#its harry still who ends up becoming the reason why his plans fail

[profoundmakerdreamerss-blog]

Tomarry AU

Where Tom wakes up in a world as a canon fodder, no named villain who is fated to die a horrible death in the hands of the hero. He is that one villain that is just destined to die and oh boy, does he hate it.

And so, like the logical man he is; he decides to kill the hero. Or to be more precise, he tries to. But, he is stopped. No, no not by the hero. The hero is weak, still. He hasn't gone through his “character development arc” which happens after the hero's best friend dies. And you see, that is the problem. The problem is the hero's best friend. Everytime, every single time, when Tom is sure that he will be successful, that damn Harry Potter has to come running.

Poison? Harry is the one who gets poisoned because he decides to eat what was meant for the hero. Assassination? Harry pushes the hero away. A burning tower? Harry jumps in and saves the guy.

And Tom hated that guy. The guy who literally wasn't given a personality in the book. The guy who's personality was basically "sacrificed himself for the hero". The guy who looks at Tom like he knows what he is doing. The guy, Harry Potter was infuriating.

But does it stop Tom from killing the main character? No. Cue to him making the most convoluted plan there is to get the hero to die. And the plan? Get Harry kidnapped. And lure the hero into a place where he could finally get him to die.

Alas, as always — it doesn't work. And just like always, Harry Potter finds a way to destroy his plans. Again.

Because,

“I know what you are, Riddle.” Harry, with blood dripping down his chin and green eyes glowing (always glowing), says as he stares at him from the place Tom had him tied.

[coffee-imagines]

Rivals

Pairing:  Harry x Slytherin reader

Requested:  hey! can u do a Harry x slytherin fem!reader from the 71(Angry sex) smut prompt? the ideia its they hating each other in the beginning, but at the end, you know the cliche. and they're friends going "WTF" seeing them together. maybe a little jealous is harry it's good too. sorry if ts too specific, I just had this in mind and couldn't get it off. btw, your writing it's amazing! also, pls tag me if you're doing this one :)

Warnings: smut, angry/jealous sex, unprotected sex, wall sex

A/N: don’t worry, requests can be as specific as you want to make them. I’m glad you think my writing is amazing that means a lot

Summary: A quidditch match reveals sexual tension

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The second you’d met Harry Potter you both hated each other. No one ever knew why, but both of you being from Gryffindor and Slytherin was the only logical reason people could think of. Not even you and Harry knew why, but the only thing you were sure of was the feeling you had when you were around each other. You both got on each other’s nerves, and you were sure you’d go for each other’s throats if you could. You could remember your second year, trading places with Draco to duel with Harry.

This school year had been different, you’d finally gotten a break from being around Harry in all your classes, until he switched to potions. Switching to potions meant he’d be spending almost all day with you. It irked you that Harry was suddenly the best potion maker of your year. It used to be you, and now that you were paired up with the black haired boy you couldn’t help but roll your eyes each time he’d perfected a potion as if it were nothing.

“Potter.” You muttered sitting down next to him

“Y/L/N.” He almost spat, making you glare at him. 

“Making love to your book I see.” You sneered, watching Harry hovered over his book almost protectively.

“Failing to brew a simple potion I see.” Harry fired back making you clench your fist.

“Why so secretive with your book Potter? Love notes from Weasley in there?” You asked, reaching over to grab it from him.

“It’s none of your business what’s in this book.” He explained defensively, pulling the book from your reach making you glare.

The year had gone on just the same, you and Harry bickering like an old married couple in your classes. The longer the year went on the more irritated you became with each other. You seemed to find ways to see each other outside of class, both Gryffindors and Slytherins getting sick of the both of you fighting each other. You’d both lost your houses quite a few points, and you were sure if you’d lost anymore your prefect would have your head.

It had been time for a Quidditch match, and this was when Harry realized just how much the both of you had been idiots. You’d taken Draco’s place as seeker, both of you pushing and shoving each other even when the snitch was nowhere in sight. Something seemed to change in Harry’s actions once the snitch came into view. You knew Harry’s broom moved much faster than yours, but you’d somehow still reached the snitch first, grabbing it with no trouble. 

“Good game.” Harry muttered making you squint your eyes. You weren’t sure if he had been serious, but you nodded in response as a silent ‘you too.’

Your team had you on their shoulders while you held the snitch, the points getting Slytherin in first place for the house cup. You’d seen someone running onto the field, and you were picked up and spun by Draco who praised you about his old position. Harry glared when he saw Draco’s arm wrapped around you and he bit the inside of his cheek. You had the brightest smile on your face, and although it would’ve been contagious to anyone who saw it, Harry felt a sickening feeling twist inside his stomach.

You were making your way nowhere near your common room once you’d changed back into your normal attire. You’d wanted a break from the loud commotion of your team, and a walk through a deserted corridor seemed like the good choice. There was a calming aspect of hearing the click of your shoes as you walked, but the relaxed feeling you had quickly turned to annoyance when you heard a second pair of steps that you’d immediately known the owner of.

“What do you want Harry?” You asked in frustration when you realized he’d been following you. “The direction of your common room is that way.” You explained in a mock explanation giving him a quick glance. “It being your sixth year you’d think you’d know by now.” You sneered, walking a bit quicker.

You gasped when your back hit the wall behind you, Harry caging you in with his hands on either side of your head. Both of you were frozen in place, you from shock, and Harry in disbelief of what he’d done. Your eyes flickered down to his lips before looking back up at his eyes. Harry had been doing the same, your eyes locking with one another. Your heart was beating out of your chest, and it had taken everything in you not to lean forward. Harry had other plans, almost smashing his lips against yours in a rough kiss. 

You hadn’t kissed back at first, too shocked that you were kissing Harry to react. When Harry’s hands held your hips in place a chill went up your spine making you hum and start moving your lips against his. Your hands came up to play with his hair, giving it a small tug earning a groan from Harry. A small gasp left your lips, Harry’s groan making a wetness pool in between your legs. You both pulled away breathing heavily, your hands roaming each other’s bodies, Harry’s touch making you stiffen when you moaned. You froze, an embarrassed blush making its way onto your face, but it only earned a smirk from Harry.

“I bet Draco couldn’t do this to you.” Harry growled in your ear making you shudder, your legs squeezing closed around his hand. 

“Why do you care, Potter? Jealous?” You taunted, trying to hide the obvious arousal you’d been feeling, but Harry could see the lust that filled your eyes.

“Pretty cocky coming from the girl who’s already soaking her underwear.” He whispered against your lips making you whimper, feeling pressure being applied to your clit through the fabric. You couldn’t think straight, Harry’s lips meeting your neck making you bite your lip to keep quiet.

“Harry.” You breathed out, his lips sucking your sweet spot making your head hit the wall.

“We’re on a first name basis now?” Harry smirked, watching your eyes flutter closed.

“Oh Merlin.” You seethed through your teeth when you felt Harry harshly run his teeth against your skin. 

“I have to mark what’s mine don’t I?” Harry asked, and the words seemed to make you ache between your legs. “I’m the only one that makes you get like this. Don’t I Y/N?” Harry teased, the tip of his finger slipping into you with no warning making you shudder and bite back a moan. 

“N-no.” You shook your head. Maybe you were lying, but you’d never let him know that. “I’ve had better.” You challenged, finally finding the confidence you’d had the past six years. 

“We’ll see about that.” Harry growled, all but ripping your robes and bottoms off so you were naked from the waist down. You watched in shock, your eyes glued to Harry’s hands, watching him undo his pants.

“Oh.” The word accidentally slipped from your mouth when you took in how hard and big Harry had gotten.

“Oh?” Harry mocked, grabbing your hand making you wrap your fingers around him. “See what you do to me?” He taunted you and widened your eyes.

“I… Harry.” You whimpered out when he guided your hand to pump him slowly, the thought and almost need to feel him inside you filling your mind.

Before you could say anything else you were turned around, your nose brushing against the wall. Harry kissed, sucked, and nipped at all the exposed skin he could access, humming at the whimpers that were coming from you. He’d pushed against you making you moan when his tip started teasing your folds. Both of you were too stubborn to make the first move, Harry continuing to tease while you stayed and took anything he was giving you, trying to stop yourself from grinding back against him.

“Fuck, Y/N.” Harry groaned into your ear, and this pushed you over the edge, your hips pushing back into him with a small roll making both of you groan.

“Oh… Harry that… that feels...” You tried to say when he slipped all the way in but your voice was betraying you. 

You rested your forehead against the wall, your walls already clenching around Harry making him moan your name from behind you. You’d never felt that good, and you didn’t think you could get enough. You wished you were facing him, wanting nothing more than to pull him closer to you. He picked up his pace, thrusting faster making your legs shake under you. Nothing but moans were coming from the both of you, Harry’s name falling from your lips endlessly.

“Who makes you feel this good?” Harry groaned out, his hips only moving faster and harder.

“H-harry.” You whimpered, your nails clawing at the wall in front of you.

“Who?” Harry almost boasted already knowing the answer.

“You! You do.” You cried out, your eyes screwed shut as Harry continued to pound into you.

“Cum for me.” Harry whispered in your ear, his hands slipping over yours and squeezing them slightly when his thrusts started to become sloppy.You didn’t need to be told twice, already shaking when your orgasm washed over you, Harry following only a second behind you. “Y/N.” Harry breathed out against your neck, kissing your shoulder softly, thrusting slowly allowing both of you to ride out your highs.

You both fixed yourselves up the best you could, Harry helping you fix your robes so they looked untouched. There was no denying the blush that was on both of your faces, your hands brushing against each other’s only making you blush even more. You smiled shyly up at Harry when you were done, neither of you knowing what to say.

“I’ll see you around Harry.” You finally broke the silence, kissing the corner of his mouth gently before making your way back to the Slytherin common room, forgetting all about your walk.

The relationship you both had with one another had changed dramatically after that. Everyone, including the teachers, were surprised you and Harry hadn’t been interacting at all for once in your six years at Hogwarts. The first few days following the incident in the hall you both couldn’t look at each other without your faces heating up. In potions class it had been even worse, both of you having to brew a potion as a pair went against you, your hands brushing against each other’s sending shocks up your arm. 

“Y/N.” Harry called you one day, stopping you in the hall. You looked at him like a deer caught in the headlights, unable to move from the spot even though everything in you told you to run.

“Yes?” You asked softly, pulling your bottom lip between your teeth making Harry lick his lips.

“Do you want to hang out? Sometime… Like a date.” He scratched the back of his neck. A small smile formed and your face.

“I’d like that.” You nodded, both of you parting ways before you could make even bigger fools out of yourselves.

You and Harry became almost inseparable after that. When you approached each other for your date everyone had thought you two were going to have a secret duel without any of the teachers there to watch. It was a surprise when they followed the both of you to see you hang out and act civil with each other. What shocked them even more was the moment you and Harry shared your first real kiss outside of your incident. It had looked full of love and passion, Harry’s hands coming up to hold your face while yours came up to hold onto his arms. 

With shock also came the people who had been disgusted, particularly your house members. You hadn’t ever said anything nice about Harry in your first six years at Hogwarts, and now that you were only gushing about him made your friends almost gag. In particular one of the Slytherins found it absolutely atrocious that you had been dating a Gryffindor, especially it being Harry of all of the ones you could’ve chosen. No one was surprised when Draco spoke down to you about your relationship, but it didn’t make it hurt any less.

“What are you two doing together?” Draco asked in disgust making you look down at your feet.

“That’s none of your concern Malfoy.” Harry explained, pulling you in the opposite direction. He wrapped his arm around your waist, kissing your temple as you walked. 

“You didn’t have to do that Harry.” You mumbled, pulling your sweaty hand away from his to wipe it on your robes.

“I did.” He nodded, standing in front of you grabbing your chin to make you look up at him. “I had to, because... I love you.” Harry whispered caressing your cheek, catching you by surprise. You stayed silent for a while, looking Harry over for a while.

“I love you too.” You whispered a response.

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Tag list: Let me know if you’d like to be added

@mathletemadison @severuslovebot @izzytheninja @obsessedwithrandomthings​ @supermassiveblackhope @tinylumpiaa​ @accio-rogers @whack-ed​

[bisexualcrowley]

Undercover

Pairing: Harry Hart x Fem! reader

Summary: While doing surveillance at a gala, Y/n and Harry's identities are threatened to be uncovered and they take to a rather intimate method of hiding their faces

Content/warnings: smutty themes? nsfw, fluffy stuff, cursing, suggestive themes, semi-public foreplay/teasing, making out, Merlin’s still alive bc i want him to be

Word count: 3,729

“A Gala. In the middle of winter, this means I might have to fight in heels, is this really necessary Merlin?” Y/n sighed, glancing out at the light drifting of snow that had begun to flutter down from the sky. Its not that she had anything against winter, the woman mused to herself, just that it makes this sort of work so much more difficult. 

The year had been tough enough already, having lost Harry to Valentine, getting Harry back, the whole issue with the Golden Circle, and the constant stress was getting to Y/n, the smallest thing now able to piss her off, and unfortunately for her, this latest mission seemed to be more than a small thing. “C’mon Y/n, i know we all could use some rest but this is important, the target is threatening to release catastrophic amounts of classified government information. I’m not asking you to be on the front line here, I just need you and Galahad on the sidelines, more as surveillance and backup than anything else.”

Y/n had been less than impressed with Merlin’s words, wanting to stay as far away as possible from field work until she had gotten a decent amount of sleep, but her ears perked up at the mention of her best friend and previous partner at Kingsman.

“You’re letting Harry in the field again?”

She asked, surprised at the man’s words. “I thought you said he wasn’t ready yet, after the problems he had while working alongside the American agents.

“Not fully, as i said, the two of you will just be keeping tabs on him from the crowd, not making contact unless absolutely necessary.” Merlin must have picked up on Y/n’s eagerness to work alongside Harry again and allowed himself a slight smile as he spoke, sliding the paperwork across the table to the younger agent. “This place is fancy, i mean really fancy, you’re gonna want to look your very best. Go over his papers today and be here dressed and ready at 20:30 tomorrow. And I mean it, y/n, be dressed to kill, in more than just the metaphoric sense”

Most of her annoyance having melted away at the mention of Harry, Y/n agreed, taking the papers and shaking Merlin’s hand before turning on her heel and jogging down the hall of the Kingsman offices, hoping to find her friend. Luckily Y/n didn’t need to search far, finding him in the actual tailor section of the building being fit for a tuxedo.

Y/n caught Harry’s eye in the mirror in front of him and she shot him a grin, leaning casually against the door frame. “Lookin’ good, Galahad. Excited to be headin’ back into it?” She asked, affection shining in her smile at the sight of Harry Hart suiting up for battle once again. 

It was no secret among many of the Kingsman agents that Y/n had fallen hard for the man, her feelings becoming clear to them when Harry was shot as she had broken down in tears at the news despite being one of Kingsman’s toughest agents, however she did manage to keep the secret from Harry himself, terrified of losing the relationship they already had by revealing her feelings only to find that they weren’t reciprocated. 

Eggsy and Merlin, of course, had required a fair amount of bribery to be convinced to keep their mouths shut, finding the whole situation more than amusing and wanting nothing more than to spill the beans to Harry, whom they were fully convinced shared y/n’s feelings. Y/n didn’t crack though, and eventually the men had settled on the childish teasing of Y/n and placing bets on who would make the first move. Eggsy had put 50 pounds on Y/n cracking first, but Merlin put his money on Harry, having said something about Eggsy underestimating the woman.

At the moment, despite her refusal to share her feelings with Harry, Y/n feared that Eggsy was going to be the one to win the wager as she felt her heart beat faster at the happy smile Harry had offered her in return.  “Looking forward to be working alongside you again, Y/n, it’s been lonely without my partner���

Y/n felt her face heat up at the compliment, but determined not to let her resolve fail she once again held back the words she wanted so badly to tell her friend, instead choosing to push herself off the doorframe and saunter over to Harry’s position in the center of the room.  “So... A gala. Haven’t done one of these together in ages, have we.”  Y/n’s hand came to rest on Harry’s shoulder, still not having broken their eye contact through the mirror. “It has been a while, although luckily, I never forgot how to dance”

Y/n’s confident exterior faltered at his words, tilting her head to the side and eyebrows furrowing in confusion. “We have to dance?” She asked, voice coming out far quieter than she had hoped. Harry let out a very ungentlemanly laugh at her shock, turning his gaze from the mirror to meet his friend’s eyes properly. “I’d assume Merlin didn’t tell you for this very reason, y/n” He chuckled. “We’d stick out too much, standing in the middle of a ballroom. To draw the least amount of attention to our position, we’re gonna have to dance”

Y/n froze for a moment, weighing her options. On one hand, she thought, I’m dancing with Harry. On the other hand, i’m dancing. In public. What a terrifying thought, i should just tell Merlin i won’t do it. But if i don’t do it, i don’t dance with Harry. 

She squinted slightly, fighting herself for which option was better, but in the end decided that the upside of pretending to be Harry’s date outweighed the negatives in the situation, and after another moment of hesitation, Y/n nodded, nervously drumming her fingers on the man’s shoulder.

“Alright then. If we’re gonna dance, we’re gonna do it right. I’m gonna go find a dress, i guess. See you tomorrow, Galahad” Y/n breathed, a hint of humor making it’s way into her words as she went on, which to her luck Harry picked up on, and replied with an exaggerated salute, earning him a giggle and smile from Y/n before she slung on a coat and took off again.

Lucky for her the London streets were nearly empty, most seeking cover from the bitter cold within the comfort of their homes, and the trip to her own home was quick for Y/n. Almost immediately upon arriving, she threw open the doors of her closet, flicking through hanger after hanger of clothes that Merlin would be less than happy about her wearing to such a prestigious event. It appeared that luck was still on her side, however, as Y/n paused, pulling out a dress previously hidden behind a thick winter coat.  It was beautiful, a slim gown of deep green velvet with a loose, plunging neckline and thin black straps with a shimmering gold woven throughout, and y/n smiled, knowing it would be perfect for the following night.

The next day passed quickly, Y/n having to study the target’s file, shower, do her hair and makeup, fit a variety of concealed weaponry on her person, and what felt to her like a million other things, and it felt like no time at all before she found herself outside the Kingsman Tailor shop, glittering heels clicking along the icy sidewalk leading up to the building. Y/n reached for the door handle, shivering slightly in the cold but was met with the door swinging open in her face, Merlin staring down at her with Eggsy, Tequila and Harry behind him. 

“Y/n, you’re late, c’mon, there’s a car waiting in the back, c’mon lets go” Merlin ushered her along, the group rounding the building to find a black towncar waiting in the alley. It took a bit of maneuvering to fit everyone into the vehicle, coats bunching up in the small space, but eventually the group situated themselves in a somewhat comfortable fashion, and they were off.

The drive was longer than Y/n had expected, but no time was spent relaxing, having found herself rather distracted by her body being pressed against a very well dressed Harry, the cramped space forcing her leg to shift up onto Harry’s so that she was sitting partially on his lap, a position that had the both of them blushing furiously and Tequila chuckling from Harry’s left. 

Hoping to distract from the uncomfortable and unfortunately mildly arousing way she was seated, Y/n leaned forward to peer past Harry and raised an eyebrow at the American agent, who in return mimicked her expression, which brought a mix of annoyance and amusement to the still blushing woman.  “Mind if i ask why Harry was forced into the middle seat? Last time i checked, i’d fit a fair bit better” Y/n asked, Harry humming in agreement with her statement.

“Why, you wanna sit on my lap instead?” Tequila smirked, earning a snort of laughter from Eggsy and Merlin in the front seat and a glare from Y/n, where Harry shifted uncomfortably and blushed harder.

Y/n’s snapped back, but her retort was cut short at the feeling of the car slowing to a stop and Merlin leaning over the drivers seat to run over the night’s details one last time. 

The plan went smoothly from then, Eggsy and Tequila positioning themselves near the main doorways and Merlin settling himself behind a computer, leaving Harry and Y/n to shed their coats and make their way further into the ballroom. A string quartet was set in the middle of the north wall, playing what y/n recognized immediately to be a slower rendition of the seal lullaby, and she fought the urge to twirl around a couple times, instead smoothing out her dress and holding out a hand to Harry.

“Well Mr. Hart, may i have this dance?” Y/n spoke calmly, careful to avoid appearing overly enthusiastic so as not to draw unnecessary attention to the pair, but the warmth shining in her eyes was undisguisable to Harry, who took her arm with a smile and led her to their position in the ballroom.

The image of the two Kingsman agents settling into a graceful mix of a waltz and a simple slow dance was reflected off the marble floors, creating what would have been a beautiful photo had there been a photographer near them and y/n relished in the moment, hand clasped with Harry’s, his hand pulling her waist to his as they swayed to the music.

Harry caught Y/n’s eye as he caught her after a spin, a grin breaking through his character that made her heart flutter. The song slowed to it’s end and the couple for the night paused, the taller figure dipping y/n and freezing, their faces inches apart. Y/n felt her breath hitch in her chest, heart pounding at the intimate position they had paused in.

Her eyes met Harry’s again, the latter panting slightly, his pupil dilated and face flushed red, and dear god it turned Y/n on. Biting her tongue to hold back what would have been a rather humiliating moan, she rested her weight into Harry’s arms, allowing herself a second to catch her breath. As the next song began, Harry shook himself out of whatever state he was in and pulled y/n back up against him, resuming the dance like nothing had happened. Y/n, still flustered, tried to distract herself by shooting a glance towards their target, who had moved from lingering by the side entrance to scanning the crowd from a nearby refreshment table.  As the song reached a peak Harry spun y/n around again, but this time around her heel caught on the seam of her dress and she stumbled, accidentally turning away from her partner. Quickly righting herself, Y/n returned to her previous stance, but not before making brief yet intense eye contact with the man they were watching.  “Shit... Merlin do you have eyes on the target? I might have just fucked us over” Y/n’s voice came out in a hoarse whisper, eyes blown wide with horror at the prospect of ruining Harry’s first real taste of action since the Golden Circle incident.

“Hang on, hang on, don’t abort mission yet” Merlin muttered through her earpiece, y/n hearing the clacking of keys as the older agent fussed with the security cameras

“Fuckin hell, Galahad, Y/n, he’s coming your way. Hold your position, we don’t blow your cover unless we’re 100% sure he knows who you are. Keep dancing, but don’t let him see your face” 

Merlin’s voice cut across the earpiece again, and by the way y/n felt Harry's shoulders tense she knew he heard the message too.

“Shit, what do we do?” she hissed back, watching her partner risk a glance to the left and finding the target moving smoothly through the crowd, eyes set on the couple.

“Keep dancing, stay inconspicuous for as long as possible, if we’re lucky he’ll just pass on by. Now i’ll say it again, don’t let him see your bloody faces.” Merlin’s voice was low, and Y/n couldn’t stop the nervous feeling they caused from setting in as she watched the man grow nearer out of the corner of her eye.

“Merlin i don’t know what you expect us to do here if it’s so imperative we don’t move from this spot, we can’t just-”

Y/n tuned out Harry’s urgent whispers as a solution came to mind, eyes widening at the ridiculousness her own mind had come up with, but not seeing a better solution she shushed him, placing a finger over his lips.

Harry looked confused but went along with it, cocking an eyebrow in silent questioning and giving her shoulder a soft squeeze as the man drew closer, nearly close enough to get a good look at the pair, and y/n knew she had to make her move.  With a quick whisper of “forgive me for this Harry”, Y/n brought her hands up to cup her friend’s face and pulled him into a kiss. Harry froze momentarily, his jaw tensing in shock before he followed her lead and returned the kiss, their lips moving against each others perfectly in sync and y/n couldn’t keep herself from sighing into the kiss, unconsciously pressing her body closer to his. 

Harry deepened the kiss, his hands moving to thread through her hair and a vague thought reminded Y/n he was just helping to conceal her face, but it was shoved quickly to the back of her mind with a particularly passionate movement from Harry which she met enthusiastically. Her hands inched upwards to tug at his perfectly styled hair, which earned Y/n a low moan against her lips, and she pressed closer again, unconsciously slipping her leg between Harry’s. She felt his cock twitch against her thigh and all thoughts of what they were there to do flew out the window, one hand clasping at the collar of his tuxedo’s jacket and the other cupping his cheek, pulling his face down to her own.

Feeling bold, Y/n made a move to nip at Harry’s lower lip but before she had the chance, they were interrupted by a more than amused Eggsy clearing his throat beside her.  The pair flinched in surprise and pulled quickly out of the heated embrace, leaving Y/n wiping speared lipstick from her face and fixing disheveled hair, Harry somewhat discretely adjusting his clothing to hide the now quite sizable bulge in his trousers with a deep blush across his cheeks and Eggsy watching from the side, eyes tearing up from the effort of holding in his laughter.

“Merlin says good thinkin’, Y/n. The two’ve you were a bit busy to notice but Tequila got the guy, he went down nice n’ quiet, we’re supposed to get to the car as soon as possible” Eggsy had a shit eating grin plastered across his face as he spoke, which only got wider when Y/n gave Harry an awkward smile, which he returned briefly before shoving his hands in his pockets and staring down at his shoes.

Snickering, Eggsy escorted the pair through the crowded room and through a series of side doors, which after a seemingly unnecessary number of hallways led to a back exit where the towncar that had brought them to the gala was waiting. Dreading what was sure to be an uncomfortable conversation with Harry, y/n winced at the thought of how inappropriate her actions towards her friend were, and she moved to open the passenger side door but was stopped by Eggsy once again, who flung open the door and threw himself in next to Merlin, who quite to her displeasure shared Eggsy’s smirk. 

Y/n’s eyes locked with his, silently pleading to switch seats but her weak attempt proved to be in vain as Eggsy winked and pointed over his shoulder to the back of the car, where Harry was already seated.  Y/n glared at Merlin but didn’t argue, and took a deep breath before sliding into the car, which to her luck was no longer so cramped due to the third agent having stayed behind with the target. The space was still smaller than she would have wished, but the cover of darkness provided a touch of comfort that y/n was endlessly grateful for. 

Shadows crossed across her legs as the car rolled into gear, Merlin driving out of the alley and beginning the long journey back to the Kingsman headquarters. Y/n sighed, leaning her head against the window and closing her eyes, hoping the cold glass against her skin would help to drown out her racing thoughts.

Much to her dismay, however, they had been traveling for less than ten minutes when Eggsy turned around, leaning over his chair with the same wicked smile stretched across his face as he had worn before.

“So, you two had some fun t’night, didntcha?” Merlin let out a snort of laughter from beside him, Eggsy nodding his head suggestively between the pair in the backseat. Too tired to come up with a snarky reply, y/n simply rolled her eyes at Eggsy, and went back to working up the nerve to say something to the uncharacteristically silent figure seated beside her.

The realization that Harry was rarely this quiet around y/n outweighed her fear of confrontation, concern for her friend pulling her focus from Eggsy to the older man, and she turned to face him.  Harry was sitting stiffly, hands clasped in his lap and head straight forward, but he must have been watching y/n out of the corner of his eye, as he looked to the side to meet her eyes when she turned from her position by the window to look up at him. 

In that moment, the car was silent aside from the low rumble of the engine, the tension between the two growing from tolerable to an absolute peak, hanging thickly in the air between their bodies.  It was thick enough, apparently for Eggsy to pick up on it, and with a chuckle about “giving you two some privacy”, he pressed a button beside his seat that caused a black divider to come up behind him, separating the front from the back of the car and leaving Y/n and Harry in silence.

Both Harry and Y/n stayed frozen in place, faces turned to each other and her eyes locked on his. Hesitantly, y/n placed a hand on Harry’s knee, a motion that years of friendship had taught him meant she had a lot to say, but didn’t yet know how to say it, and Harry nodded, the silent exchange sharing more than words would be able to.

“...I... I’m sorry, Harry, i shouldn’t have...” Y/n’s voice was low, barely above a whisper as she spoke, trailing off as the words caught in her throat. 

"No, y/n, it was my mistake, i just...” Harry's voice faltered as well, fingers coming up to fuss nervously with the strap of his eyepatch, a habit y/n had noticed Harry picked up when he felt flustered.

Neither of them knew what had happened; one moment they were sitting in silence, y/n’s hand on his knee and tension high, and the next moment y/n found herself being pulled into Harry’s lap, her hands once again tugging at his hair as they met again in a heated kiss.  Her dress had hiked up to her hips at this point, allowing Y/n to straddle her lover properly, and this time she didn’t hesitate to grind down against him, Harry’s hands coming to grip her smooth hips as she rubbed her barely covered sex along the bulge in his trousers, both letting out groans of pleasure at the friction.

Harry’s fingers trailed down y/n’s body as they made out like horny teenagers in the backseat, moving from her hair down to cup her covered breast, and down further to trace along the slick fabric of her panties. Y/n whimpered at the touch and moved to return the favor, her own hand coming to palm at his cock through his pants, at which Harry gasped and yanked her down onto his lap once again, hips thrusting up to grind against y/n’s cunt.

She moaned against his mouth once again, pulling away for just long enough to strip off Harry’s coat and unbutton his shirt before returning to her position on his lap. The two were so caught up in the moment that they didn’t notice the car pulling up to the curb and stopping, however they did take notice to the door flying open and the flash of a camera, followed by Eggsy’s delighted voice and a deep laugh from Merlin.  Embarrassed, y/n quickly tugged her dress back into place and slid out of the car, holding out a hand for Harry to take as he climbed out, looking as red faced as y/n felt.

“Go on, buggers, we took you to Galahad’s place. I’ll find out who won the bet tomorrow, go have some fuckin’ fun.” Eggsy laughed at their dumbfounded expressions at his words, but chose not to respond, instead returning to his seat beside Merlin who drove off a few seconds later, leaving two very sexually frustrated agents on the sidewalk. 

“Well then... Wanna take this inside?”

[phantomato]

Thank u for ur amazing work. I have a (longish, apologies) question about Heartbeat. I'd been a Tomarry fan for some time but recently have become lukewarm. I read your meta posts as to why you consider its not a realistic ship. I also read work by metalomagnetic which made me alive to the fact that Tom would likely never pursue a romantic relationship with Harry outside of some Macchiavellian manipulation arc. How do your reconcile your view on Tomarry with writing Heartbeat and why pursue it?

Hey! It’s lovely to get an ask, thanks for sending in this question! 💕

I’d say a few things in answer to this—

I still don’t like Tom/Harry as a romantic ship. It doesn’t do it for me for all those reasons outlined in my old Tomarry essays, that hasn’t quite changed. What has changed is that I’ve become more comfortable and interested in exploring parts of Tom’s character where he doesn’t get to be his best self: he doesn’t find the self-actualization and contentment that I want for him in an ideal happy ending. He might still get a happy ending! At least, in the sense that he’s whole and healthy, and generally free. But there’s some wiggle room within that—see my stories like Changeling, or Pygmalion, for example. Those, and others I’ve written, are realistic in the sense that they’re ways I see Tom/V believably acting, as I characterize him. But they’re also not especially romantic in the way that I write, e.g., Nottmort. Or there’s Proximity or Lush, for stories that are more happy/romantic but not meant as end-state relationships for Tom/V. He learns and grows, we get to see someone else who is meaningful to him and hear part of their story, and yet he’s not done by the end, there���s clearly more he will experience in those lives before he settles into something long-term and committed.

I tried to write Heartbeat in February, and I failed to do it. At that point I hadn’t yet written any of the stories I name above; I hadn’t figured out what I want out of this kind of fic. That version of Heartbeat meandered too much through Harry’s experiences, because I thought I needed to do so if I were going to write from his POV. And this story needs to be his POV, as it happens. I’ve long promised myself that I wouldn’t write a tomarry fic unless I felt I had something interesting to do with it, I wouldn’t write it just to drum up attention for my other fics (that seems… fraught and likelier to result in frustration than success), and yet I still got caught up in how other people tend to write the ship and imposed expectations on myself that were contrary to the story I had planned. It came out all wrong, I hated the thought of adding more to it, and I scrapped the entire work on AO3. I’d rather lose those subscribers, comments, etc. than be burdened with my initial poor telling. So it really is not the case that Heartbeat has been an easy or comfortable journey for me, and I pursue it anyway, as it’s a story I’ve wanted to tell.

Finally, I will say: you haven’t read the end of Heartbeat yet, whereas I have. I don’t find that I have much conflict that needs reconciled.

—

I’ve got another tomarry in the wings, a one-shot I hope to publish this week. I don’t ship it, no, but I tell stories about Tom. This fandom has decided that pairing these two characters together is a major avenue for telling stories about Tom, and so I will use the ship as fits my needs.

[imagine-that-one-thing]

Her Majesty || 16

Letters patent.

Anastasia’s POV.

The papers fall from my hands, hitting the floor before I step over them, “Excuse me,” I mutter, hurrying past Harry and finding my way to the bathroom. My hands grapple with clutching the edge of the sink as I bow my head in defeat.

This can’t be happening.

One hand stays grasped to the edge, and the other holds my hair back, my stomach twisting at the realisation of everything.

The door creaks open, and Harry steps into the bathroom, thoughtfully pushing my hand away and holding my hair back for me.

“This is why you need a break.” Harry sighs, stroking my back while my stomach violently turns and the remainder of my afternoon tea makes an awful appearance.

I take a breath and press a hand to my stomach, straightening my back slightly, “Now isn’t the time for sly remarks,” I murmur, closing my eyes for a moment, another wave hitting me harshly.

I lift my head again, taking another breath and praying that it’s the last time I throw up.

Harry lets go of my hair as I lean back on him, my energy depleting extremely quickly.

We are stuck. Harry and I are bound to the monarchy with no way out. “He tied me to the monarch?” The words leave my mouth, and Harry nods his head as I gaze at him through the mirror, “We are stuck in it… Why’d he do this?” I softly question, tears falling down my blushed cheeks, “I can’t end it.”

Harry wraps his arm around me carefully, “Sweetheart, I think the point was so that the monarch can’t end at all. Your Dad issued letters patent.”

“The only person who can end this shitshow is my hypothetical child?”

“That’s how it seems.” Harry nods.

“The only way anyone can cause this monarch to end is if I have a baby? Not even Pippa can end it? Parliament can’t even end this fucking shit?”

Harry again shakes his head, “The monarch can only end with your kid.”

“Our,” I correct him, “Our hypothetical kid.”

“What do we do, Anna?”

I take a moment before I take a breath. I step away from his embrace, and I turn to face him, leaning against the counter, and I smile up at him softly, “We rule the monarch with an iron fist, Harry.”

“Excuse me?” Harry’s eyes grow big.

“We do what was intended, to rule the monarch and keep it thriving. But you’re going to call for a dissolution of Parliament. Every seat in the House of Commons will become vacant.”

“Why? Pippa said parliament seats couldn’t change.”

“She is wrong. Call for the dissolution, Harry. Then we can work on getting her disbanded as Primeinsiter.”

“We can’t get rid of her. We can’t vote; royals stay neutral in that branch.”

“Harry, I am aware of how this works. Please, listen to me, clear the seats, order new parliament officials. It’s a strategic dissolution.”

“So, now you want to end Parliament since we can’t end the monarch?”

I nod my head, “You and I both know some of the people who want me dead are currently members of parliament, call for re-election, so they lose their seats. If they are not voted in, you can figure out how to keep them at bay and away from us,” I respond.

“Isn’t there a rule about Parliament only being dissolved at a certain time?” Harry asks.

I shrug my shoulders, “Parliament can be dissolved at the beginning of the 25th working day before a general election… The Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which you are also going to sign and change today. Before the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, the government had the power to call elections at a time of its choosing, and I want that back.”

“I hate being the middle man,” Harry groans, “This is fucking ridiculous.”

“Then let me have the crown back.”

“Talk to your mother about it, Anna. I don’t have a say over having the fucking crown. I have tried to hand it back… Pippa and your mother have not allowed me.”

“The best thing about you being King is that you can sign whatever the fuck you want and not listen to them. You can hand me the crown; you just have to sign it on over or find a loophole as my father did.”

“I much prefer my daily job as security than as King.”

“Listen to me and do this, Harry. When Parliament is dissolved, all unfinished parliamentary business falls, including bills that have not received Royal Assent. Bills cannot be carried over. Whatever plans any of them have will fail. If I can’t abolish this circus, I will join them and end it for them and take back the monarch... You are either with me or against me, Harry.”

“I am with you, Anastasia,” Harry responds instantly, “I will start the process of everything, not that I know what the fuck I am doing,” Harry trails off, “Any other requests while I am here? Perhaps request my blood?”

“Oh, ha, ha, you’re funny,” I roll my eyes, “That’s all for now, I will keep thinking of Royal assents I want you to part take in… Until then, I have to make my first appearance as Queen, even though that is far from the truth. Are you attending?”

“I am,” Harry nods, “Matthew has Oliver and myself on your service.”

“Great… and if you don’t wish to participate in my plan to take back control of the monarch, we can always have a baby and abolish the monarchy.”

“Uhm…” Harry trails off, “No. All due respect, but if we have a kid, I’d rather we talk about it properly, and right now, I don’t want a baby in this mix, no, no— and no.” Harry shakes his head sternly.

“I’m sure parliament would love it.”

“I’m sure that would piss them off and make things worse, no.”

“Great, so you’ll be on my side?”

“Yes. Anna. I have always been on your side. Now I’m going to take a nap until your event. Please, for the love of God, don’t start shit, don’t make any plans, don’t do anything irrational like you did the night with Henry. I don’t need more blood on my hands, literally and metaphorically.”

“I will be the perfect princess everyone knows me to be.”

“You say that with an evil look to your eyes… I really don’t need to do a protocol.”

I shrug my shoulders and step closer to him, “You have my word, I won’t start shit,” I smile, drawing small circles on my stomach, feeling a bit more relaxed, oddly.

“I am confused as to what made you switch from hating the monarch to wanting to control it again?”

I take a breath and shrug my shoulders, “Sometimes you just have to play the cards you are dealt and hope that the hand you have is the winning hand.”

“But you suddenly flipped your switch, Anna… Do I need to be concerned? What happened to the Princess that wanted nothing more than to leave and have a normal life?”

“She realised that it would never happen. This is what I was born for, Harry. I have tried to get away so many times, and I can’t. I have no choice but to deal with it. You can still leave. You don’t have to be stuck in this, Harry. You have an out.”

Harry shakes his head and takes my left hand with his, “Anna,” Harry begins with a soft breath, his thumb rubbing over where my rings would rest if I were able to wear them. He reaches his other hand up to my neck where he follows the thin chain and pulls out my rings from under my shirt, “I gave you this ring and proposed for a reason, I put that wedding band on, for a reason, I wear my wedding band, for a reason. I love you, and I want to be with you. I don’t want an out. I don’t want to leave. I can deal with the monarch. It does not scare me.” Harry informs me sweetly and calmly, “I may not be able to tell the world I love you or act upon things right now, but I don’t want to not live life without being your partner, even if you do despise me for taking your damn crown,” Harry chuckles, breaking the slight tension in the space between us.

I do not despise him for taking the crown. I will admit that him having ownership of it is a better option. I am still in no headspace to hold such power, and I am still struggling with daily activities. Royal life isn’t easy, but it is much more challenging when you lose your father but gain a monarch to run that you are not ready for. My father may have prepared me in a royal status sort of way to run the place, but I was not mentally or emotionally prepared. I don’t think anyone can be emotionally prepared for the loss of a loved one.

“Are you sure?”

Harry nods his head, “I am more than sure, sweetheart. Are you okay? I still don’t understand how you changed your mind about the monarch.”

I shrug my shoulders, “I don’t know if I am truly okay. Today’s news physically made me sick,” I admit, “But this is my family legacy. I would be destroying what generations have built. My father did build a great monarch… It may have some evil people involved in it, but the people are thriving, and the country is doing well. I can sit here and wish to abolish and destroy it all because of my own bitterness, or I can figure out how to lead without being held back.”

Harry smiles softly and nods his head, “It is good to see you coming to your power as Queen, darling.

“I have a great husband and King to back me up.”

“No, baby. You don’t have a King. You have a husband. I am merely the husband to have your back.”

I shake my head, “No, Harry. If I am reigning Queen, you will be known as King. I will be changing that. You will have that title. I can be Queen and reign on my own, don’t get me wrong, but I want a King by my side.”

“We can cross that bridge when we get there… But I want to know when the staff will know about us, and I am tired of hiding us. Surely the staff have figured it out.”

I shake my head, “The staff do not know, but you are still the talk of the ladies,” I laugh, “A lot of the ladies keep their eyes on you. Rumour has it that there is a pool on how long it takes you to get a girlfriend.”

“What?”

“The staff, they make assumptions about you since you’re so private. Some think you have a secret girlfriend, and others think that you’re just a workaholic.”

Harry rolls his eyes, “Jokes on them, I have a secret wife, and I am a workaholic. Do they just sit and talk about me to you?”

I nod my head, “Yeah, I learn new things about you all the time.” I chuckle, unsure how he doesn’t know that many of the female staff swoons over him.

“And you don’t mind?”

“No, I find it amusing,” I respond, “I don’t know how they haven’t figured out we are together. You are always in my room.”

“I am security,” Harry shrugs, “I think a few of them know. They just keep quiet. I know Grace has an idea. She keeps smirking at my ring.”

“Oh well, I don’t care, I am unsure how the people will react, but I guess we will find out. I need to get ready for the event… I am giving a speech.”

“Mhm,” Harry hums, “So Pippa told me. How do you feel about that?”

“I think I am okay, considering I just threw up a handful of times,” I sarcastically respond. “I uh… I haven’t seen the speech. I am not allowed to write my own. They don’t trust me.” I roll my eyes, “I much prefer if I could write things myself. I don’t like being dictated to.”

Harry steps to the side and grabs one of the face towels that are folded neatly. He runs it under the cold water before touching it to my cheeks lightly, “I don’t think you’re okay at all. You don’t have to do this speech.” Harry taps the damp towel to my forehead, my eyes closing as it soothes me. “You look like you need to sit down for a few minutes,” Harry softly enlightens me, and I nod my head in agreement.

My body feels weak and exhausted.

Harry guides me back to the bedroom, being overly protective. I sit on the bed and rest against the soft pillows. Harry sits beside me on the edge and dabs my forehead, “Seriously, if you’re not up to it, you don’t have to do the speech.”

“Harry, I have to be a big girl and face the fear. One way or another. It’s all just a lot to handle,” I sigh, “Will you just ask my lady maids to come in an hour later than usual? So I can lay down.”

Harry nods, “Yes,” He leans over and kisses my forehead, “Try to relax.”

“It’s hard when the damn papers are on the floor and dictate my future.”

Harry shakes his head, “We will figure it out. One way or another, it’ll be okay.”

He is right; one way or another it’ll work out the way it’s meant to. What’s meant to be will always be. Right now, what’s meant to be is taking my world and turning it upside down.

♚ ♚ ♚

With heavy breaths, I try my best to compose myself and steadily speak, but with every word I am forced to utter, I feel a heaviness in my chest that’s threatening to break my walls of resistance and cause me to break. This speech is the first public speech that I have addressed, and it is turning out to be a lot harder than I had anticipated.

I hold back my tears, aware that cameras everywhere and several sets of eyes cast upon me. It was too soon for me to have to do this. Speaking about my father is still raw and cuts me like a knife. I shouldn’t have let Pippa coerce me into delivering a speech, and I should have taken my time with healing and working through things. The monarch and the expectations can wait. My mental and emotional health is more important than addressing the public and all the national leaders who acquire my attention.

I sense a hand to the small of my back, and I take my eyes away from the paper in front of me. I glance to my side and see Harry beside me, my other half, my shoulder to cry on and the person who holds me up when I’m down and praises the happiness with me. “I can’t,” I whisper, choking up with tears, finally allowing them to cascade down my cheeks. I attempt to turn into him so that I can’t be viewed grieving, but I can’t wholly hide, I can’t lean in for a hug and sob like I want to. I have to remember the boundaries between the royal and security guard as the people are viewing.

Harry doesn’t say anything. He naturally places an arm around me, leaving no gaps between us before moving the paper closer to him. Harry clears his throat and, without warning, begins to continue my speech for me. “He was an honorary member of society, a king that will be remembered for his devotion to the nation but most of all will be remembered as a loving father and doting husband.”

I subtly wipe a few of my tears away, doing my best to hold firm as a future Queen. Coronation day hasn’t arrived, so I’m technically not Queen until then, not that it matters considering it will be Harry’s coronation. I stand before my people, vulnerable and emotional, something that is frowned upon and has been for years. It is rare to see a royal display emotions other than pleasure and power, especially when broadcasted over news outlets and social media. A royal is to uphold a particular disposition. We aren’t meant to come across as weak. As I stand here, with tears, I’m aware that I may seem inadequate, but I’d rather appear weak and show the world I have emotions than hide them. Anyone in my shoes would still be mourning the loss of their father, no matter his status, for me to uphold the image that I’m absolutely fine and emotionless is not what I want to support. I do not want to be Queen and viewed as though I have no emotions. Raw emotions show character. It teaches people it’s okay to feel things, it’s okay to break, no matter who you are— it doesn’t make me any less of a Queen. For those who look up to me, I don’t want them to observe me as just another royal or another one who follows all protocols and traditions, and I will not sustain the image of perpetually being emotionless. I am Queen, and I am human.

The speech ends, and Harry guides me away from the small podium, escorting me to escape behind closed doors, where I find a place to sit and compose myself, “Thank you,” I breathe out, “It was too soon,” I whisper, wiping a few tears away from my eyes, doing my best to hold myself together. This is not how I wanted things to go. I didn’t want to break down and for Harry to have to save me from emotional wreckage.

Harry bends down to my level, placing a hand on my knee, “You did a grand job.”

“I started to stutter and cried. I balled my eyes out, Harry.” I don’t feel proud of myself because I couldn’t finish the speech and honour my father in the way he deserves.

“And? That shows that you’re human; you’re normal. Us normal people stutter and have emotions, baby,” Harry winks, managing to pull a chuckle from me, “Pippa did that on purpose, to have you break down in front of people...” Harry trails off.

I would love to say I’m surprised, but I’m not. I’m the centre of attention with the media spotlight, and it would make her night to have me breaking down. Anything in an attempt to continue to prove I’m unfit to take the crown. That’s probably her plan, prove I am incompetent and make sure I never have that royal power. Unlucky for her, Harry is on my side and not hers as she thinks.

“How kind,” I sigh, “Thanks for saving me.”

“Always,” Harry responds, “Wipe the tears away, put on a smile and show them the tough Queen I know you can be, don’t let that speech or Pippa bring you down, okay?”

“Are you giving me a pep talk?” I stifle a laugh as I wipe away a few more tears.

“Someone has to,” Harry responds, standing back to his feet and offering his hand to help me off the chair and to my own feet. He brings me in for a hug and holds me close, “Pippa wants you to fail. She’s watching,” Harry murmurs, “I love you.”

I draw away and nod my head, mouthing an ‘I love you, too’ before taking a step away from him, well aware that it’s only a matter of seconds before someone bursts through the door to summon me. I adjust my dress and posture, taking a deep breath and looking for Harry’s nod and gesture for me to head back to the same room that left me weeping. I stroll in, head held high, my heels hammering the marble flooring and keeping my composure as a strong-willed, calm and collected woman.

I make my rounds by talking to different people and allowing certain photographers at the event to take my photo. With everything that has happened, we need some excellent media coverage within the royals. I am sure Victoria’s death will continue to be in the headlines. I’m sure somewhere down the line, the issue that happened at the palace with Henry’s doppelgänger will arise and spark significant headlines. Royal scandals and murders seem to be the headlines everyone enjoys. I will not be the following headline or humiliation. The media will not predict my downfall or portray me as weak.

As I politely dismiss one of the diplomats, Pippa makes her presence known and offers me a smile, “May I hug you?” She questions and I shake my head.

“Security isn't allowing me to be touched,” I lie, not wanting Pippa’s hug nor anyone else’s. I’m not much in the mood to be touched.

Oliver nods his head, “Correct, strict orders, she isn’t to be touched.”

Pippa rolls her eyes, “Harry’s orders?”

“No,” Oliver instantly responds before I can, “Head of security, please respect the decisions,” Oliver narrows his eyes towards Pippa, not caring that she is a government official. Harry has trained him well, I see.

Pippa nods her head in agreement, “I just wanted to say that the speech was lovely.”

“You wrote it.”

“You’re very hostile, Anna,” Pippa sighs.

“You set me up.” I point out the obvious.

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” Pippas' voice is soft as she cocks her head to the side. “It was kind of Harry to step up, but now people will start to speculate,” she trails off into a whisper, making sure nobody can hear her. God forbid if the world knows I have a steady relationship with someone who isn’t royal.

“Perhaps if I weren’t forced to make the speech, he wouldn’t have had to step up and comfort me. I don’t appreciate the events of this evening.”

“Anna, it is not my fault,” she shakes her head, “I followed procedure. It was time you spoke.”

“And as it is time for me to walk away from this conversation, good evening, Pippa,” I dismiss the conversation, walking away before either of us can speak any further. I do not care for what she has to say right now or for the excuses. I’m sure she will blame my mother and say my mother was partly to blame for the speech. Which, I’m sure my mother agreed to the address and for me to speak tonight, and I believe they were both wrong for forcing it upon me and not letting me grieve, but my anger is towards Pippa for now.

♚ ♚ ♚

For the evening, I stood my ground; I didn’t let anything bother me or break me down— I didn’t run to Harry or have him, or Oliver devise an escape plan— I survived my first event without my father and as QUEEN… Just not officially. I know I can do this, it may be arduous, and it may take everything I have inside me, but I can do this. It does make it a little more manageable to know that I have Harry beside me if I need him. That alone gives me a little extra power and support. Sometimes, all someone needs is a bit of confidence and support to thrive.

I escort across the grounds with Oliver, my heels in my hand, while my other hand prevents the hem from dragging across the soft grass that smells of sweet saturnine with every step I take. For the first night in a while, there are no battering winds that howl until the early hours, there is no bitter chill, it finally feels bearable to be outside without the need of heavy coats and wraps, perhaps this is a short-lived moment, but I will take it and relish in it the best that I can. Oliver gently grabs me and pulls back on me, drawing me behind him. “Don’t come any further,” Oliver shouts, his hand reaching for his gun.

“What is it with the men always pulling a gun on me, geez,” Madeleine responds sarcastically.

“Announce yourself formally,” Oliver responds.

“Princess Madeleine Noelle Veil of Denmark. Anastasia, tell him who I am,” Madeleine huffs, holding her hands up as Oliver continues to stare her down.

“She’s fine, Oliver.” I chuckle.

“That’s not what Harry said,'' Oliver responds, causing me to laugh. I am not surprised that Harry and Madeleine don’t get along.

“It’s fine,” I assure Oliver, “Harry has already screened her. She was here for the funeral, remember?” I try to jog Oliver's memory.

Oliver nods his head and steps aside, allowing me to walk closer to Madeleine, “Why are you out here?” I softly ask, looking around, unsure why she is by herself and unaccompanied by a guard.

“Fresh air, Harry said I could come out; he is watching from the doors,” Madeleine gestures towards the Palace doors a little further from our position. “They burned down the Palace, though.”

“Who?” I softly question, walking beside Madeleine.

Madeleine lifts her shoulders into a shrug, “I don’t know. Louis seems to think it is the people who are causing everyone havoc.”

“Why would they target your Palace? I am sorry. Which one? Charlottenlund Palace?”

Madeleine shakes her head, “Amalienborg, lucky nobody was there. It was intentionally set. Mum and Dad were meant to be there.”

“Perhaps it was an accident, surely?” I suggest, unsure of who would purposely do such a thing to Amalienborg. Madeleine’s family have nothing to do with us British royals; they stay mutual and don’t cause issues— They’re the quiet royals that don’t mind being under the radar— They show up for special events and go on about their business.

Madeleine heavily sighs, and I push the Palace doors open, not allowing Oliver to open the door for me, “So, you and Louis have been talking?” I change the subject, not sure how to go about the issue with her Palace catching fire. I don’t fully believe that it was deliberate— there has to be some logical explanation.

Madeleine grows quiet, walking into the Palace behind me, “Madeleine?”

“He is lovely to talk to, a good man.”

“Stay away from him, Madeleine,” I warn her, not wanting to see either of them get hurt or drag me into their mess.

“What? Why?”

I raise a brow and shake my head, “He is my childhood best friend. I can’t choose between you both, so if you break up, I can’t choose.”

Madeleine laughs, “Who said anything about dating?”

“Whatever the two of you are doing, I am sure it is more than talking,” I mutter, knowing both of them too well. They’re stuck in a palace together on the same floor, and I highly doubt they’re talking about royal duties and discussing policies.

“I beg to differ,” Madeleine shakes her head, “He is good company.”

“Whatever you do, be nice to him.”

“You have little faith in me.”

“You tend to be intimidating, be nice. Do you need me, or are you just roaming the palace?” I softly question as we reach my floor. I’m not trying to dismiss her rudely or be a horrible friend, but I think she’d prefer to find comfort in Louis than me.

“Roaming,” she responds, walking off before I can say anything further.

I glance towards Oliver and raise a brow, “Do you think she and Louis are a thing?”

Oliver shrugs his shoulders, “I know nothing and see nothing.”

“Mhm,” I hum, not convinced, “I know that’s a lie, but for now, I’m going to leave it alone. I don’t know if I want to know,” I chuckle and shake my head, “Thank you for your service,” I respond, stepping into my room and closing the door behind me.

I smile over at Harry and walk towards him, “I did it, I survived, and I didn’t need you.”

“Ouch,” Harry laughs, and I sigh, realising how my words came out. “I know,” he shakes his head before I can say anything, “I’m proud of you.”

“Me too,” I grin, stepping closer to him and kissing him sweetly. He pulls me closer, and I wrap my arms around his neck, deepening the sweet kiss.

I have missed the taste of his lips and the burning energy that spreads like wildfire and ignites my soul. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls me into his lap, where I straddle him at his hips, his hands roaming my body while mine eagerly moves to his button-down, flicking each button before he draws his honey lips from mine. He leans closer and presses his lips to my neck, causing me to go weak instantly. I tilt my head to the side and press my hands to his shoulders, the soft kisses down my slender column already causing my head to spin. I feel him bite down gently before pulling away with a devious smirk and bright, cunning eyes. He drops his hand to my thigh and glides his hand against my soft skin, ever so slowly and delicately, ignoring my dress and inching closer and closer to the material of my underwear. He dances along with the lace band, teasing me before I harshly kiss him, needing to feel him, one way or another. He caresses the lace, causing my breath to hitch when I feel it move slightly to the slide. I pull away from his lips and see him smirk, his eyes gleaming with delight at my eager anticipation and my yearning. “No foreplay, no teasing, let’s go,” I shake my head, my hand moving to his pants and unzipping them. Harry chuckles and disagrees.

He puts me at ease and slides a finger in, a breath exhaling from my lips as I move my hips slightly to his circular motions. His fingers slide upwards, relentlessly moving, dipping, swirling and circling around, adding pressure and attempting to obtain the one spot I have been craving to be touched.

“No, please,” I sigh, the sound of the door knocking echoing through the room, taking me away from the sensational feeling I have been deprived of, “Don’t stop,” I instruct, my hands pressed to his shoulders, my nails digging into the material of his shirt.

“Really want me, huh?”

“Tired of interruptions,” I whisper with all honesty. Every single time we get time alone, we are interrupted. It has been a few weeks, at least six since we had a moment to ourselves, and I’m pretty sure we were also interrupted that time too.

I tilt my head back, my mouth allowing a small groan to escape as I am enthralled with the circular touch and rhythm he’s presenting me with. “Harry,” I huff, “Keep going,” I instruct, feeling the aching desire through my body, the sensations radiating through every nerve possible. I feel my body begin to go weak as he holds me firmly closer to him, my legs starting to quiver, and my body squirming against him. “Harry—“ I breathe out, my chest rising rapidly.

Abruptly, without warning, Harry stops and slides his fingers out, causing my mouth to drop in utter disappointment.

You have to be fucking kidding me. He shakes his head and uses his free hand to adjust his pants, managing to do so without bothering to move me, “Ye’ all wet.”

“No shit, you got me all hot and bothered,” I mutter, my irritation washing away the moment he unzips my dress from the back and takes it off of me with ease.

He stands up, holding me against him, forcing his pants down his legs and leaving them on the floor before setting me down on the bed and wasting no time with moving the lace in his way and teasing me with the tip of his length at my entrance. I curl my fingers into his shirt and draw his chest closer, taking bold possession of his mouth, tasting the honeysuckle flavour and moving my hips to the motions of his. My body absorbs the intimate feel of him, blood humming in both our veins’ with every deep repetitive thrust that takes place. He moans into our kiss, and I tighten my grip on his shirt, the heat between us intensifying. Probing in a slow, repetitive rhythm, he perceives my every desire.

My head spins with the achy feeling of him inside of me, my legs quivering. He takes my hands and forces me to release his shirt, moving my arms over my head and holding them in place, “Hold it,” He instructs, my breath hitching in my throat as I’m getting closer and closer.

Tangy taste and male scent fill the air between us with every powerful thrust that drives us closer and closer to the barrier of resistance I am fighting. Our tongues dip and swirl between the soft groans of the two of us while entangled together in the heat of our bodies.

My breaths become shallow, and I can feel the tingly sensation in my toes that radiate around my body. My body closes tightly around him, and he squeezes my arm slightly, “Anna,” he breathes against my lips, my back beginning to arch, my body fighting the urge and squirming under him.

Our breaths quicken and the desire between us thickens to the point it's almost unbearable, and we can’t get any closer to each other or enough of each other.

He falls beside me, and we catch our breath with crooked grins. I tilt my head to look at him, “Was worth the bloody wait,” I chuckle.

Harry swallows hard, “Had been a while,” he agrees, propping up on his forearm and looking at me with his cheery grin, “Round 2?”

“We’d get interrupted,” I laugh, inching closer and pressing my lips to his just as his phone vibrates on the side table, “Fuckin’ hell, does everyone just have a bell that goes off every time we attempt to be intimate?” Harry pulls away and mutters, reaching over for his phone, “Fuck,” Harry sighs, forcing himself off the bed.

“What now?”

“I’m pretty sure a bell goes off when we try to make love, constantly interrupted,” Harry huffs, walking around the room and finding a clean pair of pants, “Always fucking something,” he shakes his head, his fingers quickly typing away on his screen, “I won’t be coming to bed any time soon, I’ll see you in the morning,” Harry informs me, looking at his shirt and noticing the creases, making the quick decision to change it.

I nod my head and pull the sheet to cover my exposed body, “Is there a problem?”

“I just have to watch the cameras until five in the morning to make sure there’s no suspicious activity from the staff who are currently being blamed for Henry’s murder,” Harry informs me, his eyes narrowing towards me. Whatever Victoria and my father managed to get themselves into has proven to be more than any of us can handle.

Harry claims he can handle it and figure things out, but I’m starting to wonder if it’s just a matter of time before it all catches up to us. He can protect me all he wants, but the plot continues to thicken. “That means you won’t be on my service,” I sigh, remembering my royal duties for tomorrow.

“Probably not. I need to sleep at some point. Matthew or Oliver will look after you. Guess I have to look into the palace fire for Madeleine, too.”

“What about Henry?”

“I don’t know about the arrangements.”

“No, how are you handling it? Sweeping it under the rug? Announcing it?”

“Baby, I do not know. I think they’re going to release that he passed peacefully in his sleep from an unknown cause… The palace doesn’t need any bad publicity, so I’m trying to hide it the best I can.” … “Just don’t talk to anyone about this, okay? Not even the lady’s in waiting or your assistant or publicist, nobody.”

I nod my head, “I know… Eleanor hasn’t mentioned it.” … “Good luck, King, I’m going to sleep now,” I half-smile, not thrilled that he has to handle this circus and not myself.

[senadimell]

If you've got time to share, I'd love to hear more about your thoughts around Snape and Lupin.

@deathdaydungeon, here you are!

After a conversation with @frederick-the-great, I’ve been thinking about Lupin, Snape, and what they say about morality in HP. I’m not talking about the troublesome white hats, black hats morality, but am instead looking at from this angle: Lupin is nice and well-liked, but often lacks a backbone, whereas Snape is mean and disliked, but incredibly brave. Which is more important? I find Harry’s last sacrifice to be a useful point by which we measure their impact.

Lupin and Snape useful to compare on several important fronts.

As foils for each others’ teaching methods

The way they deal with social disadvantage

Their connections to Harry’s father and how they pass on James’ legacy

1) They both teach at Hogwarts, and are foils for each other in many ways. Snape is mean and takes away points. He’s seen as selfish. His classes are hard and unpleasant for Harry. He’s mean to Neville, and rather than encouraging him, mocks him and belittles him, which just adds to the overall disaster of Neville’s poor self-esteem mixing badly with potions class.

However, even Umbridge admits that Snape’s teaching methods work, and she’s working for Fudge who doesn’t like Death Eaters and has been defied by Snape in GoF, so we know he’s effective for a lot of people, if not Neville.

Yet, for all that, Snape saves Harry’s life multiple times. On top of that, Snape wants to keep the fact that he saved Harry’s life a secret.

“Very well. Very Well. But never--Never tell, Dumbledore! This must be between us! Swear it, I cannot bear...especially Potter’s son...I want your word!

My word, Severus, that I will never reveal the best of you? Dumbledore sighed, looking down into Snape’s ferocious, anguished face. “If you insist...”

DH 679, The Prince’s Tale

Conversely, Lupin is nice and rewards points. He’s seen as generous. His classes are fun and interesting for Harry. He’s kind to Neville, and expresses confidence in him that leads him to succeed and do well. That confidence is a huge part of Neville’s character development. I doubt he’d grow into the resistance leader in DH if not for the many times teachers expressed confidence in him, like Dumbledore in PS, Lupin in PoA, Fake!Moody in GoF, and Harry in OotP. Harry certainly approves of his methods:

“You’re the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher we’ve ever had!” said Harry. “Don’t go!”

PoA 424, Owl Post Again

However, it’s worth noticing that Hermione does worse on his exam than we ever see. She fails the Boggart test, and she and Harry were the only two people not permitted to experience the Boggart in class. Lupin’s teaching methods aren’t foolproof. Despite that, he’s overall seen as a nice guy and good teacher.

Yet Lupin endangers Harry’s life. The secrets he keeps are dangerous: his secret to keep is that he’s a werewolf and  actively endangered three students lives with his negligence, as well as the fact that he hid a secret about a believed and convicted mass murderer to save face with Dumbledore.

“That was still really dangerous! Running around in the dark with a werewolf! What if you’d given the others the slip, and bitten somebody?”

“A thought that still haunts me,” Lupin said heavily. “And there were near misses, many of them. We laughed about them afterwards. We were young, thoughtless--carried away with out own cleverness.

“I sometimes felt guilty about betraying Dumbledore’s trust, of course....he had admitted me to Hogwarts when no other headmasters would have done so, and he had no idea I was breaking the rules he had set down for my own and others’ safety. He never knew I had led three fellow students into becoming Animagi illegally. But I always managed to forget my guilty feelings every time we sat down to plan our next month’s adventure. And I haven’t changed...

Lupin’s face had hardened, and there was self-disgust in his voice. “All this year I have been battling with myself, wondering whether I should tell Dumbledore that Sirius was an Animagus. But I didn’t do it. Why? Because I was too cowardly. It would have meant admitting that I’d betrayed his tryst while I was at school, admitting that I’d led others along with me...and Dumbledore’s trust has meant everything to me. He let me into Hogwarts as a boy, and he gave me a job when I have been shunned all my adult life, unable to find paid work because of what I am. And so I convinced myself that Sirius was getting into the school using Dark Arts he learned from Voldemort, that being an Animagus had nothing to do with it...so in a way, Snape’s been right about me all along.”

PoA 355, Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs

Plan is emphasized because those trips that ended in “near misses” weren’t some impulsive romp. They were planned and coordinated in advance.

“I just saw Hagrid,” said Harry. “And he said you’d resigned. It’s not true, is it?”

“I’m afraid it is, said Lupin. He stared opening his desk drawers and taking out the contents.

“Why?” said Harry. The Ministry of Magic don’t think you were helping Sirius, do they?”

Lupin crossed to the door and closed it behind Harry.

“No. Professor Dumbledore managed to convince Fudge that I was trying to save your lives.” He sighed. “That was the final straw for Severus. I think* the loss of the Order of Merlin hit him hard. So he--er--accidentally let slip that I am a werewolf this morning at breakfast.”

“You’re not leaving because of that!” said Harry.

Lupin smiled wryly.

“This time tomorrow, the owls will start arriving from parents ....They will not want a werewolf teaching their children, Harry. And after last night, I see their point. I could have bitten any of you...That must never happen again.

“You’re the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher we’ve ever had!” said Harry. “Don’t go!”

PoA 424, Owl Post Again

What strikes me about this conversation is how Lupin shifts the blame around. This doesn’t start with an admission of guilt. He’s not leaving because the parents are right. He’s not leaving because he’s seen how dangerous he can be, or because he owns up to making an incredibly dangerous decision. He’s leaving because Snape forced his hand. If Snape didn’t do that, he would do the same thing he’s always been doing: sweeping his misdoing under the rug and promising himself privately that he’s going to change, but never doing it.

It’s always someone else’s fault for Lupin. That’s a neat tie in to the next point of comparison:

2. Lupin and Snape both experience marginalization in wizarding society, but in very different ways. Lupin faces socio-legal** marginalization and Snape faces socio-economic marginalization.

Lupin’s a werewolf. We see how prejudice affects his life, from his inability to find a job and his worn out clothes to his people-pleasing nature. He’s always acting nice and harmless. He does nothing to play into the condemning stereotypes he’s faced since childhood. Despite that, he still can’t find a job. Nobody will hire him, and people are scared to interact with him. From the way he talks about werewolves, it’s implied that this prejudice is held blindly across Wizarding society. Both Ron and Hermione are horrified to learn Lupin’s a werewolf. *** Later on, he’s legally limited in the kinds of jobs he holds and the kind of magic he’s allowed to perform. Lupin has no control over his transformations, and did not choose his condition.

Lupin’s not really wrong when pities himself. The odds really are stacked against him when he’s treated as if he’s a wolf 24/7, not just a few predictable times a month. His prospects are honestly awful.

The problem is, his condition is dangerous. Thus, the issue of victim blaming is particularly thorny for Lupin. He can’t just accept that he’s a monster for something he has no say over, and yet he can’t escape the fact that sometimes he is monstrous for reasons out of his control. He feels guilty for the people he could have hurt, but also seems to resent that people blame him for something that’s not his fault. The problem is that he carries that lack of accountability into spheres where he should be accountable, like not taking his medication and endangering children because of it.

Snape’s story is very different. He is poor in both the wizard and muggle worlds, and half-blooded, and was sorted into Slytherin as a child. He doesn’t have one condition against him, but checks boxes that make it hard for any one side to accept him. He’s too impure and poor to survive on his own for the Slytherin, but is a Slytherin with Death Eater friends and housemates interested in dark magic, which means he’s never going to fit in with the Order of the Phoenix crowd, especially when some of its members torment him at school. ****4

 This essay makes a convincing point that the wizarding world is not a meritocracy, and that people like Snape need powerful patronage to advance if they don’t have the money to support themselves.

I don’t consider the sorting a proper choice. I know Harry does, but I’m of the opinion that at age 11, very few people have been taught how to analyze different perspectives and make an informed decision. Most 11-year-olds are trained to obey their parents and accept their family’s ideology. Harry’s choice rests on very little evidence--most of what he knows is what Hagrid told him, and that he doesn’t want to be sorted into Voldemort’s house along with Draco Malfoy, someone who reminds him of Dudley. I don’t think Snape was very informed either (I’d love to know why), because he doesn’t realize why it Lily wouldn’t be sorted into Slytherin.

“You’d better be in Slytherin,” said Snape, encouraged that she had brightened a little. DH 671, The Prince’s Tale

Either the pureblood rhetoric just wasn’t strong in those days, or his mother didn’t tell him about that.

...“Where are you heading, if you’ve got the choice?”

James lifted an invisible sword.

“’Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart!’ Like my dad.”

Snape made a small, disparaging noise. James turned on him.

“Got a problem with that?”

“No,” said Snape, though his slight sneer said otherwise. “If you’d rather be brawny than brainy--”

DH 671-2, The Prince’s Tale

It seems that most people just follow familial preferences. As to why Snape wants to be in Ravenclaw over Slytherin, my preferred interpretation is that he had a family legacy, knew that Slytherin rewarded the ambitious and clever, and that Slughorn, the head of Slytherin house, had a knack for making the kind of connections that a poor, clever boy would need to succeed.

Nevertheless, once Snape was in Slytherin, the odds were stacked against him. The house in that era was full of people who would later be Death Eaters. “Dark Magic” wasn’t frowned upon among his housemates, and siding with Voldemort wasn’t yet widely acknowledged as a transgression by wider society.

“No, no, but believe me, [Sirius’ parents] thought Voldemort had the right idea, they were all for the purification of the wizarding race, getting rid of Muggle-borns and having pure-bloods in charge. They weren’t alone either, there were quite a few people, before Voldemort showed his true colors, who thought he had the right idea about things.…” OotP 112

Additionally, people like Bellatrix were in the years above him, and given how Fred and George acted with younger students, I think it’s highly likely younger students had to find a place in the hierarchy or be the target of ‘pranks.’ He was a halfblood, after all, and dirt poor.

Snape knew these people. He ate with them, slept with them, and went to class with them. It is so much easier to understand and befriend someone you spend time with. I’d say that most people who subscribe to problematic ideologies aren’t just awful to be around all the time, or else these movements wouldn’t gain any traction. They’re likely funny and nice to be around if you’re not on their bad side.

In addition to strong peer pressure to befriend the people who would be death eaters, he was also bullied four to one. His bullies received protection from the headmaster when he was nearly killed or permanently maimed. They were popular and well liked.

The best analogy I’ve heard to describe Snape's Hogwarts situation is that he’s a kid in a rough neighborhood who joins the local gang. It provides protection and the hope of social mobility, and from his perspective, the other gang fights just as dirty (his treatment by the marauders). He doesn’t stop to think that the system is flawed, or that the gang’s very existence indicates the failure of authority and threatens its members. He just sees himself as a kid with nothing who needs help with protection and advancement. We know that Voldemort hasn’t shown his true colors, and it’s possible he showed different faces to different people.

‘Now, yer mum an’ dad were as good a witch an’ wizard as I ever knew. Head Boy an’ Girl at Hogwarts in their day! Suppose the myst’ry is why You-Know-Who never tried to get ’em on his side before ... probably knew they were too close ter Dumbledore ter want anythin’ ter do with the Dark Side.

‘Maybe he thought he could persuade ’em ... maybe he just wanted ’em outta the way. All anyone knows is, he turned up in the village where you was all living, on Hallowe’en ten years ago. You was just a year old. He came ter yer house an’ – an’ –’ (“The Keeper of the Keys”)

Dumbledore’s cited as the reason they turned him down, not their blood status. I think there’s evidence that the wholesale anti-muggleborn campaign wasn’t a huge part of the first wizarding war, and wasn’t implemented until the second, even if there was anti-muggle propaganda. (Muggle=/=muggleborn). It’s implied that Tobias is abusive and that Snape hates him for what he did to him and his mother; it’s implied that faced class prejudice by the muggles around him as well:

“I know who you are. You’re that Snape boy! They live down Spinner’s End by the river,” she told Lily, and it was evident from her tone that she considered the address  a poor recommendation.

DH 665, The Prince’s Tale

When you read stories about people who are able to escape cycles of gang violence and poverty, there’s almost always someone who lifts them out. There’s someone who pushes them, or extends a hand, or believes in them. There are community outreach programs, or churches, or an English teacher that pushed them to do better and try out for a scholarship. That person is usually someone who knows what it’s like and knows how hard it is to get out.

Snape doesn’t seem to get that support anywhere. Slughorn doesn’t seem to notice him, for whatever reason. Lily doesn’t approve of his friends, but also doesn’t understand at all what the pull is--that it’s hard to swim against the current of what everyone else is saying, despite the fact that she feels the same pressure to end her friendship with Snape.

“… thought we were supposed to be friends?” Snape was saying. “Best friends?” “We are, Sev, but I don’t like some of the people you’re hanging round with! I’m sorry, but I detest Every and Mulciber! Mulciber! What do you see in him, Sev, he’s creepy! D’you know what he tried to do to Marry Macdonald the other day?”

DH 673, The Prince’s Tale

In the very same conversation, the fact that Snape is not allowed to share what happened to him with Lupin and the werewolf incident means that Lily will never be able to understand what Snape is facing: That the leader of the good guys makes excuses for and protects people who recklessly endanger the lives of others.

“And you’re being really ungrateful. I heard what happened the other night. You went sneaking down that tunnel by the Whomping Wollow, and James Potter saved you from whatever’s down there--”

Snape’s whole face contorted and he spluttered, “Saved? Saved? You think he was playing the hero? He was saving his neck and his friends’ too!...”

DH 674, The Prince’s Tale

Later in the year after SWM, she tells Snape this:

“None of my friends can understand why I even talk to you.”

DH 675 The Prince’s Tale

She expects him to reject all of his classmates and stand against the tide, despite the fact that she knows how hard it is to do that and can’t comprehend why he sticks with his classmates. She expects him to be grateful to James Potter as if what he did was altruistic, because the Headmaster swore Snape to secrecy and he keeps his promises, despite the fact that someone else was spreading the story. (The fact that she says she heard it instead of talking about it like its common knowledge implies that she heard it from a friend, so our friends the Marauders likely weren’t keeping their lips zipped even if Snape was.)

I don’t say this to shift the blame away from Snape to Lily in regards to Snape joining the Death Eaters. I just want to point out that Lily wasn't someone who could help him break the cycle. He didn’t squander some chance she offered him. She just wasn’t enough to break him out--not empathetic, motivated, or well-informed enough. (I think the fact that they were peers plays a big role in that).

Ultimately, Snape did choose to join the Death Eaters. He did yield to peer pressure. He did obey his assignment and report the prophecy to Voldemort. He spent his youth yielding, following the path in front of him, and choosing what was probably the easier choice: stick with your group, find powerful friends, do what they want, and don’t ask too many questions about their methods. That’s what makes his decision to betray Voldemort so powerful to me.

Here’s part of the passage when Snape betrays Voldemort:

...The adult Snape was panting, turning on the spot, his wand gripped tightly in his hand, waiting for something or for someone...His fear infected Harry too, even though he knew that he could not be harmed, and he looked over his shoulder wondering what it was that Snape was waiting for--

Then a sliding, jagged jet of white light flew through the air. Harry thought of lightning, but Snape had dropped to his knees and his wand had flown out of his hand.

“Don’t kill me!”

DH 676, The Prince’s Tale

He was terrified. He knew he was caught between the world’s two most powerful wizards, but it was worth it if he could save his childhood friend.

Then when Lily dies:

“Her son lives. He has her eyes, precisely her eyes. You remember the share and color of Lily Evans’s eyes, I am sure?”

“DON’T!” bellowed Snape. “Gone...dead...”

“Is this remorse, Severus?”

“I wish..I wish I were dead....”

“And what use would that be to anyone?” said Dumbledore coldly.

DH 678, The Prince’s Tale

Whatever motivation Snape had before is gone. A person’s life who is not his own is worth more than his own, and he’s drowning in guilt. From now on, Snape works to be useful in saving Harry’s life, and later many lives, at risk of death. His choices are a black mark on his record, likely making it difficult for him to get a job when he’s been tried as a Death Eater, and all of his wizarding connections are Death Eaters or their associates. He has no money or influence. Dumbledore hires him.

So Lupin has a single ailment and faces constant social and legal discrimination. He constantly tries to undermine people’s expectations about werewolves by being mild, but unfortunately is too afraid of rejection and its consequences to stand up against bad behavior or take full responsibility for his failings. He has friends who support him, but do it by engaging in risky behavior. He does not stop them. Perhaps he fears exposure and expulsion. Perhaps he just likes belonging for once. Either way, he does not come clean until forced to.

Snape is different; instead of facing outright rejection, he’s from a poor background and grows up surrounded by peers who join something somewhere between a gang and a cult while being bullied by people groomed by a rival organization. The headmaster of his school supports the rival organization and swears him to secrecy about an incident when they endangered his life, sending the message that his life is worthless. That same group continues to publicly bully him. He continues down this path until he realizes that it endangers something he cares about, and makes a decision that puts him at risk of being killed by the two most powerful wizards alive. He changes course.

Snape seems to view his problems as challenges facing him, whereas Lupin sees his problems as part of who he is, and not something he can change. Lupin seems to accept what happens to him in a fatalist kind of way. He sees what happens as inevitable and somewhat out of his control, whereas Snape never seems to blame his circumstances for him becoming a death eater, even though they clearly limited his options. I think that attitude matters. However, because Lupin’s facing a fictional magical malady, it’s difficult to fully blame him for that attitude.

Both Lupin and Snape have to react to powerful societal pressure that makes it difficult for them to succeed. Comparing them is apples and oranges at best, because their circumstances were so different. I don’t think you can judge either’s morality based on group identity, though.

3. Finally, they both act as a window on James: who he was, and what he means to Harry, who never knew him. That means in some way, they help pass on his parental legacy to orphaned Harry.

Hogwarts is Harry’s home, which means that the teachers are more than just teachers, but play a symbolic parental role in his life.

Hogwarts was the first and best home he had known. He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here.

DH 697, The Forest Again

You can’t understand Harry without realizing what he lacks: a loving home and living parents. He’s always looking into the past to find his parents, and is saddled with a legacy he struggles to understand--why did he live, who were his parents, and what does he need to do now?

Lupin and Snape also share a connection with Harry that goes beyond a normal teacher-student relationship, unlike McGonagall or Flitwick. Snape and Lupin are more personally connected to Harry than the other professors because they know Harry’s parents and went to school with them. I will mostly focus on James from here on out since we know so little about Lily personally and Harry mostly tries to emulate or avoid his father’s behavior and legacy.

They’re also the last people who knew James to survive, and they die almost at the same time. They’re the only teachers apart from Dumbledore who give Harry private lessons. More importantly, these lessons are all tied thematically to Harry’s past. Harry’s experience with dementors and the patronus charm are his first re-encounter with his parents and his past.

Terrible though it was to hear his parents’ last moments replayed inside his head, these are the only times Harry had heard their voices since he was a very small child. But he’d never be able to produce a proper patronus if he half wanted to hear his parents again.

PoA 243, The Patronus

In the end of PoA, Harry sees himself and mistakenly thinks it’s his father.

“Come on!” he muttered, staring about. “Where are you? Dad, come on--”

But no one came. Harry raised his head to look atet he circle of dementors across the lake. One of them was lowering its hood. It was time for the rescuer to appear--but no one was coming to help this time--

And then it hit him--he understood. He hadn’t seen his father--he had seen himself--

Harry flung himself out from behind the bush and pulled out his want.

“EXPECTO PATRONUM!” he yelled.

PoA 411, Hermione’s Secret

So the patronus itself is linked up with Harry’s past, and his coming-of-age. He doesn’t rely on others to save him, but must do it himself. (Though Harry’s never really trusted the adults to save him.)  It’s interesting to note that Harry actually learns the Patronus charm under Lupin’s tutelage.

On the other hand, Snape introduces Harry to the unpleasant side of his father’s legacy. Through Snape, we see that James wasn’t just a little cocky, but a bully.

“Apologize to Evans!” James roared at Snape, his wand pointed threateningly at him. “I don't want you to make him apologize,” Lily shouted, rounding on James. “You're as bad as he is.” “What?” yelped James. “I'd NEVER call you a--you-know-what!” “Messing up your hair because you think it looks cool to look like you've just got off your broomstick, showing off with that stupid Snitch, walking down corridors and hexing anyone who annoys you just because you can--I'm surprised your broomstick can get off the ground with that fat head on it. You make me SICK.” She turned on her heel and hurried away.

....

He had no desire at all to return to Gryffindor Tower so early, nor to tell Ron and Hermione what he had just seen. What was making Harry feel so horrified and unhappy was not being shouted at or having jars thrown at him; it was that he knew how it felt to be humiliated in the middle of a circle of onlookers, knew exactly how Snape had felt as his father had taunted him, and that judging from what he had just seen, his father had been every bit as arrogant as Snape had always told him. OotP, Snape’s Worst Memory, emphasis added

It’s interesting note that Harry fails to learn Occlumency from Snape. (In fact, we never see Harry use magical skills he learned from Snape apart from Expelliarmus, which is...important). At the same time, he gains an important perspective.

You can’t have James without this part of him. However kind James was to Lupin, however brave James was when he saved his wife, he was neither kind nor brave when he bullied Snape. It’s uncomfortable and awkward, but it’s important.

When he had finished, neither Sirius nor Lupin spoke for a moment. Then Lupin said quietly, “I wouldn’t like you to judge your father on what you saw there, Harry. He was only fifteen —”

“I’m fifteen!” said Harry heatedly.

OotP

Harry rejects the idea that actively bullying someone is just folly of youth. He knows what it’s like to be disenfranchised. Regardless of what Snape and James’ relationship was, he didn’t deserve that kind of humiliation. And Lupin watched, and defends him. Harry has to grapple with that.

Ultimately, Snape and Lupin do more than just connect him to his past. They also teach him his two signature spells, Expelliarmus and Expecto Patronum. One saves his soul, and one saves his life and frees the wizarding world from Voldemort because of Voldemort’s fractured soul.

Snape and Lupin as moral counterpoints

How do we evaluate this:

“I’d never have believed this,” Harry said. “The man who taught me to fight dementors--a coward.”*****5

DH 213, The Bribe

and this?

“Albus Severus, you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.

DH 758, Seventeen years later

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s really that useful to pit two people with different backgrounds against each other. At the same time, they represent two different halves of a question: when it comes down to it, should we try to be kind or brave? I don’t think you have to pick one, but when pursuing the two, there are bound to be moments of conflict.

I always come back to the lyrics to Last Midnight from Sondheim’s Into the Woods.******6

You're so nice You're not good You're not bad You're just nice I'm not good I'm not nice I'm just right I'm the witch You're the world

Snape doesn’t care about being nice. I think this is where most non-Snape fans start pulling out the pitchforks and torches. Snape isn’t nice, and he’s not nice to kids. He’s not nurturing.*******7 He’s abrasive, allergic to coddling, and petty when he can get away with it. In fact, most of the people he’s ‘nice’ to are significantly more powerful than him, or someone he needs to be on good terms with.

Lupin is nice. He’s mild. He’s often kind. However, he often picks being liked over standing up for something.

What does that result in? He doesn’t stand up for Snape. The bullying continues and keeps Snape firmly on his path. He wins the respect of the Gryffindors with the Snape Boggart incident but loses whatever credibility he had to tell Snape to ‘put their past behind him.’

On the other hand, Neville’s bravery in DH was nurtured by Lupin’s confidence. Neville kept hope alive and led a rebellion. Lupin is one of the few adults that Harry fully respects and trusts up until the Grimmauld place confrontation. (He likes Hagrid and Molly, but doesn’t necessarily trust them to make decisions in their best interest, while he usually respects Lupin’s judgement). Harry loves him, and it’s because he loved him and watched him die that he needs to act and fight back against Voldemort.

Ultimately, Harry’s relationship with James and the adults who pass on his legacy is one of the most important symbolic relationships in the book. The thematic resolution of the series is Harry’s act of sacrificial love.

He did not know what to feel, except shock at the way Snape had been killed, and the reason for which it had been done....

...He could not bear to look at any of the other bodies, to see who else had died for him. He could not bear to join the Weasleys, could not look into their eyes, when if he had given himself up in the first place, Fred might never had died...

He turned away and ran up the marble staircase. Lupin, Tongs...He yearned not to feel....He wished he could rip out his heart, his innards, everything that was screaming inside of him.

To escape into someone else’s head would be a blessed relief....Nothing that even Snape had left him could be worse than his own thoughts.

DH 660-662, The Prince’s Tale

He rushes to the headmaster’s office to escape into Snape's memories. His memories convince Harry that sacrificing himself is the expedient thing to do, and he heads to the Forbidden Forest. To enable is last sacrifice, he uses the Resurrection stone to witness his parents and his father’s friends. Their combined testimony is enough to ameliorate his personal fears about following through with this final act.

Lupin and Snape leave entirely different legacies behind. Lupin encourages and inspires. As an authority figure, he gives people like Neville space to grow and his compassion towards Harry gives him the strength to face his demons. Harry’s decision in DH to die must have something to do with the kindness he was shown, and the sacrifices people who loved him made for him, of which Lupin is a part. Despite what he saw in Princes’ Tale, Snape wasn’t one of the people who’d make an appearance with the Resurrection stone.

Yet Snape sacrificed his life for Harry and the wizarding world, entities that Snape didn’t seem to like and that certainly weren’t kind to him. His form of bravery is about endurance, tenacity, and willingness to do what is right even when you hate your allies and no one else is going to credit you for what you do. And that’s very Harry. Even if he hates Draco, he’s not about to let him die if he can help it. Harry has much more in common with Snape than Lupin, I think.

Since this is about souls, let’s return to the Patronus charm. Snape’s not the kind of person who typically inspires that kind of emotion required to cast a Patronus in others, at least from what we see in Harry’s perspective. Yet because he has experienced that love, he can cast it and shows Harry what needs to be done. Snape enables Harry to dive under the ice. Lupin’s the kind of person who can inspire a patronus, but isn’t the one to make the sacrifice play until after Harry confronts him about his duty to his family. Ultimately, though, they both sacrifice themselves in the Battle of Hogwarts.

* Ever since I realized how blatantly tangential Order of Merlin must be to Snape’s character motivation, that line has frustrated me to no end. There’s no way frothing-at-the-mouth PoA Snape just really coveted that Order of Merlin. He’s often petty, yeah, but if Lupin believes it’s just about that and has nothing to do with Snape’s real conviction about how dangerous Lupin’s actions were, he’s deluding himself. I hate that he passes it on to his students.

**Yes, I am making up words today. Lupin’s faces prejudice and discrimination on a social level enforced by increasingly powerful discriminatory laws.

*** It’s worth noting that if we take every book as equally valid canon, then there’s either widespread ignorance towards lycanthropy, as Lockhart convinces everyone he was able to “cure” the Wagga-Wagga werewolf, and as teenage Horcrux!Riddle said Hagrid raised werewolf cubs under his bed, or else lycanthropy is actually a wide range of conditions under a wolfy umbrella ranging from treatable to incurable. Lupin is our primary source for lycanthropy: he’s the one who tells us about Greyback, for example. If we hold the first two books as equally valid, then perhaps we only know about Lupin’s particular type of condition. That’s the Watsonian analysis, anyways.

****4 These footnotes are getting ridiculous. Basically, there’s no consensus on what Dark Magic is, and on what basis it’s Evil. This essay goes into things that are labelled as curses. I’m inclined to believe that the vast majority of Dark Magic is just Magic We Don’t Like for Reasons.

The definition of what is and isn't considered Dark Magic is never explained: often it just seems to mean "a curse I don't approve of".  Even "curse" has never been satisfactorily defined, but we can certainly say that not all curses are regarded as evil, since some appear to be on the Hogwarts curriculum, and are certainly performed without censure.

*****5 While I paired the quotes at the top of this section together for dramatic effect, it’d be a shame not to look at the context of the Lupin fight.

“I thought you’d say [that your mission was top secret],” said Lupin, looking disappointed. But I might still be of some use to you. You know what I am and what I can do. I could come with you to provide protection. There would be no need to tell me exactly what you were up to. Harry hesitated. It was a very tempting offer.

Hermione then asks about Tonks.

“I’m pretty sure my father would have wanted to know why you aren’t sticking with your own kid, actually”... ...“I’d never have believed this,” Harry said. “The man who taught me to fight dementors--a coward.”

...“Parents shouldn’t leave their kids unless--unless they’ve got to.”

...“I know I shouldn’t have called him a coward.”“No, you shouldn’t,” said Ron at once. “But he’s acting like one. “ “All the same...” said Hermione.

“I know,” said Harry. “But if it makes him go back to Tonks, it’ll be worth it, won’t it?”

He could not keep the plea out of his voice. Hermione looked sympathetic, Ron uncertain. Harry looked down at his feet, thinking of his father. Would James have backed Harry in what he had said to Lupin, or would he have bene angry at how his son had treated his old friend?

DH 213, The Bribe

Harry feels personally betrayed that someone who has a family and child would abandon them. Here he is unyielding and accusing to someone he cares about in the hopes that they re-evaluate what matters. It’s a rather Snape-like tactic, actually. Or else a Dumbledore one.

I love the dialogue in this scene, but have some major issues with how Harry’s internalization drops out the window for shock value. JKR does the same thing when has Harry pull the Veritaserum trick in HBP. I don’t like it.

******6 The witch and Snape aren’t perfect analogues, since she’s decidedly more amoral in my opinion, but they’re both contractually-motivated characters whose humanity is shown by their (platonic/familial) love for a more “innocent” character and the guilt at the innocent character’s sacrificial death. Guilt doesn’t lead the witch to do anything productive, and for Snape it does, which is where they diverge on the character path.

*******7 Draco may be an exception to this. However, watching Snape struggle to build rapport with Draco in HBP leads me to think that while Snape’s been on Draco’s side, he’s still not “nurturing,” or in other words, good at cultivating trust and encouraging the strong and wholesome parts of someone’s personality to grow.  

[ultramaga]

“Why Climate Science Is Like the Rest of Science “ Ok, so he has to compare it to the rest of science to make this claim. Will he do that? 

“By and large, the public’s mood has shifted from one of skepticism to support” I think if you walk outside Leftist circles, you see a different world. China is the leading producer of CO2, and it doesn’t give a shit. We can’t help but notice the rich keep buying up oceanside properties, too, despite them lecturing at us that the sea levels are rising. “ He accepts the reality that human induced global warming is a reality” That sentence is garbage. The author wants us to accept their conclusion that their belief is reality, so they keep repeating the word. And get with the times, it’s Climate Change now, whoops, I just got a text, it’s Climate CRISIS! Panic, everyone!!! "the Earth has indeed warmed by 1.40C since 1900″ Let’s assume it has. We do not know squat about whether or not that is caused by humans, because everything we see indicates that the Earth and the solar system itself is far less stable than we used to think. We are watching the magnetic poles accelerating away from their earlier position, and now realise that gigantic chaotic movements are taking place beneath our feet, and we are the equivalents of ants walking on the skin of boiling milk.  We know also that the Sun is unusually stable compared to other stars of its type. It’s completely reasonable for it to warm up, and indeed, it is warming up over time, but in the short term, variations for such stars are mundane. If anything, the freaky thing is that our star seems to have been oddly stable for a long time.

https://www.iflscience.com/environment/we-could-be-heading-mini-ice-age-2030/ The science is settled! The climate is predictable! It’s an ice age! The poles are going to melt! The poles will melt by 2020! The Earth is going to become another Venus! I have heard it all before. The Earth’s climate has completely evaded every prediction. 

"The basic physics underlying global climate change is clear “ Bitch, no it isn’t, which is why the predictions keep going wrong. We had no idea that the magnetic poles were likely to flip until recently. We could lose a layer of our atmosphere if that happens. Hands up those who think having no magnetosphere might affect the climate! “Theoretical predications have been confirmed by observations. “| Return of the ice age and drought in peninsular Florida? https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstract/3/12/695/185838/Return-of-the-ice-age-and-drought-in-peninsular Uh huh. Convection in the antarctic ice sheet leading to a surge of the ice sheet and possibly to a new ice age https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17799300/ I lived through the 1970s. You would see headlines all the time that either the Earth was going to freeze, or it was going to heat up. The advantage is that by betting both ways, they were always right, because the Earth always changes, the Sun always changes, our orbit always changes; the idea that we live in some safe stable system is a myth. "CO2 abundances will persist with only about a 40 percent falloff over a millennium” Garbage. We could build fission reactors and siphon it off if we wanted to. We could then sequester the CO2. https://medium.com/climate-conscious/nuclear-powered-carbon-capture-and-sequestration-2fc9c97e7b5 , even if we turned off Greenhouse gas production today, and given the heat input already due to increased CO2 atmospheric concentration, sea levels will rise by at least 0.5–1m by 2100 independent of planned global reduction of fossil fuel burning.

“Residual uncertainties do not invalidate the basic picture, any more than our existing uncertainties about dark matter in cosmology invalidate the basic Big Bang model” ” there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/12/al_gore_trips_on_artic_ice_mis.html We were sold a lie. I didn’t see climate scientists correcting Gore’s world wide announcements, and movies and many press conferences. They were happy to see additional funding. Oh, and dark matter may not exist. One possible solution is that our understanding of gravity is wrong, which would certainly impact the Big Bang model. It might well be discarded entirely if MOND is found to be correct, so this is a stupid analogy. “The fact that IPCC models allow as little as 20C of heating or as much as 80C by century’s end” And yet there is no path by their model to achieve that goal, because China does not give a fuck.

http://desdemonadespair.net/2015/06/graph-of-day-carbon-emissions-and-human.html The globalists try and ignore China by using a per capita model, which means dividing everything by the gigantic number of people in China, as if that could somehow impact the Climate Change model. I guess physical systems just look at China, and see all the people, and figure, well, they won’t heat up the Earth too much after all, because despite the Chinese pumping out all that CO2, well, there are so many of them that the individual contribution is lower than the American, and so we just have to give them a break. Physics really cares about individuals that way, it’s very polite! "I am reminded of the phrase used by Clint Eastwood in his Dirty Harry movies, when pointing his potentially empty gun at a suspect, he asks, “Do you feel lucky?”” He is fucking using Pascal’s wager. What a bitch move. Even philosophers generally agree that is a piece of shit.  The tactic of the wager is to freeze the logical capacity of the brain with fear. DO WHAT I SAY, BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T, YOU’LLL BURRRRRRRRN. No. No, sir, that is not how reason works. You want us to tear up Western Civilisation, to do the “Great Reset”, and sacrifice all our civil liberties, because you say the alternative is global destruction? Well, for one thing, your Armageddon still takes place even if the West vanishes, because China has never cared about your vision. For another - the predictions of your model keep failing. At best, it is postdictive - endlessly being revised to match the data of the past, because as soon as it is pushed forward, it fails, over and over. That is terrible science, and simply wouldn’t be tolerated in physics or chemistry, despite his claims. He wants us to ruin our world on the chance that if we don’t, the world will be ruined, and ignores that China will obliterate it anyway by his reasoning. He completely ignores nuclear power, as they usually do. If these people genuinely believed their models, they would be pushing reactors to be built everywhere. Instead, they tell us to learn to have nothing, and tell us we will be happy.

I wasn’t joking. That is exactly what they are saying.

And I say that with all due respect.

[mfingenius]

Fake dating

“Tell me why we’re doing this again,” Harry says, looking wearily at the iron gates of Malfoy Manor.

“I need my father to disown me,” Draco says, “And you like to piss him off.” Harry nods. “Right.”

Draco and him aren’t exactly friends. In fact, Harry knows next to nothing about him. They only know each other because of Hermione, who’d introduced them a few months weeks ago right before she’d proposed this completely insane plan.

It involved pissing off Lucius Malfoy, though, and getting someone out of a bad situation, so of course Harry had agreed.

Though he’d never met Draco until a few weeks ago, he knows all about Lucius Malfoy. He’s in the Wizengamot, and, being an Auror, Harry has to see him much more often than he’d like. He’s always disliked him for the smugness and arrogance he has about him, but now he hates him because he knows Malfoy is taking bribes from criminals, and it’s not fair that everyone seems to think he’s an upstanding member of society.

His suspicions were only confirmed when Hermione had explained to him that she had a friend who needed to get out of an unpleasant home situation, and it had turned out to be Malfoy’s son.

“Okay, let’s go over this,” That’s at least one thing Harry knows about Draco now; he’s a very anxious person, and he likes to plan things even more detailed than Hermione. Harry can practically feel his anxiousness from where he’s standing, and it’s making him both nervous and slightly concerned. “We’ve been dating for six months, we don’t plan on having children, and we have a very active sex life.”

“That would be bad?” Harry asks. He can’t imagine how that would come up, but he doesn’t point it out because he thinks it’ll make Draco even more anxious.

“Purebloods are supposed to wait until marriage,” Draco says. “Don’t you know-” he cuts himself off and his whole face brightens. “You don’t know. That’s great! You have no idea of any pureblood customs, this is amazing! Alright. Yes, okay. We must piss off my father as most we can. It’s the winter ball, which means a lot of people will be here. If we do it publicly he’ll cut me off faster, because he’ll see it as a public disgrace so it’s perfect. Okay, alright. I don’t know how to mention that you’re not a pureblood, but-”

“Draco,” Harry interrupts swiftly. “Your father and I work together. He hates me. I’m pretty sure he knows I'm not a pureblood.”

Lucius Malfoy has a personal vendetta against Harry only because Harry arrested Tom Riddle and sent him to Azkaban, and Riddle was Malfoy’s biggest payoff. Not to say that, now that he’s in Azkaban, Riddle has a reason to kill Malfoy, since his bribery failed its purpose.

“Right,” Draco says stiffly. He's chewing on his lower lip, looking at the house with a sort of uneasiness that Harry thinks should never come when looking at your childhood home. He looks at Harry briefly, and his cheeks color. “I’m sorry. I know I'm being – annoying.”

Harry frowns. “You’re not being annoying at all. You’re nervous. It’s fine.”

Draco looks surprised. “Oh. Thank you.” There’s a beat of silence, and then, “We should probably go in.”

Draco nods, and he holds the door for Draco when they walk through the door. They’re both dressed in black suits, and Harry has to admit, Draco looks good. If Hermione hadn’t introduced them this way, and he’d seen him in a bar somewhere, he probably would’ve asked Draco out. It’s more complicated now; Harry doesn’t want Draco to think that he has to go out with him because he’s helping him.

“Draco!” A blonde woman who Harry assumes is Narcissa Malfoy approaches them as soon as they’re through the door, and she hugs her son briefly. She eyes Harry. “You didn’t say you’d be bringing someone.”

“Right,” Draco says, nervously. He grabs Harry’s hand, and Harry hides his surprise, squeezing Draco’s hand when it seems that he’s not going to continue because of how anxious he is. He bounces on the balls of his feet lightly. “This is my boyfriend. Harry Potter.”

Narcissa evidently recognizes the name, because her face becomes cold.

“Good evening, Mrs. Malfoy,” Harry says graciously, tipping his head.

“Oh,” she says, carefully, controlled. “I wasn’t aware you had a boyfriend.”

“Yes.” Draco seems to be forcing himself to talk. “We’ve been dating for six months. We had sex on the first date.”

Harry nearly chokes on his own spit. Narcissa Malfoy looks surprised, then angry, turning her glare towards Harry.

“Oh?” She says.

“Right,” Harry says, trying not to sound too awkward. “We had sex on the first date. So many times. In so many places.”

“I’m - hearing this.” Narcissa shakes her head, and looks at Draco critically, as if wondering whether or not it’s really her son. “I thought I'd raised you better.”

Draco seems to deflate slightly, and he looks miserable. He doesn’t like disappointing his mother, Harry thinks, even if it’s all a lie. Harry squeezes his hand again in silent support.

“Well, your father won’t be happy about this,” Narcissa continues, as if she hadn’t just practically gutted her own son. She looks at Harry up and down, but only speaks to Draco. “Do try not to make a scene, darling. We’ve been preparing this ball for months.”

Draco nods, and Narcissa walks away, moving on to speak to some people Harry recognizes from the Wizengamot as Malfoy’s crappy friends.

“It’s fine,” Harry tells Draco, because he looks deathly pale. “You’re doing alright.” “Get ready,” Draco says urgently, and, a moment later, Harry realizes why.

“Potter,” Lucius Malfoy’s cold voice comes from behind him. He looks at Harry like he’s gum stuck in his shoe. “I wasn’t aware you were invited.”

“I wasn’t,” Harry says cheekily. This is the part he thought he’d love – pissing Malfoy off – but it’s hard to enjoy it when Draco looks terrified. “I’m here with your son.”

Lucius Malfoy looks down at their intertwined hands, and then up at Draco sharply. “What is the meaning of this?” he hisses angrily.

Draco seems paralyzed, so Harry speaks.

“We’re dating,” he says. “We’re boyfriend and boyfriend. We have sex. A lot. We also never plan on having children, so say goodbye to grandkids. We’re going to live together and never get married, because marriage is not important.”

Malfoy looks purple by the time Harry finishes his little speech. Harry’s actually concerned he’s going to pass out right then and there. He wouldn’t be particularly sorry.

“Is this true, Draco?” He asks, without looking away from Harry.

“Yes,” Draco says unsteadily. “I love him. I want to spend the rest of my life with him.”

“We’ll see,” he says, darkly, and walks away. Neither Draco nor Harry are addressed for the rest of the night.

*

Malfoy comes up to him at work.

“How much?” He asks with a cocked eyebrow and a cold look.

“How much?” Harry repeats, frowning. He’s in his Auror robes, and he’s quite busy trying to figure out where Fernir Greyback is hiding to focus on Malfoy’s petty conversation right now. He doesn’t bother to look at Malfoy; instead, he stays staring at the pinup board filled with pictures and known addresses of Riddle’s operation.

“Yes,” Malfoy says. “How much for you to stop dating my son?” Harry turns to him, frown deepening. “Excuse me?”

Malfoy rolls his eyes. “Everyone has a price, Potter. I can give you ten thousand galleons as a starting sum, right now. We can negotiate for more if you move away.”

“Excuse me?” Harry repeats. Not only does he not need money – he has enough of it from his job, thank you – but he does not take bribes, under any circumstances.

Malfoy rolls his eyes again. “I want you gone, Potter. I can give you enough money that you’d never have to work again. The only thing you have to do is leave.”

“Your son loves me.” Hary says. He knows it’s not true, but Malfoy doesn’t. “He told you. Would you still be willing to send me away knowing how he feels?”

Malfoy scoffs. “Draco doesn’t know what he feels. He’s young and impressionable, and he’ll marry a pureblood when it’s his time. This is just – young foolishness.”

Harry’s jaw tightens.

“I don’t take bribes.” he informs Malfoy. “Least of all from you.”

He slams the door on his way out, even if it is his own office. *

It becomes a battle of wills, after that.

Harry and Draco snog in very, very public places in the manor, making sure that either Narcissa or Malfoy will walk in on them, and Harry thoroughly enjoys Malfoy’s furious look anytime it happens. He enjoys Draco’s trembling less so.

Draco even spends the night at Hermione’s and Harry drops him off at the manor in a motorcycle, looking less than neat and just shagged, which, of course, didn’t happen, but Draco’s parents need to think it did.

It all comes to a halt on a Wednesday evening, when Harry – with Draco’s explicit consent – grabs his arse right in the middle of the living room.

Malfoy begins yelling about what’s ‘proper’ his entire face red, and, in the end of his meltdown, informs Draco that he will be disowned if he doesn’t break up with Harry.

“I won’t.” Draco says. His hands are shaking. “You won’t?” Malfoy yells.

“Darling, please,” Narcissa says desperately. “It’s just – just a fling. It’s nice, you had your fun, but it’s time for it to be over.”

“No,” Draco says. “I won’t. I love him.”

They’re kicked out less than three minutes later.

“Do you have somewhere to go?” Harry asks gently. Draco’s entire body is trembling now, and his expression is somewhere between terrified and elated. “Can I drop you off somewhere?”

“I - did not think of that.” Draco says. He seems marveled, dazed. “I’ll - I can stay at Hermione’s.”

“She’s on a trip with Ron.” Harry says.

“Oh,” Draco says. He still doesn’t look very concerned, and Harry thinks it’s the shock. “I’ll - find somewhere.”

Against his better knowledge, Harry speaks. “Do you want to stay with me?”

Draco looks at him, surprised. “I couldn’t, Harry. You’ve already been so kind to me, and I can’t - I couldn’t ask for more from you.”

“You’re not asking, I’m offering.” Harry says. “I’d - be calmer if you did. Only till you find a flat you like.”

“That could take a long time.” Draco points out.

“I don’t mind,” Harry says, and he doesn’t. Though he’s never particularly liked people in his space, in the past month of ‘dating’ Draco, he discovers he thoroughly enjoys spending time with him.

“Are you sure?” Draco asks uncertainly.

“Yes,” he nods. They apparate together to Harry’s flat, and, as Harry cooks them dinner, he thinks that he’ll have to work up the nerve to ask Draco out soon.

One of these days.

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

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[kitkatt0430]

So I’ve been kind of thinking about Cisco in the first half of season 6.  About his thoughts and feelings and motivations throughout the Bloodwork arc as the Crisis looms ever closer.

Cisco finds out one of his best friends is supposed to die before Christmas and... all things considered he actually takes the news really well.  I mean, yes, he steals alien medicine that only might be able to prevent death by antimatter and does so against Barry’s express wishes, but... considering this in context with the last six years of his life, it’s pretty understandable why he reacted like that.

The show began with Cisco carrying some pretty massive survivor’s guilt.  He blames himself for Ronnie’s death because he’s the one who closed the door to the pipeline, sealing Ronnie in with the explosion.  It’s in this state of mind that Cisco is introduced to the then comatose Barry Allen and Cisco maybe goes a little overboard trying to make STAR Labs into an environment that might entice Barry to wake up, even going so far as to check out Barry’s social media pages in order to play his favorite music. 

Because if Cisco focuses on Barry, he can ignore the ghost of Ronnie in the pipeline.  The specter in the hallways that Cisco half expects to see, but then he looks up and Ronnie isn’t there.  Because Cisco closed the door.  And he can’t talk about this with Caitlin because he’s more than half-convinced she’ll hate him.

And then Barry wakes up and he connects with Cisco pretty much instantly.  They’re both geeks and nerds and love the same fandoms and they click.  Suddenly Barry is Cisco’s new best friend.

The superhero thing is fun, but Barry keeps getting hurt.  He heals fast, which makes it feel less real sometimes.  But Barry nearly dies from inhaling a meta who turns into a toxin.  Bette shows up and Cisco gets a crush on her and she does die, her death a testament to the existence of people who would exploit metas - exploit Barry - if given even half a chance.  The device Cisco made in case Barry turned out to be too good to be true after all is stolen and used to commit murder, to hurt Barry.  And then the Reverse Flash shows up to prove all of Cisco’s fears about a speedster gone wrong were far from unfounded.

Cracks start showing up in the untouchable facade of Harrison Wells.  Hartley Rathaway forces them to acknowledge the truth that Wells was aware that the accelerator might (would) fail.  Cisco’s nightmares about Wells killing him.  The discovery of the real Wells’ body hidden on the highway to Starling city.

And Ronnie turns out to be alive and Cisco and Barry help save him.  But Ronnie never talks to Cisco about what happened when the accelerator overloaded.  They don’t talk about how, if not for the creation of FIRESTORM, Ronnie would have died.  Should have died.  Cisco never gets that conversation with him, never gets the absolution he needs to know Ronnie didn’t blame him or hate him for doing as asked and shutting the door.  And then Ronnie dies.  Again.  Permanently this time.

And both Barry and Caitlin shut Cisco out.

So he’s left grieving on his own again.  This time worse, because he’s grieving for the loss of Harrison Wells, a convoluted mess of feelings because how do you miss someone you never actually knew?  Was anything Eobard Thawne said to him real or was it all an act?  Can Cisco allow himself to grieve for a mentor who cared about him when that person was a murderer and a sham?

Cisco reconnects with Barry and Caitlin and latches on to Jay, because a friendly mentor is what they need and it fills a hole in Cisco’s life, which he also tries to fill with Harry.  And Cisco has to watch as his best friend is nearly murdered in front of him by Zoom.  Cisco is the one who shoots Zoom.  And so much about Cisco’s decision to become Vibe in season three comes from this moment.  Because when Cisco’s friends are hurting, he’s willing to do whatever it takes to protect them.  But he’s also shown, before he can even develop his powers, how monstrous those abilities could make him if he ever misused them.  

Jay dies.  Cisco mourns a friend’s death, again.  And, again, he has to use his powers to prove that friend was a fraud.

He starts reconnecting with his brother, only for Dante to die and its too much for him to take and he lashes out at his best friend.  Probably in part because Barry has lost so much too, so how can he get back up?  How does he keep going?  Keep putting on that suit Cisco made for him and keep getting hurt - keep losing people he loves - and not give up?  Flashpoint hurts as much because Barry did for himself what he wouldn’t do for Cisco as it does because it proves sometimes Barry can’t get back up.  Sometimes Barry does give up.  Cisco had to realize that Barry wasn’t a hero first and foremost and its a hard lesson to learn.

At the same time, here comes HR.  HR who isn’t the brilliant scientist he pretends to be and who, despite being badly betrayed by his dearest friend, still finds it in himself to be happy and cheerful and wants to spread that joyfulness to others.  And who, for reasons that make no sense to Cisco, wants to impress Cisco more than anyone else on their team.  And it’s hard for Cisco to have this dynamic reversed.  It takes him a while to adjust, to stop being upset by this weird change.  To see HR as his own person and not just another extension of the monolithic Harrison Wells across the multiverse.

And HR dies right as he’s finally starting to let Cisco see beyond the cheerful mask to the vulnerable person underneath, the person afraid that he’s never enough and that his contributions are worthless.  And Cisco is left feeling like he massively let HR down.

Caitlin doesn’t trust him with her fears about her powers.  He has to confront her at every turn, stage interventions, beg her to let him help.  And then she’s injured and dies and what comes back is Frost.  All their fears made real.  And he doesn’t know how to separate out his friend from this person wearing her body, but he does it.  He gives her the choice to become Caitlin again.  And Frost both does, and doesn’t take it.  Caitlin’s love outweighs Frost’s fear and Cisco’s trust gives them the starting point to eventually find common ground.  But she still leaves him behind.

Barry goes into the speed force.  He probably intended for Cisco to take over Team Flash even then.  But Cisco is too depressed for that and Iris needs to feel like there’s something she can control, so she takes the lead and Cisco throws himself into his research and being a super hero.  Being Vibe suddenly means having to live up to Barry’s legacy and even with Wally’s help and Iris running the comms, its hard.  He’s not getting the support he needs to make this work.

And then Cisco brings Barry back, only for Barry to be lost in his own head and it probably doesn’t feel like success.  It feels like he took too long and he let Barry down.  And then to learn he was manipulated into bringing his friend back to further the plans of a villain?

Caitlin comes back, but so does Frost.  Their dynamic is changed and trust has to be rebuilt between them all.  It’s not easy.  (It takes until the end of season five to get all three of them there, not just Cisco and Caitlin, and Frost is well aware of the significance of Cisco making her a suit.  And its tailored for Frost’s aesthetics, not Caitlin’s.)

Barry’s framed for murder and Cisco can’t save him.  He befriends Ralph against his better judgment and Ralph dies, his body stolen by DeVoe.  What good are his powers to him if he can’t save his friends?  His powers can’t even fix the strain of a long distance relationship with his girlfriend and he has to learn to accept that sometimes love isn’t enough to hold a relationship together. 

Ralph survives after all but DeVoe’s plan creates a serial killer even in his failure.  And Cisco is tired.  Tired of fighting.  Tired of taking hits and being knocked down and having to get back up.

When is it going to stop?  It isn’t.  The hits are going to just keep coming and there is too much on his plate.

So Cisco resolves to take one thing off his plate.  Being Vibe is that one thing that has to go.  He can handle his stress with that one gone, surely?

He becomes an uncle to a time traveler who hasn’t been born yet.  And she’s his best friend all over again, with her smiles and her cheerfulness and her penchant for bouncing back to her feet when life is so hard on her that her back literally breaks from the pressure.  She’s Barry’s kid in the worst ways, so self sacrificing that she runs straight towards her death, her own non-existence, because she feels its the right thing to do.

Cisco keeps losing people he cares about.  Over and over and over...  even when they come back, he loses them again.

So when Barry tells Cisco that all that time they thought they had to prepare for the events in the newspaper clipping that Gideon’s been holding over their head since season one is gone and that Barry isn’t going to fight to find another way to survive... its no wonder Cisco cares more about saving his best friend, then some person he barely knows.

[curlyhairallday]

Bumps and Dumps - Part 6

Harry and Hattie were best friends and fuck buddies until she got knocked up. Her life was becoming one big mess and even though her best friend had finally admitted his feeling but she believed it is only because of the baby.

Harold: Him…….

Hatters: We were just friends Harry and he actually seems to care about me and he didn’t have to knock me up to realise.

Harry kept rereading the text he finally realised how bad he had screwed up his chances with her. He had always known she liked him for the most part he never realised though that one day when the universe had made it clear he can be selfish he can have her she would no longer want him. He had spent the whole of the SNL after party looking at this photo of her and fucking sink boy. Aj had been his only real threat and now he was playing the role of Dad to his unborn baby, he should be rubbing her back not him. Ever since that skit all he thought about was them going to birthing classes, getting the nursery ready in the new house and talking to her bump. Harry had been getting updates from Gemma apparently Hattie had the tiniest bump which more looked like she was bloated but only they knew it was their spud.

He tried to type her a message several times and gave up. He just kept looking at that photo he went onto twitter to see what his fans were saying. He knew Jeff would come over and try and come up with a plan to diffuse the situation but he also knew Jeff wouldn’t care as after looking at his fans tweets everyone was speculating he was going to become a Godfather to Aj’s baby all he wanted to tweet was it’s mine. Most people had assumed she had just drunk a few too many and was paying the price. Harry was so wrapped up in his phone he had forgotten that he had invited his mates to the after party including two of his exes Kendall and Camille.

“What you looking at Styles.”

Kendall quickly grabbed his phone away, Kendall had never quite known what was going on between him and Hattie but she herself thought they were meant to be together. Kendall had realised shortly into her fling with Harry that their was another women and she had never disliked Hattie the two had got on well. They were not best friends but that was because they were opposites Kendall and Camille were both slightly vain and their lives were hollywood. Where as, Hattie dreamed differently something Harry found intriguing she hated the spotlight and anything glitz and glam she craved a different lifestyle she loved fighting for people to get their attackers behind bars and helping men and women to prosecute their other halfs for domestic abuse. She didn’t need attention or money she needed to help. Where as, Camille and Kendall spent time and money on the latest clothes to look cool which is something them and Harry had bonded over, Hattie spent most her time around the house in his hoddies or merch. He tried not to compare them to Hattie when he had dated them both as he knew no matter what they would always fall short. Even when Hattie lectured him on the dangers of drug use or how he shouldn’t smoke or allow Camille to smoke in the house because his lungs wouldn’t work very well and he wouldn’t be able to hold the high notes, Hattie was a goody goody in that sense and Harry loved her for that. Now she would save her lectures for court when she realised that her child was better with Aj as a father than this fuck up. He downed his drink to help with the sorrow.

“So Harriet is having fun, wow look her new boyfriend is hot.”

“Of course.”

“Come on Styles you are normally the first to admire a man's good looks.”

“I’d admire them if he had any, she could do better.” Harry grumbled.

“By better do you mean you? I must admit thought you two would finally end up together, I was surprised you and Camille lasted so long didn’t think you could stand to distance yourself from her.”

Harry knew she was right they had cut multiple trips short during there time together because Hattie had a big test or she was stressed or he just missed her.

“I heard my name.”

Camille kissed Harry on the cheek as she joined him and Kendall.  Him and Camille were on good terms even though at the end it had hurt but he always knew he was trying to make himself love someone, when that place had already been filed.

“H, why are you so sad you just killed SNL.”

“Capital is saying you’re going to be a Godfather, is that why you’re so sad missed because you missed your shot?”

Kendall exclaimed while looking through the twitter feed.

“Harry wouldn’t care about that. When is she due? I am surprised she didn’t tell you first? Wait is she still living with you?”

Camille fired question after question at him, Camille was lovely and intelligent but she was one of those people who never wanted her ex to move on almost like a power move. In her mind Harry would have never fancied Hattie as he should still be into her. Harry quickly downed his drink he had been trying to stop drinking to fill a void but he was currently failing.

“Styles tell us what’s going on? so we can cheer your miserable ass up and get the fuck out of here and celebrate.”

Harry looked around at all of his friends in the room they were all so Harry and here to congratulate him.

“It’s mine.”

“What’s yours H?”

Camille stroked his arm and glanced at Kendall waiting for her to answer, she normally understood Harry.

“Whats going on over here?”

Jeff joined the group kissing both the girls on the cheek before looking at his mates solomon expression. Harry grabbed another drink of a waiter and downed it. Kendall passed Jeff Harry’s phone.

“Harry mate slow down a bit. I will sort it have you called Hattie made sure she is ok?” Jeff tried to reason knowing that Harry wasn’t handling his transition into parenthood the best mainly due to the baby mumma issues. He also knew one of Harry’s rules was protect Hattie so even though this would blow over in the press it probably wouldn’t have made it there if she hadn’t been friends with Harry or caught with the future CEO of one of the most prestigious law firms in the Country.

“The baby its mine.”

“Wait what?” Camille laughed out not believing him.

“She’s nearly twelve weeks, I am going to be a dad.”

Jeff was busy texting someone probably to get the press under control about Hattie.

“So why is your girlfriend with a random guy at 6am?”

“We aren’t together she doesn’t want me. I screwed it up by ignoring her for other people. Her exact last text was basically said I only want her because I knocked her up.”

“Let’s just have fun H.” Camille gave him and kendall both a glass.

The rest of the night was a blur until he woke up the next morning to five missed calls from Gemma and two from Anne. He could barely open his eyes the hangover was that bad.

“Hey Mum, sorry I was out last night?”

“Harry you need to call Hattie. She is devastated they told her that the no longer required her at the firm. Said the press photo was not a good look for the company having a employee throwing up at 6am outside Starbucks. Apparently clients won’t take her seriously and she did sevre damage ”

“Wait what? Did she say she’s pregnant?”

“Gemma has tried to comfort her but she’s distraught. She did they already knew she thinks that’s why they did it. She said to Gemma is was a possibility.”

“I can’t come home mum I have the late late show and my interview with Apple.”

“Harry you need to do something? Honestly Gemma called me panicked as you weren’t answering Hattie tried to call you of Gemma phone apparently her pregnancy hormones caused her to throw hers at the floor the other day.”

“Mum I am going to go.”

Harry layed there trying to figure out what to say, he couldn’t get out of work these things had been booked for months. Maybe he could convince her to fly out here for a break I mean he was sure his record label could use a solicitor but knew she hates that bit of the law.

“Gemma pass me to Hattie” He cut of his sister hello he was in a rush.

“Hattie, I am so sorry baby. You’re amazing.”

He could hear her hiccuping back her tears this was her dream job she had been through shit to keep this job and now she had lost it thanks to him.

“I wo-r-ked sooo …. Hard Harry.”

She began sobbing again he knew how hard she’d worked.  She was a robot at uni trying to get a first and not settling for anything less.

“Hatters baby, come to LA.  I have to be here all week but we can figure stuff out ok. I promise I will make you feel better.”

“I can’t even get drunk to numb this pain.”

Harry chuckled a drunk Hattie was a scary sight .

“Get on a plane now I will pick you up myself we will get ice cream and cake or anything spud will stomach.”

“I can’t Aj said he could get me a interview at his dads, In the family law section it’s not perfect but it’s something. I was really helping people though H they took it away because of spud. I am not going to resent spud though it’s not his fault or hers. It’s his mummy’s for being a whore.”

“Hattie what the fuck? You are not a whore.”

“That’s what twitter is saying and the people at work said I get around.”

She began crying again and selfishly all he cared about was the fact that she would be working with Aj and that made his blood boil. He also still had the hangover from hell and was struggling to not vomit.

“When is this interview?” He calmly asked so to not upset her.

“Later today.”

“Ok after I will book a flight this evening. You need a little break we can spend the rest of the week together I only have to work today and tomorrow. I can selffishly get my best friend back and hopefully you will feel a bit better.”

“I think I like that, I am sorry for being a bitch recently it’s hormones and also I couldn’t hold in my feelings.”

“We can talk when you get here.”

Hattie was annoyed with herself for apologising she was still mad at him but she wanted him bad. She had the interview and Aj had helped her a lot they had offered her a job and she was so thankful for Aj. If not she would be a pregnant singleish mum with no money at least she lived with Harry so she wouldn’t be on the street. She was excited to start next week mainly because Emily had been distant with her recently so Aj was all she had friends wise who wasn’t somehow linked to Harry. She had packed light for LA not wanting to take a lot as the morning sickness had made her feel very weak. She was surprised that she was willingly seeing Harry but she needed to. They had never spent this long without constant communication she was also excited for him to hold her as she still couldn’t believe she had lost her job and managed to get a new one in a 24hour period I guess it goes to show how important it is to know the right people.

She spent the whole flight passed out in front of the toilet or with her head down it being sick. She was convinced this baby hated her.

Bump and Dumps Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5  Part 6

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 12/4/20 – HALF BROTHERS, THE PROM, I’M YOUR WOMAN, BLACK BEAR, LUXOR, ANOTHER ROUND, ALL MY LIFE, NOMADLAND, MANK and Much More!

I hope everyone had an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving. Mine was relatively uneventful, and I only spent most of my time watching movies.  And holy shit, there are a LOT of movies out this week, but at least a few of them I’ve already seen and reviewed, and there are others that are actually pretty good, so I might as well get to it, hm?

First up is this week’s Focus Features theatrical release, HALF BROTHERS, a buddy road comedy directed by Luke Greenfield (Blue Streak, Let’s Be Cops) that’s fairly high concept but also with quite a bit more depth than the director’s previous movies. It stars Luis Gerardo Méndez as Renato Murguia, a wealthy Mexican businessman whose father left him to come to America when Renato was just a child. Just as Renato is about to get married while having issues connecting to his future stepson Emilio, he gets a call that his own father is dying, so he begrudgingly goes to see him. Once there, Renato’s dying father sends him on a scavenger hunt to find someone named “Eloise” with his annoying slacker half-brother Asher (Connor del Rio), because that will provide all the answers Renato is looking for on why his father never returned from America, remarried and had another son. What could possibly go wrong?

If you’ve seen any of the ads for Half Brothers, you may already presume that this is a fairly high-concept buddy road comedy that is constantly going for the zaniest and craziest of laughs. That probably would only be maybe 25% of the movie. Instead, this fairly mainstream comedy finds a way to take a very common comedy trope and throw in enough heartfelt moments that you can forgive the few times when it does go for low-hanging fruit. We’ve seen so many movies like this where two guys (or sometimes ladies, but not as often) are paired with one having zero patience or tolerance for the other, who is beyond aggravating to them. (Planes, Trains and Automobiles is one of the better ones.) Obviously, Renato fits snugly into the first category, and Asher could not be more annoying, very early on stealing a goat for no particular reason.

The Mexican angle and the fact that a lot of the film is in Spanish – Focus getting into Pantelion territory here? – does add to make Half Brothers feel like more of a personal story than we might normally see in this kind of movie, touching upon the immigrant experience, from the viewpoint of a low-paid worker as well as a well-to-do industrialist. It also deals with things like fatherhood and brotherhood and what it means to be one or both, so everything ultimately connects far better in the end than some might expect. I also want to give the filmmakers credit for putting together a cast of mostly unknown or little-known actors and getting such great results out of them.

On the surface, Half Brothers seems like just another buddy comedy, but underneath, it’s a heartfelt and emotional journey that touches in so many ways and ends up being quite enjoyable.

Another movie opening nationwide this Friday is ALL MY LIFE (Universal), starring Jessica (Happy Death Day) Rothe as Jennifer Carter and Harry (Crazy Rich Asians) Shum Jr. as Solomon Chau, whose wedding plans are thrown off when he is diagnosed with liver cancer. They realize they have to get married sooner since he might not live to make their planned date, so their friends launch a fundraiser so that they can get married in two weeks. The movie is directed by Marc Meyers (My Friend Dahmer), who is a more than capable filmmaker with this being his third movie in the last two years.

Now that I’ve actually seen the movie… I’ll freely admit that this is not the kind of movie I usually have very high expectations for, and maybe that’s because I’ve already been burnt twice this year with real-life romantic dramas, first with the faith-based I Still Believe in March and then more recently with Two Hearts. In both cases, I could count the issues and why they failed to tug at the heart strings as they were meant to do.  Even though I’ve generally enjoyed Meyers’ past movies, I wasn’t even sure he could pull off this type of studio romance movie without having to cowtow to the corny clichés that always seem to slip in – or at least find a way to make them more palatable. (And let’s be realistic. This is the kind of movie that snobby film critics just LOVE to trash.)

First of all, Meyers already has two truly fantastic leads working in his movie’s favor.  I’ve been a true Jessica Rothe stan ever since seeing her kill it in Happy Death Day and its sequel. Shum is perfectly paired with her, and the two of them are so good from the moment they first meet and we meet them.  In every scene, you feel like you’re watching some of that rare on-screen romantic chemistry that’s so hard to fake. Their relationship is romantic and goofy, and you’re just rooting for them all the way through even if you do know what’s to come.

Eventually, Sol does fall ill, and it does lead to some more dramatic and tougher moments between the couple, but all of it is handled so tastefully, including their need to raise money so they can have their wedding rather than waiting. I am living proof that people really do come together to step up when they see someone in real need, so I couldn’t even tut tut at something like their fundraiser getting so many people to chip in. On top of his two leads, Meyers has assembled such a great cast around the duo, the most recognizable being Jay Pharaoh from Saturday Night Live, everyone around Jess and Sol handles the requisite emotions with nary a weak link.

There’s just so much other stuff that adds to the enjoyment of watching All My Life from the use of Oasis and Pat Benatar in the soundtrack just to the quality storytelling that makes it all feel quite believable. These sorts of movies tend to be rather corny and the diehard cynic who doesn’t have an ounce of romance or love in their body will find things to hate.

All My Life finds its way into your heart by being one of those rare studio romance movies that understands how human emotions truly work, and there’s nothing corny about that. It’s a beautiful movie that entertains but also elicits more than a few tears. Watch it with someone you love.

This week’s “Featured Flick” is Chloe Zhao’s amazing film NOMADLAND (Searchlight), which I reviewed out of its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, but it’s (sort of) being released in theaters this week. It stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a woman living in her van as she moves from place to place taking odd jobs within a community of nomads. It’s another amazing film from the filmmaker behind The Rider, who will make her foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe next year with The Eternals, which I’m just as psyched about. There’s no denying that McDormand gives a performance that’s a knock-out, even better than the one in 3 Billboards if you ask me, and there’s also a great supporting role for David Strathairn, who I’ve been hoping would have another role as good as this one. Zhao is just a fantastic filmmaker, and I’m glad to see that The Rider was no fluke.

Unfortunately, Nomadland is only getting a one-week Oscar qualifying run, and I’m not even sure where it’s getting that run since theaters in New York and L.A. aren’t even open yet. Maybe Searchlight will do some drive-in screenings like they did for the New York Film Festival and Telluride? It will get a stronger theatrical release (hopefully) on February 21, just to make doubly sure it qualifies for Oscars.

Opening in theaters this week before streaming on Netflix December 11 is Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of the Broadway musical THE PROM, the first feature film he’s directed in ten years. The multiple Tony-nominated musical is about a high school girl named Emma (newcomer Jo Ellan Pellman) who wants to take her girlfriend (Ariana DeBose) to their senior prom, but the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) cancels the prom instead. The national outrage the situation creates gets the attention of a quintet of self-absorbed Broadway actors who decide to improve their PR by taking up Emma’s cause. Oh, yeah, and those actors are played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and actual Broadway stars Andrew Rannells and Kevin Chamberlin. What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve never had any sort of positive or negative gut reaction to Murphy’s work on television over the past few years, but I’ve definitely been mixed on the three movies he’s directed to date. I wasn’t a huge fan of his Eat Pray Love, though I vaguely remember enjoying his debut, Running with Scissors. Either way, he certainly has found his niche with musicals from Glee (a show I’ve never watched)  and finding a musical like The Promseems to be a perfect fit between filmmaker and material.

Having not seen The Prom on Broadway – surprise, surprise -- I was a little worried that it was going to go down the path of nudge-nudge wink-wink inside Broadway path that helped Mel Brooks’ The Producers become a Broadway hit. That I saw, and I didn’t hate the movie based on it, although I’m by no means a total movie-musical stan. There’s some obvious older ones I love, some newer ones that others love but I hated – Rob Marshall is about 50/50 for me -- and you might be surprised by which of them I liked best.

What I thoroughly enjoyed about The Prom is that Murphy manages to truly surprise everyone watching it, whether it’s in Kerry Washington’s single song – who knew she had such an amazing singing voice? – or how enjoyable Keegan-Michael Key is as the school’s Principal Hawkins, who not only loves musicals but actually admires Streep’s two-time Tony-award winning Dee Dee Allen. Considering my frequent disdain for Streep’s over-confidence, knowing full well that she’s one of the best living actors working today, she’s actually pretty amazing in the role of what many must assume Streep is like in real life, which makes her character more than a little META. In some ways, I can say the same for Corden, who is pretty fantastic as Dee Dee’s frequent stage co-star Barry Glickman, who has his own connections to Emma’s plight having been disowned by his mother (Tracey Ullman, who only shows up for one brief scene late in the movie) when he came out to her. Corden has one dramatic moment so powerful I was taken quite aback.

Even with those two actors and Kidman likely to get much of the attention, there’s no denying that the romance between Hellman and Debose, and the three or four numbers they have together, makes up the true heart and soul of The Prom. So here you have this amazing cast, and it’s a musical made-up of very fun and quite catchy songs, and that’s long before you get to Andrew Rannells as out-of-work actor Trent Oliver, who practically steals the whole movie with his showstopper of a number, “Love Thy Neighbor.” And then watching Key holding his own with Streep, both musically and dramatically, you might start wondering, “What is going on here?”

Like I said before, it’s pretty obvious that Murphy has fully poured his passion of movie-musicals into every second of The Prom, and it shows on the face of everyone joining him on this adventure. As much as the subject at the film’s core is fairly serious and a hurdle that many gay kids across the world every day, it’s also quite funny. Kudos must be given to Murphy for being able to emphasize those moments as well as the more dramatic ones. Besides that, Murphy really takes advantage of being able to go to different locations, including a sequence on Broadway that could have been done during the pandemic (it actually was built on a soundstage), another number at an actual mall and even at a monster truck rally. It also doesn’t hurt that Murphy hired Matthew Libatique, a god-like cinematographer in my book, to film the movie either.

Like most musicals, The Prom might lose a little as it goes along, since it gets to be too much that goes on for too long, but then there are more than enough great moments to pull you back. It’s by far one of the stronger movie musicals I’ve seen in a very long time, and just the right feel-good experience we all need right now.

I’ve already reviewed David Fincher’s MANK – a few times, in fact – but if you’re in one of the places where it opened theatrically in November, you can finally see it on Netflix starting this Friday. This is the general problem with the way things are these days because even though this only opened a few weeks ago, I already feel that it’s been discussed and forgotten before most people will have a chance to see it.  Anyway, if for some reason, you’ve managed to avoid things about the movie, it essentially stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Hollywood screenwriter who ended up co-writing Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in 1940. The film follows Mankiewicz as he mingles with the Hollywood elite in the 30s, including billionaire William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and his young ingenue girlfriend Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) who would be the influence for his Oscar-winning screenplay. I expect to be writing a lot about this movie as we get closer to Oscar season sometime next year.

Also on Netflix this week is Selena: The Series, starring Christian Serratos. It’s the kind of thing that I probably would never watch unless I have an excess of time, and as you’re about to learn from the rest of the column, that doesn’t happen frequently.

The third chapter of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe Anthology,” RED WHITE AND BLUE, will debut on Prime Video this Sunday, starring John Boyega as Leroy Logan, a young black man who joins the Metropolitan Police after seeing his father assaulted by police and wanting to make a difference in the racist attitudes from within. You might remember that I reviewed this out of the New York Film Festival a couple months back, so not much more to say there.

A week from Sunday, on December 13, McQueen’s fourth film, ALEX WHEATLE, will hit Amazon, and guess what? I’ve already seen it, so I will review it now. How about that? Alex Wheatle is also a true story, this one starring Sheyi Cole as the award-winning young adult writer when he was a younger and just learning the ropes as a drugdealer/DJ in Brixton before his involvement in the 1981 Brixton riots gets him thrown in jail.

As with the other three movies in the “Small Axe Anthology” there are recurring elements and themes in Alex Wheatle, mostly about the way the immigrants to England from Jamaica and other islands are treated by “The Beast” aka what they call the Metropolitan Police. It does take a little time to get to that, as McQueen, working from a screenplay co-written by Mangrove’s Alaistar Siddons, takes a far more non-linear approach than the other three films. We first see Wheatle being taken into prison where he’s thrown into a cell with a constantly-shitting Rastafarian, but we then cut back to his schooling for a short sequence that reminded me of Alan Clarke’s Scum. Both in prison and in school, we see Alex being abused by classmates and head matron alike, and this portion of the film includes another one of arty moments of actor Cole laying on the ground eyes wide open staring for what seems to go on forever. In some ways, this sequence reminds me of McQueen’s fantastic early film Hunger, since it seems to be cut from similar cloth.

Eventually, Alex gets to Brixton and that’s where this chapter in “Small Axe” really takes off as we see how naïve and green he is while dealing with quite a tough crowd and trying to adjust to city life among the Rastafarian community.

As with the other “Small Axe” chapters, I love how McQueen and his team used reggae music to help set the tone and vibe for the episode, because like Baz Lurhman’s Netflix series The Get Down, the music is frequently a key to this biopic working so well. Of course, it’s also due to the performance by Cole and the actors around him that helps make you feel as if you’re seeing a real part of history.

As with Mangrove, this chapter culminates with an amazing recreation of the 1981 Brixton Riots, done in protest after a house party fire in New Cross that the police don’t bother investigating. The actual riots were a much bigger and scarier event going by Wikipedia which says that 279 police were injured and 56 police vehicles set fire, which makes it sound more like the ’92 L.A. Riots.

I’m not sure Alex Wheatle does as good a job explaining how the young man goes into prison as a DJ and comes out as an author, but like Red, White and Blue it’s still an important and inspirational story that adds quite a bit to the previous three “Small Axe” films.

And once again, here is my interview with McQueen from over at Below the Line.

Also, I should mention that Darius Marder’s excellent Sound of Metal movie, starring Riz Ahmed, hits Amazon Prime Video this Friday, too. Check out my review!

The magnificent Andrea Riseborough stars in Zeina Durra’s LUXOR (Samuel Goldwyn), playing British aid worker Hana who while spending time in the ancient city of Luxor, runs into her former lover Sultan (Karim Saleh), as she reflects on past decisions and her current uncertain situation.

I was quite interested in this one sight unseen, not only because it’s another great starring role for Riseborough. (Honestly, she is one of the best actors working today, and I strongly believe she is just one role away from being the next Olivia Colman, who had been amazing for years before everyone in America “discovered” her in The Favourite and then The Crown… which I still haven’t watched! ARGH!). I was a little anxious about the movie, having seen Rubba Nadda’s Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig, which seemingly had the exact same plot.

Durra is a much more capable and confident filmmaker and there’s a lot more overall value in watching Riseborough exploring Egypt as Durra quietly allows Hana’s story to unfold through her interactions with others, as well as her time alone, often languishing in one luxurious hotel room or another.  Then there are the quiet and sometime awkward scenes between her and Saleh, the two of them having been lovers when they were both much younger. We also see Hana in far more vulnerable moments, so we know that she’s by no means actor, and it takes a great actor to really pull off such a dichotomy and bring such dimension to a character with so few words.

There’s something that’s almost comforting watching her dealing with emotions like loneliness in such a tranquil way. I’d even go so far to say that Luxor works in many ways similar to Nomadland, which obviously is getting the far more high-profile release with lots of festival love long before its actual release.  Like that movie, Durra’s film benefits from having masterful cinematography by Zelmira Gainza and an equally gorgeous score by Nascuy Linares, to boot.

Luxor is a quiet, beautifully-made film that really took me by surprise. It acts as much like a travelogue of the title city as it does a tourist’s map to what it must feel like being a woman very much on her own in a foreign land.

I also spoke with Luxor filmmaker Zeina Durra, an interview that will be up at Below the Line hopefully sometime later this week.

With all the talk about Aubrey Plaza in Happiest Season (now on Hulu!), this would be a great time to release another one of her indies that played at the Sundance Film Festival this year, right? What can possibly go wrong?

In Lawrence Michael Levine’s BLACK BEAR (Momentum Pictures), Plaza plays Allison, an actor/filmmaker who arrives at the remote lake house of Christopher Abbott’s Gabe and his pregnant partner Blair (Sarah Gadon), to relax and work on a screenplay, only for the night to turn into philosophical discussions that transform into angry and even violent squabbles. In the second part of the movie, Gabe is the director, and Allison his actor wife, who thinks he’s sleeping with Blair, who is also acting in Gabe’s film.

That plot might seem a little vague, and I can’t exactly tell you whether there is much connection between the two parts of the movie other than it features the same three characters. The first half turns from a drama into a thriller before ending abruptly, while the second part is equal parts comedy and drama as we see a larger part of the world around the trio. In fact, the second part of Black Bear reminded me somewhat of Olivier Assayas’Irma Vep, one of my favorite movies, and that might be one of the highest compliments I can pay a movie.

But first, you have to get through the more quizzical and dramatic first part, which easily could have been done as a three-handed stageplay as we see the changing dynamics between the three people as things get crazier and crazier with one “Holy shit!” moment after the next. (It reminded me a little of Mamet or the play “Gods of Carnage,” although I only saw that as the movie version Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski.)

The fact the connection between the two parts is never explained might confound some people who were otherwise enjoying what is a pretty decent three-hander, but the common theme involves jealousy between the two women. Plaza is a fine dramatic actor when she wants to be, and Gadon is absolutely fantastic, which makes Abbot almost literally the odd man out, but the three of them just have great scenes together.

Black Bear is certainly an enigma of a movie, as much a mystery about what must be going on inside Plaza’s head during some of her softer and crazier scenes, but if you want to talk about range, this gives her so much material for her demo reel that no one could possibly doubt her as an actor again.

Thomas Vinterberg’s new movie ANOTHER ROUND (Samuel Goldwyn) reteams him with his The Hunt star Mads Mikkelsen for a comedy…. Ish… about a group of four middle aged Danish teachers who decide to hold an experiment to prove a theory that people only reach their maximum effectiveness and creativity when they’re .05% drunk. It starts out innocently enough but soon, the men are drinking heavily at school, leading to horrible and unfortunate side effects. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Even knowing Vinterberg’s knack for strange and twisted “comedies,” Another Round is definitely on another level, opening with a scene of drunken kids playing a drinking game that gets them so out-of-control drunk and rowdy. We then meet Mikkelsen’s Martin, a history teacher, whose rowdy seniors are so bored by his classroom technique that Martin is put in front of an inquisition of parents who think he’s going to make their kids fail their final exams. Martin’s home life isn’t much better with his wife Anika (Maria Bonnevie) or his own teen sons. Although Martin says he won’t drink when he has to drive, his friend Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) convinces him by announcing his theory about how everyone needs to always maintain a certain percentage of alcohol in their system.  Over the course of the rest of the movie, we’re shown the alcohol level of our “heroes,” although most will see their behavior as some kind of synced-up middle life crisis. For Martin, it’s a breakthrough, as he starts feeling more confident and assertive towards his students, even trying to connect with them via their drinking activities, as seen in the opening montage.

Another Round is quite a different beast from The Hunt, because there’s a more humorous tone to the point where I could totally see an American studio trying to remake this with the likes of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler, which would probably lose a lot of the poignancy of what Vinberberg was trying to achieve here. At one point, he throws in a montage of seemingly drunk world leaders, which is kind of amusing even if it’s not quite so apparent why it’s there. There’s a lot of really bad white guy dancing, too, for anyone who is into that sort of thing.

There is definitely a good amount of grief and sadness to the way this story resolves, although Vinterberg still finds a way to leave Martin in a place of joy with a closing scene that may surprise a lot of people. Another Round is another tremendous feather in the cap of the Vinterberg/Mikkelsen collaboration, and it will be in select theaters this Friday before going to digital on December 18.

Another Round will be in select theaters this Friday and then on digital December 18.

Fast Color director Julia Hart returns with I’M YOUR WOMAN (Amazon), once again co-written with husband Jordan Horowitz. It stars Rachel Brosnahan from The Amazing Mrs. Maisel (which I haven’t seen) as Jean, a woman unable to have a baby with her small-time crook husband Eddie. One night, Eddie brings home a baby for Jean, but then he quickly vanishes and Jean finds herself on the run with a stolen baby and one of Eddie’s accomplices, Cal (Arinzé Kene), and there are bad men wanting to question Jean about her missing husband’s whereabouts.

This is another movie where I really didn’t know what to expect, and having not watched Brosnahan on her award-winning show, I was watching this movie trying to figure out what all the fuss was about.  It’s evident from the start that Hart/Horowitz were trying to make a ‘70s-set movie with all the trappings of ‘70s fashion and music, but when you throw in the crime element, it comes across a little too much like last year’s The Kitchen, which wasn’t very good but also wasn’t based on very good source material.

One would presume that the genre elements and a few scattered set pieces, like a shootout at a club, would be the main draw, but it’s almost 30 minutes before we even get any sort of plot, and that’s a big problem. An even bigger problem is that I’m Your Woman just drags for so much of the movie, and it’s pretty obvious that Hart-Horowitz were trying to create a ‘70s movie like some of the films by Scorsese and the movies John Cassavetes made with wife Gena Rowlands. By comparison, I’m Your Woman is stylized almost to a pretentious degree.  Brosnahan does show a few glimpses of there being a good actor in there, but the material just really isn’t quite up to snuff. It also doesn’t help the movie to have the baby crying almost non-stop throughout.

Jean eventually pairs up with Cal’s woman Teri (Martha Stephanie Blake), her son Paul and Cal’s father (played by Frankie Faison), and this is when she learns more about Eddie’s life that she doesn’t know about. Eventually, things start to pick up in the last act, but the multiple problems Hart has with maintaining a steady pace or tone only mildly is made up for by her terrific DP and whoever put together the musical score.  Essentially, the last 30 minutes of I’m Your Woman does make up for the previous 85 minutes, but it’s going to be very hard for many people to even get through how dull the movie is up until that point.

This is a week with some very fine docs, the first one being Weixi Chen and Hao Wu*’s cinema verité film 76 DAYS (MTV Documentary Films), which goes behind the doors of the Wuhan ICU Red Cross hospital over the first 76 days of the COVID pandemic after it hit the rural area of China. (*One of the film’s co-directors/cinematographers shot the film anonymously.)

Here I thought that Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control would be the best or maybe even only movie about the pandemic released this year, but here we have a fantastic documentary that captures what it was really like in one Wuhan hospital as it was nearly overrun months before COVID started to rear its ugly head in the States. The film begins in January 23, 2020 and follows a number of cases as we watch the personnel, all decked out in head-to-toe PPE, trying to save lives and keep people calm while trying to struggle with all the stresses that come their way. There’s actually a little bit of humor in a cranky elderly man (clearly with some form of dementia) who keeps wandering around the hospital, frustrating his tenders, but there’s also a very moving story of a young pregnant woman who has contracted COVID, who ends up being separated from her baby after a Cesarian section.

There are moments early in the movie where you can see panic starting to set in as we see how out of control things begin, but the anonymous health care workers soon get things underhand and manage to find a way to deal with the panic that’s setting in. There’s no question that these doctors and nurses – many whose faces we never even see -- are the definition of frontline workers, trying to deal with this unknown virus without all the answers and solutions that have been discovered over the past ten months.

76 Days will open via the Film Forum Virtual Cinema as well as other places presumably.

I’m glad I had Dana Nachman’s DEAR SANTA (IFC Films) to watch after 76 Days, because I don’t think I could have handled another dark or deep movie after that one. This doc is all about “Operation Santa,” the amazing group of volunteers and adopters who receive the letters young kids write to the North Pole and go out of their way to fulfill the kids’ wishes.

I was a big fan of Nachman’s Pick of the Litter, so I’m thrilled to say that Dear Santa is just as wonderful and joyous, starting with a bunch of kids explaining Santa Clause enthusiastically, because they really believe in Jolly Saint Nick. Over the course of the film, Nachman profiles a number of Adopter Elves, who look through the letters written to Santa by unfortunate kids and pick a few to fulfill their wishes. A lot of them are in New York and Chicago where the program has led to a number of non-profits, but Nachman also goes to Chico, California where many of the families from Paradise, the town destroyed by fires in 2018, ended up relocation. One story of an Adopter Elf named Damion is particularly wonderful, since he, like many of those who get involved in the program, are trying to give back and pay it forward.

Operation Santa is such a great program and Dear Santa is such a wonderful movie, I challenge anyone to watch it and not tear up from how big their heart will grow while watching it.

Julien Temple’s doc CROCK OF GOLD: A NIGHT WITH SHANE MACGOWAN (Magnolia Pictures) is pretty self-explanatory from its title, but as someone who was never really a Pogues fan, I was almost as entertained by Temple’s film as I was by Alex Winter’s Zappa about a musician who I actually was a fan of. Temple uses MacGowan’s own narration to tell his story from growing up in Ireland, the early days of punk that led to the Pogues and eventually, mainstream success.

My absolute adoration of well-made music docs is fairly well-known at this point, and you can’t really get much better in terms of music doc makers than Julien Temple, who had his cameras rolling in the early days of punk, captured one of David Bowie’s more interesting mainstream phases and also made a very cool movie about The Clash frontman, Joe Strummer.

Although I never really cared for The Pogues, that’s probably because I didn’t know them from their rowdier days and more from their mainstream success from “Fairytale of New York” but Temple’s movie rectifies that with some amazing footage from the band’s earlier days. Even more impressive is the footage and pictures of MacGowan during the late ‘70s dancing in the audience at Sex Pistols and other punk shows. (Temple even interviewed MacGowan during this period in the ‘70s, then put the footage in the movie.) As MacGowan tells his own story about growing up in Ireland, Temple frequently uses varied animation to recreate the stories being told, and that does a lot to embellish the cartoon nature of MacGowan’s storytelling.

I still think MacGowan is a bit of an asshole -- I’m sure he’d agree with that assessment -- but Temple has found a way into this very difficult musician, sometimes using close friends like Johnny Depp (a producer on the film) and Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream to try to get MacGowan to open up about as much as he ever might. Crock of Gold is certainly an eye-opening portrait of the Pogues frontman that surprisingly offers something to enjoy even for those who never got into his music, but it also shows another dimension to his many fans. If nothing else, it’s a fine testament to why Temple is one of the best music doc filmmakers.

Magnolia held a bunch of one-night only theatrical screenings on Tuesday and will have more on Thursday, but if you miss those, you can catch it On Demand/digital this Friday. (I also have a really enjoyable interview with Julien Temple over at Below the Line that you should check out.)

A.J. and Jenny Tesler’s doc MAGNOLIA’S HOPE follows four years in the life of their young daughter Magnolia (aka Maggie), who has Rett Syndrome. Maggie’s filmmaking parents talk about noticing her strange behavior and finding out that she had a genetic disorder that makes it harder for children to retain what they’ve learned in terms of movement but also might led to far worse disorders. It makes it almost impossible for her to communicate with her parents, which makes it heartbreaking but also quite inspirational that the parents would allow us into their very own difficult journey to try to get their daughter to use and develop all of the skills she learns by making her practice them every single day. The movie will be available to watch for the month of December on the streaming platform Show and Tell, but it’s such a personal movie and another one where I think it will be hard for many to watch without getting a little teary but more out of joy than sadness.

Also out this week is David Osit’s MAYOR (Film Movement), which follows Musa  Hadid, the Christian mayor of Ramallah during his second term of office and determined to make his city a beautiful and dignified place to lived despite being surrounded on all sides by soldiers and Israeli settlements. It will open today at the Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema in New York after winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 2020 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

What there’s more? How about Braden R. Duemmler’s WHAT LIES BELOW (Vertical Entertainment), a thriller starring Ema Hovarth from Quibi’s Don’t Look Deeper as Liberty (aka Libby), a teen girl returning from camp only to learn her mother (Mena Suvari) has a hot younger boyfriend named John (Trey Tucker), who Libby soon begins to question whether he’s human. What could possibly go wrong?

I knew I was in trouble when Suvari is picking her daughter up from archeology camp (that’s a thing?) and I misheard her asking her daughter “Any nice digs?” (think about it), especially since Suvari is playing a stereotypically over-sexed cougar, something that becomes far more obvious once we meet her boyfriend that she’s been sexing up at her lake house. There’s certainly a danger of What Lies Below turning into a prequel to a Pornhub video, but thankfully, Duemmler gets away from the inappropriate sexuality inherent in John’s presence and into the weird behavior that gets Libby suspicious.

Sure, maybe calling the movie “My Stepfather is an Alien” would have been more apropos, and there’s elements of the movie that reminded me of the Tom Hanks’ movie The ‘burbs, and not in a good way. Even so, Hovarth, who really looks like Suvari’s daughter, does a fine job holding this together and keeping you invested in how things might pan out, as things get weirder and weirder and the movie eventually transforms itself into a halfway decent and creepy “body horror” flick.

Weird but well-done, What Lies Below is not even close to the worst thriller I’ve seen this year. That might seem like damning praise, but it’s the best I can do for this one.

Debuting on Shudder this Thursday is Justin G. Dyck’s ANYTHING FOR JACKSON (Shudder), a “reverse exorcism” movie in which a seemingly kindly couple, played by Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings, kidnap a pregnant woman (Konstantina Mantelos) in hopes of getting the spirit of their grandson Jackson, who died in a car crash, and put him into her baby… with the help of demons. What could possibly go wrong? (If you hadn’t guessed, this is the theme of this week’s Weekend Warrior.)

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the horror delivered by streamer Shudder this year, and Anything for Jackson is no exception. In fact, going over Dyck’s filmography, it’s kind of surprising how decent a horror filmmaker he is, because most of his other movies seem like Hallmark-style Christmas movies? Crazy. There are aspects of Anything for Jackson, written by Keith Cooper, who wrote some of those holiday movies for Dyck. I honestly can imagine the two of them making this movie just to be able to do something different, so they come into the horror realm with tons of fim making experience and easily transition into horror.

At the heart of this movie are McCarthy, Richings and Mantelos, who are all fine actors who do a great job selling the horrors but do just as well during the quieter dramatic moments.  Not that there are that many of them, as Dyck/Cooper throw so many absolutely horrific moments at the viewer so that diehard horror fans will not be disappointed. Things shift into another gear when Josh Cruddas joins in as a Satanic cult leader they bring in to help them when they realize they’re out of their league. The results are something akin to Insidiousin terms of the types of demons and ghosts thrown at the viewer.

At times, Anything for Jackson was a little hard to follow, maybe due to its non-linear storytelling, but at least it has a substantial amount of decent replay value, since the demons and kills are so gloriously gory.

Eric Schultz’s dark and trippy sci-fi thriller MINOR PREMISE (Utopia) stars Sathya Sridharan as neuroscientist Ethan, who gets caught up in his own risky experiment involving memory loss when he becomes trapped in his home with his ex-girlfriend Allie (Paton Ashbrook), and he doesn’t remember how they both got there.

For his directorial debut, Schultz has taken the cerebral indie sci-fi film route that we’ve seen in other filmmaking debuts like Shane Carruth’s Primer, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, and if you’re a fan of those movies, you’ll already know if this would be for you or not. This is also the kind of movie that really requires the closest attention and fullest focus, which is not something I’m great at right now. Because of that, I don’t have a ton to say about a film that does a good job pulling the viewer in with its intriguing premise.

Schultz is a pretty decent filmmaker and discovering Sridharan, who has done a lot of single-episode TV appearances but nothing major, is quite a coup since this is quite a solid showcase for the young actor. I wasn’t as crazy about Ashbrook, which makes it for a rather uneven two-hander.

Minor Premise is just fine, and I think some people will definitely like it more than I did. I definitely will have to watch it again when I’m not so distracted by ALL THOSE OTHER MOVIES ABOVE THAT I JUST FUCKING REVIEWED!

It will be in theaters, in virtual cinema, and digital/On Demand this Friday, so check it out for yourself.

And finally…

Director Dennis Dugan of Big Daddy and Happy Gilmore directs LOVE, WEDDINGS AND OTHER DISASTERS (Saban Films), a “Love American Style” rom-com anthology with a cast that includes Maggie Grace, Jeremy Irons, Diane Keaton and more. Grace plays Jessie, a fairly inexperienced wedding plan hired to orchestrate the high-profile wedding of Boston mayoral candidate (Dennis Staroselsky), and then… oh, you know what? I’ll leave the rest of the description to the review portion of our review.

We meet Grace’s character as she and her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend are skydiving, which goes horribly wrong as they end up fighting all the way down and crashing through an outdoor wedding, caught on a viral video that gets her dubbed the “Wedding Thrasher.” Imagine what a PR disaster that would be for mayoral candidate Rob Barton to have her planning his wedding, but Jessie quickly bonds with his fiancé Liz (Caroline Portu) and begins preparations. Meanwhile, Barton’s problematic brother Jimmy (Andy Goldenberg) has gone on a game show called “Crash Couples” (that’s hosted by no less than Dugan himself) and he allows himself to be chained to a Russian “lawyer” named Svetlana (Melinda Hill) who is actually a stripper. They’re willing to stick it out since the winner gets a million dollars.

Surely, that’s more than enough stories, right? Nope. Turns out that Jessie’s main competition to plan the wedding is a legendary caterer named Lawrence Phillips (Irons) who is set-up on a blind date with Diane Keaton, who is blind. Oy vey.  Also, there’s Andrew Bachelor as Captain Ritchie, who gives humorous sightseeing tours of Boston via the Charles River in an odd land/water vehicle, but one day, he encounters a young woman with a glass slipper tattoo, and he becomes quite smitten. We’ll get back to him. Maybe. In fact, Duggan spends so much time setting up different stories and relationships without much connection that you wonder whether he can tie things up in the oh-so-predictable way these things normally go.

Although the movie starts out fine, and it’s actually not a bad role for Grace, as soon as Duggan introduces the game show, then we learn that Svetlana (real name Olga) is a tripper connected to the mob and they get involved, things just start going downhill very fast. Also, the idea that Keaton -- who I haven’t seen in a good movie in almost two decades --  would not think twice about playing a klutzy blind person. As soon as she shows up and immediately knocks over one of Phillips’ signature champagne glass fountains, I knew we were in for a very long haul. I didn’t even mention the other storyline involving a musician named Mack (Diego Boneta) whose band Jessie is trying to get to play the wedding – one of the multiple meet-cutes in the movie -- although Mack is squabbling with his bandmate Lenny (Jesse McCartney) who has a new Asian girlfriend who is intruding in their friendship.  (I’m sure the fact her name is “Yoni” is meant as as Yoko Ono reference.)

Then on top of that, Dugan steals the gimmick from There’s Something About Mary, by constantly cutting back to Elle King and Keaton Simmons as they’re playing folksy songs in the park. Okay, the fact that Dugan wrote many of those pretty decent songs they perform is pretty impressive.

But the movie is very predictable, especially how it all comes together for the finale, which obviously has to take place at the wedding to which everything has been building up to.

Otherwise, Dugan’s film is maybe 20% an okay movie but the other 80%? Yeesh!! It’s about as romantic as a date with the Marquis de Sade, and it somehow manages to be an equal opportunity offender... in terms of offending blind people, Asians, Jews, Arabs, gay people and even strippers and Russian mafia. It took Dugan 14 years to get this passion project made, and it’s pretty obvious why.

As usual, there were a couple movies I didn’t have time to watch, but not quite as many as the ones I did make time to watch:

King of Knives (Gravitas Ventures) End of Sentence (Gravitas Venture) Billie (Greenwich) Godmothered (Disney+) Wander (Saban Films) Music Got Me Here (First Run Features) Stand! (Fathom Events, Imagination Worldwide) HAM: A Musical Memoir (Global Digital Releasing) In the Mood for Love (4k Restoration)

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

[runnfromtheak]

fanfic author’s tagging game (yay!)

Thank ya darling for tagging me!!!! @boyblunder-thedarkheir!!!!!

AO3 Name(s): LostandLonelyBirds aka RUNNFROMTHEAK

Fandom(s): Primarily Batfamily (so, Dick Grayson) and Young Justice (along with DCU obviously, but I also dabble into Miralculous Ladybug, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, and MCU (none of which I will ever seriously write for? Idk man).

Number of fics: 22 I will admit to (how do you have so many, my dear @boyblunder-thedarkheir​? What is your secret?)

1. Fic you spent the most time on: Are we talking writing or thinking about writing, cause those are two very different answers. I spent the most time writing this bitch of a fic I’m working on right now, and the most time thinking about the two latest installments of my main series, Death is But An Illusion (aka How Could He and How Could It Be). I agonize over every goddamn detail with Dick’s anger, Jason’s Jason-ness, and every person’s every move and word. I am a mess, and I’m going to be murdered if I don’t update them soon. I am not sorry about that XD

2. Fic you spent the least time on:  You Came Behind Me Secretly and Shattered Every Piece of Me (There's Blood On My Hands) aka my pick-your-own-canon clusterfuck of Dark!Dick Grayson and Dick Grayson being traumatized and tortured with no comfort (Some of them are so fucked up I question my own mind). I take less than an hour to write 80% of them, cause they’re short, and they very rarely take any time to plan. Fun and easy!

3. Longest Fic: At present, he had a chest full of heart and a body full of scars (pain became the only way that he could ever learn)  is my longest, but the fic I’ve been hinting at on my other tumblr, @lostandlonelybirds​ is easily double the length (why do I do this to myself? Why am I like this?) the long boi (named one, not the one I won’t shut up about) is easily my best fic at the moment, and I’m so excited to write a sequel whenever I get the chance.

4. Shortest Fic: With Bated Breath and Pain You See (We're Nothing More Than Memories) technically, I have one shorter than that, but it’s a collab that wasn’t my original idea so I’m not counting it :)

5. Most Hits: You Came Behind Me Secretly and Shattered Every Piece of Me (There's Blood On My Hands) why do you people like this trash-fire so much? I don’t understand

6. Most Kudos:  How Could He which does not surprise me.

7. Most Comment Threads: Technically, How Could He followed by the trash-fire AU title thing I’m too lazy to type again, but I’m gonna love on this one: Just Close Your Eyes (No One Can Hurt You Now) because it’s my baby, and it deserves it okay?

8. Fave Fic You Wrote: Ooo we are doing a top five.

             5. How Could It Be (Jason is precious and sad and Dick is oblivious, and I love one-sided pining wayyyy too much)

             4.  How Could He (I put my life force into this stupid fic, so ofc it’s here)

             3. I'm Scared to Live But I'm Scared to Die (I'm Numb Inside) (the suicidal boy, major trigger warning)

             2. I See Things That Nobody Else Sees (And It's Slowly Killing Me)  (the only fic I’ve ever written from Cass’s perspective, and definitely one of the creepiest and most fucked up. Bruce does not look good here)

             1. he had a chest full of heart and a body full of scars (pain became the only way that he could ever learn) (so ummm Bruce doesn’t look good here either? RHATO #25 if DC wasn’t cowardly and let Dick react how he actually would, aka fuck Batman is the new motto)

9. Rewrites?: Fuck. All my older ones? Everything? Who knows.

10. Share a bit of your WIP or share a story idea that you’re planning:

Let’s do two. I’m nice.

First comes from How Could It Be:

“You loved him,” Donna says, ignoring his barb. “You loved him, and no one’s seen you or heard from you and I’m concerned, damnit.”

 She punches his shoulder roughly, and he’s reminded of her strength, no matter how small she seems in her dead best friend’s sweater.

 “I’m fine. Peachy-keen. Couldn’t be fuckin’ better. Honestly, you should be more concerned with Replacement, don’t think he’s slept in—”

 “Jason.” Her voice is firm, even as her eyes swim with tears and she holds her arms tight to herself, breathing in the well-loved item’s scent. Jason wonders when Dick wore it last, if Donna had taken it from his abandoned Gotham Penthouse or his Chicago Apartment. He wonders if he’d left it draped over the couch, like the natural disaster he was, or if it had been folded neatly in a drawer.

For someone who prides himself on not being sentimental, Jason suddenly wishes he had something of Dick’s too.

 “I’m here because I care, and because if Dick was here, he’d be doing the same thing I am.”

 “But he ain’t here,” Jason snaps, “Is he?”

 Donna’s head falls, and he feels like a giant jerk. He just… reacts poorly to that name, hasn’t heard it spoken since the transmission and subsequent funeral, since the guy he’d had the hots for since wearing the scaly panties had his mask ripped away and his life taken in front of Bruce’s eyes (who, to absolutely no one’s surprise, failed to save his son).

In the aftermath, no one said Dick Grayson’s name, always Nightwing, or some inane nickname the superhero community had for him. Last time he said it was to Damian, a failed attempt at comfort. But even Jason’s form of mutual grieving had been better than any of Bruce’s shit ideas. Bastard immortalized the ripped costume from his own son’s corpse (not that it had been the first time) and hadn’t even had the decency to give it a plaque (No ‘Good Soldier’ or ‘Good Son’, just a bare glass case with a bloody suit). Which… was weird. Jason was far from B’s best friend, but even he noticed something seemed strange, off, just not quite right. Like the funeral he didn’t speak at, like the breakdown none of them had witnessed beyond a one-off rage fit

“B, what the fuck happened down here?”

The Batcave was a disaster, dents glaringly obvious in several vehicles and a large spiderweb crack across the Batcomputer. Bruce closes the screen down, but Jason manages to catch a spiraling eye.

“Nothing, just…”

Bruce looks at the spare Nightwing costume none of them had taken down yet, still clean and ready for use (too bad its owner died and would never wear it again).

“Dick?” Jason questions, and the way Bruce’s eyes snap to his face is almost suspicious, almost enough to arouse concern.

“Yes. I—”

Jason sits next to Bruce on the desk, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I miss him too, Old Man. Don’t mean you need to be an ass about it.”

 A memorial next to Jason’s own, but Dickhead’s is empty and broken from Damian’s fists and grief, and Jason’s is just gone. No one told him why, it was just gone.

Kind of like Dick.

He wonders if Bruce would have told him if the video hadn’t been broadcast, if he would’ve told anyone. B did love his fuckin’ secrets.

 “No,” she whispers, and he can hear the tears in her voice, can feel her grief as keenly as his own. It’s palpable, tangible, “He’s dead, and I’m alive, and I don’t know how to handle it.”

 And then, to Jason’s mounting horror, she starts crying openly.

…..

Second comes from my one I’m working on rn with Stray!Dick called I See Sunset In Your Eyes (I Hate This Part Right Here)

“Come on,” Wally says with a pout, dragging an overly amused Jason and Dick with him through the karaoke bar doors. “Donna and Roy are waiting for us, and Dick had to take forever to primp.”

 Dick shrugs with a grin.

 “Beauty takes time, time I can tell you did not take.”

 Jason snorts, and Wally glares at him.

 “At least I don’t take five hours to finish getting ready.”

 “At least I can last longer than five minutes.”

 “Ouch!” Roy butts in, throwing an arm around Jason and Dick’s shoulders. “Claws are out tonight!”

 “Speaking from experience?” Jason asks, eyebrow raised.

 Dick smirks without comment, sauntering past the group towards the table Donna’s lounging at.

 “Hey gorgeous twin of mine,” He greets with a kiss to her eyes. She smirks, rolling her eyes at him.

 “You’re just stroking your own ego with the twin tacked on, Wonder Boy.”

 Dick bumps his shoulder against hers.

 “Can’t I stroke both our egos?”

 “You can stroke mine,” Wally mutters, turning red when Stray winks at his phrasing. Jason and Roy both facepalm, groaning. “Not what I meant guys!”

 “Why Kid Idiot,” Dick replies, hand on his heart, “I had no idea you could be so forward~!”

 Wally glares, waving over the waitress.

 “Round of shots, on this dick,” he jerks his thumb at Stray, offering up his fake ID. She doesn’t bother checking it, probably because this is Gotham, and they were all in uniform. “Whisky, please.”

 “Trying to get me drunk?” Jason jokes. It is, after all, his first big outing with the Titans for non-mission reasons. Stray had practically dragged him out of the Manor with a wink at Alfred and a middle finger for Bruce, saying that Jason needed to have fun outside of books.

Jason knows better than arguing with Dick Grayson-Kyle when he wants something, Stray trained him well.

 “Of course, Batboy,” Roy replies, “It’s not a Titans outing if Stray is fully dressed and everyone’s sober.”

 Dick shrugs.

 “You’ll have to get some real liquor in me if you want me to do anything like last time.”

 “Last time?” Jason asks, looking to Donna for an answer. Dick snorts. You get near naked one time…

 “Boy Blunder ended up in just his boxers in a dancing cage drunk of his ass. Everyone thought he was one of the strippers, and he made, what, three-hundred dollars in bills?”

 “Five-hundred,” Dick replies proudly, offering the waitress a twenty as she came back with their drinks. “Keep the change, darlin’!” He adds with a wink.

 She flushes, making Jason frown.

 Stray, of course, notices this and elbows Jason.

 “Don’t get jealous, Blue Jay, it’s not becoming.”

 Jason does not blush. He doesn’t, and that’s the hill he will die on.

 “I’m not. On an unrelated note, pass me a shot.”

Jason is the master of changing the subject, Stray thinks sarcastically, passing him a shot and downing one of his own.

 “Five bucks says alley cat blacks out,” Roy says smugly as Dick makes a face, the way he always did with heavier liquors. He glares at the redhead, who shrugs unapologetically.

 Donna eyes them both speculatively, taking a sip of her own drink.

 “Twenty says he gives a lap dance before he blacks out.”

 Roy snorts.

 “I’ll take it,” and to Dick, “Don’t do it, for me.”

 Dick bats his eyes innocently.

 “Lil’ old me? I would never do something so…” He trails a finger down Roy’s chest, making him swallow roughly. “Scandalous.”

 Donna grins victoriously as Roy groans, trying and failing to hide his excitement.

 “I hate you. I hate you both.”

 Tagging whoever sees this, I suppose? 

[traincat]

I wanna ask. If you could re-write Spider-Man: Life Story, what would you do?

I was waiting on talking about Life Story until after it was finished, because there was some slim hope maybe everything was going to turn around, but we’ve got, what, one issue to go, and so I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t think Spider-Man: Life Story is a good comic. I think it has a very interesting premise – following Spider-Man decade by decade and reimagining the events if time progressed in comics like it does in real life – but its execution totally fails that.

I have three main problems with Spider-Man: Life Story, so I guess my answer to the question is, I would do all of these things completely differently. The first is related to the premise and the execution of the idea. It’s a very intriguing premise, but looking at it practically, it’s also a really hard one to pull off. There are over 800 issues of Amazing Spider-Man, 300 of Spectacular Spider-Man, there’s Web of Spider-Man, Spider-Man Unlimited, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, Sensational Spider-Man, etc. The Marvel wiki lists his appearances total at over 4,000 issues, and while those aren’t all Spider-Man comics or stories that are relevant to his life in the greater picture, that’s a lot of comics to compress. Coming into it, I was hoping for something a little more akin to Marvels, which focused strongly on one or two major events in the Marvel universe per issue, albeit with more of a Spider-Man focus. 

That’s not what Spider-Man: Life Story is.

Let me be very clear that Zdarsky clearly knows his Spider-Man canon and history very, very well. I’d actually like to posit that’s part of the problem: Life Story’s so all over the place, throwing around so many different references to different stories, that I cannot imagine it’s an engaging or coherent read for novice Spider-Man readers, and as a more experienced Spider-Man reader, I just find the way it uses canon both frustrating and boring. It takes stories like Kraven’s Last Hunt, the Clone Saga, and the first Morlun story and remixes them in ways that provide nothing new or interesting and that, because of the compressed nature of the story telling, lack any of the emotional depth of the original. Let’s take, for example, the death of Harry Osborn. Now the original event in Spectacular Spider-Man #200 is one of my favorite comics ever. I think it’s a totally perfect issue – but it’s also the denouement of a lot of similarly great comics, like The Child Within. When Harry saves Peter (and it’s very notable that Harry in the original doesn’t intend to outlive killing Peter), it’s this perfect redemption moment in part because we’ve seen Harry struggle with his love for Peter and the life he’s carved out for himself against his father’s toxic influence, his childhood abuse, and his own mental health issues. It’s good because it’s earned.

In Life Story, Harry also dies in the act of saving Peter, ending up impaled on one of Doc Ock’s arms in a battle between Doc Ock, Peter, and Ben Reilly in issue #4. The problem with this being that we hadn’t seen Harry since issue #2, which doesn’t seem like a huge gap – until you realize that each issue is a decade, so that’s at least 10 years of a Harry and Peter relationship we have no context for. We haven’t seen them interact. We have no idea about this legendary friendship. The only proof it even exists is that Harry leaps in front of Peter to take the blow. As Harry dies, his last words are to Peter, saying “you’re my best…” and trailing off. It’s an obvious callback, if you know Spectacular Spider-Man #200, where Harry dies calling Peter his best friend. Except we have no proof of that here; we don’t see Harry and Peter being best friends. For all we know, Harry was trying to call Peter his best investor. Life Story depends so heavily on the already existing canon to fill in the emotional impact its readers are supposed to feel that it doesn’t bother to take the time to establish it itself, which, I think, is ultimately more important than throwing as many references to various Spider-Man plots at the wall at once and seeing what sticks. If I have to depend on the original comics to feel anything for Life Story, why are we even bothering publishing Life Story? 

Similarly, in issue #5, which attempts to remix the first Morlun story along with Life Story’s remix of Civil War Take 2: Not In Vietnam This Time, and the death of Ben Reilly, but, you know, boring, when Ben’s death is reported on the news, Peter exclaims that it’s just like Ezekiel warned him! 

Ezekiel being a character who never actually appears in this book. (I’m gonna hit on some other things in this exchange in my second and third points, because this whole section really illustrates every single problem I have with Life Story in one go.) So like, I get the whole story here, because I’ve read (and adore) the first Morlun story – which is, IMHO, a million times a better read – but what does this even look like if you haven’t? A clumsy exposition dump at best, I assume, or something that would leave you flipping back previously trying to see if you missed something. The book doesn’t even offer you an old style little citation box in the corner of the panel, telling you what issues you could find the original story in, something that I think would’ve been more than helpful and actually a fun and interesting little addition in a book that insists on being this relentlessly canon heavy without expounding or providing context on a good 50% of it. It also alters bits of canon that I feel ruin the nuance of the original, like when it depicts its version of Flash Thompson as enlisting – while 616 Flash does serve in Vietnam, in the original comics he is drafted, he does not enlist, and after the fact is clearly conflicted and deeply regretful about that service. If you’re setting your comic in the original time period, there’s no reason to alter Flash’s story like that.

The second problem I have is that Spider-Man: Life Story has a big problem in how it depicts women. With the possible exception of Peter’s daughter, depending on how the last issue goes, women in Life Story have two purposes: to sleep with Peter, to die, or both. Aunt May is only there to get dementia and die. Gwen similarly is there to be a plot device in its Clone Saga remix: the “real Gwen” dies, and Clone Gwen, apparently happily married to Original Peter as far as her own recollections, goes off without any on page internal struggle on her part with Ben Reilly upon the discovery that she’s a clone, because clones are meant to be with clones, I guess. I would think it would be difficult to give Gwen less agency in a new version of the story where an older man who is obsessed with her clones her in order to possess her, but somehow Life Story manages it. She’s never seen on page again. As she goes off, in comes Mary Jane to comfort Peter in a far more hollow version of ASM #122′s door scene, to bear his children, to take care of his ailing aunt, to leave him only to take him back, because of course she does, she’s a good woman, to be terrorized by Peter and then beg and plead with Morlun for her children’s lives. Mary Jane goes from her complicated, nuanced character in 616 to a beat down caricature, watching paralyzed with fear in front of the television as Peter fights. Additionally, she becomes her original self’s biggest fear: a battered wife. 

Which brings me into our third problem: Peter himself. It’s hard for me to tell whether the intention is to depict Peter as an abusive husband and father, however, by issue five, it’s hard to deny that’s what he is. Look at the above bottom right panel: Peter’s fist is clenched, his wife and children cowering in his shadow. I won’t lie: it’s a deeply uncomfortable page. Part of the reason I wish Life Story was more tightly written was so I could be sure it meant to do the things it is doing with Peter: depicting him as a man who is simultaneously deeply damaged and deeply unlikable. There’s no two ways around this: in Life Story, Peter repeatedly abuses Mary Jane. Not only is there the threat of physical abuse in issue #5, but there’s the fact that he made her take care of his ailing aunt long past the point May should have been kept at home, refusing to put her in a care facility. Let me be very clear as someone who has cared for elderly relatives for dementia: it is not caring to keep a relative with dementia at home past a certain point, especially when, as Peter does in Life Story, you have more than enough money to put them in a good care facility. It is abusive behavior both to May and Mary Jane, predicated solely on Peter’s selfish wishes and egotistical behavior, and it goes against 616 Peter’s characterization. 616 Peter did, at a point in time, put May in a care facility, because it was what she needed at the time, and while he stressed about paying the bills, he still did it, because it was the right thing to do and because he loves her. During the saga of his parents’ “return” (they were robots – I note Life Story chose not to tackle this particular story), when Peter fears May has Alzheimer’s, he tries to make plans about what to do if that does turn out to be the case. He does not force Mary Jane to take care of her. He’s not abusive. Life Story’s Peter is. And worse yet, Mary Jane is expected by the narrative to take him back after that. 

To be totally fair, I think Life Story tries to make Peter unlikable on purpose, to show that you can’t do what Peter does over a period of five decades and not have it take it a toll. The problem is there’s a huge gap between a hardened man or even an unlikable man and an abusive one, and Life Story doesn’t seem to understand that. If you look at Spider-Man canon as a bigger picture, there’s a pretty clear pattern present of men who have great power and abuse it among his villains: Norman Osborn, Otto Octavius. Curt Connors and the Lizard are a pretty clear domestic abuse narrative; Martha and Billy Connors live in fear of the reemergence of this violent “other” side that exists in Curt and could manifest itself at any time and upend their lives. What sets Peter apart from his villains is specifically that he is not an abusive man. 

Life Story also fails to understand the purpose of Parker Industries – though to be fair I think Dan Slott lost this towards the end, too – as something that does not organically coexist not with Peter Parker, but specifically with Spider-Man. Slott’s Superior Spider-Man is not actually the first appearance of Parker Industries. It first comes up in the prelude to Peter selling his marriage to Mephisto during One More Day, when he’s shown two alternate paths he might have gone down if he hadn’t been bit by the spider. In the life where ordinary Peter Parker forms Parker Industries, he’s rich and respected, but his emotional life is hollow and empty:

(Sensational Spider-Man #41) In the second appearance of Parker Industries, it is founded by Otto Octavius in Peter’s name in a bid to be a “better” version of Peter, ie, a more successful one, the critical message here being that Otto doesn’t understand Spider-Man’s true value as an unselfish protector of the people. To have Peter found Parker Industries of his own free will and volition, with no mitigating circumstances, fundamentally misunderstands the point of Peter as a protector of the people and why his socioeconomic status is important: Peter is not rich in the larger web because he stands for the ordinary people against the corrupt corporate landscape, just like Norman exists as his “biggest” villain because he is the symbol and the representation of that corruption. Life Story fails to understand that within its narrative, and so it fails to understand Peter Parker, especially when it tries to set him up in opposition to either Reed Richards or Tony Stark – both of whom I also find written very poorly.

I admit I was unimpressed with Zdarsky’s Peter in Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man because I found his dialogue too rambly and light; I felt like he couldn’t commit to writing a serious Peter; in Life Story he’s writing a very serious Peter, but in a way I feel fundamentally betrays and insults the core of the character. If he writes another Spider-Man series, I hope he’s able to find a middle ground. I will say the covers he did for the book are incredible, though. I’d love to have them as posters.

Basically, if I were redoing Spider-Man: Life Story, I’d focus on these three main points: streamline the canon and cut extraneous references, give the women of the book some actual agency within it, and make sure Peter is not depicted as a domestic abuser. Which, now that I’ve written that out, seems a little bit like scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of things to hope for in a Spider-Man series. There’s one issue to go and while I hope the book goes out on a good note, at this point there’s really no way it can recover from the grim landscape the previous five issues have set.

[drjackandmissjo]

firewhisky on ice, sunset and vine

you’ve ruined my life by not being mine

Chapter 4 --- previous chapter --- next chapter

Harry Potter fics Masterlist

Acceptable. A fucking A in Herbology class, all thanks to the idiot Death Eater on a secret mission that refused to proofread his essay on Niffler’s Fancy. What the hell was Niffler’s Fancy?

Blaise was livid, murderous, on a path to righteous vengeance.

It was the last round of examination of November, meaning that in less than a month their first section of the year would wrap up. Grades were already decided then, and he could not, for all the Work and Effort Salazar Slytherin had put into building the Chamber of Secrets, have anything lower than Outstanding. He’d allow himself a single Exceeds Expectations in Herbology, but never an Acceptable. That didn’t ‘threw a wrench in his plans’, as Pansy had mockingly said that morning; it utterly ruined his future career and he would not, for the life of him, let a stupid plant destroy everything he had worked hard for.

In the past, he had always managed fine in the class, even with some difficulties: who was he to understand whether the green leaves were ripe enough for a change of pots and why should he care, after all. If it was up to him, the pots would be charmed to automatically know those kinds of things, yet Professor Sprout refused his suggestion. Actually docked Slytherin of 5 points, which he then got back in Transfiguration.

In the past, he could count on a best friend who was as competitive as he was, to help him focus and study something he truly hated, that read through his essays and corrected the very few mistakes and that let him sometimes borrow his own work. It wasn’t cheating, it was collaboration. A currency that was well used in the Slytherin common room. It wasn’t as if Draco didn’t receive his share: au contraire, he rarely did Transfiguration on his own, always aided by Blaise, who, in turn, shared his own work.

That was a fool-proof way to succeed.

But of course Draco Fucking Malfoy had to mess up yet another thing and utterly wreak Blaise’s carefully thought plans.

He had to find a solution, as soon as possible. He had to get at least O on the next essay on the effects of Lumos Solem on the Devil’s Snare, otherwise he could easily kiss goodbye to his nearly perfect grades. He could easily ace the charm part of his composition, for obvious reasons, and probably would’ve managed to get an E rather easily, but he simply couldn’t allow the opportunity to slip.

He had to get an O, no matter the cost.

Which was why Blaise Zabini, renowned Sixth Year Slytherin, Pureblood, Heartthrob, Genius and overall Perfect in Every Way, remained seated on his chair in the greenhouse they currently used for their studies, glaring at his roll of parchment that had failed him once again and checking with the corner of his eyes the quickly emptying room. To anyone, he looked as if he was just packing up slowly, with a bored expression on his face.

In actuality, he was waiting. Waiting for Neville Longbottom to stop being a perfect assistant and leave the room so he could corner the Gryffindor and make his offer. Did he really have to fucking rearrange all the plants on the west side of the room and to colour coordinate the entire glove section right at the moment?

Blaise was desperate, that much was true, but he had his limits: if the bloody plant-head wasn’t done in the next two seconds, he’d accept his fate. Or so he told himself, until said boy moved to grab his seat to fix his bag, springing Blaise to hasten his own process and quickly leave the room before the other boy.

Once he was out of the door, he checked the corridor. While he wasn’t doing inherently illegal per se, he was still one of the best and most prominent Slytherins, and he definitely couldn’t be seen border-lining begging for help from Schlongbottom of all the people. Even Granger might’ve been a better choice at this point, and only because she was the best at everything.

Taking a deep breath, he rehearsed once more his offer in his head, conscious that he had to sound convincing and stern, while also seeming approaching and focused. He had calculated everything: the words, the pace, the stance.

“Excuse me?” came a deep voice from behind him, startling him out of his mind. He had spaced out in the moment of need and was blocking the door to the greenhouse, with a very timidly looking Longbottom staring sheepishly at him.

“How in the actual fuck is he managing to be hot and cute at the same time?” Blaise’s mind took shortcut, shifting its gears into a totally different direction than the one meant at the beginning.

He was speechless. His great offer forgotten, he was looking up at the dorky Gryffindor with what he hoped was a puzzled expression and not a starstruck one. It had become his Achille’s Heel: during their Transfiguration classes, Blaise had found his mind wander towards the other boy, whenever Professor McGonagall wasn’t talking; in the Great Hall, he would turn around and see him with his group of Gryffindors and he’d be rendered baffled by his bright laugh, or, in several occasions when he didn’t have full control over his brain, he’d actually look for Longbottom, whether by scanning over the crowds to see his head or by being in places where he might be as well, even if those were more on the ‘accidental encounter’ side. He had once remained stuck in the library, looking for a book, cause he had caught a glimpse of the Gryffindor studying with a muggle pencil on his bottom lip. Needless to say, he didn’t do many productive and public things that day.

Suddenly, one of his mother’s rules made him remember who he was and what his mission was: ‘Rule number sixteen: do not, under any circumstances, act foolishly around the person you like.’ And so he tried not to.

“Longbottom” he began with a cold and distant voice, trying not to seem nervous but slowly boiling inside, “I would like to make you an offer.”

“Zabini” the other boy said, instantly frying Blaise’s brain as he fixed his bag on his shoulder and moved to lean against the doorframe, “[ic1] what makes you think I would even consider accepting?” That was very much not part of the plan. He wasn’t prepared for Longbottom to talk back with such confidence and all his blood rushed downwards, leaving his brain and making him forget his façade. He was once more dumbly staring, mouth slightly agape as he tried to recompose himself as quickly as possible. He cleared his throat once, to mask his discomfort, before proudly announcing: “It would be extremely beneficial for both of us.”

Once again, bloody Longbottom did something that wasn’t scripted in Blaise’s plan: he rose up a questioning eyebrow[ic2] , looking him up and down and studying him silently for a few heartbeats. It was a furnace under his robes and he was positive he might combust any moment. Longbottom didn’t flirt with anyone, for crying out loud, so Blaise didn’t have a single way to tell if he was being mistaken in his assumption or not! He also was not aware of the other boy’s sexuality, therefore the territory was not only risky in terms of rejection but also in terms of safety. “Rule number four: don’t put yourself in dangerous positions.”

Eventually, the Gryffindor spoke again, sounding interested but casual at the same time: “Well, if that’s the case, do tell, why me?” he asked with a sly smirk on his face, sight that sent another rush of blood down Blaise’s pants. It clearly had to be meant to be an innuendo. Had to.

Yet Blaise choose to play on the safe side, just that once, because he still was not sure about anything and he desperately needed all the help he could get. “Also, tutoring each other means we’ll work really close and who knows what’s gonna happen in time. Keep it in your pants, Zabini, and finish what you started!”

He bit the inside of his cheek and nervously glanced around the empty corridor, before turning once more towards that freaking tall and slightly ripped plant-head and said: “It pains me to admit it, but you’re the best at Herbology in this gods forsaken school and Salazar help me, if I don’t pass this class with at least an E I’ll burn the ministry to the ground.”

Longbottom seemed to be taken aback by that: either Blaise’s honesty shocked him or he had indeed seen other paths those first sentences lead to. Not too bad, they’d have the time to explore those after the Devil’s Snare essay. Which he had to ace flawlessly, he reminded himself, trying not to get distracted by the hand the Gryffindor had brought behind his neck to scratch it.

“Why not directly the school?” he asked suddenly.

“We have another year to attend here and the ministry is a shitty place” came the easy answer, truthful and honest. Hogwarts was not a bad place and the Ministry could stand a renovation, both in terms of building and furniture, and as organization as well. Especially with the new developments, that place was now filled up with vicious rats. “Gotta agree on that” Longbottom admitted, undoubtedly having his own ghosts regarding the place after his and his friends’ little escapade to the Department of Mysteries. “But you said it’d be mutually beneficial? I can’t see how” he continued, a curious gleam in his eyes sparkling.

That was a topic Blaise had practiced over and over, and he was comfortable with it: “It’s really easy. I noticed you are, for a lack of a better word, a little lacklustre when it comes to Transfiguration and I’d thought I’d offer my services in exchange for your help with those stupid plants.” He did derail off track at the end, mainly because the shame of having an A still burnt him and also due to the fact that plans were, indeed, rather stupid. Longbottom moved quickly into a defensive stance, “Plants are not stupid. Think of how many you use daily, sounds stupid to you?” he asked with a sudden aggressiveness on his tone that Blaise had never heard from him and couldn’t particularly say he minded. “You haven’t really talked much with him outside of immediate necessity. Stop thinking with your dick!”

He quickly tried to return on his original path, claiming: “We have different priorities, I love Transfiguration and you like pretty green leaves.”

“They’re not just green!” Longbottom muttered in a quiet voice, sounding entirely too adorable for Blaise’s brain to handle. Coughing and hoping his cheeks weren’t reddening, he tried to regain his composure after having turned in a very metaphorical mush at the scene in front of him.

“You can think about my offer, but I’d like to know before next week” he said, waving a dismissal hand and moving to walk away towards the staircases for his next class. He was almost near the library when he heard Longbottom talk, “We have a Transfiguration revision on Friday, don’t we?” Turning, Blaise nodded slightly at the approaching boy. “That would be correct, Longbottom.” “Well then, Zabini,” he said, either accidentally or purposefully dropping his voice an octave and utterly destroying any futile attempt of Blaise’s to focus on anything afterwards, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow after History of Magic in the empty classroom two doors after the Charms corridor.” Blaise was rooted on the spot as the Gryffindor adjusted once more his bag and slowly walked away from him.

Almost as in an afterthought, he tilted his head backwards and stated pointedly: “Wouldn’t want anyone seeing me study with a snake. Is the feeling mutual?” He finished his sentence with what Blaise assumed was a wink, yet with only half a face showing it was impossible to tell.

He remained there, uselessly dumbfounded even after the other boy had left, for Merlin knew how long, trying to remember how to function.

Blaise was so incredibly screwed and briefly wondered if he had made a mistake.

BONUS

Neville: “Ginny I did as you suggested and appeared confident and shit and I felt so powerful and does that make me gay?”

Ginny: “No, Nev, we agreed you like both boys and girls.”

Neville: “Yeah but I like Blaise”

Ginny: “A SLYTHERIN? IN THIS ECONOMY?”

Luna “It’s more likely than you’d think”

Ginny: “Not now Luna. What you’re gonna do?”

Neville: “Idk but he told me he’d help me study so I’m not gonna waste the opportunity, I’ll flirt when there are no books around us cause otherwise I’ll end up with a Troll in Transfiguration”

Luna: “A Troll in Transfiguration is always better than a Troll in the Dungeons.”

[heyyyharry]

Blackout (from the Flatmate!Harry Series)

…in which there’s a big storm, and Harry and Y/N cannot leave their flat.

Warning: fluff, and (finally) smut.

It’s 4 AM where I live and I’m supposed to get up at 7, but I cannot sleep soooo.

Ben tells Y/N not to move as he carefully layers another coat of nail polish on his neighbor’s pinky, looking pretty proud of himself for how nice it turns out. Y/N giggles. She’s never actually paid attention to her nails, let alone painted them herself. She tried and failed miserably, thank God Ben’s here for the rescue.

“Oooh I love this color, Ben! Harry’s so gonna make fun of me for this though!”

“Knowing Harry, he would still swoon over you, I guarantee!”

Harry’s on the phone with Niall in the living room and has no idea Y/N and Ben are in her room gossiping about him.

Y/N holds both hands in front of her to admire Ben’s art work, then says happily, “I should practice nail painting on Harry.”

“You should definitely!” Ben chuckles. “But seriously though, thank you for doing this.”

“Doing what? You were the one who did all the work for me.”

“Inviting me over, spending time with me. It’s been a rough couple days lately. It’s good to spend some time with somebody who’s not yourself.”

Y/N heaves out a smile as she stares empathetically at her neighbor. Yes, the main reason she invited Ben over was because he’d been devastated over his fiancé cheating on him then breaking off the engagement right after, but that’s not the only reason.

“To be honest, I also need to spend more time with someone else other than Harry.”

Ben looks at her with wide eyes and the girl has to clarify right away.

“I love Harry, I do. I enjoy spending every minute with him, but I’m kinda afraid I’d scare him off if I started acting too clingy, which is very likely to happen.”

“I think you’re just overthinking, Y/N. It’s normal to spend a lot of time with him, it’s unavoidable. I mean, you two live together!”

Y/N rolls her eyes, crossing her arms in front of her chest defensively. “True. But I don’t know…Harry’s not used to having a serious girlfriend. And I just…I want to be with him all the time, but I don’t want to overwhelm him.”

“So you’re obsessed with your boyfriend, big freaking deal.”

“You don’t get it.” She shakes her head in response to Ben’s confused expression. “Harry rarely hangs out with his friends anymore. I don’t want him to feel like he’s obliged to spend every second with me. And I read it online that if you spend too much time with your partner, it’s more likely that one of you, or maybe both, will get tired of each other.”

“Let me stop you right there and call it bullshit!” Ben interrupts Y/N, holding his forefinger in front of her face. “Look, honey. Why don’t you just enjoy being in love and let everything happen naturally? I think you’re trying way too hard.”

“How can I not?” Y/N lifts her shoulders. “I...He’s the only good thing that’s happened to me in a long time...I don’t want to screw this up.”

“Everything happens for a reason whether you like it or not, so you should, I don’t know, go with the flow I guess? Relationships are unpredictable, Y/N, just be happy and enjoy every moment of it.”

Y/N doesn’t reply to Ben, she stays silent. He can only hope his advice doesn’t go over her head.

…

“I’m telling you, she’s been keeping distance!” Harry keeps his voice down, but he has to raise his head from the sofa to check if the door of Y/N’s room is still closed. On the phone, Niall remains very calm in contrast to his best friend’s anxious state. Ever since Harry got a girlfriend, Niall has somehow become his love guru though he’s not a lot more experienced than his best friend when it comes to a serious relationship.

“Have you guys been having sex?“

“No, in fact, we haven’t. We’ve decided to wait.”

“For what? Marriage or her finding a guy who would fuck her? The latter would be more likely.”

“Wait until she’s ready, you dick!” Harry throws his head back on the arm rest and blows up his cheeks. “But I guess you’re partly right, maybe sex is the reason, because she said she was afraid that I’d leave her after we’ve had sex. We’ve talked about it already, but I feel like she’s still worried somehow.”

“Would you though? Leave her, I mean.”

“Of course not! It’s never about sex when it comes to Y/N.”

“Then prove it to her.”

“How?”

“I don’t know!”

“Jesus, Niall, what kind of advisor are you?”

“The kind that’s just as clueless as you are when it comes to stuff like this? You should get more friends.”

Harry sighs into his palm and nods. “Maybe I should.”

The conversation is suddenly interrupted by the laughters coming from Y/N’s bedroom. She walks out soon after, followed by Ben. Harry quickly tells Niall he would ring him back, then ends the call just in time his girlfriend and their neighbor returns to the living room.

“I have to be at work, but I’ll be done at seven and I’ll pick you up.”

“Great!” says Y/N, smiling as she holds the door open for Ben to leave.

“You’re going out with Ben tonight?” Harry frantically asks as he sits up straight on the sofa. His girlfriend closes the door and answers him with a firm nod.

“Yeah. Girls’ night out. Aren’t you going out with Niall?“

“No.” He shakes his head slowly. “I thought we were going to a movie.”

“No…We said next week.”

“We said today,” Harry asserts. He cannot be more certain because he remembers correctly everything Y/N has ever said to him (well, maybe minus the parts where she asks him to do chores or buy something on his way home). “But never mind. If you already have plan, we’ll go next week.”

Y/N only opens her mouth to speak when the power in the flat goes off all at once and she screams so loud that almost sends Harry flying off the sofa. He quickly walks towards the nearest window to open the curtain for some natural light, only to find the sun is setting, and it’s still raining cats and dogs.

Scattered showers pop up throughout the entire day, and Harry’s been hoping the weather would improve, but seemingly it only gets worse and worse as the day’s coming to an end. Now the only things he can make out through the thick, white rain curtain are the dim street lights and headlights from the vehicles rushing home to avoid the upcoming storm, which was mentioned in the weather forecast.

“Guess your plan’s cancelled.” Harry turns to Y/N, smiling a little bit. She sighs, but looks rather at ease.

“I guess so.”

...

Ben texts Y/N to let her know he’s safe from the storm, but is now stuck at a supermarket somewhere for it’s impossible to travel in this kind of weather. Harry follows Y/N into the kitchen, using his phone as a flashlight so she can see in the dark. She opens the cabinet and mumbles a small ‘yes’ when she finally finds the candles she’s been searching for. She bought them a while ago despite Harry complaining they would be a waste of money, now it’s been proven he was wrong and she was right.

As Y/N lights up several candles around the flat, Harry looks outside from the window, the sight in front of him could be taken straight out from a horror movie. The howling wind is slamming against the glass with violent force as if its intention was to break it and intrude into their living room. The rain’s pouring down harder than a waterfall, lightning strikes here and there, lighting up the sky for a second before vanishing, soon followed by the cracking sound of thunder shaking up the whole room.

“Stay close to me, I’m fragile…” Harry begs, clinging onto his girlfriend’s arm, making her giggle.

“What happened to ‘be the Lois Lane to my Superman’?”

“I was very inspired after that Superman movie, okay?”

The candles turn out to be a great idea, because their flat has been transformed from a horror classic to a Christmas film, all cosy and warm, the complete opposite of what’s going on outdoors. Harry’s settled on the sofa with his laptop lying on his belly, there’s no internet so he decides to work on his essay until his laptop runs out of battery. Y/N’s sitting on the floor beside him. She’s trying to follow Ben’s tips to paint her toe nails, it’s much more challenging when you do it in the faded candlelight though.

“Need any help?” Harry chuckles as he notices his girlfriend’s trembling fingers trying to not fuck up. She doesn’t look up at him now that her entire attention is on the tiny brush.

“As if you can do better,” she says. Harry immediately closes his laptop as a result, and moves to join her on the floor, sitting with his legs crossed.

“Psst. Gimme that!” With a smirk on his face, Harry takes the nail brush from his girlfriend, then slouches down a bit to carefully finish the first coat on her toe nail. Y/N widens her eyes in shock as it looks perfect on his very first attempt.

In response to Y/N’s reaction, Harry tells her, “I used to paint my nails.”

“No way.”

“Way. I thought black nail polish gave me the rock star look.”

Y/N can imagine Harry’s nail painted black and the thought of him touching her with those hands alone is enough to get her off mentally. 

“Let me paint your nails! It’d be so sexy.”

Her offer makes him snort. “I’m already sexy.”

“Even sexier!” she says, holding her hands together, big round eyes staring at him. “Please?”

He cannot say no to her, not after she’s pulled the puppy dog eyes and used that magic word on him. So Harry voluntarily gives her his hand and allows her to do whatever she wants with it, same goes with his heart. He is such a fool for her.

Y/N does struggle a little bit at the beginning, but with Harry’s guidance she's able to finish one hand, then she stops because she gets tired. 

“Hey, I want a refund. Do both!”

“You can do your left hand on your own, should be a piece of cake to you.” Y/N giggles then gives his right hand a kiss. “Seriously though, I’m impressed. I feel like there’s still so many things I haven’t learnt about you.”

“Well...” Harry takes a deep breath. “Now since we have nothing to do, why don’t we play a game of Truth or Truth to get to know each other better?”

“Truth or Truth?” Y/N stares at him funny.

“Like Truth or Dare, but you can only pick truth.”

“Sounds more like a police interrogation to me!”

“You’re in or not, Y/N?”

“In. I’m in.” Y/N clears her throat, tries her best not to laugh and sits up straight. “Okay, I will ask you first, because you know about me more than I do about you.”

“Fair enough.”

“Okay, Harry, when did you lose your first kiss and your virginity, and who did you lose them to?”

Harry presses his lips together as he throws his head back to look at the ceiling, thinking for a little while before he answers, “so I was fifteen when I lost both to the same person, an old friend of mine. Her family moved away a year later and I haven’t spoken to her since.”

Y/N furrows her eyebrows at Harry, clearly not happy to hear that answer. “What’s her name?”

“Olivia. Why?” Harry snorts, slightly amused by the obvious jealousy written on Y/N’s face. He loves to drive her mad, it’s been like that since the first time they met. “Told ya I haven’t talked to her in years, baby.”

“I thought I was your first real crush.”

“You are." Harry reaches out to stroke his girlfriend’s cheek and feels her soften all at once. “Ollie and I didn’t even date. We were kind of close friends, I’d known her since we were in middle school. We did it because we were just horny and curious, no romance involved, I assure you. Then she moved away and we lost touch.”

“Ollie and I,” Y/N mocks Harry’s voice, her arms crossed sternly in front of her chest. Harry scoots closer to her and pulls her onto his lap all of a sudden, making the girl squeal in shock. Still she doesn’t protest and eventually wraps her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist.

“I hate her,” she whispers against Harry’s lips with her eyes shut. She has no idea how much he’s enjoying how cute she looks when she’s jealous.

“Don’t hate her. She’s a stranger now. You’re my girl,” says Harry, staring at Y/N deep in the eyes then presses his thumb gently against her bottom lip. “Aren’t you?”

“I am. I’m your girl.” He makes her so fucking weak it’s embarrassing sometimes.

“Now, my turn to ask.” Harry chuckles and Y/N suddenly remembers they’re in the middle of this stupid Truth or Truth game. The sexual tension has made it impossible for her to concentrate and she secretly praises him for keeping his cool.

“Who’s your first crush? I know it ain’t me.”

Y/N giggles at the pout on his face. “One of my classmates in fifth grade. I thought he was cute, always helped me with Math and shared me his food at lunch.”

“Lameeee. Hate him already.”

“We were kids!” Y/N laughs, fingers toying with the hair at the back of Harry’s head. “Have I told you about my first time having sex?”

“Yeah, with your prom date, right?”

Y/N nods her head yes. “I was so drunk, and heartbroken that my ex-boyfriend cheated on me a few days before Prom. Having sex that night was the stupidest decision I’ve ever made. Had I waited a couple years later, I could’ve done it with you.”

“You mean...”

The look on Harry’s face cracks Y/N up. She nods fast. “If it was possible, I would want you to be my first, Harry.”

“Oh...” is Harry’s response because he’s utterly speechless, his inner voice, however, is screaming with joy. She must trust him a lot to even think about having him take her virginity, which, unfortunately will never happen, yet knowing so makes him thrilled to bits.

“I love you. Why’s it so hard to believe?” Y/N asks quietly with her forehead pressed against his and their noses touching. Harry closes his eyes and heaves out a heavy sigh.

“Lately you’ve been keeping your distance so I thought...”

Y/N immediately pulls away then grabs his face with both of her hands. “No, no, no. Gosh, the only reason I’ve been doing that is because I want to give you space. I noticed that you rarely went out with your friends anymore, don’t want you to change your life completely for me.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “Y/N, I rarely go out with my friends anymore because they either get completely wasted or find some random hookups. You don’t want me to do that, do you?”

She shakes her head rapidly without a second thought. Harry smiles at her contently.

“I don’t want to either. I have you now. Cheesy as this may sound, I’d choose staying at home doing homework with you over any party.”

And Y/N cannot stop grinning as she replays that sentence over and over again in her head. She says to him, “you turning into an anti social for me is the most romantic thing you’ve ever done.”

Harry places one hand on his left chest and pretends to be in so much pain. “You making jokes during my romantic moments is the least romantic thing you’ve ever done.”

“That makes two of us.” Y/N relaxes her shoulders and slides her hands from the back of his head down to his chest. In the soft candlelight, he watches her smile slowly fades away. She sucks in a breath then lets it all out. “I know I shouldn’t think too much about this, but I cannot help it...I’ve dealt with assholes my entire life, thinking that I’d be better off alone. And then you happened...and I can’t imagine losing you.”

“Baby...” Harry throws his head back as he secures his arms around her waist, pulling her in closer to him. “To be honest, I’m just as scared as you are, but looking back, my life kinda took its turning point on the day we met and it’s been a crazy ride but I’ve never been happier. Why don’t we just enjoy the moment and not worry too much about the future?” He takes her hands from his chest and holds them tight. “Right now, it’s just you and me against the world. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Y/N gives Harry a nod and leans in to reattach their lips, slightly pushing him down so he’s lying on his back and she's on top of him. Her fingers get lost in his hair whilst his find their way from her knees to her bottom then slide under her shirt, resting on her bare back after given a nod as her permission. This is the furthest they’ve gone in this relationship, but it’s not enough for Y/N. She wants him more than this. She has no idea what’s gotten into her when she straight off tells him, “I’m ready. Let’s do it.”

Harry, still trying to catch his breath, stares at his girlfriend in disbelief. Was she drunk, he would blame it on the alcohol, but she’s sober, and this is so unlike her, the pure and innocent Y/N he’s always known. He cannot say he’s not enjoying this.

“You’re sure?”

“Do I look like I’m not?”

“Feisty.” Harry chuckles, placing one hand at the back of her head, bringing her mouth back on his own as he flips them over so he’s now on top. 

“Do you want to move this to the bed?” he asks and she shakes her head. The only thing she wants right now is him. 

“Good, neither did I,” he admits and closes the space between them again. They’ve been waiting so long for this, they cannot wait any longer, even just a minute. Though having sex on the floor is not exactly the romantic scenario they’ve expected, with all the candles all around them, it’s pretty close, they would say. 

Harry and Y/N break apart for a brief second to pull his t-shirt off and hers soon follows, tossed away on the floor somewhere, leaving her half-naked in front of him for the first time. By the glow of the candlelight, he thinks she’s even more stunning, the shadows dancing across her features, accentuating the color of her hair. He parts his lips, wanting to tell her how beautiful she looks, but she’s already one step ahead of him.

“You’re so beautiful,” she breathes and his eyes sparkles with passion. 

“So are you,” he admires before coming back to her, pressing his nose to the dip of her throat and inhaling her, drunk with her scent. She’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Harry holds his breath, slowly tracing his fingertips across her skin as if she was made of glass, easily breakable. 

The rest of their clothes soon come off, Y/N feels so vulnerable and exposed. This is not her first time having sex, why does it feel like it is? Maybe because of the way Harry’s caressing her cheeks, constantly asking if she’s okay, telling her how beautiful she is, the things that she didn’t get to hear on her actual first time. She’s so lost in him, completely infatuated by him. She believes she belongs to him, and even if she wanted to, she could never leave.

The rain is still thumping against the window, but all Harry and Y/N can hear is each other’s breathing and heartbeats. They’ve lost track of time as they kiss, two bodies kneading against each other. It’s all new to Harry, he’s never made love before, because he’s never been in love with anyone else. He knows this isn’t the first for neither of them but he wants to take his time with her, to make her feel good because she deserves that. 

Y/N lets out a light moan when his fingers find their way into her heat and he has to audibly remind her to start breathing again. He lays kisses all over her face, letting her know how good she feels and how much he loves her. It doesn’t take too long for Y/N to start squirming and biting on her bottom lip as she feels her release building, but she wants to fall over the edge with him inside of her so she grabs his wrist and stops him just in time. 

Harry withdraws his hand from her thigh and brings his fingers to his lips to lick them clean, the sight of it makes Y/N groan in desperation. She takes no time to bring his lips back to hers, tasting herself in the warmth of his mouth. It’s crazy how she hasn’t even reached her high yet and he’s already got her seeing stars.

Y/N pets Harry’s cheek as he pulls back and looks down at her. 

“You’re everything I’ve ever wanted.” His voice almost breaks as he holds her close and she clings to the back of his head. “I don’t want you to leave.”

His last words nearly bring her to tears. With all the shitty relationships in the past she almost thought no one would ever love her for real, now he’s here, telling her she’s everything he’s ever wanted, begging her to stay, proving all her doubts and fears wrong. He’s like her knight in shining armor.

“I’m not gonna leave, not ever,” she says, and she means every single word. 

"I love you,” he mumbles against her lips for the hundredth time, then lifts her legs to his hips as Y/N reaches down to take him in her palm, her sudden touch makes his breath hitch. 

“Wait...Condom,” he murmurs as his eyelids flutter and Y/N quickly assures him that she’s on the pills. Without hesitation, she slips the very tip of him inside her, the tightness causes both of them to gasp. 

She gives him a sly smile, holding his eye contact as she feels him slowly sink himself deep inside her. It takes her a while to adjust to this pleasing unfamiliarity. Harry thrusts slow and deep, causing his name to fall from her lips again and again. He holds her eye contact still, even though both of them are fighting to keep their eyes open. There’s no part of him that she cannot feel, and the feeling is just overwhelming. Harry’s eyes squeezing shut as he drops his head to her chest. She kisses his hair, fingers crawling down his back, letting the pleasure take over. The movement of his hips speeds up and Y/N feels the heat spreading through her veins. 

“Oh God, baby, fuck,” Harry curses against her skin while lifting both of their hips to get a better angle. Y/N arches her back as uncontrollable soft moans fall from her lips. She feels his entire body tense as well as her own.

“I’m so close,” she says breathlessly and he pushes her hair from her face, slipping his hand between their moving bodies to circle his finger tips against her clit, causing her to suck in a breath and clings tighter to his shoulders. 

“Let go baby,” he coaxes softly, his hips moving in time with his hand as he cries out when her walls clench tight around him.

Another moan escapes Y/N’s lips as she struggles to hold off her release. Harry speeds up slightly, goes a little deeper and harder and Y/N starts falling apart in his shaking arms. Harry’s mouth falls open, his brows pulled in and his eyes fight to stay open to witness her reaching her climax, repeating his name over and over again. He pushes though, even though his whole body is coming apart, and they both cry out until there’s nothing left they can give each other. 

All out of breath, Harry flips them over so she’s lying on his chest and he wraps his strong arms around her delicate body. They lay there on the floor, their breaths gradually come in sync after a little while and Y/N’s obliviously beaming when Harry tightens his grip and holds her close. Those small flickering flames around them grow dimmer every moment as the wax melts down, but Y/N can still make out a smile twitching at Harry’s lips. He takes her hand which is resting on his chest and raises it to his lips.

“If you’re wondering, we had sex, and I still love you.”

“I’m not wondering.” She kisses his cheek, closing her eyes and sighing. “And I love you too.”

[myharrypotterthoughts-blog]

Why I appreciate Dumbledore (and not Snape)

The Harry Potter fandom has come to a (relatively) unanimous conclusion that Dumbledore and Snape are two characters who are kind of unforgivable. However, I much prefer Dumbledore’s character to Snape’s and have actually (after re-reading the series) come to my own conclusion that he actually isn’t that bad. Here’s my reasons why.

First, let’s compare the pasts of the two characters - specifically, their childhood/adolescent years. We’ll start with Snape. The very first time Snape is introduced (in terms of the timeline) is in the memories Snape gives to Harry near the end of the Deathly Hallows. He is seen with Lily as children, and he reveals to her that she is a witch. At one point, he also injures Petunia because she annoyed him - strike one. Snape displays from his childhood that he believes he is better than Muggles because of his magic, an attitude which continues throughout his school years. He becomes infatuated with the Dark Arts, making friends with teenage Death Eaters such as Yaxley, and calling Lily a Mudblood in his fifth year. He’s obsessive, agressive and whiny in the majority of the memories we see of him, and he hasn’t made any effort to change by the time he is introduced in Harry’s first year, still determined that he is right and James potter is wrong - “Your father was a swine!”, and determined to make Harry’s life hell, bullying him and his friends out of spite - “Possibly no one's warned you, Lupin, but this class contains Neville Longbottom. I would advise you not to entrust him with anything difficult. Not unless Miss Granger is hissing instructions in his ear.” He shows that he can care and love, but IMO it’s overshadowed by how spiteful and selfish he remains, disregarding where his attitude landed him in the past.

Now, Dumbledore’s past is a little more vague and is only revealed by Dumbledore himself at the very end of the series.  we receive many accounts of his past from friends and foe. However, i think the most reliable account is his brothers, and his own. Aberforth recounts how Dumbledore to became obsessed with his own superiority, but in a different way than Snape. he says that Dumbledore’s brilliance distanced him from his family, as he left his menatlly scarred sister to the care of an unstable (but well meaning?) mother and Aberforth himself, while he met Grindelwald and dreamt of taking control of the world “For the Greater Good”. However, he realized after his mother’s death that he could no longer fulfill his dreams and reluctantly stayed to assist Aberforth, however Aberforth resented his over-bearing attitude. The tension between Grindelwald and Dumbledore resulted in a duel (after Dumbledore realized the moral darkness of his scheme) that involved Aberforth, wherein a misfired shot killed their sister. After this happened, Dumbledore ended up defeating Grindelwald in the Global Wizarding War, and never mentioned the event again. I believe Dumbledore demonstrates just as many negative traits in his past as Snape does. he’s entitled, shallow, has a superiority complex and dislikes what he sees as weak. However, contrary to Snape, Dumbledore recognized that his actions led to the death of his sister and changed his attitude completely. He began to respect Muggles deeply, and burdened by guilt, declined the offer for the role of Minister for Magic, instead deciding to teach at Hogwarts, in the hope of educating younger wizards and witches in a manner that would stop them making his mistakes. This also led to the oversight he made regarding Tom Riddle - he believed he could change him for the better, but failed. Dumbledore grew up, and although he was still distant and vague throughout the series, was serious about changing himself to become a better man, despite his role in the events of his past. - “Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory.”

Second, in regards to their actions towards Harry throughout the series, it’s fairly obvious that despite the guilt and love he felt for Lily, and his devotion to her, Snape did not care nearly as much about his son, protecting him purely because of her and otherwise treating him like an emotional punching bag. He was borderline abusive towards Harry, and this becomes evident during their Occlumency sessions in Harry’s sixth year, which he uses to essentially torture Harry with no remorse or apology, only stopping when Harry unknowingly invades his own privacy. He’s selfish, acts for himself and while I respect his protection of Harry, I don’t like how romanticized it is and how much we’re persuaded that he’s a good man, because he’s a mediocre man who did a good thing. Dumbledore also displays a relative lack of respect for Harry throughout his school years, yet he had good intentions. He never told Harry anything important to his life or future until his sixth year, and purposely neglected him in his fifth year without explanation. However, he was never purposely cruel to Harry and even though he was manipulative, it came from a desire to protect rather than control. It was wrong, but more understandable to me than Snape’s behaviour - “I cared about you too much. I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed.”

I believe the main difference between the two comes from what their own traumas did to change them. In their younger years they were very similar. the both did bad things, said bad things and displayed a lust for power and control that defined their actions and relationships. However, what came after the death of their loved ones is why I respect and admire Dumbledore and have a distaste for Snape. Dumbledore felt guilt and regret so intense he changed himself, and became determined to protect and care, no matter the cost. he used his brilliance to do good in the world for as long as he could, and sacrificed himself to ensure that Voldemort could not succeed. He was manipulative and distant, but his primary goal was to ensure that the people he loved were safe, as he explains to Harry in the Deathly Hallows. Snape, on the other hand, remained possessive of Lily after her death, and chose to resent Harry because of his father rather than respecting him because of his mother. he didn’t change because he let himself remain spiteful, determined that he was in the right during his past. While his scenes at his and Lily’s deaths made me feel for him, and pity him, I don’t think they redeem him as much as Dumbledore can be redeemed through examination of his desire to improve himself.

There’s so much more i could have said, but this is super long already so I’ll let you guys discuss this. Its my first big rant so I’m sorry if it’s a bit all over the place!