#maybe if phthalo was out all the time things would change

[privatelyownedsilicagel]

.

[joonkorre]

(love) is a heartache

@drarrymicrofic prompt: hope is a heartache - léon

let it be known that harry goes through life purely on vibes. half of his reasons why for every decision at his big age are “idk imma just hope for the best”

ao3

People’s hearts twinge sometimes. For Draco, he can barely remember the last time he doesn’t have these twinges. It’s pretty normal at this point.

“No, it’s not,” Pansy says. She’s a Healer, so she’s probably right. But Draco prefers to ignore that.

“Leave it be,” Draco murmurs, lips against her scalp, “I’m fine. Say, are you free tomorrow?”

“Yeah. You want to go somewhere?”

“Mm. Sleep.”

They go out the next morning, Pansy in thick makeup and Draco practically drunk under nine layers of Charms. The air is a bit humid, which seems to get worse when the bustling street intensifies in volume into a roaring din. Pansy pulls him under an awning, yanking at his sleeve a bit to try out her disgusting sugary coffee. She always does this whenever she wants to take his attention away from something, which means he just has to look at exactly where she’s doesn’t want him to. As his lips wrap around her lipstick-stained straw, he glances up.

Across the street, a couple strolls through a gushing crowd. Fiery red hair, airy laughter, a pale arm wrapped around her fiancé’s waist. Curls of black, sleek spectacles, a protective palm on his fiancee’s shoulder. They make the perfect picture, a vibrant oil painting. Their existence is formed from bold strokes of sunlight and starburst kisses, with the focal point being a shock of phthalo green and cadmium lemon, two minute specks that make all the difference. As all good paintings do, they pin the viewer on the spot, as if the viewer himself is a thing to behold. Then they shift away.

The exhibit moves forward and out of sight. It’s closing time, the viewer has overstayed his welcome.

Something leaps in Draco’s chest and splatters on the floor of his stomach. Placing her hand over his heart, Pansy frowns at him. She doesn’t ask why Potter stared at someone who looked like a stranger to him. Only tells him to start finding answers.

Months later, on the most awaited day in recent Wizarding history, there’s a knock on Draco’s door.

He throws on a sweater, and a throw, too, for good measure. Ambling to the door, he checks the mail slot before peeking through the peephole. Nobody but a package is outside. Draco hums and unlocks his door, crouching down the moment it opens. What feels like soft satin brushes against his cheek, cool and smooth. With a flash, a pair of shiny dress shoes appear before him.

“Draco.”

Draco peers up as he rises, hands around the package. Potter has his maddening Invisibility Cloak slung over his arm, his roguish charm heightened by a perfectly fitted three-piece suit. A tiny posy is pinned on his left lapel, muted green hellebores with a few sprigs of privet berries. He’s dressed like a man in love.

Draco feels something he hasn’t felt in months at the sight. He’s trained himself to suppress it the moment it showed itself and has been relatively successful until now. The sting, without warning, bursts from within his chest, calling forth a slight wince. Potter’s brows furrow.

"How do you know where I live?"

“How long has this been going on?”

Draco frowns. “Pardon?”

“That,” Potter gestures at Draco’s chest. “The heartache.”

He rears back. What the hell is he supposed to say to that? At Potter’s unchanging expression, Draco shoves his hair out of his face with a quiet huff and puts a hand on the doorknob.

“It’s none of your business. Please leave.”

“It is, actually,” Potter stops the closing door with one arm.

“Excuse me? We haven't had a proper conversation in more than a decade and suddenly you want to act like we're friends? Leave, now.”

“Listen to me. How can it not be my business when I feel it, too?”

“Check with a Healer, then. If you can put past grudges aside, I can hand you Pansy Parkinson’s business card,” Draco grits through his teeth, pushing against the door with his entire body, his throw slipping to the ground.

“Draco, stop, I already know, stop.”

“Know what? No, I don't care. Leave at once, else I’d alert the Aurors.”

A rough slam sends Draco staggering back. Potter pants, hard lines on his face. His chest heaves under his crisp white shirt, its top two buttons unclasped, and he steps over the threshold, closing the door.

“You think they’d believe you?”

The pain shoots from his chest to the rest of his body, and for several seconds, his lungs wouldn’t work. He whips his head away from Potter, who groans and sags against the wall.

“I told you to leave.”

“I’m sorry, that was a shitty thing to say,” Potter says immediately, sweat dotting his temples.

After an uncomfortable pause, clearing his throat, he picks up the near-forgotten package from the carpet. His hand feels around the outline of the object within, rectangular and heavy. Glancing at Draco, he says hoarsely. “I know why you bought this book.”

“Know this, know that, you know nothing,” Draco lunges forward, only for Potter to twist out of the way and raise the package out of his reach.

“The Life-long Burden of Dark Curses: A Caution by Elise Arrowlane, limited edition,” he says, unbothered by Draco’s slackened jaw. “You ordered it from the new bookstore on Diagon months ago. You were small and old and grey, but I recognized you. I always could.”

“Okay,” Draco sneers, “so you’re a stalker. Old news. Anything else?”

“There’s no need to order one. I would’ve borrowed it from Hermione if you had only asked,” Potter says. “Instead, I got curious and read it for myself. That’s how I connected the dots about the heartache, how I realized we’ve both had it since that day years ago.”

“Oh, the day you slashed me into ribbons and almost cut through my heart?” Draco clenches his jaw.

Being able to shout this ugly kind of truth into the perpetrator’s face feels oddly liberating. That is, if liberation also comes with a specific kind of agony that makes Draco want to fall to his knees.

“Dark Magic leaves a mark on both the wizard and their victim, doesn’t it? No need for a book to tell us that,” Potter says, the harsh afternoon glow of him gentled by the soft lamplight in Draco’s hallway. “In certain cases, it even leaves a link. A connection.”

Draco bites the inside of his cheek and looks away. The only consequence from that horrid night was his fucked up heart and nothing else, nothing at all. Whatever Potter is insinuating, he hates it. He hates this. He hates him.

“How are you so sure there’s a connection.”

“I wasn’t,” Potter says. “The Healers said it’s a health thing I developed after the War and I just needed to avoid strenuous activity. I didn’t think much of it, but then I read the book and realized that it usually flared up whenever you watched me.”

Scoffing, Draco turns and stalks into the kitchen. Walking past the boiling kettle, he throws a cabinet door open and grabs a mug, his hand trembling.

“Interesting how my health suffers when I see the bastard who quite literally carved me open.”

“I was eating dinner when I thought I was going to die of a heart attack at 23,” Potter continues. Draco pulls the drawers out, unable to find a single bag of tea for several excruciating moments. “The next day, I was reading about your mother’s death on the Daily Prophet. That was the first sign.”

Grabbing a rag and wetting it, Draco wipes the countertop even as he’s just done so last night.

“When Ginny saw you on the street during our date and extended her hand toward you, you shook it. But your heart ached.

“I saw you looking at the picture of Ginny and I kissing on the front page of Witch Weekly. Your hair was brown and your back was curved, but I saw you. Your heart ached.

“When I announced my engagement to her on the Battle of Hogwarts’s 10th Anniversary, you were clapping along with everyone else. But your heart ached.”

Draco throws the rag on the counter. The kettle whistles, a piercing sound. “What’s your point? Are you here purely to flaunt your relationship and imply that I’m in love with Ginevra Weasley? If so, I got it. Thank you so very much, it’s been enlightening. Now get out.”

“The point is,” Potter says, lifting the kettle off the burner to pour it into Draco’s mug, placing his tea bag in, “unless the article about you being gay was wrong, Ginny isn’t the one you’re in love with.”

“What arti—” Draco stops. “That was years ago.”

His sexuality was leaked to some irrelevant gossip rag, not even making the front page. Nobody noticed, nothing changed, and it hasn’t entered his mind in what feels like forever until Potter reminds him.

“I remember.”

“You—” Draco frowns. His eyes strain on the cup of tea until they hurt. He squeezes them shut, sighing. “It doesn’t prove anything. Perhaps I’m jealous of my childhood nemesis having a better life than me, ever thought of that?”

“Yeah,” Potter says, “I’ve thought about this a lot. Which is why I’m here. To make sure.”

Draco takes it in, then, unable to help himself, curls his lips at Potter and his attire. At his artfully gelled hair, his hanging bow tie, the elegant boutonniere on the lapel of his dark blue suit. His empty ring finger.

“Couldn’t you have chosen a better date to make sure? Preferably before your wedding day?”

Potter steps closer. A respectable distance away, but closer.

“I could’ve, but I spent most of those days in denial. Then the dots connected and I couldn’t deny it anymore, so I decided to just go through with the wedding regardless, be with the woman I loved. Hoped that maybe the odd emotions I had would go away,” he shrugs, raising his eyes to meet Draco’s. “Saw Ginny at the end of the aisle and, well, I couldn’t stop thinking that it should’ve been someone else. All this time, I’ve thought that she didn’t feel… right in my arms, but I pushed it down. And there she was in that white dress.

“Seeing that today was the last straw. I had to leave.”

Draco’s breath catches in his throat. Swallowing it down, he grabs his mug, scooping out the tea bag just to have something to do. He takes a sip without blowing, ignoring its scalding heat.

“That was stupid.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re so fucking stupid,” Draco can feel a headache building. “That was a horrible decision. I never imagined you—you!—out of all people, could be this irresponsible. What the fuck.”

“You’re right.”

“Of course I am. Merlin, that poor fucking woman. If your purpose here is to make me feel bad for Ginevra and all 300 of her relatives for once in my life, you’ve succeeded, congratulations.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say that to me, say that to—oh, you’d do what you want no matter what I say, wouldn’t you?”

“Depends on the situation.”

“‘Depends on the situation,’ he says,” Draco mocks, getting a carton of milk from the fridge to save his bitter, bitter tea. Potter doesn’t reply. Stirring the milk in, Draco lets out a heavy sigh.

“What do you want me to do about this?” He says. “I didn’t make you run out of your own wedding. If you expect me to take the blame for your inane decisions, the first person I Floo wouldn’t be the Aurors, but Ginevra Weasley herself.”

A small smile graces Potter’s lips. “I don’t expect anything from you but honesty.”

Draco squints.

“And how will you know if what I say is a lie? Will you reject my genuine answer if it’s not what you want to hear?”

“That won’t be a problem,” Potter says. “I trust your heart will speak the truth for us both.”

There’s a pang in Draco’s chest, and judging from the twitch of Potter’s brow, he can feel it too. Not another word is said, the two men merely facing each other from across a tiny kitchen, considering. Draco can feel the warmth of sunlight beaming through the little window and coating his nape as he leans against the sink, earl grey on his tongue. Lovely citric notes of bergamot drift up his nose. He closes his eyes. What to do, what to do.

Weightless oxfords clack against the yellowed tiles, clear and bright in Draco’s ears. Fabric rustles as Potter slips a hand into his pocket only to retrieve it a second later. Draco lets himself be cornered, barely glancing at the wool-clad arms caging either side of his waist. A clink catches his attention, however, and he tilts his head to the left.

Millimeters beside Draco’s hand on the counter, glinting in the sun, is a wedding band. Draco knows Potter and Ginevra’s in and out, has examined the picture on that day’s issue of the Daily Prophet more times than he should have. He knows the marquise droplets of Ginevra’s gems and the chevron curve of her ring, the blankness of Potter’s own band a dream and a question in his mind.

The band that’s resting on the counter is different. Rustic gold and a fissure in the middle, the fertile earth splitting open to reveal a stream of diamonds, a sparkling river. Draco sets his mug to the side and holds the ring up close, his finger smoothing over the grooves of its texture.

“Did you make a stop at a jewelry store before breaking into my home?” He asks.

“No,” Harry murmurs. Draco looks at him in surprise. “I’ve had this with me for months.”

A pause.

“I thought you said you were in denial.”

“I was, but I knew, somewhat, that I wanted someone else,” Harry’s head lowers, slow and careful, until his forehead rests against Draco’s shoulder. “I told myself that I just liked the way it looked, had to get it in case I didn’t want the other ring anymore. But I got it a size smaller. Been carrying it in my pocket ever since.”

Draco’s heart throbs and throbs. Large hands circle his waist, bunching up the back of his sweater and pressing him close, chest to chest. A blanket of pure heat envelops his body as he breathes in the timeless saffron and neroli of cologne, half-lidded eyes pinned on the band he’s given. Oh, dear, he thinks, and again when it settles at the base of his ring finger with ease, as if it belongs there and never left. Oh, dear.

[niveunwhite]

tddk valentine/white day exchange 2019: (for ray)

for @tododekuvalentine and @tzubakis !! happy tododeku valentines day friendo

title: i think i love you

summary: In a so-called exercise of teambuilding and marketability awareness, the UA teachers had decided to arrange a secret Valentine exchange between the students.

Midoriya Izuku

Todoroki stared down at the piece of paper impassively.

“And remember! Valentine’s Day is next week, so get those cards and candies ready fast-- let me hear you kids say ‘YEAH’!” Present Mic’s words fell on deaf ears as 1-A went about whispering to each other about the names that had been distributed to them.

In a so-called exercise of teambuilding and marketability awareness, the UA teachers had decided to arrange a secret Valentine exchange between the students.

Aizawa shuffled to the front of the group of staff, ignoring Present Mic’s radio energy, “Even though they’re called ‘valentines’, your gifts should not necessarily be romantic. The purpose of this exchange is to establish an appreciation for your peers. You’re likely to be working together for a long time, so take note of and acknowledge the positive traits in each other.”

Todoroki looked over to see Midoriya muttering to himself, deep in thought. Midoriya’s positive traits… Considering the possibilities, Todoroki should have been relieved to have picked him; there should be no shortage of compliments to give such a positive and overall inspiring individual. So why do I feel so tense…?

“You’ve all been working nonstop for the past few months, so this should be a nice change of pace. There’s only fifteen minutes of class left, so just go ahead and get started on this, I guess.” As Aizawa zipped himself in his sleeping bag cocoon for the day, and the rest of the teachers filled out of the classroom, the students quieted down, seeming to take the assignment very seriously.

To Todoroki’s left, Yaoyorozu was writing hesitantly, often sighing to herself. In front of her, Mineta was slumped over on his desk, sniffling. I suppose he didn’t get one of the girls. Todoroki took a moment to give a small prayer of thanks before directing his gaze further forward to see:

Midoriya Izuku. He was leaning over his notebook, writing furiously, right foot tapping. Ever so often, he’d tangle his other hand in his hair, and Todoroki took the opportunity to study the particular shade of green it was. Emerald? No. Brunswick? Not quite… Pure phthalo green. Like it was just painted on. He wondered what it would feel like to run his hands through it.

Then Midoriya began to shift as if to look over his shoulder and Todoroki snapped out of his reverie. Quickly looking down at his own blank notebook, Todoroki felt a familiar burning sensation crawling up to his face. Don’t write about his hair, Todoroki made a mental note to himself as he picked up his pencil.

Class ended, as it tends to do, and when evening came, Todoroki found himself in his room, still staring at the same empty piece of paper. Frustrated and confused, he decided to head to the dorm kitchen for hot chocolate. Perhaps he’d run into someone who knew what they were doing along the way.

When he entered the common room, Todoroki saw, in one cluster, Ashido, sprawled upside-down on a couch next to Kaminari and Hagakure, while Iida, Uraraka, and Midoriya sat in another on the opposite side of the room. Midoriya looked up as he walked in, smiled, and waved. Todoroki attempted a smile back but it may have come out looking like a grimace, considering how desperately his heart suddenly seemed to be attempting to jump out of his chest. This is probably not normal.

“Sooo, does anyone know what we’re supposed to actually be doing for this secret Valentine thing?” Hagakure’s voice drew his attention back to her group.

“Yeah, they didn’t really give us a whole lot of instructions,” Kaminari agreed, “What’s up with that?”

“As many things will be when we are Pro Heros,” Iida cut into the conversation from the other side of the room, “This assignment is up to our interpretation and discretion. It is yet another test of our initiative and resourcefulness.”

Ashido pouted at this response. “Boo, it sounds less fun when you put it that way.”

Todoroki debated asking for more specific advice, but he wasn’t sure how to do so without sounding foolish. Hot chocolate will make this better, he thought to himself… Probably. As he headed further to the kitchen, Todoroki heard Ashido call his name.

“Todoroki! Who do you have for the exchange? You could probably do something super duper fancy and romantic, huh?”

“Uh.” He responded eloquently.

“Don’t push him!” Uraraka scolded, as Iida simultaneously cried out a reminder of the platonic nature of the exchange.

Then the microwave timer went off and suddenly Midoriya was standing by his side, retrieving a steaming bowl of katsudon. Todoroki stared at Midoriya’s hands as the boy hummed to himself, pouring a sweet-smelling sauce over his food and smiling all the while. They were warped and scarred, but steady and soft-looking? That can’t be right.

“Would you like to come sit with us, Todoroki?”

Todoroki startled, meeting Midoriya’s eyes. “I’m--” he waved his hand towards the empty mug he had retrieved from the cabinets, “... Hot chocolate. Sure.”

Midoriya gave a nervous laugh, scratching lightly at his face with his utterly captivating hands and Todoroki is vaguely aware that Midoriya is saying something, and he’s trying to pull himself back to reality, but he’s a little preoccupied at the moment and--

“T-T-Todoroki? What are you doing?”

Ah, yes. Midoriya’s hand is comfortably soft, despite all the scar tissue. Now what can Todoroki do to explain why he’s holding it between both of his own hands?

“Boom.” A small plume of fire puffed out from Todoroki’s palm, held in such a way that it almost looked like it was coming from Midoriya’s, “You’re Bakugou.”

There was a stretch of silence.

“WHAT?” A sudden wave of laughter came from the common room, “Todoroki, what was that?!”

Turning to look, Todoroki saw his classmates in various states of disarray. Ashido and Kaminari had ended up on the floor, while Hagakure flailed about from her seat, all in fits of uncontrollable laughter. From their own corner, Uraraka looked on with a mixture of concern and barely-concealed mirth, while Iida appeared to be going through every stage of grief simultaneously.

But back to the matter at hand. Todoroki glanced back to Midoriya, who bared an uncanny resemblance to a tomato at the current moment. In the back of his mind, he vaguely registered the smell of something burning.

“I think… I might go back to my room, actually. I have a bit of work I need to do,” Todoroki muttered. Hot chocolate be damned.

“Oh! That’s totally okay,” Midoriya stammered out, “But, um. You’re kind of. On fire a little bit.”

The shrieking in the common room was revitalised as Todoroki quickly extinguished his hair, absolutely mortified. That hadn’t happened since the time Fuyumi caught him running through the living room, pretending to be All Might’s sidekick when he was five. And that now seemed to pale in comparison.

“Thanks. I’ll… see you later.”

...

“Todoroki?”

“Yes?”

“Can I have my hands back?”

Todoroki left the common room with a speed that would have made Ingenium retire in shame. Back in his room, both hot chocolate-less and no further along with his valentine, he laid down on his futon with a silent huff. Sleeping his troubles away didn't sound too bad…

There was a sudden, timid knocking on his door. Inwardly bemoaning his existence, Todoroki pulled himself together and opened the door to find--

“Ah! Hi, Todoroki!” Uraraka beamed up at him with an angelic smile. But not quite as angelic as Midoriya-- He shook his head to clear his thoughts.

Undeterred by his silence, Uraraka continued on, “So I couldn't help but notice that you seem kind of unsure about your valentine.”

“Well, I don't really know what to say…”

“Mmhm.” Uraraka studied his face with bright eyes. “Do you have Deku?”

Todoroki took a bit of pride in preventing himself from combusting again. He nodded curtly.

“Oohh, I see…” Uraraka had a somewhat unnerving look on her face… Mischievous? Knowing? What could she know? “Is it alright if I come inside?”

Once reseated on the futon, with Uraraka reclining in his swivelling desk chair, Todoroki felt himself beginning to sweat.

“So, Todoroki,” Uraraka clasped her hands together in a very business-like manner, “What are your intentions with Deku?”

He blinked. “To… surpass him as a hero?”

Uraraka stared at him. “Okay, but maybe, like, more personally?”

Twice. “To give him a good Valentine?”

“Okay, and you want to do that because…?”

And again. “Because… That’s the assignment?”

“Oh, my God, you’re even worse than I was! Where’s your fighting spirit?!” Uraraka slammed her hands down on the chair armrests, “ Listen, Todoroki. I’ve been where you are. Deku would never let anything come between him and his friends. Now’s your opportunity! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

The confusion in the air had a somewhat salty taste.

“Are we talking about the same thing?”

Todoroki felt his skin crawl as Uraraka once again stared through him.

“You like him,” she stated, matter-of-factly.

“I… Like him.”

“Yes.”

Todoroki contemplated this for a minute. Oh. Oh no.  

“You’d do anything for him, wouldn’t you?”

His head seemed to nod on its own.

“And you have so many things to say that you can’t even begin to write anything down?”

He looked towards his noticeably blank notebook and nodded.

Uraraka hummed, satisfied. “Sounds like love to me.”

Hm. That surely sounded interesting, but Todoroki was unfortunately too busy experiencing a total emotional reboot to respond.

Uraraka stood up. “I’ll leave you to think about it. But really, you’ll feel a lot better once you get it out there. I’ll see you later!”

Todoroki remained firmly planted on his futon as Uraraka let herself out.

Sounds like love to me. The words rattled around in his head like the world’s most confused baby angel. Is this what love is? Not being able to look at one of your best and only friends in the face without spontaneously combusting? When did this start? How do you make it go away? What would Midoriya do?

Memories of Midoriya murmuring to himself while furiously writing flooded his mind. Smiling, hard-working, genuine, beautiful Midoriya. Todoroki could feel his heart melting. Midoriya would never do anything to hurt him. Maybe Uraraka was right. Maybe he should be straightforward.  

With a new sense of resolve, Todoroki picked up his pen. He was ready for the class Valentine's exchange.

I think I love you.

[stereksecretsanta]

Merry Christmas, @comedicdrama!

I hope you have a wonderful holiday, comedicdrama! <3

Rating: T Tags: cameraman!Stiles, painter!Derek, friends to lovers, fluff, so much fluff

*****

A Painting's Worth a Thousand Words

Stiles pulled up to the Hale house—the Hale mansion, really—and took a deep breath. It was just another show, exactly like they did every week at the studio.

Except this was the holiday show, and like every year, it would be just him and Derek in the Hale house basement for at least two hours, and then it would be a half hour drive over to the Beacon Hills Wildlife Sanctuary, at least an hour filming there, and a half hour drive back. Just the two of them. All day long.

Just Stiles, Derek, and Stiles's massive, unrequited crush.

They'd been working together for five years, since Derek had pitched the local public TV station on a painting program. It had been an unexpected hit—well, unexpected to Derek and most of the station management. Stiles had taken one look at him—dark hair, chiseled jaw dusted with black scruff, intense stare, broad shoulders, and a clear passion for painting—and he'd known the show would be huge. Even with people who'd never picked up a paintbrush in their lives.

Stiles had begged to be put on Derek's show. Thankfully, the station management hadn't needed too much convincing, and he and Derek had been together ever since.

Professionally. They'd been together professionally ever since.

Stiles really hadn't meant to go and fall head-over-heels for Derek. Early on, it had been easy enough to chalk it up to physical attraction and move on. But then he got to know Derek, saw how much he loved teaching people to paint, saw how much he loved his family and talking about their nonprofit work at the sanctuary, saw how earnest he was with people who enjoyed the show, and...

Well, at some point in the past five years, it had just happened. And now Stiles spent an inordinate amount of his life pining for one of his coworkers and closest friends. Really, that was just his fucking life.

He sighed, grabbed his camera and tripod, and proceeded to go begin one of the best and most excruciating days of his life.

***

Derek was wearing black-rimmed glasses and a green Christmas tree sweater that brought out the green in his multicolored eyes. He'd pushed the sleeves up to his elbows, revealing tanned forearms with a dusting of dark hair across them.

Stiles bit his lips to keep from making a pained noise and hoisted his tripod in greeting. "Hey, Derek! Ready to get started?"

"Just about," Derek said. "I'm still getting everything set up."

"That's okay." Stiles set his tripod on the floor. "Just stand where you'll be painting and I'll do some lighting tests while you're setting up."

Derek grinned at him, a quick one that showed just a flash of his two front teeth, and Stiles's heart did its usual triple somersault at the sight.

The basement at the Hale house was only a "basement" in the sense that it was the lowest floor of the house and partly underground. It had east-facing floor-to-ceiling windows that let in loads of natural light and a gorgeous view of the Beacon Hills Nature Preserve, and the whole thing was bigger than Stiles's apartment and fully decked out for Christmas. Derek's studio area was just one-quarter of it, and Stiles was pretty sure that part alone was bigger than his kitchen and living room combined.

Derek had an easel and canvas set up, and was squeezing his paint out onto a palette and frowning at the canvas, like he was still trying to figure out what to paint. Or maybe figuring out how to talk about it; even after five years, Stiles still wasn't a hundred percent sure how it worked.  Derek usually just...stood up and talked while he was painting and his eyes actually glowed with happiness and Stiles mostly focused on making sure that he got the shots, the audio, and didn't drool on himself.

Once he got his camera set up, he walked around the basement and adjusted the blinds and curtains, flicking lights on and off until he got a lighting setup he was happy with. He might have to get a few lights out of the Jeep after they actually did test shots, but right now, he could probably make it work with just the lights in the basement.

He went back to his bags and got out the lapel mic. "Okay, Derek, mic time."   

Derek stood up and lifted the back of his shirt, giving Stiles a glimpse of the strip of skin of his lower back.

Professional, Stiles scolded himself, and hooked the transmitter on to Derek's belt before handing him the mic to thread up through his shirt.

"You sure we need this?" Derek asked with a wrinkled nose, like he did every time.

"Yes." Stiles poked him in his unfairly muscled arm. "We always need to have two audio tracks, you know that. I'd hate to miss out on the scintillating way you say 'phthalo blue' because the shotgun cut out and we didn't have a backup. Come on, let's get started and see if I need to grab any more lights out of the car."

"There should be some in the closet," Derek said, pointing.

Stiles raised his eyebrows. "Wait, what? You have lights?"

Derek shrugged. "We shoot out here often enough that I thought it might be good to have a few lights as backup. Just in case."

Stiles went to the closet Derek had indicated. Sure enough, a lighting case and three C-stands sat on the floor, among the myriad other things in there.

Stiles gaped at them. "Dude, I can't believe you got me lighting stands!"

"It's better than you having to drive all the way back into town because you forgot them," Derek said.

Stiles whirled on him and jabbed a finger in his direction. "That was one time."

Derek snorted. "A memorable time."

Because he always dealt with his feelings in a mature way, Stiles stuck his tongue out at him.

Derek made a face right back, then went back and picked up his palette and brush. "Ready when you are."

Stiles hit the audio recorder, turned on the camera, and counted him in.

Derek smiled brilliantly, and it made Stiles's heart flutter the way it always did. "Hey, everyone. Glad you could join us today for our annual holiday show. As usual, we have a little bit of a change of scenery," he gestured to the room, "which I've used for inspiration for our painting today, since we don't exactly get a lot of snow in northern California. So we'll run the colors across the screen for you, and we'll go ahead and get started."

"Okay, cut!" Stiles said.

Derek frowned. "Everything good?"

Stiles checked the lighting on the video and then the mic recording. "Yeah, no, looks like we're good. Let's keep going."

Filming Derek's painting on location at the Hale house tended to be more stressful than filming at the studio, where Stiles had two extra cameras and way more lighting control. But the holiday episode was always a huge one for the station, and Stiles did enjoy the time they got to spend together here.

Listening to Derek talk about painting and watching him paint was probably Stiles's favorite part of his job. Derek always looked a little flushed and happy when he did, and he got visibly excited to see a painting come together. Even after five years of watching him do this once a week, Stiles still hadn't gotten over it.

They only had to cut twice, and before Stiles knew it, Derek was finishing up the painting and giving his traditional sign off, ending with, "And wherever you are, I hope you have the happiest of holiday seasons."

"Cut!" Stiles called.

Derek set his palette aside. "So what do you think? Does it look okay?"

"Dude." Stiles stretched, staring at the landscape painting of the wildlife preserve in winter. He'd watched Derek push paint around on the canvas for an hour and he still wasn't sure how it was done. "That's fantastic. I think this going to be your most popular holiday episode yet."

Derek ducked his head, but Stiles caught the edge of his smile. "You're just saying that."

"I never just say anything," Stiles said. "Well, sometimes I do, but not about things this important. Seriously, dude, it's good."

Derek scratched the back of his head. "Then you're biased."

"I probably am, but eh." Stiles's stomach rumbled. "Hey, you want to grab lunch somewhere before we head out to the wildlife sanctuary?"

"Actually, we've got food upstairs," Derek said. "My dad made spaghetti last night, and there are tons of leftovers. We also have some apple cider, if you want?"

"That sounds amazing," Stiles said.

The tips of Derek's ears turned red. "Okay, I'll go get it ready."

Stiles grabbed his computer and the memory cards out of the camera and audio recorder. "Then I'm going to dump the files while we're eating."

Stiles followed Derek up the stairs and settled at the kitchen table to dump the files onto his computer, and Derek got out the spaghetti and apple cider to heat up.

Stiles brought the first video files up to make sure everything had recorded correctly, and let out a sigh of relief when the file was clean; you only needed to have a file get corrupted once before it made you paranoid every time.

A mug of apple cider landed on the counter beside him. "How does it look?" Derek asked.

Wow, he was standing...very close. Stiles had to resist the urge to lean back into him. "It looks great, like I told you. I can't wait to put the whole thing together."

"We still need to get the footage from the wildlife sanctuary," Derek reminded him.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Stiles said. "What do you think, head out there around one?"

Derek took a sip of his cider. "That should work. As long as you get something to eat first."

"Dude, you're literally making me lunch right now." Stiles gestured at the microwave. "You act like I don't eat anything."

"You don't, unless Allison or I make you," Derek said. "How many times have I had to drag you away from your computer to get lunch?"

"Just once," Stiles muttered. "Or twice."

Derek poked him. "A week."

Stiles tried to elbow him, but Derek had moved out of reach. "It's not that often."

"It's often enough." Derek went to get the spaghetti out of the microwave and brought it over. "Now eat, and don't get too distracted watching the videos."

Stiles rolled his eyes, but he minimized the videos and dove into his spaghetti. Holy shit, it was fantastic. "Oh my God, I'm going to marry this pasta."

Derek coughed and turned to his own bowl. "I'll let Dad know you like it."

"Does he cook like this all the time? Because seriously, I will camp out in your backyard for table scraps."

Derek rolled his eyes. "We have plenty of bedrooms, in case you hadn't noticed. I'm sure we can stick you in one of those. Mom will never notice."

Stiles grinned at him. "You're a true friend."

Derek jabbed his fork into the spaghetti. "I try."

***

They drove out to the Beacon Hills Wildlife Sanctuary as soon as they'd finished eating, a good thirty minutes across the preserve from the Hale's house. Stiles spent most of the drive trying not to get distracted by Derek's forearms or his soft smile.

"We have a lot of new animals out there right now," Derek said. "Deer, wolf cubs, squirrels...which do you think would be best to feature?"

Stiles choked at the thought of Derek playing with any of them.  Derek and adorable animals was really his kryptonite. "Uh, I really don't think it matters. Any of them will be great. Which ones are you most comfortable with?"

"Any of them," Derek said. "I've been helping feed the wolf cubs when I come out to volunteer."

"That's good. Let's do that," Stiles said. "People will go crazy for adorable baby wolves."

"Cubs," Derek corrected him.

"And that's why you do the talking on camera," Stiles said with a wink.

Derek blushed and crossed his arms. "God knows you talk enough off it."

"Aw, come on, what would you do without my rambling?"

"Suffer in silence," Derek said, but he was grinning.

It made Stiles's heart flip, and he had to turn back to focus on the road.

The Hales had been running the Beacon Hills Wildlife Sanctuary as long as Stiles could remember. From what Derek had told him, the sanctuary was his parents' baby, and when they'd first started working together, it had been on the brink of shutting down. Since the painting show had started to take off and Stiles knew at least 50% of that popularity was due to the fact that Derek was hotter than the surface of the sun, he'd suggested featuring some of the animals on the show. The only thing better than watching an attractive man talk passionately about painting was watching him bottle-feed baby deer.

It had been even more popular than he'd hoped it would be, and now the wildlife sanctuary had doubled in size, added three more full-time positions, and featured a ton of cool educational programs Stiles would have killed for when he was in elementary school. It had also helped the popularity of Derek's show as well, which made station management supremely happy.

Stiles had never told anyone the only reason he'd had the idea was because Derek looked utterly gutted at the thought of the sanctuary shutting down, and Stiles would have hand-crafted a rocket out of bubble gum and paperclips to fly to the outer reaches of the solar system if it meant never seeing that look on Derek's face again.

The wildlife sanctuary wasn't terribly crowded, being that it was the middle of a work day and the schools weren't out for winter break yet, so the only person working was Laura, Derek's older sister, who waved excitedly when they walked in. "Hey! You guys are earlier than I expected."

Stiles hoisted his camera. "We got through the painting a lot faster than I thought we would because Derek's an overachiever."

Derek elbowed him. "Hey, I just paint. You're the one who makes it look good."

Laura made gagging noises. "Get a room, please."

Stiles's face heated. "Maybe we will. But make it with the baby wolves."

"Cubs. Wolf cubs. We literally just went over this," Derek said.

Laura raised her eyes to the ceiling and muttered something Stiles couldn't hear. "Okay, wolf cubs. Come on down the hall and I'll get you set up."

The baby wolves—wolf cubs—were even more adorable than Stiles had pictured, and he had a pretty good concept of what adorable looked like. Three gangly, fluffy grey wolves and one gangly, fluffy white wolf tripped all over Derek, chewing at his sweater and making squeaky howls and yips that were so cute Stiles was pretty sure he was going to get a cavity from it. They had to cut several times because Derek was laughing too hard to talk about the wolves and why they were at the sanctuary.

Stiles kind of wished someone would stab him and put him out of his misery, because this level of adorable was too much for one human being to physically handle.

On the other side of the room, Laura watched him with a terrifying smirk. Stiles was pretty sure she knew exactly what he was thinking, which helped him rein in the desire to just throw himself on Derek and pledge undying love. He sure as hell wasn't doing that in front of Derek's sister.

Despite the interruptions, they finished up the shoot in less than two hours, and Stiles had a boatload of footage with Derek and the wolf cubs to use in the holiday episode. Even better was that he had a ton of outtakes to use on the station website, which would make everybody happy.

Laura bid them farewell, staring at Stiles like she could see straight into his soul the entire time. Stiles steadfastly ignored her and really hoped she wouldn't say anything to Derek.

"Your sister's kind of scary sometimes," he said as they pulled away.

"She's harmless," Derek said. "Mostly."

Stiles raised his eyebrows. "Mostly harmless?"

Derek grinned. "Just like Earth."

Stiles laughed out loud. He knew Derek was a not-so-secret nerd, but he still got a kick out of it every time Derek made a reference.

"Do you have a minute?" Derek asked when they got back to the Hale house. "I have something to show you."

"Yeah, sure," Stiles said. He didn't really have anywhere else to be, and even though it was almost painful to be around Derek alone for so long, he didn't want the day to end.

He followed Derek back into the house and down to the basement, and Derek went to a stack of paintings under cloth in the back corner of the room. Stiles stayed back and watched him flip through the canvases until he apparently found the one he wanted and pulled it out.

He walked back to Stiles hesitantly, still holding the canvas backward so that Stiles couldn't see what it was.

His heart beat faster. "What you got there, big guy?"

Derek bit his lip. "I don't...paint people often. But, with this one, I wanted to try, and..." He trailed off and exhaled sharply, and then handed the painting to Stiles. "Here."

Stiles took the painting and slowly turned it around.

It was him.

He was laughing, his mouth wide open and his eyes crinkled at the corners, looking off to the left side of the canvas. The colors were so warm, it looked like he was glowing, and Stiles's heart seized in his chest.

"Where did you...how did you...?" he tried to ask, but the words wouldn't come.

"It was a picture Allison took at one of the station parties earlier this year," Derek said quietly. "I had her send me a copy. I probably threw away five pieces before I was happy with that one. It was...really hard to get right."

He felt completely winded. "Holy shit, Derek."

Derek winced and rubbed the back of his neck. "Sorry, I—"

"Don't you dare apologize," Stiles said. He couldn't take his eyes off the painting, because holy fuck Derek had painted him. "Don't—oh my God, dude, this is—"

He didn't have words. For once in his life, Stiles was utterly speechless.

He set the painting down, walked over to Derek, and kissed him right on the lips.

Derek blinked dazedly when Stiles pulled back. "Uh."

"I'm kind of in love with you," Stiles blurted out. "Maybe a lot in love with you. Holy shit, I can't believe you painted me. Do you want to go out for coffee sometime?"

Derek laughed softly. "I feel like we went in reverse order there."

"Dude, you painted me," Stiles said. "I'm pretty sure that's one step before engagement."

Derek flushed bright red. "I think that's moving a little too fast. But...coffee would be nice. Or maybe dinner?"

"Dinner would be fantastic," Stiles said. "And, to be perfectly honest, I would not be opposed to more kissing. Better kissing. That one was really just because I had no idea what to say because you fucking painted me."

Derek grinned and bent his head toward Stiles's. "So, I take it you liked the painting?"

Stiles linked his hands behind Derek's neck. "Yes, Derek, I liked the pain—"

Derek kissed him, and Stiles had never been happier to shut up in his life. And he was right: this was way better kissing. Derek was probably better at kissing than he was at painting, and he was awesome at painting.

"You know, uh, if you ever want me to actually sit for you to paint, I'd do it," Stiles said when they finally stopped making out long enough to breathe.

"You'd have to sit still for a few hours," Derek said. "I'm not sure you could manage it."

Stiles poked him in the shoulder. "Hey, you'd be surprised what I could do for you."

Derek's smile went soft. "Oh, yeah?"

Heat crept up the back of Stiles's neck, and he fought the urge to look away. "Well. Yeah. Obviously."

"I'll keep that in mind," Derek said, and leaned in close. "Merry Christmas, Stiles."

"Merry Christmas, Derek," Stiles whispered before Derek sealed their lips together once again.

[dainwritesnonsense]

Farewell, Starboard!

In the center of the fine line that breaks the horizon and ocean, a lone black cruise ship whirled to it’s demise. To think I was just on that ship, hours ago is...well, I can’t find words for it as my mouth is agape staring off in the distance. 

The captain had the sense to evacuate everyone on the ship prior to us colliding with the whirlpool. In the distance, it’s difficult to discern where the starboard and port are. The ship was painted black for some reason and with the sun slowly waking up, I wonder if the ship had another purpose that they didn’t tell the passengers. Well, whatever it was, that ceased as the black cruise ship drifted in circles down to its doom. 

A dark haired laddie interrupted my view, “Hey, c’mon, let’s get moving.”

My face wore a blank mesmerized gaze, I know it. The words wanted to come out of my mouth, but the barrier of surprise...a near miss to what could have been my doom, but no, the sea god had blessed me. I am on shore with this laddie and other families. Some of the children and women were crying. Another set of crew members were doing a head count and covering our losses.

The laddie waited a few paces behind me closer to the golden city that was centered around the cape. I shut my mouth when I realized he was waiting on me and left the scene.

A loss is a loss. I know this because I’ve been through several natural disasters. It’s taught me not to be too attached to materialistic things except, maybe my identity. I had all my paperwork with me, that’s all that mattered. And I had...these people. He’s putting some responsibility on me to help out and I’m following him, because I...have nothing better to do...

He led me along the shore and we could see other islanders stranded. We escaped with nothing but the clothes on our backs, the moment was surreal. It might be a blessing for some, but this reeks of a new beginning. The air is sweet and inviting. Merriment drifted among it, further inland.

“Least we ended up near the shore of the city.” He says looking back at the ship disappear into the depths below. I can’t say it’s a sinking ship because it looked comical the way it disappeared. I shake my head.

We parted ways with the islanders. The laddie waved to one of the other crew members and led me to a decent sized hotel. Warm yellow stucco in the front and white baroque trim. How exciting! 

The hotel interior was much less so, it seemed to be outdated because there were plants growing on the floors. They were coming out of the shoe molding. Also, insects fluttered and their wings, oh their dainty wings, brushed our cheeks and noses. The youthful plants explained why the air was clean, but it didn’t explain the doors on the ceiling.

They were painted as if gender segregation was still a thing. This place is old! Boy, girl, boy, girl...that’s how it was. All symbols painted phthalo blue or a deep phthalo green. They must’ve run out of paint when rushing to complete the job.

“Wait here, let me find someone.” My companion reassured. I had almost blinked, but I had to know what the purpose was for the unconventional choice of putting doors on a ceiling, no less! It’s not functional at all.

I didn’t dare look back at him, really, the scenery was too much to take in. His cologne of pine and musk lingered to remind me he was still there...even as he wandered off down the hall we just came from. There’s a ding! that rang through the halls. The light trickling in from the windows made me feel like I was in some forest instead of a hotel. 

Why, laddie, chose a hotel, I don’t know. It was the first building that touched the shore. I was surprised, there weren’t any restaurants. This isn’t a normal beach town or city. We must have entered a secret cape or inlet?

“I’ll be back.” he calls out. He had a lot of emotions and thoughts running through his mind. Yet his voice is always calm. He never broke focus.

He’s our captain? Or one of the commanding officers. He is wearing a navy uniform with a trim of rouge and gold buttons. His shoes are black as his wavy hair. He has freckles and moles on his face. Dark eyes. On a regular day, he is always thinking. His brain doesn’t stop. Yet he needed me. Yet he plucked me out. I’m just a passenger on the ship. This was the easiest and fastest route to get to my destination, but now I’m at a stand still.

I realize I’ve been carrying my beige and black purse this whole time. To my dismay, I’m actually dressed like a proper woman. If I’m to be lost on some foreign cape, being dressed like a proper woman will only hinder me. I’m wearing a black office pencil skirt, my beige and black wedges from my internship and a white button up top. My coat is black with navy buttons. Odd feature. But nonetheless, my hair is tied up all fancy and I’m wearing gold earrings. My makeup is done too, finished with my classic wingtip. I’m actually wearing foundation and deep burgundy lipstick. What is the occasion? Being deserted at the cape’s shore? This is not how one ought to dress in these situations. I know I can change, but this overgrown hotel is taking up my mind, my conscious.

What went on in here? Who used those doors above? Is that décor? Is it just for contemporary art? Or is that another opportunity to actually get out? But, who would want to venture there if the doors are gender segregated? Sad.

An old man opened the ‘boy’ door from the ceiling. He was dressed well in herringbone and tweed. The man had salt and pepper hair. My eyes widen as my brain tries to grasp how he manages to stand like that against the wall. Of course he pays no attention to my gasp as he goes into another door staring at his clipboard. I realize the sick bay is at the top of the ceiling. Odd feature. That place is for children! My brain is rumbling with disgust about how gender segregation is still being taught to children here.

I shift in my position with unease. I feel bad. The children. I stare out the window and wonder if my companion is fairing alright. I heard him bellow a “Hello!” A few times. The only thing keeping me company are the ferns growing out of the seams of the shoe molding and my view of the caustic sea. You tell me reader, was it worth coming on shore?

[straykatfish]

There are two main parts to this task, the first being to review all my landscape paintings to consider which have been the most appealing.

This is my collection from the current module and what strikes me is the colours; I am not subtle! With the exception of the hand sanitisers (group 2 – large image), the piece of wood (group 3, top left), and the two sea front pieces (group 3, top right and bottom left), they are all some way off naturalistic. The ones that appeal to me most from a visual point of view are the hand sanitisers because that was a re-purposing of an existing painting (Evening landscape with two men by Caspar David Friedrich c 1830/35); the rather other-worldly landscape from my own photo top left in the same group; and the final one (group 1, top left) because of the relatively close approximation to the reference photo but with a selectivity and palette adjustment I wouldn’t have made before. I’m quite fond of the first two swans (group 1, top right) too but that’s hardly a landscape!

I have often made two pieces in response to an exercise and almost always the second has felt better. Exceptions are the landscape in group 1, bottom right because I didn’t feel I had pulled off the impression I had in mind and ended up over-working it; and the fragmented piece using, literally, the palette I had used for the first (group 2, bottom left) which is so wildly different from the original that I don’t know how to classify it. Quite where this leaves me in relation to this assignment isn’t clear, but I know that every one of these pieces has built on every previous piece and I expect that will be the case for the assignment.

The second requirement is to make a landscape painting of ‘around 90 cm x 60 cm’ which is about the size of an A1 board (84 cm x 60 cm). This can be begun in situ, that is, outside and completed indoors, or it can be built from previous studies, reference photos, and notes. Working outdoors which would be an issue even without a pandemic but the size requirement is not an issue as many of my ‘sketches’ are A1. I am considering some way of addressing the ‘or larger’ component of the instruction; can I make a larger piece by painting a number of smaller pieces to be assembled, or maybe find a way to paint on a roll of wrapping paper taped to the door?

Searching my stock of photos, I came across some from 2015 that changed my ideas about what to do. They’re of the memorial flowers on the footbridge at Shoreham-by-Sea that appeared in their thousands overnight following the crash of a display jet onto the A27 which killed eleven people, and I wanted to go with that as the focus rather than an experimental effort.

The people, all men, killed were in their cars or on bikes at the traffic lights waiting for green. One man, a chauffeur, had let someone in ahead of him just moments earlier and that person got through before the lights changed to red. The drivers travelling east saw the whole nightmare played out before them.

I know these traffic lights well; just the week before at the same time of day I had been waiting there with my two newly adopted kittens going for their first vaccination boosters, their carrier strapped into the passenger seat. I still wonder what I would have done if I’d seen that jet in my rear view mirror; could I have got them and myself free and out of the car, would I have just saved myself, or would I have stayed with them because I couldn’t free us all?

The fifth anniversary will be on August 22nd.

This is a crimson/burnt sienna wash on a white gesso surface. The size is A1 cartridge.

The sky on the day was a deep blue, a perfect summer day, so my plan is to use that instead of this later, paler sky. I also want to manipulate the way the wooden structure of the bridge appears, to adjust the focus as it were and aim it at the area tight to the left of fourth gap which is close to the site of the crash. I may shift the whole thing down and left so that there is closer to two thirds sky and less bridge so that the glimpse of landscape – the Adur estuary – is in the where the eye falls even though it is quite distant. True to the spirit if not the actuality. I really don’t know how easy this will be. What I do know is that I need to get some background in before I start detailing anything in front of it.

Wandered temporarily into Munch territory a bit here. The intent was to get some colour into the sky areas and fix the bridge woodwork so that job is done. Phthalo blue which has a reddish tinge, and titanium white. Washed on and scrubbed with a flannel while wet to pull back into the red and the gesso base.

I’m really not liking this at the moment! Admittedly, it’s like being caught between track suit bottoms and no make up and your full-on posh frock and hair-do but still. What I want now is to make the bridge almost transparent, maybe even just a ghost and an outline, with the estuary and skyline the key features. That’s going to mean getting all of that painting to a finished quality before doing what would normally be the detailed foreground.

I may have gone full war artist now. The plane was a Hawker Hunter jet, ex-military, which may be how the sky has become almost populated with munitions, the estuary is a wasted landscape, and the bridge has vanished. This last was intentional prior to putting it back in as light lines but now I’m not sure about doing that. The colours are redolent now of the RAF.

Clearly the image is an imagined one, or at least the overlay is because I wasn’t there at the time. I have seen photographs but I haven’t used them for reference. I’ve also changed the directionality of my gestural strokes in parts of the sky, my usual as a left-hander being left to right downward, because I wanted marks reflecting the flight of the plane which was east to west – right to left. Because the first marks are still visible, this has left a crisscross effect which is really quite war time in my mind.

So, do the bridge and the flowers go in or do they stay out? Or do I just consider this a sketch and make another? My feeling is I have nothing to lose by making a second version, especially as my ‘seconds’ often turn out to be better.

First a semi-transparent border and a crop to tidy things up. Still a bit grim though; I’m not Turner yet, am I?

After a bit of reflection I think I can see why this is so problematic and the main reason is that it isn’t really a landscape, it’s an emotionally charged image, much of which I have had to generate mentally, and I am not up to the job of doing it justice.  There are some odd moments that I quite like – parts of the sky and the estuary, and the stark line of the horizon – but the rest is something of an artistic wasteland. I need to find an image I am less invested in.

Meanwhile, and with  nothing to lose, I imported this into Rebelle3 to try out some adjustments and additional layers. Again, imagined.

On the grounds that it’s impossible to ruin the irredeemable, I’ve followed the digital experiment and put in the bridge structure. There are no flowers because the jet has only just crashed. Tomorrow, an actual landscape.

  I found another photo taken a few years ago; a classic country village scene which I would be aiming to brighten up as I had a previous image. I would also like to be selective about the scene but cropping it (this is an A4 print) changes the aspect ratio and would mean it then not translating to the larger A1 support in anything other than letterbox format, which would be smaller than that required by the task. Ideally, I would have the bottom quarter/third out, leaving the boat/bridge complex in the lower third of what remains and the expanse of bridge taking up the mid-ground. If I were taking this shot again (and also if I were a goat) I would be much lower on the bank near the water so that the boat, while still some way off, energises the centre right and lower area of the composition.

I wonder, by a process of elimination in that it would not be portraiture, figurative or abstract, does that window of boat/arch/banks/foliage qualify as landscape? That seems to me the most appealing part of this image and has the most dynamism. I’ll take the risk and go with that because it’s that part I can feel.

I think this has potential. White gesso + some pumice medium in the foliage area, Payne’s grey wash to key blocks. I wonder if I can keep it this loose and fluid.

Payne’s grey, Naples yellow, titanium white, Hooker’s green in mixed washes and more solid patches roughly applied and wiped when almost dry with a piece of flannel. I need to proceed very carefully now; this is a style I haven’t tried before and that has come about just by ‘getting some paint on the thing’. All the colours are dialled down and there are some ‘moments’ – the cottage tucked up against the left margin and the side of the house right of centre. Also some anti-moments – the house at the right margin and the edge of the bridge structure on the left. That’s over and above the fact that this is early in its development and there is a lot else to do yet.

Another day, another pass with dilute medium. I have really simplified this picture, leaving what detail there is to the foliage in the foreground, applied with a broad flat brush (sap green), a toothbrush (Hooker’s green/Payne’s grey), and a stencil brush (titanium white + Naples yellow). One of the background trees looks like a stereotypical mountain and needs fixing, as do some of the nearer trees that are lighter than the more distant one, but the building at the right margin is improved I think. The boat may be a bit smaller than it is in reality and possibly needs muting a little; and there’s a ‘glow’ at the end of the bridge under the house. I have trouble depicting light so before I un-depict it, I need to take a good look at how that happened!

Glow detail: unadulterated Naples yellow on white gesso.

Quite a lot of the structure of the bridge and the two banks is less than accurate so that locals would wonder where a wall or a cottage has gone. Nevertheless, there are parts that work and still some that don’t and I’m reaching the point where I will end up a mish-mash of inconsistent styles. I can see three even now. And the pathway to the right seems to be shot through with blood vessels. My plan is to tackle the glow, slightly un-mute the boat, deal with a gap between the bridge and the path on the left, and turn that piece of liver back into gravel.  Then I will consider it done and think about whether or not to try again with a different style. I have to admit, finding out about the variety of styles and techniques and having them begin to influence my own work is a bit like being let loose with a dressing up box and trying not to end up with a tiara, rugby scarf, and wellies over your Nan’s old dressing gown.

I’ve seriously lost interest in this now; I think I prefer the very first iteration where it was just wash and gesso. Back to the dressing up box tomorrow.

Round three. I have painted this scene twice; it’s called Tin Pots Hill and I see it whenever I walk down the river path. I discovered later that the tiny dots on the horizon are pigsties and downwind of them the air is quite ripe so they are not very popular.

First pass. Titanium white base (learning from where the mysterious glow came from in the earlier painting), then Sap green, Hooker’s green, cad yellow, Naples yellow, and Payne’s grey – some mixed with mixing white for tint. Tomorrow I may just even up the edges on the left, add some darker wash to the base of the top mound, and very softly lighten the tops of some foliage and deepen some shadows. Then, for better for worse I should leave the darned thing alone and decide which of the two should be the actual submission. Not the bridge, definitely not the bridge.

Today I have washed some darker pigment into the tree/shrub line just above the field and added a tiny amount of magenta to an area mid-right both to reflect a couple of trees at that point and also to create a slight diagonal down through the roof tops towards the lower left. I am calling this finished because I know if I fiddle any more with it things will just go downhill. No pun. The line across the centre on the right is a crease that was present in the previous photograph but seems more pronounced in this one, possibly due to the different light direction and intensity.

I have a strip of duck cotton left over so harking back to the good old days of pressing the ridiculous head gear nurses were required to wear, I took a risk that pressing this through the spare strip would remove the crease. It did, but this stuff has a memory and it springs back and I’ve caught it here just before it fully reappeared. Another lesson learned – iron this stuff before you start and make sure it understands resistance is futile.

Looking at all three paintings, each very different in subject, degree of adherence to a reference photo, and execution, I am choosing this one as the assignment submission. It may be significant that I’ve painted it before, and I’m pleased that this version, larger than the others, feels more studied but also less constrained. I like the middle tree line for its lack of definition, and the unembellished roof tops in the mid ground. I would have fiddled with those in the past. Similarly the hint-of-sheep in the foreground which previously I would have tried to render more clearly.

The top mound of the hill is too big and too high and some other aspect are less true to the reference than might be ideal. I think, though, that it would be recognisable to anyone who has stopped to look on the same path I’ve stopped to look so many times, and hope to again when the current threat is gone.

Finally, there should be consideration of what, if any, has been the influence of significant landscape artists on the work itself.

This is difficult because I have a tendency to absorb imagery without labels so it settles somewhere in my unconscious ready to exert its influence but without telling me where it came from. I can see some impressionism but none of the bold outlined German variety. Also, despite being brighter than the photograph, no hint of Fauvism which I had almost anticipated as being influential. It’s definitely contemporary; an essence of landscape rather than a documented one. Perhaps it’s a fusion; that confused state between trying to mimic other work and finding a voice of one’s own. A glance at the three paintings here probably show just how confused that is!

Meanwhile, I watched a video about Whistler by Tim Marlow yesterday and was surprised to find he liked to work much as I do, dragging medium across the support and building colour by mixing on the canvas itself. Personally, I’ve become a fan of the dirty brush where two, maybe even three colours, can be applied at once and either left to create lines of light or shadow, blended while wet, or left to dry and scrubbed back to leave intermittent patches of residue behind which make their own texture. I know I’ve seen some of Whistler’s work in various books; perhaps I picked up some of his ways of working and stored them for later.

___

2015 Shoreham Air Crash. Wikipedia. [online] Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Shoreham_Airshow_crash Accessed 7 June 2020.

Remembering Shoreham. Shadow by Lyn Jennings, Ducks in a Row by Suzanne Conboy-Hill. Audio and text. [online] Available at https://readalongreads.com/2016/07/31/remembering-shoreham/ Accessed 7 June 2020. From the anthology Let Me Tell You a Story 2014. Suzanne Conboy-Hill [ed]. Waif Sands.

Marlow, T., Great Artists with Tim Marlow. 2003. Amazon Prime. [online] Available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B07FNT8TRH/ref=atv_dp_season_select_s2 Accessed 13 June 2020.

  Part 4, assignment 4 – landscape There are two main parts to this task, the first being to review all my landscape paintings to consider which have been the most appealing.

[solivar]

WIP: Ghost Stories On Route 66

aka the one in which Hanzo Shimada is an expatriate student of the Fine Arts, attending college in what he assumes to be a reasonably sedate corner of the American southwest. Jesse McCree is an occasionally leather-clad NPS ranger whose duties extend somewhat further than shooing lost tourists back onto the clearly marked hiking trails. Something weird is going on in the desert south of Santa Fe and their lives unexpectedly come together in the middle of it.

Now featuring family meetings over breakfast, Genji being right about something, and Hanzo tossing the very last of his fucks out the window.

Author’s note: I’m having oral surgery tomorrow so I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that the next section might not come out tomorrow. However, once I get this stinking tooth out, I will no longer be continuously fighting off an infection that saps my energy and randomly puts me in the hospital. I will attempt to get back to my regular writing schedule and your entertainment forthwith. ^_^

Sweetwater’s Cafe and Dim Sum Palace was what happened when the owner of the hip young southwestern fusion cuisine cafe closest to the UNM main campus met the owner of the hip young Chinese small plates restaurant closest to the UNM main campus and, rather than engage in an increasingly rancorous culinary battle for the spare cash of every student in walking distance, they instead fell wildly in love and shortly thereafter into scrumptious and wholesome partnership. Strategically located catty-corner to the main campus residence halls, the post-merger restaurant became the place for broke ass college students attempting to top-load on calories for the day to turn up as soon as the doors opened, eat from carts pushed around three stories of public-to-semi-private dining space by an army of cheerful abuelitas for two hours straight, and still make a 9:30 lecture with time to spare. The joint Shimada-Tekhartha-Song-Correia household dined there frequently enough that the host waved them through despite the fact that Hanzo still looked like he had just committed a phthalo green and phthalocyanine blue shaded murder even after a thorough scrubbing. Fortunately, their usual table, a booth in the back corner of the semi-private floor, was unoccupied and he rather swiftly found himself tucked firmly between Genji on one side and Zenyatta on the other, with Lucio and Hana standing guard on the outside ends of the U-shaped seat. Hana had, in fact, only parted with her adopted hockey stick with extreme reluctance.

“Is it too early to start drinking?” Hana asked brightly. “Because, between you and me, I have a feeling that today is going to be the sort of thing that demands Mimosas. Lots of Mimosas. And possibly a whole bottle of tequila before it’s all over.”

“Yes,” said Hanzo and Zenyatta, more or less simultaneously and in reasonably identical disapproving tones, to their mutual surprise.

“You two aren’t going to be a single bit of fun about any of this, are you? Okay, fine.” And when the drinks cart came around, she settled for a spiced hot chocolate and waited patiently for everyone else to adulterate their tea or coffee before demanding, “All right. Spill it. I want to know in excruciating detail why our security deposit probably just went down the toilet.”

Hanzo inhaled the steam rising off his cup of tea, took a fortifying sip, organized his thoughts, and began to speak, pausing only when the food carts stopped next to their table. He told them about the trip itself, the breakdown, the walk through the desert, the ranger and their drive back to the car the next morning, and precisely how everything had gone horribly, hideously wrong from that point forward. He even copped to talking to Zenyatta first, which earned them both a half-startled, half-hurt look from Genji. When he finished, the table was covered in half-empty plates of huevos rancheros, honey-coated sopapillas, carne adovada burritos, pork xiao long bao, sesame buns, and a crock of hot and sour soup. He helped himself to a little bit of everything while the others digested what he told them.

“So...what you’re saying is…” Hana said in the tone of one musing idly aloud, “...your smoking hot park ranger has one hot vampire dad and one terrifying smog monster dad but, nonetheless, he has two dads, which means he won’t find it completely traumatic if you call him up and ask him if he wants to go get some hot chocolate and pumpkin empanadas once all this is over?”

“Really? That was your takeaway from his story?” Lucio asked.

“It was the takeaway that doesn’t make me want to run screaming back to Korea.” Hana replied, sweetly.

“Okay, there is that.” Lucio turned and leveled a deadly serious look at him, brown eyes intensely earnest. “Han, I love you man, you know that, right? So you know this is coming from a place of love when I say you could not be more obviously thirsty for this dude if you had a holoscreen floating over your head announcing in foot-tall flashing letters I am thirsty for Ranger Jesse McCree. Seriously, ask him out. The worst he can do is say he’s not interested.”

Hanzo buried his face in his soup bowl in an effort to disguise the fact that all the blood was rushing into his head with such violence he could hear it roaring in his ears like a gale-force wind. On one side, he could feel Zenyatta heroically controlling the urge to add his encouragement to the chorus; on the other, he suspected that Genji was restraining something considerably less supportive.

“Show of hands,” Genji asked, his tone positively glacial with the self-control it was taking him not to have a screaming freakout in the middle of breakfast, “Who thinks my brother being stalked by a soul-eating monstrosity from beyond reality as we know it is completely unacceptable and something we should all be working to change right now?”

Four hands went up; Hanzo abstained, since he felt his opinion on the matter should be fairly self-evident.

“Seriously, though.” Hana reached over and snagged a sopapilla. “I joke because otherwise I’d be rocking back and forth in a corner gibbering right now because, really, that was kinda the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen and my Dad collects vintage Junji Ito manga so I know from creepy.”

“I gotta agree with Hana on that one.” Lucio continued to look intensely earnest. “I get why you tried to keep us out of it and I appreciate that, I do, because this semester is trying to murder me even without the addition of horrible tentacle monsters -- “

“I am not entirely certain those are tentacles,” Hanzo murmured into the surface of his soup.

“-- or suspiciously tentacular not-tentacles, but seriously, man. Your life is like normal repellent right now. Anti-normal.” Lucio slumped back in his seat. “And your ranger dude thought sending you back to standard reality would help?”

“The principle is a sound one.” Zenyatta interjected quietly. “The purpose of returning him to us was to encourage his soul to anchor itself in the comforting rituals of the ordinary, of the life he led before it intersected with the unnatural. I suspected the medicine sent to aid that endeavor was dosed slightly too high and therefore overperforming in an unhelpful way -- reducing it, however, may have allowed for something even more dangerous. For that I am profoundly sorry.”

“I asked for your help -- you have nothing to apologize for, Zenyatta.” Hanzo drank the last of his bowl. “Perhaps I should -- “

“Take an academic leave of absence and put a couple thousand miles of ocean between you and whatever that thing is?” Genji suggested helpfully.

“I am not entirely certain that physical distance would actually constitute an encumbrance in this case.” Zenyatta interjected.

“Why not?” His brother replied, with the sort of maddening powers of logic he could marshal when circumstances demanded it. “The ranger suggested it would help if he stayed away from where it happened in the first place -- rationally, even further away would be safest, right?”

“The ranger sent me back here because you are my family,” Hanzo replied quietly. “And because being in your presence would constitute a form of healing. Would you like to contemplate the sort of convalescence I would enjoy if I crawled home and told our parents this story? I would spend the rest of my life contemplating the world through a heavy antipsychotic-colored haze from behind the unrelentingly beige walls and discreetly reinforced windows of a psychiatric institution that I would never be allowed leave again. I’m half amazed you don’t think I’m insane.”

“Admittedly, we kind of have the advantage of knowing you as the less freaky Shimada brother.” Lucio replied soothingly, flicking a glance at Genji as he did so. “No offense, G.”

“None taken.” Then, grudgingly, “I don’t think father would let that happen, but I see your point.”

Hanzo let the breath he’d been holding out in a shaky sigh. “Thank you.”

“In any case, I would suggest that our next course of action should be determining if that...painting...at the house is more than it appears to be -- “ Zenyatta looked up at the squeaks of dismay emanating from Hana.

“Could it be? Honestly?” She asked, eyes approximately twice their normal size. “Because, as it is, I’m not entirely sure I wanna sleep there with it still up as it is and if there’s, y’know, a chance it and its I-can’t-believe-those-aren’t-tentacles might come oozing off the walls I’m completely sacking out in your car for the foreseeable future, Zen, just warning you in advance.”

“Yes.” Simple and unadorned and, not for the first time that day, Hanzo felt as though he were trying to breathe around a red-hot spiky ball of panic.

“So. We call the ranger.” Genji said, firmly. “As far as I’m concerned, a whole lot of this is his damned fault in the first place and he can be doing more to help fix it.” Hanzo opened his mouth to object and found himself collecting a ferocious iridescent green glare for his troubles. “And, no, I don’t want to hear about how it isn’t because your judgment on this topic is completely impaired by your desire to climb him like a fire tower.”

“That is the worst analogy in the entire history of time.” Hanzo replied tersely. “And I am not -- “

“And Hana has a point, too, about staying at the condo not being the best idea until this gets figured out -- which, ideally, should happen today.” Genji continued doggedly on. “And you’re not going to be sleeping across from that no matter what.”

“Agreed.” There were days when it simply didn’t pay to fight, and this was clearly one of them. Hanzo fished the card containing the ranger’s contact information out of his pocket. “I’ll -- “

Genji snagged it in a single smooth motion. “I’ll call him. You’re supposed to be seeking normal, right? Go to class. Keep your studio slot. Hang out in well-lit areas preferably surrounded by hundreds of people. We’ll meet up at the Student Union at...five? How’s five for everybody?”

A general murmur of assent ran around the table and Hanzo nodded, reluctantly, in agreement.

Genji grinned. “Don’t look so worried, aniki. I’ll only chew on him a little bit.”

*

Zenyatta dropped them off at the entrance to the main campus and, until Lucio and Hana peeled off in their respective morning lecture hall directions, Hanzo felt rather distinctly like he was walking surrounded by the world’s smallest, strangest Secret Service detail. Hana was clearly still itching for the security of a hockey stick and, rather than stopping to talk to the two dozen people who tried to flag her down as they crossed the quad, she waved and continued on, her gaze darting about as though she expected something unwholesomely flexible and sanity-blighting to lurch out from behind one of the pieces of exterior display sculpture scattered along their route. Given recent events, he decided he really couldn’t blame her for her excess of caution. Lucio was altogether more mellow but he was also carrying a messenger bag stuffed with enough notebooks and musical equipment components it could probably be used as an improvised melee weapon of some efficacy against even Things From Beyond With or Without Tentacles.

And Genji was, well, Genji and walked a considerable distance out of the way from his own first class to escort Hanzo directly to the doors of Kaplan Memorial Hall, in which lay the fine arts lecture halls and reservable studio spaces. Under normal circumstances, Hanzo arose at godforsaken o’clock in order to take advantage of the fact that there wasn’t an underclassman alive dedicated enough to their major to voluntarily choose a studio block available before the sun was even properly up, no matter how long they could have it. Genji could generally be counted among those ranks, as demonstrated by his reliance on sunglasses when confronted with the early morning light glinting off the glass-and-adobe exteriors of half the buildings on campus, which he normally only encountered under significantly different conditions.

“Hana’s not done asking questions, you know. She’s got that look in her eye.” Genji remarked, pseudo-casual, and Hanzo’s already well-knotted stomach abruptly contorted itself still further into a digestive fractal of perfect dread. “She let it ride just now because she’s actually got class in fifteen minutes but between you and me? She’s going to rake Zen over the coals once she’s got the time. And when your ranger gets here? I wouldn’t want to be him.”

“He’s not my ranger.” Hanzo replied, deeply regretting both the huevos rancheros and the hot and sour soup.

“Semantics.” Genji gave him a sidelong look. “Hanzo -- “

“You want to tell them.” Hanzo finished the thought for him and paused for a moment in the shadow of one of the big pieces on loan from the Museum of Native American Arts and Culture, planting his back against its base and sinking down onto his haunches.

“Zen already knows.” Evenly. “He saw her in me before we even spoke for the first time. I think that we have to tell them. Admittedly, I wish we could do it under more voluntary circumstances but...I think we owe them the truth. Both of us.”

Hanzo closed his eyes and concentrated for a moment on making certain his breakfast stayed where he’d put it. “You’re right,” He finally said, fighting to keep the misery out of his voice and, apparently, succeeding.

“Wow, I am?” Genji actually took his sunglasses off and blinked down at him in genuine surprise.

“Yes.” Hanzo tilted his head back and let the cool of the granite statue base soak into his skull. “I think the ranger might suspect something, too. And right now it’s only a matter of time before everyone else finds out and then managing how much the fallout sucks. We might as well pull the trigger ourselves.”

Genji hunkered down next to him, hesitated fractionally, then brushed the hair back from his eyes. “It doesn’t have to suck, you know. Our friends are smart, caring people who actually like us, which gives them a couple legs up on the rest of the clan on their worst day.”

Hanzo nodded wordlessly and found he didn’t have it in him to crush the hope in his brother’s eyes. “You’re right about that, too.”

“Clearly a lesser sign of the Apocalypse.” Genji pushed back to his feet and offered him a hand up, which he accepted. “Are you okay?”

No. “I’ll be fine,” Hanzo lied with great sincerity. “I probably should have picked either the Tex-Mex or the dim sum, but not both. Bad decision making on my part.”

“Well, at least you’re grown up enough to admit it.” Genji held onto his arm for the rest of the walk. “Where are you going when you’re done in the studio?”

“The library. I’ve got some research yet to do.” The depths of the Kaplan building yawned before him like the heretofore unsuspected entrance to the Underworld.

Genji made a point of obviously texting that information to the rest of the household. “...We also might wanna kinda call the police again. I let the officer in charge know that you weren’t missing-missing and she left me a voicemail saying they’d like to talk to you to confirm that fact. I just found it this morning.”

Hanzo rolled his eyes heavenward. “Number?”

Genji sent it over and offered him a crooked smile. “Be careful, aniki.”

“I promise I won’t drink my paint water.”

“Or fall asleep.”

Hanzo shuddered. “Not yet anyway. Go to class, Genji.”

The fine arts studios were located on Kaplan Hall’s upper floors, the best to take advantage of its relatively exposed position on the south-westernmost edge of campus and the significantly longer exposure to natural light thus afforded. Hanzo made his way quietly through the corridors where at least two early morning art history seminars were already in progress, avoiding the elevators that sounded like the mournful dying song of some beautifully tragic deep sea creature no matter how freshly maintenanced they might be, and took the stairs to his second floor studio slot. Fortunately for the continuing unsettled state of both his stomach and his sanity, his thesis advisor was likely hip-deep in holoslides in front of one of those seminars right now and if he locked the door and turned on the external sound suppression she would correctly interpret that as Do Not Disturb Art Is Trying To Happen and accost him at their scheduled meeting. Unfortunately, at the moment, he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less than Try To Make Art Happen thanks very much to the present state of his bedroom and most assuredly not while locked inside a soundproofed chamber whose emergency access keys were some of the most frequently misplaced items in the entire college. He did not want to contemplate the wreckage of human folly while standing on the brink of exposing his own venality, the stupidity and arrogance that Genji had forgiven him, whose consequences he could never undo. He was not ready yet to give up the warm comfort of the others’ kind regard, could feel a part of him trying to crawl away under some internal rock and die at the thought of Zenyatta’s quiet all-encompassing compassion turning to disgust. Or the ranger. He had to plant his back against the corridor wall and clench his jaw against a stomach-churning rush of nausea as his entirely too vivid imagination painted that reaction shot against the insides of his skull. Which, admittedly, might have made for a strikingly personal and heartfelt contrast piece to the sterility of industrial-scale desolation but at the moment it primarily made him want to curl up in the crawlspace under the back stairwell and cry until he drowned in his own phlegm.

He did not, in the end, lock himself in the studio/potential supernatural deathtrap or cry his face off under the stairs. Instead, he peered over the lower edge of the nearest exterior window to make certain Genji wasn’t lurking in the courtyard, taped a note to the studio door that it was unoccupied and free to use, and fled to the library for the sanctuary to be found in research and the stringently enforced lack of interaction with other human beings.

Hanzo took possession of a carrel close to the windows in one of the second floor study rooms, slotted his tablet into the physical network interface, and connected, pulling up the local news sites he had bookmarked the night before. Cora Hernandez had not been miraculously found in the one night since he became aware of both her existence and her disappearance. In fact, all the most current news suggested that the state police and the rangers were preparing to shift from “search and rescue” to “search and recovery,” now that the temperatures were dropping consistently into the thirties by night. Even a reward for useful information offer well north of a hundred thousand dollars had yielded no new clues to her whereabouts. Her parents looked as though they had aged a decade in a few weeks, her mother pale and distraught, and he could only imagine her agony. In the back of his mind, a soft, small voice wondered idly how much effort his own parents would have assigned to the task of finding him, or his body, and how long they would have bothered. The lord and lady of the Shimada-gumi were, in the end, fairly brutal in their pragmatism and wasting more than they had to on a bad investment was never their way. Genji would never stop and he ruthlessly crushed that thought before it could go any further and closed the news tab, refusing to indulge in the thought of what would happen if his brother encountered the thing that attacked him unaware of its nature and there he was imagining it in vivid, horrifying detail and this was definitely one of those days when it didn’t pay to be a Fine Art Masters candidate. It took a long moment of heavy peace-stress breathing and thinking fixedly of nothing but a horde of kittens and puppies gamboling together in a field of wildflowers to distract himself from the increasingly Memlingesque products of his mind’s eye.

The small furry creatures and oxygen supersaturation eventually had the desired effect and his hands were at least reasonably steady as he activated the carrel’s interface surfaces and requested access to several of the library’s more specialized databases. UNM owned a cultural anthropology department unrivaled in the west, even the University of California system, and if there was anywhere he could go to cure his ignorance on a number of topics, it was definitely here, in its repository for thousands of books and even more scholarly articles and original sources. He brought up the anthropological database’s internal search engine, set his fingers on the holokeys, and hesitated.

If he stopped here, the voice of sweet reason murmured in the back of his mind, it ended here. Genji would call the ranger, and he would come to sort out what was wrong at the house. He would finish the rest of his medicine and his soul would never go wandering away from his body again and in a half a year he would graduate and move to some corner of the world where the ghosts and demons of the desert would never cross his path again. And that would be the best, for himself and everyone else, except the next unlucky soul to fall under that thing’s eye, who might not have rescue as close or as capable.

If he did not stop here, that same voice murmured with a significantly sharper edge to its tone, if he insisted upon continuing to look, then he was asking the nameless thing that saw him, that saw him and stalked him and attacked him, to continue doing so. It might even, perhaps, be an invitation to more of such things. He was, that voice hissed, risking taking a door, already cracked, and throwing it all the way open and inviting whatever waited in the dark beyond inside. And for what? He was nothing and had even less to offer and he punched in his first search queries to the sound of sweet reason’s howling despair, watched the results scroll up his screen with a certain cold satisfaction curling in his gut. There was, to put it mildly, a lot. He set is phone to give him a twenty minute warning on the five o’clock hour and dove in head first.

*

[switchbleu]

He sighs, laying back and refreshing his notifications for the umpteenth time to no avail. The skeleton groans, rolling over and moaning into his pillow.

He was bored of his games, Phthalo wasn't home, and neither were his daughter or either of his brothers. Roux had mentioned a date of some kind before he had gone and only god knows what his new-found twin was doing, exploring the timeline. Hopefully he didn't get in too much trouble.

Bleu sighs again, getting up and shuffling over to the closet. When boredom strikes, and there was nothing to do, you create your own fun.

And by "fun," he means, "masturbate a lot until someone comes home or he passes out".

Bleu takes out one of his vibes and some lube, kicking off his sweatpants & his boxers and sitting on the bed. Removes his hoodie, laying there in a plain black t-shirt.

It wasn't very often, especially these days, that Bleu formed any genitals that wasn't a dick. He was a pretty masculine guy and it was what he was comfortable with. Sometimes though, you just gotta throw gender out the window and say "fuck it" and give yourself a pussy, which is just what he was in the mood for tonight.

Bleu lubes up the vibe and turns it on, laying back and spreading his legs, pressing it to his clit. He let's out a soft moan, revelling in the sensation it gives him. It had been a while since he got off without having to worry about satisfying a partner. He loved Phthalo, with all his heart and soul, but his husband was a sub, through and through. As such, the two of them had fallen into a sort of pattern whenever they had sex, lately. Bleu would dominate and satisfy his husband, they'd make out like teenagers for a while, maybe he gets a blowjob, and then they cuddle for a while and the smaller eventually passes out. Not that Bleu wasn't satisfied by that or anything, he was, it was just... repetitive. Boring, almost. Sometimes he wishes his husband would take charge and order him around or push him down on their bed and use him for what he wants or... just something new and different.

He runs the vibe in circles around his clit, imagining a scenario like that. 

Getting down on his knees, hard as hell and desperate for satisfaction. Phthalo presses his tip to his entrance, whispering sweet things to him in that gorgeous accent of his. He doesn't fuck him hard at first, instead he slowly slides his cock between his asscheeks, moaning softly as Bleu whines underneath him from the teasing.

Bleu let's out a moan at the idea of his husband showing that much confidence. That was a very attractive image, definitely. Confidence is a good look on him.

He presses the vibe into his entrance, pleasure surrounding his entire body. He's deep in his fantasies right now, and all Bleu knows is the pleasure the runs through his body.

After he's done teasing him, the shorter slowly slides his length inside the taller, groaning a little as he adjusts to him. He grips Bleu's hips tightly, but not too tightly, and Bleu grips the pillow he'd been hugging tightly, drooling onto it. He moans about feeling full, and Phthalo responds by bending down and kissing and nipping at his spine.

Bleu groans, pumping his vibe and rubbing his thumb on his clit. He moans, panting heavily as his back arches in pleasure. "ngh," he moans softly, "'t-thalo... please... nnnnmmm..."

Phthalo purrs, slowly starting to pump his hips agonizingly slowly as Bleu quickly becomes unraveled underneath him, begging him for more. Desperate for satisfaction and pleasure. The shorter doesn't stop his movements, and smacks Bleu on his ass. He says that he'll get what wants, but on the shorter's terms, not his own. Bleu whines a little more and Phthalo slides one of his arms around and grabs Bleu cock, slowly stroking it. The taller moans softly, panting like a dog.

Bleu moving his hips in time with his thrusts and when he eventually hits his g-spot, cries out in ecstasy.

"hhaaah~! f-fuck~...!!" his deep baritone rings in the room, and he's once again very glad he had it soundproofed, even if nobody's really home right now. Pink flush fills his face, sweat dripping down his skull and he goes to town with his vibrator, loudly crying out the pleasure as his fantasy works him closer to orgasm.

Phthalo slowly builds speeds, gradually picking up the pace, each thrust met with an oddly satisfying slap of his pelvis meeting the ecto that made up his body. Bleu moans, lifting himself up on his forearms and moving his hips along with his lover's.

"bleu bear," Phthalo coos softly, "th' way i see it, y' got two choices here. either i continue to make slow, sweet love t' ya, like i am now, or... i pin ya t' this bed and fuck ya senseless. which one do you want?"

"p-please... f-fuck me..." he stutters, begging him to completely destroy him.

Phthalo chuckles. "that's what i thought."

Bleu groans, writhing and crying as he fucks himself hard on his vibe, cursing and whimpering Phthalo's name, softly whispering, "yes, yes, yes" over and over again.

He was close, he was so, so close-- just a bit longer and--

Suddenly, the pleasure stops.

...

His vibe died.

Bleu blinks, opening his eyes and pulling the damned thing out of his pussy and trying to turn it back on again to no avail.

He groans in frustration, throwing it to the other side of the bed.

Dammit, right when he was about to cum and reach the best part of the fantasy. Of course his vibe died. Because he can never have good things, right?

He sighs, sliding his fingers into his wet, sensitive core-- if his vibe was dead, he didn't care. He was still gonna cum, then take a shower, pop an edible, and take a damn nap until his family came home.

He rubs his clit with his thumb, moaning softly as he pumps his fingers in and out. A pink hue colors his bones and he bucks into his hand as he slowly gets back into it. He discovers his g-spot again, and he rides his fingers all the way up to his peak, crying out when he orgasms all over his hand and the bedsheets.

He sighs softly as he slips his fingers out, the walls of his pussy twitching and pulsing in pleasure. Bleu rides the high of his orgasm, and gently floats down into the afterglow with a satisfied smile on his face. He rest a couple minutes, before stretching out, jumping up from the bed, and hopping into the shower. Once he's clean and changed the bedsheets, he pops one of his signature brownies, slides into the fresh and clean bedsheets, and slowly starts to drift off to sleep with a smile on his face.

[mypcisadisgrace-blog]

Chapter X-III (Rich Carmine)

 *Disclaimer: It has been years since I've posted any work of mine on the internet and I have no idea how any of this would go. Nevertheless I have nothing else to do the next month or so and I kinda want a reason to stay by my laptop :P. So anyways any constructive criticism is encouraged, any way for self improvement is greatly appreciated.  

*Part 3 was written quite a long bit of time after the 1st 2 parts. Quite literally, a few years after I found it in my old hard disk's documents folder. Fast forward to now and the story is catching up to the last part written from last year. Hey, everything's written better now though xD. The verb tenses may have changed but please just ignore that, it was written by literally 2 different kinds of MEs. The ones written more recently wouldn't have that much of a difference with the ones from last year though so now big worries about that!

================================================================================

Lara reached for Jazz's shoulder, "I have no idea why you would be so anxious about this now, Francis has nothing on you anymore so chill out." Jazz was feeling somewhat relieved but either way still troubled. Lara turned around as Jazz started looking up to answer a call from somewhere around the corner. "Hey! Yeah we're over here!"

*School Bells Ring*

Even with her first year done at BH she couldn't shake of her feeling of anxiety as she starts walking towards the entrance to the Special Division Building, mostly because she didn't go to this school because of its Special Division. She was just put there after what happened last year. "Hey, no need to be spaced out, you got friends with you," Lara said to her with a big smile on her face. It was quite reassuring but Jazz knew it wasn't fully true, "Yeah, thanks I guess I really do need some cheering up," she muttered as she tried putting on the biggest smile she can make – which would mean the smallest grin you would ever see.

Francis never really planned to mess up his friendship with Thomas the way it did last year but he can't change the fact that it's already happened. "Look I just plan to finish this school year the way I planned to finish it last year. No Problems," Francis sounded more worried than assertive trying to say it to Lara this time though. "I would've believed you the first 2 times you told me but this time you literally sound less convincing than a guy in a van calling kids in," Lara sounded as confident as ever, along with that hint of sarcasm her voice always held. Francis could only roll his eyes as he heard the school bells start ringing for assembly.

"Remember students, this is a new school year, meaning, forget anything that happened last year and just plan on improving yourself this year," as usual Mrs. Carmine leaves quite the remark before the official start of the school year which leaves most students hopeful and optimistic and honestly somewhat lifts Thomas' spirits even though he knows that being in the SD is everything but staying hopeful and optimistic. "Got to get to class now."

Hmph

"Got to get to class now."

The ambient noise of a classroom is enough for Jazz to distract herself from the multitudinous things her mind is going through every single hour of the day. It doesn't help her that Thomas is her classmate this year, along with the "whole" gang from last year's incident – Lara, Francis and Jazz. "Quite a colorful class we got here eh?" a familiar voice mentioned after she drooped her head down as she was scanning the classroom. "Yeah, you could say," she sneered agreeing to the all too familiar voice. "You know Jazz, my first impression of you before you told me you were an Empathetic was that you were just a lost student wandering the campus at after the opening ceremony, trying slowly slip back into her ND classroom before the teachers would notice." "And you know Thomas; before I met you I thought you were a stuck-up dickhead who couldn't show at least one small shred of consideration for anyone. I'm glad and annoyed that I was completely wrong with that," she added, sarcastically at that. "Well, It's not like I can move someone the way you do, I can just move someone, like, literally. That's it." Jazz sat up straight and looked directly at the boy seated beside him. He looked that same as he did last year, that annoying half-smile he always had on, his glasses hanging by his front polo pocket as if he actually uses it, and his annoying all too long brown hair that he seems to cut only 4 times a year. "You know, if your thick hair actually shows how thick headed you are maybe people won't have to second guess their assumptions about you." She said happily with a smile. Atleast with what she counts as a smile.

Normally, Lara would be ecstatic that there are people she knows in her new class of a new school year but as with most of the people involved this was probably the worst situation they could've been in. The classroom is kind of big for a class of 45 but she saw this as better reason for chairs to be apart. "Heh, more space more fun," she told herself while looking around the classroom. "More like more space, less secrets to hide huh, Lara?" she just knew this voice all too well, she was surprised herself that she was able to answer calmly with: "I wouldn't think of it that way, especially when talking to you." There was nothing she could like in a person like Francis. For one, he was the very person who ruined her whole plan for staying in the background in high school. She just really wanted to slam him across the room. Twice.

Okay, maybe 10 times.

Jazz Regalia. Special Division - Year 2: Section 4

Francis Edward Maastricht. Special Division - Year 2: Section 4

Lara S. Phthalo. Special Division - Year 2: Section 4

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