could see the way your expression had turned dubious as if you didn’t believe her nonchalant act.

Yara turned up her nose defensively, “What?”

Ugh yes, some character development from Yara.... the flavor ! Yara (much like Y/N and JK) also struggles with love. She has a real fear of commitment and if far more comfortable with casual sex than relationships. She did develop actual feelings for Eunwoo, she just wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment so she cut him off. Fleed the scene if you will. Typical gemini smh my head.

"I don’t think the contract mentioned orgasms.” Jungkook smirked as you released his thumb.

“I say we let it slide.” You shrugged, leaning into him casually.

“You think?”

“Totally. Think of it as… a bonding activity.” You joked, resting your chin on his shoulder, peering up through your lashes.

“Damn, we’re really committed to this fake dating thing, huh.”

You laughed in the way that you hated, but Jungkook loved; it was loud and abrupt, but it genuine, and it was you.

“What can I say, I’m a method actor.” You sighed dramatically, causing Jungkook to grin before pressing a kiss to your nose, simply because he liked the way it always seemed to make you smile.

GOD THEY’RE SO WHIPPED FOR EACH OTHER ITS DISGUSTING!!!!!! I’m really happy I decided not to make sleeping together a big deal and I got a lot of feedback from you guys agreeing! I had a lot of fun with these two’s sex scenes knowing they could do it whenever they wanted.

CHAPTER SIX – THE STEM EVENT

I started the scene with smut BUT I wanted to point out that much of their time spent together is at Y/N dorm, Jungkook either napping, hanging out or doing work as Y/N would study like she always did. I liked the idea that Jungkook would get bored and would want attention from Y/N because she was so focused. Idk, I just wanted to write a love story about two people spending time together and figuring out how they fit in each other’s lives as opposed to some dramatic I mEeT HiM aNd mY LiFe bEcAmE cRaZy. There’s nothing wrong with that plot line, I just didn’t want that for these two dorks. I wanted Y/N to interact with JK’s scene and crowd but not give up her own which is why most days JK and her just lounged around in her dorm studying.

Also, I don’t know how the teacher/student roleplay made it into the smut, it just did, no further questions (ʃ⌣́_⌣́ƪ).

Then the event scene.

“You’re whipped, dude! Seriously.”

Jungkook felt his face go red, “Shut up, no, I’m not.”

“Hey, I’m not judging. I get it. That’s your girl.” Taehyung shrugged. Jungkook placed a hand on the fold up table in front of him, staring down at the information pamphlet you had worked so hard on.

“She’s just… so fucking driven and passionate about everything she does. Sometimes I look at her, and I’m just like… holy shit, what am I doing with a girl like her? I feel like she’s totally out of my league and being with me is holding her back but— I dunno, man. I just… really like her.” Jungkook revealed, voice growing small.

An unexpected wave of tenderness fell over the two boys, Taehyung throwing an arm over his little brother’s shoulder.

“I’m happy for you, bro.”

Jungkook didn’t know it just yet but dude was talking from the heart and, is in fact, totally whipped :’c

I loved the confrontation scene between the boys and Eunwoo because the boys standing up for Yara really did make everyone feel like a friend group, not just some character who happen to exist at the same time. It wasn’t just Y/N and Yara and one side and the boys on the other. They would all become friends, which is ideal to me. A boyfriend who likes your best friend and considers her a friend so you can all hang out??? Yes please.

Initially, irl Yara and I had noooo clue if Yara would end up with Eunwoo or not. That was actually the original goal actually. But after this chapter four, you guys made it ABUNDANTLY clear that you guys wanted to see Taeyara, despite the two never even meeting! Honestly, it wasn’t until this chapter was written that we decided for sure that Eunwoo was out of the picture for Yara. Part of me really wanted to keep Yara single, but irl Yara insisted on dick and frankly, she’s right. Bitchin’ Yara deserved a shot at love. She definitely has her own story outside of Bitchin’ and will experience a lot of growth in the future.

“God, I know. I do not miss that temper of his.” She chuckled, her words piquing your interest.

“Temper?”

“Oh, yeah. Have you seriously not experienced it yet? He’s got some gnarly anger issues. Not to mention all the lying…” Kiri paused suddenly, straightening up as she flashed you an apologetic look. “Yikes, I’m sorry. I totally should not be telling you this. I’m not trying to be that gross girl that shit talks her ex to his current girlfriend.”

Miss Kiri, Miss Kiri. She really acted up this chapter didn’t she. There was a lot of discussion about whether or not those things she said about Jungkook were true. Which was exactly what I wanted hehe. We come to find out that Kiri had definitely stretched the truth. She really is good at manipulation and understanding how people think and it’s why she is in the role that she is in. Messy queen.

CHAPTER SEVEN – THE ROOFTOP DATE

This entire chapter was inspired by High School Musical with Troy and Gabriella’s rooftop garden scenes. This was my shortest chapter and honestly, probably not my strongest. I definitely went into writing this with zero concept of what I actually wanted to happen. Usually when I write my chapters I have a 4k long outline of it beforehand that I go off of. Not this one though. I really just winged it and I tried my best to write a chapter that really showed off (dialogue wise) just how this couple bounces off each other. I do really like some of the banter they have in this chapter.

You had taken note a little wooden popsicle stick poking up from the soil of the yellow flowers. Acacias, they were marked. Pulling your knees up to your chest, you considered his words.

Yellow acacias stands the value of true friendship and can indicate a secret love! I thought that was very appropriate given these dummies' relationship.

“So, you probably know why I brought you here.”

You nodded.

“You’re proposing, right?”

“Yeah, I– oh, shut up.” He laughed, the serious mood shattering as you joined him.

Even though I knew they were going to have a semi serious talk, what with Y/N asking about what Kiri had told her, these two dufuses realistically are just too comfortable with each other to stay serious for too long.

“Hey, I said that out of frustration, I didn’t really mean it. I’m sure she’ll come crawling back soon.” You attempted to comfort him, hoping to sound sincere.

“Even if that’s true, I’m not entirely sure I want that anymore.”

“What?” You blinked. Jungkook shrugged.

“What about us?” He met your eyes, causing your breath to hitch.

“What about us?”

Jungkook stared at you for a moment, noting the way the timber in your voice had become higher pitched as if panicked.

MORE FUN FACTS LMFAO: I typically do this thing with unplanned chapters where I just go for it and write and usually it works out. But when I wrote this down I remember stopping and being like ??? WHY DID I JUST WRITE THAT ??? I don’t like deleting my writing so I had a serious think to myself about whether this was going to be the moment Jungkook confessed or not.

Canonly, I decided that Jungkook did in fact mean ‘us’ in a romantic sense, but because of the way you perceivably panicked at that possible meaning, he decided against taking the conversation in that direction, instead speaking about ‘us’ in a platonic sense. Poor kookie :(

“Stop. Listen to me, Jungkook, you’re a fucking great guy, okay? You’re charismatic and funny and care about your friends… sure, you almost ruined my event, but it was mostly to defend my best friend when Eunwoo got too pushy, right? You’re a good guy, meathead. I know I joke about your ego, but I really believe you’re capable of more than you think you are. Seriously, Kiri is so lucky to be the object of your affection.”

Jungkook watched the way the sun’s orange light kissed your face, a bittersweet feeling growing in his chest as he contemplated the object of his affection. Just a couple of months ago, he would have had no doubt about who held his heart, but as you held his stare, he found himself unsure and yet, entirely sure all the same.

“Jungkook? You okay?” You frowned, catching in the sadness in his eyes.

“Hm? Yeah, yeah. I just… realized something.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“…It doesn’t matter.” He smiled, the gesture hardly reaching his eyes.

It’s in this moment that Jungkook decides that there is no way you hold the same affection towards him that he does to you. He mistakes your words of comfort as you pushing him away. You are so kind and encouraging and Jungkook loves you so much that hearing you insist about him ending back up with Kiri hurts him so bad.

But you are still unsure about your feelings and genuinely believe that's still what Jungkook wants. You’re just being a supportive friend!! :( It isn’t until the end of this chapter when Y/N has her talk with Yara that she realizes, oh man, she’s in deep.

CHAPTER EIGHT – THE MISTAKE

BLAH. This chapter is so BLAH, you know? Having to write this chapter was SO HARD. I texted irl Yara complaining about how much I hated having to put my characters through this and that I wanted to just end the story on chapter 7 and keep them happy forever. BUT ALAS! I had planned for this to happen from the start.

You tasted like the mint of your favorite brand of toothpaste. He imagined if he had caught you any later then the mint would have been accompanied by the taste of coffee, knowing the way you rarely started a day without a cup.

God, he had missed the taste of you.

What you guys didn’t see is Jungkook spending the night with Kiri, and immediately kicking her out, freaking out as the weight of guilt washed over him. He knew he had done nothing wrong, that you weren’t his real girlfriend, and that getting back together with Kiri was exactly what he had signed up for. It was what he should’ve wanted. But it wasn't… because you were what he wanted. And that was exactly what he was going to tell you as he marched over to your apartment.

But he panicked. His mind already decided that your answer to him would be no– that you didn’t feel the same. So he kissed you. He had you in the only way he was allowed to. He was selfish and impulsive and so incredibly scared that he ended up hurting the person he loved the most.

Initially though, I had Jungkook get back together with Kiri, not that he slept with her right before sleeping with Y/N. But I decided TEEHEE let me just make everything erupt into flames. However, I didn’t realize just how angry with Jungkook you guys would get. I remember thinking DAMMIT WAS THAT TOO SCANDALOUS?? I knew I was going to have to work hard for Jungkook to redeem himself to my readers.

“She wants to get back together.” Jungkook swallowed dryly, eyes wavering between yours as if to gauge your reaction.

“…Oh.”

You shook your head.

“I mean, wow! That’s… That’s great!” You smiled, something tearing apart inside you as the words left your lips.

“Y/N–”

“Seriously! This means it worked, right? This is exactly what you wanted to happen.” You enthused, turning your head so that he couldn’t see the way your eyes had welled up.

Jungkook’s heart was pounding in his ears, fighting the urge to wrap his arms around you.

“Yeah… yeah, no, you’re right. We did it.” He replied monotonously.

GOD THIS PART IS SO UNBELIEVABLY FRUSTRATING! JUST ADMIT YOU LOVE EACH OTHER YOU MORONS! This entire situation is so convoluted because there's so much information missing and not being expressed, I seriously want to ring my own neck rereading this bit.

“Are you mad?” He called out cautiously, a heavy feeling falling onto his chest.

“Why would I be mad?” You quipped back sharply, causing Jungkook to flinch. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably.

“I just thought… I mean we’ve been fooling around a lot lately, so I didn’t know if—”

“If what? I had feelings for you?” You scoffed. “Please, as if I’d ever fall for you.”

And there it was— everything Jungkook already knew but had been so afraid to hear. Of course, you didn’t feel for him what he felt for you. How could he have expected anything different?

IDIOTS!!! THEY'RE BOTH IDIOTS!!! I don't know how y'all put up with this for so long. Forgive me.

CHAPTER NINE – THE BREAK

Okay I actually love this chapter. And for many reasons. Let me break down the three scenes for you guys.

Scene one: Kiri confrontation

Kiri is definitely an opposing antagonist. She is constantly working against Y/N because of their interests directly conflicting. BUT. I would argue that the biggest antagonist to this story is the inner ones – Y/N and Jungkook's lack of ability to admit their feelings constantly holding them both back from their happy ending. That being said, a confrontation scene between Y/N and Kiri was MUCH needed. While I suppose I can understand why Kiri doesn't like Y/N, that doesn't change the fact that she has been disrespectful and catty. So miss Y/N had to put Miss Kiri in her place (•̀ᴗ•́)

Scene two: Yara and Tae at the library

Fanservice. That is all. LMFAOOO y'all reallllyyy wanted it to happen and who am I to deny my people what they want. It was really fun getting to explore my side characters and develop them through interactions outside the two main characters. IRL Yara also mentioned giving bitchin’ Yara and Tae their own chapter as a joke and I was like LOL BET. I fully was going to but then I got the idea for the next scene and was like ahh ok maybe not the whole chapter.

Scene three: Meeting with Erik

So. This was a SUPER last minute decision. Like, it wasn’t until I was writing this chapter that I planned on Erik making an appearance. I saw a tweet with someone saying their bitchin theories and they mentioned Erik appearing out of nowhere and I was like,,, HOLD ON!!!! That could be kind of spicy ≖‿≖ 

I knew for a fact JK was NOT going to be forgiven in this chapter; I needed a way to lay the situation out between the two dorks without trying to seem like I was trying to sway my audience in a way that didn't make sense to the story. Y/N was rightfully angry. But she wasn't only angry about the timing of the sex. She was angry that Jungkook went back to Kiri at all and there was no way she was going to admit that. So who better to lay it all out than calculated, unbiased third party Erik. He deserved some character development after all.

I also liked the idea that Y/N had, in theory, “romantic options.” Losing Jungkook didn’t mean the end of her life. Having my female lead stand on her own was very important to me.

CHAPTER TEN – THE END

RIGHT OF THE BAT I needed Jungkook to suffer. So that whole scene where he tries to interact with his old group only for his presence to make everything awkward MMMM yes, sweet revenge on my part.

You were surprised. His hair was no longer shaggy and long like you remembered it. Instead, it had been freshly cut, looking healthy and neatly styled for the first time since you met Jungkook.

THE WAY SO MANY PEOPLE COMMENTED ON THIS LINE “but Y/N liked it long?!?”  IS SO FUNNNYyyyy. So let me clarify a thing. Jungkook had always wanted to cut his hair right. The only reason he didn’t was because Y/N told him not to. With Y/N no longer in the picture to convince him out of it, he cut his hair. That’s really all there is to it skfjsjf.

You know, I had written this part around the time I had just finished up the third ch believe it or not. And it was COMPLETELY different. I had it planned that Yara and Y/N ignored him throughout class and Yara had gone back after the bell rang to go verbally assault JK. And as the two hashed it out, only then was that when Jungkook would realize that he liked Y/N after Yara literally spelled it out for him.

“You like her, dumbass!” Was what I had written Yara saying. I really had written him in denial for ten chapters, I was a whole sociopath (╥﹏╥). But ultimately, I decided that Jungkook came to that conclusion on his own and the decision to apologize to Y/N would have been made over winter break.

“You said Kiri came over asking for you back, yet you still came over and slept with me the next day. Even though the two of you had sex the night before. Do you understand how that makes me feel?”

“I’m—”

“Like garbage!" You emphasized, the white paint of the door somehow irritating you further. "I felt like I was something you threw away and picked back up whenever you felt like getting your dick wet.”

Your chest was rising and falling rapidly, and you tried your hardest to not let your emotions get the best of you.

“Not to mention to everyone else, it looks like you cheated on me. Which makes me look like a fucking idiot." You scoffed.

Jungkook said nothing in reply, which somehow made it easier to say all you should have said that day in your room.

“It just sucks to realize that someone you once cared about sees you as nothing more than a toy. It fucking sucks.”

Man :( writing this hurt my heart. I really, really, love bitchin!y/n and writing her hurting freaking stinks. But she had to speak her mind. She deserves the chance to get everything off her chest with the way Jungkook hurt her.

Your heart and mind were in constant paradox, torn between wanting him back and wanting him to know just how much he had hurt you. Your mind ultimately won the battle, of course, but as Jungkook stood just a few inches of drywood apart pouring his heart out, it was hard to say which major organ was responsible for your next words.

The creak of the door being pushed open sent Jungkook's eyes wide, revealing your hesitant form. You had your arms crossed over your chest as if to guard the contents inside of it.

You looked like an angel underneath the bathroom's blue fluorescent lights, beautiful and lovely, a stark contrast from your next crushing sentence.

“I slept with Erik.”

Hehe. Ofc my girl Y/N had to have a rebound!!! She knows that life goes on. However, as I wrote in, she definitely regretted it. It was kind of the same situation that Jungkook was in where he pursued something just because it was familiar and a distraction and not because he really wanted it. Both Y/N and Jungkook are flawed characters but that’s okay! If anything, Y/N’s mistake of sleeping with Erik is what allows her to forgive Jungkook. Knowing first hand how complicated their entire relationship really was.

“I don’t need you… but I don’t think I want a life without you.” You finished shyly.

Your eyes were locked with his when suddenly a small noise escaped him, eyes pulling away from yours as his head moved to attempt to hide the way his eyes had grown wet.

I got this line from one of my best friends after her ex broke up with her. It made me physically sad and really sympathize with her so I quickly wrote it down into my notes app to save for later LMAOOOO. Knowing that you are your own person and life will inevitably go on after losing someone, but that your heart still wants and is pleading for the one person you can’t have. SO SAD. I’m happy I got to use this line in one of my fics.

The note Jungkook wrote Y/N,,, imagine him not being able to sleep one night over winter break so he just writes down everything he should have told Y/N while he still had the chance…. I’ll for real cry dude, he’s so cute. Also, the line about him buying you fluffy Halloween socks for Christmas went over people’s heads I think but HECK I THOUGHT THAT WAS SO FUNNY AND SWEET (because Y/N bought Christmas socks when it was Halloween teehee).

"Are you two dorks done crying?" Yara’s voice rang out suddenly, causing both of you to jump apart.

"Yara, you creep! Privacy, dude! Ever try knocking?" You sniffed, wiping at your face hurriedly.

"What? Like you were peeing with Jungkook in the bathroom? Please." She waved you off, walking back into the living room to give you two some privacy. She did say Jungkook had 15 minutes before she’d have to come back in after all. "Anyway, Tae will be over in 10 minutes for the Saved By The Bell marathon that’s on so you guys are more than welcomed to join." She called out from her newly seated position on the couch.

I included this scene with Yara because things were getting too serious for my liking ngl. Plus the idea that the four of them would all come together at the end for a much needed reunion made my happy bitchin heart soar.

Jungkook let out a laugh, his palm finding your cheek, eyes locked on your lips. You were preening for his kiss, mouth parting slightly as you anticipated it.

“Partners?”

The question took you by surprise, eyes widening at your not so pretend lover.

Idiot.

“Partners.” You smiled softly, eyes shiny and brimming with tears as he kissed you for what must have been the millionth time, but still somehow felt like the first.

UGH I LOVE THEM I REALLY DO. I was so happy with how this final scene came out :( They’re partners, they really are I miss these boneheads.

AND NOW, I PRESENT THE CANON FUTURE OF THE BITCHIN UNIVERSE...

10 YEARS LATER

Let’s be honest, Jungkook popped the question the day of graduation, he can’t imagine a life in which you wouldn’t be beside him

You said yes (shocker)

Cue Jungkook being the most wonderful partner and respecting your wish to finish your residency program before having the wedding

You absolutely kick ass at being a neonatal surgeon

Also, Jungkook started a film company! It’s small but he loves what he does and works with colleges and helps out the film majors with resources and equipment <3

SO IT'S THE DAY OF YOUR WEDDING RIGHT

Yara and your sisters are helping you get ready, with your best friend as the ever so reassuring maid of honor

And by that I mean you’re as calm as a cucumber and Yara is one wrong move away from having a stroke

“Y/N… Don’t freak out....The catering company put in two orders of shrimp instead of chicken and steak.”

“Yara, it’s okay.”

“NO ITS NOT???? THIS IS YOUR WEDDING DAY AND YOU’RE GETTING CRUSTACEANS.”

Y/N making Yara take a seat and practice some breathing exercises so she doesn’t upset the baby

Oh yeah, Yara is 10 weeks pregnant

Taehyung is the dad lol

Yara and Taehyung have been together ever since that day at the library hehe <3

They moved in together and adopted a cat and everything (sweet boy Tae wanted a dog but Yara’s afraid of dogs and Tae would do anything for that woman so Yeontan the cat it is)

Yara refuses to put a label on their relationship even after all this time, and Tae doesn’t ask for one. They’re happy and dedicated to each other and don’t feel the need to put pressure on something that’s already so perfect

Yara is actually violently in love with Tae but still scoffs when Y/N tries to bring it up

“Oh my god, you’re so in love with him”

“Huh??? you must be sick or something. Get well soon, damn :/”

Yara likes to come up with different labels for Taehyung every time she has to introduce him. Among her favorites are roommate, rent sharer, baby daddy and penis lender

Speaking of Taehyung, he’d have a hand on Jungkook’s shoulder as he tries to calm down the panicking groom to be

“JK, breathe.”

“What if she doesn’t show up? What if she doesn’t want to marry me? What if I pressured her into this and— and I’ve freaked her out and now she hates me?”

“Dude, you guys have been engaged for eight years. She’s had her opportunity to run. She’ll show up.”

Taehyung scruffing up the younger man’s hair reassuringly, which only flusters him more because DAMMIT he wants to look perfect for you and now his hair is messed up >:(

(You like him no matter what his hair looks like though)

Jungkook literally swallowing down a sob as you walk down the aisle and he lays his eyes on you for the first time

You having a dumb smile on your face the entire walk over because your husband to be is crying and you haven’t even exchanged vows yet

The entire audience going all sobby when you finally do exchange vows because they’re so beautiful and real

The ten years together has not been easy— from financial struggles as you tried to support yourself through med school, to personal conflicts when Jungkook wanted to start a family already

But you guys figured it out

You always do

He’s your person. And you are his.

Y/N’s sisters Rosa and Lia are a WRECK— even your dad is tearing up

Your family loves Jungkook and have been counting down the days until you guys married, let’s be honest

“You may now kiss the bride.”

Jungkook punching the air with a “FINALLY!” before kissing the hell out of you

The cutting of the cake inevitably turning into a food fight

The shrimp entrees turning out to be pretty damn good

Yara catching the bouquet and wagging her brows at Taehyung suggestively

Jungkook pulling you aside to take photos of you outside the venue because you look so so pretty and he loves the way you smile when he’s the one behind the camera

The party is in full session, your siblings tearing up the dance floor like the extroverts they are

You and Jungkook are sat at the head of the room, hands intertwined underneath the table as you watch a tired and painfully sober Yara swing her bare feet onto Taehyung’s lap, requesting a foot rub

Watching your pregnant best friend and her lover together, you turned towards your own, smile impossibly wide

“What?”

“Let’s have a baby.” You’d grin, so stupid happy

Jungkook’s eyes going round and immediately jumping up from his seat because god that’s all he’s ever wanted

Being tugged out the room by a giddy Jungkook, one of your heels flinging off somewhere behind you.

“What’s happening? Where are we going?!”

The two of you find yourself in a storage room somewhere on the hotel floor

“Jeon Jungkook, what the hell—“

His mouth find yourself, kissing you in a way that couldn’t at the altar

You kissed him back without questions, arms wrapping around the man you now called your husband

“I love you.” He’d sigh into your neck, his hot breath causing you to shiver

“I love you too.”

“Let’s make a baby.”

“Yeah let’s— wait, right here? Right now?!”

Jungkook merely nodding as his mouth found the exposed skin of your chest

“Meathead, we can’t just ditch our wedding to have sex!”

“Why not? We did our marital duties. Now it’s our guests' job to get embarrassingly drunk and make a fool of themselves on the dance floor. No one will even miss us.”

“Isn’t baby making what our honeymoon is for?”

“Screw that. I’ve done my waiting. Let’s start our family, nerd.”

Jungkook kissing your protests silent before you inevitably give in and let him take you right there and then, your wedding dress hung around your hips

Husband and wife coming together with shaky breaths and hushed moans as they promise the rest of their lives to each other, making every argument, struggle or moment of uncertainty leading up to now totally worth it

Walk of shame back into the party with nervous hair fixing from you and a proud grin from Jungkook

Yara figuring out exactly why you two had sneaked off to, flashing the newly weds a knowing smirk

The night of your wedding, Jungkook surprises you with a present

You unwrap it in confusion, only to see that it’s a glass frame and inside of it is the wrinkled and worn out lined paper the two of you had scribbled on many many years ago

Jungkook hangs up the contract right above your bed as per your request, smiling as he does and jumping on him the moment he puts down the hammer bc dammit it you’re too heckin excited to make love with your sentimental loser of a husband

And yes, by the next month, you are pregnant and incredibly happy

And of course, your daughter and Yara’s son grow up to be best friends, not a family holiday passing by where they aren’t told the story of the totally bitchin’ way both set of their parents got together

[mariaiscrafting]

You know, what think I like when you are critical of a content creator is that you know how to separate a fact from especulation, unlike a blog out there that took especulation as facts.

Example, that night when we were critical of Karl, or any instance you have discussed about him, a lot of anons were saying that he gave them clout chaser vibes to them, and despite your opinion, you expressed that those were only especulation and not the truth, and to keep that in mind. That's good critical thinking.

But this blog had some similar anons, saying that he only is friends with the Feral Boys gro clout- In fact, they said the Feral Boys were only in it to benefit from clout and money. And they took it as a truth. I know you instance on them is neutral, but come one, they are friends. All of them. Karl isn't friends with them for clout. Like today Karl was playing golf with salad gang plus Sapnap and George at first and then Quackity and Dream joined bc they had spared time and it all devolved into typical chaos (Poor Corpse and Tina and Brook, had to endure those children lol/lh /j). Like, the stream wasn't planned with the 5/5 yet they joined, missing Karl and just having fun.

Idk, I guess that blog's superiority (They were a SBI focused blog) just irritated me. It's as if they were putting both groups at each other as if those streamers aren't friends or close. They were singing prayers of one while shunning the other based from especulation. Criticissism is fine, in fact recommended to be critical of your interests, but taking rumors as facts to base your crit is yikes. It's as if I wanted to crit SBI and base it only of "Philza hanging only with people younger than him is kinda weird ngl.." or "Sbi doesn't care about Tommy cuz he joined late" like that dumb Tumblr post did or some fuckers in Twitter imply.

The main reason I take so much care to separate speculation from evidence-backed theories and confirmed truths is because I feel like that separation is what distinguishes us from mcyttwt the most. One of the main reasons for mcyttwt's toxicity, imo - for its relentless cancelling of everyone, for its bandwagon campaigns - is that people oftentimes criticize and defend based on their personal feelings rather than rationale or evidence.

For example, I complain a lot about Dream stans on here, but you know the reason I didn't stop watching Dream directly after the cheating scandal broke loose, even though I thought he cheated? Because of mcytblr Dream stans. Mcytblr Dream stans engaged with me in discussion, both publicly and in DMs, about the cheating scandal, and even those who eventually came to the conclusion that Dream didn't cheat accepted the facts and statistics they were given and kept a healthy skepticism throughout the process. On Twitter, Dream stans were defending him before he even made a video following up to the mods' initial accusations because they felt that Dream wasn't the kind of guy to lie or cheat. They were replying to screenshots of statistical analyses from subreddits and to articles from mathematicians and staticians with extremely reactionary responses because of that feeling, which they believed in so adamantly, they had accepted it as fact. The thing is, to believe that Dream didn't cheat in the face of all the statistical and rhetorical evidence to the contrary is, in itself, speculative. Usually we think of speculation as a baseless theory that something is a positive truth- that is to say, that something did happen. But speculation also applies to those theories of someone not having done something, when the opposite has been nearly proven to be true.

For this same reason, I chose not to ignore the anti-technotwt threads with screenshots of Techno's old tweets in them. For me to have simply ignored these screenshots and continued supposing that Techno never expressed bigoted beliefs and/or currently doesn't would have been speculative on my part, and to boot, blatantly wrong, given the evidence to the contrary.

People in this fandom, and in all RPF/RPF-adjacent fandoms need to understand that almost everything they believe about the CCs they watch is speculative, at least to some extent, because of the nature of the content they make. Even if someone, in your opinion, displays evidence of some aspect of their personality - whether that be some form of bigoted, sweet, rude, clout-chasing, or anything else - because of the extremely one-sided nature of sharing one's life through a screen, that theory of ours will almost alwyas only ever be speculation, not a solid conclusion that can be drawn. We will never know these people's true intentions behind something shared to us via the Internet.

That vagueness leads to virtually every viewer creating a different theory in our heads about the CCs we watch, and we can't treat those theories as facts, especially not when sharing them with the rest of a fandom. I'm not a very big blog, but I consider even over 50 followers to be way too many people to spread a theory too, without at least clarifying that what I'm posting is speculation. If I have evidence, I like to list it or, if I can, provide sources; but otherwise, I take care to qualify most things with phrases or disclaimers that will clue followers into the speculative nature of whatever it is I'm saying. This is because theories and "feelings" can blaze through a fandom like wildfire, especially somewhere like Twitter, where so many things are word-of-mouth or based on summary due to character limitation.

You know why mcyttwt was cancelling Andi? Only a handful of original Tweeters under the cancel Andi hashtags actually knew what clips or tweets to criticize her for, or tried to elaborate on that criticism. But because every other mcyttwt user was getting bombarded by their mutuals hate-posting about Andi on their TLs, the "negative feeling" towards Andi grew and grew, even if most people didn't even know what they were supposed to feel negative about, exactly. Our judgement works on a quick trigger on the Internet because of the amount of information we're receiving, and so, even a single bad word against someone you don't have too strong of an opinion on can fundamentally alter your perception of them, usually subconsciously. If the first thing you see about Andi, who you've only seen on a couple LOH's or a couple Punz streams before then, is a tweet along the lines of, "disappointed in Andi for her homophobia and joking about suicide," despite you having no context, you will most likely be pushed to the negative side of her. Thus begins the cycle of hatred, building up and up, leading to you searching for more and more criticism about Andi, whether speculative or not, until you solidly and genuinely believe she is a Horrible Person. It all starts with the vaguest fucking feeling, because that's all speculation has to go off of, and it snowballs into a fucking wildfire across an entire fandom. I'm not about to be another person to let feelings snowball and spread like that.

Now, I don't know what exact blog you're referring to, but as an adamant SBI enthusiast, let me flip the argument many SBI stans have for their speculation upon the genuity of Karl's friendship with the Feral Bois, onto SBI. What do we have to go off of for the genuity of SBI's friendship, anyways? Our perceived brother dynamic between Tommy and Wilbur could very well just be Tommy capitalizing on Wilbur's brand and continuing the charade until now because it's been profitable. Maybe Techno only continues to associate with SBI because he knows how much his fanbase likes headcanon'ing about SBI, so he puts up with streams with them so he can continue to feed his fanbase with dynamics he knows they're obsessed with. Maybe Phil would rather play MC with people his age, and actually dislikes that he's friends with a teenager, but sticks around because he profitted so much off of Dream SMP and SBI-related content. And what could any SBI stan have to argue with me on any of these theories? Just because SBI laughs around each other and seems fond of each other doesn't mean they're actually like that behind the cameras. They so seldomly stream or make videos together anymore, anyways, so maybe they've grown tired of keeping up the dynamic.

Everything I said could be interpreted as utter bullshit, and that's because it fucking is. I don't actually know what Techno wants to do with his life, or how Wilbur and Tommy actually feel about each other, or who Phil wants to fucking befriend. The same goes for Feral Boys. There's nothing wrong with stating your theories or speculation, but to treat them as fact or not at least qualify such posts with the fact that this is all based on your bias and opinion, and no substantive evidence, is irresponsible. Just because you feel like one or more of the Feral Boys is "clout-chasing" doesn't mean you have the right to tout that feeling as truth. I feel a lot of things about a lot of CCs, both negative and positive, but no matter how strong my feelings, unless they have substantive evidence backing them up, I have no right to treat them as facts with my followers.

[stylesnews]

If your quarantine has been anything like mine, Harry Styles content has been the only thing getting you through. At the beginning of the national lockdown, he created a line of shirts and donated the proceeds to coronavirus charities. And last month, he showed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests by marching in L.A. and posting about the cause on Instagram. Even more recently, he recorded a sleep story for the Calm app because his fans had been begging for one for so long. Basically, he's been doing what he can during this crazy time, and it's a delight to see.

But back on May 18 (approximately two centuries ago ago), when the sexy and fruit-filled “Watermelon Sugar” music video dropped, Twitter rightfully lost its collective mind. Watching the video was an ~experience~, and it made me wonder what it was like being in it. You know, feeding Harry watermelon, running in the ocean with him, and cracking jokes as the sun set. The video dropped during a time when people were supposed to be avoiding any personal contact. Watching Harry and all the other people in the video rolling around with each other felt almost voyeuristic, and it made me miss living in a time even just a few months ago when touching other people wasn't so scary.

I hadn't stopped thinking about the video in the weeks since, so I decided to do some digging. For your reading pleasure, I talked to five models about the juicy (heh, get it?) details of being in the video.

Most of us scroll through the ’gram to see pics of Harry, but these ladies’ feeds landed them the gig. After putting out a call, the casting director scouted every model on Insta, sending them DMs if they thought they’d be a good fit. Many of them didn't even know the shoot was with Harry at first, only finding out it was him the literal night beforehand.

"I was immediately down to do it when I found out was him," model Elizabeth Tyson says.

Unlike us normal people, these girls balance their day jobs with, you know, spending time with Harry Styles. “I actually didn't even ask my boss if I was going to get [the day] off [for the shoot],” laughs model Mercy Odima, who is also a nanny. “I just replied, and I was like, ‘Yeah. I will be there.’”

That was back in January, and the girls had to keep their mouths shut for literal months until the video premiered on May 18. Can you imagine not being able to tell a single soul about the way Harry suggestively eats a watermelon slice?

By the end of the day, after countless shots where models were not-so-subtly licking watermelon slices and shoving their face (and Harry's) with the very-dense fruit, these ladies could 100 percent live without the watermelon sugar high. “We were like, ‘I can never eat a watermelon ever again!’—we were all sticky, it was dripping,” says Elizabeth. “They must have gone through a hundred watermelons for that shoot.”

And not all of it was so sweet: “I said something like, ‘Did you know that watermelon is actually kind of bad for you if you eat a lot of it? It’s bad for your digestive system,’” Maris says she told Harry. “He was like, ‘Oh, really? I’ve never heard that before.’”

Looking sexy while you feel like Bloat City is a challenge, to be sure. “The last part was us running up and down the beach at sunset,” Maris says. “I had just eaten probably a whole watermelon at that point. I was just praying it didn't come across—I just felt so uncomfortable.”

If it looks like the video is just a massive group hang with friends rolling around on the sand and making orgasmic faces into the camera, that’s because it basically was. “Everything was genuine,” Ephrata says. “They weren't like ‘now laugh’ or ‘now go crazy.' A lot of our scenes are actually us talking.”

Other scenes, though, had more direction. “There was a moment where the directors were like, ‘Okay, we want it to be kind of like an LSD trip,’” Maris laughs. We'll let you try to figure out which scene that is, because, TBH, it could have been any of them.

Overall, all the models agreed it was an incredibly chill experience. “It was probably one of the most natural shoots I've ever been on,” model Aalany McMahan says.

As if there weren’t enough about Harry Styles to fawn over, he also has top-notch nail polish game, as many people know. He ended up matching with one of the models on the set and it became an inside joke.

“Me and him literally had the same polish on,” Ephrata remembers. “We started laughing, and he was like, ‘I think yours is more like a coral.’” Before long, it became an on-set debate: “Everybody was trying to decide what color our nails were,” she laughs.

ICYMI, Harry was recently knighted a “consent king” for asking before he touched Ephrata’s hair. “[The directors] were like ‘You can play with her hair!’ And then he was like, ‘Wait wait wait, are you even cool with that? Is that okay? Are you comfortable with that?’” she remembers.

It meant a lot to her that he took that second to check in (and she later asked him if it was okay to kiss him on the cheek). “That was a moment on set where I was taken aback for just a second, and was like, ‘Wow, he really cares if I’m comfortable. He cares if the other models are comfortable,’” she says.

It goes without saying that a Harry Styles music video is guaranteed to be flirty. I mean, this shoot required the models to lay all over Harry, rest their heads on his shoulders, sexily feed him, etc. Those vibes didn’t stop when the cameras did.

During breaks in shooting, Harry—ever the gentleman—asked the group of models where they were all from. Maris said Wisconsin, which piqued Harry’s attention. “He goes, in his very British accent, ‘Oh, you’re from Wisconsin? Are you a Packers fan?’” she laughs. “I was like, ‘Yes, duh, I’m a Packers fan!’”

Later, as the sun went down on the Malibu beach, Maris tried (unsuccessfully) to hide how cold she was in her bikini. It was January, remember? “In between takes, he kept asking me if I was okay, cause I was shivering,” she reveals. “He was making jokes, like, ‘Oh, you're from Wisconsin, you should be able to deal with this!”

But even for a music video for a song is probably definitely about oral sex, it only went so far as flirting. “There was a group of us who were trying to get him to go out to dinner, but he had plans with someone else,” Maris says. Have fun spiraling while trying to figure out who that someone might be!

Considering his entire brand is "treat people with kindness," it's no surprise Harry was nice on set. That energy started right at the beginning of the shoot. “He was nice enough to come and say 'hi' to us even before we started shooting,” Ephrata recalls. “He came and shook everybody's hand and gave us hugs and was like, ‘Hi, I'm Harry,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

Throughout the shoot, Elizabeth says he would have conversations, ask questions, and joke around with the models. “Most people, when they hit cut, they just sit there quietly, they don’t interact with you, but he definitely did,” she says. “He’s so laid back. He’s so funny, sweet—he has a personality.”

Many of the models expressed that it was this experience that made them full-fledged stans: “After working with him, I was definitely a bigger fan,” Ephtata says. Welcome to the club, ladies!

[raleighcarrera]

catch up

platinum | raleigh carrera x mc (cadence dorian)

it’s been eight months since the breakup. they have a lot to catch up on.

~6k words, M (18+ only)

songs mentioned are gorgeous | no more sad songs | touch (acoustic)

he’d been wondering who would get around to dropping their album first. from the looks of the current trending topics on twitter, cadence had won. it looked like she’d even chosen to jack his style -- dropping her album in full with no announcement, no promotion, no warning... nothing.

color him impressed.

no more sad songs was number one on trending. just below it was the word touch. related topics: cadence dorian, raleigh carrera. 

he told himself it was just his own narcissism that made him click. that, and morbid curiosity. it’d been so long since he’d last tortured himself, after all. 

a long list of tweets stared innocently back at him. GOD touch is the sexiest song anyone has EVER WRITTEN I’M SCREAMING, said the first one. make it a single queen!!!! you deserve the hottie they will cast for that music video and more!!!!!

he scrolled down. sooooooooo are we going to talk about how touch is obviously about raleigh carrera giving that good dick or nah

his eyebrows shot up. well, now he had to listen to it. 

he pulled up spotify; of course she was on the home page. with just a few taps, the song started to play. an impressive piano melody filled the room. she must have beep practicing. as her voice filtered in, he turned up the volume.

cadence sounded... soft and sad, and, the masses on twitter were right: sexy. god did her breathless, yearning voice sound sexy. despite himself, he could actually feel his face flush as he listened to the words. so won't you take it, i feel like for the first time i am not faking... fingers on my buttons and now you're playing. master of anticipation, don't you keep it all to yourself.

it took everything in him not to be consumed by the memories that were threatening, but the last thing he needed was to fall down that rabbit hole. he’d gone so long without thinking about her, after all. it was almost up to a full two days at this point, before something would inevitably remind him of her and he would spiral again.

the rest of her album stared back at him from his laptop screen. he studied the cover art as her voice filled the empty room. it was a photo of cadence, of course, a wide full-body shot against a brick wall. she looked powerful, in the sharp black outfit she was wearing, her skirt just short enough to make her legs look a few hundred miles long. 

inhaling sharply, raleigh forcibly redirected his gaze to the track list, scanning the rest of the titles. his lips curved up into a smirk as he read them off, one by one. motorcycle boy. hollywood. tattoos and bad news. subtlety was never her strong point.

then again, he mused, as he considered his own journal and the songs inside it -- kaleidoscope dress. ferris wheel. lady liberty. sex at the moda. -- he really wasn’t one to talk. not that his label would ever let him get away with that last one. it was just a working title, anyway. 

he navigated back to twitter and tapped the moment about her album, no more sad songs. the first tweet he saw said omgggg i love the energy of cadence building raleigh up in ‘gorgeous’ and then tearing him down in ‘shout out to my ex’ so much kdhfgksjfhdg HER MIND this album is everything

it looked like he had some listening to do. but first... 

he strolled over to the far wall of his bedroom and pulled off his shirt, sidling up to the floor length mirror by the window to take a selfie. his free hand pushed his hair back from his face, and he stuck his tongue out at his reflection as he snapped the picture. 

it was just trolling, he told himself as he uploaded the photo to his pictagram, already laughing at his own joke while he typed out the caption. it wasn’t like he was trying to get anyone’s attention -- he just couldn’t resist giving the fans and the internet something to talk about.

raleigh smirked at his phone as the photo finished uploading and stared back at him from his feed. photograph with no t-shirt on. well, there was no taking it back now. if cadence was allowed to write about him, he was allowed to enjoy it, right?

five minutes later, his phone rang. it was avery. he took care to pause cadence’s album before he picked up the phone. “helloooooooo?”

“you know you broke the internet, right?” she asked, aprops of a greeting. 

a shit-eating grin appeared on his face. “i have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“you’re such a dick,” she laughed, “you just couldn’t let her have one day, could you? you could congratulate her, you know. she worked really hard on that thing.”

“um, i basically gave her a number one album,” he remarked, his bravado a mask as always. “without me she would’ve had, like, one track on that thing. or she wouldda had to write about you. so you’re welcome, too.”

raleigh pulled his phone away from his face to squint down at his pictagram notifications. stream no more sad songs!! said the last ten comments. omg shout out to my ex is right

“besides, i’m getting trolled. like, a lot. i doubt she cares what i post.”

“i wouldn’t be so sure about that,” avery remarked cryptically. before he had a chance to wonder what that meant, she said, “hey, she’s playing a surprise show tonight at webster hall before the album release party. you should stop by.”

“i think if she wanted me to come to her party she would’ve invited me.” it might’ve been nice to hear from her -- especially given the intimate details about their relationship he was now being forced to listen to, along with millions of other people. 

you’re not being fair, he reminded himself, thinking again of sex at the moda. he hardly intended to give her a heads-up about that one. though he doubted she would care.

not that he cared. she could write about whatever she wanted. she could turn her life into art -- if that was what she wanted. she could tell... whoever, about what had happened between them. about what he’d made her feel.

she never told him, but, whatever. that was fine. that was her prerogative.

“earth to raleigh,” avery said on the line, snapping him out of his thoughts. “i said, she didn’t tell anyone about the party. the album was a secret, yeah? you should at least come to the show. i think your support would mean a lot to her.”

“well, i guess you’ll just have to support her enough for the both of us,” he said, meaner than he felt. raleigh shut his eyes, sighing as he rubbed at his forehead. “sorry. i’m not trying to be an asshole.”

“don’t sweat it.” avery always let him off the hook so easily, “i know it just comes naturally to you. seriously, the show starts at 7. think about it, okay? if you do decide to come, text me when you get there and i’ll let you in the back.”

he put the album back on as soon as they hung up. without a distraction, there was nothing to stop him from looking at cadence’s twitter account. she’d last posted just a few minutes ago:

surprise! i’ll be playing no more sad songs in its entirety tonight at webster hall’s marlin room. doors open at 6 for the first 600 in line. see you there? you never know who might drop by...

fuck it. he turned the volume up on her album and headed towards the shower. he’d avoided her for long enough, and tonight was as good a night for him to get over himself as any. maybe after this he could stop looking over his shoulder at every party he went to, terrified he’d have to see her. 

that didn’t mean that it didn’t feel like a mistake, to get dressed and make his way to the village. it felt like a bad decision every step of the way, even as he ducked around the back of the venue at 7:05 to see avery’s smiling face, holding the backstage door wide open. it was too late to go home, now. 

“took you long enough,” she grinned, squealing as she jumped into his arms. “i almost thought you weren’t going to show.”

“yeah, yeah. did she go on yet?”

avery led him inside, closing the door firmly behind them both. she nodded as they stepped up to the side of the stage. the screams from the crowd were deafening. “she just went out there. i think she’s about to start --”

raleigh heard the strum of a guitar and peeked around to see cadence standing center stage. “this is a really good looking crowd,” she said, grinning when the sound of the cheers rose exponentially. “thanks so much for coming out. are you guys cool if i play some tunes? yeah? okay, then. this first one is about a guy i used to date, it’s called ‘gorgeous.’”

he folded his arms over his chest, leaning back against the wall behind them. he was shameless in the way he looked her up and down, staring as she strutted across the stage. he was proud of her -- she’d come a long way since the first time he saw her perform, so long ago. cadence had real stage presence, now -- she’d come into her own. she acted like a woman, sang like a woman, dressed like a woman. she was confident. 

“whiskey on ice, sunset and vine. you’ve ruined my life by not being mine.” an elbow in his side made raleigh tear his eyes from her. he looked over at avery, rubbing at his ribs. “ow. what was that for?”

“you know everyone thinks this one is about you, right?” she asked, smirking. 

“you make me so happy it turns back to sad, there’s nothing i hate more than what i can’t have.” 

“aren’t they all about me?” raleigh asked, still hiding behind his attitude. avery only rolled her eyes, and eventually the crowd’s screams drowned out anything else they might’ve wanted to say. 

she played a few more songs before finally sitting down at the piano off to the side of the stage. now that she was closer, raleigh could see her better, and he stared as she brushed her hand across her forehead, pushing her hair off her face. she drank deeply from a water bottle and then set it on the piano’s ledge. raleigh was close enough to watch her swallow, but she still didn’t see him. it was probably the stage lights -- a single spotlight illuminated her at the piano as she adjusted the mic to pull it closer to her lips.

“we’re gonna slow it down for just one song,” cadence said, “i hope you don’t mind.” the cheers from the crowd proved that they didn’t. “i saw ya’ll talking about this one on twitter earlier.” he could see her grin perfectly from where he was standing; it was blinding. “i’m glad you like it. even if you don’t post thirst traps to it.”

the crowd went wild. even raleigh barked out a laugh; he hardly thought she had it in her. okay. point one, cadence.

“put your flashlights in the air for this one, okay? you and i and nobody else... feeling feelings i never felt...”

she was beautiful, of course -- always, every day, but never more than in this moment, with her eyes closed and her expression haunted, her hands moving along the piano keys. it probably said something dangerous about his ego that he found her the most stunning when she was singing about him. 

as the last few notes died, he sighed, digging his fingernails into the fabric of his jacket over his arms where they were folded on his chest. suddenly, it felt like he shouldn’t be there. or maybe he was the only one who should be there. either way, he hardly wanted to think about it. 

her moment of silent reflection as the song ended was gone in a flash. he watched her take a breath to steady herself, and then cadence was back in her stage persona, hopping off the piano bench to grab her guitar again. “thank you so much, new york city. you’ve been amazing. i’m so glad i could share this album with you -- it’s one of the most personal things i’ve ever written, and it means so much to me to play it for you all like this.” 

“this is the last song i have for you tonight -- it’s the title track, no more sad songs. it’s the last song i wrote for the album. this song is about trying to get over someone you can’t help but think about by any means necessary. it’s about the point in a breakup where you’re tired of wallowing and you’ll do anything you can to make yourself feel better -- i like to think it’s about the acceptance stage of grief. anyway, it felt right to keep it last... to name the album after it. i’m finally at a place in my life where i can put this chapter behind me. and it took a lot to get there, and i’m so proud of that. so, with that being said...” 

the crowd cheered as she strummed the first few notes. “thank you guys again so fucking much. sing along if you know the words already, okay?”

it was the second time that day he’d heard the song. it still made him feel the same way he’d felt when he first heard it -- angry and surprised and unsettled... and guilty. why hadn’t she ever told him she felt that way? why hadn’t she called him, and more importantly, why had he never called her, again?

his gaze hardened as she stopped at the front of the stage for the bridge. the same single spotlight illuminated her again. 

“uh, why do you have that murdery look?” avery asked from beside him. he said nothing, watching the melody build around cadence as she approached the crowd.

“still got you on my mind, starting to realize... no matter what i do, i will only harm myself tryn’a hurt you, and if i turn the music loud just to drown you out --”

her head tipped back with the powerful crescendo. she looked like an angel under the spotlight, more beautiful than he even knew how to explain. his chest seized painfully. 

abruptly, he turned around and headed back towards the backstage door. he knew he only had moments until the last song ended and cadence rushed backstage, and he needed to get out of there before that happened.

“raleigh!” avery called after him, but he didn’t stop, throwing open the back door and stepping out onto the sidewalk... immediately into a crowd of waiting fans and paparazzi.

a cacophony of screams started from the street. “ohmygod, it’s raleigh carrera!”

fuck. venue security glared at him as he shoved sunglasses on -- fuck the fact that it was nine o’clock at night -- and rushed off down the sidewalk. so much for getting in and out before cadence saw him. there’d be pictures of his exit all over social media in moments. paparazzi called after him as he rushed to the intersection, eyes scanning the street desperately for a working cab.

he stuck his hand out just as one with its lights on slid to a stop at the corner, jumping inside and slamming the door closed. camera flashes still shone behind his eyes even as he shoved the palms of his hands into them, drawing in a deep breath. sighing shakily, he met the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “88th and park. please.”

once he was alone in his apartment he felt like he wanted to put his fist through a wall. the urge to destroy something, anything was too strong -- because that was what he was supposed to do, wasn’t it? that’s what raleigh carrera would do.

she deserved so much better than him. the last thing she needed was to see him at her show and get sucked back into his bullshit. he paced around his living room, convincing himself he’d done the right thing. she’d moved on, after all -- she was happy, thriving. she didn’t need him around messing up her life. she’d practically said so herself. 

his phone vibrated where he’d dumped it on the coffee table, sliding onto the carpeted floor. raleigh couldn’t think of anyone he wanted to talk to, but he bent down and picked it up anyway.

he almost jumped out of his skin when he saw the caller id. cadence dorian. tongue out emoji. winking emoji. music note. 

“hello?”

“oh, so your phone isn’t down a well somewhere. okay, just checking. good to know.”

she hung up. 

he glared down at the phone in his hand. what the fuck? raleigh called her back before he even knew what he was doing.

“what?” she answered, though she sounded annoyed. like... really annoyed. 

“what is your problem?” he demanded.

“my problem?” she laughed. he could barely hear her over the commotion on the other end of the line -- someone was calling her name repeatedly in a way that sounded urgent -- and then a door slammed, and there was quiet. “my problem, okay. i don’t have a problem. i’m not the one out here subtweeting and sneaking in and out of your show without calling, am i?”

“no, you’re just writing and releasing an entire sixteen-song album about me and all the ways i ruined your life without calling,” he snapped, his patience finally wearing thin enough to crumble. “don’t you think it might’ve been nice for you to give me a heads-up?”

“oh, please,” cadence scoffed, and he could feel that she was getting angry now, too. it felt good, in an awful sort of way. at least it was something. “i should have to clear it with you every time i write a song?”

“not a heads-up about the album,” he grit out, the fingers of his free hand flexing with the urge to throw something, “a heads-up about the way you fucking felt. you never say a goddamn word about any of that to me and i have to find out about it for the first time with -- everyone else? that’s really fucking special, cadence. that means a lot to me.”

there was silence on the other end of the line, giving him a moment to try to calm himself down. cadence was only ever quiet when she’d been surprised, meaning she wasn’t expecting him to say that. but she was certainly silent, then; if he couldn’t still hear her breathing raggedly, he might’ve assumed that she hung up on him again.

finally, she spoke, her voice small and unsure. “raleigh...”

but he wasn’t done fighting with her yet. “what’s the matter? you never thought that it might actually hurt my feelings? i guess that’s on me for giving a shit.”

“raleigh,” cadence said again, more insistently this time, “i didn’t know how to --”

“how to what, cadence? not break up with me? not ignore me for eight months afterwards? not pretend like it didn’t mean anything to you? it’s not that difficult.”

“well, obviously it was too difficult for you to do, too. you didn’t call me, either. so i’m supposed to believe -- what, exactly? that you missed me? that’s convincing, when you’re never out without a model on your arm.” 

she sounded hurt. why did she sound hurt? she was the one who’d stomped on his heart, she was the one who’d wanted this. 

“get over yourself,” he bit out, his hand curling into a fist at his side. he was never going to get his security deposit back after what he was about to do to his penthouse. “you knew i was in love with you and you didn’t care. which is fine. you don’t have to... just own it. stop acting like i did something to you.”

suddenly, the commotion on the other end of the line was back. “i have to go,” she said softly, her voice barely a whisper. 

he hung up without saying goodbye, throwing his phone onto the couch. okay. that was fine. everything was fine.

except that he couldn’t possibly stand to be in his apartment for another moment -- not without doing something stupid. 

he grabbed his keys and his phone and left, slamming the door behind him. his fingers drummed restlessly on his thighs as he rode the elevator down to the lobby. there were paparazzi waiting outside the front door of his building -- raleigh could see them through the glass as soon as he stepped out of the elevator. with a grimace, he headed for the back door.

there was already a car waiting for him. “let’s go to kismet,” he directed, rapidly firing off text messages to anyone he knew who might be available to distract him. 

within minutes, he was inside the club at a vip table. there was a bottle of vodka sitting in a bucket of ice at the center of the booth, calling out to him. he lifted it straight to his lips, drinking as much as he could in one go without coughing. she’d always used to joke about his self-destructive tendencies. if only she could see him now.

“hey, raleigh.” belle tamblyn stood before him, smiling in the low light of the club. she must’ve just gotten back from paris fashion week. two of her friends had already sat down at the booth, talking among themselves. 

he leaned back into the booth with a charming smile. “hey, belle. i knew you missed me.”

she laughed, taking his words as an invitation to sit down in his lap. he didn’t push her off, wrapping an arm around her narrow shoulders. she was taller and thinner than cadence in a way that wasn’t unfamiliar to him, but wasn’t exactly welcome, either. you’re never out without a model on your arm.

“so,” she started, looking down at him from up close, “what’ve you --”

he leaned up and kissed her, sliding a hand into her hair. her lips parted in surprise, sticky with lip gloss. raleigh bit her bottom lip and she sighed breathlessly, and that was -- good. that was almost... close enough.

his free hand slid over her backside, pulling her in closer. she was breathing hard when she pulled away, her face flushed.

raleigh laughed, pushing his fingertips under the hem of her dress. she reached down and swatted playfully at his chest.

“you’re an asshole,” she said primly, but she was rubbing her hand over the muscles in his chest. “do you want to get out of here?”

the last thing he wanted was to bring her back to his apartment, or to be there at all. “i don’t think i can wait that long,” he said charmingly, “bathroom?”

her nose scrunched up as she considered it, staring down at him. then, she said, “fine,” and slid up off his lap. he grinned, grabbing her hand and tugging her off toward the back of the club. 

it was a single person bathroom, and blessedly empty when they arrived. no one paid them any attention as he pulled her inside and flipped the lock. 

raleigh lifted her onto the sink and leaned in to kiss her again. she moaned as he pushed her legs apart and stepped between them, sliding his hands up her thighs.

this was fine. this was what he wanted.

so why couldn’t he force himself to do what he knew he was supposed to? his hands didn’t seem to want to move from where he’d anchored them on her legs, his lips kissing her methodically but not doing much else.

she wants to have sex with you! his brain screamed at him, she is a supermodel. a supermodel who wants to have sex with you. 

impatiently, her hands slid to the waistband of his jeans. he didn’t stop her as she pulled the zipper down and slipped her hand under the waistband of his briefs. 

it’s not a big deal. you’ve done this a million times. never after an argument like that with cadence, though... only when she was busy pretending he didn’t exist... 

the bass of the music playing in the club vibrated through the closed door. the song sounded painfully familiar -- he strained to make out what it was...

of course it was a dance remix of ‘gorgeous.’ why wouldn’t it be?

panting, he pulled his mouth off of belle’s, tipping their foreheads together. “hey,” he started hoarsely, licking his lips as he glanced down towards where her hand was wrapped around him, “i’m sorry, but i don’t... have anything. i don’t think we should...”

have unprotected sex in a nightclub bathroom. her teeth dug into her bottom lip as she weighed her options. on any other night, that might have actually been flattering, but tonight...

pounding on the bathroom door made their minds up for them. he stepped back, adjusting himself in his jeans. “come on.”

he helped her down off the sink and opened the door, ready to lead her back out into the club. the line of people waiting to use the bathroom stared open-mouthed at them both as they walked off toward the booth. raleigh grinned at them as he walked past -- that was what he was supposed to do, right?

belle’s friends barely arched an eyebrow at her as they sat down again. immediately, he started pouring drinks and passing them out -- anything to be as drunk as possible before the song ended.

by the time he stumbled home, alone, it was late -- later than he’d wanted to be out. he used the front door -- not because he wanted any paparazzi to get photos of him going home alone or anything, but because he felt like it -- and waited until he was in the elevator to sigh frustratedly, decidedly not checking his phone. he knew there was no way she’d texted him.

cadence was sitting on the floor outside of his apartment door when he stepped out into the hallway.

he stared at her like she was a hallucination, lifting one hand to his eyes to rub at them. maybe he had more to drink than he’d thought. she looked up at him, still dressed in what she must’ve worn to her album release party.

he felt like he was going to throw up. god, that would be uncool.

“hi,” she said quietly, from the floor. wordlessly, he stepped closer to her and held out his hand. she took it, letting him pull her up. “can i talk to you?”

that wasn’t going to be easy, considering he had absolutely no idea what to say, but raleigh nodded, unlocking his front door and motioning for her to step inside.

he didn’t turn the lights on, letting the floor-to-ceiling windows illuminate the space. the lights from the city and the glow of the moon made cadence look almost ethereal as she slowly wandered over towards the far wall, hesitating for a moment before kicking her high-heeled shoes off. despite himself, his lips twitched up into a smile as he watched her.

“want a drink?” he asked, because he certainly did.

she nodded, and he moved to the bar cart to pour them both a half-full glass of vodka. he dropped an ice cube into his and poured orange juice over hers. 

raleigh forced his feet to join her at the windows, silently holding her glass out to her. she took it with a mumble of thanks, lifting it to her lips. her eyes were trained on the view. what the fuck was she doing here?

the silence stretched between them. finally, he said, “congratulations on the album. it’s really good.”

that seemed to snap her out of it. she snuck a glance at him out of the corner of her eye. “you listened to it?”

he nodded. no point in lying about it, now. “i’m a narcissist,” he joked, “it’s what i do.”

she laughed. raleigh stuffed his free hand into his pocket so that he wouldn’t reach out for her. god, he’d missed her laugh. 

he drained what was left in his glass in one go. “what’re you doing here?”

cadence was still staring out at the city. “i wanted to talk to you.”

“and yet, here you are. not talking.”

“i didn’t get that far when i planned this in my head,” she admitted, in an annoyingly endearing way. god damnit.

“how far did you get?”

she turned to look at him, then, leaning her shoulder against the window. “i thought maybe i would just kiss you when you got here and that would say everything i wanted to say. but then i chickened out.”

it felt like she’d just elbowed him in the stomach. “that doesn’t sound like you.”

“the kissing? i don’t know, i thought about it kind of a lot...”

he swallowed hard. “the chickening out.”

“oh.” she nodded, looking away. raleigh watched her stare down at the glass in her hands. “i guess i just felt like i already messed up so much. i didn’t want to... do the wrong thing again.”

raleigh couldn’t quite decide if he was too drunk for this conversation or not drunk enough. “how was your party?”

“it was fine. i think the last one i had -- for the odyssey -- was better.”

there was a night he didn’t want to relive. “look,” he sighed finally, turning back towards the windows and the city skyline, “i didn’t mean to put you in an uncomfortable position. if you’re only here because you think i’m upset... you don’t have to be. i’ll be fine.”

he could see her shifting out of his peripheral vision. she seemed to be considering what she wanted to say. finally, she spoke up. “that’s not why i’m here.” he turned towards her and watched as her shoulders squared. “i’m here because i missed you. a lot. and i wanted to apologize, for what happened between us... for shutting you out. for not telling you how i felt -- that i was in love with you, too. for letting you go.”

raleigh’s grip tightened on his glass so that he wouldn’t drop it on the floor. he stared at her like he was seeing her for the first time. 

cadence drew in a deep breath and continued, “getting over you was the hardest thing i ever had to do. and when i saw the pictures of you leaving the show tonight i realized... i failed miserably at it. i can’t get over you. i couldn’t. i won’t.”

he had to be imagining this, right? he was drunk and asleep in his limo, he had to be. he was dreaming.

but she felt very, very real when she reached out and twined her fingers in the fabric of his shirt.

“please say something,” she begged. she was undeniable.

“cadence...” he sighed, “you know how i feel.”

she nodded, once. “i do, but i want to hear you say it.”

“i want you to be my fucking girlfriend,” he admitted immediately, his voice hoarse. now that he’d given in, his free hand reached out and cupped her cheek. “for real. all the time. in front of everyone. i want you to move in, i never want us to go another day without talking. i don’t want anyone else to touch you. ever again.”

her lips parted. he couldn’t stop his thumb from pressing into her invitingly full bottom lip, watching in fascination as her eyelids fluttered. “raleigh,” she breathed, beautifully enough to do his head in. 

he stepped forward swiftly, pressing her back against the windows, and kissed her. she moaned, scrambling to set her glass on the side table next to her. he knew her hands were free when they shoved into his hair. 

fuck, if he hadn’t been wanting this for so long. his lips broke off of her to trail kisses across her jaw, down towards her neck. he couldn’t stop his fingers from tugging at her dress insistently. “do you want that?” he demanded. raleigh felt her nod against him. his teeth scraped across her pulse point. “say it.”

“raleigh!” she exclaimed. it was the most amazing sound in the world. his hips pushed forward insistently, grinding between her thighs. the force of it pushed her back into the windows. “i want it, i want you. i want all of it -- everything.”

the urgency to fuck her through the window was balancing precariously against his desire to do things right -- to give her what she deserved. with a huff, he wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up, walking them both off towards his bedroom.

she laughed again as he dumped her on the mattress, hard enough to make her bounce. raleigh grinned back at her as he whipped his shirt off of his head, tossing it to the floor. she was scrambling up the mattress, and he chased her towards the headboard, kneeling on top of her when she finally laid back.

he crowded her in close for another kiss, his hands everywhere at once. she whined into his lips, kissing him so urgently, like they didn’t have all the time in the world, now. “i missed you,” she breathed, her hands clutching at his shoulders desperately.

“i missed you too, beautiful,” he returned, pushing her dress up her thighs, “now lie back and let me make you feel good.”

his head was spinning by the time they’d finished, and not because of the drinks he’d had. cadence was tucked up under his arm, her head pillowed on his chest. she was still catching her breath as she dragged her fingertips along the tattoo spanning the expanse of his ribs.

the sun was starting to come up outside, filtering light into his bedroom. he stared at her face, illuminated by the dawning daylight. “you know, if anyone here is gorgeous, it’s you.”

“oh my god,” she mumbled, pressing her face into his skin, “you’re never going to let this go, are you?”

he smirked up at the ceiling as he pulled her in closer. “would you say it makes you so mad?”

“i’m going home,” she threatened, pinching his side. he laughed, squirming away from her hand. “this is over. you ruined it.”

“well, what if i want to come along?”

“raleigh,” she groaned finally, kicking him under the covers, “stop it.”

he snickered, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “what, you’re allowed to write about me, but i’m not allowed to enjoy it?”

“please,” she sighed, settling in against his chest again, “like you don’t write about me.”

“i never said that,” he hummed, already imagining the things her face would do when she finally got to listen to his album, if he ever finished it. “i’m really hoping the label doesn’t make me change the name of sex at the moda.”

“okay, you did not write a song called ‘sex at the moda.’ tell me you didn’t.”

“i’d hate to lie.”

she lifted her head to look at him, her face flushing. “will you play it for me?”

he eyed the guitar in the corner of his bedroom. like he could ever say no to her. still...

“maybe later,” he grinned, rolling over to pin her beneath him, the sheets tangling around their legs. “i can think of a better use of our time. we have a lot to catch up on.”

her arms wound around his neck. “tell me about it.”

[sanstropfremir]

okay okay before i get into what i have to say let's make it clear that rankings through out kingdom meant nothing to me so i might sound more passionate than i actually am about this topic. but from what i have been seeing there might be a reason as to why tbz came second and that is because of their korean fanbase. which i think might have been the one advantage they had from participating on road to kingdom, since the korean market eats up this kind of entertainment and investing time/voting for someone they became fond of to reach their goals. example, the produce series and the absolute hit that every group that came out of it was (even x1, literally breaking records in the split second they had together). once the whole voting scandal was outed, i saw this on street interview that showed how dissapointed the viwers were that all the time and energy they used to make their favorite trainees debut was pointless and useless. and im talking people, every age but also a lot of students, who sit together with their families to follow and root for their favorite contestants.

now, if you bring this into the whole "narrative" of tbz """fighting""" through rtk and now agaisnt """bigger""" groups, it's not that surprising to think that those fans who adopted them back in the begining of last year (which, let's say its around half of the fanbase) would also try their hardest to get them to win, because it was the goal for them since the begining of rtk. i was over on twitter a few days before the finale, and their korean fans were streaming and strategizing every way possible to make them a bit closer the trophy, i even laughed because most international fans were saying how the korean part of the fandom was carrying the entire thing.

but if you think that the other groups also have insanely strong national fanbases, which puts me in an odd spot as to if the "longest competitors" theory make sense, so i might have spoken a bunch of crap right now.

also, again, i think none of this matters because what exactly did skz win? literally, i cannot tell you who won queendom because my pea sized brain couldn't retain that information for more than three months. and the only reason we might still remember that skz won kingdom is because their fans might not let us forget about it, so what can you really do? i just hope that this could somehow affect the grandness of awardshow stages or special stages, you know. like getting to watch kingdom-like, well prepared stages at ever end of the year awards would be a pleasure. mnet, give btob that last performer spot and you might catch me sitting through the entire mama only to watch them do their magic

i mean, i get it because my family watched sytycd for YEARS together and i watched all 20+ hours of sdc3 while it was airing but like.....you can't vote in for american televisions shows from canada and we just don't have the same type of voting/sunk cost fallacy culture?? i mean it might just be my particular family but we very much had the attitude of like "ah it is time for us to watch these tiny people do their tiny dances in the magic box for our entertainment, but as soon as this hour is over we go back to our normal lives and don't think about it all."

yea, there isn't actually a tangible outcome of show for the winners, other than bragging rights. they say that the prize is a reality show but like....do single group-based reality shows really catch a larger audience, or are they just feeding content back to the diehard fans. and the way that the youtube algorithm works, any one of these groups could self produce something regardless of who won and it has just as much chance of getting bumped. half the comeback teasers and mvs that i see are spit up through my recommended videos anyways. but i do agree in that i hope what actually gets taken from the show is new methods in theatricality to change up the way stages are produced, especially at the end of year shows and special stages. i do think we're maybe starting to see some of it? i mean hoshi's special stage for spider was phenomenal and that was before this mostly started, but have you seen the mx stages for gambler?? i think that's gonna be the first comeback that i cover after i finish kingdom posts, because those stages (especially the inkigayo one) are excellent. if awards shows start encorporating more intergration of intentional camerawork and narrative driven choreo into their stages, their viewer retention rate would be SO much higher. like you said, we'll all be sitting our asses through everything to see eunkwang sing like his life depends on it.

[optimisticsprinkles]

The John Boyega Controversy

I noped out after getting the gist of it right after it happened, but it’s continued to rest heavily on my heart, so here we go. Don’t read if you don’t want to think about it (which I totally understand).

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

The monstrosity that was “The Rise of Skywalker” left everyone emotional. Not just us fans but also those who made the movie. They all got a lot of hate, and some of that hate was probably racist. John (who played Finn) in particular was probably getting a ton of crap. I did not go through his twitter feed to confirm this, but I can imagine.

In the midst of this emotional time, he posted something... crass about Finn and Rey. If you didn’t see it, good. Don’t look for it.

Its crassness was disturbing enough, and felt disrespectful toward a beloved female character, but what really seemed to trigger most Reylos was the laughing/flippant tone toward Ben Solo’s death.

I cannot think of a single Reylo who wasn’t devastated by the loss of Ben Solo. Many had grief symptoms in the real world. Depression, trouble eating, trouble sleeping, etc. And no matter what someone outside of fandom thinks about grieving a character, it can and does happen.

When someone says it's just a book, movie, or game, it belittles the depth of the emotional investment you've made. It belittles your feelings. It says, "You don't have the right to care deeply about this."

(source, yes I quoted myself)

As a public figure, John probably got more negative feedback than any of us could imagine. And he was probably fed up by the time he posted his crass joke.

I forgive him.

I don’t think he understood (how could he?) how it landed in the grieving Reylo climate at that time, or how much more painful it made the grieving process.

I forgive him.

I doubt he understood what the women were going through who responded to his joke with disappointment, hurt, and anger or why it upset them. I think there were too many people coming at him, and he didn’t have the emotional energy to consider it in any depth, had he been inclined to do so. I think he’d gotten so much hate that he was just done with any kind of negativity and he couldn’t separate the hate-filled posts from the ones with legitimate concerns. So he reacted to grieving Reylo responses with taunting shrug gifs and a distinct lack of empathy.

I forgive him.

His joke hurt. It hurt me, you, us when we were already fragile.

I forgive him.

In situations like that, it’s better not to respond, but some people did. Some spoke out. I understand the urge, but that kind of thing just fans the flames, especially in a time so emotionally fraught on all sides. No one was in any state to sit down and have a calm, rational conversation, much less the world-famous celebrity who’d just been in the worst Star Wars movie to date (yes, I’m counting the Holiday Special). Everyone in that conversation was going through a lot, and it was a terrible time to have any conversation, much less one fueled by hurt.

Some of John’s defenders called the Reylo response racist, and from the (very) few I looked at, there was no merit for a racism accusation. In that context, it looked to me like racist was used a lot like Hitler is used: to have the last word and stop any meaningful discussion from taking place. To shut the other person up so the name-caller can win.

I’m sure there were legitimate racists tearing into John on social media. Again, I didn’t look for them, but he’s a black man in a Star Wars movie, so it’s pretty much guaranteed. But the (few) Reylo responses I saw were upset but otherwise fine. If there were Reylos who went there, I did not see them, but if someone linked me to something obviously racist, I’d be like, “Yeah, that one is. Fuck that person. The others are fine, tho.”

There seemed to be (and I saw this happen with a comic artist, as well) this idea that preferring Reylo over FinnRey is, itself, racism.

Fuck that noise.

I’m not going to say that there aren’t any racist Reylos. Statistically speaking, I’m sure we have a couple. I have not met them, myself, or I haven’t seen any evidence of it if I have. (It’s not like racists go around posting selfies of themselves at Klan meetings.) Racism itself is a spectrum, embedded in society, often subtle, and there is no measuring system that can accurately quantify how much of a person’s behavior is motivated by racism, sexism, or intolerance.

But I reject, wholesale, that liking one pairing that happens to be two white people over the pairing that is interracial is inherently racist. It offends me as a thinking human being to see anyone use that excuse to win arguments or fandom wars.

Maybe someone, someday, will do a study on race, attraction, and fandom ships. How all of that affects each other. Someone probably has done a study on race and physical attraction, which I think would be an interesting read, but what I don’t think is that someone should be shamed for being more attracted to a certain gender or appearance or personality or, yes, even race.

Because I believe, to the bottom of my heart, that attraction is not something we choose. Perhaps it can be influenced, but it can’t be forced. And I think attraction does play a role in ships, but attraction is a weird formula that maybe someone somewhere has figured out, but I don’t have a clue how it works. Again: perhaps it can be influenced, but it can’t be forced, and personal preferences re: attraction aren’t right or wrong. They just are.

Racism is not preferring one fictional couple to a different fictional couple. Racism (and you can correct me if my definition is far off the mark) has much more to do with how we treat each other than with what fictional couples we prefer.

I am not here to tell anyone I am not a racist. That’s not something anyone here can know for sure, as none of you know me in the real world or see my every waking moment. Racism is a subject for me, as a straight white woman, to try to understand. I say try because I know, as a straight white woman, it would be easy for me to fall into prejudicial patterns. And I hope that by not assuming I’m infallible, it can help me live in a sincere, thoughtful, and kind way.

But for accusations or arguments with strangers online who don’t know me and don’t know you and judge based on fictional pairings?

I say again: Fuck that noise.

[today-only-happens-once]

With Great Power - Chapter 5

Title: With Great Power – Chapter 5

Catch up (or read on AO3) here!

Fic summary: Thomas Sanders is just a regular social media personality. But when he gets bit by a spider during filming one of his YouTube videos, his whole life is about to turn upside down—whether he (or the aspects of his personality) want it to or not. Platonic LAMP/CALM + Character!Thomas. Spider-Man AU.

Chapter word count: 3,515

Chapter warnings: cursing, nightmare mention, anxiety mention, minor spoilers for Danny Phantom.

A/N: Almost a month later, here’s chapter 5! So sorry for the delay. I hope you enjoy it! <3 Shoutout to @creativenostalgiastuff for her help as always. Edited by yours truly so all mistakes are mine.

Tags: @captain-loki-xavier, @human-dictionary, @the-peculiar-bi-tch, @mining-pup, @band-be-boss-blog, @asexual-trashbag, @samathekittycat, @why-should-i-tell-youu2, @theobsessor1, @always3charcoaltea, @changeling-ash, @logical-princey, @crimsonshadow323, @flickering-raven, @smokeyrutilequartz, @dontbugmeimantisocial, @liz-a-bell, @black-king-white-knight, @soijusthavetoask, @analogical-mess, @marvelfangeek09, @vigilantvirgil, @princelogical

Sorry for the delay, everyone! Thomas types out for Twitter, a couple days later. Wasn’t feeling great but we’re back at it! New CT coming to you soon!

He pauses, then looks up at Joan across from him, sitting on a chair in Picani’s office. “Hey, what if we did a livestream tomorrow?”

He still feels bad for having gone MIA for a week. Or, as MIA as Thomas ever really went. He’d texted Joan, Camden, and Talyn basically every day to tell them he still wasn’t feeling his best. It wasn’t… a total lie, he’d told himself despite the guilt that sat uncomfortably in his stomach. It definitely hadn’t helped that he’d consequentially been postponing finishing up the filming of Cartoon Therapy due to his absence. It had been a couple of weeks now without any video to post on either channel.

Joan looks up from laptop poised across their lap. “Uh, I can do that. As long as it ends before 6, ‘cause my piano lesson starts at 6:30.”

Thomas smiles. “Perfect. I just feel bad for making them wait, y’know?” To make up for it, he adds to the tweet, we’ll be having a Livestream tomorrow at 4! Open to everyone, not just members. Hope to see you all there!

“You can’t help that you got sick,” Joan replies as Thomas sends the tweet out. “They understand.”

“Yeah, but… y’know.” Thomas lifts a shoulder. “I just wanna do something for them.”

“It’s cool, man,” Joan replies. “I think it’s a good idea. And it’ll give us a nice break from the editing and shit.”

“Speaking of—” Thomas grabs the pen and journal prompts from the bookcase behind him—"how’s Camden handling his part of things? I haven’t talked to him about the vid in a while.”

“I think he’s almost done,” Joan replies. “We just gotta finish the last of Picani and we should have the rest of the footage he needs to finish his section.”

Thomas nods and adjusts the knot in the pastel green tie around his neck. It had seemed like every time they’d tried to film the rest of Picani, something got in the way. Thomas loved acting and he loved the filming stage of videos, but a small part of him just wanted to be done with it. The sooner he could be done filming, the sooner he could focus on… more pressing issues.

“Then let’s finish Picani,” Thomas says lightly. “We’ve just got the last scene with Valerie’s character, right?”

Joan nods. “Yep. Shouldn’t take long at all.”

“Awesome.” Thomas glances in the viewfinder and pushes the bangs that were falling into his eyes out of the way. “Ready when you are.”

Joan hits record on the camera, then looks down at their script. “I have to be the adult, y’know?”

Thomas taps his pen against his mouth, looking carefully at Valerie’s sightline. “You know, Elena… Danny’s older sister feels that way for much of the show, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Jazz is only a couple of years older than Danny. But she often feels like she has to be the adult in the family because she sees her parents as a bit… immature.” Thomas leans forward slightly. “So she acts way older than she really is. But that mentality ends up backfiring on her when she takes it a little too far.”

“Too far?”

Thomas places his pen on top of his journal in his lap. “In Season 2 Epsiode 7, Danny has to fight a ghost that can only be seen by kids while he’s on vacation with his family. Since Jazz acts and thinks of herself as an adult even though she’s only 16, she can’t see the ghost and starts to think—along with her parents—that Danny is going crazy.” Thomas pauses, remembering that they’d wanted to cut in with a video clip there. Then he continues. “Though her concern is well-intentioned, it leads her to trapping Danny and the ghost goes after their parents. It’s not until Danny is able to get Jazz to act like a kid again that she’s able to see the ghost, and ultimately help to save her family.”

Joan rolls their eyes to keep in character as they read Valerie’s lines. “Fine, but my family’s not under attack by ghosts.”

Thomas sighs. “You’re right. But the point is that Jazz thought acting like an adult was helping the people around her, when it really wasn’t. When she actually started acting her age was when she was able to be the most help—especially to her little brother, who was the whole reason she’d been acting so much older in the first place.”

“Huh…”

“From that point on,” Thomas continues, “Jazz tries to find a balance. She’s a mature person, and nobody was asking her to change that. But she also comes to understand the importance of still being a kid. She learns how to balance the two in a way that doesn’t ask her to sacrifice any part of who she is.”

Joan pauses. “I… guess I could try that. Maria isn’t a little kid anymore, even though I still think of her as my baby sister.”

Thomas gives a small, encouraging smile. “It’ll take some time. Learning balance is not as easy as flipping a switch. But it’s something we can continue to work on. It might even help your relationship with your sister in ways you don’t expect.”

Joan gives a single nod. “I’d like that.”

“Great!” Thomas grins. “So I’ll see you next week?”

“Definitely. And… thanks, Dr. Picani.”

“Any time, Elena.”

…

“We can tell them. Should we tell them? We can tell them. I think. Wait…”

Thomas laughs as Joan stumbles through their thoughts about half an hour in to the livestream. He laughs even harder when he sees the chat blowing up with people asking Joan to just say it already. They’d decided to go back to Thomas’s apartment for the livestream, if only for sake of tradition. Not every livestream had been from this location, but Thomas wanted some of the normalcy back. And Joan, though they’d seemed puzzled, didn’t appear to mind.

“I’m good to tell them who it is,” Thomas says.

“Wait, who as in the…” Joan arches an eyebrow. “Or…” They tilt their head. Perhaps strangely enough, Thomas knows exactly what they’re asking.

He laughs again. “Real name, not the character name.”

“Yeah, okay. That’s what I was thinking.” Thomas and Joan both look back at the camera.

“It’s Valerie,” Thomas says. “The new character we’re introducing is played by my friend, Valerie. Some of you probably know her, since she’s been in… a good number of our videos. We got really lucky that the schedules worked out, since she’s auditioning in Orlando at the moment.”

“Yeah, she’s actually been in a lot,” Joan says. They start counting on their fingers. “Reasons to Smile.”

“On the Spot in the Spotlight,” Thomas supplies. “Which we’re still planning on bringing back.”

“The first Tongue Twisted.” Joan snaps their fingers and points at him. “She’s been in a few of your shorts videos, too.”

“I feel like we’re missing something.” Thomas glances at the chat and smiles at the people shouting SANDERS SIDES in all caps. “That’s right! Goodness gracious, she was in two of the Sanders Sides videos.” He shakes his head. “Sorry, guys. Guess I’m still a little out of it.”

He manages a small, apologetic smile. But a moment later, there’s a flood of messages in the chat telling him not to worry, asking if he’s feeling better, reminding him to rest and drink water… he feels a sharp twist of guilt. He tries not to linger on it.

“Let’s see… other questions….” He watches the chat closely, the knot in his stomach loosening slightly as the messages filter from well wishes to questions again. One of them makes him frown. “Someone’s asking if I’ve seen the Ekko videos?” He glances over his shoulder towards Joan. “I haven’t. Is that a new thing? I don’t know if I’ve heard of them.”

Joan looks suddenly uncomfortable. They shrug, but its awkward and forced. “Yeah. It was all anyone was talking about a couple days ago.”

Thomas hadn’t been checking social media over the past week. A part of him felt relieved that they’d at least moved on from trying to identify who “Spider-Man” was. “What are they?”

Joan gives him a quick look. “I’ll… tell you after the livestream.” Thomas couldn’t quite read their expression, but there was a warning look in their eyes that made him nod his agreement. Whatever it was, Joan didn’t want to talk about it with an audience. They wanted to change the subject.

At Thomas’s nod, Joan leans forward to read the scrolling chat feed until they find a different question. Thomas glances at the screen as well, and sees a few questions with “Spider-Man” in them—they go too fast for him to identify what exactly they’re asking—and feels himself tense. Joan doesn’t seem to even notice the questions.

“Here’s one,” they say after a brief pause. “Thomas, if you could be any kitchen appliance, what would you be?”

As the livestream continues, Thomas finds himself falling into old, comforting habits. He’d always had fun doing livestreams, especially ones with Joan. He appreciated their ability to be thoughtful and intellectual one moment and crack a joke that would make Thomas’s stomach hurt from laughing the next. A part of him feels like he appreciates it now more than ever. Joan is his best friend, and he can tell them anything.

Well… almost.

The idea of telling them about the recent… abilities Thomas had come to acquire made his stomach squirm and his heartbeat quicken. He couldn’t quite explain why. Joan would probably be skeptical—even Thomas hadn’t believed it at first—but the powers were something he could prove, a voice that sounded an awful lot like Logan reminded him. He’d been proving his abilities to himself all week, after all. Maybe he knew there was a chance that Joan would freak out and never talk to him again. They wouldn’t do that. The thought sounds like Patton.

Even so, something whispers safer to not tell them in the back of his mind, and Thomas can’t help but believe it.

“I gotta go soon,” Joan says. They look at Thomas. “Should we end with Mind Meld or something?”

Thomas pushes his bangs out of his eyes. He smiles. “Yeah, let’s do it.” Thomas pauses, thinking of his first word. “Okay. Ready?”

“Yeah.”

“3. 2. 1. Giant,” Thomas chimes at the same time that Joan says, “Apple.”

Thomas laughs. “Giant and apple?” He makes a face. “I don’t even know where to go with that.”

Joan grins in amusement, then thinks. “Okay. I think I have one. Super and apple.”

Thomas stares at them in uncertainty before he gets an idea. “Okay. I do too. It’s kinda weird, though.”

“3. 2. 1. Honeycrisp,” Joan says at the same time Thomas spits out, “New York.”

“I was thinking like, a giant apple. New York?” Joan laughs. It makes Thomas laugh too.

“I was thinking like, ‘giant as in ‘big’ and then—”

“And then you went to Big Apple,” Joan finishes. “Okay. I kind of get that. Honeycrisp and New York. Uh.”

Thomas’s eyes widen as he frantically tries to think of some sort of connection before one occurs to him. “Okay! I think I got one. It’s… broad-ish?”

“Broadish?” Joan starts laughing again. “That’s very helpful.”

“Okay, like,” Thomas waves a hand. “Kinda broad.”

Joan furrows their brow before shrugging. “What the heck. 3. 2. 1.”

Thomas says ‘vendor’ and Joan says ‘food’. It takes another round before they both eventually end up saying ‘restaurant’. Thomas grins when they finally get there. He looks back at the camera.

“Took us a minute but we got there! Thanks for sticking around, guys. This was a lot of fun. Super glad we had the chance to do this.” He glances at the chat, laughing at all the reactions of people playing along. In the midst of the messages—some of them now transitioning to sweet goodbyes—he sees one that catches his eye.

oof after that ekko vid I could use a new reasons to smile

Something uncomfortable sits in Thomas’s chest, but he flashes a quick smile at the camera. “Love you all! Bye!”

He stops the livestream and closes his laptop. Joan sits back in their chair, the spark of amusement from the game of mind meld fades out of their eyes. He’s reminded suddenly of the solemn, uncomfortable look Joan had given him when he’d asked during the livestream about whatever the ‘Ekko video’ was about.

“I saw that message. I know what you’re thinking,” Joan chimes in quietly after a moment. “It’s… not something you really wanna watch, dude. Trust me.”

“Why?”

Joan sighs and reaches for their water bottle. “It’s just… this thing that freaked everyone out. I don’t know how to explain it, but Talyn had nightmares after they watched it.” They take a drink. “I think it’s just someone trying to get some attention. The best thing to do is probably not to give it to them, y’know?”

Thomas nods absently as Joan pushes back from the table and heads towards the kitchen. Talyn didn’t really spook easily. They played horror games for fun in the dark alone. Thomas had never really been that kind of person. But he can’t deny that he’s curious. A part of him does want to know, if only out of a morbid kind of curiosity of what could have that kind of impact on his friends. Even though Joan had talked about Talyn’s reaction, it was clear to Thomas that it had bothered them too.

Dishes clatter in the sink as Joan sets the water bottle they’d borrowed from Thomas amongst the plates and bowls that Thomas hadn’t gotten around to cleaning yet. Neither of them said anything, letting the whir of the AC unit fill the uncomfortable silence between them. Something about it had gotten under Joan’s skin. Something they weren’t telling Thomas.

Thomas opens his mouth to ask them about it when Joan interrupts him suddenly. “I don’t know, man. It was weird and it felt like a warning of some sort. Maybe that’s why Talyn and I both felt a little paranoid after we watched it.” Their dark eyes flicker up to Thomas as they turn from the sink to look at him through the cut out opening above the counter into the living room. “I just don’t really want to dwell on it.”

Thomas caves and nods. “Okay.”

“But if you want to do another Reasons to Smile, that might be fun. A few people in the chat were suggesting it. Maybe that’d be a good idea.” They cross back into the living room and grabs their jacket from the back of the chair.

“Sure,” Thomas says, still a little lost in his thoughts. What could be so bad about that video? “Yeah, I’ll reach out to Camden and the team and whoever is in town to see if they might wanna join in. Maybe I can get Lee or Mary Lee to join this time.”

“Cool.” Joan stops after they’ve pulled their jacket on. Thomas can feel their gaze on him. “You okay?”

Thomas blinks and shakes his head to clear it. “Yeah. Just worried,” he says honestly. He offers a faint smile. “You and Talyn don’t usually get freaked out easily.”

Joan gives him a look. “We have anxiety,” they deadpan teasingly. Thomas huffs a laugh, even though it does little to expel the tightness in his chest. Joan sighs softly. “Really, Thomas. We’re okay.”

Thomas nods again. “Okay.”

“I gotta run,” Joan says, sounding faintly apologetic. “I’m gonna be late for my lesson.”

Thomas gives them a smile that he hopes is reassuring. “Go. Love you.”

“Love you too.” Joan closes the door behind them.

…

Thomas slips his phone into the back pocket of his jeans and cranes his neck up towards the night sky. It’s  little late to be posting the Sunday Shout-Out video, but he liked the nighttime. The parking lot is empty except for his car, and even though he knows he ought to just go home given the hour, a part of him wants to stay out just a little longer.

Thomas sighs and jumps up on the trunk of his car and sits. He fold his hands behind his head and leans back against the windshield, looking up at the stars. Most of them are drowned out by the streetlights that illuminate the lot, but Thomas doesn’t mind. A cool breeze plays with the ends of his hair. It’s calming.

Thomas sighs and closes his eyes.

“I really ought to insist that you go home before too much longer, Thomas.”

The internet personality smiles faintly at the sound of his Logical Side’s voice. He cracks an eye open to find Logan standing beside the car, his arms crossed over his chest and an eyebrow cocked. Thomas’s lips curl up in a faint smile.

“I know, Logan.”

“If you know, then why do you appear to be falling asleep in the middle of an abandoned parking lot?”

Thomas sits up. “I wasn’t falling asleep.”

Logan hums, seemingly unconvinced. “All the same. Optimal rest is necessary for you to maintain a healthy lifestyle.”

“I know.” Thomas shakes his head a little, still smiling, and leans back again. “But this is nice.”

“This?” Thomas can hear the skepticism and confusion in Logan’s voice and tries not to laugh.

“Yes,” Thomas replies. He shifts over. “Take a seat. Try it out for yourself.”

There’s a brief pause, and Thomas isn’t sure whether or not Logan is going to take him up on the offer. Then Logan climbs up on the car, mirroring Thomas’s position beside him except for the folding his hands across his stomach rather than behind his head. Thomas smiles again. He’s a little surprised, although he supposes he shouldn’t be. Logan was the part of him that sought to learn, after all. And if Logan didn’t understand the appeal of something, he could usually be convinced to try it at least once.

“See?” Thomas says after a moment. “It’s nice.”

Logan doesn’t reply right away. “Perhaps.”

“The whole day was kind of nice, actually,” Thomas continues. He lets his eyes drift closed again. “It felt… normal.”

“Normal is a widely subjective term, Thomas.”

“Normal for me, I mean.” He takes in a deep breath of the night air. “Filming, livestreaming, hanging out with Joan. I think maybe I needed that. I needed a day to just be… normal again. Maybe not everything has to change, y’know?”

Logan doesn’t say anything. Thomas feels him shift beside him and he cracks an eye open. Logan is looking up at the sky. The streetlights reflect off the lens of his glasses. A short gust of wind tugs at the end of his stiped tie. There’s something in his expression that Thomas can’t quite read.

He doesn’t dwell on it. Thomas follows Logan’s gaze back up to the sky. “Do you remember,” Thomas asks, “when I was like, seven and wanted to be an astronaut?”

“Yes,” Logan replies. “I do remember that. It was an aspiration that lasted for nearly a full year.”

Thomas glances over at him. “Do you wish I still wanted that?”

Logan adjusts the frame of his glasses before folding his hands across his stomach again. “I don’t believe it’s that simple. I was more than content at your chosen field, Thomas, short-lived as your use of it may have been.”

“You’re talking about chemical engineering.”

“Indeed.” Logan is still looking up at the sky above them. “Although, such fields of study have many unexpected benefits. Perhaps it will prove useful yet.”

The corner of Thomas’s lips curls up in a faint smile. “Perhaps,” he says, echoing Logan from a moment ago. A comfortable silence settles between them. For all the times that Logan and Thomas had been at odds with each other, he’d never doubted that Logan was doing his best to look out for him, just like all of them always did. Most of the time, Thomas found Logan’s company a quiet kind of grounding. Calming. Tonight was no exception to that.

Thomas listens to the crickets and sound of distant car tires rolling on pavement for a long moment. His eyes drift shut again.

“You are getting tired,” Logan says softly, moments before Thomas was about to fall asleep. “I really must insist that you go home to ensure your safety.”

Thomas blinks his eyes open and sits up. He scrubs a hand across his eyes, bangs falling across his face in the process, and smiles tiredly at Logan as the Logical Side sits up beside him.

“You got it, Logan.” He pauses, the smile a little. “And… thanks.”

…

[btsybrkr]

Here’s A List Of Things I Hate

I've reached something of a mental block recently when it comes to writing. I think it's because, despite sometimes coming off like I'm mocking things or just being a general smart-arse, I usually write about things I genuinely love. I love The Apprentice. I love Come Dine With Me. I love the idea that the Saturday night schedule, currently occupied on ITV1 by The Masked Singer - a horrifying cross between The Voice and a recurring nightmare I had between the ages of 6 and 8 - might one day be livened up by a post-apocalyptic The X Factor-style talent show in which we choose the next Prime Minister from a roster of Average Joe’s that just feel like giving it a bash.

I usually have lots to say about things I love, but recently, for some reason, I’m struggling to even think of anything that I love enough to write about. Maybe I’m being dragged down by the fact that this January alone seemed to last three long months, or perhaps because January itself included ‘Blue Monday’, the so-called ‘most miserable day of the year’. Maybe it's neither of things, maybe I’m just suffering from a bad case of The Realisation That We And Everything That We Do Are All, In The End, Meaningless, And That Every Day, We Are Collectively Hurtling Closer And Closer Towards The Endless Void And There Is Nothing That Any Of Us Can Do To Stop It. There's probably a snappier name for that, but you know what I mean. In any case, I’m just finding it much easier to think about things I hate recently.

Anyway, what do we do with these feelings of negativity to get rid of them once and for all? We express them. So, for anyone willing to read it, here’s a list of things I hate.

Stephen Mulhern

ITV mainstay Stephen Mulhern arguably belongs on television - not for any positive reason, just because it’s only the barrier of television between him and the viewer that allows him to appear as a cheerful friendly presence, rather than an insufferable know-it-all prick, whose repeated condescending glances to the camera during interviews with rejected Britain’s Got Talent contestants just wouldn’t fly in real life. I mean, really, imagine you were having a conversation with someone, and they reacted to something you said by looking off into the distance, à la Fleabag, with an expression that quite clearly reads “This person is an idiot!! Laugh, everyone!! Laugh at the idiot!!” You know what, Stephen? You’re the idiot. But I won’t laugh at you, because then you might think that you’re funny, and I’m just not having that.

Coleslaw

I saw a tweet years ago that said “what was the first person to milk a cow thinking?”, and honestly, it raises a very good question. I can only imagine that there was some perverted ulterior motives at play, for someone to not only milk the cow’s udders in the first place, but then to drink it, at a time when that just wasn’t done. They must have been a pretty nefarious character, it almost doesn’t bear thinking about. Instead, I’d like to question the motives of the even dodgier character who first looked at grated carrots, cabbage and onions, and thought ‘You know what might really tie these bland individual tastes together? Mayonnaise. A fuckload of it.’

You know what, though? It's not the existence of coleslaw that confuses me the most about it - it's the popularity of it. It has pride of place on the table at every family buffet, it’s disappointingly included in otherwise-appealing wraps in the Boots meal deal fridge, and it's an option on the menu in a shocking majority of takeaways, despite the fact that nobody has ever emerged, staggering and bleary-eyed from Walkabout at 3:30am and thought ‘I could absolutely murder some coleslaw’. Most annoying of all is the way some restaurants chuck a bit of paprika in the mix and use it as an excuse to rename it ‘POW POW GROOVY SLAW’, or something equally ridiculous. Why are we trying to sex up a bowl of vegetables covered in mayonnaise? I can't think of anything less sexy, and I don't particularly want to try.

Let's face it, coleslaw has long overstayed its welcome. It's the last stubborn hanger-on from the pages of stomach-churning 1970s dinner party cookbooks (probably found somewhere between the recipes for spinach and tuna pie and a boiled, unglazed joint of ham suspended in gelatine), and it's time we admitted that and stage a renaissance for the real king of the veg/mayo combo. Rise, Sir Potato Salad - your rule has begun.

Facebook

I recently deleted Facebook off my phone, and immediately noticed an improvement in the overall quality of my life. I promise I don’t mean this in the typical ‘phone bad, book good’ way that fake-’woke’ holier-than-thou characters preach about (usually on Facebook itself, ironically). I still happily waste away hours of my life on Twitter, and Instagram, the latter of which arguably has the most negative influence on my brain out of all the social networks. The thing with Facebook is that it doesn’t necessarily have a negative influence on my brain, so much as it has no influence on any part of me whatsoever. Facebook is a vacuum. It's completely, entirely pointless. In fact, it’s where ‘point’ itself goes to die.

Considering there’s probably no two Facebook users out there with the exact same friends list, I'm willing to bet that everybody’s News Feed looks eerily similar. Every scroll through is the same - a former workmate announcing a pregnancy, someone you forgot about from school sharing a vague, ‘deep’ quote about their hurt feelings, an elderly relative you didn't realise was racist until literally right now, when they began sharing posts from a page eloquently titled ‘MUSLIMS!! it is TIME to go HOME so we can have BRITAIN BACK’, or something along those lines. If you ever have nothing better to do - although, I'm sure there is always something, anything, better to do - just set a timer, open up Facebook, and see how long it takes before you come across a single thing that genuinely resonates with you in any positive way at all. I just redownloaded Facebook to try it for myself, and it took me 46 minutes.

Sound like a lie? Well, to be fair, it is. But there's more truth in that than almost anything you'll see on Facebook.

Those Slush Puppy Straws With Tiny Spoons On The End

Plastic straws are on their way out, and quite rightly. The Sea Turtle Conservancy estimate that around half the world’s sea turtles have ingested plastic, and straws are believed to have accounted for a lot of that. With everything you read or learn about the effect of straws on the environment, it's surprising that it's taken this long for us to do something about it.

With that said, it's not just the turtles that are benefitting from the rise of the paper straw - I'm pretty pleased about it as well. Why? Because using paper instead of plastic might mean that we stop manufacturing those evil straws with tiny spoons on the end of them.

Yes, evil. How many times have you been enjoying a Slush Puppy on a hot summer’s day, only to realise you can't get to the bits at the bottom of the cup, because your straw inexplicably has a spoon on the end of it. What's that for? A Slush Puppy is a drink, and spoons are for eating things with. “It's for eating the delicious bits of vaguely-flavoured ice after you've sucked up all the syrup”, you might say, but then why? Mojitos are made with crushed ice, but you wouldn't go up to the barman and go "excuse me, mate, you forgot to give me a spoon so I could eat all these delicious bits of vaguely-minty ice", would you?

Anyway, you can't suck up all the syrup in the first place when the bottom of your straw just isn't a straw. This a problem we usually solve by holding the cup above our mouths and giving the bottom of the cup a gentle tap, usually sending the rest of it falling out of the cup and all over your face, shirt, anywhere but your mouth, faster than you can say “I can't believe I’m 23 years old and writing an angry blog about straws with tiny spoons on the end”. Another solution we often resort to is turning the straw upside down, which, in my experience, always leads to cutting the roof of your mouth on the tiny spoon that you were never going to use in the first place. No wonder it took us so long to show a bit of sympathy for the turtles - we've been ignoring our own straw-related injuries for years, probably just because we think it makes us look hard.

As far as I'm concerned, spoons are for food, and straws are for liquids. That's why, whenever I order soup in a café, I always ask for a straw. Yes, I get looks from the other customers, but I'm sure they aren't looks of amusement or confusion - everyone else just wishes they'd thought of it first.

Ladybirds

Ladybirds aren't cute. They are not ‘nice’ bugs. They are beetles, in a quirky disguise, who can also fly. With all that in mind, why are we taught to like them? Why do people spot one land on your clothes, or in your hair, and cheerfully announce “oh, there’s a ladybird on you!”, as if you’ve somehow been chosen by the ladybird and should feel honoured. Get it off me now, because I don’t know what it’s going to do! Don’t tell me that it’s ‘harmless’ and that I’m ‘overreacting’. We thought that cigarettes were ‘harmless’ before the mid-60s, cheerfully puffing our way through life, with one in each hand at any given moment, as we watched our darling babies speak their first words, which were usually something along the lines of “alright, mate, 20 Sterling Dual, please” - but then we learned. We learned that they weren’t as harmless as we first thought. And believe me when I tell you that, one day, we’ll reach the same conclusion about ladybirds. Just as soon as we find out exactly what they’re planning.

In fact, where have they gone? I haven’t seen one for a good while. Surely, they’re holed up in a specially designed lair somewhere, millions of them, carefully planning their next move in their efforts to overthrow the human race. Planning and watching. We may not be able to see them, but I’m willing to bet they have eyes on us. You know when you’re alone and you get the feeling there’s something or someone else present? It’s ladybirds. I’m sure of it. We need to watch our backs.

I’m not really sure where my fear of ladybirds has come from. Perhaps it’s down to a dream I’ve been having at least three times a year since I was a teenager, in which I’m leaving my Nan’s house and spot a ladybird the size of a Golden Retriever out in the alleyway, just sitting there, still and silent. I run around the corner to one of my friend’s houses, to warn him of the arrival of our ladybird overlords, but the entire front of his house is covered in millions of the things. I shout his name, up at an open window, and he replies that he’s coming down to open the door to me, but when he does, it isn’t him at all - it’s just a 6ft tall ladybird. I usually wake up in a cold sweat at that point, but when I try to go back to sleep, I can feel them crawling all over me.

I know I sound insane, but I promise you, I’m not - I just don't trust them, and I think that’s understandable.

Hate

If there's one thing I hate more than all the above, it's the very concept of hate itself. I don't just mean in a political or universal sense - although, I do agree the world might be a far better place if we all just hated each other a little bit less - hate has an effect on all our personal lives, too.

I'm really trying to make the most of my early twenties, and that means conserving what little energy I have left after I'm done working, drinking, and crying - just the usual daily activities that we all partake in - to be a little more productive. I can't be using that energy up on hate. In fact, in a scientific study that I've literally just made up, it was found that feeling hatred for even one fifth of a second uses up three times as much mental and physical energy as smiling at sixteen angry strangers, half of which are making fists at you. You can't argue with those sorts of statistics.

Anyway, I'm hoping to return to talking about things that make me feel a little more positive next time, because, besides anything, it's just nice to be nice, isn't it?

Not to Stephen Mulhern, though. He needs to learn his lesson.

If you like seeing me talking shit, but would rather it wasn't so bloody long, you can follow me on twitter here.

[worldoflis]

Close Binaries 7. gradual / star

A/N Longest one yet! Though I really need to make them SHORTER I can’t keep writing when I should be sleeping. AND! We have a title! I’m not sure if I’ll be sticking with it yet, but I feel it’s good to have everything under a decent umbrella. And we’re finally, slowly, getting to some actual proper interaction, so yay?

Also, the duck is real.

1. athlete / snowman  //  2. bury / cinnamon  //  3. camera / candle  //  4. deputy / paper  //  5. exclude / ribbon  //  6. feed / festival

When Blaine finishes his run that afternoon, he’s actually feeling good. It’s been a week now of running 5 minutes every day - or, well, almost every day. He’d skipped Monday, because after learning he’d been paired with Rabid Rachel for their camera assignment, he’d deserved an evening of wallowing in self pity in his couch.

So even though he still feels silly getting all dressed up and going out to Central Park for a mere five minutes of running, and even though he hasn’t lost a single pound (yet), he’s proud of himself. He’s even almost looking forward to tomorrow, when he’s going to add five more minutes to his routine, effectively doubling his running time.

Almost.

He spots a bench nearby and walks over to it, looking out over the lake as he holds on to it to stretch. It’s surprisingly calm for this time of day, only a few people up on the path where he was running just a moment earlier, and one guy standing closer to the lake. He’s tall, hair coiffed high, a brightly patterned scarf draped carefully around his shoulders as he stands and stares at the ducks. It’s his posture that strikes Blaine, though - chin up, shoulders and back straight, a gentle air of confidence that draws everyone’s attention. He seems vaguely familiar, but it’s not until he turns around that Blaine recognizes him.

For a few long, endless seconds, Blaine is conflicted between saying hi or disappearing in the background. On the one hand, it’s not like he actually knows the guy, and what is he supposed to say anyway? “Hey, you sold me some cupcakes two days ago, remember me?” On the other hand, he’s been raised good and proper, and an Anderson always greets his peers with a smile.

He’s saved from making a decision when the guy catches his eye, eyes narrowing just the tiniest bit before a smile of recognition washes over his face - a smile so warm and welcoming that Blaine is already dreading the end of the conversation before it’s even begun.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

It’s awkward. At least, Blaine is pretty sure it’s awkward, because how could it not be? He should’ve broken eye contact, he should’ve just pretended to not notice. But no. “Hi”, he’d said. “Hi.” Like a moron, like a complete fool, like a parrot unable to come up with his own dialogue - and who even started a conversation like that anymore? “Hi.” People had often told him he was a good conversationalist, and up until now he’d always believed them.

Clearly, though, they’d been lying to him.

“You go to NYADA too, don’t you?”, the guy asks, seemingly not noticing -or pretend not to notice?- Blaine’s social ineptness, and Blaine’s not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse. “We met the day before yesterday at the Cupcake Festival. Two Straw-Bette Middlers, if I recall correctly.”

He remembers Blaine. He remembers Blaine’s order, and Blaine barely even remembers his own name.

“Good memory! Two Straw-Bette Middlers, indeed, and they were a-mazing. Had to take an extra round around the park to keep them from sticking to the hips, though. Still, if you’d be willing to share the recipe, I’d love to give you my e-mail.”

Great - not only is he implying that he habitually runs not one, but multiple rounds around Central Park, when really, he barely manages to cross it, he’s also upped the creep factor to ten.

Again though, Kurt just smiles, looking genuinely flattered.

“I’d be happy to,” he says with an obliging head tilt. “Is your school e-mail fine or do you not use it?”

“No, I do!” He’s talking too fast, he’s seeming too eager, and what is even happening to him? Since when can he not have a normal conversation anymore? “So yes, absolutely, school e-mail’s fine. It’s Anderson. Blaine Anderson.”

“Bl- Blaine?”

It’s the first time the guy actually seems to be thrown off, looking at Blaine as if he’s not entirely sure he can trust him anymore.

“Blaine, yes. B-L-A-I-N-E. Like Blaine Scully?”

“Oh, I don’t watch baseball,” the guy dismisses his mnemonic, but then nods decisively. “I just need to have a conversation with someone. Blaine Anderson. Ok. I will remember that. However, if you do not mind, I think I’m heading home. I’ve been staring at those ducks for ten minutes and my feet are starting to freeze.”

“Oh no, please don’t let me keep you - I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any toes falling off,” Blaine quips. “Just don’t tell me you’ve been feeding them leftover cupcake crumbs, because I might have to fight them over that.”

Perfect - now he looks like a creep and an animal abuser.

To his surprise, though, the guy bursts out laughing, an honest-to-god, genuine, heart-felt laugh, and if Blaine was basking in the guy’s smile before, that was nothing compared to this laugh.

“I promise, I did not give the ducks any leftover crumbs,” the guy reassures him, still grinning widely. “No - I had to impersonate a hungry duck earlier in Tibideaux’ class, and got reprimanded for the lack of compassion in my performance. So I came to observe the ducks and see if I could find any compassion.”

“And?”

“Nothing.” The guy shrugs. “There goes my dream of becoming a famous Broadway star. All because I couldn’t find the compassion in the duck. I did see an orange fashionista duck, though, so at least that was cool.”

“A what?”

“There’s a bright orange duck on the lake,” the guy repeats, pointing at the lake and beckoning for Blaine to follow him. “See? There, behind that branch. Little fellow, feathers sticking out front and back?”

The guy’s right. There on the lake, between the dozens of common wild ducks Blaine’s used to seeing in the park, is another duck, littler than the rest, with a bright orange neck and golden feathers sticking up from his back, wiggling his green-and-white tail as he climbs out of the water.

“That’s a Mandarin duck,” Blaine says, taking out his cell and getting closer to the water.

“A what now?”

“A Mandarin duck,” Blaine repeats, the shutter of his phone clicking with every picture he takes. “My uncle used to have some on his pond, just cause they’re pretty to look at. I have no idea how this one got here, it must have escaped from somewhere, it definitely is not a native bird.”

He’s scrolling through the pictures, selecting a couple to post on his Twitter.

“There,” he says. “Hastag astarisborn, hastag centralparkcelebs. What do you think?”

The other guy smiles in approval, and they talk for another minute or so before they say their goodbyes, after wich Blaine realizes two things.

One. He somehow managed to get through this whole conversation without knowing or asking the other guy’s name.

Two. He’s been talking to the guy after his run. Which means he was sweaty. Which means his hair broke free out of its gel-mediated confinement. Which means that while he was worrying about his social awkwardness, what he really should have been worrying about were his curls sticking out in every which direction.

And he is absolutely mortified.

8. house / gift

[crappyfics]

Cherry Bomb [Part 2]

Rockstar!au / Chanyeol x Reader

Word count: 1 933

Pervious part / Masterlist

“What do you mean by ‘bandmates’? You’ve never told us about your acquaintance and we’ve been in the dark all this time!” Kyung was furiously yelling at me in the parking lot a few blocks away from my apartment building. There was no one with us, not even the rest of the band. They were all gone to their homes and even took Somi with them not to witness the discussion that was about to go down. 

“It is not like we’re friends anyway. We used to be in the same band a few years ago, but that was it.” I explain myself but he clearly didn’t think this was good enough explanation. 

“The way he talked to you tonight didn’t seem like you were just bandmates, Y/N!” He laughed unamused and brought his hand up to his hair pushing it back trying to calm down his nerves. It wasn’t the first time I saw him having a crisis but this time I did not exactly know the reason why he was freaking out. I could guess it was only because I was one of Park Chanyeol’s ‘old friends’, but it felt more like Kyung did not like it when the rockstar took me to the back door for a private conversation. 

If it was already complicated to explain how things were between Chanyeol and me in the past, it was even worst to try and explain what Kyung and I are in the present. I don’t know, it was some kind of weird open relationship that wasn’t ever serious or anything but we tended to ask for a commitment from each other. Our complicated relationship was only a stupid way of being together without ever letting our personal lives affect the band, which was our business. We never meant to go into deep, we never meant to fall for each other, but it was too late to go back when we always found ourselves tangled in the sheets and sharing dreams before going to bed. 

We liked to lie to ourselves too. We pretended that we were fine the way we were, that it really did not affect our band, that regardless of what would happen between us, we would remain professional. But Zack and Jin knew how close we were and how this crazy ass relationship was toxic. If only we assumed each other and tried to keep a balance without hiding and pretending to even our bandmates and friends that we were nothing, things would go much better. 

Me knowing Chanyeol and hiding it from everyone could be a parcel of our argument tonight, but to Kyung the big deal was when I left to speak to the big guy in a more private place because I used to be that close with him. 

“We only talked, Kyung.” 

“What about?” 

“I never hide anything from you, but this time please don’t ask me that.”

“And why not? We’ve been struggling for so long to have stupid gigs around town meanwhile all along you knew someone in the industry. You simply hid it from us that you had a passageway to the industry much easier than what we've been trying to do. I- I don’t get it! And now you can’t tell me what you and Park fucking Chanyeol were talking about?”

“It is strictly personal. I really hoped you could understand that.”

“No, I can’t, Y/N. I can’t! You wanna know why? Because now you’re not hiding things from the band, you are hiding from me and that doesn’t bother me, it infuriates me!”

“Chanyeol and I used to be friends. That’s all, Kyung! We barely still know each other. Telling you that I had a stupid garage band with him wouldn’t change a single thing because HE kicked me out of it!” his wide eyes now watched me surprised by the revelation. Who would ever think that me, a nobody, was once in a band with the biggest rock star in Asia and managed to get kicked out of the project? Oh well, nobody, not even Kyung saw that coming. “He would never help us get there, he would never do anything for me. He never did! Instead, he would steal our songs and make them his own!”

Pause.

It was cold outside but all the yelling heated our bodies. It felt like the thick coat of tension in the air was enough to warm us up. Kyung kept staring at me still agape not really knowing what to say. Me, on the other hand, I did know what I wanted and it was to go home. I couldn’t allow Chanyeol to destroy my career once again, especially now that he had nothing to do with it. I was tired from the concert and the fighting, I just wanted to stay alone, to go home and be by myself. I wasn’t mad at Kyung. I understood his point, or at least I tried. I just didn’t want to open up more than I’ve already done that night. It was enough for me to deal with the memory of Park Chanyeol alone. I didn’t wanna risk having other people reminding me of the guy at times. It was always better keeping it a secret.

“I wanna go home.”

I entered the car and Kyung followed me going to the driver’s seat and silently starting the car. The only sound we could hear was from the engines of the vehicle, we were both silent not really knowing how to approach each other at that point. I wanted to say I was fine and that we should forget about tonight, but I couldn’t forget the memory of Chanyeol’s tall figure towering me when we were both alone by the back door of the venue where the music was muffled and we could hear each other's strange feelings. 

Kyung kissed me goodnight before I left the car, but it wasn’t his affection I was craving tonight. I just hoped it all went away just like Chanyeol did and would do once again. 

I could hear the kettle on the stove dramatically announce that the water was boiling. I got up from the couch and ran to the kitchen to pour myself a generous mug of tea. It wasn’t any great medicine, no. But it sure would help me organize my thoughts better, maybe intercalate ideas between sips. I thought that it all would be weird once the band met again for rehearsal, but afraid of the truth, I stuck with the doubt. I avoided meeting the boys only limiting our conversations to quick and objective text messages.

The only one who caught me home with no difficulty was Somi. But knowing that I wasn’t on my 100%, she also avoided talking about my band's last gig. She did not really have a filter for social interactions, but she had a lot of respect for me and my personal space. Knowing that, I had no problem being at home with her because I knew she wouldn’t push my buttons. Not so soon. 

On cue, I saw my best friend come out of her room and join me at the kitchen table. 

“What’s up?”

“Been trying to finish my homework but I guess I’ll leave it for tomorrow.”

I only nod and shift on my chair giving her space to come and sit beside me. She poured herself some tea and silently we drank from our cups. School was Somi’s life. She woke up early in the morning every day to go to class and she came home late at night. She spent most of her day studying and if not, she would be at work trying to make enough to pay the bills. She would go out with her friends sometimes, but most of those times it was to watch my shows. But she was an ordinary girl. She had an ordinary life and that was amazing. Somi was very down to earth meanwhile I tried to believe I was as responsible as she was. I liked to believe that being a musician was my destiny, that I had a talent for no other thing in this world. But when your band is not very successful, and your talent is not well recognized by big labels, that’s when you have to question yourself and your life decisions. My tea was almost over but I still had no many thoughts I had to go through. I put my cup down. Maybe I should go back to school. Making music was not making much money, at least if I got a job as a waitress and went back to school I might have had a chance to succeed. 

"He asked me what I was doing,” I spoke up making Somi look up at me and try to understand the randomness of the conversation. She stared at me silently. “Chanyeol. He asked me what I was doing playing at a club.”

“What does that even mean?”

“He thinks it’s pathetic.” I moved to drink some more of my tea but I stopped midway remembering there was no more in the cup. I put it down once again. If a sigh could last 4 minutes, that was what Somi would hear from me in the kitchen. “Before that night, the last time I saw Chanyeol was in the garage of his parents’ house. It was after a show in a club. Back then he didn’t think it was pathetic.”

“Why did he even took you to the back door that night? To fucking mock you? What’s wrong with that guy?”

“I wish I knew.”

Ever since my last show, Cherry Bomb got quite popular around town. There were videos all over the internet, and on twitter, we gained so many followers. It had never happened after our show, but last time Zack checked, Byun Baekhyun, one of the Byun siblings, had posted a video of us on Instagram and things got crazy online. 

I wasn’t very fond of the virtual world but I could not deny its power. Zack was doing his best on updating all our social media accounts but things got a little weird and scandalous when rumors started popping out on our feed. Some comments on videos and photos were about “that girl and Chanyeol secretly talking in the back exit door of The Cave.” It was absurd. If they only knew Chanyeol was not being a flirt, these rumors wouldn't have spread so fast like that. 

As if I liked the martyr, when I heard from my bandmates that people were talking about me and the rockstar, I started accessing our accounts just for the sake of knowing what they were saying. Countless comments, countless lies, but also countless pictures taken of us talking so close to each other that from another angle it would look like something else. I was drowning in so much toxicity from the abusive posts, but I could not help myself from seeing them. It was all pretty stupid in the beginning until thousands of notification started appearing on our account.

@Park_CY Old friends reuniting. Fun times!

"OLD FRIENDS!” He literally said that! He called ourselves old friends for the entire internet to see. This was NOT what Park Chanyeol would ever tweet. ‘Old friends’ was not what we seemed to be that night. He called me pathetic, he mocked me, he was not friendly at all. Something was up and I had to find out as soon as possible before it was too late to protect my bandmates. 

Bridge chapter

[timeisacephalopod]

Trending

A random non-powered AU featuring Tony/ Bucky. Its just a random crack fic tbh.

*

Tony is wheezing as he laughs and Bucky resents that, really. “Tony stop laughing I didn’t mean for this to start trending on Twitter,” he says. Steve had had the same reaction and now he’s in the hospital because he had a real bad asthma attack. Bucky just wishes people would stop laughing when he tells them about this because he needs real advice on how not to end up Twitter famous for something other than dating Tony. That he can handle- most people either leave him alone, think he’s hilarious, or send him death threats out of jealousy. Easy peasy. This? Less so.

“Buck, you fucking fried this guy and served him for dinner,” Tony tells him and Bucky sighs. 

“I was just annoyed with his stupid comments on Twitter,” he mumbles. Brock kept replying to literally everything he’s tweeted so he got annoyed, okay. He didn’t think him telling Brock his dick looked like a dirty aardvark would get so popular. 

He also hadn’t anticipated Brock’s indignation but his responses to that also got popular because apparently responding to threatening tweets with ‘feed ur dick some termites Brock, it takes over ur brain when its hungry’ is something people find funny. And even he has to admit that Brock’s ridiculous ranting capped off by ‘ok, Arthur’ was amusing but come on. His annoyed tweets to his shitty ex about his aardvark dick eating termites is not worth making him a trending celebrity on Twitter.

“People keep tweeting Brock termite pictures,” Tony wheezes out and Bucky sighs. Ok so Brock is probably going to delete all social media by the end of the week and that’s funny, but #OkArthur is not even a good hashtag. He can’t believe this is what he’s going to be known for. If he were to choose his claim to fame it would definitely be that time he punched a Nazi even if it was mostly by accident because he panicked. But the local Jewish people and Nazis don’t mix so you know. He punched the Nazi. Steve basically had the same reaction to that that he did to Bucky’s accidental revenge on Brock. He’s sensing a theme here.

“Can you make it stop?” Bucky asks. Tony is the tech guy, he’s sure he can make this all disappear into Bucky’s list of weird things that have happened to him this week file. 

��Buck, this is the funniest thing I’ve had a significant other do and I dated Rhodey for a little while. Dude is hilarious. I want to see what happens to this Brock guy. Also you should file a restraining order because he’s clearly unstable and violent,” he says. Yeah, Bucky already knows that and its why he left but he leaves that be.

“Tony I don’t want to be known as the dirty aardvark dick guy,” he says in a pleading tone.

This mostly only results in Tony laughing more. “That’s Brock, not you,” he manages to get out and Bucky sighs.

“Honey you’re terribly unsupportive,” Bucky says, crossing his arms.

**

Two hours later Bucky is handing Tony his phone because he has no idea how to respond to Brock’s latest bullshit. Tony looks over the tweet and snorts, “tell him to go ahead, I’d love to see what a judge makes of some tweets about some guy’s ugly dick,” he says.

Bucky looks over at him for a few more seconds and when he senses that’s all he’s going to get he sighs. “If he actually sues me you’re paying the legal fees,” he says before typing his response. Tony steals his phone out of his hand and laughs at what he finds.

“What’d he say?” Steve asks, leaning forward in interest.

Sam quickly sticks his hands over his ears, “no, he is not going back to the hospital because Bucky is a shit friend.”

Steve shakes him off and Tony shakes his head at Sam. “He tweeted back, and this is a quote, ‘but Your Honor, he said my dick eats termites! I’m emotionally damaged!’” He pauses for a moment before speaking again, “does anyone else have a weird urge to want to see this dick now? Because I really want the visual proof of Bucky’s tweets.”

“I think I have pictures still somewhere, but it’d be a dick move to show people. No pun intended,” he says.

“Does it actually look like a dirty aardvark?” Tony asks, eyes bright with curiosity.

Bucky sighs, “yeah, a little. I never trusted it pre-shower. Probably shouldn’t have trusted it post shower either if I’m honest.” Tony is one hundred percent a step up in literally every single conceivable way and also some ways Bucky hadn’t even considered. Like not having a weird dick.

“The good news is that Bucky doesn’t need to show anyone Brock’s dick. I’ll just get him to show it off himself,” Steve says, grinning as he pulls his phone from his pocket.

“Steve, no!” Bucky tells him, trying unsuccessfully to reach out and stop him on account of Tony diving on him before he can manage.

Sam grins like a maniac, “I love when you decide to be lawful evil,” he says.

“Think he’ll respond to my tweet telling him to just prove you wrong with pics?” Steve asks, looking pleased with himself. Bucky, unlike Sam, does not like it when Steve decides to be lawful evil.

Bucky knows with one hundred percent certainty that Brock will buy Steve’s bait and he does not look forward to this taking on a whole new level of fame.

“He looks defeated, that’s a yes,” Tony says, sounding as pleased with himself as Steve looks.

[thesinglesjukebox]

VAMPIRE WEEKEND - HARMONY HALL [7.10] So I was going to re-use one of our taglines from previous entries as a hat-tip to self-referencing, but none of them made sense in context. So you'll have to make do with editorial whingeing instead.

Joshua Copperman: Like most people, I pressed play expecting to gawk at how much of a mess this is, and "Harmony Hall" initially sounds like the slick, misguided pop crossover everyone feared, but the melancholy edge of Modern Vampires is both less noticeable and more present than ever. An early Vampire Weekend song could start with that guitar riff, but not the low, warm synth pad. Even Modern Vampires would be gloriously cluttered with sounds, yet Manny Marroquin's mix is intensely spacious -- the choirs panned to the left and stay there, the delays ping-ponging then abruptly cutting out. No one listens to Vampire Weekend for social commentary, but Koenig goes beyond "Trump bad," instead focusing on the return of hate groups and the reemergence of anti-semitism (hiding that particular vulnerability "beneath these velvet gloves"). The callback to "I don't want to live like this/but I don't want to die" works because how tired it sounds. The line was gleeful and drawn-out in 2013, but in 2019 it's just a throwaway line to nod to the default mood. Another week, a thousand media jobs laid off, another hate crime, another swastika on a college campus, every refresh of a Twitter feed another potential verse of "Love It If We Made It" (obviously intentional on Matt Healy's part.) This isn't happy-but-secretly-sad; it's what happy sounds like when sad is normal. [9]

Ian Mathers: I think I emitted an audible little laugh in my cubicle when I first heard "I don't want to live like this, but I don't want to die" (you and me both, buddy). Something about that "Sympathy for the Devil" rolling percussion and the piano and even Ezra Koenig's current delivery makes this mostly sound like something I might have heard on oldies radio on a family road trip when I was a kid (i.e. before they added the 80s and 90s to those stations), except... better? I don't know, every time I think I'm done with these guys they grab me again somehow. I guess you can sign me up for [checks stories about new album]... Father of the Bride. Sigh. [8]

Claire Biddles: Vampire Weekend are virtuosos at encapsulating a very evocative (and I hate to say it, very millennial) melancholic yearning: a hyper-specific nostalgia for the recent past. How delicious, then, to find this distilled not just in the lyrical content, but conceptually: a callback to an album track from five years ago, when our troubles felt so huge. [7]

Thomas Inskeep: Starts out sounding like wimpy early '70s male folk, and by just past the chorus it's almost got a '73 Stones vibe going (we're this close to a gospel choir coming in, and yes, that was a vibraslap) -- so is this their Arcade Fire arena move? The biggest problem here is that, it's still Vampire Weekend, so it's still all too wimpy. [4]

Katie Gill: This is a friggin' weird song. The beautiful discordance of the depressing lyrics with the bubbly sound makes sense. The surprise piano solo in the middle of the song kind of makes sense. But I just can't wrap my head around why this song sounds so intensely dorky. Is it the plinky piano background? Is it that dumb percussion bit before "anger wants a voice"? Is it the Is it the fact that it's 2019 and I'm getting Paul Simon flashbacks? Seriously, swap out that piano for a horn section and you've got the b-side to "You Can Call Me Al." No matter what, you have to hand it to Vampire Weekend. They've certainly made something with a unique sound and something that I suspect will be talked about for weeks, if not months. [7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: With "Harmony Hall," Koenig's revealed himself as having anxieties aplenty, and it's loudly signaled with a self-referential lyric ("I don't wanna live like this, but I don't wanna die"). There's grief caused by the corruption hidden inside seemingly honorable institutions, and the song's chipper and (regrettably) Grateful Dead-like instrumentation mimics this duplicity. But more than this, such revelations have found Koenig reflecting on his own identity -- as a musician, as a Jewish-American, as a member of the upper middle class -- and what he can do. In hearing the guitar figure constantly repeat, one becomes privy to its false sense of security: "I thought that I was free from all that questioning/But every time a problem ends, another one begins." The melody's smooth ascent and cascading descent is an unmistakable Dave Longstreth contribution, but this fact doesn't make "Harmony Hall" any less about Koenig's personal turmoil; it finds him stepping out to unearth concrete answers. [5]

Josh Love: Vampire Weekend are valedictorians of indie's last decade, having not made a significant misstep, cranking out the consistently tuneful and clever alt-pop that's made them a hip millennial's staple and a top-shelf critical darling. Unlike say MIA or LCD Soundsystem or Arcade Fire, they've never seemed like overreaching or underdelivering, all of their endeavors perfectly-coiffed. After a lengthy hiatus, not a hair's out of place and you can't point to anything being demonstrably wrong here. What's worrying though is that "Harmony Hall" accomplishes in five minutes no more than it could have managed in half that time. The first couple of verses and chorus are catchy, smart, and sufficiently dynamic, Koenig meditating on Jewishness and doing call-backs to the even more faith-informed "Finger Back" from the band's last album, over a piano lick that puts me in mind of Andrea True Connection's "More, More, More," or more more more specifically, the better song that nicked it, Len's "Steal My Sunshine." Too bad the last half of "Harmony Hall" is all diminishing returns; I kept waiting for something to make this elongated running time worthwhile but the back end offers nothing more than a baroque passage and a new piano flourish or two. Hopefully this song's not entirely a harbinger for the remainder of Father of the Bride; I'd hate for Vampire Weekend to have aged into being that former head of the class who's a self-satisfied bore at the reunion. [6]

Vikram Joseph: I've always associated Vampire Weekend with clear, sparkling late winter days; there's something about their sound that lends itself to that kind of light, and a wide-eyed optimism that suggests warmer days might not be far off. Fitting, then, that "Harmony Hall" should appear now; they've never sounded so crisp, so open or just so much like Paul Simon. The intricate Baroque guitar and flurries of electric piano are accoutrements which could render a song starchy and formal, but Vampire Weekend carry them off with effortless flair and a nonchalant grin. Ezra Koenig alludes deftly, though unambiguously, to politics; "Anger needs a voice/voices wanna sing/Singers harmonise 'til they can't hear anything" is a pretty eloquent description of the chaos of current discourse. Much like a young Stuart Murdoch sang with just the right combination of pathos and conspiratorial wit to pull off Belle & Sebastian's red-wine-stained stories of sexual misadventure and tentative affection, Koenig's voice has an intoxicating blend of empathy, lightness and desperation which in the past has allowed him to get away with a lot of highbrow wordplay, and which here makes the song's headline ("I don't wanna live like this, but I don't wanna die") feel like both a weary joke and a howl of personal, political despair that rings out through decades. Musically, though, "Harmony Hall" is a fleet-footed thing of joy, the balletic "ooooh"s in the post-chorus like arcs strung out across the country, a reminder that beauty exists even in dark times. [9]

Matias Taylor: Getting the words to dance as much as that nimble piano line is tricky, but six years on Vampire Weekend's lyrical and melodic gifts are as sharp as ever. [9]

Alfred Soto: As allusive as usual -- I hear George Michael, "Mrs. Robinson," their own "Finger Back" -- the latest from the sometime quartet, an-album-every-six-years men of leisure, affirms their faith in keeping them from the brink of the great surrender. "I thought I was free from all that questioning," Ezra Koenig yelps, a self-deception. He's smarter than that. Yet he clings to his arpeggios as a grandmother to a handrail. He knows music. It won't keep him safe. [7]

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[bigskydreaming]

notjustawave replied to your post:

If the only evidence of a character not being...

me seeing ppl act like deadpool movies are the pinnacle of representation like i HAVE to laugh

Like....we’ve been hearing this “oh, progress takes baby steps, one little thing at a time” crap for our entire lives, and guess what? With the exception of representation created by actual marginalized creators who manage to get a platform for it against all odds, most other so called representation from major studios and companies and franchises looks barely any different from the scraps they were giving us twenty years ago.

Baby steps my ass. Just say you’re trying to keep marginalized viewers on the hook watching your stuff without pissing off the homophobes and racists enough that they stop watching your stuff. That’s what it comes down to. That is the only reason most representation is still half-assed, blink and you miss it.

Major billion dollar corporations and highly successful and influential actors who makes millions off every movie honestly have people bending over backwards to say they’re trying or progress isn’t easy and it takes time, like these people are actual victims and like....boxed in by the evil homophobic society or whatever....instead of the tastemakers whose prioritization of straight white heroes for generations is the reason we have to fight so hard to get actual representation in the first place! 

They’re not powerless to do more in the face of a still largely homophobic society, they’ve just made the conscious choice that they care more about making sure homophobes still buy tickets to their movies than they do actually making a difference.

And like, if that’s what they want to do, then fine, they can do that, but what kills me is this idea that we’re supposed to be grateful for whatever little hint of not-straightness or not-whiteness that they shine a spotlight on for 2.5 seconds in a movie before its back to business as usual.....as though they’d do more if they could, really they would, but that’s just the best they could manage because The Homophobes and the Racists, y’see.

The movie Deadpool only happened because Ryan Reynolds wanted it to happen so badly, he wouldn’t let the project die in development hell. He kept making the rounds himself, kept the push on to keep new scripts for it getting made, and he has enough star power and a big enough fanbase that he was able to make it happen when lots of other actors couldn’t. There’s that post going around about how there’s a Bea Arthur T-Shirt he wore in the movie that they had trouble getting in because copyright stuff, so he paid $10K out of his own pocket for the licensing stuff to go through. And on and on.

Like, these aren’t small, innocuous things, they’re a display of the fact that people have power and influence in Hollywood and use those things every single day to get what they want or do things they care about. If the Deadpool production team and star really WANTED Deadpool the character to be the kind of meaningful representation they’re obviously all too happy to accept accolades for having provided already? Then they absolutely had the power to to give Wade an actual romantic history with one of the men in his films, or even one of them as an actual love interest or reciprocated flirting with one of them responding to his come-ons with like, interest of their own. Because notice how that suddenly, magically, turns what WAS just Wade obnoxiously using suggestive humor purely aimed at getting an audience laugh rather than an actual reaction....into two men having a moment like happens hundreds of times throughout every other summer blockbuster between a man and a woman and given the same degree of consideration and attention.

And yes, before someone comes at me with ‘bi and pan people don’t need to be in a romantic or sexual relationship with the same gender to be bi or pan’, like yes, thank you, I, a bisexual man, am aware of the fact that I remain equally bisexual when single, dating a man, dating a woman, or mid-orgy. My sexuality is not dependent on anyone or anything other than my own identity.

But we’re not talking about a real life human being’s identity here. We’re talking about REPRESENTATION, which is a thing created deliberately by human beings making conscious choices about what they want to display and what they don’t, and their reasons for both.

So yes, a bi or pan character is still bi or pan whether we see them kissing the same gender or not, but you can not act like a living bi man’s romantic and sexual interests being driven by his own unique choices as an individual....this is NOT the same thing as a bi or pan character who just so happens to be romantically interested in women love interests save for the occasional suggestive joke aimed at the nearest male character.

Because the former is born of that real life bi man’s entire life, experiences, personality, his BEING. The latter is born of human agendas and creative decisions and studio politics and yes, the fact that Fox and the Deadpool production are more than happy to throw LGBTQ+ viewers just enough table scraps that they’ll stay invested in supporting it, but not so much that it might risk them losing tickets in large numbers from the homophobic sector of their audience.

If I ignore the five men in my vicinity and focus on the one woman because I feel more of an attraction or connection to her for whatever reason, I get to do that because I am my own person, and people can assume whatever they want about what my motives or thought process might be but guess what? It doesn’t matter, because my choices are for me and me alone.

If Deadpool ignores the five men in his vicinity to focus on the one woman, its NOT because he feels more of an attraction or connection to her, because HE DOESN”T FEEL ANY OF THOSE THINGS. He is a fictional character. He only feels and acts upon whatever the writers decide he should feel and act upon, and THEIR motives and thought process absolutely get to be called into question, because they are not individuals making personal choices that are for them and them alone, they are creators of content that benefits and profits from the positive responses and continued support of whomever they choose to cater that content to in order to gain their support and positive response.

And bottom line, they still care more about selling tickets to homophobes than they do about creating real, positive, meaningful representation, and like....people should say that?? We do not owe it to million dollar franchises to say thank you, can we please have some more because of whatever they deign to dole out. Not while still blatantly making it clear PS, glad you liked that little moment there in Act Two Scene Five but tbh, we still care more about not pissing off the dude who lives in his parents’ basement in Kansas and has five guns and every Deadpool action figure ever made and cries into his pillow every night because Sara Lee rejected him when he asked her to his high school prom because he’s weird and ugly and nobody understands his pain like Deadpool, who is also weird and ugly and thus he NEEDS him, and just because he makes dumb jokes to guys onscreen sometimes, that’s no big deal, everyone does that sometimes, its not like he’s REALLY into guys, that’d be weird and also he can’t be because then he wouldn’t be like that homophobic shitbag who lives in his parents’ basement and trolls LGBTQ+ fans on twitter with “Lulz, dumbass losers, just accept that Deadpool doesn’t really represent you and never will, he’s OURS.”

They understand what actual representation looks like, because they’ve been representing the infinite shades of Shitty Straight White Human Being for generations now, and every single straight white man in Hollywood has a story about the character they identified with most as a child and made them want to write or act and basically shaped their entire life.

They know what actual representation looks like and what it means, but they have no interest in providing it so long as it might alienate who they see as the real moneymakers still, knowing they can still keep marginalized viewers watching by doling out the bare minimum and saying “there’s more coming, its just progress takes time, we need to take baby steps” like they’ve been doing for actual, literal decades, with very little actual change to show for it.

Sorry not sorry, but you tell me here’s five cents for you and hand me a nickel and then turn to the shitbag human being standing on the other side of you wearing a GOD HATES GAYS T-shirt and say “and here’s a twenty dollar bill for YOU, don’t spend it all in one place, lol” and then you and he share a hearty laugh while I’m standing there holding a fucking nickel?

LMAO, you can keep your five cents, you’re not like....actually doing me any favors there and I’m not going to feed your ego by pretending you did anything other than give me a shitty fucking nickel you probably picked up off the sidewalk.