#maybe it also helps that spurs finally won a match

[tenthdocter]

I got so much good writing done tonight! And I actually feel like my filler chapter is finally actually coming toghter. I felt like the writing was a bit lazy when I first started it and thought it deserved better. I mean I had no real plan for this particular chapter except "amourshiping fluff" and "ash and serena go on a date" lol. But I've somehow made it more dramatic and gripping now 😂 and I've even figured out a way to lead it into to the next chapter. So yeah I'm quite happy with it now! 😁

[scarletttries]

Woo Jin NSFW Alphabet (Bloodhounds)

Pairing: Hong Woo-Jin (Bloodhounds) x Reader

Rating: Fluffy Smut

Word Count: 3.2k

Author's Note: As promised here is the NSFW Woo Jin Alphabet. I love these boys so much I might have to do some fluff alphabets for them too, and I think I'm going to do some Peacemaker and Stranger Things fluff alphabets too so watch out for those! I'm on holiday at the moment and am finding alphabets much easier to write than full fics so please feel free to request a fluff or NSFW alphabet with any character you might enjoy! :)

A = Aftercare (what they're like after sex)

A man who knows how to be charming, even when he's just rambling like an idiot, Woo Jin's aftercare involves a lot of talking. Be prepared for him to recap his top moments, ask your opinion on every little thing he did, making sure he knows exactly what to keep and what to change up next time to keep becoming better and better for you. He gets clingy too, his arms wrapping around you and pulling you flush against him, spooning you as he chirps excitedly in your ear about how amazing you were and how much he loves that he gets to do this with you.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Woo Jin's body is a testament to the efforts he's put into it day in and day out, but he still feels surprisingly insecure for a man in such good shape, like no matter how strong he is, he'll always be surrounded by people that are stronger. Thankfully the first time he takes off shirt in front of you, maybe he's invited you to a boxing match for the first time, and you jaw drops, eyes racking over his chiseled chest and abs, he suddenly feels so much better (you can guarantee he won the fight that day.) From then on he'll find any excuse to take his shirt off in front of you, spurred on by the wanting way you lick your lips, knowing you'll be curled up against him in no time.

Speaking of your lips, Woo Jin can't imagine a pair could ever be more perfect. He was a goner the first time he saw you smile, and when you laughed at something he said? Heart eyes for days! The sound of you giggling at his jokes is his favourite in the world and every time you smile at him he feels ten foot tall. The first time he worked up the nerve to finally kiss you, he almost couldn't believe how warm and soft your mouth felt against his, an inviting feeling he now can't go a day without. And when you map a constellation of kisses across his chest, sinking to your knees to put your lips to work, well let's just say that boy has never been happier in his life.

C= Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

Woo Jin isn't exactly shy once you're at the stage of sleeping together, and he absolutely loves feeling like he's marking you as his by cuming inside or on you. When you first start sleeping together, he's worried about finishing inside you, instead letting himself spill over your chest or stomach, quickly offering to help you clean up as an excuse to get to feel your skin even more. But when you first ask him to cum in inside you, the feeling of being buried inside you as you both cum together, well that might just be his favourite, feeling totally connected to you and as close to you as he possibly can. Sometimes he'll aim to get straight into a second round so he doesn't have to choose between being inside you or all over you.

D = Dirty Secret (pretty self-explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

Woo Jin's got a big mouth that's always running, and a big appetite, and all that leads to him having an oral fixation when it comes to you. He could happily make out with you for hours, feeling positively obsessed with having your lips on his, constantly interrupting your day to steal a kiss if he thinks it's been too long. In bed he'll constantly give you hickies across your chest where only you can see, or if the pleasures too much he'll just barely sink his teeth into your shoulder, his mouth needing to feel you at all times. If you return the favour, biting and sucking on his neck when he's inside you, prepare to hear the most strangled moan of your name as he desperately fights back his immediate climax. He'll be praised you every second as well, telling you how perfect you feel, even when his mouth is full and you can barely understand a word.

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they're doing?)

Woo Jin has a little more experience than Gun Woo, occasionally meeting women in bars and bringing them home for the night when he was younger. You'd be his first real relationship though, the first person he's wanted to sleep with again and again, and to keep impressing. He'll know enough from his previous encounters to make your first time together very special, but from then on his focus is learning everything about what you like, figuring out exactly how to make you cry out his name as loudly as possible.

F = Favourite Position (this goes without saying)

Honestly, it is probably just his head between your legs, watching your whole body shake as he makes you cum on his tongue for the second time today. But he also loves being behind you, wrapping his arms around you so you are pressed to his chest so he can keep cover your lips, neck, shoulders with his kiss while he fucks into you. He loves the strength he feels from being able to move your body around in bed, his muscles coming in very handy when he wants to pin you down and keep you exactly where he wants you, to make sure you feel absolutely everything.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

Woo Jin barely has a serious bone in his body, his happy grin on his face in every moment you two spend together. He would throw out the most ridiculous compliments and praises when you're in bed together, the whole interaction so fun and lighthearted even though it clearly also means so so much to him. He'll be giggly and euphoric afterwards too, practically play wrestling in bed with you just to keep having a reason to feel you beneath him.

H = Hair (how well-groomed are they?)

Woo Jin cares a lot about style and fashion, taking a lot of care in the way he looks and always keeping everything tidy for you.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

Woo Jin might not show intimacy in the serious way others would, but it doesn't take long for you to realise his lighthearted jokes and the way he messes around when he's getting undressed with you is his way of his being vulnerable and connecting with you on the level he feels most intimate at. He might try and be more romantic and serious if you wanted, but it's hard not to feel special when he gives you that goofy grin he doesn't get to wear very often and saves for his perfect moments with you.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

He's an excitable kind of guy, so Woo Jin's no stranger to his own company, entertaining whatever thoughts he can conjure - from the day you met, I can guarantee you that every image will be of you, he's just that obsessed. He'll definitely fantasize about you whenever you have to spend any length of time apart, getting easily riled up when he starts thinking about how much he misses your lips all over him.

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

If you're into it, Woo Jin can enjoy getting a little rough and possessive in bed - he loves being able to pin your hands above your head as he bucks his hips against yours, asking you to tell you him that you're his over and over again. Boys definitely got a praise kink too, every time you tell how good he's making you feel he'll make it his personal mission to somehow make you feel even better. And oh my god if you called him 'Sir' in bed, that bit of marine pride would drive him absolutely insane.

Finally, if you agreed with it, I think Woo Jin would love to wake you up by going down on you, wanting you to wake up in the best possible mood, and feeding into his love of feeling like you and your body are all his.

L = Location (favourite places to do it)

Despite his attitude I think Woo Jin would mostly play it safe and have the most fun just sharing nights together in either of your apartments, where he can really take his time and feel safe to explore everything with you. The exception to that is when you come see him at Boxing matches, or even just training at the gym, he'll always want to show off for you, and gets all excited seeing you cheer him on, supporting him and thinking he can do anything - when he wins, he'll definitely sneak you into the locker room for a private moment so he can show you just how much he appreciates your cheerleading.

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

Honestly it would be a shorter list to write what you do that doesn't get Woo Jin going! As above, any time he sees you cheering him on or supporting him it definitely turns him on, your support making him feel so good and loved. The same goes for when he's able to make you laugh with his silly comments and jokes, it just makes him feel like you really get him and that he can be himself with you, every opportunity to be open and intimate with you one that he wants to really make the most of. It comes from a place of feeling a bit insecure in himself, like he's been a runner up his whole life and finally here comes you, making him feel like a winner and the luckiest guy in the world every single day.

N = No (something they wouldn't do, turn offs)

We've established Woo Jin can get a little insecure and jealous, so he wouldn't want to do anything that would feel like sharing you with someone else, wanting you to belong solely to each other. Other than that the only thing that could really turn him off is if he thought you weren't really feeling it, your comfort and pleasure the sexiest thing in the world to him.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.) - oral fixation, tries to talk, vibrations work

This man lives to give. He needs something to occupy his mouth at all times, and there's nothing he loves more than putting his tongue to work between your legs, feeling you tremble at his touch, hearing you moan out his name and tell him he's the best at this. He's constantly telling you how good you look during sex, and that doesn't stop when he's going down on you, the vibrations from his non-stop monologue of flirting teasing every nerve in your body. You'll see flashes of that cheeky smile as you tell him you're ready for him to fuck you, but he just shakes his head and tells you he's not done yet.

He'll be eternally grateful when you return the favour too, the moment your tongue meets his tip maybe the only time in his life when his mind is blank and he finally stops talking - only for a moment before the praises spill out again amongst pants of your name, and confessions of just how much he loves you and how lucky he is to have you.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.) - face/rough/energetic

Woo Jin is an athletic and agile man, and that would carry through to the bedroom. He's so excitable that it's like a whirlwind as he rips off clothes and covers every inch of your body in his kisses, pace frantic and rough when he's finally inside you. Sometimes he'll slow it down though, when you roll on top of him first thing in the morning or he comes home from a particularly long day, drained and looking for the comfort of you slowly riding him as he spends the whole night chasing your lips with his, arms wrapped around you so you never get too far away.

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.) -

Woo Jin is so obsessed with you that sometimes he just needs a quickie; he knows you only have ten minutes before you need to be out the door to meet your friends, but he's been craving you all day and he feels like if he doesn't get to feel and taste you for another five hours it might just kill him! He's strong enough to press you up against the nearest wall, wrapping your legs around his shoulders so he can taste you before he brings you to his waist and pounds into you mercilessly, making sure you're both satisfied but you still get to leave on time - even if your legs feel more like jelly than you would like.

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

Despite having lived an incredibly dangerous life (with some very close calls) Woo Jin has learned nothing - he will take any risk and experiment in any way you suggested if you asked him with a smile. He wouldn't necessarily be the one to suggest something new, but he'd definitely take the risk of being together in public somewhere if he felt like he really needed you.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

Woo Jin trains to bounce back quickly in the ring, between rounds of boxing, so he's always ready for a round two pretty quickly, never wanting the moment between you two to end.

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

He wouldn't own any toys himself, but if he ever found out you had a vibrator he would beg you to let him use it on you, absolutely mesmerized by your reactions to its touch. He would definitely want to introduce it to your sleepy morning sex, just to help you wake up in the happiest way.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

It takes one look at Woo Jin's devilish smile to know this man would be the worst (and best) tease. He'd love touching you oh so gently and watching you react, joking about how badly you need him when he's barely even done anything. Lives for making you beg for him to actually fuck you, teasingly saying he thinks you're not ready and need him to make you cum again on his fingers. When he's feeling particularly mischievous he loves being able to pin your hands and straddle your hips, taking his sweet time sliding into you and watching you squirm, unable to move your hips to hurry him along.

When the tables are turned however, he is an absolute baby. He gets so pathetic when you make him wait, if you hover him with your entrance just out of reach, chuckling at his attempts to lift his hips to feel you. Very quickly starts pleading and begging for you to touch him, telling you how bad he needs you because only you can make him feel this good.

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

Woo Jin has a big mouth, that never stops running - his moans are loud from the minute you shift onto his lap until his final thrust, interspersed with the a long stream of the sweetest words you could ever want to here, praising everything about your body, your personality, your soul and the way you look and sound and feel around his dick. Even afterwards the compliments don't stop coming until he's fallen asleep for the night.

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for this character) - constantly has you on a facetime call when he's out living his life, even if it's all day - > phone sex.

Even though it's inevitable that sometimes you have to spend a little bit of time apart, Woo Jin views missing you as completely unacceptable. So whenever he has to be away from you, he'll start a video call with you and just talk to you all day while he's out living his life, like a little one person vlog. He just wants you to see everything about his day and know exactly what you're up to, even if the call has to last all day. Any time he's in his little apartment alone and you can't come over he'll get you on his phone, propping you up so he can see everything you're doing and vice versa.

It wouldn't take too many weeks of this constant company before one night he starts pleading about how much he wishes you were sleeping over, and you can see him subconsciously palming himself through his pyjamas. So you'd slip your camisole off your shoulders and ask him exactly what he'd be doing if he was with you right now, his eyes bulging wide at the realisation that this is actually happening. Now if you're apart he can't sleep without touching himself over the phone to you and telling you all the ways he wants to make you feel good when he sees you tomorrow.

X = X-ray (let's see what's going on under those clothes)

Woo Jin's pretty tall and muscular, so every part of him would probably be a bit bigger than average ;)

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

Woo Jin's craving for you is relentless, most of his waking moments filled with thoughts of your beauty and kindness, and often that translates into wanting to please you and feel you. If you ever made the slightest suggestion that you were in the mood, he'd be immediately ready to go, but sometimes all he wants to do is cuddle up with you, resting his head on your lap while you play with his hair, or having you lie against his chest while his fingertips lightly trace shapes on your arm - it's all wonderful quality time for him.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterward)

It tends to be the two ends of the spectrum for Woo Jin - half the time he'll be immediately unconscious, the other half he'll be so excited about having a great time with you that he'll be buzzing with energy, playfully rolling around with you in bed and smiling ear to ear as he pours out every thought he's ever had and tries to learn absolutely everything about you.

[plaidbooks]

Hiiiii love! Can I request a Barba x Reader the first time they meet? And he knows that he wants you???

First Dance

A/N: I...I just keep using Hamilton as my go-to play, and I’m not sure why. I’m ignorant of Broadway, and I apologize. This was also just an excuse to write a gala scene, so I hope you don’t mind! Thanks for the request @infiniteoddball

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Words: 1711

Taglist: @the-baby-bookworm @beccabarba @thatesqcrush @itsjustmyfantasyroom @stardust-fray @permanentlydizzy @infiniteoddball @glowingmess @ben-c-group-therapy @averyhotchner @mrsrafaelbarba @whimsicallymad @detective-giggles @dianilaws

For once, everything in Rafael’s life was looking up; he had just secured three tough convictions, with another two looking to be going in his favor. His mother was just granted extra funding for her charter school, and she was able to hire on extra help. The Yankees were going to the World Series and Hamilton was coming back to Broadway, and Rafael had gotten tickets to both. The only slight dim spot was that he had one ticket to those. That he didn’t have anyone to celebrate with, outside of maybe catching a nightcap with Olivia. But now that she had Noah, that was happening less and less. And Rafael realized that with his view from the top of the mountain, he could see how alone he was. With every win, though, that loss sunk further and further into the back of his mind, hidden behind tight-lipped smirks and smartass quips.

He was sitting in his office, going over his final revisions for a closing argument when there was a light knock on his door. “Enter,” he called out, not bothering to glance up.

“Uh, are you Mr. Barba?” a voice asked. He looked up then, not recognizing the voice. His eyes widened slightly as he took you in, but he recovered quickly; you were beautiful.

“I am. And you are?”

“Detective [Y/L/N]…and I’m here to pick up a warrant,” you smiled shyly at him. You had heard all the rumors about ADA Rafael Barba; the good and the bad. He was passionate, quick-witted, wanting justice for the victims. He was also sarcastic, pushy, and downright rude.

Rafael shuffled through some files on his desk. “The Langford’s apartment, yes?” he asked, and you confirmed. He found the correct warrant, pulling it out and glancing over it before handing it to you. Your fingers brushed his, and a jolt ran through him. Smiling brightly once more, you turned to leave with a small thanks.

Maybe it was because of the many wins recently that made him stop you. “Detective?” he called, causing you to stop and turn back to him, hand on the doorknob. Or maybe it was that one loss he still had. “Would you like to get a nightcap with me? I like to meet with the people I’ll be working with.”

Your eyes widened for half a moment before that shy smile was back. “I would love to, but I can’t tonight. Raincheck?”

“Of course,” Rafael replied, a tight-lipped smile and a nod, a clear dismissal. He watched you leave, and he felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time; a wanting. A yearning, deep within his heart.

 *******************

The next time Rafael saw you was in the precinct, partnered with Carisi and interrogating a hardened pimp. At first, Rafael was concerned that Olivia was letting the two greenest Detectives go at this guy, simply because he wanted an air-tight case against the bastard. But as he watched you and Carisi work, he was in awe at how you conducted yourself, and he found that the wanting, the yearning, hasn’t lessened at all. His mind wandered as he watched you lean over the table, your pants pulled tight over your ass, and he wondered what you looked like under your clothes, what you sounded like when he….

The door opened, and he pulled himself out of the gutter. “Oh, hello Mr. Barba,” you smiled when you came out of the interrogation room, taking his breath away.

“Detective,” he nodded back, a small smile tugging across his own face, as if he wasn’t just picturing you on your back in his bed. “You did well in there.”

“Did hell just freeze over? Because I think you just got a compliment from Barba,” Carisi joked, elbowing you and smirking. Rafael gave him an impressive glare, and you laughed. The sound was so magical, his glare fell flat, and he moved to the Bullpen with you to hear Rollins’ rundown of what they had so far.

Once he got all the information he needed, Rafael stood, pulling his jacket back on and heading towards the exit. “Let me walk you out, counselor,” you said.

“Please,” he replied, surprised, but not unhappy. You followed him to the elevator, hitting the button and getting into the confined space with him. This close, you got to examine the brightness of his eyes, the flecks of grey in his hair, the intoxicating aroma of his cologne. It made your knees weak.

“I’m free tonight, if you want to turn in that raincheck,” you murmured, unsure of yourself. You were a little afraid that when he asked the first time, it was a spur of the moment question, and that he’d decline now.

Yes, Rafael thought instantly, and he almost said it. Almost. “As much as I want to, I’m…busy tonight.” He cursed himself for accepting a dinner with McCoy, to go over his next re-election.

“Ah, no worries,” you replied, your heart sinking.

Rafael hated the look of sadness in your eyes, the rejection obvious on your face. “There’s a charity gala in two weeks. I have to make an appearance to please my bosses, and I’m sure most of, if not all of your department will be there, too. We could try to talk then?”

The doors dinged, sliding open, but Rafael made no move to leave. “Uh, yeah! As long as I’m not stuck working OT…I’m still the new kid on the block, so I get the worst shifts,” you chuckled, rubbing your arm nervously.

Rafael gave you a grin. “I’ll see you then, Detective.” And with that, he left the elevator.

You watched him leave, the doors closing in your face. “See you then, Mr. Barba.”

 *********************

You were in a floor length, silver, A-line style dress that had golden details. Looking in the mirror, you felt like you were Cinderella. You felt elegant, distinguished, not something that you normally got to feel. You had worked your way up through the Brooklyn patrol office, making your way to SVU detective—it was rare indeed that you got to dress-up in anything that wasn’t a skimpy outfit for an undercover op.

This was your first charity gala; you had gone to little charity events for the NYPD, of course. But until you had your detective’s badge, there was no pressure to go to events. So, your eyes lit up when you saw the decorations inside the building, your mouth dropping open. Now you really felt like Cinderella as you walked in.

“Hey, partner,” Carisi said, making his way to you. Your grin matched his as he linked and arm through yours, pulling you towards the bar. “Can I buy ya a drink?”

“Sure, Sonny, that sounds great,” you replied, giggling as he dragged you over. You were so glad that you were partnered with Carisi; he had made you feel instantly at home at SVU, and he was instantly your best friend.

You had just finished your first drink when Rafael appeared at the bar next to you, wearing a simple black tux, and making the heat rise in your cheeks.

“Hello Detective.” Rafael got the bartender’s attention, ordering himself a scotch.

“Mr. Barba,” you greeted.

“Please, call me Rafael.”

“Only if you stop calling me ‘detective’,” you smirked back. His eyes sparkled mischievously, and he took a sip of his drink.

“Deal,” he replied. “Now, tell me how you got here. Why SVU?”

 *********************

You spent most of the night chatting with Rafael, answering questions and sipping at your drinks. You vaguely noticed that he deflected most questions about himself, focusing more on you. Olivia had warned you that he was a pretty private man, so this wasn’t too shocking to you.

Eventually, Rafael glanced to the dance floor, then back to you. “Care for a dance?”

You felt your cheeks warm. “Uh, sure,” you smiled shyly, taking his offered hand, and letting him lead you to the huge ballroom floor. He kept his hands high on your waist, your hands on his shoulders, as he twirled you around the dance floor.

“So, you said you were going to Hamilton?” you asked idly, swaying with him, his warmth comforting, drawing you in.

Rafael grinned at you. “I am. Have you seen it?”

“I have not. But I was able to snag a ticket before they sold out, so I will be seeing it.”

He spun you around, and he dipped you, making your heart leap into your throat. His green eyes were bright as he pulled you back up. “Would you like to go together?”

“Rafael Barba, are you asking me out on a date?” The song ended, but you both stood there, not leaving the dance floor.

“So, what if I am?” he asked, voice low.

You stood there, dumbfounded, your face on fire. He was attractive, you had to admit. But could you date an ADA, especially one you worked with? What would 1PP think? What would Liv think, Dodds? You were still new; would they fire you for this? Transfer you?

“A-are you sure that’s appropriate?” you asked, voice just as low. The music had started back up, couples moving around you. Rafael replaced his hands on your waist, leading you into another dance, and you jumped to keep up.

“It’s one date—no one needs to know about it. Not yet.”

“And if it becomes more than one date?” you asked, searching his eyes.

Rafael’s eyes flashed, a triumphant smirk on his face, as if he won simply by you thinking about having more than one date with him. “Then we will figure it out. But I’d rather not count the jury before the trial.”

You scoffed at his reference, rolling your eyes. “Okay, theatre date it is,” you smiled at him.

His grin broadened, and he pulled you to him. To the outside world, he was whispering something, probably work related, to you. In reality, Rafael pressed a small kiss under your ear, making you freeze in place, heat creeping up your face.

“I’ll see you then,” he whispered into your ear before he pulled away, leaving you standing on the dance floor. Oh, Rafael loved to win, and he was already planning on how to win your heart.

[sunshinesukuna]

all the colors of love

pairing: oikawa x reader

genre: fluff to angst

summary: oikawa is able to see other people’s feelings as colors. what color are you on your wedding day?

wc: 1.6k

insp: the gifted - claire (star. ramida jiranorraphat)

big thanks to @writeiolite​ for beta-ing this <333

for the haikyuuwriters june prompt event: marriage

Oikawa's world has always been colorful. Literally. There was purple for fear, like Kageyama's first match at Kitagawa. Kageyama’s trembling fists and pale face when he stepped up onto the court was enough to push Oikawa to give his kouhai a slap on the back and some words of encouragement. The purple around Kageyama dissipated shortly after.

Blue for sadness, like the smidge of azure around Kyoutani whenever he lost a challenge to Iwaizumi. Yellow for happiness whenever the team won an exceptionally hard rally during matches, or whenever his friends had their tests handed back with 100’s at the top. 

There were other colors too. Like the green around you whenever you saw his fangirls flocking around you. He always thought you looked cute whenever you were jealous. Or the red that time the referee was clearly playing favorites and even Iwaizumi and Oikawa combined couldn't hold you back from giving the ref a piece of your mind.

Personally, his favourite was pink. Pink like when he woke up next to you, his eyes only a crack open to trick you into thinking he was sleeping so you would continue kissing his chest. Pink like when he opened your laptop to find him as your wallpaper. And how could he forget the magnificent pink around you when he got on one knee and popped the question?

Oikawa walks through the hall where everyone is gathered towards the room where he was going to get ready. Everyone around him is multicolored, as usual. Your father earlier was purple from head to toe. Well that’s to be expected, his only daughter is getting married. Oikawa would have felt the same if he were your father. 

On the other hand, your mother was positively pretty in both the pink dress and the pink aura that surrounded her. She had always loved Oikawa just a little bit more than she did her own daughter.

“Oi, if you trip out there, we’re going to laugh at you and ask the photographer to get a good shot of the pimple on your chin,” Mattsun says. Makki and Iwaizumi snigger at the joke as they adjust their suits.

“It’s my wedding day! Can’t you all let me live a little?” Oikawa says. 

“That’s what she said,” Makki mutters to the other two. They chuckle. Oikawa shoots them a dirty glare.

“I feel bad for (Y/N),” Mattsun says. He doesn’t mean it, of course, but says it with enough animosity that would make your mother gasp.

“Yeah, if she’s gone after the ceremony, we’ve kidnapped her and let her live the rest of her life in New Zealand with 13 goats and a cow,” Makki replies. Oikawa rolls his eyes. He continues bouncing on his toes as he waits for the ceremony to start. 

“Tooru!” his sister calls from outside the door. “Five more minutes.”

All four of them rise up from their seats. As best man, Iwaizumi stays behind to go to the altar with Oikawa while Makki and Mattsun go off to meet up with the bridal procession. Before going out, they give him a clap on the back.

“We believe in you,” they say unanimously, “captain.” Oikawa can't help but smile a little at his old title.

At long last, he stands in front of the aisle. Oikawa takes a deep breath and a glance at Iwaizumi. Oikawa’s heart rate is enough to make him sweat bullets even when he’s standing in a well-ventilated room. Iwaizumi gives him a thumbs up. The yellow around his old friend calms his nerves a little, along with the small wiggle of his legs he does before something important. 

The walk to the altar is brisk and clean. He catches glimpses of the colors of the people around him. Some sparks of green and blue here and there, but mostly, the hall is decorated in beautiful hues of pink and yellow. 

Oikawa nods at your uncle, the one officiating the ceremony, when he gets to the altar. As stated in your family tradition, the groom may not see the bride until she reaches the altar. So he turns back and waits, with bated breath and a rapidly tapping foot.

The doors open with a loud groan as the bridal party steps inside. The music starts. Tiny footsteps that belong to your smaller cousins spread flowers along the aisle. People coo left and right at the appearance of these wonderfully cute creatures, like cupids straight out of a renaissance painting. Maybe someday he could call one of them his own — your own.

A hush falls over the crowd. The bride has arrived. 

“Whoa,” Iwaizumi mutters next to him. Oikawa glances to his side. His best man drips in pink from head to toe, lips parted and his eyes on you. If even the stoic Iwaizumi could react like that, then how would Oikawa fare? Not well, certainly. 

“How does she look, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa asks. Iwaizumi shakes his head, as if to clear his thoughts. Oikawa takes a closer look at his long time friend. Something is off about Iwaizumi.The pink that once wrapped around Iwaizumi so harmoniously was now replaced by a harsh green. 

Oikawa squinted a bit. He rubbed his eyes. No amount of eye picking would change the green lights that radiated off of Iwaizumi. He could swear that Iwaizumi entered the hall absolutely coated in yellow. So where was it now?

The sound of footsteps from behind Oikawa becomes louder and louder and snaps him out of his thoughts. It doesn’t matter, Oikawa thinks. Maybe he’s just having some spur of the moment feelings. 

When the footsteps finally stop behind him, he knows it’s time. Your bridesmaids and his groomsmen are starting to take their places. All that’s left is to turn back and see you in your wedding dress. 

What shade of pink would you be? Your mother had a magnificent rosy hue whenever she looked at your father. Oikawa’s nephew turned a much darker shade of magenta whenever he saw the girl with the pigtails at school. Would the tinge around you change as soon as you said your vows? 

Everyone’s in place now. Oikawa clears his throat. He turns back, left foot first, like he practiced so many times. The smile on his lips wants so much to burst free, but he suppresses it for when he sees you. Oikawa turns his head to see...

The darkest blue he’s ever seen. 

Dark isn’t even enough to encompass all of it. People are always colorful, no matter what they’re feeling. The strongest emotions always have the brightest shades. But here you were, looking at Oikawa, on your wedding day, in your wedding dress in the gloomiest color he’s ever laid eyes on.

What’s worse is that you’re smiling. You're in your wedding dress, the brightest smile he's ever seen on your face, but with the darkest colors surrounding you. The smile even reaches your eyes. 

His jaw hangs open, but everyone is smiling even wider. They must think he’s in awe at your beauty or something else. Oikawa feels his hand quiver as he reaches out to you. Your skin is as soft as ever as you take his hand in yours. He wants to pull away, to never see you again, to bury the memory somewhere no one will ever reach it. But he also knows that the second he does that, he’ll come back to you wanting even more. 

Oikawa blinks away the burning in his eyes during the vows. Knowing that the words that come out of your mouth could, or possibly were, big, fat lies. Then what has it been all this time? Had it been any other person, he would have slapped the daylights out of them, but this was you. The whole reason why this was complicated. You. 

Nothing can come out of his mouth when he opens it for the vows. Oikawa clears his throat a little and laughs it off. Some of the members in the audience laugh with them. He shoots them, and you, a dazzling smile. 

It’s how he’s created his whole image, right? Ward tears off with a smile. Laugh off the lump in your throat before it gets too noticeable. Fold your arms to hide your shaking hands so you look frightening instead of frightened.

When his vows end, all he can do is stare at you. Stare at the murky black that juxtaposes with a smile that could light up a room. 

The hardest words he’s ever had to say in Oikawa’s whole life turn out to be “I do.” He chokes it out while looking up at the mosaics on the ceiling as to not break the dam holding his stability together. You giggle at his antics. If only you knew better. 

“I pronounce you man and wife.”

And out of the corner of his eye, he sees a pink spot emerge from the murky black. It grows bigger and bigger, completely overtaking the black until not a speck is left.  His heart races, finally thinking that it was just last moment jitters. The pink grows until the black is almost gone. Yes, you truly do love Oikawa with all your heart. 

But you’re not looking at Oikawa. You're looking at Oikawa’s best man. 

[ladyloveandjustice]

The Westing Game Chapter 21

The Fourth Bomb

In a wacky misunderstanding, Theo thinks Alice is the bomber and tries to blackmail her with the info so he can borrow her bike (Yes, really. Go big or go home is Theo’s motto) but of course Alice thinks he means he knows ANGELA is the bomber.

And in what might be the most touching moment in the book so far, Alice responds to this by setting off a bomb and writing a thing indicating that she is the bomber in order to throw all suspicion off Angela. She eve loses her trademark braid in the process.

It really is incredibly sweet. Alice is very caustic toward her sister, but this isn’t the first time she’s indicated she’s ride-or-die when it comes down to it (she got rid of the evidence for Angela and warned her not to say anything to the lawyer), and it’s also a very lovely response to Angela’s early sacrifice- where she took the bomb she made to her face rather than have it explode to her sisters. But while Angela’s sacrifice was spur-of-the-moment motivated by guilt and panic as well as love (not that it makes it less meaningful), Alice’s is one she planned out and considered. She had time to consider the consequences. She knew that Angela willingly put herself in this position. But she still chose to take the fall anyway, and set off a bomb after seeing what the same thing did to her sister’s face.

She already feels meaningless to her family in general, and maybe on the surface she feels her standing (with her mother in particular) can’t get any lower. “I’m already the troublemaker, I’m already the unwanted one, I have nothing to lose, but Angela would lose everything” was how she convinced herself. (in addition to being aware as a minor she wouldn’t be punished as harshly, smart girl that she is).

But it’s also clear that Alice DOES long for her mother’s love and approval, and I think she also had to contend with a deep fear that after this action, there’d be no going back for them, that she’d doomed herself to be the ‘bad one’ forever. Yet she still did it.

And the loss of her braid is of course, incredibly significant. Angela said earlier that the braid is her “crutch”- she bases a lot of her personality around it. It was her excuse to spend time with her mother and now her excuse to spend time with Flora, it’s the trademark thing people can pull on and she can then she gets excuse to kick them and get in fights and form connections, it’s how she gets attention and relationships for herself without exposing her own vulnerability. But she sacrificed what little that makes her stand out, what little social currency she has to protect the same sister who she envies for being in the spotlight- because that bond is more important than her jealousy and her need for attention. Just like her sister sacrificed one of the things that bring her adulation- her looks- to protect her. Love is more important than those petty things.

Alice is forced to talk to Judge Ford afterwards and, sharp as ever, Ford guesses that she’s protecting Angela.  This quote especially gets me:

The judge was astounded (…). Angela could not be the bomber, that sweet, pretty thing. Thing? Is that how she regarded the young woman, as a thing? And what had she ever said to her except “I hear you’re getting married, Angela” or “You’re so pretty, Angela”. Had anyone ever asked about her ideas, her hopes, her plans? If I had been treated like that, I’d have used dynamite, not fireworks; no, I would have just walked and kept on going. But Angela was different.

There’s a fascinating theme in this book about being marginalized, and the different ways these marginalized people both are pitted against each other and can overlook even each other while also finding connections and comradery with each other… I think I’ll have to wait until the end to fully get my thesis on the whole thing together, but I really find it interesting and appreciate it. Ford’s struggles as a black woman, Alice being overlooked for not performing femininity (thus envious of Angela despite knowing how shitty she has it), Angela being boxed because everyone wants to mold her as the perfect feminine ideal (thus feeling envious of Alice despite knowing how shitty she has it), Sun feeling out of place as a Chinese immigrant, Hoo knowing he’s looked down upon as a Chinese-American (yet still not considering the pain of his own wife), Chris struggling as a disabled kid, many people who are financially disadvantaged and/or feeling limited to the role of caretaker, Sydelle feeling overlooked in general and appropriating others’ struggles in her bizarre quest to get noticed- it’s all very interesting and pretty deftly handled, especially considering the time period the book was written in. 

And our antagonist is quintessential exploitative Rich White Man (obsessed with American Exceptionalism to boot), though it’s casually mentioned he’s the son of immigrants, an identity he seems to have actively shed, going so far as to change his name (if that’s why he changed it), so there’s even complexity there.

But the thing with Ford here is an interesting demonstration of that. Despite being smart and socially aware and having an even more fraught history of being dismissed and belittled, she didn’t give much thought to Angela and subconsciously went along with the same objectification everyone else does, putting her on a pedestal. (There’s a lot to be said about how Angela’s veneration and perceived “purity” by the others might interact with her whiteness, and how Ford realizing she bought into that narrative subconsciously might feel to her as a black woman, but I’m not really the person to discuss that. Anyway!)

The other important development here is that Alice also finally confesses that she saw Westing the night of his murder but mentions that the Westing she saw didn’t look dead, but asleep and like a wax dummy. This sets off alarm bells for both me and Ford.

So, I think its safe to say my earlier theory Sam Westing isn’t dead is probably true. What of the corpse that was present at the will-reading? I think people would have noticed it was a wax dummy, but a disguised corpse from his coroner friend still makes some sense. So where is Westing now? Considering Barney Northup doesn’t exist, could he be Barney?

But speaking of Westing, if we need further confirmation the man is the scum of the earth, he’s a union buster and he fired Sandy for trying to organize one in the paper plant.

We also learn Ford’s backstory with Westing at last: Her parents were household staff at Westing’s mansion and she grew up there as a result. She played chess with Westing frequently as a child, but not only would he brag and take pride in beating a goddamn pre-teen, he mocked her with racialized insults. She never won, but Westing ended up financing her education (that’s the ‘debt’ she owes him). She believes he did this to get a judge he could control, but has refused to play along, removing herself from any case involving him.

I can’t help but think Westing would have known Ford wouldn’t play ball, though. So he may have had another motive for sending her to school. It could be something even more sinister. Or… in his own twisted way, did he actually like her? He obviously realized she was incredibly intelligent during those matches, even if he sadistically enjoyed mocking her, enough to know she’d do well with an education. Did he play chess with her so much not just because he enjoyed tormenting her, but enjoyed her as a person as well? It obviously does not excuse what a racist sadistic shithead he is, and I’m not saying he’s secretly nice- just that it could be he was incapable of relating to anyone in a healthy way. I actually think sending Ford to school could have just been an extension of his desire to torment her AND the only way he knew that would guarantee he remained important in her life. He didn’t ever plan to cash in on her debt, but knew it would kill her just to BE in his debt, and got pleasure out of that alone. He probably just thought it was funny and it was also a way to guarantee he’d live in her head rent free- and because deep down he knew she was a cool kid, he also wanted that. He didn’t want her to forget him, maybe, which is sick! But much more interesting than simply “he wanted a judge he could manipulate”.

But it’s also worth noting this is Ford’s (perhaps) final chance to win against Westing in the ultimate chess match. And I can’t help but think he is well aware how smart she is, so he invited her here specifically because he knew she could be his undoing, the one who unravels everything. So- if we go with the ‘Westing is seeking atonement’ theory- did he invite her to give her that satisfaction of finally beating him, like he always knew deep down she could? Because he WANTS to be beaten, to be found out and knows she deserves to be the one after all the hell he put her through? Or in the ‘Westing is still a complete monster’ theory- is his intention to torment her one last time, to show her she can’t win against him? (if it is, I think he may well find he’s gravely mistaken there).

I don’t think Westing can truly achieve “redemption” with this “game”, nor am I one to easily believe the Ultimate Shitty Capitalist can change easily, but if one thing can shake someone’s worldview and make them reevaluate how they live their life, the death of their child WOULD be a big one. So “this will actually be Westing’s weird twisted attempt at atonement” is a possibility I just can’t stop thinking about. If it is, it’s kind of funny and incredible he can’t stop being manipulative and traumatizing even when he decides he wants to do something good.

On top of all that, Angela and Sydelle get more clues and finally figure out the ‘America the Beautiful’ connection. God, so much to chew on this chapter! I really fear for these last nine chapters. I might end up writing a novel longer than the actual novel analyzing and recapping them if I’m not careful. But that’s how you know it’s a compelling story, so hats off to Ellen Raskin!

[buckyskorpion]

“take a seat, we’re gonna be here a while” with bucky barnes? please and thanks! i love your writing btw xoxo

i know this was sent ages ago but i needed to get mi creative juices flowing so im filling this prompt now! thank you for sending this and thank u so much for enjoying my work!!

~~~~~~~~~

Bucky appears in the doorway look grumpy, lumpy, and thoroughly confused. He stuffs his hands in his oversized hoodie and glares at you from the shadows, frown deepening as you catch his eye and grin. 

“Good morning,” you sing-song. The stormcloud in the doorway grumbles like thunder. 

“It’s two-thirty,” he says, and you just shrug. 

Natasha whacks you on the side of the head which hurts like a bitch (not that you’d tell her) and says, “Stop moving.”

“What are you doing?” Bucky asks, sounding wary. He shuffles further into the room with a deeply suspicious squint, trying to see what Natasha is doing on your head. You sit cross-legged at her feet while she works - she’s already sectioned your hair so you’re sure you look a treat with the deformed buns littered over your head. Now she’s got the clippers and is carefully shaving the hair at the nape of your neck, moving up in careful strokes. 

“Shaving my head,” you tell Bucky, gesturing to your hair wildly which earns you another slap from Nat. “Duh.” 

“Why?” Bucky asks slowly, like you’re dumb, and maybe you are but honestly you’re just so bored. Quarantine sucks, your hair sucks, you’re sick of it getting in your face and in your mouth and being a general pain in your ass. Training is a nightmare with long hair, Steve always sits on it somehow during movie night, and Sam won’t stop bitching about it clogging the drain in the gym showers. This is what’s best for everyone. 

“My hair, my choice,” you say, and Nat hums in agreement. “I wanna see what my skull looks like. Don’t you ever wonder that? What if I’ve had a weird shaped head this whole time and never knew.”

“You do have a weird shaped head,” Bucky says, “Don’t need to shave it to figure that out.”

“Rude,” you huff. Under you breath, like an actual child, you mutter, “Your mum’s got a weird shaped head.”

“My mum’s dead,” Bucky says, deadpan. Nat snorts and you grab a chunk of your hair to throw at Bucky, but it just falls uselessly at his feet. 

A few beats of silence pass, save for the low buzz of Nat’s clippers. It feels really nice, like every stroke is ten pounds off your shoulders (or scalp, you suppose) and you can’t wait for Nat to be done. She moves onto the next section, kneeling in a ring of your hair on the ground, while Bucky just stands in front of you shuffling from foot to foot like an idiot.

“Take a seat,” you say, gesturing to the floor space in front of you. “We’re gonna be here a while.”

Bucky hesitates for a second. You can hear his metal hand whirring in the pocket of his hoodie like he’s wringing his hands together, but eventually he folds himself down to sit cross-legged in front of you. You smile at him, and he smiles back but it morphs into more of a laugh. His face scrunches up all cute as he looks at you and you can’t help but poke your tongue out at him. 

“You look funny,” he says, gesturing to the weird buns Nat’s put your hair in to hold it out of her way. 

“That’s rich,” you say, gesturing to his face. He rolls his eyes but he’s still smiling, so you know he’s not really offended. But you’re looking at him now and he does look funny - dark circles under his eyes, red rimmed like he’s been crying or up all night or maybe both. He must’ve been wandering around the compound at two in the morning for a reason, and unless it was to shave his head as well, it probably wasn’t a good one. 

He seems happy enough now, sitting on your bedroom floor with you and Nat and the soft hum of the clippers. She’s done one side of your head now, and it feels weird to not have the familiar curtain of hair tucked behind your ear. You reach up to move it only to find nothing there, your fingers brushing against fresh, cropped stubble instead. It feels so different - soft but rough at the same time, scratchy under your fingertips but so good on your scalp. You feel your eyes grow wide as you run your fingers over your new hair again, ignoring Nat’s annoyed huff at your movements. 

“You like it?” Bucky asks, smiling at you stupid. A rush of giddy excitement shoots through your chest, spurring you to reach out and grab Bucky’s arm without thinking. 

“Feel it,” you say, tugging his arm until his hand leaves his pocket. He looks wildly uncomfortable for a moment before he relents, letting you manoeuvre his flesh hand onto the side of your head. 

“Do you want me to cut you?” Nat asks, but she doesn’t sound pissed. In fact, she sounds amused, and that’s never a good sign for you. But you can’t really focus on that when Bucky is now entranced with the feeling of your buzzed head under his fingertips. 

He stares wide-eyed as he rubs the side of your head, and you let your eyes flutter closed at the feeling. It’s nice, alright? Bucky’s touch tingles all over your scalp and down your spine, little lightning bolts to follow his moody thunder from before. All trace of his bad mood is gone as he scratches at your buzz, now, making you shiver. 

That seems to be the final straw for Natasha, who finishes off the last chunk and clicks the clippers off. The silence startles Bucky and he lets his hand drop, looking up almost guiltily at Nat as she says, “I’m done, I’m going to bed. Have fun, idiots.”

“Thanks Tash,” you say, but you don’t even look at her as she leaves the room. You’re too busy looking at Bucky. 

“How’s it look?” you ask, all quiet in your now silent bedroom. Bucky snaps his gaze back from the empty space Nat once took up to you, eyes widening as he takes in the full picture of your middle-of-the-night-breakdown decision. 

He swallows, but his voice still sounds hoarse when he says, “Um, good. Looks neat.”

“Neat, huh?” you say, and run your hand over your head. That’s different, for sure. Gone is the length and weight around your shoulders, and when you shake your head like a wet dog you’ve never felt so unencumbered. Bucky laughs at your antics and you grin back, almost breathless, so enamoured with the cool waft of the aircon on your nearly exposed scalp and the absolute lack of anything to get in your way. You say, “Yeah, pretty fucking neat.”

“I liked your long hair,” Bucky says, and you almost frown until he adds, “But I like this, too. Maybe more. It feels nice.”

“Like a tennis ball,” you say, nodding solemnly. 

“You’re so fucking stupid,” Bucky says with an eyeroll, but you just grin. You rise onto your knees, crawling into Bucky’s lap before he can say anything and rubbing your head in his face like a deranged cat. He squawks and tries to lean away from you without also toppling over onto his back, and you just laugh. He grips your waist to stabilise you both and you settle a bit, letting your legs loop around his hips and your hands to rest on his shoulders.

“You think it feels nice,” you say, teasing lightly. Bucky makes to shove you off but you clench your thighs and hold on tight, all two-hundred pounds of Bucky no match for your stubborn idiot-streak. “You like it.”

“Said that, didn’t I? Turn your ears on,” Bucky says, but he’s blushing so you know you’ve won. 

“You like me,” you say, and you grin, because you finally push Bucky over the line you always love to toe. Teasing Bucky is a sport and you’re the Olympic champion, the Usain Bolt - you win every time. Bucky growls and snaps a hand up to grip the back of your skull. You’re delighted to find his giant hand spans the entirety of the back of your scalp as he holds you in place. He scritches into the short hairs and you’re even more delighted at the feeling that zings down your spine to your cunt almost instantaneously. 

“And you like that,” Bucky grins, all sharp teeth and dark eyes because he’s a devil and teasing you just so happens to be his Olympic gold as well. You make a sound almost like a groan, kind of like a purr, and nudge your head back into his hand some more so he keeps touching you like that. 

“Don’t like you, though,” you say, breathless now so it doesn’t quite have the same impact. Bucky rocks you backwards, lying you flat so he can crawl on top of you despite the absolute carnage of your old hair littering the carpet and now, probably, all of your clothes. Good thing you won’t be needing those much longer.

“We’ll see about that,” Bucky says, and see about that you most definitely do. 

[bananaofswifts]

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

[mythiica]

Reader x Lucien {MLQC} - Obsession {Day 10}

Title: Obsession

Fandom: Mr. Love Queen’s Choice

Character: Lucien

Genre: TRICK AND TREAT 2 IN ONE BABY 

Warnings: i dont want to spoil it for you, but its not creepy or overly violent so dont panic

Word Count: 4164 words

Other comments: i dont have the energy to put comments atm so , tomorrow, i also am not paragraphing it right 

Lucien had asked for your help to splatter fake blood onto his lab coat, and you willingly complied because it meant you could paint your skin red and stamp your palms onto his ass (to make the perfect imprint of your hands on him just in case anyone got any ideas during the Halloween party.) He entertained the idea of letting you leave the apartment with your super-short skirt, but ultimately offered you a long pair of his pants that scraped the floor. The two of you came to an agreement: white tights to match your overly revealing nurse outfit. 

Victor was hosting a Halloween party, and much to your surprise, Lucien accepted the invitation without a moment’s hesitation. It surprised you even more when you learned that it was a costume party designed for couples to match. Lucien suggested a few ideas that you vetoed immediately (pine + apple, Schrodinger + cat, Albert Einstein + Elsa Einstein, etc), but you took a liking to good old doctor + nurse. 

However, as you make final adjustments to your costume in the mirror next to the door, you ponder if it is too late to cancel. The white stretches across your sides and leaves nothing to the imagination. Lucien adores it, but you suspect that you might attract lustful gazes from other, unwanted, people. 

“Is it cold outside?” you ask, throwing your head back to glance out of the window. It is too dark to see anything, but Lucien has his phone in his hand and can check the weather. 

“Do you consider below negative to be cold?” A smirk tugs at his lips as he reaches for your coat. 

“Yes?! Is that even a question?” Putting one hand through the jacket, Lucien helps it over your shoulders before opening the front door. 

You nearly run into Kiro because you have your back turned to the hall as you exit. His hands land your side to catch you from falling, but he quickly returns you to an upright position. “You haven’t left! Oh good, I was worried I wouldn’t catch you–” Kiro is wearing a full black tuxedo and a pair of aviators. He takes them off and leaves them to rest atop his blond hair as he talks with you. “Can I please ride with you to the party? My agent was supposed to take me… but I made him mad…” 

Giggling, you nod your head. “Did he find your snack stash?” 

Lucien locks the door behind you and ushers the two of you down the stairs. 

“He did… it’s kind of embarrassing to be honest. He said I had to walk to Victor to make up for lying, but it’s so cold I couldn’t even dream of it!” 

Lucien pockets the keys and glances at Kiro. “What… are you?”

Kiro jumps off of two steps and lands triumphantly. “I’m a spy! Could you not tell? It means I’m blending in well with the general public…” 

This makes you giggle, and Lucien takes your hand in his. He huffs slightly, now that he has realized that he will have to behave himself in the drive to the party location. 

In the garage, Kiro is kind enough to open the door for you, so you step inside and fold your skirt so that it sits comfortably without wrinkling. Kiro sits behind you, and Lucien takes his chances tucking his hand up your skirt. 

Although you squirm around, Lucien’s hand slips up the skirt. He finds the smallest hole in your tights and manages to push his finger through the fabric. Lucien is unusually good with his hands, even if he cannot see what he is doing. 

“So, are the two of you Dr. Jekyll and a nurse?” Kiro cannot see Lucien’s joyous smirk from where he is sitting, and thankfully, he can’t see that Lucien’s hand is up your skirt either. 

“M-More of just generic doctor and nurse…” you reply breathlessly. Lucien has pushed his digit past your underwear and is rubbing your folds gracefully. 

“Oh! I see… why the blood though?” 

Lucien chuckles to himself and he is at least two knuckles deep inside of you, and his palm is pressed flush against your thigh. The warmth from his skin makes you giddy on its own, but he rubs your walls in an attempt to make you moan. 

You have to bite back the urge to scold him for trying something so risky in front of Kiro. “Spur of the moment and I got a bit carried away with how I placed my hands–”

“I should have put some hand prints on you, don’t you think?” Lucien says this with a smile, but you see past it and know that he is enjoying himself. 

“I think that you have enough hands in– on me as it is.” 

Kiro squeals, and the high pitched sound masks the soft moan that escapes your lips. “The two of you are so cute together!” He taps a finger against his lip. “Do you think you will win the couples’ costume contest?” 

Lucien’s finger brushes past the spot that is overly sensitive, and you cross your legs over each other. “I did not realize that he would be judging instead of participating.” 

Kiro laughs and nods. “Minor managed to convince Gavin to wear a matching shirt, even if they aren’t a romantic couple. But I don’t know anyone who could out do you!” 

At a stoplight, Lucien leans over and brushes your hair back with his free hand. As his lips graze your ear, Lucien whispers, “My how wet you are.” 

“Lucien!” You cover your mouth for a moment, but then you point at the light. “It’s green, we don’t want to hold up the line…” 

The engine revs, and you are off again. Your heart has started pounding against the tight vest you are wearing. Lucien is pumping his finger faster, but still manages to keep the sound softer than the music from the radio. Kiro put headphones in, so he couldn’t hear much anyways, but you do not want to take any chances. 

When the three of you arrive at the party venue, Lucien pushes your underwear back in place and laps at his finger to clean off the slick (only after Kiro has gotten out of the car). You lean against Lucien as he tucks an arm over your shoulders. “Are you disappointed we’re here?” 

You shove him playfully. “You are ridiculous. How would you have explained that to Kiro if he caught us?” 

Lucien shakes his head. “He would not have.” 

“But if he–” 

Lucien grasps your hands and kisses them. His breath fogs up in the cold night air, but his warmth envelops you. “I apologize if I have made you uncomfortable. I only wished that he hadn’t interrupted us–” 

You pout slightly, but Lucien gives you a swift kiss and leads you inside, out of the cold. “It won’t happen again unless you give me permission.” 

Inside, someone takes your coat, revealing your entire outfit. Kiro is on the other side of the room, but he sees you and waves, beckoning you and Lucien over to speak with Victor. He wore an extravagant Dracula costume, and upon seeing you, he smiles to show his fake fangs. “Ah, a nurse, exactly what I needed,” he jokes, taking your hand to kiss your knuckles. 

Lucien says hello, and Victor steps back. “Ah, and the doctor.” 

You giggle and pull your skirt down in the back a bit. “Victor, your party is lovely, and I adore the decorations you’ve had put up. Kiro mentioned something about a contest?” 

Kiro is eating a generous slice of cake and nods enthusiastically. 

“Yes- I should not be telling you this, but I am one of the few judges that will decide who has won… you have an advantage.” 

“Because…” 

Victor coaxes you to spin for him, and the edge of your skirt to fly around your legs. “Because you look amazing. I do not think that I have seen you in white before. It is a fitting color for you.” 

“Thank you, Victor.” You land against Lucien’s chest and lace your fingers with his. “I would not be complete without my doctor though–” 

Victor bows his head. “Of course, that is understandable.” Someone calls his name, so he takes his leave to go attend to his host duties. 

Lucien offers you a glass of black punch (colored in celebration of the spooky holiday) as he eats a cookie. It is one of those soft cookies with pure sugar for icing. But he makes a point to eat it slowly and sensually because he knows that you are watching as his tongue flicks against the crumbs before the have a chance to fall. 

“Lucien–” 

“Hm?” 

Rolling your eyes, you take the half-eaten cookie from his hand and finish for him. “You’re trying to tempt me, aren’t you?” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, not in the slightest.” 

He pulls you to the dance floor and leads you into a waltz – a row of musicians sits against the back wall and the melody floats through the air. When Lucien dips you back, you admire the ceiling. It is decked out in fake cobwebs and felted spiders – they hang from the chandelier and drip down to the ballroom. It looks beautiful, and you feel like you are suspended in the middle of a dream. 

Lucien tightens his grip on your waist to lift you into the air. Your hair flutters behind you, and you squeal as he tips his head up to kiss you. 

“I have to keep you close. It has barely been an hour, and already you have attracted the gaze of many.”  He brushes another kiss against your jaw to seal his words in your mind. “Maybe you should have been the doctor, and I should have been the sexy nurse.” 

This makes you erupt with laughter (the thought of seeing Lucien wearing a slut-worthy skirt and a garter brings tears to your eyes). You excuse yourself to go and fix your mascara now that it has touched your skin. 

It does not take long to pat the mascara away. But, as you open the door to leave and return to the party, Lucien stands in the doorway, keeping you from leaving. “Lucien, do you need the restroom?” It is a single stall room, and you are using the only one in the area. 

“Hm..” He savors your words before taking you back inside. “I need something else… from you, that is.” 

When Lucien locks the door behind you, you understand what he is doing. His hands pull your skirt up, exposing your tights and panties to him. 

“W-What are you doing?!” 

“Allow me to indulge myself. We have time before they need us back, so might as well.. No?” 

You ponder it, but you surrender because you have been dying to let him touch you more since your drive coming here. “Lucien, you are the devil–”

He smirks and bows for you, but that is only a ploy because he drops to his knees and invites himself to your crotch. The tights to not seem to be much a problem, because he rips them within seconds and he pulls them from the way. 

“Hey! Don’t rip my underwear–” 

“If you insist…” 

Lucien simply pulls them to the side and gives your slit a long lap. You release a breathless moan and clutch his hair. Another moment later, and Lucien hoists you to sit on the edge of the sink. You grip the quartz as he tongues you. Damn Lucien for knowing all the things that make you go crazy. He laps at your clit before dipping his tongue into your hole. 

“Oh fuck…” 

As the curse leaves your lips, Lucien bites your folds. “Don’t curse. It is unbefitting of you, my love.” 

“Shut up!” you scold. 

Lucien does not take lightly to this and starts fingering you at the same time. The added stimulation makes you moan loudly, but you hear someone pass by the bathroom. Clasping your hand over your mouth, you try to push Lucien away, but he continues to suckle at you. 

The doorknob jiggles, so you bite back a moan and call out, “I–It’s occupied!” 

He leans back for a moment, a string of slick hanging from his tongue, and smirks at you before diving back in. 

“L-Lucien.. Ahh.. please, there–” 

“Here?” Lucien’s fingers hit your g-spot directly and you feel the knot in your stomach coming undone. You pant heavily and realize that you blacked out for a split second. Lucien’s chin is dripping wet, but it makes you laugh. 

“Are you really laughing after–” 

You pull Lucien back up for a long kiss. “Thank you…” 

He nuzzles you for a moment and smiles. 

The tights are ripped, so you cannot put them back on. Instead, Lucien takes his lab coat off and drapes it over your shoulders. Before he opens the door, Lucien cleans his fingers off and washes them properly with soap and water. “We should return, no?” 

You unlock the door and step outside. “I think they are announcing the winners of the costume competition. Did we really take that long?” 

Lucien is behind you in a moment, and the two of you take your leave and return to the main room. “No, actually, I think I made you unravel in record time–” 

“Hey!” 

His lips curl into a smirk. “If you beg to differ, prove me wrong next time.” 

Huffing, you enter the ballroom and gravitate to the large crowd gathered around Victor. He gives the usual host speech and thanks everyone for attending. “And, of course, without further delay, I would like to reveal the winners of the costume contest. It is no surprise that the best dressed nurse and her doctor have won first place tonight, as they are not only matching, but also a couple. And no, Minor, I am not awarding you pity second place.” 

Everyone laughs and then claps for you and Lucien. As the two of you make your way to the stage, you process how Victor announced the two of you: he mentioned you first, and then Lucien (the nurse’s doctor). It warmed your heart, and Lucien helped you up the steps so you would not trip in the heels. 

Victor hands you a gift card to use how you wish, but you know that Lucien will promptly take it the moment you arrive home (to either get some research books or sex toys, there is no anticipating what he orders until it comes in the mail). 

It does not take long for the party to resume in full swing: people glide across the dance floor and everyone is seemingly in sync to Thriller. Gavin catches you and congratulates you on winning. He is wearing a keep him shirt, so you assume that Minor has the matching if found, return to Gavin top. “Victor was right – I didn’t see you earlier, but your outfit looks great.” 

Lucien is chatting with another couple a few feet away from you and Gavin, so you exhale and relax. Who knows what he would do if he heard Gavin complimenting you. “Thank you. I take it your better half has been abandoned somewhere?” 

“Minor?” Gavin laughs. “Do you know how hard I have been trying to get away from him? I’m surprised he hasn’t found me… now that I say that, I feel like someone is watching me.” 

When you glance over your shoulder, you catch Lucien glaring at Gavin. 

To be expected. 

You laugh nervously and excuse yourself. Nestling yourself at Lucien’s side, you loop your arm through his. “It’s getting late, don’t you think?” 

Lucien nods. “If you will excuse us, I have a meeting tomorrow, and we must take our leave. Have a wonderful evening!” 

He is always such a gentleman, which you adore. The two of you say goodbye to Kiro, Victor, and (reluctantly for Lucien) Gavin before you are off. The music hums, and you enjoy the time alone with Lucien. Parties are wonderful, but when Victor goes full out like that, you tend to get drained. 

“Did you enjoy yourself?” Lucien inquires with a smile. 

“Yes! It was wonderful to see everyone having fun. I think I even caught Gavin laughing at Minor.” 

“Well I caught Gavin doing other things…” 

“Hm?” 

Lucien waves a hand. “He must have been admiring the handprints on your backside. I don’t see any other reason he should have been tracing your form with his eyes.” 

You laugh and capture his hand. “You have demonstrated today that I am yours. Promise you won’t let it get to you?” 

“I intend to show you my love one more time tonight. Is that acceptable?” 

His voice drops when he says this, and your heart jumps at the thought of what he has planned. Lucien knows how to keep you on your toes, so you nod your head enthusiastically. 

You had not even realized that the two of you have arrived home in the meantime. Lucien leans over the divider between your seats to brush his lips across yours. It is not a full kiss, and it leaves you craving more. 

All night, Lucien has been teasing you with the promise of sex, and now you are finally getting it. 

You do not hesitate to run out of the car and up to the apartment. Lucien has not even made it up the stairs, but you want to take your costume off before he rips it to shreds. Bouncing to the bathroom, you let the coat drop to the ground before you pull the top over your head. As you fumble with the skirt zipper, you feel Lucien’s warm breath on your neck. 

“Need help?” 

“Y-Yes–” 

Lucien’s hand trails up your torso and then back down to unhook it before pulling the zipper down. He is incredibly steady and slow, making you wait for it. The fabric drops from your waist and to the floor: he lets you step out of it before Lucien spins you around and cups your face to kiss you. “You look even more beautiful without clothes on…” 

He knows exactly how to make you squirm with just words alone. With his lips so close to your skin, you can only think of how he made you cum earlier. “L-Lucien?” 

“Yes, my nurse?” 

Swallowing hard, you lean against Lucien. He supports your weight and pulls your hair back to kiss your neck. 

“Tell me what you want…”

     Lucien trills his fingers up your side until he unclasps the back and removes it slowly. As it drops to the ground, you hold your arm over her breasts, but they spill outwards still. Lucien’s hand presses to the small of your back and he kisses your bare shoulder down to the top of your breast, coaxing your to reveal yourself to him. 

“I desperately want you to Dr. Jekyll me…”

“Oh?” He guides you back into the bedroom, keeping a hand on your bare hip. “You’d like me to ravage you?” As the back of your knees hit the mattress, you fall onto the bed. Lucien looms over you and pushes his knee between your legs. “You want me to make you cum again?” He starts kissing down your body and stops once his lips meet the hem of your panties. “Tell me so I know...” 

“Yes! Please, Lucien. You have been so naughty all day, but now, when I really want something you have the audacity to deny me it. How very Mr. Hyde of you.” 

Lucien leans back to remove his tie, and he uses it to bind your wrists above your head. “What about this?” 

Squirming around, you giggle at Lucien. “I like this…” 

His next movements are swift and fluid: he removes his belt and then pants, followed by his shirt and underwear. Lucien presses his body to yours so you can feel his erection pressing against your underwear. You wonder if he will continue the game of foreplay and fuck you through your underwear, but he seeminly reads your mind and pulls your underwear down to your knees. 

“Ah… you are still wet from earlier. How beautiful~” 

“You did eat me out in record time…”

“So you admit that I have the ability to make you cum fast? Let us see if I can do it again–” 

Lucien pulls your leg over his hip and inserts himself into you. His cock rubs against your walls and stretches you. It makes you moan loudly and squirm around again. He holds your abdomen down and gives you a moment to adjust before he begins to thrust in and out of you. 

All night, you have been waiting for this, and now that it is finally happening, you surrender yourself to the sensation without hesitating. Lucien envelops your senses as he kisses you everywhere, leaving marks in his wake. 

Heat radiates from his muscles, and your breath catches in your throat when Lucien traces the curve of your thighs. Lucien repeats your name over and over again, and it makes you wetter than if he would dirty talk you. There is something about how his voice dips lower and lower that makes you giddy. 

“Lucien, please tell me you have been thinking about this since we left..” 

“I’ve been thinking about this since you got your costume,” he admits.  

You cannot stop moaning as Lucien thrusts into you. Although your wrists are bound, you hook them over Lucien’s neck and you bury your face against his skin. Consumed by lust, you can't help but dirty talk him to the moon. "Lucien! You feel so amazing inside of me... your cock.. I wish you would have fucked me in the bathroom instead of just eating me out. That would have been so hot.” 

“I’ll take it under consideration for next year.” With that, Lucien tucks his hand between your legs and finds purchase directly on your clit. This earns him a few more moans from your lips, and he laughs triumphantly. When he does, his hair curls over his eyes, but you are quick to push it back. You clench around him tightly and watch Lucien’s face contort with pleasure. 

He had been denying himself pleasure as well, but now you have a chance to show off to him. "You are so incredibly warm.." Goosebumps ripple down his arms and Lucien groans loudly – it's music to your ears. "Clench around me again – won't you?" 

His words seemingly make you respond on command, because you fall over your edge as his tip brushes the spot that makes you see stars. You thought the squelching sound was loud before, but now it is the only thing you can hear.

"Lucien!"

“Yes, my beautiful nurse… cum for me… how wonderful you sound…” 

Cream dribbles down your inner thigh, making Lucien grin with pride. He does not stop thrusting until squirt forces him out. It wells out of you and makes the bed wet like nothing else you have ever experienced. He makes sure to pleasure you before he pumps himself a few times. 

“Lucien, doctor… I want you to cum too.” 

“Oh?” 

When you arch your back to entice him, your breasts fall outwards and his eyes go wide. “Cum on me and make me yours. That’s what you want, no~?” 

You fight against the tie until it loosens and you have the ability to use your hands again. Swatting Lucien’s hands away, you pump his tip rapidly and don’t stop until you feel him tense against your palm. 

A string of curse words escape his lips, and you know that he is close, so you remove your hand and smile at him. “Edging me?” Lucien grips your jaw and laughs. “You are the naughty one.” His thumb dips into your mouth and he coaxes you to open for him. His tip is smoothe against your lips, and you do your best to take him all down your throat. He wraps his fingers in your hair and tugs slightly, but then groans as you hum against his length. 

So much has happened in a day, and now it has come to this. 

With your mouth full of his cock, you look up at Lucien with big eyes and hope that your expression is enough to make him cum. His grunt is drawn out and breathless, and then you taste the bitterness of his cum as it trickles down your throat. Having been stimulated from fucking your pussy, it did not take much to have him unravel like you did before. 

However, you do not swallow it as he wishes. Instead, you let it drip down onto your breasts. 

Lucien smiles and takes the tie to throw it away as he kisses you. “Perfect, my little nurse.” 

[the-necessary-unnecessary]

Translation of the interview with Mapi Leon (Part 2: minutes 18:50 to 29:15)

- You, a person who is very sincere, I’m going to ask you and see if I manage to get you to be completely sincere here. Does this get boring? When one team is dominating so much, when your game play is so direct and effective- in this case in terms of goals- does that get boring, does that get overwhelming? Do you think about the outcome of the league being just about decided? When you ever come out for a match do you consider it a given that you’ll win? People don’t know what even to say about Barça… So, is this a nice feeling, does it get boring, does it get overwhelming?

No no, well not for me at least. I don’t really like to listen to all the praise because sometimes praise can also be weakening. Well it depends because sometimes it’s also nice to motivate and lift your mood but in a lot of situations its debilitating, so it needs to be a bit balanced. It’s very nice that maybe you’ll speak with someone… well at the end of the day you talk to friends that play in other teams and they tell you ‘damn, you guys have great players, you’re doing so well.’ But yeah, it’s a positive reinforcement to see how the rest view you and that helps to tell you that yes this is working, and we are doing things well but right now we can’t stop. I mean, now that we’ve found the right track then we can’t get off it for anything in the world. If we want to really grow as athletes then we have to continue at this high level. The other day a friend, a friend from another team, was saying to me yeah you guys are boring.

- Ha! See that’s why I’m asking you! 

Yeah like obviously for me not but from other people’s perspectives then it’s not as great. She was saying, it’s a good thing, for you guys its very good but I see you play and you guys bore me because there’s nothing we can do against you. Obviously it depends on the game, it depends on whether we’re in a good moment. It’s clear that we have to work very hard for each game and… I don’t know, I think we have matured and I think that that’s meaning that we are working harder and more together. 

- You’re an ex-Atleti player, now at Barça. Let’s see, another one to put your sincerity to the test: is it particularly gratifying to beat Tacón? To beat Tacón and in the manner that how you beat them, with a 9-1 win in the first round and 0-6 in the second. Is it more gratifying as they’re going to become Real Madrid, its maybe even ‘El Classico’ of women’s football? 

Uhhh. I mean, no. No, it’s the same as it is with other teams… 

- Even though before you played against Tacón a lot of people were saying Real Madrid this and that, when they invest money in the team after all these years that they’ve kind of been on the sidelines of women’s football. Isn’t it especially satisfying to win 9-1 in the first match, 6-0 in the second? 

Lets see, I mean it’s not exactly like that… I mean it’s a bonus yes. At the end of the day Real Madrid is going to invest a lot and that’s great. It adds competitiveness and that’s good for all the players. If they invest more money that will mean that other teams will also have to invest more if they want to stay on the same level. That’s good, in the end it’s all a process. They can pour in bucket loads of money and bring in great players but they’ll need to play as a team because in the end that’s maybe what’s been happing for these last couple of years at Barça: the level of our squad was probably better than any other team but when talking about the level of our play and our togetherness then Atletico de Madrid was always superior. So for that reason football is such a beautiful game, and the reason why it’s not always the team with the best squad that end up winning the league but the one that works best as a team. 

- Atletico de Madrid this weekend, Atletico de Madrid in the Super Copa, Atletico de Madrid in the Champions League… What is this? [they both laugh] 

I don’t know, I really don’t know. 

- When the Super Copa fixtures came out what did you guys thing? What did you say? 

Yeah we’re going to get bored…  Well it’s pretty hard to play each other so many times as it’s a lot more complicated to maintain the same standards, to maintain a winning streak or… 

- Yeah, the surprise factor right? 

Of course, or they catch you in a moment where you’re on a bad streak. But it’s hard, and you may have won one match but then end up losing the next and things can change quite radically. So yes, that it’s going to be interesting. 

- How are you seeing your ex-team? This year it’s weird right because on top of the fact that you guys are doing really well with this amazing streak of no defeats, it looks like Atleti is being weighed down a bit from all the expectations they’ve built up over the last years. From these little snags they’ve been having, the structure of the club has been lost from all the changes in coaches- the last one of which has been made official this week and is the third one of the season. Do you see Atleti, you who has played there so know how the club works, how do you see right now the team who is going to be Barça’s rival a lot in this coming month as you’ll be facing them in all competitions. 

Well, let’s see, the thing is that Vera did things very well. Vera arrived and he’s worked really well with them. It might not look like it but it’s hard, at a professional level, to have a team at such a high performance what with leading the team, training sessions… You have to know how to spur the team on, to connect with the players, and Vera did that really well. When he left well it’s hard- he’d hit the nail on the head with the team and it’s hard to find that again. Now, I don’t know the atmosphere that they’re in coming up to this match but well, it’s what people say as well, in the moment when you’re more wounded you summon on your strength and say ‘or I believe in this or I’ll sink’. We shall see, like honestly how they will play is a mystery right now as although they’ve been having a bad streak, with the change in coach and everything then you never know how they’re going to play now. Everything is more of a surprise at the moment. 

- With the league almost in the bag- although as a player you’re not going to like hearing this- but 

No I’m not 

- But with the league almost in the bag- I’m going to say it. 

Well you’re saying it but… 

- With the Super Copa in this new final four format being played in Salamanca I think its going to be pretty cool, and the Champions which is Barça’s unfinished business, if you had to pick just one competition to win right now. Like obviously as a player you want to win them all, but which one for you would have that added special value? 

Well that question is horrible. Obviously its.. nah.. that can’t be asked 

- Go on then, pose the question again to yourself and answer it lets see [okay this sounds very forceful when translated but with the tone and everything its mostly just quite jokey] 

I mean obviously what we’ve been striving for in these past few years, and what’s putting up a fight against us achieving it, and however much we work it still alludes us is obviously the league. And I’ve always said when they’ve asked me that I’d be really excited to win a league with Barça, which since I’ve been here has always just escaped our grasp. At the end of the day it’s the reward for all the effort put in during the entire season, week after week. It’s like, ‘look you’ve done well throughout this entire year’ not just ‘you’ve done well in a couple of matches’. That being said, winning a Champions League title, in terms of level of competition must be amazing. But that’s something that’s very hard to do. Even though last year we got to the final that’s something that’s very hard to do, just because we got there last year doesn’t mean we’re going to get there this year too. It might not look like it but its something very hard. 

- And the Super Copa does that excite you guys, the players, or not really? With this final four format, being there for five days in Salamanca and everything…. 

I’m going to acknowledge something to you and that’s that I don’t fancy it very much. 

- [laughs] well from Barcelona its quite a trip. 

Yeah like its connection transport-wise to Barcelona is a bit complicated. But no, at the end of the day a competition is a competition and we’re going to go there for the same thing we always go for. That’s to say, everything that we can win, everything that’s a match, a trophy or whatever- we’re competitive we’ll want to win it. 

- Well Mapi, we’ve gone through a little bit of everything. Let’s see what happens this Saturday, let’s see what happens in the Super Copa, let’s see what happens also in the Copa de la Reina, the Champions- everything. We shall keep following all of your steps, an enormous kiss from everyone who forms a part of ‘Área Chica’. Thank you for being here with us today and all the luck in the world for what’s left of the season. 

Well thank you very much!

[bfnbear]

From the San Antonio Express-News; Texas. June 29, 1998.

Young actor clicks in third try

Deborah Martinez; Express-News Staff Writer

Chris Cardenas finally found his match in Jared Padalecki.

For the past two years, Cardenas has gone to the National Speech Tournament to compete in duet acting. Each time, the 1998 Madison High School graduate went with a different partner. Each time he placed in the top six.

When Cardenas, 17, teamed up with Padalecki, 15, and traveled to St. Louis last week, they were gunning for Cardenas' last shot at a national title.

The pair turned in a tear-jerking rendition of "Dominick and Eugene," a story about a man's paternal relationship with his mentally retarded brother, before a crowd of about 3,000.

The judges awarded them first place, giving the North East School District its first national championship in duo interpretation.

"It means a lot to finally win. It was my last chance," said Cardenas, who plans to go to Carnegie- Mellon University in the fall and major in theater. "It probably does mean more to me than it does to Jared because I have been trying for this the past three years."

The most harrowing moments for the pair came after their final performance. They had to sit through a three-hour award ceremony in which winners in their category were the last to be announced.

Although the partners were poised about their performance, the national title came as something of a surprise.

"I was pretty confident of the scene, and I was confident we would do well. But there's always that little question in the back of your mind," Padalecki said about the stiff competition with the 200- plus teams of duo interpreters.

With two years left in high school, Padalecki said his partnership with Cardenas will help him prepare for future competitions.

"I love the way Chris acts," Padalecki said. "I respect his work. Everything I see him do he's always really good in. All the rest of the audience is really enthralled by him.

"It was a good experience and an honor to be chosen to work with him."

Both actors attributed their success to their coach, Mike Harrison.

Cardenas said his and Padalecki's championship was an emotional climax to four years of hard work in which he sacrificed teen- age experiences such as his high school prom.

"When I look back at the last four years, it's more important than a prom," said Cardenas, who described as a relief the actual moment after he and Padalecki were announced champions.

"It was like a sigh of relief because you're like tense and you're holding your breath and all of a sudden you can exhale," Cardenas said. "After that, you just start freaking out."

Overall, North East had the best representation of any school district in the nation at the 67th annual tournament, sponsored by the National Forensic League, said Diana Schumacher, assistant to the district's fine arts director. The tournament included events ranging from debate to speech and drama.

For Churchill High School, Blake Walker took home a fourth place in humorous interpretation and Danny Lutman placed sixth in the original oratory category, while Aimee Gonzalez took 10th place in dramatic interpretation. High School student Justine Fisher was a triple winner, taking fourth place in extemporaneous speaking, eighth place in policy debate with partner Justin Freeman, and 10th place in the Phyllis Flory Barton Debate Speakers Awards category.

From the San Antonio Express-News; Texas. August 11, 1999.

Teen trades ranch work for appearance on TV

Jeanette McNamee; Express-News Staff Writer

When Hollywood came calling for aspiring actor Jared Padalecki, the Madison High School senior was working on a ranch in Blanco, far from the bright lights of a television or movie studio.

Padalecki, 17, of San Antonio was one of two teens selected nationwide as a winner of Seventeen Magazine and Fox-TV's "Claim to Fame Contest." Patricia Pendleton of Putnam, Conn., was the second winner.

A tall, Matt Damon look-alike, Padalecki won an expense-paid trip to Santa Monica, Calif., to appear as a presenter on the 1999 Teen Choice Awards. The show was taped Aug. 1 and will be aired locally 7-9 p.m. Thursday on KABB- TV.

Winning the contest meant a welcome break for Padalecki from a couple of hot weeks spent building fences, digging holes and cutting trees on a Blanco ranch owned by Spurs chairman Peter Holt.

Padalecki was one of approximately 20,000 teens nationwide who entered the contest by submitting a videotape of themselves to their local Planet Hollywood restaurant. Each contestant had 30 seconds to tell why he or she would be a good presenter. That was not a problem for Padalecki, who had been in numerous speech tournaments and taken drama classes since he was in the sixth grade.

He and his parents, Jerry and Sherri Padalecki, flew to California on July 29 for a five-day stay. Although the show was taped in Santa Monica, they stayed in Beverly Hills.

The Teen Choice Awards recognizes popular teen stars in film, television, music, sports and fashion as chosen by teens across the country who completed ballots found in Seventeen magazine's June and July issues or accessed the magazine's web site to vote for their favorites.

An estimated 1,000 teens were on hand for the filming of the show.

"I thought I was just going to sit backstage and maybe just go on stage a couple of times," Padalecki said. "But, actually, they let me help backstage. They also had me handing awards (which looked like surfboards) to presenters and even sometimes giving them to the people who won."

"They introduced me on the show, too. I don't know if they're going to keep it or if they're going to cut it."

He got to meet such celebrities as Freddie Prinze Jr., Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Brandy and Tara Lipinski.

But the most important part of the trip for the outgoing, personable Padalecki was the chance to meet agents such as Rich Beddingfield, manager/agent for Freddie Prinze Jr.

"We're going to keep in touch, and he (Beddingfield) is going to try and send me some audition material," a hopeful Padalecki said. "It's kind of tough living in San Antonio when the main acting cities, of course, are New York and L.A. So, instead of flying you back and forth, they send you the material and ask you to put yourself on tape and then you send the tape back to them, and they review it."

His parents are very supportive of his acting aspirations, he said.

"But it's a pretty tough business in acting, and they want me to have something as a backup. But if it all works out, they'd be ecstatic."

He's hopeful the audition tapes he sends to Beddingfield will lead to appearances in some TV shows or movies.

His mother said she and her husband share their son's enthusiasm for his acting goals.

"We think it's wonderful," she said. "He's been interested in it (acting) a long time. He was always a ham when he was little."

She is a teacher at [...] High School and Jerry Padalecki is an accountant with [...] Corp.

After graduating from Madison High School, Padalecki hopes to find acting roles in Los Angeles.

"I want to see how this next year in high school goes before deciding on college," he said. "If something happens during the year, like I get to be on a TV show or I send an audition tape and they like me and want to put me in a movie, then I'll go into acting. If I can do it, there's nothing else I want to do in the world."

If he finds acting jobs in L.A., he might attend the University of California at Los Angeles to major in theater or communications.

"Or, if this doesn't work out, I'll probably go to the University of Texas at Austin and major in engineering or computer science."

Padalecki has taken speech and drama classes for several years, first at Wood Middle School and then at Madison, where he's won awards in speech and drama competition.

He praises Madison's drama teacher, Mike Harrison.

"Mr. Harrison always told me I was real talented. But he also said it helps what you do in your lifetime. It helps the experiences you have and the way you see things," Padalecki said.

In addition to his success in drama and speech, he is an all-around 'A' student and a National Merit Scholar. He takes honors classes and is in the gifted and talented program at Madison. He also enjoys basketball and football.

His brother Jeff, 20, is a student at St. Mary's University, and his sister Megan, 14, is a freshman at Madison.

Forgot the link. Oops

[hearyourheart]

Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world.

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23.

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

[frozenfallenuniverse]

Kylem-The fans

If wotc won’t make stories for kylem, guess that leaves me

The roaring and ringing of the crowd deafened the announcements for the latest matches of the day. Swarms of goblins rang their chimes in a bittersweet cacophony that caught the ears of every stall vendor, whether they wanted to or not. Taller races walked through the gates behind them and began to loiter around several of the stalls. Each possible customer had hair dyed as close to their favorite competitors’. Rainbow hues and the noise made the area seem like a leprechaun’s fever dream. Every day in Valor’s Reach was a massive payday for the stall owners.

Each merchant’s popularity differed based on what races came around or what competitors were fighting. The dragon rider got more sparklers, the homunculi brought along more purchases of horns and the twins brought along a ton of purchases for blond dye. Food was popular all the time. A meal and a show was almost as good as the finale of the games. A few azra, even, had stalls that focused on ‘good luck charms’. Most were fake but every now and again, people swore their favorites won due to them. Noisemakers were also popular, mostly among the ones who were already creating a massive racket. The most popular for the goblins, outside of that, were the confetti stands.

Goblins were surprisingly the races who bought the most merchandise for the tournaments. Be it replica suits of armor, rotten food for those that were terrible or confetti as colorful as the array of dyes sold. Goblins love- live for the championship. Between the azra and them, the remaining merchant are hardly a handful. Although they weren’t fussy, many goblins loved to get their throwable paper from an azra merchant known by the name Aures.

Aures’s confetti was cheaper, brighter and most importantly more flammable than the rest. Trade secret, he says. Even though the wardens would never allow it, you never know when a bit of flashy paper that go up in a second might secure a match. Every goblin that ran about stopped at Aures’ stall, brought a handful then returned to the pregame chaos. Each coin that entered his coffer made his smirk grow wider until a strange goblin stepped up and could only muster a single coin.

She was half the size of an adult goblin which made Aures guess she was a kid. The makeshift wood and leather costume she was wearing somewhat resembled Gorm’s, if Gorm the giant was a miniscule goblin with only five coins to his name. It was made with heart, clearly. Even had a drawing of one on the breastplate of it. Her eyes were massive, smile reaching across her face and ears pointed straight to the sky, as she cupped her hands for the purchase.

“I’d like a handful, sir! Mister Gorm is gonna be there today and I gots to make sure he wins!” Her ears flapped as Aures looked at the measly coin she could produce. He looked down and scoffed at the lack of a coin purse on her. He did at least humor her by thumbing through the coins for what felt like hours to the young goblin. Although the pre-competition noises were deafening, she clearly heard him speak.

“I’m terribly afraid this isn’t enough for a finger’s worth, let alone a handful.” He returned the coins to her awaiting hands. Her ears already began to wilt as she felt the weight of something much heavier than she was expecting. She clenched the coin in her hand and shook her head a few times as the merchant chatted with other customers. She slammed the coins back on his stall and pleaded as tears started to well up. She cleared her throat, almost choking, before she spoke.

“Mister! Please! Gorm has to win today! I need as much confetti as I can get! I’m using all of my allowance and everything!” Her ears and lips were quivering and one customer finished their transaction before Aures had to excuse himself. His hand came to his brow, wiping away non-existent sweat, followed by a long sigh. Tears were bad for business but he’d be at a major loss if he had to give her enough to look decent in this crowd. His hand dragged down his face. Every second spent on her was another loss to other sales. A new lanky azra customer was already lining up behind her. He clenched his fist, covering his mouth with it, and weighed his options like coins. He gave her his best customer service smile to start.

“Miss, I’m terribly sorry but my hands are tied. I have a limited supply for today and as much as I would love to give you a fair sum of my wares, I must get food on my table. Maybe you can come back the next time you get your allowance? I’m sure you can purchase much more than you were expecting with time!” Each word came with no hesitation. At least one of the regulars swore they heard it before. He lightly placed the coin in her hand and slowly closed her fist around it. He crouched to her eye level, gave his best customer smile again and returned to his side of the stall. It took her a few moments to realize she had the coin back. She brought it to her chest and took a few long breaths. The azra that was standing behind her crouched to her level and seemingly soothed her. Well, that’s what it seemed to the other people in the thoroughfare, Aures was already hawking wares and past the entire meeting already.  

A lanky azra came to the stand next. Dark, minimal leather clothing and a hood with a hint of gold on the tips of his horns. Aures wanted to pry but bit his tongue at something that would cost him a sale. He wasted enough time already today. The customer looked back at the goblin before finally speaking.

“ ’Scuse me. My buddy, Gorm, there forget their wallet so I’m gonna pay if that’s all right. we all need a good teammate sometimes.” The azra pointed a thumb back to the goblin that Aures was speaking to previously and the voice sounded familiar but Aures couldn’t place it. He gave a quick glance at the girl, who seemed to be frozen in place, before returning his vision to his customer, holding out his hand. It took a few seconds before a massive coin purse caused his hand to crash into his stall. A smile befitting an arch demon was on the customer’s face while a pained one was on Aures’s. It seemed a bit too convenient really.

“I suppose I can do that but just to make sure, you are friends with her right? I’m fine with good deeds but I want to make sure she’s going to be safe.” There were enough guards, people, and judges to make sure nothing bad happened but it’s always better to be safe. A creeping sensation was nibbling away in Aures’s mind about this person. The azra mulled the question for a bit before laughing and tossing his hood back. A few people gasped and the goblin girl was searching for something for him to write on.

The black clothing, the chain and sickle on his hip and the grey mohawk were perfect replications of Virtus, the Veiled. It wasn’t a replication. It was Virtus. The goblin’s hands were trembling as she pulled out a small piece of parchment for him. He signed it, along with a few other pieces nearby fans brought, before turning back to the flabbergasted merchant.

“So, can my buddy Gorm here have some confetti?” He winked as he held out a hand to Aures. It took a few moments for Aures to realize this wasn’t a fantasy and he quickly scrambled to give the fighter a massive bag of confetti. Far more than his gold would get. This would spur a rumor of this stall being Virtus’s favorite in the arena.

 The crowd’s roars grew louder with each moment. The two pairs split apart and were fighting with half their normal strength. Virtus dragged the dragon rider to the ground and was keeping her busy with acrobatics, swift blows and being a general nuisance. Gorm was left with the dragon. The scent of burnt leather and armor spoke to how it was going. A claw came down on Gorm’s shoulder, the beast’s weight bringing him to his knees. The roaring in his face, along with the saliva that came with it, didn’t help either. The pain and attrition was showing its face.

“GORM!!!” A scream from across the arena caught his attention. A small goblin girl, with tears in her eyes and wearing something that resembled his armor, grabbed a big handful of confetti then tossed it into the arena. “YOU CAN DO IT!”

Gorm couldn’t help the smile he got from that and felt a new rush of energy through him. He pushed off the clawed foot of the dragon and brought his second arm to its throat. With a shattering battle cry of his name, he flipped the dragon over his shoulder and brought a thumb downward at it. The crowd met the roar with their own cacophony and the judges called the round. A victory for the duo and a fan that kept them going.

[veridium]

Thank You 300 Followers - Here’s Some Heartache!

Thank you for enabling me, everyone

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is not a chronological part of my #Theiaphine romance arc. This story takes place a year after Inquisitor Theia Trevelyan disbands the Inquisition, marries, and moves her sights to the incoming conflict threatening all of Thedas and the world. It is also a very emotional and tumultuous moment in the lives of Theia and her wife, and as such I will warn you: it is some sad shit. Also, if you don’t want to spoil the chronology of their romance, maybe don’t read this...and I’m sorry (lol).

The Inquisition had been disbanded for a year now, and yet for Theia her work never truly ended. She still felt the pressure to perform, to represent something greater than her own identity. Even with all she had sacrificed to save Thedas, she felt spurred to give more – as if her body and spirit had finally resigned to her greater purpose. Still, the concerns of her life did not waver from her heart. She still stood at the side of the woman she loved in a time of war, and now a time of preparation. She still pushed herself to be a better Mage, even with the loss of her hand and forearm. And now, she was preparing for perhaps the most complicating eventuality of her life: becoming a Mother while one of the leaders of a covert operation to stop the destruction of the entire world at the hands of a former ally and friend.

The ocean air laced with salt, easygoing and in no hurry. It was a calm morning for the ports and for the halls of the apartments House Montilyet owned along Rialto Bay. Her healer had recommended remaining near the water for the first few months, in order to relax her nerves and keep her mind preoccupied with the business of the surrounding city life.

She gazed absent-mindedly in the floor-length mirroring metal that stood in their bedchamber, as a servant helped secure her tunic dress from behind. Her hair in wavy curls and tied up into a ponytail, a beautiful façade to a busy mind. Among her thoughts, reports from Leliana – though Thedas called her Divine Victoria – letters from the Seeker’s hideout in the mountains, and intel gathering from various agents scattered across the landscape. She did not need one for the Imperium, however; she had a direct voice from the heart in a dear friend whose voice echoed through a messenger crystal at every chance he got.

Once she was fully ready, she turned and departed her room, single-mindedly heading for her office. Well, their office. The thought of two important and busy women sharing one work space would puzzle some people, but once they were invited into the large room, it was understood why. In two corners were each of their workspaces: one corner, an illustrious library of tomes, papers, and scrolls, along with a fireplace and a bearskin run reminiscent of the décor of the Free Marches. On the other end of the rectangular room was another desk and chair, ornamentally designed, and matching the large window overlooking the sea ports. The window was rarely closed. Framing it were bookshelves, statuettes, and artwork.

Theia entered into the middle of the room, which was bordered by a long and thin balcony which overlooked the small garden courtyard. The sun was bearing down on the rustic stone of the architecture, facilitating a warm and dry atmosphere. That kind of weather did well for Theia’s pale skin, but she grew only slightly darker than she had been in their days at Skyhold; the phenotypes of her heritage were hard to shake off.

Her eyes went immediately to the leather-bound booklet of papers that rested in the middle of her desk. She grabbed it and unbound it from the leather string, opening and searching for the bottom line in all the jargon. It was from the Divine: more detected movements of elves departing their posts and homes and retreating somewhere rural, some place hard to pinpoint. Meanwhile, “special emissaries” – the Divine’s word for her spies – had been monitoring the Qunari advancement on the Imperium with grim conclusions. Her friend and now Magistrate Dorian Pavus was working under ever-increasing pressure, and his faction proved rigorous in the face of not only political opposition, but decreasing time.

With all this in mind, anyone who knew Theia during the early days of the Inquisition would say they felt a shift in her soul, as if she had aged ten years in the span of three. Perhaps it was the betrayal of her friend that hardened her heart and drew the line in the sand. Or, maybe, the loss of her arm that left her permanently jaded to a degree. The core of who she was managed to survive, if in more episodic expressions. The main thing that changed was that she was careful who witnessed it – who still got to see Theia for who she was, and not merely what she must do.

--

Her quiet time alone with the reports was interrupted by the sound of her partner entering with a courier, who was feverishly taking notes per dictation.

“Tell my brother to take count of all the masts we have left-over from the renovation, and see if we cannot find some use for the fabrics elsewhere. Particularly if we can experiment with designs for the several ships I need built,” Josephine ordered as she walked with determination to her desk.

“Yes, My Lady,” the courier nodded, before departing quickly back out the door.

From across the vast room, Josephine sensed her presence, and couldn’t help but grin smartly as she, too, got her eyes lost in some important documents.

“Mi amor, you brood with increased intensity these days,” she said out loud.

“Funny, and I thought the servants were merely joking when they got caught calling me Mistress Ice Dragon,” Theia mused, finishing up a sentence she was writing on the correspondence in front of her.

“You know they were drunk, do not take it personally. Besides, there is something…magnetic about such a title,” Josephine’s playfulness had an ultimate goal: avoid Theia’s now heightened temper at all costs, if it could be out-maneuvered. Such a task proved only possible for the most capable, such as herself.

“Yes, of course, I much prefer it to all the rest. In fact we should combine them all into an ultimate title: The Herald of the Ice Dragon Inquisition? It’s catchy,” her words were laced with a saltiness, as much as she tried to have a sense of humor, she could not help but have low patience these days.

With that, Josephine chuckled, and withdrew from her end of the room in order to arrive at her woman’s side. She came around to her side of the desk, sitting on the edge to her right, her eyes glimmering in the abundant daylight.

“What is the latest from the Divine? She sent me a letter a few days ago, but it was more personal in nature.”

“Nothing I didn’t already expect, unfortunately. More elves retreating to somewhere, the Qunari are not backing down from the Imperium’s borders. Solas was right, with their defeat in the Deep Roads, they are now striking at Tevinter with the vengeance of a wounded animal.”

“It was imperative that we defeat them. The Exalted Council’s destruction would have been more disastrous than the Conclave.”

“Yes, but now I fear we have won the battle only to lose the war.”

“Surely not. With the ships my brother is working on in the yard, we can have a sustainable fleet to support our forces if they need it.”

Theia pursed her lips. Josephine spoke of their months-long project they began shortly after she got the Montilyet trading fleet back on its feet. Using some of the smaller ships as conduits, they began transferring correspondences, agreements, and acquisitions in an underground, transactional process. Eventually, they even dispatched explorers to secure new raw materials for their eventual plans of a security fleet that could withstand evacuation, maritime battle, and even land-based natural disasters. A smaller, more maneuverable fleet to stand by should land become too dangerous to undergo operations.

“You still sound the way you did when we were in Skyhold. So full of hope and promise. I wonder how you did it,” Theia admitted with a vulnerability in her tone, now

“I watched the woman I thought would be lost to me forever, come back to me, from a most impossible battle. Now, she and I live the life I thought was foolish to daydream. I have an endless reservoir of foolish resolve,” Josephine played.

At that, Theia smirked. “I am sorry I’ve been so distant. Between the sickness and the affairs we have going on, there are times when I feel like I am more of the kind of person Varric said I’d be: this embodiment of intimidating ideas, and not a human being.”

“You have managed to be both for this long, mi amor, and will continue to. Just take care of yourself, please, for both your sakes,” Josephine referred to the child that was now growing inside of her, the child that would be their heir and their shining beacon of faith in a time of great duress.

“I will. I’m trying. It doesn’t help that no one else knows besides you and Dorian. I’m surprised Dorian has kept it to himself this long, it surely is a sign he has more vital matters to concern himself with. I will need to tell Cassandra and Lelia—Divine Victoria, before rumors or spies gets the information to them first. They would not be pleased with me,” she stood from her chair and took hold of the letter she had finished. Folding it up precisely, she reached for her small bottle of parchment wax, and began warming it over the one candle she had lit for such purposes.

It would only be a month or so before her abdomen would start swelling, and become noticeable even other the shapelessness of her tunic gowns. She had to devise the best and most covert way of letting her closest allies know of this recent development. Surely they would understand if she could just use the right words, or provide the most accurate context.

No matter what, though, she knew it would not be smooth sailing.

--

The Seeker was anxiously awaiting word from the former Inquisitor, seeing as how she had dispatched pages of updates and time-sensitive information for her feedback. The Seekers had been rebuilding and training intensively for months in the mountains, free from the momentum of politics and everyday debauchery of Orlais. She was personally overseeing the reformation, and with that came great power and great nerve. One of the few sources of solace, as well as connection to the outside world, was her frequent communications with Lady Trevelyan and the Divine.

She paced along the floor runner of the foyer, waiting for the courier to arrive with the morning letters. When he finally did so, breathing rather heavily from having ran up the flights of stairs to her wing of the fortress, her eyes sparked with impatience. He handed her a stack about an inch thick; surely one of them would be from Theia.

There were two. One that was more plain, probably of logistical reports and the status of the ship fleet. Then a second, with personal parchment, sealed with her own emblem.

Curious, Cassandra thought. Why the need for two? Has something happened?

Stepping into her private study, first she opened the plainer letter. It was official business, nothing out of the ordinary – a confirmation of support here, a comment in the margins there. So, why a need for a personal note? Typically, when Theia wished to say something personal, she snuck it in at the end of reports.

Her fingers nervously opened the second letter, the wax snapping as it broke open. Her eyes went immediately to the first line:

“Dear friend,

I would have included this in the reports, but, I did not wish for something so private to be shuffled into affairs of business. I know you will react strongly to this, but, it is something I won’t be able to hide from you much longer. I am with child, due 7 months from now. I am well, and well-cared for. Rest assured, I will not shirk my duties or correspondences during the remainder of my pregnancy. I have sent a letter to the Divine relaying this news, so do not feel bound to secrecy with her. After all, who could dare keep a secret from our beloved friend?

Sending well wishes your way,

T”

The Seeker’s heart sank deeper into her ribs as she read the note. How could she do this? Now, of all times? Her body filled with fearful dread. It was not that a child wasn’t a blessing from the Maker, it was the timing of it. Surely, she had thought Theia would remain focused on the responsibilities she had to the forces under her control and advisement, not do something that would require so much of her energy. And what of the child of the Inquisitor? Would such an identity ever promise safety in the face of war?

Cassandra sat down at her chair, pondering how to react to this news in a way that would not alienate a friend she valued so highly. Throughout all the years they had worked together, she trusted Theia to have fair judgment, and to understand the brevity of her choices. Now, something had changed.

Just as she was about to put her hand to paper, and write her response, another courier staffer barged into her study. Her face, annoyed with such a gesture, looked up with tense eyes and posture.

“Yes?” she huffed.

The man stepped forward, holding another letter, one that looked eerily familiar. It was the same parchment that Theia had used, only with a purple seal. It was Ambassador Montilyet’s emblem.

“My Lady, this came expedited from Antiva. Lady Montilyet sent it with most urgent orders to get it to your hand as quick as possible. The rider looked as if he hadn’t slept in two days.”

Cassandra’s eyes narrowed; she was exasperated with the apparent bureaucracy of the situation. Just how many personal letters would she receive from the same location? Could the two women not collaborate their message into one letter? For Maker’s sake—

As she stared down at the open letter, her heart experienced whiplash.

“Lady Cassandra,

It is with urgency and pain that I write to you to inform of that my wife, and your friend, suffered a miscarriage this morning. She is recuperating, but is under acute distress and pain, as you can imagine. I write to you not as a colleague or ally, but as the partner to your closest friend, and woman: come to Antiva to see her. She needs all the motivation she can get to recover. It would mean the world to me.

Kindest and most astute regards,

Lady Josephine Montilyet”

“Maker,” Cassandra said out loud, to the dismay of the courier standing before her. Her voice was sad, emotional, feeling, a sound that her men did not witness often.

“Have my horse prepared, and get me two guards to accompany me. I must go to Antiva immediately,” she ordered, hardening her resolve for the sake of saving face. As the man departed, she gathered the two letters, folding them into one another.

She rose from her chair and made her way to her fireplace. Without so much as a word or a sentimental expression, she tossed the papers into the fire. No one would know of her friend’s tragedy, lest they be acquainted with her blade or her fist.

--

The heat of the Antivan sky bore down on the back of the Seeker’s neck – this temperate weather was not her choice, nor was it what she was used to after about half a year in the mountains. The roads were hills, and the cobblestone under her horse’s feet was hot to the touch. The two guards that flanked her eyed the scenery with awe: being out of the desolate area they had been in was a much-needed retreat of sorts.

Finally, the Seeker had found the entryway to the Montilyet home. It was a tall stone façade with a gate that gave way into a courtyard, with a large double-door entryway with Antivan rounded columns. Although, the place felt eerily quiet and still, as if something very devastating had engulfed it, making it feel dimmer than the surrounding buildings.

Coming out of the opened doors was Josephine herself, wearing a dark purple gown and silver strands of ornamentation in her hair. In Antiva, mourning was marked by conservative dress and retiring from public social life temporarily – a grim choice indeed in the opulent grandeur of Rialto bay. The Seeker dismounted and immediately approached Lady Montilyet.

“Seeker, it is so good to see you,” she greeted, her hands collected in front of her, a ring being toyed with nervously between an index finger and thumb.

“Lady Montilyet,” Cassandra bowed her head in respect, “I came as soon as I got word. Where is she? How is her health?”

“Come with me, I will take you to her at once,” Josephine reached out a hand, beckoning her forward. Soon, they were walking side by side down a spacious corridor, servants stopping to look at the honorable guest that had come to see one of the Mistresses of the household.

“She bled for two days, so much so she went unconscious for several hours. The Healers were able to stem the bleeding, but, there was no salvaging the…” Josephine’s breath ran out as she blinked, trying to hold herself together. “She is still weak, but her prognosis is good. They cannot tell yet whether or not the damage has been done permanently.”

Cassandra was quiet with reverence towards the loss. “I have been praying for you both, Lady Josephine. I hope you know just how apologetic I am for this travesty.”

“Thank you. It has been…most difficult. Her pain has made her expectantly tumultuous in demeanor. I have been trying everything the Healers suggest to distract her, but, she is very stubborn as you well know.”

“If I may ask, what…was she doing, when it happened?”

Lady Montilyet was quiet, the footfalls of their walking being the only sound to remind them of where they were. Her eyes glazed a bit as she put together her response in her mind.

“We are not exactly sure. She had been preoccupied for many days, but, earlier this week she woke up screaming from a nightmare. When I awoke to the sound, I saw her crying there, hunched over, her night dress doused in blood. All I can hear is her screaming, even still. She will not tell me what the nightmare was of, nor will she sleep for more than two hours at a time, mostly out of sheer exhaustion.”

The Seeker had to hold back her own pang of emotion now, as they made their way up a flight of stairs into a wing with bedchambers.

“I must warn you, Seeker Cassandra, she is not herself. She may say hurtful, ambivalent comments to you. She does not mean them,” Josephine’s words were laced with hurt; her warning came from personal experience, and that made Cassandra feel even more sympathetic to her.

“Lady Montilyet, I…I do not know what to say to make this any easier on you, only that you of all people – both of you – deserve so much happiness for all you have endured.”

“Yes, well,” Josephine looked away, her eyes shifting as she kept hold of composure, “I have heard that many a time, Seeker, so forgive me if I come off as…unaffected. Her recovery room is just down this hall, fourth door to the left. Please tell her that I love her and I will see her tonight,” Josephine nodded solemnly and retreated back down the stairs, leaving Cassandra to stare down the hallway and feel the nerves in her chest dance. It had been many months since she last saw her friend in person, when she came to visit the fortress. Now, as much as she would be happy to see her, she almost with she could fast-forward in time and be visiting several more months from now, perhaps when Theia would feel better.

Making her way into the fourth doorway, the air was thick with incense – what she could only assume was supposed to be a sedative effect, as she felt slightly drowsy the more she inhaled. The room was dark, only lit by the reflection of the sunlight on the tile and mosaic-lined stone. The tapestries lining the balcony lightly shifted in the breeze, but otherwise it felt as though time had frozen them in place here.

There was a large bed, sheets disheveled, but covered a thin-framed figure. She then saw her messy and long blonde waves of hair. It looked as if she was sleeping, no longer able to fight the exhaustion.

Cassandra’s boots made ample noise on the floor, and soon Theia’s figure moved slightly, her legs curling and bending as they stretched.  The Seeker came to a stop, several feet from the side of the bed, her eyes overburdened with sadness seeing her friend, a woman she had seen stand so tall, so resolutely against forces of peril, now facing something so much more destructive to her spirit.

Her stare was broken when Theia’s face looked back at her, her eyes slowly blinking awake.

“…C-Cassandra?” she groaned, the depth in her voice lingering from the days of crying she endured. Her face looked pale, as did her lips. The deep, dark circles under her eyes only comparable to the ones she had when she was in the prison, all those years ago, waiting to be questioned for her part in the Conclave disaster. That forlorn memory made the Seeker’s chest ache.

“Yes, my friend, it is me. I have come to see you,” Cassandra stepped forward, pivoting on her hip as she sat on the foot of the bed, an arm stretching out over the Inquisitor’s legs. Theia rubbed her face softly with the back of her hand, her brow furrowing as the surprise sank in. She pulled herself up, her abdomen still sore as she did so, but she managed. She adjusted her pillow against her back as she lay in place once more, taking pressure off of her stomach.

“I…assume, someone in particular wrote to you. And it was either our blessed Divine, or my wife,” she muttered, a hand resting instinctively on her stomach, the other falling to rest at her side.

Cassandra grinned. “Yes, Josephine wrote that I must come as soon as possible. Surely, you must not think you have to fight every antagonist without me at your side.”

“It is not a battle I face this time, Seeker, unless you wish to disembowel me and remove my ability to bear children. And that, I fear, has been taken care of already.”

Cassandra held her breath, hearing the roughness in her voice as she discussed something so horrific.

“My friend, you do not have to discuss it if you do not wish to. I came here to be of solace to you, in whatever capacity you need.”

“I do not need solace, Seeker, I need my child. Since I have lost her, I am rather satiated with the disappointment of life,” her words stung with resentment, and suddenly Cassandra saw the demeanor that Josephine had undoubtedly been exposed to for several days.

“How did you know it was…” her thinking out loud would be the death of her, but she said it, and now she was at the mercy of Theia’s answer, whatever it was.

Theia paused and looked out at the balcony, her eyes narrowed as they reacted to the contrast in light. “I felt it, it was…just a hunch, I suppose, but. I just knew. They say mothers always know, that they feel things others cannot possibly fathom. I felt her.”

“My Lady, I am so—“

“Do not apologize. I am so tired of hearing the processionals of ‘I am sorry.’ If everyone is so sorry, why can’t they find some way to return to me what was mine?” she seethed, but was too tired to fully express it. The soreness of her abdominal region curbed her fury.

Cassandra felt like weeping, watching her friend be reduced to such carnal emotions of grief. Then, as she saw the absence of her friend’s left arm, she was reminded of just how much more risky it was for Theia to remain enveloped in herself.

“Friend, are you sure you are taking adequate care of yourself, considering your special circumstances?” she asked with careful intrepedation.

Theia picked up on the intent rather easily. She was considerably not herself, but she still had her intellect and intuition in spades.

“Oh, now you fear I’ll be consumed by a despair demon, Seeker? Is this what is supposed to comfort me, my own friend looking at me as a possible target for her blade?”

“I did not say that, but you know as well as I do what the reality is of your existence.”

“I am a mother with no child, Seeker, that is the reality of my existence.”

“I know, I just wish—“

“Get out.”

Cassandra stopped herself, caught off guard by the sharp order she had been given. She had come all this way, dropping everything in order to do so, and she was being sent off as if she were a menial servant. It riled her ego viscerally, but she battled within herself to have compassion for her friend.

“My Lady, with all due respect,”

“No. Get out of my sight. You wish to scold me like everyone else. I want to sit here in my silence and grieve like I deserve. I never asked for you to come here,” she growled. From the narrowness of her gaze, her purple irises began stirring with color.

“Theia, I am not leaving.” She used her first name now, a unique and alarming urgency.

“If you do not leave you will be tossed out on the top of an ice sheet, Cassandra, I am warning you one last time,” Theia hissed back, her hand collecting into a fist that gripped onto her bedsheets.

“No. I have never abandoned your side when you needed it, and I will not do it—“

“GET. OUT.” She yelled now, in the most animalistic tone Cassandra had ever heard come from a woman. The pain almost felt like daggers shooting at her. But, if it was one thing the Seeker was always trained to do, it was to stare down the roaring fire from a dragon’s throat and continue forward, to do what must be done.

“You do not scare me, my friend,” she said calmly, stepping forward and dragging a knee across the bed as she sat close to Theia, who was now lurching away from her.

“Theia! Theia, stop,” she said low, putting her arms out and trying to wrap around Theia’s shoulders. She felt several punches against her chestplate as she slowly pulled the violent embrace of the woman she trusted with her life into her.

“Get off! I do not need to be coddled!” Theia yelled.

Some more resistance, but then she relented, one last fruitless punch against her friend’s armor. From her chest, Cassandra could hear and feel her friend sobbing, the deep, guttural sound of her voice sending sorrow through her.

Stillness, even if in agony, is still stillness.

Protectively, Cassandra stroked the back of Theia’s head, feeling the slight friction between her hair and her riding glove.

“It is alright. I promise,” she muttered as her friend now held onto her for dear life. They stayed like this for a while, while Theia’s crying seemed to be bottomless, as if the sea itself wished to be the source of her tears.

--

The remainder of the day passed into a night of armistice, and it was not until the following morning that the Seeker saw some reason to hope. While sitting in the courtyard and eating a modest breakfast alone at one of the tables, out walked Theia, slowly, unescorted, but tall. She wore a black dress, a purple sash tied multiple loops around her waist to gather the light fabric into some shape. Her hair was not decorated, but it looked washed, which was more than what she could say yesterday. It was the fifth night she had slept alone, reclusive.

Cassandra flinched as she saw her friend, and her eyes shined with pleasant surprise.

“My Lady, you are walking! Come, sit with me, do not rush,” she said as she chewed through a mouthful of food, standing to beckon her over.

Theia’s face was stoic, but cordial. She nodded once, accepting the offer as she made her way, fingers lightly grasping on the skirt of her gown as she stepped down some shallow stairs. She sat beside her friend, grunting under her breath as she did so.

“Cassandra, I wish to—“

“There is  no need,” Cassandra interrupted, sitting down once more and anchoring her elbows on the table. “I understand that you are in a most difficult moment of your life, and I know the woman you are, underneath it all.”

Theia sighed shallowly, her eyes staring off blankly into space.

“Cassandra, that is just the thing, though – this is the woman I am. I cannot reverse what has happened, as much as I wish I could. I can never be the woman I was in the days of the Inquisition again. I haven’t been her for some time now.”

“Everyone has foundations to who they are, no matter what life’s changes do to impact their outlook. You are still the brave, kind, and strong person I befriended in war. Even if you do not find humor in the things you used to, you hold true to those virtues.”

A silence fell over them as they both sat, straight-backed and contemplative.

“Did you ever have a moment in your life when something was before you. A chance, to make your life about something you could have for yourself. Something that did not have to abide by outside rules or customs, that you nourished, and protected?” Theia’s tone almost sounded like dutiful sobbing the way it as so melodic.

“Yes, I have.”

“What then?”

“I…when I fell in love with a Mage, when I was young. I felt as though all of the rules I had held myself to no longer applied. I loved him, and he loved me, and that was the most sacred truth of us. When he died, I mourned him in private, because I did not wish to share my pain with anyone. I felt as though no one was worthy of such vulnerability. As if, such raw power of emotion could level entire buildings.”

Theia’s eyes flickered to her friend’s face as she spoke; Cassandra never discussed the Mage she once had as a lover, except that once. It was years ago. Theia never pressed her about it since, knowing just how important of a pivot it was in her life.

“That is how I feel about this. I do not want anyone near me. I feel like I have lost myself, and I’m wandering alone in in this spiral of a pathway, one side of it being some form of stability, the other the heart of my devastation. I keep trying to move forward, but I find it’s just the same twisting path, in and out of my despair. I do not know where it leads, or when I hope to stop and rest, my feet just…keep going.”

“But each time you re-enter your grief, you do so having survived it time and time again. You will continue to do so, until it feels like you have more control over just how close it gets to your heart. Trust me, my friend, you are the kind of person who can survive this.”

“I have survived everything, I am getting quite bored of it.”

“The dead would disagree with such a sentiment.”

“Spoken like someone who would know, Nevarran.”

Cassandra couldn’t help but grin in surprise. In a flash of seconds, her friend’s wit had made an appearance. She looked at her, and nodded in concession.

“Theia, I know I cannot possibly relate to your loss. But, I do know what it is to lose someone you love when a piece of your happiness relies upon them staying alive. You are anything but alone.”

Theia sighed, coupling her hands in her lap. “I understand that, but you must also concede just how lonely it is to be recognized as a heroine, someone who has done impossible things, and yet fail at what is supposed to come natural to you. It all feels backwards. I can hardly keep track of the illogical nature of my life.”

“A great deal of things come naturally to a woman, my friend. We are capable of most anything we invest our will into.”

“Yes, but that does not mean it does not bite us back for trying. If I may ask, would you walk with me? The healers say I must get some air, and distract myself,” her voice was half breath as she hoisted herself up from her seat. Cassandra agreed readily.

--

The gardens were lush but reverent in their stillness for Lady Trevelyan’s sorrow. Cassandra couldn’t help but notice just how lively and beautiful the scene would have been if only the fountains were spouting water, and the birds would come to visit on the disbursed seeds and nuts the servants would dish out every morning. Even the walls and facades of the building felt as though it had humbled itself to the concerns of its fair-haired occupant.

“I have had one of my assistants tend to the letters and dispatch responsibilities. I trust her to do so competently, and I will return to the duties myself very soon. I do not have a real choice,” Theia remarked as they walked.

“Theia, no one is doubting your dedication or fitness for your role. Do not race an enemy horse that does not exist,” the Seeker advised, hands behind her back.

“I know. Still, I cannot sit by and know that Divine Victoria must make up for the work of another person whilst she does the job of several. And you, my friend, cannot make such excursions to Antiva lightly.”

“We all make sacrifices for the needs of our allies. You have done more than enough to deserve such measures.”

“We all have, that doesn’t mean the world stops hurling towards disaster with each passing night.”

They came to a balcony view, one of many that overlooked the ports. They could see some of the Montilyet ships at port, secured and ready for whatever they were tasked with transporting. Somewhere nearby, surely Josephine was working, keeping herself busy whilst her mind fought off worrying about her wife, and the desire to go to her at every other minute.

“They are beautiful ships,” Cassandra complimented as they both peered down.

“Yes, Josephine was always one to combine style with pragmatism. They are fast and durable. Just like the ones we’re building for our forces, but those will be better, and well-armed.”

“Tell me, how has it been between you and Lady Montilyet? She seemed quite careful when she greeted me the other day.”

Theia let a moment of silence pass as she overlooked the shore, her throat stiffening with nervous feelings.

“Josephine and I…don’t quite know what to make of each other because of this. I am afraid I have hurt her badly. In the days after the incident I was very angry, and even malicious. I wanted to fight everyone around me. When I looked at her, when I heard her speak, it was as if every bone in my body felt this mixture of shame and resentment. I still resist the feeling that I’ve failed her,” Theia’s candidness was hard to swallow, but it felt good to speak truth to the feelings that had permeated the air.

“I am sorry to hear that. When is the last time you spoke to her?”

“She comes and bids me goodnight every night before she goes to sleep, and comes to bid good morning with breakfast. She sleeps in our room while I have recovered in the guest wing. I feel so out of my element, not having the ego to be the protective one anymore,” Theia leaned over the stone rail, elbows holding her chest up as she walked the people walk up and down the port.

“I am sure she is just as unnerved to see you be so defenseless.”

“Agh, she knows what I look like when I am at the end of my rope. She’s always been the voice inside my head, and in front of my face, inspiring me to find one more foot of it to hold onto. But, I think she is torn between grieving her own loss and being strong for me. And I have made it very hard for her to want to be strong,” Theia could admit when she was wrong, but she hadn’t the time or energy to do so whilst recovering both physically and psychologically. Indeed, she couldn’t even promise that this moment of reflection would resonate with her; perhaps in an hour she would be back to being distraught and mean.

“I have always told you, honesty is the best way to protect what is important to you.”

Theia patted Cassandra on the shoulder as she took a step back from the railing. “This is true, if inconvenient,” she replied. “Come, I wish to show you the rest of the place. Maybe you’ll get some sunburn, if I keep exposing you to the daylight.”

“We can all hope, friend.”

--

The rest of their walk was slow and sentimental, keeping to Theia’s determined pace of exertion. When she needed a break, they would sit at a bench, or stand in front of a fountain. Soon, the midday brightness dimmed into early evening twilight, and Cassandra’s attention turned towards the expectations of dinner and socialization.

“The Antivan people are always ready to share food and drink and spur you out of your grief. They hardly rest for such trivial matters such as depression or sorrow. It is most invigorating up until you suffer a personal tragedy,” a smirk had managed to appear on Theia’s tired face as she described her experience.

“They sound like the opposite society to Nevarra. There, a party is not considered worth it unless several people cry, another brings the tokens of their dead relative to pass around the dinner table, and an hour-long toast to the departed has been recognized.”

“Perhaps I should get a summer home there, so I can stop eclipsing the jovial sun here with my sulking.”

They returned to Theia’s temporary room, which had been cleaned well in her absence. The servants had taken the opportunity to change linens, freshen the flowers, and pull the tapestries back to air out the room; clearly, her leaving the space for longer than an hour had been rare.

“I should go see Josephine. Maker knows she is already aware that I have arisen from my sickbed, and is trying to conjure up the right reaction, the right words, the right tone…” Theia sighed, playing with the pyrophite bracelet on her wrist.

“Is that such a bad thing? You do know what your temper is like, surely.”

“No, but I know once we do collide, it will be as it was when we were at Skyhold: a battle of wits, then of tempers, then of wills.”

“Ah, yes. Now, those are fond memories.”

“Some things change, others remain with their heels dug in, you could say.”

“Then I will go to dinner and then to bed. I can stay one more day, but after that I must return to the mountains. Thank you for spending this day with me, it is good to see you out and about once more.”

“Thank you, friend, for everything. I shall see you tomorrow. Perhaps we can walk by the pier, and I can show you the ships up close.” Theia smiled softly as her friend bid her goodnight, and withdrew from her room. Inhaling slow, she turned and around at the room she had been confined to for days. It was so cold, so desolate to feel it around her. She could feel the energy of her cries, her wailing, her groaning in pain, almost as if it had seeped into the walls. This would haunt her mind for a while.

--

Josephine stood at the foot of their bed, a chalice of wine in hand and held close to her face as she stared at the freshly made sheets. Only one side of the bed had been used for the last week, and even though she tried to sleep, she would jolt awake from the resonating anxiety at hearing her wife cry in alarm.

They had not slept apart unless separated by miles since Corypheus was slain. She had believed that sleeping alone would be impossible. Surely, even in all of her foresight, Josephine had not expected such trials to drive so deep of a wedge between them. They had always been shoulder-to-shoulder, at least, when it was not a battlefield in front of them.

It gnawed at her nerves, worrying that Theia felt so alone in her pain, that she must sequester herself.

So, when her wife stood in the entryway of their chambers, she had to do a double-take to be sure it was her. When it was confirmed, suddenly so many emotions took hold. Defensiveness, sadness, relief…and so much more that couldn’t be named, for it all bled into one another.

“Josephine.” Theia said, before walking towards her. The very sight of her walking, up on her feet, like she had been before…the color in her face now reappearing. It was enough to make her fall to her knees and start crying, if she had felt safe enough to.

“Theia, you are well, and walking?” she said, setting her wine down at the nearest end table, before meeting her halfway. As they stood in front of each other, the palpable awkwardness of being in the aftermath of so much trauma took hold.

“Uh, yes. I got up this morning, and Seeker Cassandra walked with me all day. I feel my strength is returning, which is…relieving.”

“Yes, to say the least. How are you doing besides…besides your energy?”

“Good. I wanted to…to thank you, for inviting Cassandra to be here. It has helped a lot. She…is a very wise and loyal friend.”

“I know, which is why when I thought of who to turn to, she came to mind first and foremost. Are you beginning to feel like yourself, even just slightly?”

“I…am trying my best. I…agh, Josephine, let’s stop this,” Theia took hold of one of her wife’s hands, holding it to her chest as she looked at her. “We are talking like strangers.”

“Forgive me, mi amor, if I prefer speaking like strangers after these days of you speaking to me like an enemy,” Josephine pulled away, turning around and walking further into the room. The act of turning away from her hurt her on the inside, but so did the lingering sting of her words that she yelled and growled at her.

“What do you wish me to say, Josephine? That I regret feeling the pain of losing our child? That I am sorry I could not better prepare myself for the devastation of it all?”

“Theia, we were both underprepared! You forget that this was a joint venture, we did this together, like we have done everything. You turned away from me. I had to grieve alone, away from your vitriol!” Josephine turned around to face her for this argument.

“I cannot control how this affects my body, Josephine. Every hour I feel a whole different emotion, I am not myself, and you know this,” Theia came closer, but only slightly, testing the waters of just how close she could get without Josephine retreating further into the room. This was the room, after all, where it happened, and the memory of it still consumed her senses, even as she tried so hard to remain present.

“I know that well enough! Why do you think I came to you even after all had been said and done. Every morning, every night, I’d come to see you, to be met with your shoulder and indignant words. I felt like my wife had been lost along with…” she stopped herself, still unable to speak it out loud. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand, turning away as tears began to form in her eyes.

“My Love, I know how you hurt from this. I want to be here for you, I want to be that protective person you married, the person who would put her body between you and anything coming for you. But I am so…” the tears were evolving for Theia now as she choked out her last words.

“I can’t, I can’t do this, not here. Not with this…this right in front of me..” she motioned towards the bed, the bed where she had woken up to the disaster.

Josephine turned around immediately, and realizing what she was referring to, suddenly the screams began in her head again. The memory of her, screaming as if she was dying, the fear in her voice.

“Neither can I…” she breathed, and she quickly found her way to Theia’s side. Wrapping an arm around the back of her waist, she escorted her out of the room, Theia leaning on her as they walked to somewhere, anywhere, but there.

--

Eventually they found their study, the room where they had always sought congress with each other for the most important of matters and discussions. Some of their most heated arguments, and some of their best reconciliations. Now, as they held each other on the floor, having pulled the ghastly bearskin rug into the middle of the expansive stone floor, the quiet comforted them as they comforted each other.

“I will arrange to have the bed replaced in the morning,” Josephine muttered as she let Theia lay her head in her lap, looking outward towards the balcony. Slowly, she started playing with her blonde strands of hair, another hand resting on her shoulder. Her face was soaked with tears, making her cheeks feel slightly sticky.

“Thank you,” Theia whispered, resting her hands underneath her cheek, feeling calmer now to be close to her wife, her partner, her ally in life.

Josephine’s night dress slipped off her shoulder as they remained there, graceless and fallen apart.

“You know what is going to haunt me forever? The fact that I will never get to meet her. The fact that I will never know what she sounds like, what her voice sounds like, what her hair feels like in my fingers…”

“Theia, darling…”

“No, let me get this out. It’s been resting on my chest like a boulder, I can’t breathe anymore. I…I listened every time they warned me how much it would hurt. How much…how much childbirth would hurt. But, feeling the pain and the agony of losing…all I could think was that I would endure three times whatever pain it was to have my child in my arms, and the pain of losing my arm, all in the same moment.”

A couple of tears streamed down Josephine’s face without notice as she listened to her wife mourn out loud.

“I just want to see her. Just once. Just to see what her eyes were like, if they were purple like mine. If her hair would be dark like yours. How beautiful she would be, the product of us.”

“Between your temper and my will, she would have been a force to be reckoned with. Dorian would have his work cut out for him,” Josephine said through her tears. This made Theia swallow hard, choking back the urge to break down.

“Yes, she would have driven him crazy. There would have been so much laughter….so much…” she closed her eyes harshly, letting the tears overflow and escape her eyelids.

“Shhh, mi amor, it is alright,” Josephine cooed, stroking her hair. She heard Theia inhale sharply, congestion in her nose.

“I am so sorry, my Love. I failed you. I failed us.”

“Theia Sofia, you did no such thing,” Josephine interrupted her, a hand guiding Theia’s gaze forefully up to make eye contact with hers. “Do not even begin to tell yourself you let anyone down. This is not your failure, this is not your fault.”

“You trusted me. I was entrusted with this life, and I lost it. I failed to protect the one thing that could only ever depend on me.”

“Theia, come here,” Josephine pushed her wife’s shoulders up so she would sit up, right in front of her, so their eyes made level eye-contact. Gently, she held Theia’s face between her hands, the glimmer off fresh tears under the moonlight.

“It will take time for us to recover from this loss, and I know each day will be different for you. Some will be harder than others, and I know you will need distance as much as closeness in the coming days. But, I never want you to feel as though you must shut yourself away to atone for something you need not be punished for.”

“Josephine, I have no idea what this will do to me before it’s all over. I cannot promise you I won’t be the wounded person I was these past few days. You deserve to have your wife be there for you through this.”

“I deserve nothing more than you do. We may not have the path written out for us, but we will move forward. When has the lack of precedent ever stopped us from doing so?”

Theia put her hand to Josephine’s, the end of her tears clearing her vision.

“Do you remember our vows? How we made up our own because I refused to have a fully Andrastian ceremony,” Theia chuckled under her breath.

Josephine smiled. “Yes, and everyone cried and cried,” she pulled her wife into her chest, wrapping her arms around her.

“You Mother almost fainted when we told her we would not swear only to the Maker. I thought surely she would pin me to one of the tapestries.”

“She still hasn’t forgiven you, you know. She swears you are provoking Andraste to take back more than just your hand.”

“Maybe I am. But she can try take this away from me all she wants, this…you, you are the one part I refuse to let go.”

Josephine put her lips to the top of Theia’s head. “I am not going anywhere, mi amor.”

[your-dietician]

You're probably wrong about what they say

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/nba/youre-probably-wrong-about-what-they-say/

You're probably wrong about what they say

Chances are, if you care about the NBA’s television ratings, you care about what you think those ratings say, and what you think those ratings say is probably wrong, so the entire exercise is a waste of your time.

The NBA is a multi-billion-dollar corporation doing just fine, no matter how much hand-wringing you want to do about social commentary from its players or the absence of big media markets in the conference finals.

It used to be that every so often the subject of ratings would arise when two smaller-market teams met late in the NBA playoffs. Think the San Antonio Spurs facing the Detroit Pistons and Cleveland Cavaliers in 2003 and 2007, respectively, the two lowest Finals ratings ever recorded before last year’s bubble experiment.

A Twitter search of “Adam Silver” and “worst nightmare” provides countless examples of people presenting this year’s four conference finalists — the Phoenix Suns, Los Angeles Clippers, Milwaukee Bucks and Atlanta Hawks — as bad for the business of basketball, absent any discussion of the quality of basketball, as if somehow fans should be more concerned with the winner of a popularity contest than the sport itself.

More recently, ratings have become a political conversation piece. Former President Donald Trump repeatedly drew a line between the NBA’s embrace of social justice movements and its ratings decline in 2020, without providing context created by the coronavirus. Games were often played midday, midsummer and eventually opposite the return of every other major sport in September and October, all while viewers were much more attuned to news of the pandemic and a presidential election that could further impact it.

“People are tired of watching the highly political NBA. Basketball ratings are WAY down, and they won’t be coming back,” Trump tweeted on Sept. 1, around the same time he suggested three days of player-led protests of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, were “going to destroy basketball.”

Story continues

Donald Trump was an NBA consumer long before he publicly turned on the league. (Nick Laham/Getty Images)

The politicization of the NBA’s TV ratings

Trump is not unlike so many who draw grand conclusions from their own personal experiences. A month earlier, he claimed to have turned his television off once teams knelt together during the national anthem, so everyone else who was not watching the NBA this past August must have done so for similar reasons.

It is a narrative ripe with controversy that agenda-driven media outlets can leverage to their own advantage. They had plenty of experience with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whose protest against social injustice elicited a response that birthed the politicization of television ratings. Instead of Kaepernick’s quest for equality being one possible reason viewers turned off the NFL in 2016 and 2017, it was painted without context as the reason, only for ratings to recover and fall again during the pandemic.

Naturally, Outkick the Coverage founder Clay Travis hosted Trump on his Fox Sports Radio Show in August 2020, giving the former president a wide berth to conclude without question that “very nasty” and “very dumb” players protesting injustice, along with the NBA’s business relationship with China — a pair of topics Travis’ Outkick website have regularly mined for readership — primarily caused a ratings decline.

Just last month, Outkick’s Bobby Burack wrote, “Each year that LeBron James waves a middle finger at half the country, viewers respond by turning the channel at a rate higher than the previous year,” citing the NBA’s 25% ratings decrease over the past two years for regular-season games across ABC, ESPN and TNT, and singling out the 2021 Preakness as evidence that “other sports have not suffered nearly as much.”

Only, none of this has proven true. In fact, just the opposite. James and his Los Angeles Lakers’ play-in win over the Golden State Warriors drew the league’s highest rating since 2019. The NBA’s national TV ratings for the first round of the playoffs were up nearly 50% from last year’s equivalent and in line with 2019 data.

People came back, and basketball was not destroyed. Far from it.

“If there was any question whether last year’s decline was primarily due to the bubble, the fan-less environment, the months-long delay, if there was any question as to whether or not that was true, it’s been answered by the fact that the ratings for a postseason where Steph Curry didn’t make it to the playoffs and LeBron didn’t make it out of the first round are up dramatically from last year, just by default,” Sports Media Watch’s Jon Lewis, an expert on the subject, told Yahoo Sports. “It’s obvious that 99% of why the ratings were so bad was because of the circumstances. Now, were there also people who tuned out because of seeing ‘Black Lives Matter’ on the court? Maybe, but I can tell you it’s painfully obvious that last year’s results were primarily because of being in the circumstances that the league found itself late last summer.”

Consequences of a watered-down regular season

There are equally obvious answers for why the NBA’s ratings suffered another decline in the regular season. A shortened offseason and condensed schedule led to increases in blowouts and either injuries or rest to prevent injuries, not to mention COVID-related interruptions. A watered-down product in empty arenas was inevitable, and still the NBA recovered through two rounds of a playoffs plagued by superstar absences.

The return of fans alone has improved the viewing experience, and two Game 7s in the Eastern Conference semifinals helped counterbalance mitigating factors. Six of the 10 NBA All-Star starters did not make it to the end of the second round, a seventh was swept, and Joel Embiid played on a partially torn meniscus.

Only Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kevin Durant were still healthy and playing, and their Bucks and Brooklyn Nets treated the NBA to a 6.9 rating that matched the percentage of TV homes tuned into Kawhi Leonard’s iconic buzzer-beater for the Toronto Raptors in Game 7 of the 2019 conference semis. Sunday’s Game 7 between the Hawks and Philadelphia 76ers was the NBA’s second-highest-rated contest of these playoffs.

Giannis Antetokounmpo, Deandre Ayton and Devin Booker are among a generation of bright young NBA stars. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Early investment in a post-LeBron future

The NBA is not naive to the fact that Lakers-Nets would have been a huge ratings draw, but the rise of a new generation of stars, including Devin Booker and Trae Young, while initially a potential ratings hit, could also serve as a considerable investment in the future of the league. Young’s Hawks, in particular, open the door to the league’s seventh-largest media market, one that has been largely dormant for its existence. The Golden State Warriors were not the ratings darling they became until Curry built equity with the audience.

Lewis cites the Houston Rockets, who eventually became enough of a draw after two consecutive title runs that they bounced Michael Jordan’s eventual 72-win Chicago Bulls from the 1995 Christmas Day slate. The NBA could theoretically leverage a handful of stars into driving ratings that two uber-popular stars once did.

Outside of the most unconventional seasons in the league’s history, the ebbs of NBA ratings much more closely followed a decline in overall TV viewership, and that does not account for the unconventionality of this season. Millions did not cut cords because “Love Us” was stitched onto the backs of players’ jerseys.

Quality basketball draws an audience, especially if you get seven games of it. The Suns and Bucks — favorites to meet in the Finals — might be the NBA’s 11th- and 24th-largest media markets, but a competitive series from Booker and Antetokounmpo would still generate momentum, for various reasons, entering next season’s presumed return to normal, laying the groundwork for the future of the business.

The NBA’s TV market share just hit an all-time high

Even if you want to skew your read of declining ratings in the most negative light possible for the NBA, do we have bad news for you. Think of linear TV consumption as a pie chart, and while the overall size of the pie has been shrinking, the NBA’s share of that pie will only continue to grow. Live coverage is increasingly becoming the primary reason to retain traditional TV, so sports and news are keeping cable networks afloat.

The viewership share for this year’s playoffs — the percentage of people with TVs in use that are watching the NBA — is at its highest since the the league first began logging that data during the 2002-03 season. The NBA also happens to feature the youngest audience across major sports, one advertisers covet. Even as ratings declined during the pandemic, the NBA secured business partnerships with at least nine major brands, including Hotels.com, CarMax, Clorox, Michelob Ultra, Oculus from Facebook and Microsoft.

“The NBA, as far as the demographics, that’s where everything matters,” said Lewis. “Phil Mickelson won the PGA Championship and comfortably beat Lakers-Suns Game 1 in total viewership, but guess what? That was only in 50+. That was Phil’s demo. In every other demographic, including the ones advertisers care about most, [ages] 18-49 and 18-34, the NBA game won. The demographics are the story here. If demographics didn’t matter, then Harry’s Law would still be on with Kathy Bates. The fact is, people in advertising are looking for a specific demo, and the NBA does well in demos that advertisers care about.”

Expectations are the NBA’s next media rights deal will increase

Not only are networks increasingly desperate to retain their share of this pie, tech companies want a piece of it. Take the NHL, for example, which doubled its annual TV revenue from The Walt Disney Company with a first-of-its-kind deal signed in March that included 75 games broadcast solely on its ESPN+ over-the-top service. For perspective, the NBA’s TNT crew broadcast only 64 games during this year’s regular season.

That is why you have seen sourced reporting that anticipates a massive increase when the NBA’s current media rights deal expires in 2025, like the one from CNBC’s Jabari Young in March that set expectations at $75 billion — more than triple the existing package — even amid another regular-season ratings decline.

“The value is always rising. You have to think about what that means. What the ratings decline means isn’t, ‘Oh, my goodness, they’re all going to go broke.’ That’s absurd,” added Lewis. “What the ratings decline means is you’re going to have to make some sacrifices to get as much money as you want to get. Those sacrifices aren’t going to be paying players less. They’re probably going to have to put some games on Peacock or ESPN+ or one of these platforms that networks are willing to overpay to get programming for.”

Ratings are only a fraction of the NBA’s audience

Armchair TV ratings experts often cast aside the nuances of an inherently flawed metric that is increasingly under fire (i.e., the exclusion of regional network simulcasts, and Nielsen only began including out-of-home viewership — an expected double-digit numbers increase — in October, when sports bars were mired in a pandemic), they also ignore the fact that TV ratings account for a fraction of the NBA’s media consumption. 

The NBA reaches a billion people in more than 215 countries across the world, and roughly three quarters of its viewers are outside the U.S., boosted by the popularity of Antetokounmpo, Embiid, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, four of the top six vote-getters in the MVP race. Global viewers on League Pass for the playoffs are up 18% from last year and 24% from 2019, per the NBA. None of them are included in Nielsen ratings.

Neither is the majority of the NBA’s 56 million Instagram followers, an audience that generated 6.55 billion views and counts about twice the following of the NFL, NHL and MLB combined. The league is approaching 9 billion lifetime views on YouTube — again, almost as many as the three other major American sports leagues combined. Nearly 70% of the NBA’s social media followers are outside the U.S.

Nielsen is expected to unveil a metric that better accounts for viewership across platforms in the coming years. Until then and before you consider caring about TV ratings, remember the NBA is garnering a greater share of the audience advertisers covet, and that does not include its massive global fan base — another demographic that tends to consume content in non-traditional ways. The NBA’s brand is beyond healthy.

– – – – – – –

Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach

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[dangmanronpaimagines]

Hoshi, fuyuhiko, teruteru, mondo and gundam proposing to their s/o !

This was cute, cute, cute!!! Wow, I should make an otome game with theamount of cheese I’m able to stuff into the crust that is my lovely writing.HAHAHA!!

please enjoy

Ryoma Hoshi

He knows that he loves you, but he’s not quite sure if youknow that yet. While he’s confident in his feelings, he’s not the best atshowing them. That’s not because he’s completely socially inept either, it’sjust that when it comes down to the moments where he has the perfectopportunity to let you see the truth, he backs away a lot. Deep down, evenafter years of being by your side, he’s afraid that something bad will happen,something that he can’t fix. He doesn’t want a repeat of his failed love lifebefore. He wants you to die of old age, having had a happy life.

It takes a longtime for him to come to terms with the fact that he truly does want to spendthe rest of his life with you, his S/O. Even longer still to be convinced thatmarrying you isn’t such a bad idea. Longer then to understand that you truly dolove him as much as he does you. When he finally makes the decision and buysthe ring, he’s surprised that you hadn’t popped the question yet instead. Wereyou really that adamant for him to do it, or were you trying to make sure thathe was ready first?

He doesn’t give much thought on the type of ring to get you.During his time spent with you, he would understand if you liked flashy orsubtle jewelry, gold or silver, etc. and would get a ring that he thought wouldbest match your preferences. When it comes to proposing, though… He tries to come up with something special,but ends up just taking you on a lovely dinner date where you both wearsomething nice. Not being one to make a fuss out of occurrences, he asks you tostop reaching for the breadsticks for a second and to just listen to him. Despitethere being a piece of bread still comically placed inside your mouth, he startsto speak.

“Hey… I know that I’m not the best man on this planet, but…If there’s one thing I know, is that I must be a lucky one. I found someonelike you to give me something in life and that’s a hell of a lot more than Iever expected or wanted. Will you take this ring? I’d like to be your husband.That is… if you’ll have me.”

FuyuhikoKuzuryu

He’s known for a while that he’s wanted to stand with you, faceyou, read his vows, pledge his love to you in front of friends and family andthen seal the deal with a kiss. It’s a thought that makes him blush down to hisneck and up to his ears, but he knowshe wants it, and he really hopes thatyou do too, because he knows he did not spend hours in front of a mirrorpracticing how to save ‘I love you’ for the first time for you to tell him noto his proposal years later. You said you loved him too, dammit! You can’t takethat back!

He’s deep in thought on the ride home from the jeweler, afterbuying you your ring. He’s planning on making his proposal be one of thebiggest things that he’s ever done for you, but on the other hand he just wantsto get it over with and ask you to be his forever. When he pockets the box andenters his house, he’s still deep in thought when you pop out of nowhere,greeting your adorable boyfriend by slinging an arm around him and kissing hischeek. When he can’t help himself from smiling immediately and putting an armaround you too, he thinks ‘fuck it’ and asks you to go to the backyard patioand wait for him. You do so happily, wanting to spend time with him after along day of being apart due to life’s other responsibilities.

As you leave, he grabs a couple glasses and a bottle of winefrom the kitchen and then joins you under the night sky. For a long while, thetwo of you just enjoy each other’s company as you usually do. You talk abouteach other’s day, joke around, and just chat as you drink. It calms Fuyuhiko’snerves quite a bit, and in a sudden moment (for you at least, he’s beenreciting his lines in his head since you’ve been out there) he puts the box inyour hands. When you open it and then look at him with wide eyes and an openmouth, he’s got a grin on his face.

“Hey, don’t say anything yet. You know that I love you, and Iknow that you love me. If that weren’t the case then either I’m dense as fuckor you’re just a really good actress. I want to spend the rest of my life withyou, and if I didn’t think you would ever want to do that with me, you wouldn’tbe living with me and you wouldn’t greet me as soon as I walk through the door.We act like a married couple already, but I want to say our vows and make itofficial. Will you marry me?”

Teruteru Hanamura

This boy takes the thought of proposal seriously. When itcomes to the point where he’s thinking of spending the rest of his life withyou, he flips off the switch!! He’s done!! Eyes for you only!! …Okay, he’lllook and still joke around, but reallyit’s you that’s the love of his life!He wouldn’t even dare to think of actually betraying your trust! When hefinally realizes he wants to marry you, his game of finding the one is done. Hewon. Well, you have to say yes, first, but… that’s it!

So, he’s going to make the proposal romantic; you’re going toremember the moment for the rest of your life and when the light finally drainsfrom his eyes as he holds your wrinkled hand in his own, he wants there to havenever been a moment where you regretted saying yes to him. When you finallypass on, he wants the ring he gives you to be passed down from generation togeneration, inspiring his descendants long past his lifetime. Maybe one daythey’ll even inherit his passion for cooking just like him and become an evenmore famous chef than he…?

As expected, he cooks a lavish dinner for the two of you.While he does this all the time, the only thing that tips you off that it’s aspecial occasion is that the lights are dimmed, there’s candlelight’s on thetable, the fancy plates are out, and after he served the food, he disappearedand game back with a suit on. You make a joke, saying that you were completelyunderdressed in just a shirt and jeans, and he waved his hand at your statementdismissively saying that it wouldn’t matter later (his voice cracked a bit whenhe said that, despite the confidence he was still trying to exude). After youhad finished your meal and began to talk again, Teruteru got up from his sideof the table and came up to you, getting down on one knee with sweat drippingdown the side of his face.

“I-I… Love you more than anything, S/O!! I want you to be thefirst to taste any new dishes I make! I want you to be there with me when I’mold! I w-want-“ Through his speech, he actually ends up bursting into tears, whichmakes you console him. He might constantly act confident and laid-back, but theemotion of the moment causes him to stutter through his speech. Eventually, heasks you to marry him and when you say yes, his tears seemed to have vanishedand he’s back to his joking, friendly, perverted, self. But he does seem to beradiating happiness for the rest of the week.

Mondo Owada

He’s the one that is least prepared to propose, as he does itat the spur of the moment and without a ring to give to you! After a long dayapart, he ended up taking you on a date to the cliffside, letting you hop on theback of his motorcycle as you both reached your destination. Sitting on top ofthe rocks, you both just looked at the stars and enjoyed each other’s silencelike you’ve done many times before. When he turns his head to look at you, yourgaze is set not to the sky, but at him and after the shock of having him catchyou red-handed, you laugh awkwardly with a blush crossing your entire face.

“We’ve been together for years and you’re still acting likeyou’re some high school girl?” You gasp dramatically. “Me? Mondo, you’re thehigh school girl!!” “No, I’m not!” “Just the other day you got all stutter-ywhen I gave you a kiss as I passed you in the hallway to go to the bathroom!Don’t deny that you’re super cute!!” That conversation, while it may havesounded like arguing, was just light-hearted banter between two people that hadbeen married for yea-

Mondo paused. You guys hadbeen together for a while, but you weren’t married. It seemed like itsometimes, and in many cases, you practically already were. You lived together,ate together, slept together, cooked and cleaned together… He ends up sighingand rubbing the back of his head, suddenly serious. In his silence, you alsoclose your mouth and stare at him in concern. Did you say something that offendedhim? Was he upset with you? Did something bad happen earlier and he was waitingto tell you about it? In worry, you place your hand on his arm, but he ends up placinghis other hand on top of yours. He looks at you straight in the eyes and onlyutters a few words.

“Marry me.” Depending on how long you stay silent after thatin surprise, he may end up freaking out a bit. To your defense, he did say itout of the blue!

Gundham Tanaka

He’s had the box hidden away in his pocket for a few months,unsure of what the perfect time would be to ask you. Every time he even begins to think about how to present itto you, he ends up pulling up his scarf out of reflex and the tips of his ears turnred in embarrassment. He’s used to it now; the affection, the fact that there’ssomeone that loves him romantically, the close proximity he’s shared with you…It’s the honest moments, the times where he is forced to show his heart truthfullyis what still makes him hesitant. He would do it for you, though. He knows atthis point that you would not ridicule him for his honesty nor be afraid tospend the rest of your life with him.

He ends up taking you to the local fair one day, one that wasonly in town for a few weeks. While he wasn’t the biggest fan of the hugecrowds, he knew that you wanted to go and enjoy the parks many entertainments.You both ended up enjoying the food, the sights and sounds, and even the rides(although it could be said that you enjoyed them far more than he did). All inall, it was a fun day! You had thought so, at least, but seeing the frustratedlook on Gundham as he walked by your side made you think that he wished he hadn’thave ever gone. You tried waving a hand in front of his face as you walked andtapping his shoulder to get his attention, but you were only rewarded with a quickglance when you called his name. You both stop walking when he turns to you.

With the bright, twinkling lights in the backdrop and themany people passing you both on their way to go home, Gundham strongly gripsyour shoulders and pulles you closer. With his eyes closed and his head hangingdown, he speaks in a voice that’s very close to a whisper.

“I cannot help, but… admire your… I can’t… The sight of yourvisage in my mind- Sets my heart at e-ease… Please, S/O… Will you marry me?”You think his uncharacteristic stuttering is pretty cute and when you reach outyour left hand with a smile, you laugh as he fumbles through his pockets tofind the ring.

[drv3imagines]

Ah, maybe we are doing well…maybe…lol…Also, this is a cute ask, but it is breaking a rule: “ Also No doing everyone wastes time.” As I’ve stated before I will do so, but I will split the post… I got the boys done today and will do the girls soon (it’s the first time I’ve written for most of the girls, hope I don’t screw up) This deserves an introduction:

It was shocking to know that this time the troublemaking culprit was neither Miu nor Ouma, but Korekiyo. His so-called ‘romantic interaction’ file had been lacking lately and he needed to observe teenagers, A.K.A your classmates, partake in a social activity that would incite embarrassment and shame if one failed to complete the task. Not everyone was on board but sure why not, the Pocky Game shouldn’t be too much trouble. (Character) draws a name from the box and end up getting you as their partner, having mixed feelings about selecting their own crush in a kissing game…hoo boy…

Rantaro Amami * Carefree boi has such a playful attitude about this, it’s like he’s not even worried about what’s about to happen. * He’s got this, all he’s gotta do is think about the end game: his sweet victory. * Not focusing on your lips…definitely not thinking about how cute you’d look blushing while he held you close..definitely not thinking of that at all…nope…he’s just gotta win this thing. * His smooth exterior gives away no hints as to how he feels, but it’s somewhat calming. * Gaining some confidence, the game started and you two were already holding the biscuit between your mouths. You took one bite, waiting for him to make the second move. * He one-ups you by taking a bigger bite. * This competition between the two of you slows as he grows nearer. * He can’t back out of this now…it’s a game and he’s gotta win it… * Before he even knew what was going on, his lips were brushing yours. If only he could get you to move forward a little more– * A slight miscalculation on your part, the biscuit snapped in half and the distance between you reverted back to when you began. * “Better luck next time, Rantaro,” he grumbled to himself as he returned to his spot in the circle. Little did he know you were saying the same.

Korekiyo Shinguuji * Kukuku, he was certain that he overheard you mention this game to one of your peers, which caused him to come up with this mediocre plot in hopes of becoming more intimate with you. * He only wanted to confirm the rumors of this legendary Pocky Game, could love truly be discovered by a sweet eating ritual? And if so, why do people who desire love not utilize this game in order to find a life long companion? Puzzling questions indeed. * He was also besides himself with how the others were all reacting to his experiment~ * The game was in full swing, however he had yet to be paired with his intended test subject…he was nearly tired or purposely losing (especially with Ouma) and was almost ready to try his secondary plan, when- * “Looks like I’m paired you, Kiyo~” * You kneeled before him, with one of the biscuits already sticking out between your lips. * He was nearly too eager when he took a bite of the other end, but moving too quickly could frighten his opponent. He’d have to take it slow… * …One by one, painfully he waited for you to approach him…his mind went a little fuzzy thinking about the taste of your lips, much sweeter than this chocolate covered breadstick…how he wanted to simply pull you in and successfully complete this love ritual. * Even though his eyes were growing very intense with anticipation, you patiently waited for him to move forward…just one more iiiinnccch…suddenly your nose began to tickle, and you could feel a sneeze coming on. * *Now isn’t a great time!* you yell at your body, but at the rate your eyes were watering, you had to turn away and sneeze. * Welp, not only did you lose the game but you were 👌 this close to kissing the host of the game…

Kaito Momota * This game was bottom tier when it came to actual romance, but he’s heard legends of people actually falling in love because of this chocolate covered biscuit. * So why not give it a go? * Imagine the future generation hearing about how he met his future marriage partner? Hmm, he’d better step it up on the romance if this is gonna be their first kiss. But how to do it? * He was so focused on how to make this interaction the most romantic first kiss as possible, he nearly missed his turn. * He absentmindedly selected a name from the box not even paying attention to the fact that your name was on it. * Only when you took a seat in front of him did he realize what he’d done. * Okay, I think I’ve got it, phase one is a go! * He took a Pocky stick from the box and placed it in his mouth, offering you a suggestive smirk to start things off. * Your smile told him you were interested, so he leaned forward hoping you’d join him in this stick biting competition. * ??? But that’s the reason why you were all here, you *wanted* to play, it wasn’t a spur of the moment thing. * You both took turns biting the biscuit, until your lips lightly brushed against another. * Kaito had it all figured out, he would lightly caress your face with one hand while the other hand rested at your side. It would be a sweet kiss, you were his crush not s/o (yet). It was a perfect scenario that would be told to generations to come~ * His fanboy moment almost cost him the kiss, but just when he was about to make a move, you broke the stick. * What? * The??? * ACTUAL??? * He thought he saw all the signs???? You smiled at him??? You didn’t move away when your lips touched??? He?? WHAT??? * You gave him a sidelong glance and explained why you moved back. “It’d be better if we had our first kiss in a more romantic setting don’t you think? The luminary of the stars Kaito Momota should save it for when we’re both ready, not some silly game.” * …dang, you right…He huffed, but at least you promised a better kiss in the future. Wait– does that mean you also–

Kokichi Ouma * Ouma is so gonna own you at this game. * He’s played this a billion times and has never lost a single match. They even call him the Pocky Master in his little ring. * His big talk only riles you up to want to win against him. If he’s as good as he says he is he won’t have any issue meeting you halfway, right? * Well all seemed to be going well…for who that depends on who’s side your on… * To say the least, Ouma was not playing a fair game. * All while keeping eye contact, he was poking, prodding, tickling, and just about anything he could do without breaking his end of the biscuit. * But you would not cave. He was going to lose even if it was the last thing you did! * You sped up your chomping, hoping this game with him would come to a quick end. * Your lips were almost touching when your (strike: jerkface) opponent took the liberty of making the last move forward. * Now you had to hold this position until he caved- * He struck fast moving in for the final kiss, when suddenly the stick between you disappeared. * What…the…actual… * He literally pulled the remaining bit from your mouth and was contently eating his “winnings.” * “Well I guess that’s a draw, right?” You smirked at him. * “Nice try, (your name), but since I didn’t let go of my end and the end that was in your mouth is in mine, not only did I indirectly kiss you, but I also won the game.” * That little sneak…wait, did he just admit to stealing a kiss from you?

Shuuichi Saihara * He was nervous about this… * A game where it may be inevitable to kiss you. He could have chosen not to do so…but Kaede and Kaito were already egging him on in hopes that *you* would be his partner. * He decided he’d go first, and what do you know…your name was on that little slip of paper. * His mind was fuzzy about the in between stages, but the next thing he knew, he was staring you in the eye at the end of a Pocky stick. * Deep internal breaths. He recalled Kaede’s pep talk from earlier. He could do this! All he had to do was go for it. He already knew he wanted to confess and if this was the easiest way to do so, he could do so! It would only take a moment. He didn’t have to linger…unless you wanted him to… * Wait…what if you were more experienced than him at this? If he couldn’t meet your expectations, would you not want to be in a relationship with him? * You noticed his expression twitch in thought as you two proceeded to eat the chocolate stick. * You hadn’t even crossed the midway point when he broke the stick, face completely red. * You pat his hand gently, hoping to encourage the poor kid. “It’s okay, Saihara, everyone has their own pace.”

Kiibo * Kiibo was glad Korekiyo had invited him to attend this event for humans like him. * Even though some of his classmates were wary about it, he was excited to go through with this fun process! * Until he learned that this required eating…hmm…he couldn’t eat…so how would this work? * He played along anyway, even going as far as to draw a name too. * He just wants to be included. * So sweet. * You gave him a sweet smile, kissed your index finger and touched his cheek. * Good end?

Gonta Gokuhara * At first Gonta was confused about this whole thing until he saw Maki and Kaito go first. * Was it gentlemanly of him to do this? * He was helping a Korekiyo by doing so, which was polite. A gentleman always helps his classmates! * He was nervous to complete this task, though. He knew intimacy between two individuals could vary depending on his partner. He would be sure to respectfully fulfill his partner’s desires and only do what was asked of him 😊 (imagine if he was paired with Iruma, okay I’ll stop) * It was Gonta’s turn to draw from the hat, but when he unraveled the paper, a light blush showed up. * The one he wanted to be a gentleman for was written on this paper….your name…he would just have to do his best to impress you! * Taking a seat in front of him, Gonta offered you one end of the Pocky stick, while he took the other. * You took a bite and waited for him to move. * But??? * He didn’t???? * His lip quivered, and his blush was growing even darker. * Um, Gonta? You okay, pal? * Gonta can’t do it. He doesn’t want to disappoint you, but he isn’t sure this is right either. * Doing the noble thing, Gonta lost on purpose and allowed you to have the rest of the treat. * “Gonta is sorry to disappoint (your name), he just does not want to make (your name) uncomfortable.”

Ryoma Hoshi * When Shinguuji asked him to join, he immediately said no and that was the end of it. * He *didn’t*, however, expect you to go after him. * He was in his room, tossing a tennis ball up into the air, lying back on his bed, when he heard a knock. * Thinking it was Kirumi to come and do her maid service, he opened the door, only to find the one he stupidly fell for standing in his presence. * No. * He had let you in to explain yourself, and you offered to play with him on your own, without the crowd watching. * His answer was the same as before, ESPECIALLY with *you* of all people playing with him. * Even if you were offering…the whole box…if he won…nope…he didn’t care how many chocolate sticks…were in that package…he wouldn’t… * Okay, one quick round. * You cheered victoriously and propped the candy between the two of you. * One bite at a time, little by little… * At this point you were craning down, to meet him at the middle, then the stick snapped in half. * Huh? * He held up his end of the deal, now you had to stay true to your word. * …wha? Well…he *did* say he would play…he never said he would try to win…😑 you win this round, Ryoma.