#lee's shitty reviews
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lee-isnotcool · 4 months ago
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the final chapter of my favorite fic came out...y'all know what that means!!!!
FIC REVIEW TIME LETS FREAKING GO
Fic: Chew me up but don't spit me out
author: @imdamagecontrol
length: 260k words (mid-length fic)
summary: stripper au where reg left grimmauld a couple years after sirius didn't come back for him and dances to help pay for uni and billionaire ceo james 'walks in'... deviousness and tomfoolery ensues in first dates to italy and much longing and horniness.
review: oh my god. this is going to age into a marauders classic. obviously we have to start with the jegulus: they are PERFRCT. this is the perfect jegulus dynamic omg james is literally sunshine boy and reg is this emotionally unavailable little shit and they want each other SOOOO BAD- reg is genderfluid in this fic, which is honestly one of my favorite hcs along with trans reg. their journey to figuring out their gender actually was so special to me (i'm a genderfluid presenting trans guy) and i loved the way it was portrayed. BLACK BROTHERS ANGST REIGNS SUPREME OMG idk why i like torturing myself so much but this is peak. sirius is also genderfluid and helps reg out once they reconcile. endgame jeggy obviously and background wolfstar.
guys i mean it when i say u NEED to read this. i fully broke into the media room at my no-phone sleep away camp so i could check if this had updated. (it had. it was the black brothers reconciliation chapter. i cried.) ANYWAY READ THIS MASTERPIECE AND WELL DONE @imdamagecontrol !!!!!!!
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alchemiclee · 6 months ago
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I hate when google something and get conflicting results and am too busy or tired to spend hours researching the truth.
i'll search for example "is *thing* good quality" and get one result that says "after many tests it's very good quality and is about the same compared to *other thing of actual proven quality* and is worth it"
then directly under it is a result "after many tests compared to *other thing* it's poor quality and not worth it"
google results are so bad and it's so hard to find anything unless you want to spend hours diving deep into results and doing different searches. just give me correct or helpful answers right away and not sponsored paid results that are full of lies!!!!
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nevermorgue · 3 months ago
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Okay but what about modern Amnabel's group food preferences?
cracks knuckles. Alright, let’s get into it.
Annabel Lee - complicated. Annabel likes to have the upper hand in every situation, even in casual afternoon lunch outings. She will adapt to almost anything put in front of her. For example, if she goes to someone’s house and they serve tea and scones, she will claim that they are her favorite. Are they? Who knows. She will play it as if whatever is given is something she enjoys immensely, creating the illusion that the world seems to cater to her- that she got lucky that it was her favorite meal. She does this ALL. THE. TIME. “Oh, they are serving pie. That is one of my favorites.” No it is not. She is just making it seem like it is to create the look that “Wow, how lucky for her. The world seems to love her- they’re serving her favorite food!” You get it? She says it’s her favorite for convenience sake. This is why Prospero brings her so many varied pastries when he can. He’s trying to figure out what she actually likes.
As for what she actually likes: She has a pretty varied palette. She does prefer food that is considered more “common” as it tends to have more flavor, and she absolutely loves American food far more than what she had at home. Is the type of person to eat popcorn one piece at a time, but then resorts to shoving 4-5 pieces in her mouth when she’s invested in whatever she’s doing.
Keeps up appearances by ordering what is expected of her. Teas, light foods with small portions.
- packs snacks throughout her school day like grapes or small cheese cubes. Dainty, barely filling little things.
- She loves spicy foods. Hot curries, salsas, she loooves the burn.
Ada - Also keeps up appearances, but obviously not the same way Annabel does. She will pretend to only like more expensive things, but she honestly thinks such things are too bland. She’s a southern girl used to flavor and savory dishes.
- LOVES cheap frozen dinners. She would rather die than admit this of course. Like think those frozen mac and cheeses you put in the microwave.
- She can and will force herself to eat something she doesn’t like, especially if Annabel/Prospero is eating it.
- Hates squid. Calamari? Yuck.
- She likes to comment on things she eats like she’s doing a shitty food review on Youtube. The only person that listens is Will, but you can’t really tell that he’s even paying attention.
- Loves celery
Prospero - This man has a sweet tooth, but he knows how to keep it tamed. He has a very balanced diet and makes sure to make every lunch or breakfast filling enough to last him through morning classes.
- Salad man. He will put so much shit into a salad. He’ll make days worth of salad and sometimes he and Annabel will just eat the whole thing in between classes.
- His favorite dressing is balsamic vinaigrette.
- Very rarely eats fried foods. Corn dogs are cool and he’s more likely to eat one of those rather than something else fried
- For snacking he always gets the things that are called “thins” or “light”, and he is very strict when it comes to the “no eating three hours before sleeping” rule.
- This man hates cashews
- I HC prospero as a mama’s boy idk i get the vibe. He grew up having homemade pasta and refuses to eat it if the restaurant isn’t like locally Italian.
Montresor - Big on steak. Big on potatoes. Big on veggies when they’re roasted or oven baked or anything where they’re mixed up and peppered and cooked. Dude will eat a raw carrot for fun though
- crunches loudly on chips. he does it on purpose.
- has a surprisingly shitty spice tolerance. It’s not BAD, but his face will get red and he tries to play it off.
- Likes messy finger foods like ribs
- Licorice kind of guy. specifically red.
- Prefers green apples over red ones
- really likes blue cheese, especially for his wings
- cannot STAND marzipan anything
Will - Peaches peaches peaches peaches pea-
- Prefers simpler foods. Basic ham and cheese sandwiches, a bag of chips…normal and boring.
- gets overwhelmed when served anything more complicated than what you’d get at an Applebees. He doesn’t really think he nor his body are suited to eat such things. They’re TOO delicious and he isn’t worth it.
- He loves cheesecake brownies. He’s literally only had them twice in his life but he would go insane if he ever saw any for sale anywhere
- The drinks he gets at coffee shops are considered “girly” to Montresor, so he only buys them when he’s alone. Like fruity refreshers and stuff.
- He would like a lot more food if he actively attempted to try new things, he just has no desire to treat himself.
- eats wheat thins for fun
- Only eats 1 singular fruit for breakfast or just skips it all together.
- would probably start crying if he ate a soup. it’s warm and filling and it makes him feel like a waste of space. the warmth settling in his stomach reminds him that he’s real and he hates it.
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eoieopda · 9 months ago
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FORCE QUIT // EPISODE III: SPIDER
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somebody has to make sure you make it through the firefight alive.
pairing: lee minho x reader | series masterlist (3/4) | prev. episode series summary: it's 2077, and life's a fucking nightmare. corporate titans ate the state and shat it back out, leaving citizens of the new republic to fall in line, or fall to their knees. a reckoning is coming — where will you fall? au: series — dystopian, cyberpunk; episode — mutually-pining fuck buddies. ➢insp. by: cyberpunk 2077 + the true lives of the fabulous killjoys genre: smut + angst word count: 23.5k rating: 18+ — minors do not have my consent to interact. series warnings: violence (hand-to-hand, firearms, explosives), depictions of injuries (blood/bruising/burns), some characters have cybernetic modifications, class conflict + poverty, surprise - corporations are bad!, unethical medical/tech experimentation, self-indulgent references to non-skz idols, reader is afab and uses she/her pronouns. episode: above + combat leader!minho, disabled!hacker!reader, pov switches, time skips, loss of limb due to injury (not depicted, minimally described), ref. to hospitalization + recovery, sunshine/storm cloud dynamic, minho is kind of a dick, depictions of combat violence, minor character death(s), unprotected p in v penetration. reader notes: afab and uses she/her pronouns; has a prosthetic/cybernetic leg; wears minho’s shirt at one point. ➢ notes added/expanded upon during 8/6/24 inclusivity review a/n 1: this part required a lot more external resources than anything else i’ve written, so i’ve kind of… footnoted? what i used. see the note at the end of the fic for the list! a/n 2: each episode features a different member x reader pairing, but the plot is linear, so you'd need to read them (in order) to get the full picture! you can sign up for the taglist to be notified of the next uploads. thank you to my beloved @sailoryooons for beta'ing this and @jihopesjoint for being my emotional support internet wife even though she doesn't stan skz. ily both endlessly!
Yours is the Black Screen’s worst kept secret.
The irony of that isn’t lost on you. Professionally, your most marketable skill is your ability to lower others’ defenses; to build and break walls as needed to take what you want for keeps. With finesse few can imitate, you vault over boundaries. Unfortunately for you, you don’t personally have any of those.
You’ve always been this way — no poker face, no affinity for bluffing, no discernible self-preservation instinct — and just the same, you’ve always wished you weren’t.
Time and again, your cards are on the table the second they’re dealt. If that alone wasn’t shitty gameplay, you and that relentless optimism of yours raise the stakes, double down. There’s no hesitating before you go all in; and there’s no surprise when you lose it all, either. Nothing you’ve ever felt has shocked anyone because they saw it coming in the previous turn.
Like Seungmin, for example, who won’t stop rolling his eyes at you from the other side of the room.
“If I took a shot every time you looked up at the door…” He sighs, gesturing from your corner of the Hub to its entrance, “I’d have died of alcohol poisoning six times over by now.”
The grimace you don’t want to concede can’t be hidden, so you rein your gaze in and direct it back at the screen in front of you. You don’t absorb any of the information flickering in front of you, however, because Seungmin has a point. Any second you haven’t spent staring wistfully out of the room is wasted on glancing at the clock. 
It’s close to nine o’clock now, which means your not-so-secret distraction is due any minute.
That reminds me…
You check again, wondering how many minutes have passed since you last looked, only to learn that it’s been less than one. That’s when the reflex takes over. Without your permission, your eyes wander from the glowing, green digits on the wall to the door — just in case.
No dice.
Damn it.
In a feeble attempt to cover your chronic — terminal — hopefulness, you try to refocus on your work. All it takes is a few seconds of staring before your eyes glaze over again. That disinterest isn’t reflected in your rigid posture, though. Your brain may be a flat tire, but your body is a bow drawn back, ready to fire.
Anticipation is a hell of a drug, isn’t it?
Seungmin crosses his arms. From the corner of your eye, you can see the knowing look he shoots you. He may not speak his favorite words, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hear them, loud and clear.
Told you so.
“It’s kind of funny, actually,” he says instead. 
You know better than to be thrown off by his trademark, flat affect. This is the most amused you’ve seen the weaponsmith in weeks. The corner of his mouth even twitches slightly; it might be the closest he’s ever been to smiling. “He only steps foot in here when you do.”
With all the heat you can muster, you aim to warn him — to puff out your chest a little, just this once — but it just sounds like a whine. “Seungmin…”
As if on cue, light footsteps sound off from down the hallway, shifting closer with every muffled step and cutting your would-be bickering off in the process.
Even with Seungmin’s judgment focused elsewhere, you continue to pretend that the glaring, blue light in front of your face has garnered any amount of your attention. It doesn’t. It hasn’t and won’t, so long as you can feel the seconds tick by in your chest.
He snorts. “Like clockwork.”
Damn it.
For being as light on his feet as he is, Minho tends to drag them more, the longer the day lasts. You never point that out to him; he doesn’t need to know that you’ve noticed. That fact sits among the million others you try to keep to yourself, just like your ability to identify him by gait alone.
Besides, you think, he’d never listen if you begged him to slow down, even if it’s just for a night. Rest doesn’t feature on the short list of things Minho wants from you. Come to think of it, neither does advice or concern for his well-being.
“Well, well, well. Look who it is,” Seungmin sings out when the shuffling stops short. “You lost, hyung?”
The way your head snaps up has nothing to do with Seungmin’s mocking tone and everything to do with the flutter in your chest. You’d attempt to keep that a secret, too, but then Minho walks in, and it’s game set. 
He’s fatal with his tattered, grey t-shirt half-tucked into ripped, black denim; and you have to clench your jaw to keep it from dropping. Before your dry throat can choke you, you clear it, swallowing down the thought that Minho and his jagged edges are the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen.
It gets easier to get a fucking grip on yourself when Seungmin starts needling again: “No, seriously, are you lost? What are you doing here?”
Dark, cat eyes flick to you, then back to their target. Deadly, you think, just like the rest of him.
“Wishing you weren’t,” Minho responds without missing a beat. 
As usual, his tone is carefully balanced between bored and annoyed. You suspect that’s purposeful. A tactic. It leaves listeners in the dark about his feelings, so they have to guess whether or not they should run.
Nine times out of ten, they guess wrong.
This time, Minho deigns to give a hint. It’s quick enough that you would’ve missed it if you hadn’t been staring. Thankfully, his target sees the microscopic flex of his eyebrow, too. 
All that bark leaves Seungmin in a hurry, no bite to follow. With his tail between his legs and his palms raised in defeat, he skirts around Minho before slipping wordlessly out the door. 
You frown slightly as you watch him flee, although you sure as shit won’t mind his absence.
“Seungmin’s harmless,” you remind Minho quietly, although you don’t know why you bother. He’s never felt threatened in his life, as far as you can tell. You don’t necessarily hate it when he flexes that fact in front of you, but that doesn’t mean he should. “You don’t need to scare him off.”
Minho crosses his arms and tilts his head in a way that makes you only the slightest bit insane. “I’m not scary,” he rebuts matter-of-factly, as if that’ll make it true.
You make the mistake of looking him in the eye then. Like it always does in moments like this, heat immediately rushes to your face like a backdraft.
Like he always does, Minho senses the spike in temperature. To crank it higher, he meanders his way across the room to you, eyes glittering impishly all the while. Your heart thuds harder with each footfall. Stupidly, you wonder if he can sense that, too.
“In fact, I’m offended,” he corrects you as he closes in.
His palms press down against the opposite side of your desk once he reaches it. This close, you can read the mischief scribbled all over his face, which only serves to tear you in two — equal parts fucked up by his assertiveness and the rare playfulness that only comes in flashes, only with you.
Minho looms over you now, his hardened stare softening just slightly. Whispering through what almost looks like a pout, he adds, “And you’re mean.”
For a second, you think that the hand inching its way across the tabletop is seeking yours. Anticipation makes your fingers twitch. Try as you might, you can’t think of a single fucking thing you want more than to slip them between his. 
Proving once again that you’ll never read him right, Minho’s hand darts out to your side instead. You watch in slow-motion as he snags the bag of honey twists from its resting spot near your left forearm, which is nowhere near fast enough to catch him before he pulls away. Useless, your empty hand drops back onto your desk. 
You stare longingly at the stolen packet, so dejected that you really could cry, and mumble, “It took so much effort to get those.”
“It shouldn’t have,” Minho counters with a shrug.
He isn’t wrong, and you hate that.
The Black Screen’s demolition expert, Lee Jihoon, is as hard to crack as the shit he blows to pieces. His footlocker full of snacks — a rarity, given the whole everything going on in the world — is even more impenetrable. Charming your way through his stony exterior had been your only option to gain access. It took months, as well as unrelenting friendliness administered in small, persistent doses.
Just like —
Minho wouldn’t have wasted his time with flattery or nuance. He never needs to open his mouth to get what he’s after because his presence — from his stance to his intense, vaguely violent gaze — does all the talking for him. All he would’ve needed to do is blink in Jihoon’s direction, then he would’ve walked out of there with the older man’s treasure trove and the jacket off his back.
Having just been robbed blind yourself, you keep your mouth shut about that.
Shrugging once again, Minho throws down the gauntlet: “Finish your shit quickly, and I might decide to share them with you.”
How thoughtful.
If he’s expecting a verbal response, he won’t get one, you decide. The most you give is a disgruntled sigh. Dying star that you are, you collapse in on yourself, sinking deeper into your chair until you wind up as a half-crumpled heap on the desk below your monitors. It’s a perfect picture of abject failure, making this the only thing you’ve gotten right all day.
You don’t expect Minho to ask after your current state, so you’re not disappointed when he doesn’t. Or, at least, you will yourself not to be. In reality, your bated breath is held for a second or two before you remember who you’re dealing with. 
He does speak, though, which surprises you. Your first guess would’ve been that he’d give a hard pass on your dramatics and wander back out the door while your face was buried in your arms.
“Spider,” he sighs, and his tone is so gentle that it shocks the hell out of you. Intimate, almost, even if it is just a caricature. “Call it a night.”
More curious than cautious, you lift your head enough to blink up at him. Between his eyebrows, there’s a small crease that you don’t see often enough to competently translate. You stare at the tension there for a beat longer than you mean to before your gaze drifts downward to meet his.
See? Beautiful.
The second Minho sees your eyebrows raise slightly in question, a switch flips. He shuts the light off, irons out his expression. Whatever softness you found there is gone as quickly as it came.
He clears his throat, then huffs, “Come on.”
You frown and gesture to the screen ahead, pointing out the program you’ve spent all goddamn day working on to no avail. The silent protest doesn’t work on Minho. His stare only becomes more expectant the longer he levels it at you.
“Seriously. Fuck it.”
Having chosen the hill you plan to die on, you envision roots tying your unmoving body to the floor beneath you. Your frown deepens. No, you think emphatically, as if making your internal monologue shout will make him listen.
Minho tries again. “It’ll be here to ruin your day tomorrow.”
You don’t budge, and it pulls an exasperated noise out of him. Curling his right hand into a loose fist, he taps the knuckle of his index finger lightly against your elbow, like the contact will force your mental task list to shut down. 
“I’m bored.”
You know exactly what that means.
“Come up to the roof with me.”
Strike that.
“The roof?” You peep, hardened expression smashed to bits before you can blink.
Minho looks a little too pleased by your sudden concession. He even makes one of his own, chuckling slightly before he rolls his eyes and elaborates, “It’s nice out.”
It’s nice out, so you want to fuck me… on the roof?
The hand at your elbow pulls away and re-routes towards the back pocket of his jeans. When it returns to the space between you, there’s a dented, silver flask glinting in his grip. He shakes it, arches one eyebrow, and tops it all off with a wolfish grin that makes your stomach flip. 
“Stolen whisky tastes best in restricted areas, I hear.”
He nods his head towards the door, beckoning you to give in, and you’re on your feet without needing the invitation to be repeated. 
The sudden movement after sitting for so long means that your body isn’t as enthusiastic as your brain. A sharp pinch pulls a slight gasp out of you. That’s the extent of your own reaction, but Minho isn’t used to this the way you are. Alert eyes flick down to where your residual limb slots into your manufactured one, then back up to search your face. 
Once again, he asks without saying a word. You answer with a wave of your hand, “All good.”
Minho’s concern doesn’t immediately dissipate. To prove that you meant what you said, you snatch the packet of honey twists out of his unsuspecting hand and circle around the desk until you’re face to face. 
“If I’m on my ass for too long, my leg forgets how to leg,” you explain, grinning more out of triumph than reassurance. Then, you dangle your reclaimed prize from your fingertips because you are nothing if not a little shit. “I’m not a doctor, but I think science says that food helps.”
“Science says?” Minho snorts. 
You nod authoritatively, then you turn to the spare folding chair near your work station. Your jacket waits for you there, carefully folded on the cracked, plastic-coated cushion. Shrugging it on, you shove the honey twists in your right pocket and tease, “Sure does.”
The corner of his mouth tugs slightly upwards, and you swear there’s an affectionate smile threatening to break loose.
It doesn’t.
Instead, after pushing off his palms, Minho stands fully upright, nods his head towards the door a second time, and starts making his way towards it. You follow because you always do, biting back your lips to keep your giddiness to yourself.
As the pair of you exit and head down the hallway in comfortable quiet, you note his proximity to you. It’s always the same; he’s always close by but never near enough to touch. The edge of his shirt sleeve brushes against your arm, although his skin never does. 
You stopped wondering about that a long time ago, unwilling to figure out if this is a tactic, too.
Halfway to the nearest stairwell, Jeongin appears in a doorway. The room he emerges from used to be an office for the human resources department, back when the factory was operational — back when employers bothered with pretending to give a shit. 
Now, the room’s function lands somewhere between a bar and a bedroom. The latter only comes into play when the former makes staggering upstairs to the residential area too much of a hassle. From what you can see over the younger man’s shoulder, that’ll likely be the case tonight.
Jeongin gives you a cursory smile before directing his full attention to the man keeping cursory distance at your side.
None of it makes sense to you, all this effort spent to hide intentions. Maybe, you think, that’s why you’re so fucking terrible at it.
“Hey, hyung!” Jeongin chirps as the pair of you approach. He lifts his hand to wave, but it just looks like he’s shaking the deck of cards in his hand at Minho. “Do you want to —”
Without slowing down, Minho cuts him off mid-ask and at the knees. “No.”
And then his finger slips into the belt loop of your jeans, tugging you along beside him as he keeps up the pace. You’re gone before you can see Jeongin’s face fall, but you’re sure it does. 
Yours would.
When you reach the stairs, Minho matches your careful pace, albeit much less awkwardly. For as life-saving as the chunk of metal and carbon fiber on your right side has been, there’s at least one problem it hasn’t solved: going up steps is a bitch. 
To compensate for your less dynamic knee, your left leg takes stairs two at a time so you can simply step straight up with your right. And even though you’re a bit out of breath from the extra effort, you open your mouth to comment on what you just witnessed.
Minho stops you before you can start. Shooting you a look you know far too well, he sighs, “Don’t.”
You’re as good a faker as you are a listener.
“He’s just trying to —”
He releases his grip on your belt loop. It’s the only reason you realize he’d still been holding on. Stopping at the landing, Minho turns to look back at you. “Can’t think of anything I want to do less than sit next to someone and have to hear about their fucking day.”
Eyebrows raised, you stare up at him. This time, you don’t say a word, letting your expression speak for you.
“With the ever-present risk that I’ll be murdered by the state tomorrow, forgive me if I’m not wasting today by listening to shit I don’t care about.”
There it is, you think.
The combat leader’s insistence that his life will only end one way: too soon and bloody.
That unexploded ordnance drops heavy between you. You step over it, joining him on the landing, and you don’t look back. Just at Minho, who watches you carefully for a reaction; whose tension leaves his muscles when the slight, upward curve of your mouth says, I understand.
Together, you climb the remaining flight until you reach the thick, steel door leading out to the roof. It’s barely functional, like the vast majority of the factory, and can’t shut all the way. With more force than is even remotely necessary, he kicks it fully open. The thick, rubber tread of his boot thuds against the metal. It’s quickly drowned out by the strangled squeak of its hinges.
You’re at least slightly thankful that those hinges don’t explode into a cloud of rust.
On his way to the ledge, Minho grabs two empty buckets from the pile of discarded odds-and-ends near the doorway. The rest of the pile — mainly two-by-four planks too busted to rehab and similarly spent range targets — threatens to collapse without its foundation, but neither of you stops to fix it. He leads, and you follow, ultimately coming to a stop near the ledge.
“So?” 
His insufficient question is underscored by the two buckets landing mouth-down on the concrete with twin thunks.
You’re still blinking through your confusion when he unceremoniously drops himself on the furthest bucket and when he stretches out his leg to tap the remaining one with the side of his boot. Coincidentally, you’re still waiting for the rest of his inquiry when you sit — much more gently — next to him. This time, it’s you who moves, nudging your chrome knee against his flesh-and-bone.
Minho finally takes the hint and continues, pulling out his flask as he does. “How was your day?”
The whiplash makes your neck ache.
Remind me again about the last thing you said to me.
After taking a swig without incident, he passes the flask to you. You take your sip — small, cautious — and immediately let out some clownish, choking noise when the strong notes of wooden barrel hit your taste buds.
“Oh, that’s —” You cough, nose scrunching. Whisky-laced breath slips out of your teeth in the form of a hiss. “Absolutely wretched, I fear.”
For the first time all night, Minho’s mask cracks, and a full-fledged laugh tumbles out of his mouth, high and clear as it cuts through the otherwise dead air.
“It’s not,” he counters. Without taking his eyes off your pout, he lifts a hand to catch the flask that you toss at him. “You’re just childish.”
In recompense, you swat his arm. 
He lets you.
“Shut up.” Your distinctly childish comeback is breathy because, like always, your laughter isn’t something you can successfully hide. “Am not.”
Another swig, no further incidents.
“Think you need to be demoted. Maybe I should start calling you baby instead of Spider.”
The violent flutter in your chest doesn’t seem to care that what it heard isn’t at all what he meant. For now, you let it happen. You focus instead on his creased eyes and barely-crooked smile; drink them in as quickly as you can, knowing that your window is closing.
As rare as it is, levity looks perfect on him.
While your laughter ebbs, the wind kicks up slightly, bringing a chill with it. You pull your jacket tighter around you as you watch browned leaves spin in pirouettes near your feet. Their presence here is surprising, given how devastating the War was to the ecosystem, but it’s welcomed. It’s a reminder sorely needed: nothing’s ever truly fucked beyond repair.
Minho pipes up suddenly, “You never answered me, you know.” And even though his voice is low, it startles you.
He’s too busy fiddling with the cap of his flask to see it when you turn your head to look quizzically at him. He probably missed the way you jolted just then, too, which is fine by you. Your goldfish brain is still trying to recall what he asked that went without a reply.
When you remain quiet, he supplies, “Your day.” 
As it turns out, you’re just as stunned by his question the second time he poses it. Part of you wants to remind him that he could be murdered by the state tomorrow, just in case he wants to reclaim his wasted time. The rest watches as his absentminded fidgeting stops, and his head lifts to look at you — not impatiently, not sardonically, but with the tiniest bit of insecurity scribbled into his slightly furrowed brow.
Oh.
Now, you’re frozen into silence for an entirely different, entirely devastating reason: he wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t genuinely want to know.
A self-effacing laugh serves as a smokescreen for how fucking flustered that realization makes you. 
“Well, I had plans to go phishing, but they fell through.”
“Beach advisory?” He feigns a frown, making your lips curve upwards at the corners. “Those hypocrites at Thanotech really need to stop dumping their shit into the reservoir.”
At this, you laugh outright. 
This is the Minho that no one but you could pick out of a lineup: the one that will take a bit and run with it, who lets his guard down and catches you off yours. This one may not be yours — you know he isn’t, not really — but at times like this, when it’s just the two of you alone, it feels like he is.
“I’ll make sure to tell them you said so.” You pat his thigh, which tenses slightly in the second your palm rests on it. Redirecting your thoughts from where they’re headed, you pull your hand back and tuck it into your jacket pocket. “I really think they’ll listen if they know Lee Minho’s the one asking.”
His eyes roll in response, but the amused smirk he wears doesn’t dissipate. It’s still there when he slowly leans closer, making your breath hitch. His hand shifts closer, too, and your pulse hammers harder with every millimeter that’s cast aside.
There’s an old saying about where the shame should fall when a person gets fooled twice. You practically feel it collide with your thick skull when, for the second time, Minho turns the tables. He nearly turns your pocket inside out in the process, hand snatching the yet-untouched packet of honey crisps before you even know what’s happening.
Just like last time, you put up no fight when he settles back into his own makeshift chair with a smug glint in his eyes. A forlorn sigh is covered by the racket of plastic ripping, followed soon after by a faint crunch.
“Speaking of bait,” he snickers once he’s swallowed. “What are you dangling?”
You really want to hate him for that segue, along with all the rest of his committed atrocities, but you can’t. So, you offer up the only thing you still have: 
Technobabble.
“The plan is to sneak in a program to mine data. So long as nobody interrupts me —” You pause to shoot him a pointed look. “— I’ll finish coding it tomorrow and fire it off at some grunt in Ulsan’s fiscal department using a cloned, corporate email account.”
“You think they’ll fall for it?” Minho asks, curiosity piqued.
You flash a grin. “I know they will. Nothing spooks a low-level employee quite like an overdue, mandatory, cybersecurity compliance attestation.”
If you didn’t know better, you’d swear he looks almost proud when he hears about the form of your Trojan horse. It’s certainly what you feel blooming in your chest, especially when you pluck the crisp from between his unsuspecting fingers and pop it into your own mouth.
“Once the program installs, it’ll start reaping what they have access to,” you explain. “I’m sure it’ll be limited at the start, quarterly budget reports and such.” 
You shrug dismissively, then look down at your hands. There’s no way this is interesting to someone that isn’t you, but he asked, and you’re answering, and you can’t seem to stop talking. 
“But those point me in the direction of invoices and their line items, which gets me to payment accounts, recipients, and other shit they don’t want me to know. It’s a paper trail leading to a paper trail, honestly, but it’s —”
“— how you weave a web.”
It stops your brain in its tracks, leaves your would-be sentence to peter out. You can’t remember the last time anyone followed where your explanations led, let alone saw the importance of all the tiny, tedious steps you take. All the intricacies of your carefully plotted architecture.
With you stalled out, Minho finishes that thought where he left off. “Strand by strand.”
“Yeah,” you exhale, warmth creeping from your chest to your cheeks. “Strand by strand.”
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You sit on that bucket on the roof for however long it takes for your ass to go numb, and then you sit some more. Hours, maybe a day or two — irrelevant, as far as you’re concerned. You have Minho next to you and a burgeoning sunrise ahead; and you’ll bask in the glow you’ve found there for as much time as you can.
Minho, it seems, has other plans.
He sighs and flattens his palms against his knees before standing, causing the bucket he’d been occupying to scrape against the concrete. The noise is what gets your attention, not the movement. You turn to look up at him. Your disappointment is more than likely broadcasted all over your face.
“Stay with me,” you whine before you can stop yourself.
Needy isn’t normally a word you’d use to describe yourself; you’re far from it. Now, though… In this moment, it might be written in blaring red letters on your forehead, judging by the extremely brief flash of surprise you see in front of you. It’s gone as quickly as it came. The twinge of embarrassment you feel sticks around to keep you warm.
Minho is quiet for a beat, like he’s got something to consider. Whatever he decides on, it makes his head tilt to the side. A devilish look takes over his features, washing from his narrowed eyes to his tilted lips. All mischief, he counters, “Fuck me.”
Why do those things have to be mutually exclusive?
You don’t voice your question out loud, even though you kind of want to scream it, because he holds his hand out to help you up, and instant gratification together feels so much better than waiting through a delay alone. So, you take his hand, just like he knew you would, and you follow. 
Back to the door, back down to the second level of the factory, back to your room in an otherwise unoccupied wing, until the door is shut softly behind you.
Every single one of your rendezvous has been different from the last. The time, location, everything varies, not unlike the version of himself that Minho lets you see. Even though the steps change completely from tryst to tryst, they still feel like they’ve been choreographed and rehearsed ahead of time.
For example, he’s never caged you against a wall and pinned your wrists one-handed above your head before, but your body reacts as if this is the sole position it was made to occupy in life.
His teeth nip at the side of your neck, and your head falls back instinctively. You don’t give a shit about the muted thump of your skull against the brick, but Minho seems to. 
“Watch yourself,” he murmurs, lips fluttering against your throat. Despite the muted volume, his tone carries an authority to it that makes even your chrome knee weak. “If you wind up with a concussion, I’m not explaining it to Doc.”
You gasp when his tongue flicks out to soothe the sting his teeth leave behind. Beyond desperate, you push up on your toes to bring yourself closer to his mouth. It’s further out of reach than you remember — it shouldn’t be. Barely a week has gone by since he last had you like this. 
Embarrassingly breathless already, you ask, “Have you gotten taller? What have they been feeding you?”
His knee comes forward slowly to nudge yours apart. You make room, letting his thigh press into the gap created. If his left hand wasn’t keeping you stretched up to your full height, you’d be riding that thigh by now.
“You know what I eat.”
Your eyes roll back. You’re not sure if that’s a reaction to his line or the way he clenches his thigh, shifting it further into the space between your spread legs. Either way, that taut muscle is only millimeters away from your cunt now; the low hum that rumbles from his chest says that he can feel the heat rolling off you in waves.
You want so badly to be able to touch him, cling to him, scratch your nails across his scalp and pull him in by his hair. You want him to touch you — really touch you — not just to tease you the way he is, threatening to mark you up with his mouth without following through. 
If you try to tug your arms down, will he let you?
Part of you hopes that he doesn’t. 
At least, not without consequences.
Minho can tell how fucking restless you are. You’re not surprised; you vibrate with want at a frequency he’s always been attuned to. Speaking any of it out loud would be redundant, so you save your breath. His fans warmth over the shell of your ear, pulling the hammer back: “What’s the matter, Spider? You don’t like being the one in the trap?”
You can’t help but tremble at that.
“Fine,” he tuts, finger on the trigger.
Your eyes widen in anticipation when his hand drops its hold on your wrists; and your arms fold slowly back down when he retracts. There’s a muted ache in your muscles from the strain they’d been put under. You can’t say that you mind.
His hands move next to his belt buckle, deft fingers making quick work of the metal before the two pieces dangle on either side of his zipper. That’s the image burned into your brain when he leans in close enough to kiss you. He doesn’t kiss you — he never does — but he finally fires at point blank range:
“Turn around.”
Bang!
It’s so unexpected that you don’t register it as real at first. Neither does Minho, whose demanding gaze stays glued to you. The noise comes again, louder than the first, and you hear the cry that comes with it through the door.
“Spider, are you there?”
Hyunjin.
It’s his voice, you know, but it doesn’t sound right at all. The air of self-assuredness he usually carries is long gone. Whatever’s replaced it sounds completely unlike him in a way that makes your stomach turn.
Minho puts distance between your bodies in the time it takes Hyunjin to push open the door. You notice that he forgot to address his belt buckle, but you suppose it doesn’t matter. The youngest among you is too visibly shaken to see it as he stumbles inside with red-rimmed eyes.
Oh, fuck.
Panicked, you shoot a quick glance at Minho, hoping he’ll see your alarm and know what to do with it. His eyes are locked onto Hyunjin, who comes to a stop in front of you; Minho’s expression is the definition of illegible.
Your hand lifts instinctively to Hyunjin’s shoulder. Apparently, that reassuring touch is all it takes to break the dam; to break him down into sobs.
“Hey!” You gasp, knitting your arms around his frame and hauling him towards you. His face slots into the space where your neck meets your shoulder, allowing his hyperventilated breaths to hit your skin directly. “Hey, it’s —”
You know better than to lie and say it’s okay. 
Minho may be fearless, but it’s Hyunjin that’s the least flappable in the entire group by a long shot. If you were to search back through the last decade, you wouldn’t be able to find a single moment where he seemed annoyed or anxious, let alone fucking devastated to the degree he currently is.
This is the farthest from okay things could possibly be.
You can’t tell if it’s heartbreak, nausea, or both that swells when you fill your fists with the back of his jacket and hold on tight.
From his spot two meters away, Minho cuts to the chase. “What happened to you?”
Hyunjin can’t answer, not at first. 
Maybe, you think, saying whatever it is out loud will confirm the reality of the situation. You don’t push him. Instead, you stop holding him long enough to pull him over to the far corner of your makeshift bedroom, where he drops down to sit on the mattress held off the floor by two wooden pallets. Despite his wiry frame, the force of his collapse makes the wood clatter against the concrete floor below.
When you take a spot beside him, it’s much less quickly, no more graceful. Hyunjin doesn’t mind the hand you place on his shoulder to keep yourself steady. If he hears the click at your manufactured joint over the sound of his own barely-regulated breathing, he doesn’t say so.
Still standing where he was left — where he left you, more like — Minho’s narrowed eyes hone in again on Hyunjin. The expression on his face is just as unreadable as before, and he still won’t look at you.
As much as that bothers you, your own feelings are never your first priority. You turn your head to look from Minho to Hyunjin, whose hands grip the black denim of his jeans like a lifeline. When the latter finally does speak, the explanation hemorrhages out of him, spilling and flooding until there isn’t much air left in the room to breathe.
Three things in particular hit you like a train:
The Bliss Beta is infinitely more insidious than you could’ve imagined — even for Ulsan — and its mass rollout is closer than you ever would’ve guessed.
You now have the data you need to find the servers running the Beta, which means there’s a chance that the way things currently are is the worst they’ll get.
There’s a guillotine blade looming over the Professor’s neck, and it’s your hand on the rope, obligated to let go. It’s your scale that’s tasked with weighing lives.
Nausea, you realize, almost too late.
You grab hold of the wastebasket near the foot of your mattress and squeeze your eyes shut while your honey twists leave you in a hurry.
He loves her.
He loves her, he loves her, he loves her, and there are fifty-one-million faceless reasons why he can’t have her. You feel the weighted stares of every single one of them on you when he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small, silver datashard. It’s thin, flat with sharp edges, but it’s a bullet if you’ve ever seen one.
When Hyunjin places it in your hand, your fingers don’t close around it. You can’t even look at it without feeling faint; your body won’t accept the weight of it in your palm. You avert your eyes, praying that your object permanence disappears along with it. 
And then that reflex kicks in again, craving some semblance of safety.
Minho is already watching you intently when you turn your head his way. The relief you feel is immediate, and you don’t have the energy left to pretend that’s not the case.
You love him.
You love him, you love him, you love him, and this goddamn horror show you’re living through feels survivable while he’s around, even if it isn’t. 
Maybe, you think, if you live to see the end, his presence will help you hate yourself less for the things you’re about to do to get there. That’s been the case so far, anyway. You’ve got a decade’s worth of scorched bridges behind you, and the ash on your face has never made him see you any differently.
Hyunjin clears his throat, dragging you back into the moment you don’t want to be a part of. 
“She said there’s multi-level encryption on this thing,” he mumbles, voice weak. His hand envelops yours and gently folds your fingers over your palm, as if he knows damn well you won’t do it yourself. “I don’t have to tell you this, but be careful, Spider. One move too many, and we’re all dead.”
You freeze; he stands, wiping invisible dirt from the front of his jeans. Nothing he attempts will make him feel clean, you know, but you don’t fault him for trying.
Before he can take a single step back towards your door, you reach out and grab his hand, preventing him from leaving.
“Keys,” you croak.
His eyebrows knit together.
“Cryptographic keys — characters. Numbers, usually.” You shake your head to realign your thoughts. It doesn’t do much; your explanation still comes out sputtering. “Each encryption is going to have a different algorithm altering its data, and it’ll be faster if I don’t have to write a separate program to try and find the strings I need.”
Judging by his face, the explanation makes sense, but he still looks as if he has no fucking idea what the answers might be.
For the first time in nearly an hour, Minho speaks. The suddenness of his participation makes both you and Hyunjin flinch.
“Dates,” he offers gruffly. “Ones that are significant to the two of you, maybe.”
The suggestion cracks against your skull like a baseball bat. 
Of all the things you could’ve expected him to say in the presence of someone other than you, something sentimental didn’t even come close to making the list. Hyunjin, it seems, is just as startled by this — by the appearance of your invisible friend, who’s spent ten years refusing to let this side of him be seen.
You make a note to ask Minho where this idea came from. If there are any dates he holds onto, with no one the wiser.
Hyunjin’s brow furrows for a moment while he thinks. Then, the light bulb behind his eyes flashes.
Eureka.
Dashing now towards the door, he calls out to you over his shoulder. “I’ll make you a list,” he promises breathlessly before he disappears altogether.
Without Hyunjin’s voice to fill it, the silence of your room roars in your ears. You need to shrug it off you, physically; move around so that you stop feeling like you’re being hydraulically pressed. 
In a wordless request for help, you hold your hand out to Minho. The jury’s still out as to what you want when he takes it: to drag him down to you, to be hauled to your feet, or to simply have it held. 
For the first time — possibly ever — he doesn’t take it.
Well-practiced hands drop to his belt buckle instead of reaching out to you. He re-fastens it quickly, and over the clink of metal, he grunts, “Stop looking at me like that.”
You blink rapidly when that sucker-punch statement hits you. “Looking at you like what, Minho?” You ask gently, as if your excess will make up for his lack.
“Like I’m your future.”
And just like that, he’s gone without another word or a backwards glance.
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Eleven days crawl by without you seeing or hearing from Minho. You struggle to keep count as they pass. You’re so preoccupied that there’s no real difference between them, leaving them all to bleed together. It doesn’t help that all ten nights so far have been more or less sleepless.
While you’d love to say that all your time awake has been productive, you’d be lying. Sure, you spend the vast majority of it with the bright light of your monitors boring into your retinas, but that doesn’t mean you’re actively engaging with the shit displayed there. Between your program and your spent brain, it’s your neural pathways that are most in need of re-writing.
“Goddammit,” you hiss when a shock jolts through your upper right thigh for the umpteenth time today alone. 
Halfway crazy from frustration, you glare down at your quad and see the remaining muscles there twitching violently. And even though it’s been over a year, your brain is still surprised to find that the source of your pain doesn’t exist at all.
That outburst from you certainly isn’t the first, yet it’s the one that catches Chan’s attention. Like you, he’s spent an unhealthy amount of his time in the Hub over the past week and a half, pouring over who knows what. It’s safe to assume that’s how he’d describe your work, too.
“Been especially bad lately, hasn’t it?” He asks, head popping up from behind a stack of files.
He probably doesn’t expect you to squeak out a laugh at the sight of him, but you can’t help yourself. 
“You look like a meerkat when you do that.” The frown you get in response only makes you giggle more, despite yourself. “Like an overworked, overtired, under-caffeinated meerkat.”
Chan works overtime to control his expression, steel himself. It doesn’t work. It never does, no matter how obnoxious you and your comrades are around him because at the end of the day, all he ever is, is fond.
He sighs as he sits up fully in his chair. “Spider.”
It’s funny, you think. He sounds just like your father when he takes that tone with you, although the name he uses is nowhere near the same.
“Talk to Doc.” Realizing he sounded more stern than he meant to, Chan’s mouth softens from a thin, straight line to a slight smile. He adds, “Please.”
And because you’re the best behaved of all his pseudo-children, you don’t put up a fight. You don’t roll your eyes the way Seungmin does, or do the exact opposite of what you’ve been told, like —
Don’t go there.
You just get up, ignoring the strong urge you feel to buckle at the knees and hit the floor, and push your chair back with the underside of your thighs. Chan sees the pained look on your face immediately and moves to stand up and help you. You wave him off.
“All good,” you lie through gritted teeth, bearing weight on your palm as you maneuver your way around your desk. 
Chan may not believe you, but he listens, nonetheless. While you guide yourself from your workstation on the far side of the room towards the door, you try very hard to ignore the thought that keeps ricocheting around your skull like a bullet, shredding whatever grey matter gets in its way.
There’s one person that line wouldn’t have worked on. 
It takes a considerable amount of time to hobble to Doc’s clinic, which is clear on the other side of the compound, but you eventually make it there without breaking too much of a sweat.
In a past life, the space was an employee locker room that featured shower stalls and toilets on one side, and numerous lockers and benches on the other. Jeongin tried his best, but the plumbing was fucked beyond repair; all the utilities were scrapped. Whatever useful parts remained were repurposed elsewhere, while the broken bits wound up in that pile of assorted garbage on the roof.
Don’t.
Due to the size of the space, there’d been a multi-day debate on what to use it for. In the end, the decision was made to give it new life as a makeshift field hospital because Minho was right. The tile and drainage system is ideal for —
Stop it.
When you push through the swinging, double doors and stagger inside, you learn that you’re not today’s only patient. On one of the cots up ahead, Doc’s nimble fingers work to stitch Scraps’ left eyebrow back together, while Felix paces in the background with his hands in his hair.
“I’m so —”
“Felix!” 
Scraps slaps her hands down onto her thigh. The sound echoes off the tile walls like a thunderclap, but she doesn’t flinch at the contact. Doc does, however. She freezes solid, needle-holder in hand.
If Doc is frustrated, she doesn’t show it. That bedside manner of hers is unparalleled. Her gentle voice sounds suspiciously like Chan’s when she pleads, “No violence until I’m done holding a needle near your eye.”
Scraps nods in acknowledgment, which only contributes to the panicked look on Doc’s face. You bite your lips to hold your laughter in as you amble closer and dump yourself onto a nearby cot.
“Seriously — stop apologizing,” Scraps calls over her shoulder. 
If it wasn’t for Doc’s gentle hold on her chin, you suspect that she’d turn her head to look at Felix outright. 
“I told you to raise the stakes, and you did. So, I owe you a gold star for being a good listener, I guess.”
The way he looks at her when she can’t even see him kind of makes you want to sob. That ache only grows when he puts his hands on either side of her head, leans down, and plants a kiss on her hair.
Meanwhile, Doc is muttering, “Please stop moving, please stop moving, please stop moving,” like those are the only words she knows. You feel as guilty as you do grateful; her distress is a sufficient distraction from your own.
“Done!” She chirps moments later. Relief washes over her in a heartbeat, releasing tension from every single muscle cell she has — like she’s successfully disarmed a bomb, rather than sutured a minor injury.
And even though she’s too polite to say it, you swear you can hear her thinking it:
Please leave now.
And they do. They fall into lockstep, with Scraps tucked under Felix’s arm and hers wrapped around his waist.
And you’re still staring at the door once it swings shut again, so lost in all your conflicting thoughts that Doc has to call your name twice to get your attention.
“You’re not due back in for another month or so.” She frowns. “What’s on your mind?”
As usual, you don’t know where to start. You don’t know how to turn the faucet on without overflowing the bathtub, either, so you just let it all pour out.
“Everything was fine — perfect, probably. Or the closest it’s going to get, I guess. Then — I don’t even know what happened, but he won’t fucking look at me now. Won’t talk to me, walks out of a room when I walk in, like he can’t even stand to ignore me in my presence.”
You suck in a breath through your teeth to make up for all the ones you skipped out on while you rambled on. 
Of course, that doesn’t mean you stop rambling.
“And I think it might be breaking my heart. I don’t know. I don’t — I don’t know what to do now. It’s very distracting,” you mutter, frowning. 
A laugh slips out to signal how uncomfortable you are with the sudden intentional vulnerability. It sounds more like the sort of hiccup that precedes a sob. 
“Stupid thing to fixate on when the world’s on fire, isn’t it?”
To say that Doc is taken aback would be an understatement. Her eyes go wide; her lips purse. She pauses for a moment before she ultimately whispers, “I meant your leg.”
You’d go dig your own grave out back if you could walk that far.
“Oh.”
Doc does you the favor of averting her eyes. She focuses instead on her lap, eyes widening without blinking, as if she’ll be able to see her way out of the conversation more easily that way.
Self-conscious now to the point of nausea, you play with the frayed edge of denim that lays over the end of your residual limb. You can’t help but wonder how many right-side pant legs you’ve chopped off over the last twelve months, and what those bits of fabric ended up being used for.
Maybe they’re in that pile on the roof.
“Is mirror therapy helping at all?”
You glance up at Doc. “Not as much as it used to,” you sigh. “I think my brain figured out I was trying to bamboozle it and threw another wall up. Those are all it has at this point — walls and holes.”
It’s quiet for a few moments. Now, you wonder if you’ve taken Doc out of her depth. You were her first — and thankfully remain her only — amputation. If anyone’s gonna stump her, it’s you.
You snicker at your own unspoken joke.
Get it?
“How much do you remember?” She asks, catching you off-guard. It was the fact that she asked you anything that surprised you, not the question itself, but she assumes she’s offended you. Quickly, she apologizes. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to talk about it.”
The truth is, the before and during are both incredibly vague. You know that you went with a small group to Ilsan, planning to fuck up one of WraithCo.’s supply lines, and that their ghouls caught wind of your plans. 
Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. The audio underscoring this montage in your mind is warped to all hell; the faces and voices are blurry, as if they’ve since been censored. Deleted, just like the lower two-thirds of your leg.
As for the after… All that comes to mind is pain, in one form or another.
Fighting off an infection, which left your waking hours in some fever-filled daze that only stopped when the various meds worked their magic and knocked you back unconscious.
Being bed-ridden for an eternity after that fever broke and the infection cleared, too exhausted and depressed to keep your eyes open. 
Aching all over as you forced your body to remember how to walk, too obsessed with your newfound crumb of independence to let anyone see you stumble.
Self-imposed isolation to hide the toll it’d all taken on you, and the frustration that came with knowing what you were doing but being unable to stop yourself.
“Nothing I wouldn’t mind forgetting,” you finally say.
Doc hums thoughtfully but offers nothing beyond a tiny frown. The part of you that wants to know why she’s asking is overrun by the part of you that fears what she’ll tell you; clearly, she’s similarly torn.
Add this to the list of things you’ll have to learn to live without.
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Time continues to both slip and crawl by. Days are gone before you can blink; nights encase you in cement, trap you in place. You know it’s not a coincidence. You’re only alone after dark.
Still, it’s not all bad. You’ve certainly been more productive lately, whether or not you truly want to be. That’s not a coincidence, either. You’re capable of accomplishing quite a bit when the only person you truly want to talk to has no interest in listening.
If he did want to listen, you might tell Minho that he was right about the keys to the encryption being linked to dates. You could thank him, if he’d hear you out. Maybe you’d finally summon up the courage to ask where the idea came from.
What if…?
These little hypotheticals of yours only get more painful, the longer you steep in them, and you’re no good at reining your mind in when it starts wandering. It runs off in the same direction every time it goes — back to the night you finished peeling back all the layers.
You know there’s no point in imagining the ways Minho would’ve distracted you then because he didn’t. He was nowhere to be found; and you cried alone in your room, overwhelmed by both the relief of having answers and the all-consuming guilt of knowing what — and who — it cost to get them.
A familiar, prickling feeling at the corners of your eyes pulls you back to the present. You tilt your head back and blink rapidly to keep the dam from breaking. Part of you is proud. This might be the first time you’ve ever managed to keep your feelings to yourself.
“My halmoni always said that holding back your sneezes like that takes a year off your life.”
With a jolt, you snap to attention. Your neck does the same, head falling back down so quickly that your teeth click painfully against one another. The surprise — and the inadvertent scowl it prompts — melts away when you register Jeongin in the doorway.
You frown, although you laugh a little. “That’s horrifying, kid.”
If Jeongin sees you swipe the back of your thumb over your cheekbones, he doesn’t say so. He simply ambles into the Hub and finds his usual spot at the far side of the central table. 
“She said the same thing about being under streetlights when they burn out,” he tuts, taking a seat. He blinks through thoughtful silence for a moment before re-focusing newly-widened eyes on you. “Now that I think about it, she did die young...”
You would’ve loved to hear that theory play out, but the opportunity flies out the door as soon as Hyunjin walks through it. The comment you want to make about his surprising punctuality is swallowed down just as quickly as it bubbles up. His expression tells you that he’s not up for much of anything, let alone teasing. With a cursory nod, he acknowledges that he is, at the very least, capable of noticing his surroundings.
Unfortunately, you’re not capable of looking at him — seeing the state of him — without your bleeding heart cracking right in half.
Chan serves as a sufficient distraction, thankfully. He enters shortly after Hyunjin with both Seungmin and Doc in tow. He ignores the former’s nagging about who knows what and ushers the latter to the chair next to the head of the table. He doesn’t sit, though you wouldn’t have expected him to; he never does. Instead, he stands at the back of his chair with his eyes flicking expectantly over to the door.
In the time it takes you to cross from your workstation to your usual folding chair, the guest list doubles. Holding up the wall in the corner, Jihoon stands with his arms crossed loosely over his chest. To his right, Scraps sits on a rare patch of free space on Chan’s desk, legs swinging idly as they dangle; and to his left, you spy the cat-eyed girl whose name you still haven’t learned. All you know about her is that she works under Hyunjin, and they’re so in-sync that people have taken to calling them siblings.
You see no similarities between them now, however. She has light left in her eyes.
Several others filter in as the minutes pass, most of whom you haven’t yet crossed paths with. Well, you might have. Your days all run together; your short-term memory isn’t firing on all cylinders. You don’t take the opportunity to register their faces now, though. Your eyes only linger for the second it takes to confirm who they aren’t.
Chan turns his head to you, earning your attention. “Where’s —?”
Doc shoots him a look that interrupts his question before he can finish it. She knows what he doesn’t, after all: You’re currently the worst person to turn to for information on Minho’s whereabouts, even though you used to be the first.
Behind you, a heavily-accented voice chimes in, “He’s with little Yongbokie on an errand. They should be back soon.”
You don’t have to turn around to know who’s speaking. Sierra, as she’s known within the collective, has the sort of presence you can feel, even when she can’t be seen. It’s still unclear to you how she wound up a world away from the island she grew up on, but you’re glad that she did, and that she’s on your side. If she wasn’t —
Well…
Suffice it to say, there’s a reason why this foreign mercenary is called what she is — two reasons, actually, according to her native language — and neither bodes well for enemies. Specifically, there’s a mountain of bodies behind her, all of them hacked to bits by those blades she’s so fond of. 
Yeah, you think. Definitely better to keep her close.
“Just start without them,” she snaps at Chan, eye roll evident in her tone. 
Despite outranking her, Chan can’t hide the uneasiness that comes with being addressed by Sierra directly. You watch him swallow the lump in his throat before he clears it fully. “Everyone, listen up,” he says with the sort of gentle authority only he’s capable of. 
You can’t help the smile that tugs at the corner of your mouth. It’s such a stark contrast to the tone that goaded him to speak in the first place.
Still, a hush falls over the Hub immediately.
“I know some of you have heard whispers about this. I don’t necessarily trust that the rumors swirling are accurate —” 
Pointedly, Chan looks at Jeongin, who’s often the point in the relay where things go horribly wrong. The youngest never intends to pass on off-base gossip, but his attention span is about as poor as his audio processing. Jeongin ducks his head down; the tips of his ears go a dangerous shade of red.
“— so I’d like to make sure our record is straight.” Chan claps his hands, and as he rubs his palms together, he turns on his heel towards your side of the table. “Take it away, Spider,” he sings, beaming.
You turn your head quickly to the left and then to the right, searching for whoever the hell he’s truly cold-calling because it simply cannot be you. He knows better; he has to. For the decade you’ve worked together, you’ve hidden behind your screens because you don’t have the stomach for this leadership shit — especially not public speaking. It’s why you nominated him to run the show.
Eyebrows disappearing into your hairline, you stare incredulously back at him, silently begging him to pick the gauntlet back up.
Meanwhile, at least twenty pairs of eyes burn holes into you, like sun rays through a magnifying lens.
Fitting.
“Well,” you eventually manage to squeak out. “I — um… I spent the last month or so spelunking into confidential files relating to the — uhh — the Bliss Beta?”
It’s not a question. You don’t know why you made it sound like one.
Collapsing in on yourself, you knot your fingers on the table in front of you and stare down at your hands. “There’s a facility, it turns out, in — umm —”
“Is this going to take long? If it is, I can go and grab snacks.” Seungmin, from his spot across the table, smirks at you in such a way that you might — for the first time in your life — choose violence. 
That is, if his jokes at your expense didn’t have your nervous stomach churning even harder, sending bile up your throat.
That is, if a cold voice didn’t fly out of nowhere, primed to eviscerate Seungmin before you can even process your own reaction. 
“It’ll be a bit hard for you to chew after swallowing all your teeth, don’t you think?”
You hadn’t noticed Minho enter, but you find him easily now that he’s given himself away. He leans casually against the door frame with his hands in his pockets, leaving his tone as the only indication that he is, in fact, bothered. Everyone that had previously been standing near the door must’ve cleared a perimeter at some point — undoubtedly without being told to.
In response, Chan’s warning look is bifurcated, shot off to both men with equal, albeit subtle force. Seungmin’s face gives way to something apologetic. You can see it in his eyes that he thought he was being funny; that there’s no malice, only an inability to read a fucking room. To the contrary, Minho’s expression is pure venom, jaw set so tight that his teeth could crack.
He may have just interjected on your behalf, but he doesn’t look at you for more than a split second, as if he didn’t mean to concede even that much time.
And even though it feels illegal somehow, you keep your eyes fixed on him, as if you’ll catch another sliver of acknowledgement.
“In Cheongju,” you continue shakily. Your voice barely registers above a whisper, like you’re speaking to a single person, rather than a room full of them. “There’s a facility in Cheongju. All the servers currently associated with the Beta are operating out of there.”
Despite your anxiety, you manage to laugh. “They’re sitting ducks, really. Terrible planning from a security standpoint — either stupidity or arrogance.”
“Both,” Jihoon adds gruffly. If you’re not mistaken, he directs his next line at Seungmin. “Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
You know it wasn’t his intention, but you crack a tiny smile, nonetheless. “Comorbidities, aren’t they?” 
As soon as you say it out loud, your cheeks set to burning. You send a panicked glance to Doc and duck your head, like your fear of looking stupid isn’t on full display. “Please tell me I used that term correctly,” you mutter, feeling instant relief when she nods and a profound sense of comfort when she pats your still-clenched hands.
“So, what are we going to do about it?” Sierra cuts to the chase, as she often does. “Arson?”
Her eyes sparkle at the suggestion. You find yourself surprised that she’s offered something so tame. Only a week ago, her response to seeing a cockroach in the canteen was to shoot at it.
Not for nothing, you’re also surprised by how endearing you still find that little anecdote — but maybe you shouldn’t be. It’s not the first time you’ve developed a soft spot for someone so sharp.
Reflexively, you look over at Minho. You see his eyes flicker, like he’d averted them just in time to miss yours. It’s the only reason you have to believe that he’d been watching you, save for the inexplicable warmth you’d felt crawling up your neck.
You don’t know what to do with any of that.
“Destroying the servers would only be a bandage,” you sigh. “I want to fully eradicate the program itself, which means those servers need to remain intact — for now.”
“So, we do it like Daegu, then?” Felix suggests. Judging by his sudden participation, he’s overjoyed to have something to contribute to a conversation he wouldn’t normally follow. “We broke in and set up that…. thing for you, in that room that was like an…. air-conditioned microwave?”
You bite down on your lips to keep from laughing. It’s a miracle that he remembers the Thanotech raid at all with the concussion he sustained in the process. It’s even more incredible that he remembers the non-technical explanation you gave for the server room within that data center.
Shaking your head, you frown. “I need to be on-site for this one.”
“Absolutely not. Fuck no.”
Across the room, Minho now stands fully upright. His hands are no longer in his pockets; they hang at his sides, clenched tightly.
You can’t help the incredulous scoff you let out. Bold of him, you think, to write you off completely and then attempt to dictate where and when you get to exist. That slap in the face still stings, but you keep your tone as light as possible. 
“If something goes wrong, or if things have changed from the schematics I was able to access, I won’t be able to handle it remotely. I need to be there to troubleshoot.” And even though it goes without saying, you remind him anyway: “We’re not getting a second crack at this.”
“I know you don’t remember Ilsan, but I do,” Minho glowers, tone as dark as his eyes. The rest of the room falls into a charged silence; everyone is too tense to breathe, let alone speak. “I remember carrying three-quarters of your body out of Ilsan and spending weeks at your bedside.”
Just like that, the air in your lungs turns to cement. 
How do you admit to not knowing he was even there? 
And what the hell are you supposed to do with this information now that it’s reaching you for the first time — a year after the fact — in front of an audience? 
You try to start somewhere. “Minho —”
“No. I won’t do that again.” His voice is sharp when it cuts you off, but there’s a crack in the blade, so microscopic that you wonder if you’re imagining things. He clears his throat to try and keep himself even. “You don’t get to make that call.”
Here comes that prickling feeling again, causing tears to spring up at the corners of your eyes. You clench your jaw and try to wish them away.
It’s Chan that speaks next. “You’re right. Spider doesn’t get to make that call,” he concedes. Then, his expression turns to stone. “I do. She said there’s no way around it, so she’s going —”
Minho seeks to interrupt, but Chan raises his hand and stops him in his tracks. You want to argue, too, because you’re right here and don’t need to be spoken about, as if you’re not in the room. The leader plows through, unaffected.
“— and because you know what the stakes are, your only job is to keep her safe.”
If the anguished look on Minho’s face says anything, it’s that he wants nothing to do with the burden of keeping you — what’s left of you, rather — in one piece. 
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The briefing continues after his outburst, but Minho doesn’t hear a word of it. It all flows past him, waterlogged and warped, without sinking in. He finds it hard to give a shit about that fact, though. 
Clearly, his input doesn’t matter. Worse, the sole order that’s been made of him is fucking redundant. He can’t imagine that the rest of them would mean much, so what does it matter if he didn’t pay attention?
He’s halfway out the door by the time Chan wraps up. Dodging eye contact, Minho turns to leave outright, to disappear somewhere and lick his wounds. One last lash manages to hit him as he goes: 
When you cross the room, you’re not headed his way. No, your quick steps take you straight to Jihoon.
Minho knows that he has no right to feel this bitter. He should be grateful that his pushing you away is having the intended effect — that you might’ve found someone other than him to lean on — but the relief he’s been waiting to feel is nowhere to be found.
It never is.
The quick fixes he’s gotten of you in back rooms and shadows didn’t satiate him, either. Cutting you out completely has only proven to be more of the same ache.
Unwilling to watch the consequences of his own actions unfold, Minho turns sharply out of the doorway. Automatically, his feet carry him down the hall, up the stairs towards the roof. His brain might tell him otherwise if it wasn’t currently swimming, but his body acts on its own, seeking out the last place and time where he didn’t feel like this.
It’s a bad call, he realizes as he ascends.
He’ll never be able to recreate a scene with half the cast absent. The stage directions are fucked now. There’s no reason to take the steps one at a time now that he’s alone, but he still does. Without context, his motivations make no sense; and his hands don’t know what the hell to do without a belt loop hooked underneath one of his fingers. They twitch in the absence of denim. 
With every step, he repeats his only line:
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
And when he reaches that busted fucking door and kicks it with everything he has, no one looks at him with amused disapproval.
It’s all wrong.
Steel hits cement with a sickening clang that’s still ringing out as he stalks over to the ledge and drops himself down on a familiar, overturned bucket. Its counterpart sits unoccupied at his side. Minho can’t look at it, can’t get up to throw it off the fucking roof, can’t do anything except simmer in his rage because —
Your only job is to keep her safe.
He tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and shouts into the void above, “Fuck!”
As if he needs to be told. 
As if he hasn’t been trying to do exactly that for all the years he’s known you, driving nails further into his own goddam coffin with every second spent in your web.
Elbows come to rest on his knees. His face falls, too, until it drops into his palms. No matter how hard he tries to control his breathing, it comes out through gritted teeth, seething.
The fucking audacity.
Even if Minho hasn’t given you a reason to know better, Chan should. He’s seen better, firsthand.
Every time Chan stopped by the clinic to check in on you, he found Minho already sitting next to your glorified cot, watching your sleeping form like a hawk for any sign of distress. 
Chan didn’t need to ask how your hair ended up in poorly-executed braids because the unskilled hands that made them were wringing themselves at your side. He never needed to ask why, either. When you finally stopped thrashing through nightmares, you didn’t wake up to find yourself tangled in inescapable knots.
Keep her safe.
That’s the fucking problem, isn’t it? 
When his candle gets snuffed out — and he knows it will, can feel it in his bones that this is it — who’s going to keep you safe? 
Hyunjin doesn’t have the capacity — not anymore. Minho was there with you the night Hyunjin’s whole world exploded into pieces. You saw love, but Minho saw your future. He sees it every time he looks at Hyunjin, who’s still listless, still lingering on the periphery like a fucking ghost. Hyunjin will never be the same, and if Minho lets himself get any closer to you than he already has, you’ll wind up just as empty.
Then who?
Chan is too busy. Doc is just as preoccupied, and as kind as she is, she’s never understood you — not really. Felix and Scraps can barely manage themselves; you’ll fall through the cracks amidst their bullshit shenanigans. Neither Seungmin nor Jeongin can be trusted with anything —  or anyone — this important. They’re both fucking disasters in their own right, although Jeongin may eventually grow out of that. Changbin is too reclusive, and so is Jihoon; Jisung’s an anxious mess. Sierra is, at absolute minimum, insane.
And Minho may be the worst of them, but he tried his best for you. He’s still trying, even though that means keeping you as far away from him as possible.
“Fuck,” he repeats, albeit much less strongly.
That pathetic, choked-out word hits the air and dissipates quickly, leaving Minho alone in self-imposed exile. He stays there until sunrise, when the unoccupied bucket to his left becomes too visible to tolerate.
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The next time Minho steps foot in the Hub, it’s much less crowded than the last. In fact, for what might be the first time ever, he’s beaten everyone else in. It’s no wonder; his stomach has been churning for hours now, and it was useless to keep laying in a bed he couldn’t sleep in.
Because life is far from fair, you’re the second to arrive. He doesn’t have to see you enter to know it; definitely doesn’t need to look up to confirm that it was your deliberate, slightly uneven footfalls he heard coming up the hall. It’s a reflex, though. His gaze lifts just in time to meet yours.
“Oh,” you peep, eyes bright despite the dark circles below them. “Hi.”
You seem startled to find Minho here ahead of you. Warranted, he thinks. The sunshine you cast on him isn’t, but you don’t try to withhold it — or maybe you can’t. As much as he loves that about you, it confuses the shit out of him and scares him just as badly. You either didn’t get the memo when you chose this life, or you don’t feel the crushing weight of it yet: 
Sparks like yours can’t last forever.
His voice sounds like gravel after last night’s anxious reflux, but he echoes you, nonetheless, “Hi.”
And then Chan walks in. He stops short when he sees the two of you, eyes flicking from your face to Minho’s with barely-hidden intrigue. Somehow, he misses the daggers Minho shoots at him with eyes alone.
“I re-routed everyone else to the vans and told them to load their shit. You ready?” Chan poses the question to both of you, but his focus is fixed solely on you. It lingers for a moment, settles in somewhere between the lines. 
Minho doesn't know what’s going on, but he does know that he hates whatever it is.
You nod. Whether that’s in response to what was asked or what wasn’t, he can’t say. Your mouth sits in a tight, straight line. That, Minho can easily translate to feigned confidence. You’re not ready; you’re not good at bluffing, either. 
He sees his window in that bit of doubt and tries to leap through it. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
It doesn’t sound as firm as he wants it to. If you listen closely — and you always do — it probably sounds like he’s pleading, which feels both alien and illegal to Minho. He clears his throat. “We can do this without you, Spider. I’m serious. Tell me how to get you set up for remote access, and I’ll —”
“I don’t know how many more times I have to say this for you to understand: You can’t do this without me. You need me.”
Despite what you say, there’s no heat in the way you say it. It sounds like you’re pleading, too — scratching at the door to be let in. He knows you well enough to catch the subtext; to know that you’re not just talking about the job. But Minho can’t make his mouth move. Likewise, he can’t turn away.
Stop looking at her like she’s your future.
Chan doesn’t have time for the thousands of things going unsaid, so he interjects with an exasperated grunt, “Vans.” He points to the clock before gesturing between you and Minho. “Ten minutes, or you’re both walking to Cheongju.”
Neither of you moves once he clears the threshold and disappears again. Say something, he tells himself. Say anything.
He doesn’t.
“You didn’t sleep last night,” you muse, eyes narrowing slightly with concern. It’s not a question. There’s no uncertainty in the way you look at him, although that’s nothing new. “I read somewhere that peppermint gum helps with reflux.” 
You shrug, like it’s simply a fact you’re sharing. It’s not. It’s the millionth way you’ve found to say “I love you” without using those words.
Minho slips off the empty workstation desk he’s been sitting on, dusts off the back of his jeans once he’s back at his full height. With a nod of his head, he gestures to your workstation. “Take what you need,” he advises quietly.
When he moves towards the door, you move forward into the room. Your paths cross in the middle, but Minho keeps his distance, too aware of that magnetism of yours to take any risks now. Upon reaching the door, he pauses and looks back over his shoulder to call out your name. As if you were anticipating it, you look up from the desk drawer you’re combing through.
He freezes for a moment, although he doesn’t mean to. You might be the only person capable of catching him off-guard. Once his brain stops lagging, he says only half of what he wants to: “Don’t forget your mask.
Hurriedly, like you really would’ve forgotten, you pull open a drawer and fish out a black gaiter, which you then tuck into the zippered pocket of your jacket. Instantly, Minho’s posture gets a little less rigid. Not for nothing, yours does, too.
“Thanks,” you sigh. The corners of your mouth raise slightly. From what he’s been hearing lately, this might be the closest you’ve been to smiling in weeks. Your reaction stops when you notice the way he’s halfway out of the room. “No need to wait on me. I’ll meet you in the loading dock in a minute.”
Minho stalls, feet unwilling to move, until you go back to gathering items. He nods once, as if you’ll even see his acknowledgment, then slips off into the hallway without you.
The loading dock he’s headed for is on the opposite side of the factory, but his anxiousness propels him there in half the usual time. His team is loitering around the two vans when he reaches them: one unmarked, one branded, both stolen.
Felix grins from the hood of the primary vehicle, where he sits cross-legged. He slaps his hands on the white metal below and proudly states, “I told you it would work.”
“Let me guess.” Minho looks over at Scraps. “You were the one who hot-wired them.”
She glances apologetically at Felix, then turns back to Minho with a shrug and a sheepish smile. “He tried his best,” she sighs. “If we had all day, he probably would’ve succeeded.”
At this, Felix’s grin droops into a cartoonish frown. “What do you mean probably?”
Minho rolls his eyes. “Enough — and go put a hat on, or you’re getting a full balaclava.” He points to the mess of blue hair spilling onto Felix’s shoulders. “If your fashion statement gets us pinged on a security camera, I’ll kill you myself —”
A laugh rings out behind him. He turns on his heel to find Sierra snickering at Felix’s reddening cheeks, both tattooed hands covering her mouth as she does.
“— and you know better,” Minho snarks, pointing straight at her. “Gloves. Now.”
Scraps’ eyes are as wide as the moon when Minho swivels back towards her. She doesn’t give him the opportunity to say it; she’s already shoving her decorated arms into the sleeves of a plain, black jacket and zipping it up as high as it’ll go. He hears relief leave her in a quiet sigh when his focus finds who he’s truly been looking for.
A few meters away, Jeongin is buried so far under the hood of the secondary van that his feet barely touch the ground. With his target now acquired, Minho crosses to the neighboring bay.
“Well?” He demands, “Did you find them?”
The younger one startles at the sudden questioning; there’s a dull thud when he smacks his head on the underside of the hood.
Jeongin groans, “Aigo,” and carefully ducks his head until it clears the obstacle above him. His cheeks are pink and smattered with both dirt and grease — and the mess only gets worse when he mindlessly wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his semi-blackened hand. 
“Behind the radiator on this one.” Jeongin then thumbs over his shoulder to the van Felix sits on. “That one was attached to the undercarriage, near the fuel tank.”
With a grunt, Jeongin exhumes himself from the engine compartment and hops to his feet. It’s completely unnecessary, but he drops the tracker he just detached onto the concrete and smashes it under his steel-toed boot. 
“You won’t need the GPS blocker anymore, so make sure to turn it off,” he advises. And he clearly didn’t learn his lesson thirty seconds ago because he taps one of his temples, leaving a dirty fingerprint behind. “Otherwise, it’ll interfere with your comms.”
Jeongin then blinks up at Minho like he’s expecting a pat on the head. 
Over my dead body. 
Minho instead points at the shards of plastic littering the ground. Affect flat, he tells his junior to clean that shit up, which is the closest he will ever fucking get to you did good, kid. The second Minho steps away, Jeongin drops down to hurriedly scoop the broken bits into his palm.
While he waits on the rest of the group — namely you — to roll up, Minho busies himself with checking supplies. 
The unmarked van will carry the backup team to a rendezvous point half a kilometer away from the Ulsan facility, just in case. For this reason, it’ll also carry the big guns, which — like the vans themselves — were nicked from corpo rats. The seats inside were gutted immediately to clear out a cargo area. The trip sure as shit won’t be comfortable, but six people and a few ammo bags will fit inside without much issue. 
Most importantly, there’s enough room for Minho’s crown jewel: a goddamn, motherfucking anti-tank gun. He’s been dying to try it out since the WraithCo. raid that brought it into his possession, but he has a sinking feeling that he never will.
Moving on to the primary van, Minho notes the logo emblazoned on the side. This one was harder to steal than its counterpart, but you stressed the necessity, and he made it happen. Now, when the infiltration team drives up to the facility, it’ll be under the guise of the outsourced IT company that Ulsan uses for routine maintenance. 
According to the data you managed to reap, Ulsan’s made two glaring security errors, likely because they assume they’re infallible — not handling their own shit in-house, and scheduling their tech contractors to pop by on the same dates every month. Both details were barely footnoted in the reports; anyone but you wouldn’t have thought twice about them.
Something twinges in his chest when his thoughts start wandering in your direction, so Minho shakes his head to clear them. It doesn’t work. Instead, it seems to summon you. You step onto the loading dock a few seconds later.
You’ve changed since Minho left the Hub. The lapse in time makes sense now that his eyes sweep over your frame. The black jeans you’re wearing now aren’t chopped halfway up the right side. In order to conceal that highly recognizable part of you, you struggled through the significant extra time it takes to get your artificial foot through the openings — and he didn’t have to tell you to do any of this, unlike the rest of the team.
It’s been so long since you’ve been one of the boots of the ground that he underestimated you. Clearly, he shouldn’t have because you haven’t skipped a single detail. The treads of your boots have been filed down; but the platform sole remains intact, concealing the brand and size, as well as your true height. Specially-designed black gloves cover your hands, so you can utilize whatever touchscreens and keys you come across without leaving your trace behind. Likewise, the gaiter you grabbed at the last minute rests just below your chin, ready to cover your mouth and nose.
His breath catches in his throat when he sees the long-sleeved black top hanging loosely and hiding your figure. He wants to ask if you remember, but he doubts you do. You borrowed it from him so many years ago that it might as well be yours now.
To stop himself from staring, Minho starts to address the group. “Now that our guest of honor has shown up —”
“We still need Jihoon,” you interject with one finger raised, gently asking Minho to wait.
“What?” Minho can’t keep the confusion off his face, and he can’t wrap his head around this curveball you’ve thrown. Incredulously, he scoffs, “It’s a covert break-in.”
There isn’t a single reason he can think of to include the demolitions expert in something requiring finesse.
You don’t respond with words; your eyes flick to Chan, which is enough of a hint. The two of you are planning something — keeping him in the dark about something — but Minho can’t figure out what or why. The leader doesn’t provide much in the way of explanation. All he offers is, “We need a driver and an extra pair of eyes,” as if that’s the whole truth.
Whatever.
The second Jihoon finally walks through the door, Minho immediately starts his briefing.
The main team — including you, Chan, Felix, Sierra, Jihoon, and Minho himself — will head straight to the facility. The reinforcements — Scraps, Changbin, Eunjae, Sunwoo, Hongjoong, and some fucker from Texas known only as “Cowboy” — will wait just outside the property line with range weapons, ready to party with any gatecrashers.
On site, Felix and Sierra will take out security at the gate; only two men guard that post at any given time. Meanwhile, you’ll slip in and disable the remaining security measures: cameras, mainly, although the alarm system is your biggest priority. To get everyone inside, you’ve cloned the badge of a mid-level researcher who, like the Professor, has authorization beyond the front desk.
From there, the interior group will divide into watchdogs and infiltrators. Given the relatively small size of the building, it shouldn’t take long to get you to the control room, where you’ll take a crack at the main computer housing the Beta’s program. If everything goes as planned, you’ll be in and out within 30 minutes.
Nothing ever goes as planned, though. That Ilsan mission was simpler with significantly lower stakes, and it was a fucking nightmare. Minho can’t think about anything else when he crawls into the back of the van next to you.
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For over two hours, Minho has been sitting cross-legged on the floor of this godforsaken van. His brain, unlike his body, is wholly fucking incapable of staying still. No matter how hard he tries to ground himself, he can’t shake the chill running down his spine or the voice in his head. It just keeps repeating the same thought, over and over: 
This van will be missing passengers on the drive back.
“It’s your turn, Minho.”
His head snaps up. Instead of Atropos and her scissors, it’s Felix staring back at him, smiling curiously. Warmly. Minho’s pulse should ease up at the realization, but it doesn’t.
He clears his throat, although his voice still comes out jagged. “My turn?”
“He’s asking everyone what they’re going to do with their lives when this is all over,” you explain. Minho turns his head to look at you. For once, he can’t decipher the look on your face. You laugh when you squeeze his bent knee gently, adding, “Don't worry. I didn’t have an answer, either.”
But it’s not an answer that he lacks, it’s time.
Don’t you know that I’m already dead?
The van slows considerably, shifting from paved roads to gravel. Then, it stops entirely. Jihoon turns in his seat and squints through the holed, metal divider between the cabin and the back of the van. 
“Spider?” He calls out over his shoulder, and it’s no wonder he struggles to identify you. Everyone sitting in this unlit area is cloaked in black from head to toe. 
To help him out, you raise your hand and wave. Even if the dark gloves you’re wearing aren’t visible, your smile is. Your voice is just as bright when you chirp, “Over here!”
Minho sees Jihoon smile for the first time in all the years he’s known him. If he was anyone else, that flicker at the corner of his mouth wouldn’t count for shit; but Minho’s no stranger to steel or your uncanny ability to bend it. He knows your impact when he sees it.
“End of the line,” Jihoon reports. “The next time I stop, you’ll need to sneak out the side. I can see a camera positioned directly above the security vestibule, pointing downward from the left. The van will create a blind spot if you stay low to the ground.”
Now, Jihoon’s involvement is starting to make sense. He’s one of only four people who joined the Black Screen within the last year — after the Ilsan disaster, which led to the incorporation of masks into all field ops. Out of the entire organization, his face is one of the only ones that won’t tip off the guards.
Until the next news cycle, Minho thinks ruefully.
Once the driver is satisfied that the passengers are on the same page, he turns around and sets the van back into motion. Every dip in the uneven road below throws your shoulder against Minho’s; and every time you collide, he wants to wrap his arm around you to keep it from happening again. He doesn’t. Eventually, the opportunity disappears along with the faint crunch of gravel beneath the tires.
The brakes squeak slightly when the van stops a second time. Minho can’t hear the conversation Jihoon is making with the security staff from where he sits, just the slow-motion movements of you, Felix, and Sierra as the three of you inch the side door open and spill onto the driveway like molasses.
All Minho has left to do is wait — for you to come back or for shots to be fired. His pulse picks up when seconds slip by without either of those options playing out. 
It’s funny, he thinks as he pulls his rifle into his lap, that the thing bringing him comfort now is designed to take it away. His thumb hovers over the selective fire switch, flexing in anticipation. Any second now, all his best laid plans will explode. 
It’s only a matter of time until —
“All clear,” comes your voice through static.
Minho flinches. In all the tense silence, he’d completely forgotten about the earpiece he’s wearing. The breath he’d unknowingly been holding leaves him in a hurry, taking the tension in his shoulders with it as he deflates.
“Meet us at the fire exit on the northeast side. I shut off the emergency alert system, too, so we shouldn’t have any issues getting into that stairwell.”
Jihoon is already pulling the van around by the time you finish speaking. In a matter of seconds, he pulls up to the door in question and shifts gears to park. 
You’re standing in the doorway when Minho’s feet hit the ground, eyes crinkling when you see him with a smile he can’t otherwise see. He doesn’t know what to do with that, so he addresses Sierra first. She’s got blood on her temple, and Minho can’t tell whose it is. 
“You didn’t make a mess, did you?” He asks, frowning slightly.
“This is business, not pleasure, so no.” She rolls her eyes. The sigh she lets out reeks of disappointment. “Wrung out their necks like chickens and shoved their bodies into cabinets.”
Glancing quickly at Minho, Felix figures out where his leader’s eyes are focused. “Not hers,” he clarifies, nodding to Sierra. With the back of his sleeve, he reaches over and gently wipes the blood from her face, like he’s cleaning gochujang off a child. “Didn’t leave a trace, though.”
That’s all Minho cares about, so he asks no further questions. Instead, he checks his watch before looking up to check on you. He doesn’t pose the question, but you answer him, regardless; and when you do, you accompany it with your thumb raised.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
“All good!”
You then gesture with that thumb to the stairwell over your shoulder and ask, “Shall we?”, as if you’re inviting him to dance.
“You two —” Minho points to Felix and Sierra respectively, drawing their attention. “Station yourselves along the main hallway. If anyone so much as pokes their head out of a doorway, blow it the fuck off. No witnesses.”
Both nod in acknowledgment, but it’s not enough, not when your life is in his hands. He glares expectantly at them, waits in silence until they get the hint.
In tandem, they repeat, “No witnesses.”
Good enough.
Wordlessly, Minho waves his hand and sends them on their way to the second floor. He doesn’t budge until he sees the tops of their heads through the window, disappearing past the landing. Seconds later, Felix’s voice sounds off in Minho’s ear to advise him that the area is clear.
He turns back to the three people standing behind him to ensure they’re ready to move in. The second he sees the pistol in your grip, his stomach lurches so violently that he really might vomit on his boots. 
It’s categorically fucked — so fundamentally, intrinsically wrong — that you’re standing here now with lethal force in your hands. Over ten long years, you’ve never fired a single shot in combat; never stolen the light from someone’s eyes while you’re staring into them. Still, no matter how nauseous the image makes him, the irony of it all can’t be ignored. 
You only know how to shoot because he taught you.
“Let’s move out,” Chan says when Minho doesn’t.
Minho takes point with you close behind him. Behind you, Jihoon follows with an inexplicable duffle bag strapped to his shoulder. By now, Minho knows better than to question what’s going on here. He wouldn’t get an honest answer if he did; and Chan makes no excuses for it as he trails after Jihoon up the stairs.
At the top of the landing, you tap Minho’s shoulder, prompting him to stop. When you gesture up ahead, his eyes follow, gaze sweeping down the long corridor towards the southwest side of the building. Near the end of the hall, a pair of glass doors interrupts the path to the server room, which sits further down on an intersecting corridor. Somewhere between that server room and the bulletproof barrier in front of you is your target: the main computer running the show.
All the signage he can spot declares the area secure and for authorized personnel only. You’re neither safe nor sanctioned, but the badge you pull from inside the neck of your — his — shirt will let you pretend to be. 
Lim Namseok, it reads.
That poor bastard will probably be dead before sunrise for the things you’re about to do. Minho doesn’t have any higher hopes for himself, but he wonders whether or not you’ll be able to sleep when this is over.
No, he ultimately decides. You won’t.
You keep glancing down at that man’s photograph, swallowing hard like you’re choking down an apology. Committing those features to memory, as if you’re obligated to remember each one of the creases in his forehead.
It’s not a question of if that face will pop up in your nightmares but when.
Minho’s both unwilling and unable to let you keep torturing yourself, so he shifts his assault rifle to his non-dominant hand and reaches out to you. Neither of you says a word as he gently removes the badge from between your fingers and lets the lanyard unfurl. You watch the ID flutter downwards until it rests against your chest; his eyes don’t leave your face.
“Come on,” he says softly. “There are fifty-one-million Namseoks out there that still need their asses saved.”
You don’t want to laugh. Your furrowed eyebrows inform him that you’re trying very hard not to, like your half-hearted glare will override the muted chuckle that slips through your mask. His attempt at levity worked, though. You start moving again when he does.
On the way to the first set of security doors, the four of you pass both of your lookouts, who’ve taken up posts half and three-quarters’ way up the corridor, respectively. Not for nothing, both look bored by the lack of action.
When Felix sees Minho, he complains, “Why is it always unpaid fucks like us who have to work on weekends? Shouldn’t these goons be here to justify their salaries?”
He’s not wrong. This place is a fucking ghost town, and although the datashard you combed through said this would be the case, the emptiness still makes the hairs on the back of Minho’s neck stand up. Whether or not he can put his finger on it, something feels off.
“Wouldn’t mind a desk job,” Chan muses, more to himself than to the rest of the group.
Minho leans into the assumption that he wasn’t meant to hear it. If he was, he’d have no choice but to point out that Chan hardly leaves his fucking desk as it is. So, to keep the peace, he keeps his smart mouth shut.
When several more meters come and go, the four of you reach the security checkpoint. With the badge back in hand and nerves evident in your tone, you hold it to the scanner and mutter, “Here goes nothing.”
Nothing is precisely what you get. No sirens wail, no trap doors give way to swallow you all down. The glass panels simply part with a click before sliding outwards along their respective tracks. Your shoulders sag with relief, unlike Minho’s. He carries tension in every single one of his muscle cells; and he only grows more rigid with each passing second.
To keep his pulse down, Minho counts each step he takes towards the control room. It’s an exercise in futility, of course. He’s a goddamn mess, no matter how hard he tries to hide it.
16…17…18…
Present moment excluded, he can only think of one other in which he’s ever experienced fear. Real fear, that is; the kind that begs his limbs to lock. It’s no coincidence that he can barely function now. How could he, with the common denominator trailing behind him like a shadow?
19….20…21 —
Suddenly, you hiss, “Shit!”
By the time he wheels himself around, you’re frozen in place with your pistol aimed through a doorway that wasn’t open when he passed it. A woman in a lab coat stands there with her hand still on the handle, eyes doubling in size when they land on you. Immediately, the coffee mug in her hand drops, sending both liquid and shards of ceramic flying. Both of her hands are in the air before the pieces can settle at her feet.
You fire once, panicked, and strike her in the upper arm. It’s a shit job, one that’ll give her time to call for help before she bleeds out on the floor, so Minho’s instinct takes over.
“Turn around,” he tells you. 
You do. 
From her knees, the woman clutches her bicep and begs Minho to lower his weapon. She still wants to have kids someday, she tells him, sobbing. She’s too young to die.
Unaffected, Minho aims at the space between her brows. “Aren’t we all?”
Bang!
Her body drops to the floor like a bag of cement, lifeless. Although the shot still echoes, it’s otherwise dead silent until you whisper, “I’m sorry.”
Stepping to the side to look at you, Minho furrows his brows. “Don’t be. We can’t leave witnesses.”
“I’m sorry that I didn’t do it right,” you clarify, voice wavering but louder than before. “You taught me better than that.”
For a minute, he forgets where he is; loses track of the two people standing on eggshells behind you both. There’s definitely still a corpse lying two meters away, but all he sees in his peripheral vision is proof: You may have chosen this life, but this life hasn’t chosen you.
Despite the bullets and the viscera making a mess of the tile nearby, you’re still the person he met a decade ago — someone with the instincts to do what’s needed but too much heart to be swallowed by them.
He hopes you never change.
“There may be more people that we haven’t accounted for.” Chan’s reminder forces three pairs of eyes to focus on him. He urges, “We need to get this done. Spider, where’s the control room?”
With his gun and without a word, Minho gestures to an office several doors down from where the group currently stands. In giant, black letters, it states, “CONTROL ROOM”. Your answer would be redundant at this point, so you don’t bother giving it. Moreover, Chan can fucking read.
“Oh,” is all the leader says before the group presses onward.
You swipe the badge again when you reach the control room. As was the case with the previous door, this one opens without any theatrics. All four of you slip inside before they close on their own, several moments later.
As soon as he steps foot inside, Jihoon whistles. “Damn.”
Damn is right.
The room feels even larger than the dimensions he saw on the blueprints; and with the forced air flowing from the overhead vent, it’s far less welcoming than Minho expected. Halfway between an operating theater and an airplane, the crisp whiteness of his surroundings seem both sterile and stale. He’d wash the feeling off himself if he could, but he can’t, so his skin continues to crawl.
Consuming the back half of the room, a U-shaped desk boasts multiple monitors, keyboards, and switches. Minho has no fucking clue what any of this equipment is supposed to do — he doesn’t give a shit, either — but he sees your eyes go wide with that childlike wonder he’s always been stupefied by.
Your hands twitch, likely from a desire to touch every surface they can find, so you hold them close to your chest while you look around. After studying all the options at your disposal, you take a seat behind the monitor at the left end of the desk.
Jihoon asks what everyone else is wondering: “Is the main computer not the one in the middle?”
Normally, this is the sort of thing you'd laugh at. You don’t, though; you barely seem to have heard it. Transfixed, you simply mumble something about that computer being hardwired to the server room. Minho doesn’t catch the rest of your explanation, but he hears the words “temperature control” and “ventilation” before concentration makes your voice peter out mid-sentence.
The next few minutes pass by without you noticing. Nobody speaks, nobody breathes too loudly for fear of interrupting your train of thought. That’s not to say it’s silent; far from it. Your rhythmic typing takes over the room, and the effect it has on Minho is borderline hypnotic.
A siren song, sort of.
In response to its call, Minho’s mind picks up and races from the room you’re in — back to the Hub, where this all started; to the countless hours he’s spent just like this, watching you work. As mundane as those moments might be in the grand scheme of things, they’re still his happiest.
Maybe he’d count this moment among them if the Sword of Damocles wasn’t swinging so blatantly overhead.
Out of nowhere, you slam your fist down on the desk, startling everyone else enough to flinch. It’s not just the noise that has Minho, Chan, and Jihoon on high alert; it’s the fact that none of them have ever seen you explode like this.
“Goddamn it!”
Immediately, Minho rushes over to where you’re sitting. His eyes dart from your face to the screen, then back again, finding no obvious answers for your distress. 
“What?” He demands, “What’s wrong?”
Eyes glued to the monitor, you continue to mutter, “No, no, no —“
“Spider, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on, so we can fix it.”
“They fucking —” You smack the desk again, like hitting something will knock your thoughts loose. “Fuck!”
For a second, you let the rage simmer. Then, the defeat you still haven’t articulated settles in. You slump down in your chair with your face in your hands, forcing your breathing to slow. 
“They must’ve added it after the Professor defected. I can’t — It wasn’t referenced anywhere on that datashard, Minho. There was nothing.” 
All your panic is funneled directly into the palms of your gloves, making it difficult to decipher what you’re saying. Minho leans closer just in time to hear you cry, “They built a failsafe.”
Minho is out of his fucking depth. In fact, he’s drowning. 
“A failsafe?” He asks, “What, like a back-up program?”
“No, as in, any attempts to delete or alter the program data will invalidate the study.” 
Based on your phrasing, Minho assumes you’re quoting something directly. Swallowing back the acid rising in his throat, he opens his mouth to ask you what the fuck that means. Before he can hurl his question out, you look up at him with abject hopelessness in your eyes; and suddenly, he can’t speak.
“All of their research subjects will be purged,” you spit.
On the other side of the desk, Chan and Jihoon exchange a look — a grim one, but not one of surprise. They’ve arrived at the conclusion before Minho can leap to it, and they’re still talking without saying a single goddamn thing out loud. 
Minho can’t take it anymore. He shouts, “What the fuck does that mean?”
“If Spider wipes the beta, everyone with that chip goes with it,” Chan sighs. He scrubs his hands over his face until it’s red. “If they don’t drop dead immediately, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that their brains will be permanently and irreparably fucked as a result.”
Now what?
Now what?
Minho’s legs grow less steady by the second. He presses his palm flush against the desktop to keep his knees from buckling. He knows damn well it won’t make a difference; his spinning head will bring him down if his body doesn’t. Everything — including the pulse hammering in his ears — is simultaneously too quiet and too loud.
What the fuck was this all for? The time, the energy, the lives everyone keeps sacrificing to this fucking cause — any of it. 
All of it. 
What’s the point of fighting this hard if Ulsan will always be ten steps ahead?
“Minho!”
His head snaps in your direction only to see that you weren’t the one calling his name. He blinks, confused. Who —?
“Minho, they’re coming! Lim Namseok — terminated yesterday. His badge — it flagged —” 
Scraps’ voice comes shrouded in gunfire. The weak connection makes it even harder to hear her; whatever isn’t exploding is crackling due to the distance. Each word fizzles at the end, as if lit by a fuse.
“— to get out —”
Hand flying to his left ear, Minho presses down the button at the center of his ear piece. “Who’s coming?” He barks, “Scraps, what the fuck is going on?”
When she doesn’t respond, someone else takes over.
“It’s the fucking retention team. A sniper took Eunjae out before any of us even saw them coming,” Hongjoong yells. “They’ve got a unit on the ground and one in the air. I’ll try to shoot the chopper down, but you need to get out of there now.”
“Hongjoong, do as much as you can to tear them up, but don’t push your luck. If you’re outnumbered, fall back before we lose anybody else. Do you copy?”
He doesn’t get a response.
Jihoon moves closer to the door to listen for any incoming footsteps. Hearing none, he growls, “Who the fuck called the boogeymen? Don’t they only deal with defectors?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Chan waves him off, “They’re here, and we need to be anywhere else.”
Despite what he just said, the leader doesn’t move; doesn’t budge a centimeter in any direction. Chan simply glances across the room at you, and when you stare back at him, it’s with the same, eerie calmness. Some quiet resignation that makes no fucking sense under the circumstances.
“If I can’t kill the program entirely, I can make it inoperable long enough for the existing chips to be removed,” you say, like you’ve already had this idea in your pocket. “Force quit, so to speak.”
You don’t elaborate, leaving Minho’s frustration to drive him halfway out of his goddamn mind. Worse, you ignore the way he’s staring so fucking desperately at you and address the person standing several meters behind him. 
“Jihoon, did you bring the party favors?”
In response, Jihoon slips the duffel bag off his shoulder and holds it out to you. Only then do you move. Chan follows behind as you cross towards the door; neither one of you says a thing when you pass Minho, who’s still cemented in place.
“What the fuck are you planning?” He demands, although his voice shakes. “What fucking secrets have you been keeping, and why?” 
Once you secure the duffle bag on your own shoulder, you finally bring yourself to look at him. Above your mask, your eyes soften. They crinkle at the corners, as if you’re smiling, but there are tears brimming at your lash line, threatening to fall.
Please don’t look at me like you don’t have a future.
“For what it’s worth,” you start. Then, you sniffle, breath hitching as you try to get the rest out. “You’ve always had my heart. All of it — every stupid piece.”
And with nothing more than a nod to Jihoon, you’re gone, running out the door with Chan towards the server room before Minho can say a single word to you; before he can even think of chasing after you. 
In the blink of an eye, biceps wrap around him like a vice, pinning his arms behind his back and gripping tighter with every kick he tries to use for leverage.
“Spider!” Minho yells.
He fights with all he has to break free of Jihoon’s hold, to throw one or both of them to the ground, to get to you, but the older man doesn’t bat an eye. As if Minho weighs nothing at all, Jihoon begins hauling him back down the hallway towards the fire exit.
“You’re going the wrong way,” he grunts as he thrashes. “Let me — go —” 
Jihoon doesn’t say a word, doesn’t waste a breath, doesn’t stop pulling. Whatever strength he has left in the reserves, it’s wielded against Minho, not on making apologies. 
Minho bucks again, throwing all the weight from his legs to his back. It does nothing apart from exhaust him, but he can’t stop. He’ll never stop. 
“Spider!”
Close to feral, his anguished shouts devolve to desperate, growling noises. “I swear to god, I’ll bury you for this, Lee —”
He digs his heels into the ground to slow the older man’s momentum. His knees could snap at the force with which he’s resisting. He doesn’t give a shit if they do; he’ll crawl to you if he has to.
“I’ll splatter your brains against the fucking wall when I get my hands on you,” Minho spits. “I’m your commanding fucking officer!”
The next time he kicks, someone grabs him by the ankles to help carry his restless body down the stairs. Felix, judging by that pathetic, apologetic look in his eyes. Minho resolves to kill him, too, when he gets his limbs back. He’ll burn the whole goddamn compound to the ground for standing in his way; for letting you do this.
It should be me.
You’re the best of them, and they’re letting you die. 
It should be me.
They’re going to stand here, watching while you —
A sob he wasn’t prepared for bursts out of his chest in the form of your real name. With it, his threats dissolve into pleas, so goddamn pitiful in comparison to the violent way he still flails.
“Please!” He cries, voice raw. Making himself louder doesn’t make him heard. Incapable of doing anything else, he begs, “Please don’t let her do this. She’s all I have — All I want — Goddamnit, please! I need to get her out of there —”
So useless.
“I have to get her out,” he sobs with one final burst of energy rattling through otherwise spent limbs. 
The arms and hands around him still don’t relent. Over and over, he repeats his only thought in rapid succession until his voice gives out: 
“I have to get her out.”
Two seconds before they drag his body over the threshold, the whole facility shakes, like the earth below has opened up to swallow it down. Even from the opposite side of the building, Minho can hear shattered glass hitting the ground like sheets of rain. With the heavy, black cloud swirling over the southwest section of roof, he might’ve believed in some storm.
He might have.
But now, Minho sees the flames licking at the sky above, and he no longer believes in anything.
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There are 244 kilometers between Cheongju and Changwon. By car, the distance flies by in fewer than three hours, assuming the expressways aren’t clogged with corporate commuters. All things considered, it’s not a trip that disrupts a person’s day. It’s straightforward, and above all, it’s easy.
What isn’t easy is crawling on your stomach underneath a blanket of smoke, only to drag half of someone else’s body weight with you down a flight of stairs.
There’s nothing straightforward about slipping through alleyways and ditches, trying to avoid nearby police blockades as they pop up; or attempting to conceal clothes that are singed in some places and actively smoking in others.
That distance does not fly by in three hours, even though the expressways aren’t clogged, because there’s disruption after disruption: 
Starting on foot, only to steal — and later dump — a car when the walk becomes unbearable. 
Wandering blindly without a working mobile, unable to access assistance or a map, and learning that your best guesses are wrong turns more often than not.
Avoiding phones in general due to the localized surge in cell surveillance, knowing even a coded message could wind up with you and any recipients dead.
Stopping repeatedly with burning lungs to check on someone in far worse shape than you, pretending not to hurt for their sake.
No, the estimates are all fucked. 
It takes twenty-one hours to travel the 244 kilometers between Cheongju and Changwon; and you feel the weight of every single one of them when you hobble through the front doors of the factory just to drop, exhausted, onto the floor.
News of your survival spreads like dandelion seeds throughout the compound. Within minutes, it seems, everyone you’ve ever made eye-contact with swings by the clinic to pat you on the back. 
One of them — Sierra, of all people — does you the greatest kindness of all: bringing you a change of clothes and then refusing to stick around for a chat. 
Half of them have never spoken to you before now, though you try not to hold that fact against them. 
Almost all of them throw the word “brave” around like it’s weightless. 
You know better.
What you did was useless in the grand scheme of things, and knowing that is heavy. Crushing, even, so much so that you find it hard to catch your breath. No, you’re sure, what you did was peak cowardice.
You need to get out of this clinic. You need all of these well-wishers to stop looking at you like some tragic hero. You need —
You push off the cot you’re occupying without giving it a second thought. The lightheadedness threatens to take you right back down again, but the feeling passes as quickly as it comes. You stay on your feet, even though you sway, by sheer force of will.
That’s it. There you go.
Doc gave you a once-over when you were first hauled in. Neither one of you truly felt like you were a priority. She may have been justifiably distracted, but in forming her expert opinion, she saw your bruised — not broken — body and declared you “good enough”. You take that glowing assessment at face value now and promptly discard the bit about “needing to stay for observation”.
Her primary concern is that you shouldn’t sleep with your concussion. Baseless, you think ruefully. You’ve been awake for two days and don’t see that changing any time soon.
Before you attempt to make a break for it, you glance at the far end of the clinic. There, a white screen stretches longways across most of the area for privacy, leaving two exits on either side. You don’t see the point of it; it doesn’t hide a thing. Two work lights shine so brightly from their spots by the wall that every movement in front of them is broadcasted on the thin, nylon divider.
As expected, the shadow puppet you’re looking for is still hovering around an unmoving mass in the center of the screen.
Chan.
He’s alive, even though he doesn’t look it. He’s talking, too, which is a marked improvement from the state he was in just a few hours ago. The morphine drip must be helping, you figure. Until now, he had a belt between his teeth to quell the pain, which would’ve kept him quiet.
Otherwise, there’s only one explanation for the corner he’s turned over the past few hours: The love of his life hasn’t left his side since he was carried into the clinic; and he knows she’s there. 
You’ve learned the hard way that both of those conditions must be met to make a difference. 
One without the other isn’t enough.
You can’t hear what they’re murmuring to each other, and you don’t want to. It’s theirs. Thankfully, their hushed tones give you the only confirmation you need: neither of your pseudo-parents will catch and scold you for leaving against medical advice. They’re oblivious; they’re fine; they have each other. You have —
Do you, though?
The person you want to see is coincidentally the only one in the entire compound that hasn’t come by seeking proof of life.
At first, you feared the worst; ripped your cuticles to shreds when the faces passing by weren’t his. No one mentioned his name or asked you if you’d seen him, as if there was no him left to see.
Then, you saw Jihoon walking around with his cheekbone stitched together. There’s some sick comfort in knowing that Minho at least lived long enough to beat his knuckles bloody. You’ve apologized to Jihoon three times now for the effect you caused, but he’s shrugged off every single one of them, like yesterday was just another day at the office.
Wasn’t it?
You creep out the door undetected and make your way to the nearest stairwell. The quiet throughout the halls in the factory isn’t comforting in the way it used to be. No part of the deeply familiar landscape is. 
It should be.
It’s the only real home you’ve ever known — one you thought for sure you’d never see again.
But every empty doorway you pass may as well have a body in it. You still see that woman and her unspent aspirations everywhere you look. You still hear the way she begged for her life before she lost it.
And when the stairs ahead finally come into view — ones you’ve taken a million times — they’re insurmountable. Your body aches automatically, like you’re still pulling Chan’s phantom weight out of the fire. That memory is muscle-deep now, you fear. There’s no getting rid of it.
At the landing, you force yourself forward. The siren song only you can hear is far stronger than the call of your own bed. It lures you around the corner whether or not you’re ready to follow it.
You aren’t, you realize as your steps continue automatically. The guilt threatens to eat you alive, and frankly, you’re prepared to let it. You deserve it. 
Somehow, despite your bullshit insanity and your numerous violations of trust, you still managed to skate through with a life left to live. Considering what you did, you figure it’s only fair that you pay this price — feel this fucking awful — for the rest of your unearned years.
Maybe. 
You don’t know. 
You’re in uncharted territory now because your plan didn’t include an after. 
As your footsteps draw closer to Minho’s room, it dawns on you that you don’t have a plan at all now. You don’t know what the fuck to say to him, let alone where to start. You wonder whether or not you should bother at all. 
If Minho knows you’re back at the compound, that means he made a choice not to find you. You have no right — none whatsoever — to take away his options a second time.
He’ll never forgive you, you tell yourself. If the roles were reversed, you’d do the same.
Maybe.
You don’t know.
You can’t take those hypotheticals and draw conclusions because Minho has never — would never — put you in the position you stranded him in. He wouldn’t hijack a mission you created or exclude you from a half-baked, shittily-executed contingency plan. He’d never force a friend to make some destructive, deathbed promise; wouldn’t have you dragged out of blast radius, kicking and screaming and fighting and spitting, just to drop you in a front-row seat.
He’s the best of all of you, and you did your absolute worst to him.
It’s selfish, walking up to his door now. You know it is. Despite that, you can’t make your body stop moving now that it’s started; can’t keep that boulder from rolling down hill. One last look, you tell yourself. That’s all you need. 
Even if he never looks you in the eyes again, this can be enough.
You raise your hand and reach out to the scraped-up wood with your knuckles leading the way. They’re dirty, you note, caked with soot in every crease. They shouldn’t be. You scrubbed them raw to get the blood and plasma off your skin. It’s possible — likely, even — that your brain is fried beyond fixing, and that you’re imagining things.
Maybe.
You don’t know.
You don’t hear an answer when you finally bring yourself to knock. No, you correct yourself, that’s an answer in and of itself. Acting selfishly once again, you don’t heed that silent reply. You don’t knock again, either. Heart hammering against your ribs, you wrap your hand around the knob and twist.
Part of you wants to laugh. Of course, his is the only door in the whole fucking factory that doesn’t squeak horrifically on its hinges. His tolerance level for annoyance has always been low.
Inching your way over the threshold, you call out, “Minho?” 
And once again, you don’t hear a response.
Standing now inside his room, you don’t see him — not at first. He certainly doesn’t see you. His back leans against the window frame while he slumps on the ledge, presumably staring off in the opposite direction through the glass. His defeated posture is as telling as the position he’s in. 
The Minho you know never sits with his back to a door. It’s too big a risk and too broad a target; an invitation for a nasty surprise. He’s said it a thousand times: whoever kills him needs to look him in the eyes.
This is what it looks like when a person’s given up, you think. 
This is what you did.
Throat thick, you call his name again. This time around, it barely qualifies as a whisper; all your breath is caught up in that tangle in your chest. There’s no way he heard it because you barely did. Really, you should —
“Fuck off,” Minho growls without turning around. “I won’t tell you a third time.”
His words don’t carry the same venom they usually do in circumstances like this. He just sounds hollow, and it devastates you so completely to hear the emptiness that tears start falling without your permission. You don’t move from where you stand, too overwhelmed to process both ambulation and falling apart at the seams.
The lack of footsteps tips him off to your ongoing, unwanted presence.
“When will you people give up? ” After slamming his left fist against the window frame, he pushes himself abruptly off the ledge to his feet. “I don’t want your goddamn sympathy. All I’ve ever fucking wanted is —” 
He wheels around then, fists clenched and ready to swing. All the air in his lungs leaves him when he sees you standing there. The rest of that thought is strangled, and it drops lifeless on the floor.
“You.”
You can’t guess what comes next: screaming, blame, silence, violence. You don’t even know which of those things would be worst — just that he’s entitled to all of the above, and you’ve earned the lot.
What you end up with isn’t an outcome you ever would’ve anticipated. It’s him, his quivering mouth, and his exhausted, red-rimmed eyes taking several steps forward on shaky legs. It’s a desperate bid to close the distance, and a look built on so many conflicting emotions that you can’t even begin to take inventory.
At first, your hammering heart tells you to back away; that he may hate you enough to hurt you. 
But he doesn’t.
He falls to his knees in front of you when his legs ultimately give out. Boneless, he crumples forward onto his palms until his head hangs low between his arms. From where you’re standing, it almost looks like he’s praying. That is, until you notice the way his shoulders shake.
Of all the people you’ve met in your life, Minho is the only one who seemed to be incapable of crying. Nausea swells now that he proves you wrong. It feels like a violation to see him this way, especially knowing that you’re the reason for the state he’s in.
Through a clenched jaw, he begs for answers you didn’t anticipate needing to give: 
“I’m hallucinating, aren’t I? I’ve finally lost my fucking mind?”
Oh.
Without a second thought, you fall to your knees, too. Chrome and carbon fiber scrape against concrete as you scoot yourself closer, and you pray that your proximity will be proof enough that you’re here.
It’s not.
“I left you for dead, and now I’m seeing ghosts. Is that it?”
Heartbroken, you try your best to get through, “Minho, no.”
Tentatively, you reach out to touch his shoulder, thinking that you might be able to ground him, even if you can’t comfort him. Before your fingertips find him, he senses your movement and lifts his head. Your hands automatically reroute to claim either side of his face, fingers sliding into unkempt hair. To your surprise, he doesn’t pull away. Instead, Minho studies your features intently, like he’s ruling out translucence; like his sanity is on the line.
Maybe it is.
More desperately than you ever have before, you drink down the sight of him. Beautiful, you think, even like this. 
Now that you’re able to see his face in full, you find it tear-streaked. Somehow less alarmingly, his right temple is scraped to hell and back, while his left is black-and-blue. It’s a perfect portrait of the fist that struck him. The darkest shades of indigo demarcate where the knuckles dug in deepest; and the scabbed, scarlet lines on his other side illustrate the state of the ground he fell to.
Gravel.
You have to stop yourself from asking who hurt him. After all, it doesn’t fucking matter whose name he’d drop. You already know who’s to blame. 
Nevertheless, Minho sees the question in your eyes, and he tells you, “I tried to run in after you once the bomb went off. After the fire started.”
Of course he did. What did you expect?
“I’m sorry,” you whisper, as if that’ll ever be enough. It doesn’t and won’t erase what you did, yet you repeat it anyway, “I’m so sorry.”
Opening your mouth was a mistake, you quickly realize. The dam breaks, and you can’t keep the words from spilling out. They all pile up, overlapping in time and urgency. 
Every word you say comes out in one breath; sputtered, as if your head has finally broken through the surface of rushing water. “I should’ve told you about the contingency plan, but I knew you’d try to take my place, and I couldn’t —”
“I couldn’t leave you there,” he swears, as if you left him with any other choice. “Even if I was too late to save you, I needed to bring you home.” 
Minho suddenly shifts, prompting your hands to fall from his face. To erase the distance he’s created, he sits back on his knees and pulls you into the space between them. You melt into his body when his arms wrap around you. Just as easily, you give in to the thousandth conflicting reason you’ve found to cry:
He’s never held you like this before.
With his cheek pressed to the side of your bowed head, you can feel his runaway tears. Though his voice wavers, his intentions are rock solid. “I fought like hell to get back to you. They had to knock me out just to get me into the fucking van. I didn’t want to leave you. I swear, I wouldn’t —”
“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t stop the rollout,” you cry. “Keeping you in the dark was the only way to keep you safe.” You bury your face into the front of his shirt and repeat it even more emphatically, “Minho, I’m so fucking sorry.”
For a moment, he stays quiet. As curious as you are about his silence, you don’t pull away to look up at him. You think you’d rather actually die than sacrifice a single second of the closeness you walked through hell and back to find.
Eventually, without prompting, Minho does speak. His voice is so soft that his question hardly reaches you. “Why did you do it?”
You pause, unsure of which part of your explanation he wants repeated. If he’s truly asking you to start over from the top, you will. You’re prepared to rake yourself over those coals forever, but you doubt he has the time. 
“In the control room,” he explains when you don’t arrive at the point yourself. “You told me that you love me, and then you ran off to blow yourself up. Why did you leave without letting me respond?”
Once again, you’re thrown; so disoriented that you can’t find the starting line. There were several reasons for running out the way you did: fear that he’d stop you if he caught on too quickly, or that he’d follow before Jihoon could drag him to safety. More than anything, as you sheepishly admit, “I didn’t think you’d say it back.”
He goes silent again. His arms pull you even closer, though you didn’t think it was possible. 
“I think Medusa had it easy,” he confesses, sounding almost self-conscious for the first time in his life. 
Though you’re caught off-guard, you don’t interrupt him. 
He hesitates for a moment, then adds, “I think my curse has it all backwards. I turn to stone when people look at me, not the other way around.”
At this, you finally unearth your face from where it’s buried in his t-shirt. His body goes slightly slack without your frame to hold him up; the look on his face is just as deflated. 
Turning in your spot to face him, you frown, but you tell him the truth. “I’m not as good at reading you as I thought I was.”
“Say it again.” 
You blink.
Minho lifts his hand and cups your cheek. “Please,” he begs, thumb brushing over your skin. “Say it again, so I can get it right this time.”
You lean into his palm, allowing the warmth of it to radiate until you feel it everywhere — feel him everywhere. From there, as is always the case, the reflex takes over. “I love you. I think I always have.”
“I love you,” Minho echoes emphatically. “And unfortunately for you, I think I always will.”
It strikes like a pickaxe, sending cracks through a well-built wall. You swear you can hear the pieces of it falling. If you look closely, you can see the light as it rushes in.
There you are, you think. I knew you were in there somewhere.
He kisses you then, scrambling your brain so thoroughly that you almost forget it’s the first time he ever has. But he’s no stranger to you, and he proves it. Calloused hands maneuver you into his lap without resistance, without interruption, and lean arms snake around you as you straddle him, pinning you against his chest.
In an instant, you thread your fingers through his hair, hellbent on clinging to whatever parts of him you can get your hands on. That desperate grip of yours has always made him lose his mind; tonight isn’t any different. He groans into your mouth when you tug those strands now, proving that you’re no stranger, either.
His tongue flicks over your bottom lip, like he’s scratching at the door to be let in. You let him, let out some needy, mewling sound as he licks into your mouth to claim it.
Yours, you think. Yours, yours, yours.
When he unexpectedly pulls away from you, those little whines of yours only get louder. Kiss-bitten, Minho’s lips flatten into a thin line that indicates he’s fighting off a smile. 
“Spider, I know vulnerability is your thing,” he sighs. His left hand releases its hold on the bottom of your thigh. With it, he gestures to the other side of the room. “But did you mean to leave the door open for this?”
Whipping your head around, you confirm that you did not, in fact, close the door behind you. Heat rises to your face before you can stop it. No matter how thoroughly you rack your brain, you come up short. There’s no excuse— not even a bad one — for a cybersecurity expert being this abysmally accessible offline.
You’re in the middle of questioning your qualifications for the role you occupy when Minho gently pats the side of your leg, wordlessly asking you to leave his lap. With great difficulty and a dash of awkwardness, you do. Just as soon as you’re back on your feet, your body riots. All the exhaustion and soreness you’ve been ignoring screams for acknowledgement.
Minho must hear it. 
“Bed,” he murmurs, punctuating his instruction with a quick kiss to your temple.
Also a first, you note. 
Despite your long history of entanglements, you’ve never once ended up in his sheets. Your heart flutters involuntarily at the prospect; the fever-grade burning in your cheeks only gets worse. Thankfully, with his back now turned to you, Minho doesn’t see how eagerly you stagger towards the stolen bed frame in the corner. You hope he doesn’t hear the relieved moan you let out when you collapse in an aching heap on his mattress.
Across the room, the lock clicks. Footsteps follow so quietly that you would’ve missed them if you didn’t have his gait committed to memory. The person walking back to you looks unfamiliar, though — somehow. There’s no trademark sharpness at the edges now. There’s no want darkening his eyes, but something delicate that softens them.
It’s need, you realize when he comes to drape himself over you. It’s gentle, the way he compensates for your strained muscles and takes it upon himself to shed your clothes, layer by layer. And it’s trust, finally letting him see the way you exist on your own — with your artificial leg removed from the equation and set carefully off to the side.
After positioning himself between your thighs, Minho pauses. His forearms rest on either side of your head, caging you in against the pillow below. Time doesn’t seem to pass while he gazes down at you, and you certainly don’t mind the delay. Of all your moments, this one — here, with him —  is your happiest.
“In case it doesn’t go without saying,” he murmurs, nudging the tip of his nose against yours. “I forgive you for doing what you had to do.”
Blinking quickly doesn’t do much to dispel the tears prickling in the corners of your eyes. You bite your bottom lip and nod to the extent that you can. “Thank you,” you whisper.
“Do me a favor, though?”
“Anything.”
“Kiss me,” he requests, and you do.
When your mouth is finally on his, he rolls his hips forward with deliberate precision, length sliding through your arousal until he enters you, groaning. He maintains that slow, careful pace; coaxes you open for him until the stretch melts from pain to pleasure.
Eloquent as ever, you mewl with your lips still pressed to his. It’s muffled, of course, but there’s no context to miss. “Oh, my god.”
Once you acclimate to his size, Minho could ramp up the intensity if he wanted to. He doesn’t. He takes his time, grinds against you so perfectly that you’d never dream of rushing through this. 
At this pace, every stroke hits deeper than the last; each languid drag of his cock along your walls converts more and more of your thoughts to static.
It’s such a change-up from every other time you’ve wound up underneath him. Part of you wishes that you could scrap all those trysts and pretend that this is your first. In a way, you suppose, it is. There’s a drastic difference between being fucked by Minho and being loved by him. For obvious reasons, you don’t plan on going back to the way it was before.
His length grazes your g-spot, pulling a whimper out of you. Dizzy from the sensation, you don’t notice the way your cunt clenches down on him until he curses under his breath.
“Shit,” he moans, “Wish you knew how perfect you feel wrapped around me. I swear, I’m not leaving this bed as long as you’re in it.”
Another stroke hits you exactly where you crave him most. 
“Please,” you gasp, back arching off the bed. He leans in to capitalize on the length of neck you’ve left exposed; the heat of his tongue on your flesh drives you absolutely insane. “R-right there, Minho. Please, I’m so close.”
Other people have described Minho as defiant, but you have to disagree. He does precisely what you beg of him, angling each thrust to get you gushing around him. And even after he has you shaking underneath him, he refuses to slack off.
The orgasm he pulls from you is so overwhelming that you feel it tingling in your scalp, resonating down your spine until every nerve in your body is a live wire. You’re still somewhere in the stratosphere when Minho unravels, twitching and spilling inside of you until he’s got nothing left to give.
Spent, he pulls out of your heat, maneuvers himself carefully around you, and collapses at your side to catch his breath.
His eyes are closed when you regain enough motor function to turn your head his way. Across his forehead, stray strands of black hair stick to a thin veil of sweat. The slow rise and fall of his chest says he’s halfway to sleep, and with how hypnotic you find it all, you’re nearly there yourself.
Just a few more minutes, you tell yourself. It’s too hard to look away from him. You’d never had the chance to see him this way before, and you know better now than to waste it. 
“Please don’t ever stop looking at me like that,” he mumbles with his eyes still closed.
Your quiet laughter doesn’t prompt him to look at you, but it does spark the hint of a smile. “Like what, Minho?”
“Like I’m your future.”
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while likes are appreciated, comments/tags/reblogs with your thoughts are really what make my brain go brrrtt.
series taglist:
@saintriots, @mal-lunar-28, @dabiscrustyfeet @ldysmfrst @obeythemasters @moni-logue
stray kids permanent taglist:
@variety-is-the-joy-of-life @sourkimchi
multi permanent taglist:
@jihopesjoint @bahng-chrizz, @/variety-is-the-joy-of-life
resources used
regarding prosthetic limbs: tiktok users @/bren_hucks @/footlessjo @/alex1leg @/bionickick; amputee coalition regarding hacking + world-building: gurps: cyberpunk guidebook by loyd blankenship
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talesfrommedinastation · 1 year ago
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My redneck neighbor Doug on 'Tribe'
When not turning his home into a giant light hazard for Jesus's Birthday or getting into yelling fights in the alley with Bobby Lee (another redneck neighbor who is a DIE HARD 'Bama fan) about SEC football, Doug's been randomly texting me things about the Jedi.
I'll update y'all on that soon enough. (Plo Koon = Sexy Shrimp Daddy?!)
Meanwhile, here is his review of his favorite episode of Season 2 of The Bad Batch...TRIBE, or as Doug calls it 'Chewbacca Junior and the Weed Business'.
Yes, a random fetch quest one in which Clone Force 99 helps out a random Wookiee kid. His favorite. Don't ask.
Need a Doug refresher? Check it out under Doug Talks Star Wars here.
TW: Doug Doug's as is his Doug-like wont. Hold onto your butts. A little calmer since Daddy Warcrimes is MIA in this one.
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So we got Daddy Rambo and the gang making counterfeit licenses for underage drinkers or whatever. You gotta do what you gotta do, I guess, and Daddy Rambo will do a lot of things, but obtaining gainful employment ain’t one of them. 
Ryan-from-Accounting is smug as hell about his counterfeiting operation. You’re so smart, Ryan-from-Accounting, why don’t you go to law school and start practicing corporate licensing? At least you can get equity there, ya dingaling.
And Little Orphan Blondie runs away because she’s embarrassed to be seen around them. I get it, kid.
Woah, it’s Chewbacca Junior! Are the lizard and robot people trying to sell him to the circus or something? Oh, he’s a Jedi?! When did this happen, this is awesome! I loved Chewbacca! I love Wookiees! AWESOME!!!
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And Little Orphan Blondie is protecting him, go Little Orphan Blondie, go! 
I hope they adopt Chewbacca Junior and get him a collar and a nice bed on the floor of the HMS Search Warrant. They need a pet. Little Orphan Blondie can brush him and put bows in his hair! Do you think he uses a litter box?
They’re taking him home, and look! Little Orphan Blondie is giving him her Lunchables. I’m proud of the Dad Batch, they’re teaching Little Orphan Blondie good morals. Oh, poor wee Chewbacca Junior, he has no family and when he talks it sounds like Jimmers when he’s treed a squirrel*.
But Ryan-from-Accounting can understand him! Ya know, I wonder if his helmet can translate Bitch and that’s how Ryan-from-Accounting talks to his Bitch Wife Laura. 
It would be awesome if they adopt Chewbacca Junior and he attacks people with his lightsaber. He’s like a pet version of an MR-15! Imagine the DAMAGE his furry ass would do on the battlefield! 
Ooh, they made it to Wookieeland! Ya know, it always reminded me of where Jenny and I used to camp in northern California. I wonder if there’s a brewery nearby? I bet Toaster Strudel needs to throw back, that man needs a beer and a restraining order from Daddy Rambo. 
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Oh SHIT, looks like the bugs from Klendathu made their way down to Wookieeland. Somebody call the Starship Troopers! Oh, wait, they can talk to those things like Dougie Houser did? Woah. Neat. 
Looks like the Empire found the Wookiee weed farm and torched it. Poor Wookiees, they’re just trying to make an honest living growing herb. Leave ‘em alone!
Which planet makes meth, my money’s on Tatooine, it looks like New Mexico and that place is meth Disneyland, there was a whole TV show about it. 
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(Above is...Tatooine?! - Dr Meat Muffin)
Oh man it’s Houma-BBQ-Bitch’s shitty brothers and they’re burning the whole weed operation to the ground. Guess they work for the DEA.
Kick their asses, Wookiees! Now they want Chewbacca Junior, but the Dad Batch is saying FUCK YOU! 
Go Dad Batch go! Fire ‘em up! Destroy the tanks! GO JULIO GO! It’s like Apocalypse Now with Bigfoot!
More Wookiees! And they’re riding giant monkey-cats! AWESOME. Man, I feel stoned just watching this episode. Why can't I stop giggling.
Granny Wookiee says come on in and have some weed! Oh, shit, are they doing ayahuasca? Toaster Strudel ain’t having it, but Julio’s down. Julio’s down for anything, he’s probably gonna stick around, use his pipe laying skills, and get some free ganga out of the deal. Man, we all need a Julio in our life. Love him. 
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Oh, poor Chewbacca Junior can’t find a home. Come on, Granny Wookiee, just let him crash with you guys! He can clip weed on the side, he’s got that lightsaber, let ‘em have it. But first, let’s talk to the trees! Did they take mushrooms before this scene, Jesus Christ this really does take place in Humboldt County, doesn’t it.
Ah, nevermind, the gators that run the DEA are here. With Stormtroopers. Oh shit, are the gators wearing Wookiee pelts while fighting Wookiees? That’s some Silence of the Lambs shit right there.
Welp, time for fire fights, Smokey the Bear does not approve of this episode, especially as one of the lizard men chases Chewbacca Junior and Little Orphan Blondie into the woods with a flamethrower. 
Oh shit, there are the bugs! Shit, am I actually cheering on the bugs from Starship Troopers? What is going on here, I’m so confused. Whelp, they’re eating Houma-BBQ-Bitch’s brother, good for them.
Back to Granny Wookiee’s Pot Palace, where Toaster Strudel and Julio throw back her questionable moonshine and smile at each other. If they end up with Wookiee girlfriends, it will be weird, but I will be happy for them. 
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And Little Orphan Blondie and Chewbacca Junior are talking to the trees, again. Just watching this episode makes me wanna go back to Electric Forest. Except I don’t think Oceana County has wookiees, but it does have crazy people in the woods I guess. 
*=Jimmers is Doug’s extremely handsome poodle mix dog. His full name is Jimmers Jimothy Jimerson III and they found him as a stray when he was eating trash behind a bowling alley in Nacogdoches. 
Where my Doug fans at? @amalthiaph @eyecandyeoz @merkitty49 @sued134 are the biggest, but let me know if ya wanna be tagged in the next installment!
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witch-craft-works · 17 days ago
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My complicated feelings towards Glitter Force
(Remember this is all my opinion please don't attack me)
So I wanted to talk about Glitter force a bit because I have a bit of a love hate relationship with it. So now that Glitter Force has been removed from Netflix and with absolutely no plans of renewing it at least at the time of this post I thought it was a good time to talk about it.
So lets go back in time to 2016. It was a dark and stormy night I was fresh into middle school I had transferred out of my shitty Catholic Elementary School and started public middle school.
I was bullied relentlessly in elementary school so I wasn't in a good headspace at the time.
Anyways I was mindlessly scrolling through Netflix when I came across Glitter Force, during this time I had gotten into Sailor moon and it looked similar so I clicked on it and watched the first few episodes.
I thought it was pretty good at the time and binged the whole season. Anyways because of that I would watch glitter force related videos on YouTube and then I came across an AMV (yes I was that kid😂) of New Stage I recognized Happy and Peace on the thumbnail next to two other girls (Melody and I think Muse) and wondered who they were as the title of the video was in Japanese, so I clicked on it and oh my God my little 11 year old mind was blown. It was awesome! and I wanted more of that content and I wanted to know more about the other girls. The I came across Azen Zone's reviews and fell in love with the franchise.
Anyways I didn't actually get to watch a pretty cure season in subs until I think Huggto on one of those free streaming sites and came across the Smile sub and Dear God was it leagues above Glitter Force because the dub was dog water compared to the original. And I was surprised that they had left a good amount of episodes out of the dub as well.
So I'm going to get into the gripes I have with GF/Doki Doki. In no way am I blaming the dub cast as I'm sure they had to work with what they were given but looking at the cast. GF and Doki Doki was stacked with really good actors.
The Cast:
Glitter Force:
Laura Bailey who played Cure Happy/Glitter Lucky
Colleen O'Shaughnessey played Cure Sunny/Glitter Sunny
Alex Cazares played Cure Peace/Glitter Peace
Danielle Judovits played Cure March/Glitter Spring
Kate Higgens played Cure Beauty/Glitter Breeze
Debi Derryberry played Candy
Todd Haberkorn played Pop
Mary Elizabeth McGlynn played Royal Queen/Queen Euphoria and Majorina/Brooha
Keith Silverstein played Wolfurun/Ulric Akaoni/Brute and Joker/Rascal
Glitter Force Doki Doki
Debi Derryberry played Cure Heart/Glitter Heart
Cassandra Lee Morris played Cure Diamond/Glitter Diamond
Melissa Fahn played Cure Rosetta/Glitter Clover
Stephanie Sheh played Cure Sword/Glitter Sword and Raquel
Erica Lindbeck played Cure Ace/Glitter Ace and Dabyi/Davi
Tara Sands played Sharuru/Kippy
Bryce Papenbrook played Lance
Ray Chase played Bel
Benjamin Disqen Ira
Carrie Keranen played Marmo
Cherami Leigh played Regina
Grant George played Joe Okada
Kirk Thornton played Sebastian
So the acting I don't mind at times, the name changes, don't mind that either, Pokemon was known for doing this back then all the way up until Ash's exit from the anime. There were also times where the scene would darken the mostly happened when the girls used their attacks I can see them doing this because they didn't want to cause any health risks and cause seizures so it didn't bother me too much. So what's the issue then?
One of the biggest issues I had when it came to Glitter force after watching the original was how much they changed. They removed a lot of episodes. For example Smile had 48 episodes and Glitter force removed 8 while Doki Doki had 49 episodes and Glitter force removed 19 episodes and even combined some of the episodes which kind of made them clunky. The episodes removed were the ones focused on culture and I guess you can use the excuse it by saying that they removed it so that they wouldn't confused kids but thats still a pretty bad excuse they also changed it so that Glitter force took place in the United States and that just seems a bit silly to me.
They also removed the episode about Yayoi's dad and understanding why she was named Yayoi which is concidered one of the best episodes in the season and I've seen some people say that it's one of the best in the francise. Another thing that annoyed me was that they removed the episode where Brian a student exchange student from America transfered into their class, this episode was about a language barrier between him and Akane so I can see why they didn't want to dub it but they end up still mentioning him in a later episode so if they didn't want to confuse the audiance they failed. I mean what they could have done is have him speak in a diffrent language and say he came from i don't know Spain instead of America. They did this in the Tokyo Mew mew dub but I digress.
They also removed the episode where the girls go and visit Miyuki's grandma which I don't really understand why. Another thing I did not like was the fact they seemed to try and remove any scene where the Cures are sad or tone it down unless there was no way to cut it out they even tried to make those scenes comedic as well which is just, Why? (Minor spoilers for Smile Precure) For example in the final episode of the season the girls they have to say goodbye to Candy and Pop as they have to go back to Marchland. In the original once they saw that Candy had already disapeared thats when they broke down crying.
Another thing that kind of bothered me as well as alot of other people is that the acting felt, flat at times. One of the most brought up scenes is when Majorina almost killed Nao's siblings when you compare both scenes it's just really jarring to watch. They even added voice lines that weren't in the original. I think the people handling the dub just didn't want to upset/scare kids or make their parents upset so they tried to tone down/cut the darker moments out of the show. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing but kids can still enjoy a show even if theres darker moments.
I was also told that Glitter Force was homophobic but I never really understood where that came from. Maybe I just missed it? Idk
While Pretty Cure is about friendship and teamwork Smile was trying to show kids that you shouldn't give up and that sad things happen in life. This was because the year before japan suffered a really bad earthquake/tsunami which resulted in the deaths of Thousands of people. Smile Pretty Cure was made in order to comfort people who lost their homes or their loved ones. Glitter force while theres nothing wrong with this the producers seemed to be trying to push the message of friendship, teamwork while kind of neglecting the message of not giving up hope and I've seen alot of people think it's disrespectful concidering the circumstances and what led to Smile's creation
Anyways for as much as I criticize Glitter force and Glitter Force Doki Doki I have to admit that theres a chance without it I never would have discovered Pretty Cure as early as I did. And if you look at my blog you can tell I really love this franchise. And while it's kind of sad to see it go I think it's best that the trademark can finally rest after being in limbo for so long.
Would have been interesting to see what they did with the all stars movies tho
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ronaldreaganfan · 6 months ago
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Reagan Reviews #1 -The Killers (1964)
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i watched this movie a few months ago and honestly it was VERY confusing and,, not that good. basically the synopsis is (MAJOR SPOILERS): these two hit men (the killers i guess) kill this guy, but he wasn’t very resistant? and that was weird to them. so they go figure out a little mystery!
there’s a lot of flashback segments about this race car driver and ronald reagan’s girlfriend who i guess he’s letting get with other guys or whatever. reagan’s about to do a heist but (here’s the best part) his character cannot drive for shit!!! so angie’s like “hey my new boyfriend can actually drive why don’t we get him to help.”
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so they hire him for this whole elaborate heist where they trick a van carrying money to take a detour down this shitty road, pretend to be police (i think?? idk) and pull the van over, they beat them up or shoot them and take money.
they do all this and of course the race car driver steals all the money and pushes reagan out of a car and he rolls down a hill LOL. ronnie and angie find him and get the money back (and presumably put a hit on him??? who knows). the killers track them down (i guess they really wanted the money?) and (REALLY BIG SPOILERS) they literally just all die at the end.
it’s a remake of a movie that people actually like which is based on a hemingway short story. it made about $9,000 worldwide and coincidently came out the same year reagan decided to go into politics!
(i think i read that he gave up acting because he didn’t like playing the villain in that movie, but once i watch the santa fe trail i don’t think that’ll make much sense)
anyways, ratings!
acting - i’m not that good at judging acting, let’s just say like 8/10
plot - very confusing. a lot of flashbacks. for an action/mystery/heist it had a lot of fluff and a lot of VERY LONG race car scenes. 4/10
reagan - honestly i prefer his silly/more comic relief characters, but i think for his older self it was a good role. he has a lot of creepy shots and slaps angie in the face before absolutely getting his shit rocked. also he roles down the hill which is incredible. because i have a frame of reference for his other characters, 7/10
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cinematography - pretty good! it has a lot of cool shots, again several long ass driving scenes. i think maybe the race car blows up at some point? johnny is GOING THROUGH IT. but yea 9/10
ending - pretty lame "they all die at the end." i didn't understand what happened but maybe that's just me. like 2/10 for lady i don't have the time.
overall - 6/10 decent movie, nothing to write home about. reaganomics music video was better.
where to watch? right here ^_^ https://ok.ru/video/2871101557400 (ty @/dc-follies)
till next time 🫡
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write143 · 1 year ago
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✨Reading Master List (PART ONE)
Here's a masterlist of what I have read and/or am reading on AO3! Currently everything I'm reading is primarily SKZ fics (some have referenced TxT or ATEEZ and it's cute) but I'm generally just reading to read and learn what people are writing/passionate about. It's honestly enlightening, in a good way (most times). Reviews are below the cut. ♥
You can find change notes in the QRTs, where I list if anything was added, removed, edited, etc.
Also apparently this post got SO LARGE that I now have to break it up into pieces...will likely make a Google Doc of the Other Finished Fics section.
Number of fics I've finished reading: 114
my ao3: think143 🔖 - unfinished work 📗 - completed work 📖 - currently reading/tracking
My Favorite (Finished) Fics
(In order of completion, not best/worst or anything like that)
hands-on learning 💖 (E) 25.2k Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - College/University, Porn with Feelings, Friends to Lovers My Notes: I thought I would have more to say about this one but it's just really really good. A nice quick nighttime read before bed. There's just something about the ones with "feelings revelation" that make me sooooo happy. And yes, all of the smut is *chef's kiss*.
MFA (Most Fuckable Ass) 💖 (E) 53.2k Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: Teacher-Student Relationship, Professor Lee Minho, Student Han Jisung, Slow Burn, Daddy Kink My Notes: I burned through this fic in an evening and I am fanning myself like a Southern woman in the heat of summer on her front porch. So incredibly well-written, and I've found a fic author that I'll be following closely for a long time.
don't leave me tongue-tied 💖 (E) 57.5k Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - College/University, Friends to Lovers, Friends With Benefits, Porn with Feelings, Light Angst, Denial of Feelings, Emotional Slow Burn, Misunderstandings, Fluff My Notes: This was honestly really endearing to read and see actual feelings come to light. Author commented to say that it's based on a manga called "My Quiet Best Friend's Just Tongue-Tied", but without the dub-con elements. Well-written and reads easily; comical when it needs to be!
Haebang 💖 (E) 193.6k Relationship(s): Stray Kids Ensemble/Stray Kids Ensemble Notable Tags: Fluff, Smut, Porn With Plot, Sex Work, Dom/sub Undertones, Daddy Kink, Explicit Consent, Subspace, Porn with Feelings, BDSM, Polyamory, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort, Possessive Behavior, Feelings Realization, Safewords My Notes: Okay, hear me out; there is a LOT going on in this fic. A lot. The point of the Haebang retreat is that each member specializes in helping you find liberation with one aspect of sex; be it intimacy, dom/sub, etc, and each chapter follows each member at the start before things start to get a bit more involved. However, any time I try to word why I like this fic so much, I simply cannot. Also Seungmin is a nerd and we love him for it.
instinct 💖 (E) 53.4k Relationship(s): Bang Chan/Reader Notable Tags: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Alternate Universe - College/University, Light Dom/sub My Notes:This was the first ABO fic I read and it makes every other one I've read after it pale in comparison. I love how the author describes what's going on in the reader's head without over-explaining or spoon feeding it to us. The relationship between Reader and Chan, plus all of the other housemates, is so so so good.
come on home 💖 (E) 206.7k Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: Angst, Smut, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, Violence, Strippers & Strip Clubs, Denial of Feelings, Referenced Homophobia, Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Feelings Realization, POV Alternating, Gangs, Guns, Shitty Exes My Notes: The guns are there for a split second, but this fic is very centered on a incredibly difficult to read domestic abuse situation, and the liberation from said relationship. There's also the orientation realization of another character, but that instills a lot of angst and fear of loss while reading. However, the fic is still incredible, a powerful read, and definitely on the recommended list.
Wannabe Poet 💖 (E) 134.2k Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: Bad Poems, Bullied Han Jisung, Friends with Benefits, Loss of Virginity, Exhibitionism, Smut, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Sexual Assault. My Notes: I'm all about found family and I feel like this fic really hit the nail on the head for it. I loved the concept of this fic from the beginning. Han texts a bad poem to a random number and makes a friend in Minho. Most of this fic seems centered on Han becoming comfortable with his true self and what he wants, not what his family wants for him. I really love the love that he finds not only in Minho, but in everyone around him. ♥
Five Stars 💔 but 💖 (E) 420.7k Relationship(s): Hwang Hyunjin/Yang Jeongin, Han Jisung/Lee Minho, Lee Felix/Seo Changbin, Bang Chan/Lee Minho Notable Tags: MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH, GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE, DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT, Cannibalism, Dismemberment, Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Emotional Manipulation, Some Fluff, Explicit Sexual Content, Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Grooming, Murder, Mutual Pining, Minor Choi San/Jung Wooyoung, Implied/Referenced Suicide My Notes: I have to stress so so so so much that the writing on this fic is one of the best I've ever read. HOWEVER, it's also one of the most fucked up pieces of fiction I've ever read. Mental health issues are at the center of this bloody, sexy, kinky fic. It would truly be a horror movie if it were put onto screen. Please please please make sure to read ALL OF THE TAGS on this fic before deciding whether to read it or not. I had to take frequent breaks but it was difficult to make myself look away because I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I have never screamed so much at a fic before in my life. I cried at least six times and four of those were in the last 50k words.
Heart Song 💖 (E) 63.1k Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho, Bang Chan/Lee Felix, Hwang Hyunjin/Seo Changbin, Kim Seungmin/Yang Jeongin Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst with a Happy Ending, Physical Disability My Notes: I just...I cried so much during this fic. In this universe, soulmates are identified by a dream that people have on the night of their 16th birthday. They dream about a significant memory from their soulmate's life, and when they awaken, their soulmate's first impression appears on their body written in their handwriting. The only problem is that...Han Jisung is blind, so he has never seen anything. Lee Minho leads his whole life thinking that he doesn't have a soulmate, because he saw nothing in his dream. I LOVE the author's storytelling style, the way they use angst in believable ways, and the way that they bring the characters together.
Speak With Your Eyes 💖 (E) 164k Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - Space, Hybrids, Androids, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Space Corps, Miscommunication, Slow Burn, ONLY ONE BED, Found Family, Smut My Notes: A ROMANCE IN SPACE?! Lee Know is an android hybrid, and unfortunately this universe has a lot of not very nice things that are in place regarding people who are not fully human. Lee Know saves Han's life, then Han saves Lee Know's life, then Lee Know saves Han's life again...you get the picture. It's incredibly well-written, a lovely drop into a different setting than I'm used to, and devourable in a day. Will be following this author for a while!
so sweet like chocolate 💖 (T) 71.7k Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: Alternate Universe - College/University, Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, Fluff My Notes: I cannot stop gushing about this fic. The mutual pining is written incredibly addictingly and just aaaagh! Lee Know is a librarian, Jisung is a student who has never visited the library before, Jisung may have accidently thrown a pencil at Lee Know...it all becomes very fluffy at just the right pace. I read this so quickly and when it was over, and the author's note popped up saying "and that's the end!" I had to check the % progress on my kindle. I would devour any further stories written about this story, but I am also okay with how it ended, and imagining what happens next.
The Curse of Saturdays (T) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
opposites attract (E) Relationship(s): Bang Chan/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
chances taken (E) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
Let Your Love Walk In (E) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
LMCat_98 has joined the chat (E) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
i need you now, but i don't know you yet (M) Relationship(s): SKZ Ensemble/SKZ Ensemble Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
he ain't heavy, he's ours (M) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/SKZ Ensemble Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
A Beautiful Mess (E) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
strawberry chapstick (E) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
Promises to keep, we won't ever need Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
Loves Me, Loves Me Not Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
After Lust Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
abode of the saints Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Hwang Hyunjin Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
why did we ever meet Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho, Hwang Hyunjin/Lee Minho, Hwang Hyunjin/Lee Felix Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
Lonely Street Relationship(s): Lee Felix/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
break in case of emergency Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
Finger Lickin' Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
Poles Apart Relationship(s): Bang Chan/Hwang Hyunjin, Lee Felix/Seo Changbin, Han Jisung/Lee Minho, Han Jisung/Hwang Hyunjin/Lee Felix Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
boys, biology, and other inconveniences Relationship(s): Lee Minho/Yang Jeongin Notable Tags: TBA My Notes: TBA
To Be Read/Reading List
Charmer 📖🔖 (E) Relationship(s): Stray Kids Ensemble/Reader
Quaver and Storm 📖🔖 (E) Notable Tags: SKZ Member/Reader, Dom/Sub, Fluff, Smut, Polyamory, Non-con elements
Leap of Faith 📖🔖 (M) Relationship(s): Stray Kids Ensemble/Reader
Kerosene 📖🔖 (E) Relationship(s): Bang Chan/Reader
The Stray Kids Gang 📖🔖 (E) Relationship(s): Stray Kids Ensemble/Stray Kids Ensemble
In Too Deep 📖🔖 (M) Relationship(s): SKZ Member/Reader
We'll Be Alright 📖🔖 (E) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Hwang Hyunjin/Lee Minho
Connected 📖🔖 (E) Relationship(s): Stray Kids Ensemble/Original Female Character
I like the view right now 📖🔖(E) Relationship(s): Hwang Hyunjin/Lee Felix
The Force that Drives the Flower 📖🔖 (E) Relationship(s): Lee Felix/Lee Minho
Animals Without Direction 📖🔖 (E) Relationship(s): Stray Kids Ensemble/Reader
Everything you Crave 📖🔖 (E) Relationship(s): Stray Kids Ensemble/Reader
A Crack in the Glass 📖🔖(E) Relationship(s): Stray Kids Ensemble/Reader
Sin 📗 (E) Relationship(s): Hwang Hyunjin/Lee Felix
Boyfriend for Hire 📗 (M) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho
Waiting For Us 📗 (M) Relationship(s): Bang Chan/Yang Jeongin, Han Jisung/Lee Minho, OC/Hwang Hyunjin, OC/Lee Felix
You Are My Safe Space. 📗 (NR) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Reader
Ocean Sounds 📗 (E) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho
I Kiss Boys 📗 (E) Relationship(s): Various ATEEZ/ATEEZ and SKZ/SKZ pairings
The Pink Rose's Promise 📗 (E) Relationship(s): Bang Chan/Lee Felix
Stalking Tiger 📗 (M) Relationship(s): Lee Minho/Yang Jeongin
Wandering Eyes, And Spreading Thighs 📗 (E) Relationship(s): Han Jisung/Lee Minho
Other Fics I've Finished Reading
Due to Tumblr being a general jerk about post size, this is now in a google doc. You can view the list by clicking here. Sorry, I wish I could make this work better!! :(
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viewfromthelake · 18 days ago
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If anyone is curious, the Halloween watchthrough has made it up through:
[spoilers ahead]
Halloween H20: Pretty decent, especially following the shitshow that is The Curse of Michael Myers. Jamie Lee Curtis is good in this. The movie does still have some bad 90s stink on it, though. Please don't put pop songs in the end credits of Halloween movies! Why are you making me listen to Creed???
Halloween Resurrection: I prefer to think of H20 as a self-contained movie, because this movie just sort of Highlander Twos away the nice ending to H20 with some shit exposition within the first few minutes. Jamie Lee Curtis is on the poster, but only appears in the movie for the first approximately 15 minutes to once again confront Michael and then die. Then the rest of the film is a whole other shitty movie about an internet reality show being filmed in the old Myers house. My Letterboxed review: "Resurrection is very much a movie you'd come up with if you'd determined that you wanted to use the franchise to explore the way the media turns serial killers into celebrities, but then you got kicked in the head by a mule and suffered a massive concussion."
It's very fitting that I watched Resurrection on one of those shitty-quality DVD collections of 20 horror films that I found secondhand for like two bucks. This movie was compressed within an inch of its life to squeeze onto a DVD with four other movies no one has heard of. This seems to be the perfect way to watch this film.
Oh Katie Sackoff is in it. Don't get too excited, she isn't "good" in it (not necessarily her fault - it would take a genius actor to find a way to turn this script into a good performance), though she does get a ridiculous decapitation kill. More like Katie Headoff, it seems.
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Breaking down the comics: Doing good (Issue 34)
Moon Knight, Issue # 34: Primal Scream
Written by Tony Isabella and drawn by Bo Hampton. 
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And Bonus short: The Vault of Knight
Written by Tony Isabella and drawn by Richard Howell.
Let's stop for a second. Take a little comic history lesson tour. 
This is not written by the usual Moon Knight team. 
Let's get into a little Moench history here and why he left. 
He did not really get along well with the then Marvel Chief editor James Shooter. Understandable. Here’s why: 
James Shooter got his start writing for DC then moved to Marvel. During the 70s and 80s, Marvel was experiencing a huge boom in content and new titles (like Moon Knight!) 
Further more, Stan Lee stepped away from monitoring comics to heading the animation works in LA right when Shooter became the cheif, leaving him fully in charge. 
Many felt that Shooter ran the place like a dictator, but there had been a huge influx of missed deadlines and Shooter put a stop to that. 
Despite keeping things running and overseeing a lot of new and important titles, he also alienated a LOT of long-time Marvel creators. 
Many of the long-time creators, like Moench, left Marvel to join with DC, who had a new editor. (He got to write for Batman!) 
NOTE: Shooter also enforced a policy forbidding the portrayal of Gay Characters in the Marvel Universe. In fact, the ONLY and first portrayal of a gay themed comic was of gay men attempting to rape Bruce Banner in the YMCA (which Shooter himself wrote), thus making Marvel to be widely considered Homophobic throughout Shooter's reign. (You should look into the history of LGBTQ+ in comics. It's a ride.)
I would like to point out that Moench's last issue during this time was about a reporter that was obsessed with making her deadlines and who wrote shitty pieces that were praised but awful and caused harm and eventual death in one character she wrote about. HMMMMM. 
When did he leave? Sources say the end of 1982, but those that understand the publishing timeline will note comic publish dates don't match the date they reach the shelves. 
So what is the official last Moon Knight Comic Moench worked on?
Let me put it this way... We aren't going to see Moench anymore for the 1980s run. 
He DOES come back for a bit later on, but it's short lived for a couple of limited run editions.
(And this is all new knowledge for me, who thought he originally finished the 1980s run and now I'm looking at an earlier review I did out of order because I'm an idiot and realize I've made a grave mistake.... Oh joy.) 
Farewell my sweet writer Doug Moench. Hats off to you. 
Now! That out of the way, let’s take a look at the first step we truly take away from Mr. Moench. 
For some reason, any time a guest writer sits in for early Moon Knight, they feel the need to over explain the character and introduce his past. Almost as if they were trying to explain who they are writing or getting a grasp on it for themselves. 
This is also a special double large edition. Another cause for writers to try to over explain characters as Marvel expects a bigger issue to draw in new fans. 
However, this is an odd story to push on the hopes of new fans. 
Let’s get into it! 
Yep. We open with a fast recap on who these characters are. 
It leaves me wondering what happened when Moench left. Did he have a script written out? Did he have to give notice and they knew he was leaving and this writer was already on the backburner? Or was this done in a hurry to get a planned comic deadline out on time? 
I would ALSO like to point out that when Bill left, he got a send off. Moench did not get a send off. He just disappears from the credits. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. 
"He was born Marc Spector and Spector wasn't a very nice man...Not so much evil as callous...A mercenary whose concern was reserved solely for himself and his Bankbook. 
That man could never have come to this deserted industrial wasteland on a mission made of equal parts mercy and vengeance." 
I disagree. Marc would be all over vengeance in a deserted wasteland. 
"Steven Grant could have. You've read about Grant... The committed millionaire about town...A pretty defendable guy as the upper crust goes. Still... 
Grant couldn't have found this place without Jake Lockley. Jake is the eyes and ears of Grant and Spector...A cabbie whose heart pulses to the beat of the city." 
Putting a bit on Steven, but he'd want to do good. But a gritty back alley is not really his style. 
"Ready for the kicker? Spector, Grant, and Lockley are all the same man...A man you know better as..." 
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(A side note... We see Moon Knight running through a warehouse complaining it smells like a sewer. HE WOULD KNOW. And then he's startled by a cat. This is hilarious to me for so many reasons.) 
And that leads us to the title page where a young man is leaking off the crates above to tackle Moon Knight. 
"Frank? Hate to do this to a hopped-up kid, but the quicker I put him down...the less chance of his getting hurt! Though when I think of what he did to Gena..." 
He tosses Frank across the warehouse. 
Moon Knight again alludes to the damage this kid did to Gena's diner after getting high on some new 'junk'. 
Moon Knight is about to call in to Frenchie to get the medics out to take care of the hopped-up kid when the kid takes off. 
He isn't worried. The fight has been knocked out of him and the police shouldn't have an issue. 
Now we head back to the diner where we find Jake having a cuppa wihth Gena and Crawley. 
Crawley is talking about "The Raiders" which is a young men's social club (read 'Gang'). They are known to be brutal and even the police are afraid of them. 
Gena mentions about how she never raised her boys to run in gangs. Out back, we see Frank leading a group of gang members up to the back door of the diner. 
The gang busts in and attacks the patrons, demanding food. 
Jake isn't about to lay down and let it slide. 
He clocks one of the kids and worries about his friends. 
"Gotta get over to Crawley and Gena fast! They're not used to this kind of action!" 
Jake's heart is made of gold. 
One of the kids jumps Jake, growling and snarling. 
"A for effort, punko, but I've seen a real werewolf up close--And all you've got in common with him are lousy table manners!" And Jake flips the man off. 
Frank jumps on Genna while Jake is preoccupied. He cries out that he's hungry and he bites into her arm. 
Her cries distract Jake and someone bashes him on the back of the head, knocking him out. 
On waking up, Jake immediately asks how Gena is. He finds Gena loading up into an ambulance. 
"His name is Frank... So much for my perfect record. Find him before the police do, Jake." 
"I...Understand. I'll make sure the boy isn't harmed." 
"You don't understand! I want that ungrateful little maggot harmed! I want him harmed so badly he won't ever be able to walk upright again! I treated that boy like family! He treated me like today's hot lunch special! Get him for me, Jake! Bring me his stinkin' head on a platter!" 
Jake's pretty irked about Gena getting hurt, but... 
"But that's not what Moon Knight stands for, is it? I'm the agent of vengeance, not vengeance itself." 
That’s an interesting thought for Jake to have. Jake who so often slips out to let the others handle the Moon Knight mission. He trusts that they can handle things. But what is the difference between being an agent of vengeance and vengeance itself? Perhaps, looking to another comic is where we see that line and the difference between Moon Knight and the Punisher. 
He sets out to find Frank and his gang. He hopes having Frank brought in will help Gena. 
"Because I never want to look into the eyes of someone I care for and see so much hatred and despair there. I've seen it too many times before... Within myself." 
So this issue I’m just going to be crying over Jake the whole time. Okay. Good to know. 
Back at the diner, Gena is out of the hospital and facing her fears. 
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Moon Knight is searching the hideout of the Raiders. He fllows the smell till he comes across a delirious woman with some sort of chemical burn blotches all over her. 
Looking around, he realizes, Steven Grant has been here before. An old factory he had been trying to save to create jobs has fallen into ruin. 
The factory is left to rot and all the chemicals inside are left there as well. 
He radios to Frenchie to make sure medical is on standby. These kids have been living in the toxic waste too long. 
He asks if the police got anything out of Frank when they grabbed him. 
Yeah... they didn't get him. He got away. 
And he's still looking for food from Gena. 
Back at the diner, we see Gena trying to clean up on her own. 
She is skittish as she cleans but tries to tell herself that no one's coming for her. 
"Besides, I'm not gonna let anybody or anything chase me away from what's mine!" 
And that's when Frank breaks back into Genas’.
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Moon Knight finds one of the kids conscious enough to talk. Alcaide, their leader, didn't let them leave the hideout. He found drums full of a top secret toxic waste that drove people wild and crazy. 
Moon Knight recalls that Grant had learned that the factory used to work for the government. 
"Grant saw that in their public records. But the Spector part of me can't help but wonder if they didn't also do some more discreet research for the feds." 
Bingo bango. He finds the drums, filled with "Primal Project" chemicals. 
Oh! time for a Marc Spector flashback! 
"Spector was working for the feds at the time, escorting a man named Wenzel through a south American jungle..." 
They were heading to meet up with a professor in Manaus (that’s in Brazil!) to shut down the Primal Project. 
"It was supposed to slow a man's thinking process...Make him docile...Easy to handle. Something went wrong." Wenzel talks about the project. 
Marc stops them in their tracks. He hears something stalking them from the trees above. 
A creature leaps at them and Marc fires his gun. 
The beast is hit and lays dead. Deformed and animalistic. 
Marc asks if this is the work of the professor they're heading to see. 
"Spector...That IS the professor." 
They reach the campsite to find men dead across the site and more creatures running around. 
They are attacked adn have to fend off the beasts. They ended up blowing up the site to get rid of the beasts and the remaining chemicals. 
Apparently not all the chemical was destroyed. 
Now, Alcaide, the gang leader, approaches, fully a beast now. 
Back in the diner, Gena fights for her life. 
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The cops have arrived at the factory and the paramedics are working on the gang. 
Moon Knight still battles the crazed beast and so does Gena. 
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The next day, Jake stops in to see Gena. 
Most of the kids will make a recovery and their lawyers claim they were unter the influence of the Primal toxin. 
Gena is still shaken deeply. 
"I trusted Frank like he was one of my own, Jake...And every time I come in here all the pain comes back. Maybe it wasn't all his fault, but nobody forced him to join that gang. And is it right that I can't walk into my own diner without getting sick?" 
Jake tries to comfort her. Or perhaps, he reaches out to her in a way that he wishes he could with himself and with Marc. Because he knows that it does eat them up. It eats Marc up every day. He isn’t sure if it will ever stop eating them up.
"No. But you're too good a lady to let this eat you up forever." 
"Yeah... I'll work it out."
Poor Gena. 
She shoos them away. She needs to lock up for the night. 
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This story is beautiful. This one time special guest writer, Tony Isabella and artist Bo Hampton really did a beautiful job here. 
They manage to keep the usual Moon Knight pace and story feel. We have Jake trying to protect his people. We have Gena facing a kid she helped to raise up, despite him not being her own, joining a violent gang and hurting her, we have Governmental neglect to clean up their mess and doing experimental biochemical weapons on unsuspecting people (a thing that really did happen in ‘Nam), we have economic failure for the factory that lead to the failure to clean up the toxic chemicals, and then we go back to Gena who is now facing trauma. 
No one in this story won. No one goes home feeling good about the day. They just have to pick themselves up again and move on. And they shouldn’t have to. Yet here they are, facing it all alone. 
This moves us to the short story afterwards. "The Vault of Knight." 
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This is a weird one. Stranger still is that the short is written by the same person who wrote the main line. That’s pretty rare. Usually the short is done as a commission to be filler or bonus issues. 
Weirder still is the way it’s presented. A commentary on the main storyline! I've seen it done before. It's sort of like the Watcher to the audience. 
We have a strange looking character that addresses the audience. He's dressed like a baseball catcher with a Cubs cap on. Fitting. 
He calls himself "The Score-Keeper". 
And this... Let me tell you....
"Aloha, Adventure-addicts! Was twenty-four pages of gratuitous Do-Gooding enough for you...Or does your Hero-Habit demand even more of (yawn) Moon Knight's exciting escapades? I'm your sinister statistician, The Score-Keeper, and what I wanna know is... 
What is this Turkey in his cowled skivvies accomplishing? Does he really make a difference? Let's add it up. You can't lie to a Scorecard!" 
Interesting. A common question that pops up in Moon Knight comics. 
"Take last story for example. Sure he put ONE gang of teen terrors out of commission, but what's he doing about the rest of the anti-social adolescents in this city?" 
We see Moon Knight on a stakeout, waiting where someone's been hitting the same place for a week. 
The someone is two punks that dress up like werewolves and rob the shops in the area. In fact, they've hit five places in the past week alone! 
They hit a store where an old man cowers in fear....Until Moon Knight swoops in and knocks the thugs out. 
"You...You're that Moon Mensch fella! And you came into MY shop to save me from those Gonifs." 
"It's sort of my job." Moon Knight pauses. 
"Nu? To you, it's maybe a job. To me, if my store gets robbed, maybe I don't eat that night. So I thank you a lot, you and your job." 
"Friend, it was a mechaieh." 
Oh boy oh boy oh boy you have no idea how happy I am to hear Moon Knight say THAT. 
Back to the score-keeper, he's not impressed. "Why can't these heroes ever save Bloomingdales?" 
And the score-keeper starts talking about Gena and the previous issue. 
"What about Gena? One of Moon Knight's own team and he couldn't prevent what happened to her in this issue's other story. I don't think she's over it yet." 
We see Gena's boys Ray and Ricky head into the diner. 
"What did you want to talk to us about?" 
"I...I was talkin' to your uncle Rollie today, the one with the big restaurant out in Houston and he...Well, he kinda offered...I mean..." 
Score-Keeper scoffs. 
"Way to go M.K. While you're brushin' up on your Yiddish, one of your closest friends is bookin' this urban paradise. Maybe we should ask the rest of your little outfit what they think of you..." 
And this cracks me up because we get Frenchie, Marlene, and Crawley. Each one speaks of a different altar. And Frenchie is just SO pissy about it and so protective of Marc... He calls him his friend. Marc could always count on Frenchie back in the day. 
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I’m…Not going to get into the “Faces of Eve” thing. It’s… A lot. But it was the big DID story and eventual movie that came out around this time that somewhat inspired a loose input into the creation of Moon Knight having DID. 
"You ask me, you care more about these guys than you care about Moon Knight." 
A misnomer. These people are what makes Moon Knight and keeps him going. In his adventures, helping him, and even when he fails them, they stay with him. 
Score guy jabs at it, noting that Moon Knight hasn't protected any of them. 
Frenchie's girlfriend, Marlene's brother, Crawley's son... 
He moves on to Detective Flint. 
Flint waits for him in a back alley. 
"Something happened --Didn't want you to read about it in the papers first. That Alaide kid you brought in was found dead in his cell an hour ago." 
"Yeah, that would've ruined my Breakfast all right." 
(Honestly, Jake is the one that reads the morning paper and eats breakfast. Jake would have been upset.) 
"Wasn't anybody's fault, guy. You know how crazed the kid was --He strangled himself before anyone could get to him." 
"That supposed to make me feel better?" 
"No...This is. It's the room number of the officer that was injured that night." 
Moon Knight pays the officer a visit. The officer is surprised to see him, thinking that he might not come. 
"Flint tells me that storage drum busted three ribs. I'm sorry. Maybe if I'd moved a little faster..." 
"It's all part of the job. But I don't have to tell you that...
You know, I figure you're pretty much a regular guy under that mask. Weird clothes, but no special 'powers'. I'll be honest... This job scares me a lot, like all the time. I was shaking when I went into that warehouse." 
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Sometimes he doesn't see the good he does. 
Sometimes all he can see is the pain he leaves behind. Blaming himself for the pain of his friends. 
Maybe he doesn't really understand why this Daniels is thankful for him. But maybe in this moment he thinks it might be worth it. It might be why he is still trying. 
Back to Score-Keeper. It's time to add up the score. 
"Is Moon Knight doing any good or is he just swinging against the wind?" 
He looks at the results and seems surprised. Ripping up the scorecard, he tells us to figure it out for ourselves and leaves. 
A weird story, but I'm not mad at it. It ties into the main story line, shows the aftermath of what happened, and still shows their friends standing by them. 
It also lets Moon Knight take a moment to feel appreciated. 
And it does ask a question that Moon Knight has asked time and time again. “Am I doing good?” 
Is he causing the harm or is he just shouldering the blame because of his past traumas? The question remains over the years as things become more and more broken for them, and the answer has always been there. It’s just that sometimes it’s hard for them to see it… or accept it. 
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fibula-rasa · 1 year ago
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Cosplaying Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara in Valley of the Dolls (1967)
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Take one of my closet cosplay of Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara in the telethon scene in Valley of the Dolls (1967)
Or, as Patty Duke herself called it, “Valley of the Dreck.”
Why Duke would continue to feel chagrin over Dolls and her performance even after the film developed a devoted cult following is no great mystery. Dolls was Duke’s first film after the end of her sitcom, The Patty Duke Show. What Duke envisioned as a potential first step in a full career of proper adult work was marred by an abusive work environment and resulted in a funhouse mirror reflection of the novel and, eventually,  a cornerstone of Camp.
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Take two of my closet cosplay of Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara
Duke wasn’t the only one in the cast hot off major television roles: Barbara Parkins and Lee Grant had prominent roles on Peyton Place, Martin Milner and Paul Burke  starred in Route 66 and 12 O’Clock High, respectively. However, for Duke, Dolls held extra weight: between the end of her sitcom and the production of Dolls she had been institutionalized for her mental illness and she had finally been able to seek work free from the abusive management team she had as a child. There would naturally be a lot riding on Dolls for her, professionally and personally. For Dolls to not only be a shitty filming experience but a dud of a film—garnering Duke bad reviews—would understandably leave a lasting bad taste in her mouth.
Despite Duke’s negative recollections of the production and release of Dolls, it’s clear in her memoir, Call Me Anna, that Duke approached the role of Neely in earnest. She would be immediately dispirited, however, witnessing first hand the poor treatment of Judy Garland, originally cast as Helen Lawson, and experiencing abuse of her own from the director Mark Robson. Duke even alleged that casting Garland in the role was a publicity stunt; as it was long rumored that Duke’s role of Neely O’Hara was inspired by Garland.
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A troubled production isn’t always destined to fail and, in fact, Dolls was successful at the box office. However, in this case, what resulted was a sort of “passionate failure”—to quote Susan Sontag—which has cemented its place in Camp canon over the fifty-six years since its release. Quite a few writers have examined that more thoroughly than I could here, so rather than doing a full literature review, let me instead recommend you do some reading on your own about Dolls’ Camp pedigree. Instead, taking note that I love Valley of the Dolls, I can provide some context on how the film became what it is—and why Patty Duke suffered for it.
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Take three of my closet cosplay of Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara
Read on BELOW the JUMP
Buy me a ☕
Jacqueline Susann’s bestselling novel, Valley of the Dolls, published in 1966, is also a Camp classic (in a wholly different manner than the film—another story for another time). Regardless of Camp status, the novel pushed a lot of boundaries in terms of the social mores of the 1960s. Susann frankly depicted drug abuse, queerness, female friendships, and the difficult realities of living life on your own terms as a woman in the social climate of mid-century America. As you might imagine, a Hollywood film made in 1967 would hardly be able to present much of that effectively.
To start with, the filmmakers heavily sanitized the entire work and also condensed the timeline of the story significantly.* The language used and nature of conversations are heavily censored or completely removed. The events that form the basis of the three lead characters forming their friendship are elided or rewritten, making the intertwining of their lives/careers feel like little more than a narrative device.** In my opinion, the most obvious victim of the changes is Duke’s Neely O’Hara.
The novel takes place between the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, with relevant flashbacks/backstory for many of the characters. Neely is only a teen at the start of the book and is in her mid-thirties by the end. Obviously adapting a novel to a single feature-length film requires truncations. Characters are removed/reduced/remixed and a lot of backstory is erased—understandable and expected. But, a puzzling choice in the case of Dolls is that the bulk of the events of the nineteen years of the book are still included in the film. Which means packing a lot of pretty serious life events into a drastically shorter timeframe—a move destined to produce absurdity.
“Neely had no education, but she had the inborn intelligence of a mongrel puppy, plus the added sparkle that causes one puppy to stand out in a litter. This puppy was clumsy, frank and eager, with a streak of unexpected worldliness running through her innocence.” — Valley of the Dolls, Jaqueline Susann
In the case of Neely, she has her big break, gets married, gets a Hollywood contract, gets addicted to pills and booze, her marriage falls apart and she has an affair with/marries her costume designer who then cheats on her and they divorce, she hits rock bottom and she’s institutionalized, then she steals Anne’s boyfriend and when she’s poised to make her big comeback, she gets sloshed and can’t go on. All of that goes on in the film with little to no change in fashion or styling to indicate time passing. This makes Neely’s rise and fall and rise and fall come off as absolutely outrageous.
No matter how earnestly Duke might have pursued her characterization of Neely originally, she was going to emerge looking ridiculous. [IMO, ridiculous in a highly entertaining, non-mocking way, but nevertheless ridiculous.] Whether it was possible to foresee this outcome at the time, I can’t know for certain. However, Susan Hayward’s insistence on having her hair white, instead of being bald from cancer treatment (screenplay) or hair treatment gone awry (book), makes me wonder if the more seasoned performer saw the writing on the wall and wasn’t willing to commit to such extremities?
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Take four of my closet cosplay of Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara
With the benefit of time, fifty six years after the film’s initial release, the Camp factor of Dolls has only increased. If it had been competently adapted and had better direction, I feel confident that we wouldn’t still be talking about it in 2023. And, if Patty Duke’s performance hadn’t been so wildly over the top, Dolls might have been kind of dour and slightly boring. That’s not to deride Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate, Susan Hayward or Lee Grant, they did great work with what they were given—but they also weren’t given jobs as impossible as the adapted Neely.
Duke’s performance is often derided (even by herself) and Dolls did end up being deleterious to her transition to adult screen roles. But, her Neely O’Hara is a Camp icon and I have a great affection for her work. It’s a performance that’ll stick with you—love it, hate it, or laugh at it. Maybe it’s the irony of having such a young actress (only twenty two!) so convincingly portray a performer that’s already been chewed up and spit out by the industry. Maybe it’s the energy she brings—the bottled up ambition to make it stick and no longer be thought of as a kid. If nothing else, Duke’s Neely is one of a kind.
“Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn’t propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.” — Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag
What do you all think about this film? It’s divisive for a lot of very good reasons! And also bad reasons!
---
Footnotes:
*Only in writing this did I learn that one of the two screenwriters credited for Dolls, Helen Deutsch, is also the screenwriter who adapted Paul Gallico’s The Love of Seven Dolls into Lili (1953). If you have also read the book and seen that film, the, um… creative choices there would also leave you questioning some things. Though maybe I should give her some leeway and assume that they weren’t strictly her creative choices given that, under the studio system in Hollywood at the time, it’s not likely that a closer adaptation of the book could have passed the censors or been palatable to studio heads. Ditto with Dolls.
**Most instances of queerness of the characters (mostly Jennifer and Anne) are erased entirely. I will talk about this more in future posts!
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lee-isnotcool · 4 months ago
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Another fic review...
Fic: Just lovers (like we were supposed to be) https://archiveofourown.org/works/38344720
Author: bizzarestars
Length: 320k words (mid-length fic)
Ships: jegulus, wolfstar
Summary: jegulus 'fake' dating in a no-voldy AU (they are in love)
Review: im sure all yall have read this by now but i just loved this fic so i wanted to rant. URRRRGH JAMES FLEAMONT POTTER I LOVE YOU TO PIECES BUT YOU ARE SO STUPID SOMETIMES- seriously he's so oblivious it kills me. reg is a little shit obviously, and sirius is almost as oblivious to remus's feelings as james is to reg's. they're my pookies. anyway, this is a classic (for good reason) and should 100% be read. go read if u havent i know i waited too long
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watching-pictures-move · 2 years ago
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Movie Review | Under Siege (Davis, 1992)
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Despite the fact that I own this on DVD (I think), I saw it was about to leave Canadian Netflix in a few days and decided to give it a rewatch. Mostly because I don't remember where I placed my copy (if I actually own a copy, that is; I think it's included in one of those "Four Film Favourites" releases that Warner Brothers used to put out so you can get four movies of wildly varying quality for dirt cheap; I think I actually got two of the Steven Seagal ones, inspired by Vern's wildly entertaining book Seagalogy; no, I don't remember where the other collection is either; such is the peril of buying movies faster than you watch them), but also because it's nice to be reminded that a movie kinda owns. And rewatching this, I can confirm that, yes, it does kinda own.
This is regarded as one of the better Die Hard clones, and like that movie is greatly evocative of the physical reality of its location. A ship is a great location for an action movie, because whether you're in the control room (or whatever you call that in a ship) or in the bowels (or whatever), there's always garish, coloured lighting that pops on the camera. There are always pipes and hissing steam to provide atmosphere. There's always clanging to remind you what a formidable piece of machinery we're in. There are always little things jutting out to give you interesting things to look at in the frame. There are always tight little corners for the camera to snake around and the characters to duck behind for cover as they're shooting at each other. I generally think of Andrew Davis more as a good director of action movies rather than a good action director, but I think he acquits himself pretty nicely in the shootouts. He's less impressive with the fight scenes, going in a bit too close and cutting a little too fast, perhaps to hide Seagal's slipping physical prowess, but despite all the camera shakes and excessive knife waving in the climax, he gets a good jolt out of the flashes of brutality. This is not Seagal's most bloodthirsty movie, lacking the ultraviolence of Out for Justice and Marked for Death (or arguably Hard to Kill, where he offers to take the villain to the blood bank), but it has its moments.
Davis' strengths as a director go a long way in making Seagal seem charismatic, shooting him in handsomely lit close-ups and cutting to punch up his delivery. (Davis previously worked miracles not just with Seagal but also Chuck Norris, who frequently comes off as flat but in Code of Silence is made to look like a seasoned character actor.) He may seem like a joke now, but for a couple of years there, Seagal really seemed like a big deal, like somebody with an unusual screen presence who was appearing in some really entertaining movies. Of course, it turns out that the unusual screen presence was the result of him being weird and a piece of shit, and with the mask coming off with On Deadly Ground (which was totally unable to hide what a fucking freak this guy was), it became obvious that directors like Davis and John Flynn (the man behind the aforementioned Out for Justice, my personal favourite Seagal flick, imbuing him with a nice streetwise swagger as he goes around town for ninety minutes brutally maiming or killing mob goons while spouting lines in a shitty Brooklyn accent) were doing heroic work in directing around him. Davis also cheats here by casting him against Gary Busey and Colm Meaney, two actors who excel at playing assholes, and providing a great lead villain with Tommy Lee Jones. The crazy guy villain played by an actor going against type is such a stock character in action movies now, that it's nice to be reminded what you get when you have a genuinely great actor in the role, and Jones, on top of being very fun to watch, gives him a real unpredictability. I was less enamoured with the handling of Erika Eleniak, who is cast for her Playboy credentials but is not the greatest actress and spends the movie being bullied by Seagal (which does not go down well in light of his his offscreen actions). I will however note that she's the only person in the history of movies who doesn't look dumb as hell with a backwards ballcap, so she does have that going for her.
A few additional notes:
As far as Die Hard clones go, I think I prefer The Rock, which probably has the best use of Nicolas Cage in an action movie, pairs him with Sean Connery in one of the all-time action movie teamups, and has a murderer's row of great supporting actors as well as those big, beautiful, gleaming Michael Bay magazine cover images while retaining some level of visual coherence. I'm also very partial to Die Hard 2, but I guess that's cheating.)
As a Die Hard clone, it hits an awful lot of the same beats, including a shot of its hero jumping off something to evade an explosion, a seemingly impotent supporting character (re)discovering their capacity for violence, villains pretending to be political terrorists but actually acting for personal gain. They do differ in satirical intent, with Die Hard taking aim at pompous authority figures and macho meatheads, while Under Siege is concerned more about the aftermath of Cold War American foreign policy. (The villain is a black ops type who the CIA was happy to let run free when he was useful but then tried to dispose of, not unlike the attempts by the George H. W. Bush administration to "course correct" through the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War. H.W. himself makes an appearance, you think he knew what the movie was saying about him?) Surprisingly, the guys in the control room are more supportive in this movie, with Dale Dye's casting presenting a guarantee of Seagal's heroism. If a guy whose job it is to advise movies on military accuracy says we can trust Seagal, we can trust Seagal.
I've seen this movie multiple times, and I keep forgetting that Seagal doesn't actually have a ponytail in this one. From certain angles, it looks like he might have, given the way his hair is slicked back, but he turns his head, and a ponytail is nowhere to be seen. I guess they don't let you keep one in the navy. But I'm sure the next time I revisit this, I'll be surprised again. This is my Mandela Effect. Others have the imaginary Sinbad genie movie. I have Seagal's spectral ponytail.
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soyouareandrewdobson · 1 year ago
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How do you feel about Dobson portraying the “stagnation” of comics being 100% the fault of the comics industry, but not mentioning anything like the Comics Code of Authority, the time Lynn Johnston was sent death threats for having a character come out as gay in a comic strip, or Stan Lee and Jack Kirby wrote themes of civil rights and racial discrimination in the goddamn X-Men???
Let me put it this way: There is this one strip he did called Comic History 101, in which he essentially blames comic stores to have been breeding grounds for "toxic" nerddom, all so he can virtue signal of how others (aka him) have to expose the toxic fandom mentality. That strip offends me for a variety of reasons, and the fact that it is more of an shitty opinion piece instead of relying on genuine historic facts is one of them. And yeah, I will review it in the near future.
now I am from Europe, so I honestly know little about the Comics Code of Authority, the Lynn Johnston incident (I didn't even know who she was till I googled her name up and even then I never read her work) and some other potential things to bring up. But even then me, someone who did not "study" how to be a cartoonist, has heard about certain of these things, read up on them or absorbed some knowledge via popcultural osmosis. And the fact Dobson either knows so very little on these subjects or willingly ignores bringing stuff up to make his "view" more valid, always irked me.
Dobson was a lot of things, but genuine fair was not one of them
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iamnotawomanimagod · 2 years ago
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I posted 17,392 times in 2022
1,096 posts created (6%)
16,296 posts reblogged (94%)
Blogs I reblogged the most:
@theemptysound
@sapphicromantic
@iamnotawomanimagod
@super-space-time
@serotonesque
I tagged 5,562 of my posts in 2022
#beautiful people - 720 posts
#euphoria spoilers - 275 posts
#dimension 20 - 268 posts
#love and power tour - 262 posts
#rambling about my life - 249 posts
#legacies spoilers - 186 posts
#hotd spoilers - 181 posts
#euphoria lb - 171 posts
#halsey - 158 posts
#baby h - 148 posts
Longest Tag: 140 characters
#man i wonder how the op of that video feels knowing mike flanagan watched and then was inspired to add something from that video to his show
My Top Posts in 2022:
#5
it feels very right and correct that Emily Axford has done the most damage in a single turn that 23-years-and-counting veteran DM Brennan Lee Mulligan has ever seen.
932 notes - Posted April 28, 2022
#4
can't help but feel some real bitter irony over the fact that they always joked that they had never had a scandal or an all-lower-caps apology video or any real headlines and now they've gotten all of that and it might lead to the actual end of an eight-year-long creative and business venture 😥
1,012 notes - Posted October 3, 2022
#3
Happy 4th birthday, Dropout!
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See the full post
1,779 notes - Posted September 26, 2022
#2
they had already recorded so many videos. there's an entire season of Without a Recipe that has to be re-edited. Which is going to be a huge, huge undertaking, given that they absolutely did not shoot that footage with the idea that they'd need to edit one of them out.
it just sucks!! it's so shitty!! such a selfish decision that impacts so many people.
5,388 notes - Posted October 3, 2022
My #1 post of 2022
Eugene is chewing on his tongue and is clearly holding back some real rage, Zach is on the verge of tears, and Keith is in Full Professional mode.
In terms of responses, they could've done a lot worse. It was an honest, succinct and straightforward statement. You can tell Ned's actions, and the subsequent decision to fire him, really impacted all of them.
11,454 notes - Posted October 3, 2022
Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →
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nightguide · 1 month ago
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FUCK THE CAMERA: sarcasm turned physical
LIKE THIS WILL HELP YOU SOUND LIKE A SMARTASS WITHOUT YOU SOUNDING LIKE A JACKASS ON TV (INTERVIEWERS HATE YOU BEING SCIENCY WITHOUT YOU BEING AN ASSHOLE FIRST) FUCKING LEE PACE MY ASS IF HIS EYES NOW TURN INTO HIS HAIRY STRAWBERRIES GONNA MAKE YOU DROOP FOR DROOP HIS WORD MAY TRYNA BE YOUR ROPE
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P. 357
NEW COMPLEXES HATE TO DIVIDE YOU: PERSONA
I DONT REALLY THINK THEY KNOW THE REST OF IT, EVERYDAY IS FRIDAY SO THEY CALENDAR IRRELEVANT
BILABIAL (RATIO + SCREEN) : ASSHOLE ENERGY
P.22
'IN A MODERN DEATH SCENE, HOPE TURNS TO THE PROFESSIONAL 'HEALTH CARERS' WHO NATURALLY AND PROPERLY CONCENTRATE ON THE EXERCISE OF THEIR TRAINED SKILLS. THE EXPERTISE CAN INCLUDE THE GIVING OF EMOTIONAL SUPPORT, BUT INEVITABLY WHAT IS CHIEFLY REQUIRED IS THE ABILITY TO PREVENT, POSTPONE, OR REVERSE DEATH.'
RATIO: YOU'RE ACTUALLY THINKING ABOUT THE TIME WHERE YOU *BLACKS OUT* AND YOU *JIMMY FALLONS SMILE* AND YOU *STAMMERING OVER 'THE TRUTH' WITHOUT YOU CAMERA SOUNDING RACIST*
SCREEN: THAT IS NOT EVEN ALLOWED SO YOU LET THE INTERVIEWER (FUCKING GOMEZ ADAMS) SCREW YOU UP, SO SELENA TOOK YOUR JEWELLERY FOR FREE
POINT: THAT DUMB. ASS FUCK. STOLE MY CREDIBILITY FOR FREE
BILABIAL MEANS YOUR LIPS, SO SHE STOLE YOUR MICROPHONE FOR A SHITTY SINGLE SHE AINT GONNA WEAR
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LABIODENTAL: (SCREEN + CAMERA MAN AT THE BACK) : BIG DICK ENERGY
P. 55
'MANY SUCH PATIENTS REPORTED HEARING A LOUD NOISE WHICH MIGHT BE MUSIC, SEEING DARKNESS, FLOATING ABOVE THE HOSPITAL BED, RAPIDLY REVIEWING THEIR LIVES WITH SELF-CRITICISM, FEELING DRAWN THROUGH A TUNNEL TO A BRILLIANT LIGHT WHICH AT FIRST COULD BE FRIGHTENING,'
SCREEN: IF YOU KNOW YOUR PASHTO (LANGUAGE THAT CAN ACTUALLY BE HEARD IN THE INDO-AFRICAN REGIONS OF THE HIMALAYAS) THEN YOU KNEW ONES ABOUT THE END TIMES, YOU KNEW ABOUT THE WORLD IF YOU'RE ABOUT TO TURN INTO STONE ONE DAY THAT YOU'LL EVENTUALLY LIVE THAT BIBLICAL VERSION OF THE END TIMES LIKE YOU SEEN ON AMERICAN DAD THAT HAD NO POINT THAT YOU HAD SOME INTEREST IN 'LEAVING' LIKE DEMI'S RACIAL BACKFIRE TO YOU
CAMERA MAN AT THE BACK: YOU HATE BEING 'THERE' SO YOU HATE WEDDINGS AS MUCH AS THAT ONE PASHTUN SPEAKER DOES IF SHE WAS DISABLED, NOW TO THE POINT WHERE LEE PACE IS NOW KNOWN AS AN HONOURED MAN. HE CANNOT SPEAK IT BUT LIVED IT, NOW U BLACK AUNTY THAT ESCAPES THE PRISONBREAK SITUATION IN YOUR MIND
POINT: THERE IS NO CAMERA. THE OBJECT IS YOU, THERE IS NO JW UMMAH KILLING YOU
LABIODENTAL MEANS LIPS AND TEETH SO SELENA MADE YOU REJECT YOUR BREATH FOR HER WILL TO GO ON (THAT CONTRACT IS DESTROYED INSTANTLY, THERE IS NO KING OF SWEETHEARTS)
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INTERDENTAL: (SELENA GOMEZ + HATER) : STONE COLD (DEMI LOVATO COVER)
P. 137
'IF YOU CRY TO GOD TO PITY YOU, HE WILL ONLY TREAD YOU UNDER FOOT'
SELENA GOMEZ: DIALOGUE IS COMPLETELY YOU BUT THIS IS NOT EVEN WHY YOU HATE HER, YOU HATE ME FOR NOT BEING WITH YOU BUT YOU HATE THE VIBE THAT SHE IS GIVING, SO YOU HAVE A VOICE INSIDE YOUR HEAD RIGHT NOW THAT SAYS 'DONT DO' THEN OPPOSE THAT, SHE AINT YOUR BOSS OR GOD, YOU SERVE YOUR HEART NOT YA FUCKN MIND.
HATER: LIKELY GOING TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU LET 'THE NEW DEMI LOVATO SURVIVE' THAN THE LATTER OF, YOU KNOW YOUR BESTIES BY BABY THOUGHT AND THATS HOLLYWOOD
POINT: YOU KNOW A GUY AND THATS THE GUY I REFERENCED, KEEP A HEALTHY CATALOGUE OF UR JOURNEYS IS WHAT SELENA HATES, SHE HATES IT IF YOU'RE BETTER THAN HER (PURELY JW)
INTERDENTAL MEANS THE GAP BETWEEN THE TEETH, SO SHE TOOK YOUR WORTHINESS THAN YOU BEING THERE FOR YOURSELF TO LIE AND LET IT ALL BE BECAUSE YOU HATE EVERYTHING
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VELAR: (MATT SMITH IN DOCTOR WHO THAN YOU BEING THERE + I HATE YOU DICKHEAD FUCK ASS BITCH DICK HEAD 2) : PEOPLE DYING PURELY BECAUSE THE SHITTY SCENARIO EXISTS TO MAKE SURE THE DEAD IS DEAD OUT OF PETTY TALK
P. 136
'SUCH A CREATURE WOULD BE BOUND TO GO ENDLESSLY MAD.'I WILL CALL NO BEING GOOD'
MATT SMITH IN DOCTOR WHO THAN YOU BEING THERE: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS 'PRIDE' LIKE BE IN THE SHOW IF YOU WANT TO BUT YOU KNOW YOUR FICTIONAL BADASS IS YOU (WHAT LEE KNOWS ABOUT RIVER SEA IS TRUE)
I HATE YOU DICKHEAD FUCK ASS BITCH DICK HEAD 2: YOU HATE EVERYTHING TO LOVE YOURSELF BACK, THIS AINT THE END
POINT: YOU WON. THATS IT.
VELAR IS THE UVULA (DANGLY THINGY AT THE BACK OF UR MOUTH) SO SELENA KNOWS A FAMOUS FAMILY WHO THEY USED TO CONTROL YOU
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PALATAL: (YOU + NATIVE LANGUAGE RELATIVITY ON SCREEN WITH YOUR BEST FRIEND ENERGY) : HATE IS ALREADY THERE IN FRONT OF YOU
P. 136
'HELL HAS BEEN BELIEVED TO BE THE FINAL DESTINY OF THE VAST MAJORITY OF HUMANKIND.'
YOU: EVERYBODY HAS A SEQUENCE WHEN THEY'RE WATCHING PUSHING DAISIES THAT I KEEP MOTION REFERENCING YOU TO FIND AND NOW YOU'RE IN IT, AND YOU NOTICE A GIRL WITH LACE OVER HER FACE AND YOU TALK TO HER, WHAT WILL SHE SAY AND WHY?
NATIVE LANGUAGE RELATIVITY ON SCREEN WITH YOUR BEST FRIEND ENERGY: YOU'RE ACTUALLY IN PUSHING DAISIES NOW YOU KNOW MY PIN BOARD CALLED 'SOMEBODY CITY' IS A DAVID BOWIE REFERENCE!!!!!!!!!!
POINT: YOU IN DAVID BOWIES M/V ON HIS WAY BACK FROM MARS, BRO!
PALATAL MEANS TONGUE ROOF AN THATS HOW SELENA EATS UR DREAMS CUZ SHE THINKS SHE DOESNT EXIST, SHE BILL NIGHY DEAD IN THE CAR IN SHAUN OF THE DEAD, SHE LONG GONE BRO. LEAVE HER ALONE
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ALVEOLAR: (NOW U IN A ZOMBIE MOVIE WITH SIMON PEGG AN NICK FROST + SARCASM IS YOUR BRAIN) : BRATZ IS YOU NOW
NOW U IN A ZOMBIE MOVIE WITH SIMON PEGG AN NICK FROST: NED STARES AT YOUR PUSSY (MAN OR NOT) U IN HIS ENDGAME LIKE HE MASTERED THE SELENA GOMEZ MAN-FECTION MAN-FUCKTION, THAT IS ZOMBIE DAZE ZOMBIE DAYS AN HE LIVED IT (PD) HE AN THAT STRAWBERRY SQUIRREL CREAM PUFF AT THE SIDE LIKE ALL THE FCKIN TIME (HIS PURE ANTI-WATCH CLOCK ASHLEY TISDALE 9YO CUTE PATOOTIE)
SARCASM IS YOUR BRAIN: GOD HATES BLACK PEOPLE NOW, YOU'RE DEAD (ROOTS: TV SHOW IS COMPLETE)
POINT: YOU EATING WHO?
ALVEOLAR IS LIKE THE BRAIN THINGY FOR THE 'MMMM, YUMMY' BUT EVERYBODY TAKES THAT SHIT FOR GRANTED BUT WITHOUT IT, ITS LIKE THAT FOOD WILL EXPERIENCE THAT SAW RIDE YOU SAW AT THORPE PARK ON YOUTUBE BUT ITS ROCKY AND TERRIFYING TO EAT WITHOUT THE ROOF NIGGA ON THE TOP TAKING YOUR FOOD AWAY TO HEAVEN AND SELENA ATE YOUR PUSSY FOR FREE THINKING YOU THE ONE ON OMITB
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