#my entire family is music based! we have family radio hour together instead of like watching tv on weekends or during dinner etc

[barstoolblues]

music is my main form of media consumption like i dont watch tv and i struggle with reading but at least once a day i park myself in front of the radio and sit and listen. like i cant read while listeninng to music they are like equally attention-using to me

[afriendlyblackhottie]

Gorgeous

Summary: You’d spent the last year and a half pretending to hate Ransom Drysdale. One Christmas trip could break that facade.

Pairings: Ransom Drysdale x Plus Size!Black!Reader (though it’s pretty inclusive. It’s just what I had in my head when I wrote it)

Warnings: And there was only one bed, enemies to lovers, fluff, smut, swearing, secret crush, daddy kink

Words: 7K

(A/N: Yes. I pretty much wrote a Hallmark movie. Yes it is also based on Gorgeous by Taylor Swift because I’d also hate Ransom Drysdale for making me fall in love with his stupidly handsome face. No I will not be taking questions.)

Tagging: @titty-teetee @queenoftheworldisdead @olyvoyl @liquorlaughslove​ @harrysthiccthighss​ @mariahthelioness29 @donutloverxo @navybrat817​ @stargazingfangirl18​ @hqneyyincc​ @iam-laiya​ @zaddychris​ @emjayewrites​

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Contrary to popular belief, you didn’t hate Ransom. Sure, his smug smile made you want to punch him in the face sometimes. But you kind of liked the vein that popped out on the side of his head when you did something to irritate him. Or the way he rolled his eyes at you when you did something to annoy him. And you annoyed him a lot. It was like you couldn’t help yourself.

To be honest you kind of like those things too much. Not that you’d ever admit it out loud. Imagine everyone finding out that you had some little primary school like crush on this asshole. Down to the point where you’d push him into sand to prove that you didn’t like him in the slightest.

Since your best friend was marrying his best friend, you were spending way too much time with him. You thought you’d done a good job at convincing Monica, your best friend, that you absolutely couldn’t stand him. She seemed to buy it since every eye roll was appropriately placed anytime you thought you might laugh at one of his rude jokes.

So, when your best friend asked you to accompany her and her fiancé to visit his family, you were positive. It might be nice seeing how these super rich people did the holidays. You’d met them a few times and they’d been super nice. Nothing like how Ransom or your own boyfriend’s family came off as stuck up as hell. Also, you were kind of dying to see the decor.

Until that day came. “I’m sorry!” Ava said for the millionth time since she’d told you the news when she’d FaceTimed you. That not only was Ransom coming, you’d have to ride with him in his Beemer because she’d packed more than she’d expected and there’d be no more room in Simon’s car.

You groaned softly, wrinkling up your nose. Your cats rubbing themselves against you because they knew you were leaving and loved to get all needy when you did that. You were already having a hard morning so this was kind of the last thing that you needed. “Maybe I shouldn’t go,” you suggested, even though you were supposed to be leaving in about five minutes.

She pouted. “But I need you there so I won’t be bored.”

“You know David,” your own boyfriend who was not going with you because he had to work and also because you weren’t sure he’d be your boyfriend by the time you came home, “hates Ransom.” It still made for a good excuse, though.

“What he won’t know, won’t kill him?” She shrugged. “Look it won’t even be that bad! It’s just the car ride.”

You raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, for four hours.”

“Just do this for me,” she whined. “Please. I’d do it for you.”

“Fine, but next time my boss has one of those boring dinners at his house, I’m making you go with me.”

She gasped. “Deal!”

There was a honk outside and it was safe to say who it was. You rolled your eyes. “You’re so lucky I love you because I’m already annoyed.” You peeked outside the window to see him aggressively honking.

Fucking asshole.

Once you’d hung up with Ava, you grabbed your bags so you could hurry out of the house. Luckily David was already at work so you didn’t have to explain to him why you were getting in the car with him. Ransom seemed to like getting under his skin, which you’d noticed is what he did to most people. Including you, but it seemed to be for a different reason than most people had.

“Hey,” you greeted him, as you struggled to carry your stuff to the trunk. Even though you were trying to keep this facade up, you didn’t want to be rude.

“Can you hurry? We’re on a strict timeline, Buttercup.”

You hated when he called you that. “First, don’t call me that. Second, maybe I’d finish sooner if you’d help.”

There was this smirk on his lips as he finally opened up his car door so he could take one of the bags out of your hands and then the others. “Did you pack your entire closet?” He asked as he tried to make it all fit in the trunk.

“I have a lot of needs,” you retorted.

“That’s probably why you need that sugar daddy, huh,” he said. This is why David didn’t like him. Okay yeah maybe you’re twenty-six with a forty-seven-year-old boyfriend. Sure, he brought you nice things, but what was wrong with that.

“He’s my boyfriend,” you made a point to emphasize. You weren’t going to tell Ransom Drysdale that you were with your boyfriend because he was your daddy dom. That’d be fucking stupid.

“Look, sugar daddy boyfriend whatever,” he said, dismissing you. “I just think you should pack lighter.”

“Whatever. Aren’t we on a tight schedule or something?” You rolled your eyes before going over to the passenger seat.

“Hey, hey, hey!” He stopped you to open the door himself. “I don’t need you to scratch my shit. You have to handle with care.”

You tried not to laugh which made you bite your bottom lip instead making you taste the mint chapstick you’d just put on. “You’re such a control freak,” you said, having to brush passed him so you could sit.

He didn’t say anything as he closed it gently.

The ride had been pretty boring so far. You yawned a few times. Wiggled in your seat trying to get comfortable. He surprisingly pulled over to get you coffee and even got you your blanket so you could curl up at some point.

If you weren’t trying to hate him, you may have swooned. He also said it’s because he didn’t feel like hearing you complain so maybe less swooning anyway. You reached for the radio and he smacked your hand away. “Ow!” You gasped.

“I’m just fucking with you.” He laughed, glancing over as you glared at him.

“Dick,” you mumbled under your breath as you reached forward again to change the station.

“What was that?” He asked.

“I said you’re a dick,” you repeated, sitting down as a song you liked started playing.

He groaned. “I hate this song.”

“Too bad,” you snickered.

“Need I remind you that this is my car, Buttercup?”

You narrowed your eyes at him because he called you that damn nickname. “Whatever. At least it wasn’t that Dad stuff you listen to.”

“Should you really be the one making fun of Dads?” He laughed.

“Hey! David doesn’t even want kids.”

He raised his eyebrow. “You don’t?” He asked looking genuinely surprised at that.

“I mean... maybe. I don’t know.” You shrugged. “Do you?”

“Well, I hate kids, but maybe for the right women. Who knows?” He once again took a quick glance at you, with this small dorky smile on his face.

That was surprising. You felt yourself starting to get to where your heart was swelling in your chest. “Why are we talking about this, you weirdo.”

He chuckled as you cross your arms in front of your chest as you looked out the window.

For the rest of the car ride only the music filled the silence. You wanted to say something. Thought about at least trying. Every time you started to open your mouth no sound came out.

You’d look at him while he focused on the road. Just because you couldn’t like him didn’t mean you couldn’t look at him, right? Though it was bothering you that there was a hole in his cashmere sweater.

“I’ll open your door,” he said getting out. You waited for him to open your side, but you heard the trunk pop open. You turned around watching him take out your four bags along with his. How the fuck was he so strong.

He opened up your car door finally. “Do you want me to take some?” You asked him with a frown as he closed the door with his elbow.

“It’s okay,” he replied already walking off. You scurried behind him trying to catch up.

Ava and Simon were right behind you. Ave got out and went to hug you. “See I told you it wouldn’t be so bad,” she said. “Wait why is Random holding all your stuff?”

You shrugged. “He insisted.”

“Weird,” she replied.

Simon’s family was pretty nice, but they were so busy doting on the happy couple you were kind of ignored. It was actually kind of nice because when you met David’s family, they pretty much scrutinized everything you did. His mother was honestly the bane of your existence. Like, lady, if your son hadn’t had a kid by now how was that your fault.

That was another thing that made you treat Ransom the way you did. You’d met Linda a few times now and she already hated you. You could only imagine how she was towards his girlfriends. You’d only seen the tip of the iceberg of the insanity of the Thrombeys, though Harlan had been nice every time you’d met him.

“Okay, so, it turns out that one of Simon’s cousins decided to come at last minute and uh,” Ava took a deep breath, “you two have to share a room okay, bye!” She tried to grab Simon’s hand, but you managed to catch her first.

“What,” you said a little too loudly so you lower your voice, “the hell, Ava.”

“You’re shitting me,” Ransom groaned.

“It won’t be so bad just think of it as a sleepover. Maybe he can paint your nails and you two can do face masks together,” she started rambling off.

You weren’t as amused. “Or maybe me and you could share.”

“Hell no! I’ve slept in a bed with you. You’re a cuddler.” She frowned. “Besides I wanna sleep with my boo.”

“You’re the worst best friend ever,” you told her. “Fine, but he’s sleeping on the floor.”

“Like hell I am,” Ransom said.

“I have a boyfriend!” You reminded them. “I can’t sleep in a bed with another guy. Especially Ransom.”

He raised an eyebrow. “We’ve been over this, Buttercup. You don’t have a boyfriend; you have a sugar daddy.”

You huffed. “Alright that’s it I’m calling an Uber.”

“And paying a hundred bucks to get home?” Ava rolled her eyes. “Come on just tough it out.”

“I hope you know that I hate you now,” you told her.

“Good. We’ll work it out in couple’s therapy.”

—————

The first night was awful. It felt like you couldn’t sleep. While Ransom seemed to sleep like a baby on the other side of the wall of pillows, you’d built between the two of you.

Even when you’d tried to move away from him, he’d just hold you in place. At some point you just had to accept your fate. At least you were cozy. So, you just kind of let it happen because who knows if this could again. When you actually woke up, he was already gone. You were neatly tucked under the comforter.

As you were finishing up your face routine and making yourself look presentable, Ransom was coming back in. You’d never seen him with sweats on before because he was usually such a preppy asshole, but he looked good. “Morning.”

“Morning,” you mumbled.

“How’d you sleep?” He asked.

You raised an eyebrow. “Why? You didn’t do something did you?”

“Me? Never?” He smirked before walking passed you and into the bathroom.

You walked through the house, taking in the way everything was beautifully decorated for the holiday. Honestly this place was house porn. “Good morning!” Simon’s mom, Trish, greeted you as you walked into the kitchen.

“Good morning,” you replied with a grin.

“Did you sleep okay?”

You nodded. “Yeah, it was perfect,” you answered.

“Breakfast will be ready soon so why don’t you go wake up Simon and Ava.”

You nodded. “Yeah of course.” God they were too nice. Maybe you need to be around rich people more often.

Oh wait, no. David’s family came from money and they were awful. Also see Ransom.

Simon had come to answer the door, freshly showered. Ava was just coming out of the bathroom. “Morning,” he said.

“Morning. Your mom said breakfast is going to be ready.”

He nodded. “Okay. Babe, you ready?”

“You go ahead,” she told him. “Y/N, c’mere.”

You and Simon exchanged looks and he shrugged. “Guess I’ll get Ransom.”

Ava waited until he was completely out of the room before motioning for you to close the door. “So,” this shit eating grin appeared on her face, “how was it?”

“How was what?”

“Sleeping with Ransom.” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “How was it?”

You shrugged. “We put a pillow wall up.” You really didn’t want to mention the cuddling.

“What? That’s it?” She groaned. “I always thought he’d be a bed hog.”

“I stayed on my side, he stayed on his.”

“That’s boring. I at least thought you’d have something to talk shit about.” She sighed. As far as you knew her and Ransom got along. She just found it super entertaining how you bitched about him.

The two of you went to sit in the dining room, waiting for everyone else. Trish sat down not to long after bringing the two of you mimosas. “Oh my gosh thank you!” Ava said getting up to hug her mother-in-law.

“Of course, Sweetheart.” She grinned. “So, Y/N, how long have you and Ransom been together?” She winked, bringing her champagne flute to her mouth. “I always said that Ransom just needs to find a sweet girl to settle down with. Maybe melt down that cold exterior he puts up. You know he really is a sweet boy.”

It was a good thing you hadn’t even been able to take a sip because you probably would have choked on it. “Her and Ransom aren’t together,” Ava answered before you could.

Her jaw dropped. “Oh, I just thought because you were fine sharing a room.”

You shook your head. “It’s okay.”

Ransom took a seat beside you while Simon sat on the other side of Ava. Trish looked between the two of you because this table was huge and Ransom could have sat anywhere else. He could have sat on the other side of Simon if he’d wanted to.

Breakfast went by pretty uneventfully, though the pancakes the housekeeper made were kind of to die for. “So, what are you kids planning for today?” Simon’s dad, Warren, asked as plates started being cleared away.

“Well, Ava’s never been ice skating,” Simon said.

“That’ll be fun,” Trish said. To be honest you were kind of nervous about ice skating. You’d done it before, but ate shit hard. “Is this your first time, too?” She asked you.

“No,” you replied. “I’m not very good at it, though.”

“I’m sure Ransom can help you,” she said with a grin.

Ransom groaned softly beside you. “Yeah of course.”

  As soon as you got on the ice you could feel yourself going down. Ransom grabbed onto you to hold you up. “Don’t eat shit on me already,” he said with a smirk on his face.

“If I go down, I’m taking you with me,” you snap back at him.

He rolled his eyes. “Let’s just get this over with.”

It was a good thing you’d bought these leggings that were fluffy on the inside and this jacket you were wearing was cozy because it was freezing out here. Ransom had to

At some point you kind of started to think that you had the hang of it. Like maybe you could actually do it. He started to slowly let go of you, but the minute you started to feel unsteady he’d grab your hand. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” he said sighing softy. He stood for a minute holding your hand so he could skate with you to the middle of the rink. “Hey can we talk about something. Really quick?”

You nodded. “Sure.”

“Hey, so,” he looked down at you with this almost nervous look on his face. “There’s been something I wanted to say, but I wasn’t really sure how to before.”

You nodded. “Yeah, what’s up.”

“Um,” he sighed. “Well, okay, so I-“ well he didn’t get to finish as this asshole barreled into you. “Y/N!”

You hit the ice pretty hard almost bouncing up as you came back down. “What the hell!”

Ransom immediately helped you up. “Watch where you’re fucking going!” He yelled back after the guy who’d already started skating away without even saying sorry. “Are you okay?

“My leg like hurts really bad,” you felt yourself tear up because you’re a little baby.

He sighed. “Shit, okay,” he said. “Are you okay to stand?”

“Oh my gosh!” Ava came over to the two of you. “Are you okay? I told Simon to go tell security. That guys been such an asshole this whole time.”

“Yeah thanks,” you said.

“Here why don’t we got some hot chocolate,” Ransom said.

It felt so nice being back in your boots. Ransom had you sit before going to get the drinks. You couldn’t help yourself as you rubbed over the spot on your leg that had been hurting super bad. Wincing at the tenderness.

“How’s your leg?” Ransom asked, sitting beside you with the steaming beverages in hand.

You brought your cup up to your mouth loving the warmth against your cold nose. “It’s fine,” you answered.

He reached down to touch the spot making you jump. He laughed. “Wow usually I have to get a girl naked before they start reacting like that.”

You narrowed your eyes at him, trying to play off as annoyed, but it didn’t work since you couldn’t help yourself as a smile spread on your face. “Oh, shut up.” You blew at the steam before taking a sip. “So, what did you wanna talk to me about?”

“It’s.... it’s nothing,” he said picking at some lint on his coat, suddenly getting all quiet. He took a sip of his own drink.

Here’s where you made a mistake. Which is the mistake that got you into this in the first place. Because every time you looked into his eyes, seeing those long lashes framing those deep blue eyes made you feel like you might drown in them.

And you fucking looked into them. After that first time you told yourself to never do that again. That it’s what made you trick yourself into thinking that you liked him the first time. No. He was just so close.

You pretty much fought yourself on this for the rest of the day. Even during the little shopping trip that the two of you dragged the boys to when you’d been debating with yourself if you wanted to buy this gorgeous coat or this really dress. Not that you needed more of either.

“Here just get both,” Ransom grumbled, taking out his card.

“What!” You gasped. “No, I can’t ask you to do that!”

He shook his head. “It’s okay. Just wear it for the Christmas party.”

“But I already have a dress,” you said.

“Look, I’m sure your sugar daddy buys you very nice things at Forever 21, but I insist.”

You rolled your eyes as he quickly handed the worker his card. “Hey!”

“Too late,” he replied with a shrug that smug smile on his face.

You looked down at the glass as your things were being wrapped up nice and neat. The gold necklace had a diamond moon pendent. It looked so delicate and would have gone so good with that dress.

“You like it?” He asked, noticing.

“Yeah, it’s beautiful,” you said. “But this is already too much.”

“C‘mon, we have to get back for dinner,” Ava said as Ransom grabbed the shopping bags.

—————

At some point every night the pillows would end up on the floor and you’d end up nestled into the crook of his neck. He’d have his arms around you until you’d roll over onto your side where he’d wrap himself around you again. Then you’d wake up to him gone because he went on his runs at the ass crack of dawn. You noticed how you’d be snuggly tucked into bed each time.

A part of you wanted to feel bad. That you were away and cuddling with another man every night. It was hard to feel guilty when you weren’t sure if your boyfriend was taking advantage of you being gone not that he knew that you knew. He was probably in some club, too, doing you don’t even want to know what. You knew when you left that you may be going home to end things.

You were trying not to think about it. Hell, you hadn’t even told Ava. You wanted everyone to have a good holiday and not worry. Besides you wanted to have fun. Which is why the four of you were going to some club tonight.

The four of you had went to dinner at this really nice restaurant. There were a few times when you’d caught Ransom looking at you all weird. “What?” You wrinkled your nose.

He cleared his throat before going back to picking at the salmon on his plate. “Nothing.”

As the drinks finally started flowing, you started to get a little loose. Ransom was sitting beside you being all sulky as he sipped from the glass of whiskey on ice.

“What’s wrong?” You asked him. Okay to be honest maybe you were more than a little loose, but you were just trying to have some fun.

“Nothing.” He glanced over at you then back to his drink.

“Hey,” this girl sat on the other side of him. “My friend was wondering if you wanted to dance.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Why couldn’t your friend ask me herself?”

“She’s a little shy, but she’s cute.”

Ransom glanced over at you. “Nah. I’m just sitting here with my friend.”

The girl pouted, but finally left. You snickered. “I’m just sitting here with my friend,” you mimicked. “What too cool to dance?”

“Because I don’t know. I didn’t feel like it.” He shrugged then took another sip of his drink. “Do you wanna dance maybe?” He finally looked over at you and you were almost hypnotized, but managed to keep your composure.

“With you?”

He rolled his eyes. “No, Buttercup, with my grandpa.”

You laughed once again ignoring the nickname. Maybe it was kind of growing on you. It only took a year and a half. You stood up. “Fine, but you better not stomp on my feet.”

“I might on purpose.” He got up standing in front of you. For a minute you thought he might kiss you until he grabbed your hand to pull you onto the dance floor.

You didn’t want to admit this either, but you were having fun hanging out with Ransom. Ava and Simon were understandably in their own little bubble of love and you didn’t want to interrupt.

After the club Simon had the bright idea of going in the hot tub to warm up. Since you were all a little tipsy that sounded like a great idea.

You had to wear your long sweater out of the house since it was freezing. You in your own little space while Ransom seemed to scoot way to close to you. The four of you were just talking mostly. Enjoying the hot water after being in the freezing cold.

All of you were talking when Ava gave Simon a kiss, which got deeper to the point where they were showing you way more than you needed to see. “I think I speak for both of us in that we really do not want to witness the two of you procreating,” Ransom said.

Ava made a face at him while Simon laughed. He whispered in her ear where she pecked his lips again. The both of them started getting out right after. “We’ll see you two in the morning.” He grinned.

“Goodnight!” She said.

“Night,” you and Ransom said in unison.

You went to the side that your incredibly horny friends had been on which had been across from him. His eyes were closed with his head tilted back. You splashed water at him making him jump a little.

“Hey!” He splashed you back. You laughed as you did it a second time. “Alright, alright,” he said.

You did it again for good measure. “Can’t have someone seeing you have too much fun.”

He went back to his previous position this time putting his muscular arms on the ledge. You wouldn’t care to admit how long you stared at his biceps and shoulders. Then taking the quickest glance at his abs. Then that neck that you kind of wanted to put your mouth on. This is bullshit.

Why was he allowed to be this hot? It couldn’t be enough that he was an asshole. He had to be hot about it. Okay you looked at his pecs and tried to see if you could get a glance of what may have been in his swim trunk. Whatever.

“What are you doing?” He caught you, a smirk appearing on his annoyingly perfect face.

“It’s called minding my own business,” you replied. “You should try it.”

He laughed. “You’re such a brat.” You shrugged turning your head to look at nothing. “Is that what your sugar daddy sees in you?”

“He’s not my sugar daddy. I mean he buys me things like for my birthday, but... that’s not what our relationship is about. I don’t even know if we are in a relationship anymore.” You don’t know why you were spilling all of this to Ransom of all people.

Ransom frowned. “What happened?”

You looked down and sighed blowing out your cheeks after. “Well...” you sighed again. Your stomach was turning now. “You have to take it to your grave.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

You rolled your eyes. “Promise?”

“I promise.”

You sighed, biting your lip weighing in your options. On one hand it wasn’t Ransom’s business. You really hadn’t told Ava this. You didn’t want her to worry.

“So, he’s not my sugar daddy,” you said, hoping he got the hint.

You could tell he did by the grin on his face and the way he raised his eyebrows. “You?” He explained. “No there’s no way and here I always thought you’d be boring in bed.”

You rolled your eyes. “Shut up no you didn’t.”

“I took you for a dead fish kind of girl,” he teased. “It’s always the cute ones.”

Your eyes widened at what he said. Then so did his when he realized what he said. “Anyway, so yeah that’s how we started off as,” you decided to ignore what he’d just said.

“Alright so go on.”

“Yeah, so it turns out I’m not the only one,” you said. “He’s been going to these clubs and he doesn’t think that I know.”

His jaw dropped. “This is the plot twist I really wasn’t expecting. I gotta tell ya.”

You shook your head. “Shut up.” You splashed him again.

“Stop!” He laughed, doing it back to you.

As you kept splashing at him, he came over to you, grabbing your hands to keep you from doing it again. “Let go of me.” You laughed.

“No.” He wasn’t laughing anymore. Just looking at you. Fuck he was putting you under his spell. You were supposed to not looking into his eyes. How did you make this mistake so many times? “Y/N, I... don’t make things weird.”

“What?” You laughed.

“Yeah. Don’t make this weird,” he said again softly before brushing his lips against yours finally.

“And here I’d always heard that you were a ladies man, Ransom,” you teased. “That was kind of weak.”

“Yeah, well maybe you bring out the worst in me.” A dopey smile had spread across his face. It was okay because there was one on yours too.

“Oh whatever.” You rolled your eyes still smiling. He leaned over to kiss you again but you put your hand against his lips to stop him. “I’m getting kind of tired actually.”

You walked back to your room. All wrapped in your sweater because fuck it was freezing now. You also wouldn’t say this out loud, but his lips felt really nice. As you made it to the bedroom the two of you were sharing, he came on not too far after, grabbing your arm to pull you into a kiss. He’s so dramatic.

As his lips worked against yours, you wrapped your arms around his neck. He felt so good. You can’t remember the last time David kissed you like this. “Fuck it’s actually really cold,” Ransom said.

You laughed. “I know I’m freezing.”

“How about we take a shower,” he said. “Maybe we could save some water together?”

“Oh yeah. We would totally be helping the environment.”

He grabbed you hand to lead you the rest of the way. You pulled off your wet clothes. As soon as you felt time hot water on your skin, you moaned. “

Jesus Christ, why not shower in hell,” he hissed.

“I’m already there.” You threw your arms around his neck. He leaned down to kiss you again. Pawing at your ass. He was so close this time.

You tried to act like nothing had happened as you finished getting ready for bed. As you got all settled under the covers, you felt your body finally start to warm up. He slid in next to you. This was the first time that you didn’t even attempt to put the wall of pillows up.

He pulled you all close to him. “You little shit! Are you naked?” You gasped.

He laughed. “Yeah. I don’t even know why you bothered.”

“Who said I was going to do anything with you?”

“Well, what if I tell you that,” he said, grabbing a handful of your ass, “I actually maybe sort of have feelings for you.”

Ah fuck.

Well, obviously.

But, ah fuck.

Why were you supposed to hate him again?

Because he was a giant asshole. He was rude to the help. Rude to everyone. Even you. Yet you still liked his stupid smug smile. That annoying laugh. You liked how he’d been surprisingly good company for this whole trip. Liked how he was holding you right now. You were pretty sure he could get an ugly haircut and you’d still like him. How he looked at you even when he was irritated with you.

Waiting for you to say something back.

“I... I have feelings for you, too.” You bit your lip after like you were nervous about what he might say back.

“Yeah?” He said with another dopey smile covering his face.

You nodded right before he bridged the gap first. Pressing your lips to his. His mouth moving ever so softly against yours. Like he was afraid you’d run away if he moved to quickly.

You deepened it and he finally pushed you down on your back. Ransom grabbed the back of your leg so you’d wrap it around his waist. Fuck he was already growing against you. “I still can’t believe you got dressed,” he pulled away to whisper in your ear. “You should have known I was just going to take everything off.”

You rolled your eyes. “Ever think that’s part of the fun.”

He chuckled before kissing you again. “Oh yeah?” He pulled away so he could start pulling down your sleep shorts. “You wanted me to take your clothes off?” You nodded, looking into his eyes. He hissed. “Didn’t even put-on panties, dirty girl.”

You laughed. “Do you like it?”

“Oh, I really, really like it.” He reached down to rub his hand up and down your slit. “What a pretty little pussy.��

You gasped. “Fuck.” His hands felt so good on you. He’d barely even touched you and it felt so, so good. Finally, his finger grazed your clit. He traced along it in a circle. “Stop teasing me!” You whined.

“Be patient, Buttercup.” He smirked.

“I’m going to kill you.”

“Shit,” he stopped, “I don’t have a condom.”

You shrugged. “I’m on birth control.”

He smirked. “Yeah, you want me to fuck you raw, Baby. Want me to cum in you?” He leaned back down to kiss your neck this time. His thumb was pressing into your clit now. Going on sweet, sweet circles. He stopped for a minute to pull off your top.

When you were fully naked and he finally put his mouth on your nipples, you needed him to just fuck you. “Please, Daddy,” you whimpered.

He went back to kissing your neck. “Yeah? You want me to be your daddy? Want me to take care of you.”

“God, yes.”

He lined himself up at your entrance. Looking into your eyes as he started to push into you. You closed your eyes tightly. “No, no open your eyes. I want you to look at me while I fuck you,” he commanded.

You nodded doing as you were told as he made you stretch over the thick head of his cock. You were so fucking wet just from him touching you like that. Your skin felt like it was on fire. You cried out as he inched into you. Fuck he was bigger than you’d expected. He was making you feel so full.

“Ransom,” you whimpered, he started out with shallow thrusts not going all the way in.

“Fuck, you’re fucking tight,” he groaned. “Can you even take it?”

You nodded. “I can take it, Daddy.”

He steadied his hips before finally shoving himself all the way inside of you. You gasped as he started fucking into you going so deep. Little droplets of tears formed in the corners of your eyes.

He was fucking you so good, your brain went blank. All you wanted was him. Wanted him to never stop fucking you. “Oh my god,” you whined.

“Yeah. Feels good?”

You nodded as you tried to take it. “Yes, Daddy.”

“Daddy making you feel good?” He panted. “Daddy’s gonna always make your pussy feel good, Baby. I’m gonna take care of you. Buy you whatever you want. Give you every fucking thing your boyfriend wouldn’t.”

Your pussy was gripping his dick like a vice. How were you so close already. “Please?”

“Is that what you want?” He asked in that condescending voice, you’d always hated, but fuck he was going to make you cum because of it. “Want me to buy you nice things. Be your boyfriend. Give you a fucking family.”

If he wasn’t balls deep inside of you, you would have probably reacted differently to him confessing that he wanted something with you. More than just this, but fuck hearing it like this only made you that more far gone. “Yes!” You moaned a little too loudly.

He clamped his hand over your mouth to shush you. “Shhh, Baby. You don’t want everyone to hear you getting dicked down do you? Want everyone to hear me fucking you?”

You shook your head, but stopped as you tilted your head back because you couldn’t stop it. Your eyes got all glazed over as your orgasm hit. 

“That’s it, cum for me.” He breathed. “Fuck. I’m gonna cum in your pussy.”

“Yes,” you whimpered. You could feel him so deep in your stomach. You can’t remember the last time you got fucked like this. No one else had ever been able to do this to you. 

As he finally couldn’t hold out anymore, cumming deep inside of you he still moved his hips. Making sure you got all of him.

He laid on top of you for a minute, not pulling you as you both came down from your orgasms. It felt like your heart was going to beat out of your chest. How the hell were you going to explain this to everyone. 

He rolled beside you before pulling you into his arms. You rested your head on his shoulder. Still trying to catch your breath. “Fuck.” He laughed. 

You chuckled. “I know.”

“Why did we wait so long to do that again?” He asked.

“Because I hated you.” You didn’t mean to let out a bigger laugh because your lower half was way too sore for that. 

He rolled his eyes. “Bullshit. No, you didn’t.”

“I wanted to.”

“Brat.” He chuckled. “I just... I meant everything I said.”

“What?”

“That I wanna be with you...” he replied. “That I wanna make an honest woman outta you.” You rolled your eyes, trying to maintain that damn facade. He was making it hard because this smile spread across your face. “I’ll even let you live with me when you pack your shit out of that old man’s house.”

“Moving so quickly? Ransom, I’m shocked at you.”

“Look, I’ve put up with your shit for a year a half already,” he explained, “I already know that I want you.”

“You fucking sap!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why don’t you suck my dick about it?” He rolled his eyes.

You shrugged. “Okay.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

----------

You didn’t fall asleep until the sun was already coming up. Every time you tried before that; Ransom would start kissing your neck. You were exhausted, but satisfied in a way you hadn’t been in a long time.

You woke up to rustling on the bed. You tried to feel for him because although you were still cozy you wanted his warmth, but he wasn’t there. “Ransom?” You yawned, peeking your eyes open to him fixing the comforter. 

Oh.

“Hey, Baby,” he said with a smile on his face. He leaned over to kiss your forehead. “I gotta go, okay. I have some errands I have to run.”

You nodded, before wrapping your arms around him. He held you to him tightly kissing your forehead more. “Do you have to?”

“Mhmm,” he replied. “I told Simon I’d help him with this surprise for Ava

“Okay. I love you,” you replied sleepily before dozing off again. He smiled down at you before laying you back down, kissing your forehead before leaving. 

You woke up again to Ava jumping up and down on your bed. “Get up!” She cheered. 

“What are you twelve?” You grumbled. Then your eyes cracked open when you fucking realized you’d told Ransom that you loved him. “Oh no.”

“What? Wait, are you naked?” She raised both of her eyebrows as she got settled beside you in bed. “Did you and Ransom...”

You shook your head, suddenly feeling like you might puke. You fucking told Ransom Drysdale that you loved him. “What? No. I just got really hot last night.”

“Where’s your pillow wall?” She asked with a smirk.

“We were too drunk last night to remember?” 

“Bitch, you slept with Ransom Drysdale!” She gasped. “What about David?”

“Um... David and I are... I was already going to end things with him.

This annoyingly shit eating grin spread across her face. “You dirty slut. Okay, well, I don’t think Simon would mind if you stayed with us until you got back on your feet.”

“Actually, I already found a place. I just... I didn’t want to ruin your fun, ya know.”

She sighed. “Y/N, I’m your best friend. Your problems are my problems. I wouldn’t have cared if you told me. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” You smiled. 

“So...” another smile spread across her face, “how was it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking.” You laid back down, turning on your side and ignored her as she continued to ask questions.

You got your nails done with Ava, Trish, and Simon’s sister. Still thinking about what you’d said to Ransom. Nerves had started to settle in that you’d done something wrong. Raking your brain trying to remember if he’d even said anything back. You couldn’t remember.

It was Christmas Eve now and there was supposed to be this super fancy party today that the family apparently threw every year. Of course, you were going to wear the dress Ransom had bought you. There was no question. It fit in more. Besides okay maybe you wanted to look pretty for him whatever.

Neither him or Simon had come back by the time everyone started getting ready. You did your makeup in Ava’s room before going back to yours to get dressed. The was a knock on the door as you’d just finished.

“Hey,” Ransom leaned down to kiss your cheek lightly to not mess up your makeup. Setting down a little gift bag on the bed. “You look... you look beautiful.”

You were going to have to get used to him being nice to you. “Thank you.” 

“Sorry, it took so long. You know Simon. Has to go above and beyond.” He chuckled. 

You waited for him to get ready, checking your phone. David had been texting you throughout the trip. Not that you ever responded. You thought when you’d get to the end of this trip, you’d be dreading the drive home. Instead, you were hopeful of what was to come. 

"So, I kind of got you something,” he said before the two of you could leave the room.

You frowned. “I didn’t get you anything back.”

“That’s okay. I don’t think either of us were expecting this,” he replied. “I just wanted you to know I was serious about everything.”

“Okay.”

He clenched his jaw as he grabbed the bag he’d placed, taking out a jewelry box which he handed you. You looked up at him with those big eyes. “I saw you looking at it at that store so...”

“You’re such a sap,” you sniffled.

He smiled. “I just... when you told me I love you this morning, I didn’t say it back. I wanted to say it when I gave you this so... I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Yeah?”

You nodded and he pulled you to him, hugging you tightly. You really didn’t want to mess up your makeup so you forced yourself not to tear up. Except lipstick be damned because you were not, not going to kiss him.

It was taking you everything to not hold his hand as the two of you walked into where the party was starting to pick up a little. He looked so cute in his red sweater. Simon and Ava were being doted on by his grandparents. 

“So, Ava kind of figured it out,” you said as he handed you a glass of champagne. 

“How?” He asked.

“You didn’t lock the door and I was still naked under the covered.”

He snickered. “Should have given her an eye full.”

You shook your head. “I’ll give you an eye full.”

“You already did, Buttercup.” He shrugged.

“Why do you call me that?” You rolled your eyes.

His face started to get all red. You’d never thought in all your days you’d see Ransom blush. Between the two confessing your feelings for one another, of you having sex, you accidently telling him you love him, and him telling you that he wanted to be with you, making him blush made you feel like you’d won whatever game the two of you had been playing.

He sighed. “Well, okay, so when me and my cousin Meg were younger, she was obsessed with the Powerpuff Girls. I didn’t want to admit that I kind of liked it. Your bad attitude reminds me of Buttercup. She was my favorite.” He rolled his eyes looking away from you like he was embarrassed.

“You’re shitting me.” This smile spread across your face.

“Shut up.” He wrinkled up his nose.

“Never would have guessed that under all that wool and assholeness was a sweetheart waiting to burst out of the seams,” you teased him.

“You’re so lucky I think you’re pretty or else I think I might drop kick you.” He sighed.

----------

Christmas Day passed by nicely and easily. Mostly with everyone relaxing. You spent most of it tucked into Ransom’s side drinking hot chocolate watching Christmas movies with everyone because at this point the two of you are just a cliche. Which was fine because you liked it. 

He’d whisper I love you in your ear. Or pull you under the mistletoe because he’s corny. Ava and Simon teased you while Trish swore that she called it, which she kind of did.

When it was time go home you were a little sad. You liked being in this little bubble with him. Now you’d have to go home and deal with having to officially break up with David and having to talk Ransom out of taunting him. Of course, Ava and Simon offered up their place until you got on your feet, but him being him pretty much demanded that you live with him.

Normally you would kick yourself for moving so quickly and you don’t know why, but you saw something in him. Of course, you weren’t going to be able to move all of your stuff out today, but there were two very important things that you needed. David wasn’t even there when you got home. He was probably still at his parents.

“Hope you like cats because I’m not leaving them,” you’d told him as you packed them into their carriers. 

He groaned, throwing his head back. “Fine, but you’re giving me a blowjob as soon as we get home.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” you said before placing a wet kiss on his cheek just to annoy him.  

“Hey, you wanna have sex in his bed before we go?” He asked with a smirk.

“You’re an awful person, you know that?” You put your hands on his chest. “Of course I do.”

“God, I love you.” He grinned before pressing his lips to yours. 

[thiswasinevitableid]

Hi!!!!!!!!!! I just saw your playlist for the indruck rockstar au so naturally I had to go and reread the whole entire thing in one go this morning and I just wanted to say how much I Love it and the way you write that whole scenario, especially with the way you incorporated the music lyrics??? (Especially since you wrote a bunch of those????) chefs kiss. I was wondering if you had ever written or planned out any of the sternclay that happened before this story took place because the way you described what we got of how they got together sounded so amazing and I would Die to hear their point of view. Hope you have a wonderful weekend!!!!!!!!!

Thank you so much! I’m really proud of that fic, and it seems to have been one a lot of folks really enjoyed. And well, when you asked this, it got me thinking. So here’s a brief history of how Stern and Barclay got together in this universe. Heads up: it is NSFW

That didn’t go as planned. 

Joseph only meant to alert The Cryptids to the fact their manager was clearly skimming off the top and downplaying offers for further connections in the business before turning every ounce of charm he could muster on Barclay. He came to fuck bigfoot, not change careers. 

Now he’s packing up the second of his two suitcases, conversation with his parents still ringing in his ears. They’re not taking the fact that he’s dropping out of college to manage an up and coming, horror rock, very gay band particularly well and have tried twice to talk him out of it. Which is why he’s glad he went through all the bureaucratic steps before calling them. 

He’s never been more terrified or excited in his life. He’s sure he can do this, he’s already booked them four more gigs in a logical tour path, found a better system for making their merch, and is tracking down a promising P.R lead. It’s the close quarters that scare him the most; he’s certain he could charm Barclay for an evening, could get the others to like him enough to hang around back stage once or twice. But for months on end? What if they think he’s prissy, or too perfectionistic, or too normal?

What if Barclay hates him?

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

“I must admit, I’d have thought you would have made a move on Joseph by now.” Indrid says before pulling a sweater on over his head. It gets caught on his glasses, and he flails until Barclay helps it the rest of the way down. They’re somewhere south of Madison, the van cutting a lonely path down the dark road; it’s so late, and they’re on one of those vast, distinctly midwestern stretches where there’s nothing but night sky and fields. Jake drives, tapping the wheel in time with the radio while Joseph sleeps in the passenger seat and Vincent sprawls on the far back one.

“Kinda weird to hit on your manager, right?” Barclay peers warily around the passenger seat to be double sure the manager in question isn’t listening. He isn’t, lips parted slightly and dark hair falling in his face as his sleeping body is tilted this way and that by the motion of the car. 

“Not when the manager looks like that and has already broadcasted his eagerness to fuck you.”

Barclay can’t really argue that first point; Joseph walked into that sorry excuse for a dressing room looking like centerfold come to life. There’s a certain kind of fan of theirs who spends their daily life buttoned up and following the rules, and Joseph struck him as exactly that kind of self-repressing, well groomed gym bunny. They’re always the most fun fans to fuck, in his experience. Couple that with the fact Joseph was (is) hot and willing, Barclay would have happily called dibs on the van for an hour to fuck him senseless that first night. But now…

“I dunno, he hasn’t really flirted with me since we met. And even then he didn’t flirt much.”

“The lecture on Haye’s deficits did start about two seconds after he entered the room.”

“Yeah” Barclay sighs fondly at the memory, “maybe he’s just not interested now that he’s seen me offstage.”

“Or maybe you’re both acting from the same vein of professionalism. Which is not terribly punk rock.”

“I’m being myself” Barclay grumbles “that’s-”

“The most punk rock thing you can be.” Indrid finishes, nodding sagely. Then he smirks, “but that doesn’t change the fact Joseph wants to get into those leather pants of yours. Why do you think he keeps recommending the stage outfits that involve them?”

“Hey, I like that look too. It’s my idea as much as it’s his.”

“Mmmmhmm.” Indrid yawns, rests his head on Barclay’s shoulder.  Then he sings in his ear “Baby you got the clothes, baby he’s got the romance, you’ve got the moves so while you’ve got the chance, you wanna get in his pants, you wanna get in his pants, you wanna-”

Barclay elbows him sideways onto the seat, making them both giggle like they’re ten and wrestling on the trampoline in his backyard. 

“Enough with the prophecies, Mothman.”

“That was hardly a prophecy.” Indrid sticks his legs into Barclays laugh, “but very well. I will leave you to pine for as long as you please.”

Barclay spares another glance towards the front of the car.

“I’m not pining. I just want him to like me.”

A snore in reply, Indrid out with his arms sprawled in different directions. Barclay chuckles softly, roots around for one of their two pillows, and settles his head against the window. He doesn’t shut his eyes right away; instead he watches the lights of distant houses and stars race past, melding into the reflection of Joseph’s sleeping face.

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

“I bought us ten more minutes, I cannot believe they didn’t warn us this was a double appearance. I’ll-” Joseph finishes shutting the van door and promptly grips it so hard it leaves an indent in his palm. 

The band is in various states of rapid undress, trying to get back into their first set of outfits, and smack in the center of the tableau is Barclay, naked from the waist down.

“-I’ll be more thorough going, um, going forward. See you all backstage.” 

He can’t scramble out of the vehicle fast enough, finds one of the two functioning bathrooms in the place and locks himself in without a second thought. Leans against the graffiti coated door and shoves his hand down pants, a little embarrassed at how turned on he is just from one peek at Barclay’s dick. That doesn’t stop him from picturing it as he shoves two fingers into himself and jacks off like it’s the last chance he’ll ever get. The smell of two kinds of smoke, the half dead bulb, the din of the crowd gathering in the building all make him harder; he’s so desperately horny for his bassist he’ll make himself cum in a shitty dive bathroom. The thought has him moaning, and he covers his mouth with his free hand as he cums. 

With a much clearer head, he washes his hands and leaves to round up his band. It’s better this way, better for him to get off alone than put Barclay in a weird position by his manager coming onto him. That’d be weird for everyone; this way is much easier.

Ten minutes later, standing in the shadowy steps and watching The Cryptids perform, Barclay growling and sweat-soaked, giving Indrid a messy, open-mouthed kiss when the singer initiates it, he knows it won’t be easy at all.

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

They’ve done it; Joseph helped the others successfully sign with Amnesty Records, securing them a re-release of their first album at higher quality and with wider distribution, a massive U.S tour, and more money up front than any of them have ever seen. Amnesty sees promise in them, and Barclay knows they can deliver. They celebrated for two nights solid, and now reality sets in; Indrid is locked in a hotel room, writing like he’s possessed by the ghost of several rockstars at once, Vincent and Jake are trying to find places to live now that they’re based in Atlanta, and Barclay…

Barclay is standing in a half-furnished apartment that doesn’t belong to him. It belongs to Joseph, currently hopping on and off the phone while Barclay waits for dinner to arrive. In a perfect world he would have just cooked, but given how Joseph’s been the last few weeks, he’s worried that gesture of intimacy might freak him out. The manager was in meetings all day and is still in his suit, a forty dollar one they bought in a strip mall at the edge of town. On him it looks like it cost a thousand dollars just for the slacks. The slacks Barclay is failing very hard at not staring at. Joseph isn’t even twenty-one, but he’s been working deals like a pro, and it is the hottest fucking thing Barclay has ever seen. 

He tries distracting himself from his unhelpful gay thoughts via distressing images. All he comes up with is having to steal Indrid’s phone from him after the singer called his family for the first time in almost three years. Whether that was to deliver a final fuck you or toss a hail Mary of reconciliation their way, Barclay isn’t sure. All he knows is he watched Indrid’s face take a turn, old hurts smothering the spark in his eyes, and he took the phone away while someone yelled on the other end of it. 

“How are your parents taking it?” Joseph looks up from the laptop on the kitchen table where he’s entering dates into a calendar. 

Barclay smiles, “Good. Pretty sure they’ve told everyone in the family the good news. Alice can get a chain email out like nobody’s business. They say they love me and are proud of me and that I have to promise to still come home for Christmas every now and then.”

Joseph smiles back, open for a moment before a guard slips back up. Barclay tucks his hands in his pockets, psyching himself up. He has to do this. He has to know.

“Have I, like, made you angry or something? You’ve just been standoffish lately.” 

“Working out everything for the contract has been so stressful I’m not sure anyone but the execs have seen much of me.” The answer is well-rehearsed. 

“Oh.” Barclay nods, hands still in his pockets and shoulders slouched. 

“And, um, and they haven’t gone away. My feelings for you.” This answer is far quieter, the other man looking up from the screen with fearful eyes. 

“That’s a...bad thing? But I, uh, I, like you too. I like so fucking much.”

A little puff of laughter, “I can tell. Believe me, I can. It’s just that being your manager is different than being a random fan looking for a hook-up; I might  want something you’re not ready to give, or vice versa, and if we rush into things it could fuck up everything you guys worked for. Everything we worked for.”

Barclay cautiously steps forward, “What if we took things slow? Like, really slow.”

Hope sneaks into the corners of Joseph’s eyes, “What would that look like?”

“Like we go step by step, with first dates and like, hand holding and shit. We can take as long as we want; I mean, unless you’re planning on ditching the next big thing in the music world, think we’re gonna have plenty of time to spend together.”

“I like the sound of that.” 

Barclay circles the table as Joseph stands. He cups his cheek, running his thumb up his cheekbone.

“Hey.”

“Hi” Joseph’s eyes have taken on a distinctly Bambi-ish shape. 

“You wanna go get dinner tomorrow?”

The other man loops his arms around his shoulders, “Absolutely.”

Their first kiss comes less than twenty four hours; they may be taking it slow, but there’s only so much two men who’ve been pining in the confines of a van for months can take. It’s soft and popcorn scented and Joseph holds his hand the entire time. 

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

Joseph waits in the dressing room, ears ringing from the sound system and the screaming crowd. It’s the first time The Cryptids have played any sort of true arena, and they sold out the show a week in advance. 

Barclay clomps into the room in his combat boots, grinning as soon as he sees him. He’s dripping with sweat, his eyeliner is a little smudged, and even though he isn’t the lead vocalist, he has enough backing vocals that his voice is a touch raw when he speaks. 

“Fuck that was fun.”

“You all did so well. I, this is going to sound corny, but I’m so proud of you.”

“Should be proud of yourself too, babe. Without you, we’d probably still be playing no-name bars in Des Moines or Fresno.”

“Managing is easy when the talent’s this good.” He runs his hands up Barclays’ fishnet-clad chest. 

“Take the compliment, blue eyes.”

High on pride and the knowledge that at least a third of the crowd would commit a felony to take his place, Joseph pinches Barclay’s left nipple, “No.”

Barclay growls, grabbing his lapels and yanking him into a salty, toothy kiss. He moans in reply, drops his hands down to undo Barclay’s fly so he can grind against him, feel him getting hard through his dress pants. 

“You really wanna do that here, babe? Don’t wanna make our first time all soft sheets and candlelight?” Barclay rubs the top button of Joseph’s shirt between his thumb and finger. 

“Yes, I want you and I want you now” 

Barclay lunges, shoving him back until his ass hits the dressing room table.

“Fine” he grunts, getting his cock out while Joseph kicks one leg free of his pants, “can’t take a compliment, gonna take something else.”

“OHmylord, fuck, fucking finally.” He thunks his head back against the mirror as Barclay sets a ferocious tempo. 

“Shit, you feel even better than I thought you would, and I’ve been, fuck, thinking about it for a long fucking time. Ever since you walked into that shitty dressing room in those tight shorts and shirt with my name on it.”

“Nnhng” He spreads his legs wider at the memory.

“Oh you fucking like that, don’t you babe? That why you wanted to do this here? So I could treat you like the horny fucking fanboy you really are?”

“Yes, ohmylord, yes, yes.” He can’t feel anything but the points where they connect, can’t hear anything beyond Barclay’s growls in his ear and the slap of skin on skin.

“Fuck” Barclay pulls his hair with one hand, shoves his knee further up with the other, “shoulda known, even with that fancy suit all you wanna be is my fucking toy.” It’s a snarl, the hottest sound he’s ever heard and he drags Barclay into another kiss, amazed that he feels close to cumming already. 

Knockknock.

Barclay turns his head towards the door, Joseph muffling his panting breath in his shoulder. 

“Uh, who is it?”

“Mothman. The winners of that drawing are back here to meet us.”

“Shit” Joseph hisses, starting to sit up only for strong hands to trap him in place. 

“Cool. Uh, gimme like” Barclay looks down to where his cock is buried into Joseph, “three minutes?”

The smile in Indrid’s voice is unmistakable, “Of course. I still need to find Vincent. See you soon.”

“Three minutes seems optimisticAH, ohgod” He holds on for dear life as Barclay fucks him with sharp, deep thrusts. A calloused hand finds his dick and Joseph bites down on a broad shoulder to keep from alerting everyone in the vicinity to his impending orgasm. 

“That’s it babe, cum for me, cum on my cock in a backroom like the horny, needy thing you are.” Barclay stills his hips, hand working with slick, messy movements until Joseph cums. He doesn’t wait for him to finish all the way before slamming into him for ten of the best seconds of Stern’s life and cumming with a deep moan. 

“Fucking-A that was good.”

“Good is an understatement.”

“I love you so fucking much.”

“I love you too.”

A kiss on the head as Barclay helps him onto the ground, a flurry of putting their clothes into a rough approximation of order. Then Barclay kisses him again as Joseph strokes his hair. 

“Offer of soft sheets and candlelight still stands.” 

Joseph holds him tighter, smiling against his neck, “I guess we know what we’re doing tomorrow night.”

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

It’s the last day of recording the tracks for “Blood on the Mirror” and the mood is bittersweet. After this, there’s one more tour and then The Cryptids go their separate ways. It was time, everyone but Indrid and Jake ready to move on to other projects, and Joseph is already on board to manage Indrid’s solo career (“I’d trust it to no one else, Joseph. I mean it”). All the same, when the final track is deemed done, everyone applauds and embraces like they’re going off to war. 

He heads down to his office to finish reading over venue contracts while the band packs up, but he only gets through one before Barclay appears. 

“Hey, blue eyes.”

“Hi, Bigfoot.” Joseph stands and comes to the door to kiss him, “are you already set to go home.”

“More or less” Barclay rubs his arm, his most consistent anxiety tell, “uh, there’s just one thing I gotta ask before we leave.”

Hushed voices down the hall, but no one there when Joseph looks behind him to check. When he turns back, his hands fly up to cover his mouth. Barclay is down on one knee.

“I, uh, I know this might not be the most, uh, traditional spot to do this but it feels right. I’ve just been thinking about how a huge chapter of my life is coming to a close and there’s this whole new, exciting, terrifying blank page where I have to write the next one. And I, I realized that I want you to be in that chapter with me, and the next one, and the one after that. So, uh, what I want to know is: Joseph Stern, will you marry me?”

He nods, not trusting his voice to come out with intelligible words. 

“Oh thank god.” Barclay springs up, cupping his face and spinning him in a kiss. Joseph laughs as whooping cheers echo towards them. Indrid, Jake, and Vincent, are peering around the nearest corner, beaming.

“Indrid is for sure going to say I told you so the second he gets me alone” Barclay chuckles, “I was so afraid you’d say no because things will be kind of up in the air for the next few years.”

Joseph turns his face back towards him, “You’re right, they will. But I can’t think of anyone I’d rather spend them with.”

[douglashonorscollege]

Burn the House Down

essay by Olivia McDougall ⌂

IT WAS 2006 in the heart of New York City. The New York Knicks failed to make the play-offs for the third consecutive year. President George W. Bush’s approval rating had hit at an all-time low. Panic! at the Disco released “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” and Justin Timberlake performed “SexyBack” on the MTV Video Music Awards—hosted by Jack Black—at Radio City Music Hall. For the American people, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times… and three young kids were out pursuing their dream in the streets of Manhattan.

Adam, Ryan, and Jack Metzger were trying their hand at busking in Central Park and Washington Square. The youngest at nine years old, Jack led vocals while his older brothers backed him with instrumentals. The boys played covers of songs old and new, anything to get enough money for new instruments with which to experiment. The brothers spent many years on street corners serenading strangers, earning their 10,000 hours. In the following years, when YouTube started gaining traction, the boys put up videos of their covers: more and more inventive spins on pop songs. Jack and Ryan also started trying their hand at writing, directing, and acting in their own little sketches for video content. At that time, the boys had very few followers, but nonetheless continued to play, to save up, to buy more equipment, to make more music.

As they grew, the boys were exposed to their parents’ old records and the sounds of a very different generation influenced their style. The Beach Boys; the Beatles; Peter, Paul, and Mary among many others inspired them, but more contemporary artists like Kanye West also came into play. Later, while eldest brother Adam pursued his degree at Columbia University, the younger two brothers took note of sampling—the music trend of artists taking sound clips and reusing them in their songs. Jack mentioned to his brotherhow cool it would be if someone sampled Spongebob Squarepants on a track.

“Well, why don’t we do it?” was Ryan’s reply.

In spring of 2013, the brothers, naming themselves AJR after their own initials, released a video of their first single “I’m Ready.” The song sampled the popular Spongebob catchphrase, and became a classic, upbeat, dance-floor pop song. The brothers sent the link to their video to several celebrities over Twitter, until famous singer-songwriter Sia noticed them and passed it along to her manager. The song was then commercially released that summer and began to see regular radio play, and the band was labeled as the next up and comers in the music scene.

After “I’m Ready,” AJR released a five song EP of the same name. Their first song continued to grow, receiving millions of views on YouTube and going platinum in Canada and Australia. The brothers continued to create music (and go to school; the eldest was only in his early twenties at this time), releasing another single and EP titled Infinity in 2014. The majority of the band’s music was pop songs, easy to listen to with familiar rhythms and lyrics of love and youth. Remarkably, the boys chose to mix and record all their own music in their NYC apartment living room, instead of paying for studio time. Paying homage to their workspace and independence, the band released their first album Living Room in 2015. Except for some bouncier, odd-duck tracks like “Big Idea” and “Thirsty,” most of the songs fit the same earlier patterns of the pop genre. However, in 2016, the band experienced the shift that would change their music career forever.

Before the What Everyone’s Thinking EP came out, AJR had little recognition beyond their break-out hit. However, the tracks on the latest EP sounded entirely evolved from the brother’s previous style. The lyrics were brimmed with honesty, abandoning the emptiness of many other pop tunes. The boys sang about missing out on their friends while pursuing their dreams, about being unsure about what love means, about not trying so hard to be cool, about being human. Their style of composition had also matured. The band would release videos on how they made their songs, revealing that they took whatever strange sound they could make and mix it however they could to make it new and interesting. They had people who were not musicians or artists, such as their ever supportive father, come in and sing to add a new dimension to their songs. They used something they called “spokestep,” a technique of recording a someone singing, then cutting it up over a beat in editing. They continued to utilize sampling, taking bits of anything from Fountains of Wayne to yodeling competitions. The EP was well-received with hundreds of messages from fans who deeply related to the music. This was all the push the brothers needed to keep writing freely, and not what they thought would sell.

On June 9th, 2017, the three brothers dropped the album that would unknowingly launch their music career to a unimaginable level. Several songs on the album made it to regular radio play, giving the band more recognition and growing their dedicated fan base. The Click clearly communicated AJR’s desire to get real in their music, with songs about the detached feelings of growing up or distaste toward the typical party scene. One of their most successful songs, “Sober Up,” featured Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo and paved the way for more collaborations with artists such as Steve Aoki and Lil Yachty. The band had been on tours before, playing small venues where the opener drew more fans than they, but now they began to sell out everywhere. The kids who had been playing to no one on street corners now began to sing for thousands.

Shortly after their album The Click debuted, AJR announced that they had been asked to create the theme for Supersize Me 2: Holy Chicken, a documentary attempting to expose the fast food industry’s lax safety regulations. The band had been asked to write for other people before, but never for a movie. The theme song, “Burn the House Down,” would live to surpass its original purpose and become the honest encapsulation of the political attitudes of its time. “Burn the House Down” expresses the band’s indecision to either “keep things light” or to get involved in important issues. The song, with compelling lyrics such as “Or should I march with every stranger from Twitter to get shit done? / Used to hang my head low / Now I hear it loud / Every stranger from Twitter is gonna burn this down” further cemented the band’s dedication to revolution and their abandonment of passivity. The song called out deception plaguing the media cycle and public affairs, and the need to burn it all down in order to expose the truth.

*   *   *

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 acted as a catalyst for various protest movements around the country. Marches have occurred on the White House doorstep since the signing of the Constitution, but the Trump administration triggered a marked influx. Beyond Washington, protests like the Women’s March and National Pride March were seen nation-wide. People from all over rallied together to advocate for science and evidenced-based policies, for immigrant’s rights and racial justice, for transparency over Russian involvement in elections, and even for the publication of Trump’s tax returns. People, especially those liberal-leaning, felt that their voices weren’t being heard and that the President was not reflective of their values. Change in politics is gradual and incremental, but it felt like everyday a new injustice was being thrown at the American people. Families were being separated at the border, more evidence that Russia swayed the 2016 election came to light, allegations of sexual abuse from the President were revealed, racism, sexism, and hate seem to run rampant and unchecked, and overall many people felt disheartened and disgusted with the state of the nation. So, with the power of social media, users of popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter planned protests. The marches drew thousands of people together, uniting many for a common cause. Today’s youth, often labeled as lazy and entitled, came together in the March for Our Lives, an empowering result from one of many tragic school shootings. High-schoolers fed up with feeling unsafe on their campuses advocated for stricter gun control laws and led the biggest youth rally since the Vietnam War, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of people. Americans refused to take anything sitting down and demonstrated their needs loudly to those in charge.

The effectiveness of these protests is a tricky one to determine, as many perceived different goals for the marches. Some believe getting people out on the streets and building a community of like-minded people is a strong start, but others think success is nothing less than immediate change and tangible evidence that they have been heard. Further, some argue that current protests lack the solid political backing that are required to enact true change, and that the marches will never be as powerful as they mean to be without that factor. However, even though many of the things modern protests have demanded have yet to come to fruition, it does not necessarily mean the marches have been for naught. Many of the marches throughout history that today are viewed as world-shattering did not see the change they were fighting for immediately. Politics take time, and the justice and change in policies the people demand to see might still be a long time coming. However, it is necessary to take up the fight, for the people to demonstrate that enough is enough.

Protest songs in the past like “Fortunate Son” by Credence Clearwater Revival or “The Times They are A-Changin” by Bob Dylan rallied people for their cause, stoking the flames of change in hearts across the nation. Music was a way for artists to contribute to the fight, giving a voice to those silenced and reflecting the opinions of the oppressed or wronged. Protest songs today have the same effect, uniting thousands to sing in one voice and empowering movements. “Burn the House Down” provides a battlecry for a whole new generation of people. It is a warning of accountability for those in the corrupt establishment; the harbingers will burn it down.

Works Cited “Burn the House Down” Music Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnyLfqpyi94 AJR Zach Sang Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQnXGsKwaIU&t=1725 Recent Marches Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rallies_and_protest_marches_in_Washington,_D.C.#2018 Supersize Me 2 Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me_2:_Holy_Chicken! Article on political protests, bustle.com: https://www.bustle.com/p/do-political-protests-actually-change-anything-29952 2006 NYC Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2006_in_New_York_City AJR Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJR_(band) One of AJR’s “How We Made THE CLICK” Vidoes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YWj3DAo6xM  ∎

More on Olivia ~ Minerva’s Owl Homepage

[sabineelectricheart]

An Excitingly Boring Rainy Night

Summary: Sylvain and Byleth spend a night in with their daughter. It rains.

Rating: K - Intended for general audience 5 years and older. Content should be free of any coarse language, violence, and adult themes.

Words: 2700

Notes: Parenthood fluff. It’s nice once in a while, too.

When Byleth married, she heard two warnings. The first, from almost every guest to the reception, was that her husband was a skirt-chaser and should not be trusted. She did not take it seriously. The other, which was whispered to her ear by her mother while they sneaked a peek inside the church, just before the march began to play.

Her groom was smiling brightly, laughing as his best man scowled and her grandmother demanded them to be quiet.

“You are in for a lifetime of excitement, dear. He is jovial, full of energy.” Sitri said, a pleased smile dancing on her features. “Sylvain is just like your father in that sense.”

The infinite wisdom of her mother’s, born out of experience and self-reflection, has not failed them in this instance. Life with Sylvain had always been unorthodox, even when they were just friends. From snippets of life amongst the 1%, with expensive restaurants, opera tickets and impromptu trips to Brigid, to the simple and sweet, like flowers at her workplace, massages when her back hurt and stay-in dates just because. Every day was a, usually pleasant, surprise with that man.

It was all fine and good when it was just the two of them, but when Byleth got pregnant and had a little girl not even seven years ago, things became an entirely different sort of chaos. Unrestful nights and busy days became the norm as their daughter required most of their attention. Neither parent really mourned the loss of life they had before. Being the cool couple without children was awesome, but they loved their daughter more than life itself. Having her was worth any sacrifice, lest of all their high life they led before.

So, with all that, it often came as a surprise when they had a quiet evening at home, when nothing special happens. Nights like these were rare for Sylvain, and he thinks he will never really get used to it.

Isolde was sleeping peacefully in her bed. The dishes from dinner were clean and drying on the sink as the redhead sat in his office looking over questionnaires and tables on consumer preferences for his new client at his advertising firm. His wife was sitting on the couch flipping through history books, preparing next week’s classes for her annoying but lovable teenage students. The crackling fire and sounds of the rain hitting the window were comforting, though lulling the man to sleep. 

Cracking his neck, Sylvain shuts down his working notebook and rubs his amber eyes. He loved his job but he severely underestimated the number of papers he had to sign and review, he thought it would all be about coming up with creative ways to sell people crap they do not need. Glancing at the watch on his wrist, he notes the late hour and decides to call it a night for work. He could always get his intern to do it later. 

Byleth knows that her husband is done with work for the evening based on three things. The first is the loud groan that comes from his office which signals he is stretching his back and closing off whatever he was doing. Then he would peek his head into the living room. The messy ginger hair making an appearance as he checks to see if she is still awake. When she is not, he will scoop her up and carry her to bed. If she is awake, though, he moves to step 3. 

Jumping into her lap. 

The 1,86-meter-tall idiot which she has come to love collapses on the couch right on top of her. 

“Sylvain!” She scolds as she moves her arms to protect the book.

He does not respond and instead snuggles up to her ample chest. He eyes the open pages of her book and scrunches his nose up in disgust. 

“Really, princess? We aren’t in school anymore. You don’t have to keep reading about Loog’s rebellion.” The redhead points out, as if it was a revelation which would set her free.

Rolling her eyes, Byleth marks the page and set the book down on the table so she could turn her attention to her ginger husband. 

“Yet, it has not left the school curriculum since you and I graduated, so I still have to teach it.” She says, a little forceful. “And, before you ask, no, they haven’t figured out new things about a war 1800 years old, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t brush up on the old stuff.”

A flash of lighting followed by the sound of thunder captures both of their attentions. 

Sylvain grimaces as he buries his face in her neck. It is foolish of him, but he fears thunderstorms. When he was a child, rain meant staying inside, and staying inside meant having no escape from Miklan. Ironically, years later, when he was already dating she who would become his wife, it was also under heavy rain they had to drive to Conand, to identify his brother’s corpse after he died at a police shootout.

Knowing such a history, Byleth hugs him and tries to distract his attention.

“M’tired but I don’t want to go to bed.” The woman mumbles softly as she plays with her husband’s hair.

He chuckles softly. Snuggling on the couch sounded like a wonderful idea to him but he had something else in mind. Climbing off her he walks over to the radio in the corner of the living room. 

“Sylvain?” She asks, wondering why he left her embrace.

He shushes her and turns on the radio. The sounds of an old song began playing full volume through the room, drowning the sound of thunder outside.

“I Put a Spell on You.” Sylvain says, waltzing over to his wife, holding out his hand.

Byleth raises an eyebrow and lets out a small laugh.

“Name of the song, darling.” He answers an unasked question. “My mother had these tracks on repeat when I was a kid.”

“I really can’t see your mother liking any music, lest of all romantic jazz.” She wonders, thinking about the infamous harpy of her mother-in-law. “Who do you wager she put a spell on? Your father?”

More ridiculous than Mrs. Gautier swaying through the room listening to I Put a Spell on You is having Mr. Gautier dancing with her. Many stories ran around about her in-laws, none of it any good.

Sylvain shrugs and gestures his hand, asking her to take it. 

A bit of late-night dancing did not happen often anymore and it would be great revisiting it. Grabbing his hand, he pulls her off the couch. One hand coming to rest on her waist and his other holding her hand up high. 

“I would have thought you’d have gotten bored of these songs.” She points out, knowing full well her husband’s musical tastes veered towards contemporary, high-energy, top 40 songs he could listen on the radio on his way to work.

“Well, blasting Yummy wouldn’t exactly be what I call romantic, even if appropriate when I see you in this negligée.” He says as he twirls her around and making her laugh.

Both of his hands slink down to her waist as he pulls her closer. Swaying to the soft tunes of the radio and the muted rain outside. 

“I didn’t know how much missed this.” He mumbles softly, his big amber yellow eyes meeting her green ones.

He looked tired but still full of love. The years had passed but, at this moment, it felt like they were back at the monastery where they went to college, that it was Establishment Day again and they were dancing the night away. It might be a little downmarket from the fancy gowns and the soft-falling snow, but dancing together in her pyjamas was just as romantic and joyful as far as she was concerned.

Another loud clap of thunder makes her jump in surprise.

Sylvain chuckles and pulls her closer. “Don’t worry, I got you princess.”

Byleth rolls her eyes and wrap her strong arms around his neck, pulling him into a soft kiss. His hands squeeze her hips lightly as he moves to deepen the kiss. 

“Daddy?” A sleep voice calls from the staircase.

The sound of their 6-year-old pulls them apart. Sylvain has a small pout on his lips as he was already thinking of what the two of them could do before his little girl decided to interrupt. 

“Mummy?” She calls over once more.

“What’s wrong, Isolde?” The mother walks out of Sylvain’s grip over to her tired little girl who had small tears falling down her cheeks. 

“I’m scared.” She tightly hugs the stuffed teddy bear Sylvain got her a few months ago.

Picking her up, the woman presses a small kiss to her cheek. 

“Is the thunder scary, sweetie?” She asks.

Isolde nods and rests her head against her chest. Sylvain’s annoyance quickly disappears as he reaches for his daughter. 

“Come here, princess, there is nothing to be afraid of, I promise.” The father coos.

Isolde climbs out of her mother’s arms to get to Sylvain’s. She was definitely a daddy’s girl with the way she grabbed at the man. The woman watches it with curiosity, as in her family, she was more taken with her mother, while her brother and father stood as a unit. Amongst their in-laws, her husband was the favoured son, but he did not appreciate too much either of his parents’ company.

Thunder rolled across the sky causing Isolde to hide her face into Sylvain’s chest. 

“I’ll protect you, don’t worry.” He whispers softly in her ear as he rubs her back soothingly. It was one thing he dearly wished when he was a child, and now he is happy to provide for his daughter.

She looks up at him with those big tearful eyes making her father melt away like putty in her tiny hands. He hates seeing Isolde cry. Wanting to distract her, he eyes the radio that was still playing music.

“How about I teach you to dance?” Sylvain offers.

Her head perks up at that. Setting her down, he grabs her hands. 

“Now, for a proper dance, the boy bows to the girl.” He grins and bows dramatically making the girl giggle at her father’s goofy grin. 

“You never did that for me.” Byleth points out, playfully.

Sylvain looks over at her and scoffs playfully. “That’s not true, I was nothing but a gentleman during our first dance.”

That is a lie, of course. The college boy got rather drunk on their first Establishment Day, then asked for her forgiveness on his dick moves throughout the year, cried a little and then asked her to a sloppy dance through the ballroom.

Rolling her eyes, she cannot wipe the smile off her face as Isolde bows to Sylvain. Standing up straight he grabs both of her small hands. 

“Here, princess.” He lifts her so her feet rest on his.

She seems a bit nervous as the tall man moves, her feet not on the ground nor any arms propping her up. 

“Don’t worry, darling, daddy won’t let you fall.” The cheering mother says as she sits on the couch, holding her stuffed toy.

The girl nods and looks up at Sylvain. To the tune of old jazz music, he begins to dance around the room. Isolde squeals as her father waltzes her around the room. 

“You’re doing great, honey!” The doting parent says proudly as he tries to spin her. “You’re a natural.”

He picks her up in his arms and kisses her cheek. 

“My little flower bud is so talented.” He looks at his wife with a wide smile.

“She really is, isn’t she?” She rests her head on her hands as the redhead dances around the room with his daughter in his arms. 

Sylvain became a whole new man when Isolde was born. He still had that carefree and devil-may-care attitude that reeled most people’s nerves, but anytime he was with the girl, he was transformed into the most serious and focused man this side of the Oghma Mountains. Everything the girl did or say made him proud. His eyes just shined with delight when she would look at him or call for him. He loved her to pieces. This was his daughter. His little flower bud who he had to love and care for and he adored every moment. 

“Rain isn’t scary.” The man proclaims as the music come to an end. “Did you know that little ducklings love the rain? They all walk joyfully through the water, like one big party. It seems really cool, right?”

He brings her to the window. This is the first time in many years the man voluntarily looks out when it rains. The girl presses her small hand to the cold glass and pulls it back quickly. She looks to her father, still unsure about it. 

“You know what you can do only when it rains?” He offers, instead.

Isolde shakes her head as Sylvain smiles.

“You get to splash and play in the puddles.” He says, in that fabricated excitement parents used to cheer their children up. “Tomorrow how about we go out and play in the puddles? You can run and jump around like a real little duckling.”

The girl claps and nods her head. 

“Honey, don’t you have a meeting with a client tomorrow? And Isolde has school in the morning.” Byleth points out, as she usually did as the grounded, serious parent.

It might be a little cold of her, but it was better that the girl has no expectations rather than getting her hopes up, only for her dad to be stuck at work. The man frowns for a moment but the girl’s sad eyes pull his attention back. 

“It’s going to rain tomorrow morning, too, so the puddles will be there when I come back for lunch. I can take an afternoon off for my little flower bud.” He peppers the girl’s face with light kisses, making her squeal with happiness. 

“Sounds perfect, Sylvain.” Standing up, the mother rests her hand on his shoulder. “Let’s get this one to bed so she won’t be grumpy when tomorrow comes.”

Byleth bops Isolde’s nose and she giggles. Her eyes were drooping from tiredness and as much as the man would like to stay up with her, he knows his wife is right. 

“It’s my turn to take care of it, princess. I’ll meet you in bed.” Kissing her cheek, the man heads off to the child’s room.

Ghosting her cheek, the woman clears out the living room and makes her way to the marital bed. She wonders what her Grandmother Rhea, the one who most often dragged up the man’s sordid past, would say if she saw her grandson-in-law with her great-granddaughter. Probably nothing good, as she still was not over her daughter’s wedding, and that was over thirty-five years ago.

Climbing into bed, she waits for Sylvain’s return, but soon the weight of the long day’s work threatens to overtake her consciousness. Her eyes close but she keeps herself awake.

A few minutes later, the man opens their bedroom door carefully and shuts it quietly. He quickly changes into pyjamas and climbs next to his wife in bed. 

“Hey, Sylvain.” She whispers tiredly.

“Oh darling, I thought you were asleep.” He wraps an arm around her figure and turns to face the woman. “You must be exhausted. Are you still having trouble sleeping?”

“I was just waiting for you, dear.” Her words string together as Byleth could barely keep herself awake. “I wanted to say goodnight before bed.”

Sylvain squeezes her waist and leans down to kiss her forehead. 

“Sleep, my love.” He whispers.

Snuggling up to his chest, she finally lets herself fall asleep. 

“I love you, my princess. Thank you for giving me my wonderful family.” With another kiss he closes his eyes and falls asleep with his wife in his arms, dreaming of what was to come.

If every night was as boring and uneventful as this one was, then he would live out a lifetime of happiness.

*_*_*_*_*

Fire Emblem Masterlist

Three Houses Masterlist

[mummybear]

Betrayal - Dean Winchester One Shot

Words: 1863

Warnings:  Swearing, Cheating, Hurt/Heartbreak think that’s it

Characters: Dean Winchester/Reader Mentions of Sam Winchester

A/N: Dean and his girlfriend (You) have an argument but with their relationship survive (Based on song) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOzdfaEPaR0) Jazmin Sullivan Bust your windows)))also there may be a follow up to this

Part 2

Dean had been pushing your buttons all day, winding you up to the point of you snapping. Honestly, you knew you had held back as long as you could. The anger was boiling inside you, as you slammed yet another door closed in the bunker behind you, although he continued to follow behind, no sign of him giving up anytime soon.

He continued to insist you couldn't go on certain hunts, apparently, they were too dangerous for you. Even though you had been hunting easily as long as he and Sam had. But there was one, in particular, that was grating on you, he knew how much ganking this vamp would mean to you. The one who had taken away your entire family.

Sam had left a while ago, declaring he would be back once you two had sorted your shit out.

According to Dean you were over emotional and going to get yourself killed, "Fuck you, Winchester! How many times have you been over-emotional! Angry beyond reason even, you're a grade-A hypocrite" you growled at him accusingly, jabbing your finger into his chest.

Dean rolled his eyes as he neared closer this time you were unmoving, angrily glaring up at him. "I'm doing this for you. You're no good to anybody like this! Just stop being so fucking stubborn!" Dean retorted, throwing his hands in the air before grabbing another beer.

"That's it, Dean! Drown yourself in alcohol pass out and ignore the situation! Good to see nothing changes. You're one to talk about stubborn" you scoff at him venom lacing your words as you turn to walk away.

Dean grabs your wrist before you can get too far away, a fake laugh leaving his lips when your eyes meet again. "Ain't you one to talk sweetheart. You love drinking as much as I do! Every. God. Damn. Day! Sitting in bars letting those guys flirt with you, making me jealous, thinkin' I don't notice the way you smile" he spat back, getting in your face now. 

Dean practically walks you back so your back collides with the wall, his nose bumping yours as he attempts to kiss you, but you turn your head away the tears burning at your eyes. 

Everything suddenly pouring out of you until you turned back to him, catching his smirk, thinking yet again you were gonna let him get away with it. But you'd been pushed way to far this time. You shoved hard at his shoulders, watching him stumble a little shocked as the tears began to slip down your cheeks. "You wanna know why! Because it's the only fucking time you look at me, the only time you want to touch me! The only time you look away from them sluts, who're rubbing themselves against you all night!" you said an angry sob leaving your lips.

"You know it isn't like that. Stop being so stupid!" Dean sighed annoyed, trying to get closer to you. 

You backed away shaking your head. "So now I'm stupid as well!  Fuck you Dean Winchester" you cried, heading out to leave.

"Wait! Where the hell are you going?" Dean called sounding a little panicked but still annoyed.

"I'll be back later. Not that you give a shit" you replied quietly, as you left leaving him no room to reply. 

Climbing into your car the tears continued to fall, you shook every feeling inside of you, begging you to run back into his arms. You quickly buried that feeling deep down, switching on the radio didn't help exactly not with the words playing back at you.

you've got a hold of me

Don't even know your power

I stand a hundred feet

But I fall when I'm around you

Show me an open door

Then you go and slam it on me

I can't take any more

I'm saying, baby

Please have mercy on me

Take it easy on my heart

Even though you don't mean to hurt me

You keep tearing me apart

Would you please have mercy, mercy on my heart

Would you please have mercy, mercy on my heart

The words caused you to turn off your music before you could hear anymore. You punched at your steering wheel as you pulled over, into a felid a short distance from the bunker, as if you were unable to go any further. "What the hell is wrong with me?" you questioned yourself, alone in the middle of the night in the car.

Slumping across the steering wheel you let your mind wander, to what you and Dean had talked about long ago. When you had first gotten together, the plans you had made, the way he held you at night while you cried about your family.

Your eyes slipped shut, thinking about his face when you told him you'd loved him. Those gorgeous green eyes were practically sparkling, the tears rolled down his freckled cheeks. The way his lips had curled up into that adorable smile, the one that made you want to hide him from the world, protect him from everyone and everything that would ever hurt him.

You hadn't realised you'd even fallen asleep until you woke with a jump hours later. You wiped your tear-stained cheeks and eyes with your sleeve and cleared your throat. Sighing to yourself it was damn late, you needed sleep, even if that meant taking one of the spare rooms for the night. 

Starting your engine again you slowly made your way back to the bunker, intent on ignoring your boyfriend when you got there.

The drive back was silent, you weren't sure whether things between you and Dean were going to get any better, but there was no way you could leave it like that. 

You finally arrived outside the bunker, you sighed heavily climbing out of your car. Heading inside the sight before you made you wince, there was glass shattered all over the floor, clear signs of Dean's anger once you'd left. Anywhere else you may have been worried about, but here you knew he was safe.

Reluctantly you headed down the stairs, walking through the hall past Dean's room, you decided to duck your head in your room to check on him since the light was still on. "Dean" you sighed as the door opened, your heart dropped in your chest at the sight before you.

Dean was in there alright. With some blonde chick straddling his waist, her hands clawing at his chest. You stumbled back, afraid you were about to throw up. Dean tossed the girl onto the side of the bed, doing his best to pull on his boxers, a look of complete horror on his face.

 "What the fuck! You complete bastard! I'm gone a few hours and your fucking some slut in our bed!" you scream at him, noticing the way his mouth opens and closes several times.

"I thought you'd left me" Dean replied quietly.

"No fucking way, not flying with me Winchester. I said I was gonna be back later. I was right though, clearly didn't give a single shit did you! Took you hours to move on from us" you spat disgusted, backing out of the room unable to look him in the eyes anymore, not wanting him to see you crying over him, again.

"Baby please, I'm sorry. I love you. Don't go, I need you" Dean begged following behind you, making sure not to get to close.

You spun around on your heel to face him, so fast that Dean almost collided with you. "Dean, you!" You screamed shoving his chest as you pushed away another sob, focusing on your anger to get you through this. "You never get to call me baby again, don't you dare pretend that you love me right now! There's some naked random in our bed right now! You don't need me, you just need someone to keep your bed warm" you all but screamed, your voice straining and you sighed. "So, go ahead. We're done" you motioned back to the room that was his alone, as you finally cracked letting the tears fall.

"No. No, not like this. Please, I do love you. You have to believe me, I fucked up. I'm one big fuck up, but please you can't leave me" Dean begged as he dropped to his knees in front of you, hugging your thighs.

"I can't do this anymore Dean, I loved you, more than I ever thought possible but you've broken me" you sighed looking down at him.

Dean let go of your legs but stayed on his knees looking up at you. "I only did it because you left me, I didn't think you were coming back, maybe if you would've stayed this never would have happened" Dean replied getting up suddenly and towering over you.

"Oh wow, so that's how you're gonna play this. It's my fault!" you growled, folding your arms across your chest.

"Well yeah, you know if the shoe fits" Dean spat back, mirroring your stance. 

"I'll call Sam about picking up my stuff when I'm settled, don't even think about trying to find me when you've got your brain back" you replied simply, grabbing the baseball bat and machete by the door as you headed towards your car.

"Hey, they're mine" Dean shouted following behind you.

"Think it's the least you owe me, don't you" you answered twirling the bat in your hand. 

"No, not really. Not when your about to get yourself killed" Dean said stiffly, trying to act like he didn't care. 

"You lost your right to care about me and tell me what to do the second you found a hole to fill for the night" you spat spitefully at him lashing out with the bat, he ducked thinking you were aiming for him, but instead colliding with the window screen of the impala.

"Don't be a spiteful bitch Y/N" Dean growled, attempting to snatch the weapon from your hand. 

You dodged him just in time, landing another shattering blow to the driver's window. "Less chance you'll follow me, quick enough, at least," you said simply with a shrug.

"Don't take it out on the car, stop being like this. Just come inside, can't we just talk about this, what about Sam?" Dean asked you, he was serious was the thing that shocked you.

"Tell Sammy I'm sorry, sorry that you're a cheating piece of shit. You're lucky I don't carve my fucking name in your baby" you screamed towards the end landing a final blow on the rear window, it was easy enough when you thought about all the time you'd spent together talking about the future. Never had you imagined this.

"That was shit, that was stupid. I'm sorry, please. God, I don't want you to go, hit me, punch me I deserve it! Just don't go, I can't handle anything happening to you" Dean sighed defeated, you didn't want to but you ignored him, quickly climbing into your car. 

"Goodbye Dean" you replied sadly, closing your car door and driving away from the only man you'd ever loved and he'd broken your heart.

Tags: @lettersofwrittencollective @stiles-o-dylan24 @chewie-redbird @lusyschwa

[underatedcharactersunite]

Beauty and The Scientist; The Saviours

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Chapter Summary; Eugene has a question pondering on his mind, but he’s terrified to ask you. The Courage is there, the perfect setting is finally set but the moment is forced to a halt the second Negan and the Saviour show us days early for their first pick up. With Negan and the Saviours around nothing is ever good...  Paring; Eugene Porter X Female Reader. WordCount; 1,999 Warnings; Dwight being forceful, Angst, fluff A/N; You don’t need to have to read the previous chapter to understand what’s going on but if you could it would be brilliant.  Tagging; @eugenessix​

Arriving back home, everyone should have been in high spirits. Everyone should have been gathering around welcoming people home as you successfully got Maggie to Hilltop. However, the scene you imagined from your head was far from that, instead, everyone was consumed with grief and sombreness. Suddenly, the high morals of Alexandria had been blown to smithereens. Two incredible people had been lost by the hands of the Saviours. It felt everywhere.

The Saviours had made their presence known to Alexandria in the same manner as they had with Hilltop. They point had been made they wanted to control everything. Negan wanted to be the King of the new world.

Except they had never encountered a group like Alexandria, we had faced many battles already, and the Saviours would one day be just another story. It was natural that everyone in Alexandria was currently petrified by the new threat, and what it would eventually bring. Another fight. More death and destruction coming their way. The Saviours might have already killed Abraham and Glenn, but they couldn't stop Alexandria from regrouping.

With Negan's pending collection, everyone gathered around putting supplies in place. Every time anyone went out, people were going the extra mile to bring back more than we needed to survive. Terrified they might lose someone else.

You and Eugene had been in sort of trance. The two of you had spent considerable time apart with Rick needing you on different things, but when the two of you came together, it was like the vacuum.

As the early hours of the morning came, the sun played peek a boo behind the walls of Alexandria. You sat on your porch enjoying the quietness, that seemed to surround the place. There were no secret discussions about Rick's role of leadership, no looks of fear plastered on the faces of adults and children alike. It was peaceful, it felt like it was as if the world wasn't ready to mess with Alexandria just yet.

"You know it's an ungodly hour to be up and outside in such cold temperatures." Eugene's voice broke your concentration from the scene that currently surrounded you.

"Sorry I didn't mean to wake you. It's just so peaceful. Like nothings wrong and the Saviours won't be here in a few days, taking whatever they please." Eugene wrapped his arms around your waist, nustling his head into the curve of your neck.

"Everything's going to be A-Okay, as long as we comply with Negan's needs. I've started repairing a radio so they can at least listen to some tunes while they do whatever Saviours do." Laughing, maybe some of the Saviours found comfort in music like you used to. Perhaps there was a part of them that held human emotions.

"Perhaps Negan will appreciate some tunes it might put him in a better mood." Eugene seemed to appreciate the idea as you felt the rumbling of his chest against your back. Eugene would never admit how scared he was of the thought of losing you. So he decided he was going to hold onto you for as long as he could. When he remembered he could have forever as the perfect symbolism was sitting in his bedside table.

"Come on, let's get back inside and I'll make you a cup of coffee while we still have it." Eugene twisted you around before going back into the house that the two of you shared. Flipping the switch of the coffee machine, you observed Eugene's hunch over. This wasn't how he wanted to propose but with the Saviours looming over everyone's head.

"What's wrong, my love?" You questioned as you walked up behind him, this time you were the one to wrap your arms around him. Eugene adored whenever you came up behind him, to comfort him. The relationship was purely equal, and the two of you balanced each other out, and he liked that. Eugene knew that you wouldn't care about a fancy proposal. However, he wanted to make an effort. He knew that at times he wasn't exactly great at showing emotion especially, of the romantic kind, but he wanted to give you this. Yet the Saviours were forcing his hand it was now or never.

"Would you make the coffee? I'll be right back." Eugene sped off, leaving you speechless, was something wrong? Trying to ignore your mind beginning to overthink, you pulled two mugs from the cupboard and prepared to make the coffee.

Moments later, Eugene came back downstairs, running over to you passionately melding his lips with yours. Unexpecting the kiss, your eyes widened in shock but quickly melted at his touch reciprocating the kiss with matching eagerness.

Eugene began to question why he didn't kiss you like this more often. The sensation running through his body was pleasurable, and he could tell you were enjoying it too as you run your hand through his Tennesse top hat. Never had he found a woman who found it as intriguing as you had.

Eugene never meant to get caught up in the moment, but you were the only person in his life who ever treated him in such a way. As his hand went under your shirt, you suddenly stopped.

"I never meant to-" You pressed your hand to his lips softly, with you closed your eyes. Eugene had seen that look on several times you used it whenever you had thought you heard something.

"Sorry I thought I heard something." Leaning in for another kiss, this time Eugene stopped you.

"We can finish this afterwards, but before I get distracted by your beautiful body and your delightful touch. There's something I need to say first."

"Is there something wrong?"

"Far from that, we've been together for a while now, and I wanted this to be romantic, but with everything going on. I don't know if we're going to get a moment where the two of us are not running around like headless chickens. Which is a technical-scientific impossibility? This is the biggest thing I have ever thought about doing in my life-"

"They're here." Rosita came bursting in through your front door, your eyes widened. They were early. Too early. The two of you were forced to pull away from each other, as you grabbed your coffee cup and headed outside. This was probably going to be the last one you had for a long time.

You took two steps outside of the house to see them already going through houses, procuring furniture and food. They were savages. Unrespectiable savages, who thought they could take whatever they pleased. Someone barged past you and Eugene as you entered your home.

When the world ended, for a long time you didn't have a lot. You starved and struggled to survive. Until you got to Alexandria and they gave you a place to call yours, a base you called home. Now it was being ransacked.

"Go on and find Rick. You don't need to see this." Eugene pressed a kiss to your temple as you walked away. You were well aware that wherever Rick was, Negan would be. You would gladly punch him in the face, a hundred times over until he resembled Abraham or Glenn's bashed-in skull.

Meeting Rick and Negan, you knew immediately that Negan was going to say something. You had to prepare to grit your teeth through the entire encounter. Knowing that one day, Negan would be the one suffering, regretting the day he ever decided to mess with any of you.

"What's in that cup gorgeous?" Negan asked you as you took a sip the still scalding hot coffee.

"Coffee. Take it if you want." You offered your mug to him, anything to keep him sweet.

"See. Rick, I like her. She immediately offered her stuff to me. Just like that, I didn't have to ask. Now because of that, she gets to keep her cup of coffee. Tell me Sweetheart are you currently with anyone?"

"I have a boyfriend if that's what your asking?"

"Well, that's a dam shame. Sweetheart, if your boyfriend and you ever decide to part ways. Just know that you can always share my bed back at the Sanctuary. I've heard break up sex is great, especially when it's not with your ex." Your eyes widened, at Negan's bluntness. He had most definitely come onto you.

"Y/N, can you go and do that thing I asked you to do earlier." Nodding, you walked away rather quickly. You couldn't believe that Negan dared to hit on you. Just days after he bashed two of your dearest friends skulls in.

Strolling through Alexandria, you realised Rick didn't give you anything to do. So you observed the Saviours taking everything from your friends and family. You've never met a group of people who would just take everything from everyone.

"You looked pretty relaxed, for someone's world who has just been smashed to pieces."

"You would know that, wouldn't you? I really do not understand why Daryl ever tried to help you. It makes me wonder, how you can stand by a man like Negan." You snarled, recognising Dwight. You would never forgive him for what he did to Denise.

"You know I like my woman feisty. Perhaps I could see if Negan will let me take you back."

Dwight pushed you up against the house. The touch of his skin made your skin crawl. He was just as bad as Negan was. The feeling of his breath on your skin, the closeness of the two of you was all wrong.

"Get off of her!" Rosita snarled pushing Dwight off of you. You were relieved, which was an understatement. Standing up to Dwight, the two of you stood side by side.

"You are here to collect food and furniture. Not people, now get away from here, and if you ever touch her again, you'll be the one dead. Do I make myself clear?"

"The last time I checked I wasn't a piece of property, now go."

"This isn't over."

Dwight pretty quickly scrambled away, leaving you and Rosita standing together. She put an arm on your shoulder as you thanked her. She knew where you needed to be, who you needed to find. He was the only one who made you feel comfortable after anything happened.

Running all over Alexandria, searching for Eugene, you eventually found him passing something to a Saviour. He didn't notice you at first until he was further away from the Saviour, you ran into his arms, catching him off guard.

"Hello to you too." When you didn't reply, he immediately knew something was off. At first, he didn't push it, rather than that he cradled your head reassuring you.

"What happened?" Pulling away from him just enough so you could face him. You kept your arms wrapped around his neck, playing with the loose hairs at the bottom to comfort you.  

"Dwight just came onto me. He pinned me up against the house. I didn't know what to do- I just froze."

Eugene's stomach sunk. They thought they could do that? Trying to force someone into a situation like that, Eugene brought you closer together letting you, nuzzle your head into his neck. He knew you needed to feel close to him right now. Slowly rocking you back and forth, Eugene realised something.

The Saviours were going to attempt to destroy all of you by destroying the world that you had built for yourselves. They didn't want a world where they weren't in control of it. Most importantly, he realised that now the Saviours were calling all of the shots, there would be no right time to propose to you. He needed to let them all know that you were with someone, and if you wanted him to let them know so was he. He would gladly wear a ring on his wedding ring finger. Now, however, time wasn't on his side. So he would propose, tonight.

[syntaxeme]

Giardino Segreto ch. 8

[Read on AO3] | [First chapter] | [Next chapter] Rating: T Chapter summary: Molly is wary of Angel's new 'family' and their intentions. But are her suspicions based on observation or misinformation? One has to wonder where she's getting these ideas.

— — –

While Alastor sat aside and waited for Angel to join them, Venture was a veritable flurry of action, sorting through files, making calls, meeting with family members and giving orders. Granted, they had only been working together for the past month or so, but the change in her performance was shocking nevertheless. ‘Trying harder,’ indeed!

An hour or so after Alastor had entered the office, the doors swept open again to reveal a properly-dressed and put-together Angel with Molly in tow. She observed the space with wide eyes as she followed him inside and he explained proudly, “So this is my office. You met my consigliere already. Everything goin’ okay down here, Venn?”

While she might have normally responded with a clever quip or a tongue-in-cheek ‘no thanks to you,’ she instead gave him a curt nod, only looking up from her work briefly. “I’m drafting a contract for Cherri’s Dust dealer. I’ll need you to look over it by the end of the day so I can finalize that deal. The Cortezes got back to us with an offer this morning too, so let me know when you’re ready to discuss it.” And back she went to writing up the contract.

“Uh, yeah, will do.” Angel gave Alastor a confused look, as if to ask What’s up with her? but the Radio Demon could only shrug. It wasn’t as if he could explain to Angel the conversation they’d had earlier and the real reason for her increase in productivity. The boss frowned and turned back to Molly. “Eh, she’s usually more fun than that”—he shot her a look to see if his jab had provoked a response, but there was none—“but I guess she’s…busy today. Hey, Al, I’m givin’ Molls a tour around the place. Wanna come with?”

“Happy to,” Alastor agreed, much preferring an upbeat Angel to the very concentrated Venture. He joined Molly in following the boss downstairs to the ground floor and couldn’t help feeling that even though Angel was leading her around the building and pointing out all its various features, she was watching Alastor warily the entire time. Had he done something to offend her? Was his first impression in Angel’s room enough to make her assume he was up to no good? He could only hope his smile would make him seem less threatening—though he was aware it often had the opposite effect.

“And look, you’re gonna like this,” Angel was saying, holding Molly’s hand as they came back to the lobby and he led the way up the stairs to the mezzanine and lounge area. In addition to the bar, there was a sprawling seating area with armchairs and loveseats, along with a more unusual addition, which Angel had insisted was necessary: a grand piano where, every night, one of their host of demons would provide live music for the guests. And, just as he’d predicted, Molly lit up at the sight.

“Ooh, it’s gorgeous,” she cooed, hurrying across the room to seat herself at the bench and run her hand along the cover over the keys. As Angel and Alastor joined her, she looked up at her brother with eyes sparkling in excitement. “Can I…?”

“Yeah, I figured you wouldn’t be able to resist,” he laughed, leaning against the side of the piano. “Knock yourself out.”

She lifted the cover, quickly found her fingering, and started to play with ease, evidently from memory. Angel went to stand over her shoulder and watch her hands move, so Alastor joined at his other side. He didn’t recognize the tune, but it was lovely regardless, and Molly played without a single falter or sour note. He somehow felt a bit more respect for her, seeing how focused and skilled she was at what he knew for a fact was a difficult instrument to master. For a moment, he entertained the idea of joining her—but it seemed a step too far. Maybe he would demonstrate his skills at another time.

“She’s good,” he noted honestly.

“Always has been,” Angel agreed with the slightest smile on his lips. It wasn’t the cocky grin he usually wore, all smug, pushy bravado; it was softer, more genuine, and Alastor finally realized how much it had been upsetting him to be separated from his twin.

That was only natural, all things considered. She was always the one to support him through their father’s violent outbursts, the only one in the Dellarosa household he could confide in and look to for understanding. Having that so suddenly removed from his life to be replaced by an army of demons who hardly knew him… Alastor could only imagine how it must feel. He watched as Angel sat at her side, looking more relaxed than ever, and he realized this was a problem.

Angel missed his sister. He was happier for her presence. Meaning that when she left to return to the Dellarosas, when she became ‘the enemy’ again, he would be utterly miserable. They couldn’t have that. Not only would it be a detriment to Angel’s overall mood, but it could interfere with his goal of taking down the Dellarosa family in the long run. Something would have to be done.

As Molly finished her song to light applause from the few guests in the area, she blushed and smiled bashfully. “Still got it,” Angel told her with a grin.

“Never lost it,” she teased back. “Hope I didn’t bother anyone.”

“Please, they should be thankin’ you,” he said, waving off her concerns. “Besides, I own the place; we can do what we want.”

“I still don’t get how you pulled it off. I mean, I saw this place a couple months ago, and it was a wreck!” Her eyes lingered on the glittering chandelier above them. “And I thought the owners were gonna demo it or somethin’. How’d you get ‘em to hand it over?”

“Eh, I had some help from my sottocapo here.” Angel nodded in Alastor’s direction. “This guy might not look like it, but he’s got a few tricks up his sleeves ya wouldn’t expect. He bought the place for a song and then gave it to me as a”—he tossed Alastor a smarmy smirk over his shoulder—“token of his affection. Didn’t ya, honey?”

You have no idea.

“You’re absolutely right, cher. You might also call it an investment.” There was something gratifying in the knowledge that Angel would so readily flirt with him around others, including his sister, even if in a teasing way. It felt legitimizing in a way, as if they did actually have some sort of relationship already. Of course, Alastor tried to take that satisfaction with a grain of salt, as the boss didn’t hesitate to flirt with anyone, but it still felt different when addressed at him. More specific, less flippant.

“Affection, huh?” Molly said, eyeing Alastor skeptically.

“Oh, come on, don’t make that face.” Angel nudged his shoulder into hers. “Not every guy I get with is a complete asshole.”

‘Get with’? That was a conveniently vague description of what was going on between the two of them.

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Molly answered, pursing her lips. “Anyway, this is all nice, but I wanna know where the real business goes on. I know you and your consigliere run things upstairs, but what about the soldatos? What about the caporegimes? It can’t be just the few of you.”

“They stay in the rooms all over; it ain’t the same as Pop’s place where everybody’s separated. I got capos on floor twelve and floor two. I got soldatos on floor ten and floor five. They’re just around.”

“But.” Molly’s face twisted into a pretty frown of confusion. “How do you keep everyone in line like that?”

“Oh, that’s not an issue,” Alastor answered before realizing he might be stepping on Angel’s toes. Still, the boss gestured for him to go on, so he continued, “Every member of our family has known since their arrival that Angel is the one in charge. We’ve only been in business a short time, but every day he makes it clearer that he knows what he’s doing and is someone to be trusted. I know without doubt that our people see that and respect it.” Angel beamed at his compliments, and he meant every word.

“It’s pretty impressive to have their loyalty after just a month or so,” Molly noted. “How many’d you say there are?���

“Like two hundred, give or take.”

She bit her lip, the gesture eerily reminiscent of Angel’s habit of doing the same. But why should she be nervous at the moment? “That’s way more than Papa’s got,” she said with a weak laugh.

“Yeah, that was kinda the point,” Angel agreed with a satisfied smirk. This was another particular he had stipulated when the Giardinos first began. “Gonna be a lot easier runnin’ him outta business when we can prove we got better forces.”

The young woman drew into herself slightly, legs crossed at the ankle, hands folded delicately in her lap. “You’re really serious about that?” she asked gently.

“C’mon, Molls.” The boss let out a sigh and pushed to his feet. “Don’t get all weepy about it. I know ya don’t like thinkin’ about it, but you can’t act like he doesn’t deserve some kinda payback for all the shit he’s put me through. I ain’t askin’ ya to help me do it, but ya ain’t gonna stop me either.”

“No, I know,” Molly said hastily, her hands clasping tighter as she looked up at him with what seemed more like concern than irritation. “I’m sorry, caro. I don’t want you thinkin’ I’m not happy for you. I am. I’ve just been worried. You’ve been gone all this time, and nobody knew what you were up to. I’ve never been away from you that long before, especially not knowin’ why. It was scary.”

Angel ran his fingers through his hair to comb it back from his eyes, visibly fighting guilt over his sister’s discomfort. “Yeah, I get it. Look, why don’t we take a step back from the whole business thing for a minute?” He paused to check his watch. “I’ll take you to lunch or somethin’ and we can just talk like normal for a while. Okay?”

She smiled sheepishly. “I’d like that, Angelino.”

“C’mon, then. Lemme show ya around my part of town a little.” The two started toward the stairs, but he paused when he realized Alastor wasn’t following. “You comin’, Al?”

It was difficult to miss the distinct pout on Molly’s face as she turned to continue on her way as if she hadn’t noticed Angel stopping. Difficult to misinterpret her attitude toward Alastor. “Actually, I think I have some work to get done here,” he said apologetically.

“Work?” Angel scoffed. “Since when d’you have work? I don’t remember givin’ ya anything to do lately.”

“Then I’ll find something to keep myself occupied.” Lowering his voice slightly, he nodded toward Molly. “I think your sister would prefer to spend time with you alone. Not that I can blame her.”

“Well. What if I need you or somethin’?” Angel insisted, arms crossed, pouting a bit himself.

“Then call me, and I’ll come to you.”

The boss let out a frustrated huff. “But I wanted you two—”

“Angel?” Molly called, standing by the stairs. Nothing in her voice was demanding or whiny, nothing in her smile signaling impatience. “I thought we were leavin’.”

“Just a minute,” he answered, waving a hand at her, obviously still not satisfied with where he and Alastor were leaving off.

“If it’s going to bother you, I’ll come along, cher. I could also follow discreetly in case you run into any trouble. It’s up to you.”

The boss let out a sigh and shrugged. “Nah, forget it. I been away all this time; least I can give her is an hour or two for just us. I’ll see ya when we get back.” His eyes flickered down to Alastor’s lips, and he started to lean closer, then thought better of it and backed away, giving a weak half-smile as he went to meet his twin at the stairs. As they left together, that smile quickly turned more genuine, and Alastor’s chest constricted with unwarranted jealousy.

— — —

Luckily, he wasn’t allowed much time to dwell on whatever angst Angel’s outing with Molly had instilled. Looking for something to do with himself, as promised, he went back up to the third floor and the office, where he found Venture in a meeting with a group of three capos. Her eyes darted toward the door as he entered, then she went on with her conversation.

“I don’t want excuses, gentlemen: I want answers,” she said plainly. “This isn’t grounds for an execution or even an expulsion, but when the boss hears about it, he’s not going to be happy, and he’ll want the name of whoever’s responsible. You’re going to get me that name. Understood?” All three nodded in silence, and she dismissed them with a flick of her hand, turning her attention to Alastor instead. “Where’s Angel?” The usual languid self-assurance in her voice had been replaced with a certain no-nonsense quality to match her sudden severe attitude shift.

“He took Molly to lunch. He said they should be back in an hour or two,” the Radio Demon explained, wandering over to her corner of the room to look over her desk, which was far busier than usual just as she was.

Venture let out a clipped sigh. “Of course he did. First the distraction with you this morning, now a personal visit—with one of our rivals, no less. Maybe if I’m lucky he’ll be able to spare some attention for the business too. Our don is quite a popular man,” she grumbled, even her writing fevered and frustrated as she scribbled down some note or another and scanned over the many stacks of papers on her desk to categorize it.

“Ahem. Is there anything I might do to help?” Alastor suggested, almost wishing she would take back her vow to so thoroughly devote herself to the Giardinos’ success; she was so much less fun this way.

“Oh, do you work here?” she chuckled, finally raising her eyes to meet his. That was the same sentiment Angel had expressed, and he still didn’t care for the suggestion that he wasn’t pulling his weight.

“You should know better than anyone, my friend, that I’m every bit as capable a man as one could find in these halls,” he answered indignantly, gesturing toward the rest of the hotel. “Just you tell me what needs doing and I’ll see that it gets done.”

“Is that so?”

It seemed as if Venture took those words as more a challenge than an assurance. Somehow, she had a never-ending list of errands to be run, ranging from within the hotel itself to a few blocks down the way to the opposite end of Manhattan. Alastor, ever a man of his word and always up for a challenge, fulfilled every directive she issued, from pressing their lessees for unpaid ‘taxes’ to seeking out some poor fool who had borrowed money from the family and then gone awol.

Over the course of his trials—which had by then become a matter of principle—he must have lost track of time; he returned to the hotel with a bundle of dossiers Venture had sent him practically all the way to the Bronx for, but stopped outside the office when he found Molly waiting there on her own.

“Nice to see you again, but I feel you’re missing something. Have you lost Angel?” He tried to joke, but her smile was sympathetic at best.

“He’s inside,” she said, nodding toward the door. “His consigliere really wanted to go over this deal they’re doing with the Cortezes, so…maybe not the best time to go in.”

“I see.” He wondered how Angel was dealing with Venture’s paradigm shift.

“Our family doesn’t really deal with the Cortezes,” Molly mused, absently twirling a pale blond curl around and around her finger. “Papa says they got too much Spanish in ‘em. ‘No sense of urgency.’”

“As I understand it, Angel doesn’t subscribe to many of your father’s more traditional ideals,” Alastor answered cautiously.

“Yeah. That was never his bag, I guess.” Her eyes wandered to him, inspecting everything from his hairdo to his fashion sense to the spectacles perched on his nose. “He talks about you an awful lot.”

He could only hope his smile didn’t look too self-satisfied. “That makes sense. We work together closely, so he spends a lot of time around me.”

“Yeah, but it’s not really the way ya talk about a coworker. He doesn’t talk about his consigliere like that. Plus I saw how ‘close’ you two were this morning.” Some of the sweetness had faded from her voice since her earlier conversation with Angel.

“May I ask why that bothers you?” What about being involved with Angel is inherently a sin?

“It doesn’t,” she said unconvincingly. “Just makes me a little nervous how he’s trustin’ all these people he barely knows like they’re a real family.” There was nothing catty or snide in her tone; she genuinely just sounded worried.

“With all due respect,” Alastor started at length, “his ‘real’ family, present company excluded, have proven they aren’t all worth trusting.”

For the first time, he saw a distinct scowl crease her face. “What d’you know about it?”

“Only what Angel’s told me. I wouldn’t try to explain your own family to you, but my point is that this change of scenery—and company—has done him nothing but good.” He tried to be as gentle and unobtrusive as possible in noting all this, to make his point without making Molly feel attacked. Not an effort he would make for just anyone. “Doesn’t he seem happier to you?”

“I guess,” she mumbled, winding her hair tighter around her fingers. “But it’s not right, him bein’ away from home. It’s not where he belongs. Family’s supposed to stick together, especially families like ours.” There was a hint of nervous panic sneaking into her tone, as if these concerns had been building up all day but she’d been afraid to voice them to Angel. “What if somethin’ happens? What if he needs help and we’re not there? What if he gets hurt and I’m not around to take care of him?”

In some ways, her concern for Angel resembled his own more than, say, Cherri’s. She wasn’t aggressive or controlling. She didn’t act as if she knew what was best for her brother better than he did himself. She simply recognized that the world—especially the world her family lived in—was a dangerous one and wanted to be present to see him through it. Because she loved him.

That was a sentiment Alastor understood.

“You don’t have to worry about all that, my dear. I can promise you, as I’ve promised Angel: I won’t let him come to harm. Whatever it takes, for as long as I’m breathing, I’m going to keep him safe.” Alastor was almost surprised at the fervor with which he made these promises, but maybe he shouldn’t have been. The passion that burned in Angel was the sort that spread to anyone he touched.

“But. But if…” She was biting her lip again, her shoulders tense as she struggled to accept what she was hearing.

“I understand your concern. Truly. But please believe me when I say that here, among this group and in this role, is where he belongs.”

Molly took a slow breath, then gave a small nod. “I think you might be right.” She covered her eyes with one hand in what at first looked like a sign of frustration. Then her shoulders trembled slightly, her breath came out in a shuddering sigh, and Alastor realized with horror that she was crying. A bolt of panic shot through him as he tried to figure out what he’d done wrong and how on Earth he could fix it. This was the last thing he’d wanted!

“I. Er. I’m sorry, Molly. I didn’t mean—”

As luck would have it, this was the point at which Angel exited the office. He paused for a split-second, saw his sister in tears as Alastor hesitantly reached out to her, and rushed over in alarm to pull her close. “Hey, what’s wrong, passerotta? What happened?” Shooting a defensive glare at Alastor, he hissed, “What’d you do?”

While the demon was at a loss, unable to explain any part of the turn this conversation had just taken, Molly was shaking her head, trying to speak past her tears. “No, no. It’s not him, caro,” she managed, burying her face against Angel’s shoulder. “It’s me. I’m the one who… I-I was so worried about you, and he said you weren’t safe here—”

“Alastor?” Angel asked, confused, but she shook her head again.

“Papa.”

[39isabop-blog]

Somebody To Love

So this piece is for @fredthelegend‘s writing challenge. It’s based off the song “Somebody to Love.” It’s your wedding day to John Deacon and it’s going to be the sweetest :)

Word Count: 1800

Warnings: None, it’s total fluff

Also if you enjoy this, check out We Belong Together (Brian x Reader wedding)

You woke up in a cold sweat because your bed was empty. But then you remembered why. It was the morning of your wedding, and you and John had decided to spend the night separately. “It’s bad luck to see each other before the ceremony,” he winked.

It had only been one night, but you missed waking up to his cheeky gap-toothed grin. You roll over and notice that light is already streaming through your window. God, the apartment feels so empty without him. Roger, Brian, and Freddie threw him a stag night last night. You hoped it wasn’t too wild. Brian was really the only one who could control himself, and you hoped he was a good mother hen to the other three.

You turn on your bedside radio. Elton John’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” pours out tinny through the tiny speakers. John had brought the song home on a 45 after falling in love with it after Freddie forced him to listen to it. You had actually met Elton once, through Freddie. He was as delightful as you hoped he’d be. You sigh, and climb out of bed.

You weren’t sure whether you should get into your wedding dress straight away or what. You didn’t want bridesmaids to help you. This day was about you and John. One of the boys would be over to pick you up in an hour and a half or so. You go to your bathroom and do your makeup and hair, and then decide to get dressed. You had found the dress in a vintage market. It was a turn-of-the-century lacy gown, with a high neckline and puffy wrist-length sleeves. You modernized it, though, with a pair of platform sandals. Instead of a veil, you opted for a flower crown made of baby’s breath.

You had a bite to eat in the kitchen to calm your nerves before you heard someone honking violently outside. You peek through the drapes and see Roger pulled outside your flat in his candy apple red convertible. You gather your skirt in your arms and march outside.

“Morning, gorgeous,” Roger smiles when he sees you.

“Same to you,” you grin. Roger was wearing a grey suit (with tails, you might add) and white gloves, much to your amusement. However, his trademark sunglasses were still perched on the top of his head.

“Shame you didn’t choose me to be your bridesmaid,” Roger says.

“John called dibs on you. And I hate to say it, but Brian’s done a heck of a job as my maid of honor,” you laugh.

You had been friends with the boys since college. You went to the teacher’s college near Brian’s, and had met and became friends with him first. He had actually introduced you to John, thinking you’d be perfect for each other. Brian was never wrong, especially in this case.

Roger pulls up outside the hotel and helps you out of the car. He links his arm through your and you walk through the grand front doors into the lobby. The hotel still retained it’s 1920s glamour, from the art deco architecture to the gilded wallpaper. It was the site of your first nice date with John- he had taken you to the restaurant here. It was an expensive date, but John justified it by saying that you had put up with so many nights-in that you deserved something more, especially since “A Night At the Opera” was such a success.

This time, the entire hotel belonged to you. Freddie had insisted on buying the entire thing out just for you and Deacy. Your guests were able to stay the night before and after for free, and there was a penthouse-style suite for you and John to start your honeymoon in. For now, you made your way to the first ballroom, where the ceremony would take place.

You attempt to take a peek inside until you hear someone clearing their throat behind you. “Brian!” you jump slightly, startled.

“John told me that under no circumstances can you look in there until you are walking down the aisle,” he explains, taking your hand and guiding you to a bench in the lobby.

You both sit down. You were growing frustrated. It had been almost twenty-four hours since you had even seen John. It seemed like forever. You unclip your flower crown and lean your head into Brian’s arm. “I’m ready now!” you moan.

“There’s still at least another half hour, dear,” Brian pats your arm. “Can I do anything to make it go faster?”

“Yeah, tell me what John’s planning. I hardly know what to expect from my own wedding!”

Brian laughs, “That’s ironic, because he wanted to make it as stress-free for you as possible. He loves you so much that he wanted to take it upon himself to do everything to make it perfect for you. You heard his song for you, ‘You’re My Best Friend?’”

“Yeah, it’s the sweetest thing he’s ever done for me,” you sigh.

“Well, think of this wedding as ‘You’re My Best Friend,’ but times a hundred.”

You sit in silence with Brian for another few minutes before Roger peeks his head out of the ballroom and motions to you. You hear the swell of a string quartet, and a piano. Brian gives you his hand and helps you teeter to your feet on your platforms. He dashes inside the ballroom, leaving you alone in the lobby. This is it, you think.

You make your way towards the doors, and they open with a swoosh. Brian is at one door, Roger at the other. Guests, your family and friends, are seated in neat rows. Swaths of white silk and tulle drape elegantly from the ceiling, along with strands of fake pearls. Candles line the aisle, casting an intimate aura. You stand ready at the end of the aisle. Roger hands you a bouquet of white roses and takes your arm. Brian hooks his arm through your other elbow.

The music begins to play. It’s Freddie at the piano, but it’s a song you’ve never heard before. “Can anybody find me somebody to love?” he croons.

There’s a pause, and you lock eyes with John down the aisle. He’s wearing the same grey suit as Roger and Brian, but it looks stunning on him. It was tailored perfectly to him. His hair is neatly brushed, his spaniel ears, you teased him. His face is bright and eager, and he flashes you a huge smile, causing his eyes to crinkle.

Freddie resumes singing, “Each morning I get up I die a little…” You, Brian, and Roger begin your linked-arm march down the aisle.

“Can anybody find me somebody to love?” Freddie sings. Tears are already rolling down your face, and the ceremony hasn’t even officially started!

When you get to the end of the aisle, you realize that it’s just you and John. There’s no officiant. Your mind races, but then John begins saying, “Today is the day for just me and you. We’ve called these guests to witness us marrying each other, but we don’t need someone else to make it official for us. I have loved you for years now, and I’m ready to dedicate my life to you. Will you do this with me? Will you spend your life with me?”

“Yes!” you chirp, as if you couldn’t get the word out of your mouth any faster. “John, I love you so much. I love you beyond life itself. My life wouldn’t be a millionth of what it is if I didn’t have you. We’re a team, we take on the world together. Bad or good, let it come at us.”

John shuffles around in his pockets and pulls out two rings. He hands you the larger one. “Okay, we’re going to put these rings on each other at the same time.”

You put out your hand and slip the ring on John’s, as he does the same to you. You lean in and kiss, hard and slow. The guests erupt into applause, and you break apart, grinning. Freddie resumes the piano, playing “You’re My Best Friend.”

You two march down the aisle, and John leads you into the second ballroom, set up for your lunch reception. A dance floor seems to take up most of the room in the room, surrounded by round tables dripping with white roses. It’s just the two of you in the room. John takes your hand and twirls you on the dance floor even though there’s no music playing. You know the music’s in his head.

Roger, Brian and Freddie burst through the doors. Roger pops a bottle of champagne, accidentally spilling it all over the carpet. You just laugh. Nothing, not even spilt champagne could take you down from your high. The rest of the guests fill in, avoiding the wet spot on the floor.

Before lunch begins, there’s a round of toasts. Roger begins, “To the happy couple! May they enjoy much tranquility and peace, because God knows John doesn’t get enough of that around the band. Kidding aside, I wish you years of happiness and marital bliss.”

Brian stands next, raising his glass, “I take full responsibility for their happiness. As many of you know, I introduced them. Now I expect to be the godfather of your first child. It’s what you owe me.”

Finally, Freddie raised a whole bottle of champagne for his toast, “There’s an old wives’ tale that the number of ribbons you break while unwrapping your wedding gifts is the number of children you’ll have. Well, I’m just letting you know that I’ve wrapped my gifts entirely in ribbons.”

This elicits a roar of laughter from your guests, and another round of applause. John glances at you with a sheepish grin, and you smile back. You both desperately want children soon, and make no secret of it. Obviously, Freddie picked up on that.

After a small lunch, it’s time to cut the wedding cake. Brian smiles and hands you a pack of guitar strings. “What are we supposed to do with these?” you ask.

“Well, pull out a string. You take one end, John takes the other, and you slice the cake with it!” Brian explains with a shrug. “It was Freddie’s idea, actually. We all thought it was sweet.”

You grin and you and John do as Brian instructed. The cake gets cut neatly in half, and then you cut the top layer into smaller pieces. You and John grab forks and take a bite of cake for each other. You feed each other the cake, but pieces fall out of your mouth and frosting sticks to your cheek. John leans in and kisses off the frosting.

“I’m so lucky that I’ve found somebody to love,” he whispers.

[oscartheproletariat]

Spring Breaking My Media Usage

I decided to track my media interactions for the week of spring break. It was not hard at all as I do not watch television as it is always being used by one of my 7 other family members, I do not listen to radio because it is always playing uninteresting music and shows on most stations, and being that it was spring break I did not use a computer as I wanted nothing to remind me of school for the week.

Instead I used my phone (as I always have) for everything. I have both the Hulu and the Netflix and those apps keep me entertained with my favorite animes such as “My Hero Academia”, “Attack on Titan”, and “One Punch Man”. My phone also works as my radio as I play my favorite music from the spotify app in the car, as well as my favorite podcast from Apple's podcast app. Podcast such as “Chapo Trap House”, “Opening Arguments”, And “Last Podcast on The Left”. My phone also works as my news source as I use the youtube app to watch my favorite political shows such as the David Pakman Show, the Majority Report with Sam Seder, and the Young Turks. Twitter also helps me stay on top about what is going on in the world since if there is anything noteworthy people will soon start tweeting about it giving their opinion on the subject. Twitter is also where I go for laughs as there is always something funny like a political pundit getting dunked on for being an all around bad person, or a tweet about a funny experience in someone’s life.

Being that it was spring break week and there also was a Rock-a-Billy Convention where I work, this week’s media usage was very different to most weeks. I was booked for 10 hour shifts everyday, and most of my freetime I spent sleeping in as I was terribly tired from the amount of work I had to do all day.

Thanks to my phone itself having a feature called “Screen Time” I have a far more detailed graph about exactly what I spent doing on my phone for spring break. According to the graph I spent 38 hours and 12 minutes using my phone for the entire week, averaging out at 5 hours and 27 minutes per day. 16 hours and 36 minutes of that were spent social networking, 13 hours and 47 minutes were spent on entertainment, and only 52 minutes of the entire week were spent on productivity.

To me this does say a lot, in fact it is quite shocking. I have always tried to make my time on the phone as productive as possible. When I started college all of my papers would mostly be written on the google docs app, in fact part of this paper is written on that app. And before that I had an instagram account that essentially worked as a blog in which I wrote my thoughts about various topics, which now I know did in fact help with strengthening my writing and learning as a joint study between University of California, Berkeley and a company named Digital Learning found after interviewing and observing 800 teenagers and young adults that some of them used the opportunities created by social media to explore their interests and become as educated or talented in a subject as they can possibly be, no longer held back by the rigid learning systems of a school (M. Ito and H. Horst 2008).

I do concede that I have strayed away from an academic mindset and have become vested in watching all the sitcoms I always thought were a waste of time. In the last few months I have seen all seasons of “the Office”, all seasons of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”, and all seasons of “Community”. A Syracuse University study by researcher Lesley Pena does point to binge watching giving the viewer escape gratification in a much better way than moderate watching of a series does (Pena 2015) so this may be part of the reason I started using my phone more for entertainment for than for academic purposes as it helped distract me from all the bad things going on with my life.

Having said that, I really do think my phone has been more so a force for good in my life than bad, while older people are claiming it is making the younger generation more depressed, there really is not any evidence to support that notion. A study concerning 190 adolescents of an average age of 18.9 found that there actually was no link between social media usage and clinical depression (Jelenchick 2013). Still people will links these things together, partly I do believe it is fear, not just of new things, but fear of what we can do with this. We can organize protests, warn people about something that is going to happen, and get people fired from their jobs for being heinous people. This does not sit well with older people so they will seek to make social media seem to be the worst thing possible.

Given all these thoughts on my media usage it may seem like what I should do next is cut down on the use of it, but I do not think that is the best course of action. Instead using my time more productively should be a priority for me. I do everything on my phone, it allows me to finish assignments from anywhere, learn something new everyday, and better myself at a hobby in a matter of minutes just based on what I use it for.

Work Cited

Ito, M., & Horst, H. (2008, November). Living and Learning with New Media: Summary ... Retrieved April 23, 2019, from http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-WhitePaper.pdf

Jelenchick, L. A. (2013, January). “Facebook Depression?” Social Networking Site Use and Depression in Older Adolescents. Retrieved April 23, 2019, from http://lp7lc5er8n.scholar.serialssolutions.com/?sid=google&auinit=LA&aulast=Jelenchick&atitle=“Facebook depression?” Social networking site use and depression in older adolescents&id=doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2012.05.008&title=Journal of adolescent health&volume=52&issue=1&date=2013&spage=128&issn=1054-139X

Pena, L. L. (2015, June). Breaking Binge: Exploring The Effects Of Binge Watching On Television Viewer Reception. Retrieved April 23, 2019, from https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1283&context=etd

[topweeklyupdate]

TØP Weekly Update #56: I’m So High (7/27/2018)

I’m still adjusting to Twenty One Pilots once again being a regular part of my day-to-day life. Just when things look like they might be settling down, Tyler Joseph jumps back onto our timelines with more Quality Content to carry us through to the next album, the next tour, and whatever else is on the horizon for our favorite band. Let’s pick apart this week in Twenty One Pilots news together, shall we?

This Week’s TØPics:

“Nico and the Niners” Video Drops

Tickets to the Bandito Tour Go Straight to the Secondary Market, the Clique is Real Sad About It

“Jumpsuit” Soars to #1 at Alternative (and Other Chart News)

And More! 

Major News and Announcements:

The biggest news from the last week was yesterday’s surprise release of the music video for “Nico and the Niners”, which came out with no dmaorg.info buildup or any other cryptic nonsense to prepare me for how much I had to write last night. 

Announced as the second of a trilogy of music videos telling the Trench storyline, this video depicts Tyler inside of Dema itself. Shot in what appears to be Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev, Ukraine (not coincidentally the first concert date on the Europen leg of the Bandito Tour), this video gives us our first clear picture of the community that Clancy’s been telling us about for months now. 

As Reddit detectives discovered two weeks ago in the background of a few shots in “Jumpsuit”, Dema is nestled in the middle of that gorgeous and wild Icelandic countryside. The walled city is laid out (more or less) exactly how the dmaorg.info map suggested. It looks run-down and exceptionally gray (matching the clothing of all its non-bishop denizens), with the only direct light coming from strange florescent strips and tubes. These light sources seem to be created by the bishops themselves in weird religious ceremonies involving glassblowing and waving their arms around in an impression of Michael Phelps getting really lost on dry land. One important note: it seems like the bishops are making much more than just weird art installations...

The video narrative depicts Tyler in his small Dema apartment packing up his belongings (notably the yellow flowers from “Jumpsuit” and the red beanie and white sunglasses of the Blurryface Era) and preparing to escape Dema with the help of the torch-wielding Banditos. When the group meets up, Josh removes his mask; Tyler and Josh smile at each other like gosh darn angels and perform the full secret handshake, marking the first time that we’ve seen the duo physically together outside that single promotional photo since 2018. I’m still crying about it.

The Banditos set up a drum kit and hand Tyler a microphone, and the band perform the song, literally starting a concert that draws the bishops out of their weird little church service. The Banditos flee through ad underground tunnel, with Tyler leaving his jumpsuit behind so two Dema children can find it and be inspired by the sign of yellow. As the band marches into the light, the Banditos attach more yellow duct tape to Tyler’s clothes, demonstrating that the costuming is a deliberate choice and not just the results of cutting costuming budgets.

The Clique has asked a lot of questions about where precisely in the timeline this video falls and what it means for the Trench storyline as a whole. It is pretty easy to read this as coming directly after “Jumpsuit”, with Tyler being rescued by the Banditos he met in that video. However, others have suggested that this is set before Tyler’s failed escape attempt due to the lack of a cut on his nose, leaving open the possibility that Tyler did in fact die in the “Jumpsuit” video, gripping onto a wild flower that reminded him of those he had previously collected by other means within the city. I honestly don’t know how much I buy that- How would Tyler have gotten separated from the other Banditos by the events of “Jumpsuit”?- but I’d be very excited to see if the third video in this trilogy fills the gap and explains how Tyler wound up lying unconscious in the middle of Trench.

The other pertinent question is how this entire narrative relates to our boy Clancy. Tyler appears to be acting out the distraction Clancy described creating several weeks ago, which would make sense if this was a prequel to “Jumpsuit”... but it also doesn’t make sense, because Clancy described the distraction as a signal for attracting the Banditos into the city in the first place, not something that they planned themselves. This discrepancy could just be choked up to an error on Tyler’s part, but I’ve known this kid too long- he cares about his art too much for those kinds of errors.

My theory? This is set before “Jumpsuit”- and also set before Clancy’s escape attempt. Perhaps Tyler initially sought out Dema as a place of temporary refuge, was forbidden from leaving, and then was rescued by his friends and family? Perhaps the band’s performance and them leaving behind their instruments/ jumpsuits alerted Clancy to the possibility of escape in the first place? Maybe Clancy is the kid, or one of the parishioners? I don’t know, man, but I’m pumped to see where this story leads when we get a new video (and a new song) in just a few weeks. (Just please don’t make us wait until Trench comes out.)

In other, potentially less exciting news: this time last week, tickets for the upcoming Bandito Tour were just going on sale. Now... they’re pretty much all gone, at least from the direct-from-source market. Thousands of fans logged onto Ticketmaster at 10 am to grab some tickets priced from $60-$80, waited in a virtual line for half an hour, and were left with only a few scattered seats in the nosebleeds priced at Platinum rates of as much as $500. Even while several sources tried to spin the news of near-complete Day One sell-outs as pointing to the passion of the fanbase, it was pretty apparent to everyone that the vast majority of the purchased tickets did not go to people excited to see their favorite artists, but rather to bot accounts set up by scalpers- StubHub, Seat Geek, and similar websites are filled to bursting with secondhand tickets being offered at double or triple the original listed price.

In all honesty, I’m not sure how we fix this problem moving forward. Ticketmaster and concert promoters truthfully have no incentive to say no to guaranteed sales of all their tickets; if anything, it just encourages them to continue to raise prices. The only way scalpers would stop investing their resources in huge shows like this is if the US followed the lead of several European countries and passed legislation banning the practice or if scalpers had reason to believe that they couldn’t resell most of the tickets for at least slightly-above market “value”. In major markets, there are certainly 20,000 folks rich enough to drop a couple hundred dollars on a night out, so the latter seems unlikely; Twenty One Pilots will keep getting bought out until Josh’s nightmare of only fifteen people in the crowd really comes true.

Another way things could change is if multiple A-list artists really put their foot down on a populist stance that $80 a ticket will make everyone plenty enough money and that they won’t work with companies that don’t invest in defending against bots. And, no, that’s just never gonna happen. Perhaps Tyler and Josh could one day expand the pre-sale program so that every die-hard fan who wants one can access and afford a ticket before bots can get to it, bu that just carries the problem of potentially excluding people based on their fandom instead of their bank account. Sadly, that’s still the only hope I can see on the distant horizon. 

If you did not get tickets, be on the lookout for giveaways and keep watching for the secondary market prices to drop to more reasonable levels as the show date nears and the scalper becomes more desperate to recoup their investment. Godspeed.

Chart Performance:

After their return last week was slightly dampened by the mid-week release date, the band continued to see their new tracks rise up the Billboard charts. With a full seven days of sales and radio play, “Jumpsuit” rose up to #1 at Alternative, the fastest a song has reached that peak since Green Day’s “Know Your Enemy” nearly a decade ago. “Jumpsuit” gained at most every chart save for sales, which we already knew would be front-loaded in the modern marketplace. In its first full release week, “Jumpsuit” gained airplay and moved up to the third most streamed rock song (passing all of the band’s legacy tracks from Blurryface). All this allowed the song to move up ten spots to #50 on the overall Hot 100 (coincidentally the same position the track debuted on the UK charts last Friday).

That’s not to imply that “Nico” didn’t get any action prior to the release of its music video. It also predictably sunk in sales and still isn’t getting significant radio play compared to its brother, but it was still the fifth best streaming rock song of the week (again passing “Stressed Out” and company) and managed to ride those seven full days of data to a #79 debut on the overall Hot 100.

So what can we take from all those numbers? I’m still entirely not sure. I can’t emphasize enough how important having the full week of data has on the songs’ performance. Chart forecasters projected last week that “Jumpsuit” would rise far more than ten spots on the Hot 100 thanks to all those extra days, and it’s hard to not see it as looking a little front-loaded. However, seeing concept rock songs as decidedly non-mainstream as these two tracks on the Hot 100 is both a huge breath of fresh air and a definite accomplishment in itself. I can’t imagine anyone at Fueled By Ramen headquarters being displeased with securing an Alternative #1- the band is still unquestionably the crown jewel of the label’s current lineup. 

I don’t believe “Nico” will stick around on the Hot 100- it’s definitely really weird- but “Jumpsuit” still has a few weeks to gain traction, and the steadily improving radio play seems promising. We’ll just have to wait and see how the songs do next week. 

Power to the local dreamer.

|-/

[kiruuuuu]

Making out like a Bandit Part 1/3

Jäger needs help and Bandit is there for the rescue. Both of them are roughly in their mid-20s in this. I guess it’s an origin story? Third part contains all the goodies :) (Rating T, fluff/a bit of angst? maybe?, ~3.6k words)

.

“So, we met through your brother, that’s probably easiest since it’s also true. Was it on the job? Did we stumble into each other at some point, did we go to the same party and he introduced us?” Marius’ brain is quick-firing possible scenarios, providing both reasonable as well as inane ones as he overtakes an idiot who really should be in the right lane yet refuses to switch over, blocking the middle lane completely. As soon as he’s past him, he accelerates the car and his thoughts simultaneously.

“Dude, relax, you’re driving like a madman”, says the person sprawling next to him, the seat moved all the way back so he can stretch out his long jeans-clad legs. “You’re putting way too much thought into this. Don’t you want to come off as natural?”

“Most of all, I want to come off as reasonable”, he replies quietly but lays off the gas a little nonetheless. He’s been useless for the past few days, drowning in a sea of worries and what-ifs and increasingly ridiculous scenarios, switching so rapidly from eerie calm to extreme tension over something that shouldn’t mean this much to him yet does. He barely ate, considered cancelling the entire thing several times but knew he had to go through with it. Had to.

“I can do reasonable”, the guy agrees easily and flashes him an open grin. He’s an odd one, that much is clear, there was definitely some hesitation when he was suggested to Marius even if he’s not adept at pinpointing what exactly it is that feels slightly off about the other young man. One thing helps a little with his frayed nerves at least: he cleaned up nicely. When they initially met to discuss a few details, the guy called Dominic showed up with an impressive stubble, well-worn clothes, bed hair and a sour attitude where now he’s dressed in clean trousers and a freshly-ironed, subtly-patterned shirt. He’s shaved, looks like he even styled his hair and applied an undeniably attractive cologne that put Marius on edge immediately as soon as he caught a whiff of it.

To be very honest, he’s stunning. He looks like someone whom Marius would notice in a club, on the street, in the supermarket, instantly obsess about and possibly dream of but never interact with for fear of blunt rejection purely because he’s so far out of Marius’ league. His jaw could cut glass, his hazelnut eyes are piercing and his broad chest looks perfect to rest one’s head on, his toned body and his height are just an added bonus. He moves with a mesmerising confidence that Marius both admires and deeply envies. There’s only one problem with the entire situation: He’s straight.

“Okay, so, let’s decide on maybe the first date and first impressions, how about -”

“I love this song”, Dominic interrupts him mid-sentence, doesn’t pretend to be apologetic about turning up the volume of the radio and even starts singing along a little. “What’s your uncle like? He means a lot to you, right?”

Marius has to raise his voice to fight against the music now. “He does, yeah. He raised me after both my parents died when I was still a kid.”

“Oh shit.” The volume is lowered considerably again, the effect almost humorous, quelling Marius’ rising irritation right away. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright. He did a fantastic job regardless. He’s one of the greatest people I know, dedicated to his work, honest and smart, I have nothing but respect for him.”

“Then it makes sense – I was wondering why you’d care what your uncle thinks of you being gay.”

Marius just answers with a strained smile.

.

It’s one of the worst ideas he’s ever heard, not only because he despises lying but also because lying to his family is something at which he’s always been terrible. His friends could pretend to be ignorant about the fate of the freshly baked cookies even with crumbs around their mouths whereas he basically confessed to wanting to eat one before he even does. Additionally, it means he’d have to get another person involved for which he’s entirely unprepared, so at first, he discards the suggestion despite the fact it worked out reasonably well for the guy telling him about it.

And reasonably well in this case means that the person pretending to be his friend’s boyfriend so he didn’t have to come out to his parents all alone actually caught the knife thrown at the poor sap in mid-air, shielded him bodily from further harm and offered to stay the night to ensure he’s fine. The two of them are still dating, which Marius supposes is wonderful for them yet he can’t get over the haunted look in his friend’s eyes as he recounts how he was basically expelled from his own family.

Still, he refuses to entertain the notion for a year during which he very carefully chooses which places to frequent just in case someone who might snitch to his own family runs into him making out with yet another mediocre-looking dude who’s indubitably more interested in Jäger’s lower head than anything he has to say. At some point, he gets sick of it and decides to make the jump, to at least let his uncle know why he wanted to own a skirt even if he never put it on in public as a child, why he insisted on watching each and every cowboy film on TV as well as most football matches (even though he hates football) and why his first attempts at dating girls went so horribly wrong.

He’s probably a coward. Dragging someone else into this extremely personal matter just so they can offer moral support is nothing but selfish, he knows this, and yet it’s reassuring to know he won’t be alone. There’s absolutely no chance his uncle is going to react like his friend’s family in any way but despite this, having someone there who will possibly share the weight of disappointment and disgust so it doesn’t weigh him down as heavily is too tempting to dismiss the prospect. He asks around in his circle of friends, some of which immediately offer to do it themselves but Marius is close enough with his uncle that most of them have met him and even introduced their wives, so they’re out of the question.

Eventually, Cedrick speaks up.

Cedrick is someone who’s usually drifting at the edge of Marius’ vision, a friend of a friend of a friend, popular and hard-working though he has a reputation for being a little strange, sometimes even callous. He’s loud due to genuine confidence in the fact that people want to hear what he has to say, Marius is loud to mask the fact that he assumes no one cares – the end result is similar, however, and so they don’t interact very often whenever they’re stationed together. When Cedrick approaches him one day and mentions having heard about his troubles, Marius steels himself in expectancy of a vaguely hurtful joke though ends up pleasantly surprised when all he receives is encouragement and sympathy. It turns out that both of them assumed they disliked each other, so after an awkward conversation to clear everything up, Cedrick mentions his twin brother who’s visiting the Ruhr area at the moment and that he’s probably spontaneous enough to go through with Marius’ plan.

Dominic really does share a lot of similarities with his brother but is actually more burly, visually more intimidating and, unfortunately, gorgeous. There’s something about his demeanour that sets him apart from Cedrick, ensures they won’t be confused – Marius would be hard pressed to identify what exactly it is but he notices an uncomfortable attraction with which he’s too familiar. Handsome straight guys are the source of equally many broken hearts as desperate jerk off sessions, they’re the bane of Marius’ existence and the one mistake he keeps making. He doesn’t learn and as much as he hates lying to others, he’s a master at lying to himself.

.

The entire car ride, which takes longer than the usual hour due to traffic, he’s careful to keep his eyes on the road instead of the impressive figure next to him but even so, he’s not impervious to their ongoing conversation. Dominic seems unwilling to dwell on Marius’ game plan, instead jumps from topic to topic, sometimes based on a car plate he spots or a news story being discussed on the radio, though more often than not entirely at random. He appreciates the distraction and finds his voluntary companion to be an interesting and interested talker though when they arrive, he wishes they’d chatted more about what kind of plot they’re going to act out as soon as they enter the house. He feels entirely unprepared.

“I don’t think I can do this”, he says, his stomach in knots upon him laying eyes on the home in which he grew up, the four walls that are heavy with memories. It used to be a safe haven, a place of freedom and comfort in which he never felt wrong. He does now, sharply and suddenly, all the possible ramifications of his impending confession flooding him at once. His uncle always told him he didn’t need other children if he’s got him and what used to sound lovely to his ears now creates a lump in his throat.

“Can I call you sweetcheeks?” The unexpected question startles a short laugh out of him that shakes him out of his downward spiral of unproductive thoughts and he smiles at Dominic, grateful for the comment. “What’s the worst that could happen, hm?”

“He disowns, insults and assaults me”, Marius shoots back matter-of-factly.

“What’s the best case scenario?”

For this, he needs to think a moment. “He accepts me as I am and even supports me.”

“And what’s most likely going to happen? Probably somewhere in the middle, right?” His uncle loves him and if previous altercations are anything to go by, he’s not a confrontational person at all. Reluctantly, he nods which turns out to be a mistake because now Dominic is beaming at him with the force of a thousand suns. “There you go. It’ll be fine. I’ll hold your hand during, if you like, and you can cry on me until my shirt’s soaked afterwards, but right now, you got shit to do. You got this. Let’s go.”

Marius finally understands why Cedrick roped his brother into this instead of volunteering himself – Dominic is proving to be an absolute sweetheart.

.

“It’s good to see you, come in, come in. Who’s this?”, his uncle pats his arm as he slips past him into the familiar house and then shakes Dominic’s hand. “Hello, I’m Helmut.”

“Dominic Brunsmeier, a pleasure. You can call me Dom, everyone does”, Marius’ companion responds politely and shuts the door behind him. They’ve come this far so Marius decides to takes the next logical step.

“Dinner is almost ready, you can sit down in the kitchen.” The fact that he doesn’t question Dom’s presence and instead accepts him into his home without protest simply because it was Marius who brought him along stings a little – he’s so unsuspecting.

“Actually, there’s something I’d like to talk about beforehand. Can we…?” His uncle seems surprised but ushers them to the living room nonetheless and this is where the reality of what’s happening finally catches up with Marius who is eternally grateful that he at least made it to the sofa before his legs give in. He can feel his heart pounding in his temples and while it does help, it doesn’t do much to have Dom by his side until he sits down right next to him, their thighs touching, his hand brushing over Marius’, thumb running over his knuckles for a brief moment. It centres him in a way, allows him a brief respite to take a deep breath and prepare himself mentally once more, just like he’s done every day during the previous week.

This is him. His uncle deserves to know about this because it’s a large part of him, his future and past, and leaving him in the dark just doesn’t seem fair. This is who he is and he can’t, won’t change anything about it – and this realisation helps. He’s content with himself. And even if his uncle might not be, it’s ultimately less important than his own opinion of himself.

He hesitantly leads up to it, speaks deliberately and has rehearsed most of it before, and while he probably only voices a couple of sentences, it feels like he’s talking for an eternity which is reassuring because his uncle hates interrupting people – so as long as he’s talking, he’s fine. He forces himself to stop, closes his mouth, resists the urge to squirm in his seat, to inspect the room to find something to comment on, switch the topic. Dom next to him is silent, a few of his fingers stroking Marius’ leg out of view in support. He hasn’t felt this vulnerable in a while, it’s as if he willingly presented a weak spot to someone with a weapon and trust is the only thing keeping him from flinching.

His uncle seems pensive. Not disappointed – not yet –, not angry or confused but Marius expects the quiet thinking to tip over into any of those soon. Instead, he looks at Dom. “Am I right in assuming you’re together?” Dom, the utter angel, simply nods and agrees. “Then you can consider yourself a very lucky man.”

His face lights up once more. “I do.”

Marius just stares. Not only did his uncle just use the informal “you”, reserved for family and friends, he also – what sort of reaction is that? “Wait -”

“How long have you wanted to let me know? Don’t tell me you worried yourself sick over this, your cousin’s gay.”

Now his eyes are almost bulging out of their sockets. “What?”

“From your dad’s side. Markus. Did you never – well, I guess you didn’t. I just hope I’ve made enough food. You really should’ve told me you’d bring a guest. You’re planning on staying, right, Dom? I’d like to get to know you better.”

“I’d be delighted”, Dom replies and sounds nothing but genuine.

And Marius just looks back and forth between the two, trying to process what just happened.

.

Dinner is entirely surreal and Marius feels like a complete and utter fool the entire time. The first half is spent on him answering his uncle’s questions about when he knew, what his experiences have been like so far and he’s forced to disclose all of it with Dom watching him with a small smirk and dear God Dom is probably judging him so hard internally because he made such a big deal out of it and it turned out to be absolutely nothing to worry about. A few times, he has to interrupt his uncle before he starts with the really embarrassing stories (though Dom subtly tries to guide the conversation back to them, as if Marius wouldn’t notice). It’s domestic and lovely and decidedly strange.

The rest of it is spent on Dom and this is where the whole thing might crumble. Marius completely missed the point where he could sensibly tell his uncle what’s up and is now stuck in this pretend relationship that threatens to blow up any second but the longer they talk, the more apparent it becomes that Dom knows exactly what he’s doing. It turns out he’s using all the topics they’ve discussed on the way here to drop natural-seeming remarks that imply how well he knows Marius, and though he disagrees with some of the “relationship” details that Marius brings up, it only serves to strengthen the front they’re putting up because they end up bickering like a real couple.

“Oh, you have a twin?”, his uncle asks curiously at some point and Dom nods.

“We both joined the BGS at the same time, yeah. Sometimes we dress the same to see whether Marius will end up holding the wrong person’s hand but so far, he’s behaved very well.” He winks at Marius, making him blush and his uncle laugh.

“You’re not that similar, actually”, he replies begrudgingly and adds, before he can help himself: “Y ou’re more handsome.”

“I’m beginning to understand why you suddenly developed such a passion for sports when you got that new teacher all the girls were fawning over”, his uncle muses but Marius can barely hear him due to Dom’s smile eclipsing pretty much everything around him. This was a terrible mistake. All of this was a mistake.

After they’ve eaten – and though it was nothing special, it tasted of home regardless – Marius shoos his uncle away, insisting that they’ll take care of the dishes since he never bothered to buy a dishwasher. As soon as he’s out of earshot, he murmurs: “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know he’d take it this well and now you have to -”

“Don’t be ridiculous, this is hysterical. I’m having the time of my life, sweetcheeks”, comes the easy response and Dom actually does sound like he’s enjoying himself immensely.

“Call me that again and I’ll slap you with the wet towel.”

“Oh, is that what you’re into?” He chuckles at Marius’ exasperated expression that partly stems from the fact that Dom is playing his role a little too well. Weirdly enough, he seamlessly fits into his life, he’s witty, charming and sincere, his humour aligning perfectly with his and even his uncle’s and right now, he looks completely at ease, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and him almost elbow deep in dishwater. He’s gone from someone whom Marius would admire from afar to someone about whom he’d daydream – like waking up next to him, cuddling while watching TV. Only he has the bonus of being really, really hot. His lower arms, despite being halfway obscured with foam, look more than strong enough to hold him down and - “Really though, I’m happy for you. And I like your uncle.”

And his uncle likes him, which is a whole new problem. Because he’ll have to find an excuse as for why Dom isn’t in his life anymore the next time he visits and that means more lies on top of the ones that are currently stacking up. At least his biggest worry is gone now and he won’t have to hide such a fundamental part of himself anymore, which got rid of the worst knots in his stomach – but his uncle finding out Marius expected him to react so negatively that he made up a boyfriend remains a fear of his still.

“Hey. Cheer up.” He turns his head to answer only to find Dom’s face right in front of his and then he kisses him, nothing spectacular, just a short peck on the lips before he returns to his task but a kiss nonetheless. Habit kicks in and he involuntarily chases him, earns another blinding smile and a second kiss, yet this time neither of them withdraw and it’s an awkward angle, Dom’s arm is in the way, they both seem unsure about committing and it’s perfect, it’s quiet and unexpected and shy but Dom smells heavenly, his composed and supportive presence is doing wonders to Marius’ soul and all he wants to do is to snog him senseless, until the water is cold, until the sun goes down, until his uncle checks on them. He takes note of his smooth cheeks, the long eyelashes gently curving, the specks of gold in his honeyed irises; they tilt their heads and eyelids flutter and someone clears his throat behind them.

Marius jolts, barely stops himself from jumping away from Dom, reminding himself he’s supposed to be doing this, whirls around and feels warmth creep into his face at the amused expression on his uncle’s face. “Do you boys want to stay for the game? The BVB is going to play Schalke into the ground – hopefully.”

Okay, no, this has already gone too far and with him almost making out with Dom he’s straying uncomfortably far into dangerous territory. Besides, he can’t stand football, which is the perfect excuse for them leaving as soon as possible. He’s adamant on not ruining things with Dom so his budding friendship with Cedrick doesn’t get tarnished, not to mention the fact that he’s probably provided the twins with enough ammunition for blackmail to last them a lifetime. “Thank you, but I think we’ll -”

“Sure.” His mouth snaps shut and his head whips around to Dom who doesn’t even have the decency to return his gaze. “Another Dortmund fan, hm? I can get behind that as long as it’s against Schalke, we have a common enemy.”

A broad grin is Dom’s reward for such a betrayal. “That’s what I like to hear. Marius, if you don’t want to watch it, you can do me another favour. The model helicopter I bought a few months ago is broken again and I’ve had trouble fixing it. It’s in the garage.”

He barely resists the urge to glare at the utterly unapologetic man next to him. “No, it’s okay, I’ll join you. I’d rather make sure you don’t tell him any embarrassing things about me.”

His uncle dramatically puts on a mock hurt expression. “What, me? I’d never, cheese weasel.”

And while Dom snickers into the dishes, Marius’ face gets even hotter.

[gutterdreams]

The Chain Pt 1 [Billy Hargrove]

Disclaimer: READ THIS FIRST. Or don’t. But I wrote this based on something very personal to me and on my own life experience to some degree. I still can’t believe I’ve been as honest as I have been. So, yeah that’s a good disclaimer. It’s also good if you’re someone who likes to be aware of content that may trigger. Word Count: 3.8 k MASTERLIST

It had surprised you how the world around you kept moving while you laid on the dirty and cold living room floor stained with your own tears and vomit. It wasn’t as if you were all that sure what you were going to do anyway and Billy wasn’t exactly supportive either. He made his feelings very clear the moment he saw the strip was pink. Of course, that was two years ago and a lot had changed since you miscarried at eight weeks. You had been in the middle of a shift at work, rounding a client’s free edge when the warmth underneath your skirt, between your jeans came as a striking surprise. While petite, the red stain was violent as it moved through your blue underwear. Even though you knew what was happening long before the cramps began to grope at your hips, you didn’t move. You finished the manicure, you asked your client when she wanted to re-book, and told her to have a great trip to Boca. It wasn’t until the nurse asked for your partner’s contact information and you said ‘Billy’ that what had happened clicked. The car ride home was silent. Billy opted not to turn on the radio for once and just drove home to the sound of traffic outside, his tires against the rain soaked pavement, droplets greeting the windshield, and your occasional sigh that sounded heavy enough to shift the Earth. 

He glanced at your legs hidden underneath a pair of his navy sweatpants. The nurse had told him to bring you a change of clothes and that was what he managed to find after staring helplessly at the unfolded laundry in the hamper on the bed you two shared. He grabbed one of your tank tops from your top drawer as well, but you stayed in the same black Lycra top you had worn to the salon. He didn’t know what to say. You hadn’t said anything to him since he arrived at the hospital to see you in a paper thin white white gown, your legs dangling over the edge, and your face directed to the chipped pink polish on your toes. He just ran a a cold dry hand down the back of your head and kissed the part in your hair. “We can do whatever you want tonight.” Billy said softer than you had ever heard him speak before, soft enough that you looked away from the parking lot he was pulling into to make sure that it actually came from him. He drove right into the spot that belonged to him and heard you sigh again. Each time, it felt like tight knuckles jabbing into his abdomen. He wished there was something he could do, but he knew there wasn’t. The best thing he could was let you pick the TV show you pretend to watch, the meal you pushed around your plates, and anything else. “It’s fine.” You lied so naturally that it sounded believable. You reached around to your side and unbuckled your seat belt and then picked up the canvas straps of the tote bag you always took with you on the bus to and from work. “You don’t have to pretend you’re not relieved.” With one leg heading out the door, just missing a puddle, you verbally shook him and then pushed yourself the rest of the way out of the car. It burned like cheap whiskey down his throat, like a bad hit from a dirty bong, like an open wound sliding against jagged pavement. Billy stayed completely still behind the wheel and watched you through his rear view, walking to the back door of the apartment building. His mouth was open and trying to release all the steam in his body that was collecting from an overload of emotions. No, he hadn’t wanted you to keep the baby, but not because he didn’t want to have children with you. He just wasn’t ready. It wasn’t even slightly on his mind. He had just started getting full time hours with the roofing company he was on with, your hours seemed to be dwindling at the salon, bills were almost always paid late, you shared a one bedroom apartment in Fremont, California, and you two had only just stopped fighting every day after a long span of barking down each others throats due to stress and jealousy. It just wasn’t the right time. Billy didn’t know if or when he would want children, he just knew that he didn’t want to have a baby right now. Suddenly, watching you walk away with the depressing burden you were carrying on your shoulders alone, he felt his stomach drop and his face prune inward. He pictured a little boy with curls like his, a chin like yours, and tiny fat feet and he cried. Billy sat alone in the car for forty five minutes and cried while you laid on the living room floor and sobbed hard enough to make yourself sick. While it took you days to actually acknowledge the rays sneaking between the pulled blinds of yours and Billy’s bedroom, every day the sun rose and people would get up, put their feet on the ground, and go about their lives. Since it was a slow time of year at the salon, you were able to take two days off to yourself without any annoyance from anyone. Billy, on the other hand, woke up to you crying into your pillowcase before his alarm went off, rubbed your back and rested against your shoulder before going to his job every morning. He would return in the evening and you would be up, in thrown on clothes that resembled an outfit, and have forced yourself to make dinner. It wasn’t as if Billy was useless, but since he was the one working all day, you felt a sense of obligation. You were too aware of how empty you were inside now and feelings of guilt seemed to fill the void at every opportunity. They didn’t need another reason to grow inside you. It wasn’t as if you had anything to do anyway. The apartment was clean enough, every television show had a pregnancy or family storyline, you weren’t showering, and music didn’t make you feel anything. Preparing dinner was safe even if you had no appetite. Now and again, you two would fight and the apartment would become an unorganized battle ground of Billy’s fists hitting the counter and your screaming tears lashing out at him, making him feel to blame for something that was your body’s decision, accusing him of being happy. You would stomp out into the hallway with him pulling on your sleeves to come back or he would sleep on the couch, but somewhere by the end of the next day, you two would apologize and vow to talk about it from now on instead of fight. The problem was that Billy never wanted to talk about it. It already hurt so much and talking about it only made it more raw for him. It was routine like this that brought you two through the year. Christmas came eight months after the miscarriage. You knew it would be hard. A family themed holiday was bound to irritate both you and your boyfriend especially when you had been due for early December. There was this person that you never met that you were missing so terribly and they were supposed to be there. Billy held your hand the entire car ride from the Indianapolis Airport to your parent’s house. He kept a hand on your back when you were in the living room making small talk with family, and he held your knee under the dinner table. The next morning, when you two hesitantly went to his father’s place in the morning, his hands kept themselves glued to your body again. “We should have just stayed home this year. You were right.” Looking down at your mitten clad hands as if they should have an answer in them, you told Billy in the car between houses, leaving him to just hunch into himself and wrap his hands tighter around the wheel. He was considering driving right past his former residence, take the long way to the airport and give you your present there. He knew it wasn’t what you really wanted, but he couldn’t bring that back if he tried so he settled for something that could you let be gift wrapped. They moved at the pace of a turtle stepping through peanut butter, but things did progress. Eventually, you two didn’t resemble the couple you once were in the slightest. The fighting had transformed into patient conversations when ready, usually taking place in the shower, and the heartache came less and less while also losing it’s strength that used to feel overwhelming. Two years had passed and you two were still together. Nobody was more surprised than you were even if Billy found that a little bit offensive. He had moved up quickly through the ladder of seniority at work. Money wasn’t nearly as tight and, all on his own, he was dropping hints about looking for a bigger place, maybe even a starter home. Since you had left your previous salon and started working in a spa at a high end hotel, you were also feeling a lot less stressed about the amount on your paychecks. Covered in scars, you two were finally feeling okay. It took the last pregnancy abruptly ending for Billy to realize that he did want children, but only if they were with you. He had never had any desire for marriage or a family before and he had a feeling that he wouldn’t want them if you two broke up, but right now, he was eager to do as he promised you so many times when you were crying under the blankets and start a family. “Let’s get out of here.” In your ear, Billy moaned as he approached you from behind. His thumbs came between the bar’s edge and your body, pressing into your hips so you could dip into his groin. He smelled so good, the side of his face leaning against yours. “It’s not even nine thirty.” You laughed against him and leaned your waist into the bar again, trying to earn the bartender’s attention. You two were out for a co-worker’s birthday, looking to blow off some steam after a long week. “Why do you want to go already?” Billy didn’t like a lot of the people you worked with, but he had a couple friend’s in their spouses and boyfriends. Besides, it was a night where the only activity was drinking. He was good at that. You had promised him that your limit would be two cranberry vodkas so that you could be the designated driver. “I want to…” He groaned and shoved his groin into your backside like a child. “You know…” Billy was never coy, but he flattened his hands onto your sides and checked his left to make sure that their was no eavesdropping ears near. “We have had sex every day this week.” Turning around, you put your back into the bar and poked at your horny boyfriend’s nose. “Are you complaining?” He asked with his eyebrows. “Besides, I’m not ovulating right now.” “Just in case.” Billy had decided the best way to get pregnant would be for you to get off the pill and for the two of you to have sex every single night. If it happened before when you were on the pill, he figured that it would be even easier this way.

You two had been trying for three months, since your birthday in July, and honestly, Billy was stunned that it hadn’t happened yet. Maybe, he was naive, but he just assumed that it would be easy as putting a store bought pizza in the oven. The first time your period came a week early, but for the last two months, you took a test and nothing happened. Your period always came along just a couple days later, making you both feel bummed about being out twenty bucks as you did feel disappointed that you still weren’t pregnant. It was beginning to cross Billy’s mind that he might be the problem. Perhaps, his little guys weren’t up to the challenge anymore. He didn’t like to think about it because it made him unreasonably angry with the world, but he was starting to wonder if he had gone sterile or if that was even possible. He didn’t even know if that was a thing, but he was procrastinating making a doctor’s appointment to find out. He never wanted to go to the doctor, not even when it was physically necessary. “I’m having a good time.” After noticing one of your favourite girls from work walk in, you squeezed Billy’s shoulder and said. “We said we were just going to let it happen, right?” He held your stare for a moment and let your lips come to his, tenderly nibbling on the bottom while your hands met loose behind his neck. “Yeah.” He finally agreed even if he wasn’t happy about it. “Let me get us some drinks…” You cooed while knocking your forehead to his, feeling more flirtatious with him than ever before. “And try not to think about being inside of me for a little while, okay?” He was just about to let out a breathy, needy sigh, but his face twisted into a frown as you turned around to return to vying for the bartender’s attention. “You’re evil.” He hissed behind you and gave your bum a small smack. ___ Grunting, Billy sat up from lying on his back, his chest pink, slippery, and panting. He wiped at his forehead beneath a curl and then reached for a tissue you from the Kleenex box on his night stand and used it to clean off his member, glistening and just beginning to lose his erection. You were in the bathroom just a few steps down the hall, going about your own post-sex routine. While you were still the only woman who drove him that mad, who he wanted to buried deep inside of, Billy did miss pulling out of you to paint your chest with his load. He was starting to long for spontaneous sex, kissing you in the kitchen and then forgetting all about the boiling water in the pot on the stove due to getting carried away. Even with his pounding libido, sex was becoming a chore. He crumpled the Kleenex into a ball and chucked it into the small garbage pail by the window. It just barely made it in from the plastic edge. He heard the floor creak and knew you had returned. Billy laid back down and admired your naked body as you bent down at the ground and swiped one of his dirty t shirts from the hamper. You sniffed at the material by the under arm stitching and then covered yourself with it. “Did you ask that girl you work with for the name of her realtor?” He asked as your knees dug into the mattress, you climbing into your side where the blankets were in a helpless tangle. It took a second for your memory to catch up to his question, but you sighed once you did and laid down on your side to face him with the pillow tucked comfortable between an arm and your face. “No, I forgot.” You watched him keep his expression clean to not show his disappointment. Billy had done a lot of work when it came to controlling his reactions. “I will tomorrow. She’s in tomorrow.” Slowly, Billy relaxed and reached into the drawer of his night stand to pull out a joint he had rolled nights ago and his lighter. He plugged his both with the end and flicked on his lighter with the same choreography he had perfected as a teenager. It always amused you. “Do you feel different?” He asked, voice muffled before inhaling deeply. “What do you mean?” “Last time…you had a hunch you were pregnant before you even missed your period. Do you feel like that?” Billy felt pretty useless. He wasn’t the one carrying a child. All he could do was close his eyes, cum, and cross his fingers. It was beyond his control and he hated that. 

Sadness didn’t take it’s time greeting you. It moved over your body like a thin sheet, hugging your limbs and then tightened your throat before filling your eyes with a heavier shade of their regular color. “I don’t want to talk about last time.” You told him with a weight choking your speech. Quickly, your hands gripped at the blankets by yours and Billy’s feet and you shook them out abrasively until they were untangled. “Okay.” Billy swallowed and took another hit while you draped him with the thick off-white comforter. He knew the pain from the miscarriage would never completely fade into nothing, but he had thought that by being in a better place now, you wouldn’t be so distant about it. There was a time when it was all you wanted to talk about, but back then, he was a brick wall. Last time was precious to you and all you could do was protect it. Anyone’s opinion was invalid and infringed on the morsel of solace you told yourself you had found. Last time, Billy had freaked out and cursed over and over into his hands. He left the apartment and did not returned until the next morning because he needed his gloves for work. Last time he told you that he thought you two should make an appointment at the clinic. While you weren’t sure what you wanted to do yourself, it stung sharply to have no support from your boyfriend. Last time, you miscarried and when you finally worked up the courage to tell friends, they told you that was probably for the best or that God works in mysterious ways. They offered no empathy or even silence to just listen to your story. Last time had been Hell and there were plenty of afternoons that you considered killing yourself. Last time was dark and you didn’t want to talk about it. “What do you think of the name Tyler?” Getting comfier in bed, Billy asked as he pressed his shoulder blades into the mattress and rested his head on his propped up pillow. “No, but I like that you’re thinking of names.” Smiling at him wistfully, you admitted. Sometimes, how eager and interested Billy was now hurt. You wished he could have been that way before, but there was no way to change the past. All you could do was be grateful that he had come around and grown. “I like it. It’s a name for a cool guy.” Billy chattered. Secretly, he wished he had a name like that, but instead he was William Hargrove. It made him feel like one of the boring old men behind the bank who never acknowledged him when he went to make a deposit. “Do you like it for a girl, too?” “I don’t know.” Reaching over, Billy tapped out the joint in his ashtray on the night stand. It was rare for him to not include you, but you assumed this was all a part of his baby prep. He had suggested you stop drinking as well, but you answered him by polishing off a bottle of Moscato to yourself that night. “I haven’t thought about names for girls.” He admitted with a shrug and then rolled over to be closer to you. His arm instinctively fell over your side and found the small of your back to bring you closer to him. “Girls exist.” Sleepily, you smiled at him while pressing your face deeper into your pillow. “I know they exist.” With your eyes shutting, you could hear his eye roll. “I like Natalie.” You admitting, your heart swelling as the conversation felt more real than ever before. “Or Rebecca.” “Not Rebecca.” Billy shook his head before taking his hand off your back and reaching forward. His chest leaned into your face as he stretched to shut off the lamp on your side of the bed. “I went to school with, like, three Rebecca’s and they were all bitches.” He shared and then cuddled up to you in the dark. “Natalie is pretty though.” He whispered and drew two fingers up and down the same few inches of your spine. His mind repeated the name and paired it with Hargrove. It sounded perfect to him. “Hey…” You found his other on the mattress and squeezed it tenderly. “I’m a little tired of baby talk.” It still wasn’t easy and you imagined it wouldn’t be until you were deeply pregnant, like I’m your second trimester. “I’m going to try to sleep.” You opened up your eyes in order to find him in the dark and give him a last kiss. Billy nodding, knowing that most conversations were harder for you than they were him. He supposed he was luckier that way. “Goodnight.” After kissing you, he murmured against your skin. His scent was all over it. Sometimes, it was hard to tell where one of you ended and the other began, the way you would tangle together through restless sleeping. You wiggled around and laid with your back to him, his fingers still moving over the same patch of skin. He laid with you for a little bit longer, wide awake and hoping that next month you two would have a successful pregnancy test. He turned onto his back and watched the ceiling, waiting for the pot to kick in and lull him to sleep. He decided to give it ten more minutes and then he would give up and watch TV until he fell asleep on the couch. Thankfully, he sunk into slumber in less than the allotted ten minutes.

@lovelydacre @stevesharrlngtons @4-a-m @kaliforniacoastalteens @daddyslittlemunster @ineedacureforme @stephaniecats @inspiredbynewt

@penguinlover15 @devintagekids @gemgemswift

[practicingmedicine]

Practicing Medicine: Chapter Two

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I had never felt so good in my entire life.

I’d had moments of triumph before, but nothing like what I was feeling as I walked home from Mrs. McBain’s house, my white coat trailing behind me, damp hair blowing in the wind. I was riding high in the saddle!

I’d saved a life. Like, an actual, human life! Everyone had been so happy with me- suddenly, I wasn’t the weird retard across the street, the creepy kid who was always pissing himself over loud noises and sitting alone in the town square. I was a doctor, and I was to be expected, and cheered, and listened to… It was like all my fantasies had come true! I was the coat wearing, slow-walking, calm and collected badass that I’d always promised myself I’d be!

Well, that wasn’t totally true. I’d been a little shaky there for a minute, and there were things I could have done differently, but I hadn’t shut down like I thought I might! That was real progress from the days when a dog barking at me could make me curl up and sob.

I didn’t bother ringing the doorbell as I threw open the door to my home and waltzed into the main hall, where mom was waiting for me. I didn’t even flinch as she came up and hugged me, because I was already throwing my arms around her myself. She looked surprised.

“Momma!” I shouted, and pressed my head into her shoulder. Even though I was 17 years old, I was still a lot shorter than her, because she was tall for a woman and I was knee high to a lamb- only five foot four at the time. It usually made me feel sort of self conscious, but right now, I didn’t care. “I saved Mr. McBain today! Beagle accidentally shot him while they were doing target practice, and he hit his femoral artery, so I had to-“ My mom shushed me.

“I know! Trust me Ikey, I know! I heard all about it from Mrs. McBain!” There was a pause. Mom ran her fingers through my wet hair. “God I’m so proud of you, Ikey! I was scared when I realized you’d gone, but I knew that you’d be alright. I just knew.”

A wave of guilt washed over my heart as I realized that I hadn’t checked with mom to tell her where I was going. She’d probably looked for me in the town square, and then heard a single gunshot in the hotel…

“I’m fine. Sorry I didn’t tell you where I was heading,” I said. I was still pressing my head against mom’s shoulder, because even after a shower and lunch, I felt completely drained.

“It’s okay. You’re home, you’re alive, Mr. McBain is alive… Everything is alright.” Now that I looked at her, mom’s skin was all flushed, and she looked awful sick. She’d looked old for years, but today she looked real frail. Some combination of stress and that long illness she’d gotten way back when, I guessed. I hugged her even tighter, then let her go. We stepped away from each other.

“Well, why don’t you go to your room and unwind- maybe you can play something on the computer, listen to the radio, rest a little…” I stopped smiling. That was how mom liked to preface bad news. Now I was all tense, waiting for the other shoe to drop…

“And then we need to talk about something.”

I knew it! “Is this about me leaving? Cause, I normally wouldn’t go like that, but it was an emergency, see, and I haven’t hurt myself in years-!”

“It’s not about that,” my mother said, gently. I slumped a little. “Oh, I shouldn’t have said anything. Come on- go to your room, relax, and I’ll talk to you in an hour. Alright?” I didn’t answer. I felt like crying, and if I talked, it would make it worse.

“Alright Ikey?”

“Okay,” I said, and walked to my room. I shut the door gently behind me, and then sat down at my desk, legs hanging off the end of the chair. I took my pip boy off, plugged it into the computer and then stared at the screen for a while. I hadn’t gone back to my room after answering the emergency phone call, so the “Game Over” screen of Red Menace was still glowing in my absence.

I turned off my computer; I wasn’t in the mood for games now. I put my headphones on instead, plugged them into the radio, and tuned it to the 70’s music station. I had to wade through a few seconds of static before I got the right frequency.

‘We-are-family!’ came the voice in the headphones. I had a soft spot for Disco, so I cranked up the volume a bit. “And I got all my sisters with me…”

Once I was satisfied with that, I opened my drawer and pulled out an old picture of Father that I kept there, that I liked to consult in situations like these. He looked a lot like me- Thin, blonde haired, always wearing his Followers of the Apocalypse Coat. My coat, now. But, where I was short, round faced, and weak, father had been the opposite. The features of his face were sharp and defined, and he had a well-groomed beard. He never wore glasses.

I closed my eyes. Even though he’d been all those things, that wasn’t how I remembered him. I remembered him because he was fair, and honest, and loving in a different way than my mom. Patient, is what he was. Even back when people thought I was a retard, father raised me like he would any son- he taught me to be good, to resist tyranny, and to never, ever hurt anyone, no matter how bad they were. When I showed an interest in medicine, he taught me that, finding ways around my inability to read and write and do complicated math. He taught me how to use a calculator, how to use simple tricks to solve complicated problems, and all those sorts of things.

I really liked my father. I’d say that I wanted to live up to his memory, but I knew I couldn’t ever do that. Everyone in the Mojave knew about Lucas Saller and all the folks he’d saved, and I had some problems that he didn’t. Instead, I tried my best to do what would make him proud anyways. “ Find a way ,” he’d told me, and so I always did.

There was a knock at my door. Quickly, I shoved the picture back in the desk drawer and shut it. I tried to keep a steady voice as I said, “You can come in.”

The door creaked open. Mom walked in the door frame- a picture of majesty, in my eyes- and sat down on the bed. She took a long, deep breath.

“Please take those headphones off,” she said. I plucked them off my head and sat them down on the desk. “Thank you.” As an afterthought, I bent over the desk and turned off the radio. I heard the headphones crackle and then go silent.

“Now, I know I said I’d wait an hour, but I got the feeling that I was just stressing you even more by waiting…” It was true. I would have probably exploded if I had to wait an hour. “Is it okay if I talk to you now?”

“Of course!” I snapped, words firing out of my mouth just a little too fast. Mom smiled.

“Oh Ikey…”

And there was that weakness again- the way her shoulders slumped, her green eyes glossed over- I looked away. “You know, since your father died, you’ve grown up so much.”

I stared at the ground. “Not really,” I said. “I’m still smaller than anyone else I know.” Well, not everyone. I was taller than Mr. Nash’s wife now, but not by much.

Mom shook her head. “You know that’s not what I mean. When you walked in through the door today, all happy and composed, I saw a man in you. And, it was just… It was crazy, to think that you’re this grown up! That I can trust you to go out on your own, and deal with this, this insane , stressful situation, and then come back like it was all nothing.”

I smiled a little at that, and let myself look up from the ground. “Remember when I used to bite people for touching me? How old was I last time I did that, ten?”

“Thirteen,” my mother replied, sounding solemn. I raised an eyebrow.

“Really? Was that before or after…”

“Before,” she said. I nodded to myself. Before father died. “I think that it sort of… forced you to grow up a little. Or a lot, just based on today. And I guess I saw it before then too. You did ten years of learning in three.”

I shook my head. “It didn’t force me, I made a choice to be stronger after that. Nothing done forced me to grow up,” Mom frowned, and my chest hurt a little at that. What was I saying wrong?

“Ikey… well, you know what, it doesn’t matter! One way or another, you’ve grown up a lot since then. You might not see it,”

“I do,” I interrupted, “I’m doing a lot better now.”

“-Of course, Ikey. I see it, you see it… And, I think that God’s seen it too, because the world’s decided to give you a new challenge.”

My heart sank.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Mom looked me in my eyes. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were all red.

“Ikey, remember that story we told you about the cultists? How your father and I were attacked on the road, and how I got shot?” I nodded. It wasn’t one of her favorite stories, but father had told me about it before. “Well, the problems didn’t set in for a while, but once they did, dad realized that I was sick. You probably don’t remember, but when you were young, I’d disappear for a couple of weeks, every once and awhile. Do you remember that?”

“No,” I said, and I didn’t. I’d forgotten a lot of things.

“Well, no matter. I’d go missing sometimes, and while I was missing, I was getting treatment from the Followers of the Apocalypse. It was expensive, but your father paid for it, either with caps or with his reputation. Between Aunt Julie and him, I could always find help.”

The pieces were starting to fit together now, and I was starting to fall apart. Had she come to tell me what I thought...?

“Momma, are you dying?” I asked, before she could continue. My mom choked a little bit.

“Ikey! Ikey, please let me finish! I already feel so terrible, dumping all this on you-“

“Dumping what? Momma, ARE YOU DYING?” She breathed deep- looked away from me, clenched her fists- but she didn’t stop. She just spoke to the floor instead.

“Well, the treatment worked! I didn’t even lose my hair, like they said I would- it was all so perfect. The doctors were optimistic. They thought they’d fixed it, killed the disease, but they hadn’t. They’d just slowed it down.”

“For a while, I was alright. I started feeling better, and for ten years or so, I raised you and ran the Casino and spent time with your father without any signs of the disease ever coming back. And then one night, I started feeling sick again, so I sent a letter to Julie and the Followers…”

I knew the rest of this story. “And then Father made an emergency trip home, and he died. I remember, mom. You don’t have to tell me that part.” I was crying now too, thinking about that night. It was dark and hot, and father had brought me a little snow globe…

Nope. Not going there.

“When he died, I lost all of my freedom. You were too young and too…”

“Retarded,” I finished, glaring at the ground.

“No, too inexperienced, to look after the Casino for me! And I was worried that you might try to hurt yourself again. So, I just tried to tough it out, waiting for the day that you’d be old enough to watch everything while I was gone to get treatment…”

I bit my bottom lip. That day had probably passed about a year ago, but she hadn’t seen it until now. What could I have done differently, to show her that I was ready?

“Why didn’t you tell me? I could have grown up a bit faster if it meant you getting your cancer treated!” I said helplessly. Mom set her jaw.

“Because I’m never going to try to force you to grow up any faster than you need to. You needed time to develop!”

“And you needed chemotherapy!” I stood up, and Mom glared at me.

“Ikey, sit! I didn’t-”

“I’m not-”

“ -DIDN’T COME HERE , for you to storm off on me!”

“Momma, I’m not gonna storm off!” There were tears in my eyes. “I’m- I’m worried about you, is all! If you came here to ask me if you could leave me alone a few weeks then the answer is yes, obviously! I love you!”

But she just shook her head.

“It’s too late for that, way too late. You need to be strong to survive that journey, and I’m not strong anymore. And the roads have gotten more dangerous since then, too- so dangerous that the NCR is taking action. Did you hear that they’re getting ready to set up an outpost here?”

I shook my head. Obviously, NCR control would be bad for Primm, but that wasn’t what I was worried about now. I was worried about my Momma! My mind was already racing with more possibilities.

“Then what are we gonna do? You- you think we could get the Follower’s to come down here? We could write to Aunt Julie! We could remind them about Father!”

Mom sighed. She decided to stand up then too, and even with her hunched back, she was so much bigger than me. She drew open the curtains, and some of her majesty returned as the sunlight and breeze washed over her.

“No, the Followers have too much on their hands right now to treat me again. There’s no options, Isaac...”

My heart clenched up-

“ I’m going to die .”

And shattered.

She rested her arms on the sill as the words sunk in. The horror, the finalty… the absurdity of it all. Because even when you know it’s coming, news like that is more crazy than it is anything else. I couldn’t find any words of my own, so I just closed my eyes and bit my tongue. I would’ve screamed otherwise.

“I don’t know when it’ll happen. It could be a year from now, it could be four. But when it does, I need you to be ready to take up the Casino- hell, you can sell the thing, I don’t care- but, I need you to be able to survive on your own. Do you think you can learn to do that?”

A few more seconds passed as hot tears made their way down my cheeks. I kept my eyes and jaw clenched shut, lest anything escape.

“ Ikey, baby, do you think you can do that for me?"

And I heard Momma walking towards me, felt her gettin closer. Felt that static in my head again...

“ Ikey…?”

She put her hand on my shoulder, and I exploded.

“NO!” I shrieked. Her eyes went wide.

“What?” “You heard me Momma! Fuck that, I’m not just going to just, just lay down and watch while you die!” I sniffled. “I’ll- I’ll go and get the Followers myself if I’ve got to, but I am gonna find a way to help! I’ve gotta!”

Still shocked, my mom sat back down on the bed.

“Ikey… I appreciate that, but that’s an awful idea! I already told you, the Followers can’t-“ she started, but I was already gathering up my things to leave.

“Fuck them too! They have to help you, I’ll yell at Aunt Julie or something!”

I was in the hallway now. Mom tried to catch up with me, but I’d already clicked on my pip-boy, swept up my coat and picked up my bag. What reason did I have to delay any longer?

“Ikey, we can still do all those other things! We can still send a letter to Aunt Julie, write to her for help-”

I stopped. I took a deep breath. My hand was on the door knob now, but I drew it back for a moment and stood still at the end of the hall.

“If all them letters didn’t work before, then they ain’t gonna work now.” I turned to face her down. “You ain’t going to change my mind on this, momma. I am going to find a way to save you.”

“No! Isaac I didn’t, I never...”

She clenched her fists. She looked even weaker now; I’d never noticed how gray her hair had gotten, or how wrinkled and yellow her skin was becoming, or seen any of the signs that I’d so painstakingly memorized. Maybe because I hadn’t wanted to.

What was that look on her face? Was it worry? Anger? Regret? Maybe it was all of them at once. I don’t know. I’d gotten so used to reading Mom’s simple, practiced expressions that she’d put on just for me, that I didn’t know how to interpret her raw emotion besides knowing that she was feeling something awful strongly. I kept my gaze steady.

“... Oh, damn my pride,” she muttered, eventually. She covered her eyes. “My goddamned pride! Oh, I should never have lied to you!”

“It’s okay Momma...”

The hot air burned me as I stepped outside. Momma fell to her knees sobbing.

“I never should have lied! Come back Ikey, I didn’t, I didn’t-!”

“It’s okay! It’s okay, I’ll be back!” I shouted, and left the door hanging open for her to close. I didn’t have the heart to shut the door on her, maybe because it would solidify the crazy decision I’d just made.

Crazy or not, I’d made my choice. No matter what I had to say, or what I had to do, I was going to find a way to save my Momma!

[+]

[secretradiobrooklyn]

The Singing Senator Edition | 5.22.21

Secret Radio | 5.22.21 | Hear it here.

1. Dara Puspita - “Bertamasja”

Dara Puspita was an Indonesian band, active right from the start of rock n roll — like, they jumped into it in 1964. I love how it sounds like gnarly garage rock until the lead guitar tone pulls out and reveals a super VU sound. With a surf structure! It’s just about a perfect nugget of song. 

2. Yol Aularong - “Sou Slarp Kroam Kombut Srey (Rather Die Under a Woman’s Sword)”

Yol Aularong has the wildest voice, and total commitment to rock’s magic transformative power, even in a context where he was risking his life. He does things that would make Screamin’ Jay lean back and appreciate. The arrangements and his delivery just o’erbrim with life and character. 

3. The Psychedelic Aliens - “We’re Laughing”

This band is like Atomic Forest in that they’re just the answer to any collector’s wildest dreams of rarity: they’re a Ghanaian band who released exactly 8 songs and were big in the Accra scene. The groove of this song, especially in headphones, is just mesmerizing, and his delivery gets gradually more and more abstract. It sounds like Marijata and what I wish WITCH sounded more like. Undeniable.

- Glenn Miller Orchestra - “Sunrise Serenade”

4. Prewar Yardsale - “Turn On (Live Peel Session)”

We got into Prewar Yardsale through Jeffrey. Because we got into this band that he introduced us to, he said he had some rarities and other tracks. That he sent our way, and this is from that.  

5. Chai - “In Pink (feat. MNDSGN)”

I think first it was the New York Times, then the Guardian, then the New Yorker all writing about this band essentially in the same week — and we definitely had no idea what they sound like. This song had just debuted on YouTube 18 hours earlier. I think, especially now through repeated listens, it’s a rad track. I love the way MNDSGN winds his vocals into the song, then has his passage, then smoothly winds his way out again. It’s like meeting a really interesting person at an already cool party.

6. Waipod Phetsuphan - “Ding Ding Dong”

Siamese music — Thai music. The guitar part is so primal and the drums so bright in the fills and meanwhile it sounds like he’s casting a spell. And what a refrain.

7. Jacques Dutronc - “J’ai me un tigre dans ma guitare”

One of the greats — I have loved every song of his I’ve ever heard. This song really makes me appreciate his band, especially his drummer. 

8. Orchestra Baobab - “Kelen Ati Leen”

When we started WBFFing, it was partly because we were being blown away by the indisputable proof of James Brown’s influence on, and interaction with, the entire world. I don’t think I realized JB was a lot bigger than the Beatles in huge swaths of the world. This track is fundamentally expressing a JB groove and doing their own entire thing at the same time. The lead vocals’ flavor is just off the charts and the band is SO tight. 

9. Pierre Vassilou - “Qui c’est celui-là?”

What IS this song? It’s in French but it sounds like Brazil — I guess really it sounds like Os Mutantes. 

10. Betti-Betti w T.P. Orchestre Poly Rythmo - “Mahana”

The abundance of T.P. Orchestre keeps on giving. This beautiful, beautiful song is from an album they did with Cameroonian star Betti-Betti, who basically expressed the pain of her country so precisely that the whole nation mourned her passing when she died young. This melody is just stunning, and the harmony 

- Stunt Double - “Be My Baby”

Ace track from some of our favorite people in all of LA.

11. Bug Chaser - “Crowley’s Kids”

I don’t know if Bug Chaser is active at the moment, but some of our favorite STL shows have been watching and/or playing with Bug Chaser. We did the City Museum rooftop twice — and we split favorite VU songs at the Lou Reed Farewell show. Two drumsets, way too much information per track, and an epic live show with a lead character who knows how to lose himself in a song.

12. Eko Roosevelt - “Attends Moi”

We learned about Eko Roosevelt by glimpsing him in a movie about Betti-Betti. He’s a handsome bearded gentleman behind a piano. The first songs by him that got us were super heavy disco, but this one has its own special power. Lately Paige has been singing and playing it on guitar — I’m kind of hoping that we hear her version of “Attends Moi” in another broadcast.

13. Manzanita y Su Conjunto - “Shambar”

One of the sweetest musical gifts in our life has been the discovery of Analog Africa’s ever-growing musical jackpot. They sent their list a note recently about an upcoming record focused on Manzanita y Su Conjunto and their path through cumbia music, and there are two  tracks available now counting this one. We’ll be getting this record, this shit is amazing.

Paige: “I gotta get in touch with Mrs. Link.”

14. Lizzy Mercier Descloux - “Fire”

This song is from her 1979 debut, “Press Color,” and man, what an undeniable new character on the scene! She was based in Paris, hooked up with Michel Esteban, and together they not only established a store of crucial Parisian punkness but also published a fucking MAGAZINE called “Rock News”!! While making music like this! Eventually they moved to New York in 1977 (natch) and as far as I know just continued to be the coolest humans on Earth. I can’t wait to share some of her other tracks with you — besides the brilliant first album, there’s a whole record called “Zulu Rock”! 

15. Os Mutantes - “A Minha Menina”

And as always I think: What did the Beatles think of this music?! They must have known about it, they must have. To me it really brings a whole additional level that the Beatles wanted to get to but literally didn’t know how — and Os Mutantes did. 

16. Suburban Lawns - “Janitor”

Sometimes I wonder why something that sounds so objectionable can be the most vital music in the world. Like, nothing about the lyrics or the way this song is sung should be appealing — and instead, this song is brilliantly undeniable. It’s even better when you see them performing it. If you don’t know what they look like, I guarantee you she will be a surprising character.

My favorite words on it ever are something someone wrote as a comment under the video of their TV performance of this song: “Spent 15 years as a janitor. Can confirm every word.”  

17. Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea - “Mou Pei Na”

These two are just amazing characters in the pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodian music world. Ros Serey Sothea’s voice is totally unique, and Sisamouth has a sincere urgency that gives the whole song a surprising narrative shape.

18. Ranil - “Ángel Terrenal”

Analog Africa again — the cure for what ails you. They are truly combing the world for music that amazes. They played the length of the Amazon river and did their best to stay out of big cities after a bad experience with a record label. So they released these psychedelic jungle masterpieces on little slabs of vinyl that they sold up and down the river. Can you freaking believe that? 

- Salah Ragab - I believe you are responsible for telling us about Salah Ragab, Josh Weinstein. So good.

Also, as promised, further information about glue traps and why they’re so harsh (and how to pull off a successful rescue!) can be found here.

19. Dagi D - “Beka”

I feel like I knew my musical life had changed when I started thinking of every visit to an Ethiopian restaurant as a valuable moment to learn as much about the music as possible — especially Meskerem in St. Louis, it must be said. It turns out modern Ethiopian pop music is super addictive and can easily get stuck in your head for days. 

20. Raxstar - “Jaaneman”

We’re still pretty new to Kensington, our neighborhood in Brooklyn. We knew that a Muslim holiday called Eid al-Fitr was happening, and when it was happening, but we were still surprised by what a joyous holiday it was in our neighborhood. Everyone of all ages was out in their fines, which involved a whole lot of sequins and shining metallic threads. The men wore a lot of caftans and those excellent long shirts and/or jackets, most with beautiful patterns. We went for a long walk and just enjoyed seeing a holiday at full pitch — excited kids and tutting grandmas, people carrying big flower arrangements (in the shape of a crescent and star!), heavy-looking tins of food headed toward a feast, even fireworks overhead. We crossed paths with a group of dudes all dressed up in various states of celebration, from a sharp Western-style two-piece suit to an even sharper South Asian suit with a Nehru collar and snug caftan. It looked like they had just finished the parental part of the night and were deciding where and who to meet up with — exactly like, say, Thanksgiving night in your hometown. It felt like, from Coney Island to McDonald, Church to Cortelyou, it was New Year’s Eve for everyone but us. 

After our walk we returned to our apartment and set up a little folding table out back to enjoy a glass of wine in the warm air. Our neighbors across the fence were still in the midst of family time, with tons of kids running around, including a teensy little girl on a tiny little pink scooter and a gaggle of beautifully awkward teens in the posture and attitude that says “stand by your cousins and let me take your picture.” As the evening wore on and the parents drifted back inside, the young adult contingent got a speaker going, and soon we were catching tracks we’d never heard before. The one that made us first pay attention was “Jaaneman,” with the vocalist’s super-charismatic delivery and priceless accent. We found ourselves Shazaming song after song, and thus started learning about Desi hip hop, a whole world of East Asian immigrant tracks that offer a lens into life in the US and UK that I haven’t really seen since watching “My Beautiful Laundrette” many years ago. Fascinating!

“Jaaneman” literally means “soul of me,” but translates to “my love” or “my darling.” Check out Raxstar — I’d love to see him play SNL and get an impression of what he’s like live. Just last month he released “Forever Jaaneman,” which updates his original smash hit and is also a very strong track.

21. Nate Smith - “Spress Theyself”

One of the last shows we got to see in St. Louis was Nate Smith at Jazz at the Bistro, and holy smokes, what a pleasure to see him do his thing up close. I love this solo album because it sounds like a practice sesh that died and went to heaven. It doesn’t have a song’s logic, but it does follow the feel of a great intuitive exploration of a beat, wandering through subdivisions and feel variations with complete ease. 

22. Jefferson Airplane - “White Rabbit”

This is Paige’s call. I think it’s cool because I can hear the direct connection between this and Erkin Koray’s Anatolian psych rock style, which I previously had no idea about. This listen through, we’ve both been appreciating how overwhelming massive Grace Slick’s voice is.

23. Marie France - “Dereglée”

Another cut off the fantastic Born Bad Records comp “Paink,” and more proof that punk was happening in other languages at the same time. (Though I think they called themselves “méchant”… or denied being méchant, depending) The album art reveals that Marie France happened to look uncannily like a punk Marilyn Monroe, which only makes both MM and MF cooler. 

24. Operation Ivy - “One of These Days”

I was never for one second a punk in high school, but I knew that the Op Ivy t-shirt was the essence of functional punk.

- Shin Joong Hyun - “Moon Watching”

25. Shin Joong Hyun - “Spring Rain”

This guy has an otherworldly sense of melody and performance that indie rock only starting catching up with decades later. This is the guy sometimes referred to as the “Korean godfather of rock.” He was active from the early ‘60s til 1975, when he was arrested, tortured and banned in South Korea. Eventually, the leader who had hammered down on him died, and he was able to begin piecing his life back together. These iconic, evocative, cinematic recordings would sound great in any decade. 

Spoiler: it wasn’t! We walked across the bridge and it was a thoroughly magical New York evening. 

[shirlleycoyle]

How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle But Lost the War to Spotify

For a few years in the late 2000s, Pandora was the on-demand DJ for tens of millions of people, creating the soundtrack to college dorm room parties, quiet coffee shops, busy kitchens, and family get-togethers. The days of building massive MP3 music collections through file-sharing was receding quickly into the past, and instead the shared experience of radio was making a comeback via the clever algorithmic matchmaking of Pandora's endlessly customizable stations based on individual taste. Today it's a feature we take for granted across every music service, even if Pandora's implementation still seems like it was the best. Pandora itself, however, can feel like an afterthought. Betamax to Spotify's VHS, or maybe more accurately, MySpace to on-demand streaming's Facebook.

It's not that Pandora was oblivious to its competition, or complacent about its place in the industry. It was, however, an innovator in digital music at a time when the major labels were hostile to the entire concept and would fight on every front to preserve the lucrative of the compact disc era. To take on this legal and lobbying juggernaut, Pandora needed a clever strategy to avoid the kind of head-on fights that had sunk Napster. The solution was the radio model of music licensing, a brilliant strategy at the time, but one which would be the subject of a long fight between Pandora and the recording industry. Pandora would win that battle, but in doing so, it also found itself stuck with a business model that could not evolve alongside the streaming space.

Pandora’s personalized radio service took the FM listening experience, put it online, and exploded the typically narrow path to music discovery for millions of people. It was the first real introduction to digital streaming music for a lot of America’s population in the mid-2000s. People could type in a song or artist they liked and get a never-ending stream of related music.

On the surface, at the listener level, the magic was in how all the songs were linked and connected. Behind the scenes, the magic was in how Pandora was able to provide access to all these songs, without asking the major labels for permission.

Radio broadcasters don’t have to spend exorbitant amounts of time and money trying to license every song from major record labels: they only need to pay a small fee each time songs are played. So after developing its music discovery technology, the Music Genome Project, Pandora went into radio to take advantage of the same licensing agreements already in place.

The Tower Records "music discovery center" powered by SavageBeast / mockup courtesy of Dan Lythcott-Haines

For Joe Kennedy, Tim Westergren, Jessica Steel, and Tom Conrad, the four Pandora executives leading the company's rebirth as a digital broadcaster in 2004, this was the only path forward. Radio was the path to profitability in the music industry.

“It was already clear to us that most of digital music was a disaster from a business standpoint,” said Former Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy. “At that time the four labels didn't want digital music to really exist, but we found this one piece in internet radio where there was the statutory license that, I felt, gave the potential to create a business of value and avoid this phenomenon one board member referred to as an organ donor business — where you just exist to funnel money to the major record labels.”

As a quick background, Savage Beast Technologies was founded in 1999 by Tim Westergren and would later become Pandora. The company spent years developing its Music Genome Project music recommendation engine to help people find new songs and artists similar to their existing tastes in music. It powered a few in-store kiosks at Best Buy and Tower Records, but the Music Genome Project itself never found a viable market fit. In 2004 Larry Marcus and Walden Venture Capital’s lead investment saved the company, starting a new chapter. Jessica Steel joined as VP of Business and Corporate Development. Tom Conrad came into engineering, but quickly rose to Chief Technology Officer. Founder Tim Westergren moved from CEO to Chief Strategy Officer and Joe Kennedy was hired to be the company’s new CEO.

UI mockup courtesy of Dan Lythcott-Haines

Kennedy got to work on a new business plan and put the pieces together to pursue radio. Looking at LaunchCast’s success (a similar service to Pandora, which would later be acquired by Yahoo), along with potential market size and fixed costs through the statutory license it was their path towards profitability for the startup.

Pandora launched its personalized radio service in the second half of 2005 paying a per performance rate of $0.000762 each time a song was played.

The Battle Over Rates

Pandora and other webcasters were paying song rates from the 1998-2005 timeframe. By the fall of 2005, Pandora was already too late to officially participate in the hearings happening to assess rate adjustments for the next period of time. Kennedy did, however, stay connected to how testimonies to the Copyright Royalty Board were progressing. The CRB was created under the Copyright Royalty and Distribution Reform Act of 2004 with three permanent copyright royalty judges.

There were several different groups and sides presenting their case for what they wanted, one of which was the Digital Media Association (DiMA) representing 42 companies including AOL, Live 365, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AccuRadio LLC. Another, representing the entrenched music industry, was SoundExchange and executives from Atlantic Records, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and other labels. Mixed in were groups identifying as terrestrial radio, small webcasters, large webcasters, commercial, non-commercial, and so forth. There was plenty of nuance to the companies and groups wanting special considerations to the rates they would pay.

SoundExchange and its side argued for 30 percent of gross revenues from webcasters or a performance rate beginning at $.0008 per performance in 2006 and increasing annually to $.0019 by 2010, whichever was greater. It wanted the rates to be as high as possible.

The DiMA group wanted a fee structure of either $.00025 per performance or 5.5% of revenue directly associated with the streaming service. For a lot of these internet companies, music was not their main business, but an ancillary one.

Tim Westergren, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Pandora Media Inc., center, Steven Newberry, president and chief executive officer of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Corp., left, and Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs with CTIA Wireless Association. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, June 6, 2012. Credit: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Pandora may have entered the music industry a little naively, planning for a world where the statutory rates remained low and they had time to bloom. Even before its plans for radio, it had run out of cash multiple times. In 2000, venture capital dried up fast from the first dot com bubble bust and left the company scrambling for new funds early in its life. Tim Westergren, always the easygoing and formidable guy, never laid anyone off, he simply asked those who could continue working without pay to stay with the eventual promise of reimbursement once new funding came in.

Even after receiving around $7 million in funding in 2004, Pandora didn’t have the capital to either negotiate direct licensing with record labels or the runway to offer free, ad-supported radio. It had to launch as a subscription service to cover some of the costs. But, shortly after launch it secured a large investment by James Feuille and CrossLink to make the transition to free ad-supported radio.

“Fundamentally, I did not believe people would pay for radio,” said James Feuille. “The idea was $3 a month, $36 a year, with no advertising and I just didn't believe you could build a big business like that.”

The numbers from the 2005 launch reflected most people’s reluctance to pay. Pandora radio launched with 10 free listening hours before it presented a paywall and cut off listening to non-subscribers.

“They generated 500,000 users, zero to 500,000 users in six weeks,” said Feuille. “At the end of six weeks, 40,000 people had subscribed, it was .08, not even 1 percent.”

Despite its growth and the excitement it was generating, Pandora spent its first several years struggling to keep the lights on. It had publicly warned of pulling the plug. It was paying artists according to the law — which wasn’t a given in the early days of digital music — but it didn’t think it could afford to have the rates double or triple.

The Night The Lights (Almost) Went Out in Oakland

The Copyright Royalty Board presented its decision in March 2007. Included was a summary each side had been making against the other: “SoundExchange accuses the Services of seeking a marketplace characterized by perfect competition. DiMA and the Radio Broadcasters claim that SoundExchange is championing a marketplace characterized by monopoly power on the seller’s side.”

The three-judge CRB sided with the proposed rates from SoundExchange and the major labels. The new per play rates would be $.0008 for 2006, $.0011 for 2007, $.0014 for 2008, $.0018 for 2009, and a per play rate of $.0019 for 2010.

“It was March 2007, I'll literally never forget the moment,” said Joe Kennedy, Pandora CEO at the time. “I had just come through the tunnels on my way to work in Oakland and Tim [Westergren] gives me a call and says there's a decision out of Washington. He read me the rates and it was like, oh my god, the rates are almost triple. I immediately knew that’s game over, there's no path forward.”

Westergren knew Pandora was in trouble so he immediately spearheaded a grassroots campaign to persuade its listeners to contact their congressional representatives. This effort resulted in the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008 that was able to bring those involved parties back to the table and try to negotiate a different rate settlement. It allowed for a simplified process to amend any deal that could be renegotiated between the parties. Webcasters, including executives at Pandora, were anxious to find a number they didn’t think would put them out of business.

Although the bargaining table had been set again, this time joined by Pandora, there was a significant amount of division among the companies and groups. RealNetworks with its Rhapsody streaming service saw Pandora as a competitor and potential threat. The National Association of Broadcasters saw internet radio as less desirable and profitable and was happy to see it go away or remain small. They were primarily interested in addressing their problem of simulcasting over the internet. Yahoo was an advertising company and so it didn’t want revenue sharing from non-core products to eat at its bottom line.

The labels had the upper hand with the increased rates they had asked for already in their pockets. Plus, negotiators for SoundExchange and the Recording Industry Association of America understood these divides and played them against each other.

As CEO of Pandora, Joe Kennedy was representing it in these negotiations, trying to keep the company on a path to profitability. Pulling out all the stops, Pandora even went as far as to offer private stock in exchange for a compromise agreement. The labels weren’t interested.

“The major labels came back and said, Well, you know, we shared this with our business people, and they took a look at it, and their analysis says, even at the lower rates, there's no chance you guys are going to make it,” said Kennedy.

In its first years as a digital radio service, Pandora and its millions of listeners had become an annoyance to the major labels. Historically, major record labels exhibited all the power in the relationship with terrestrial radio. FM radio was a promotional vehicle for labels to sell their artists. Digital services like Pandora were shifting that promotional power away from the labels with algorithms and user input.

If Pandora continued growing it would become a threat to power and control within the music industry. Circumventing directly licensing music through its use of the DMCA was seen as combative since digital music was already marked as undermining established business. Pandora was scrappy, having already moved Congress into action once, and that was worrisome.

The 2008 Settlement Act didn’t do much when it was signed by Congress. What it did do though was allow for a simplified process for new settlement approvals. The stage was set, if Pandora and its other webcasters could reach a deal with SoundExchange and the labels by the stipulated date of February 15, 2009 then it would go into effect simply by submitting it to the Copyright Royalty Board. There wouldn’t have to be any pre-hearings, public comments, or any of the previously required steps in the tedious process.

Despite Joe Kennedy’s best efforts, the deadline passed and Pandora was momentarily left with a decision. Would it accept a mountain of debt that rose higher as it gained popularity and more songs were played or would it pack it all in and call it quits?

“I wrote an email for the board that night and more or less said, I tried, failed, it's over,” said Kennedy.

Kennedy called Tim Westergren in the middle of the night to let him know. Westergren answered from a bus in Jordan. He was in the Middle East on a congressional delegation with his wife. Kennedy explained that the deadline had passed and negotiations had failed. The previously tripled rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board in 2007 would take effect.

Westergren replied that Congressman Howard Berman was currently on his bus. He would talk to him about the situation and see if there was anything he could do.

Congressman Berman was representing Los Angeles’ 26th district in 2008 and was on the Intellectual Property subcommittee, part of the Judiciary Committee. Congressman Berman had the right connections with people from most parties involved in the entertainment industry.

“I fully believe we had Right on our side back then,” said Westergren. “And I had the perfect timing to just explain the whole story, not the caricature that had been told to him. I think he heard it and said, what you're asking for is fair. Ultimately that’s why I think he intervened.”

“[Berman] called from Amman back to Washington and got some kind of procedure where a page on the floor can open the chamber and make some change,” recalled Westergren. “And because he was Chairman of the Judiciary he had some abilities or power to extend the deadline.”

Westergren called Kennedy back and told him that Congressman Berman said to keep going. This was happening in the middle of the night back in the U.S., a few hours after the deadline had passed. Because of the speed, negotiations didn’t have a chance to unwind from where they were left the day before.

“I immediately got on the phone with two more people,” said Kennedy. “First the point person in the negotiations and then our biggest ally who was with the Independent Music Association. I said, I just talked to Tim, Tim just talked to Berman, and Berman said we should keep going.”

In light of the immediate progress, Kennedy quickly amended his initial email to Pandora’s board admitting defeat, saying everything was over — it wasn’t yet.

“I think by the time the board got the first memo, I'd already sent a second memo that told the whole story of Tim talking to Berman and to hold on because maybe there's still some hope,” recalled Kennedy chuckling.

On July 7, 2009, more than two years after the rates had been set to increase, a settlement deal was formally announced. In the press release, John Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange, said, “It’s a creative, groundbreaking approach that we wanted to try, and we hope it will work well for everyone involved—the artists, labels and eligible webcasters.”

The new agreement allowed for webcasters to pay per performance rates ($0.0008 retroactive to 2006 and increasing to $0.0014 by 2015) or 25% of revenue — whichever was greater. The per performance rate was a little bit lower, but the introduction of the revenue sharing would help webcasters keep costs in check and plan for the future.

The Power of Tens of Millions of Listeners

Pandora might have been on the ropes when it came to money, but it was a growing powerhouse of influence. In 2009 Pandora had seven million monthly listeners. Five years later in 2014, it had over 81 million monthly listeners. Westergren even attributed its active listeners calling members of Congress in the early days to its new settlement and Pandora’s ultimate survival.

Pandora’s radio service might have just hit at the right time to fulfill consumer demand and grow in popularity. It could have also had the right timing to land in the middle of Apple’s mobile revolution fueling its growth, but the truth is that it spent years working on its streaming backend and engineering so that it could hit it big overnight with the iPhone’s App Store.

Through Jessica Steel’s leadership, the team identified mobile early on and started by putting Pandora on flip phones with network carriers like Sprint and AT&T. At the time, this only resulted in a few hundred listeners, despite the major engineering effort involved. After Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007 it became apparent that this new internet connected, “music player,” device in people’s pockets needed to be the future of its mobile efforts.

After pushback on only allowing web apps for the iPhone, Steve Jobs announced that native apps would be coming to the iPhone. In the interim, Apple Senior Vice President Scott Forstall invited Tim Westergren and his CTO, Tom Conrad, over to a local Cupertino lunch spot. The trio talked for hours about what Pandora had learned about streaming audio from putting apps on flip phones, like Motorola’s RAZR, for wireless carriers. The meeting ended with a question for Forstall.

Credit: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty Images

“What, if anything, can we do at Pandora to get ready for the next generation of iPhone that includes an app store and native APIs?” asked Conrad. “Forstall said, it wouldn't be a waste of your time to jailbreak some iPhones and use the kind of back door toolkits that were being distributed by other people to build a native Pandora app while we get our act together at Apple on something more formal.”

So, Conrad, designer Dan Lythcott-Haines, and many others on the team got to work jailbreaking iPhones and working on a Pandora iPhone app ahead of the official APK release. Then, on day one of the App Store launch, Pandora was the first internet radio app available. Nine months later the Pandora app was installed on 21 percent of iPhones.

Five years after that first iPhone app, nearly 80 percent of Pandora’s radio listening was on a mobile device. But even with a great mobile experience and ubiquitous access across all kinds of devices into the future, its linear, radio style appeal was encountering pushback from listeners.

“We always knew there was a portion of how people listened to music that we were not addressing,” said Joe Kennedy. “I think what changed over time was obviously the emergence of Spotify, but I think alongside that is not just in music but across the board, people's willingness to subscribe to things on the internet grew quite a bit over time.”

The Spotify Effect

By 2010, after it went through these settlement negotiations, Pandora was fully entrenched in radio. It had gone to court for it. It had become the face of internet radio and was becoming the torch bearer for the idea of radio in a lot of people’s minds. There was a consumer demand for this style of music service but Pandora and its executives were getting locked into the protection and cover they thought the statutory license afforded it.

Pandora was feeling heat from listeners who wanted to be able to listen to any song they wanted to at any time. They wanted more skips and other features that were outside of the statutory license’s scope. This pressure was one piece, of many, that led to Joe Kennedy announcing he would be departing as CEO in 2013.

“There’s many pieces to this puzzle of why I decided to leave,” said Kennedy. “Among them was the natural strain of having worked with the board for a long time, the strain of being a public company, and this very significant pebble in our shoe of what to do about Spotify and the on-demand business.”

Pandora finally launched an on-demand offering in 2017. It took years to repair relationships and get to a place it could work with the major labels. The work started secretly in 2014 which eventually led to Pandora acquiring Rdio’s on-demand licensing deals and other assets in 2015. In exchange for these on-demand licensing deals, Pandora agreed to renegotiating new, direct, radio licenses outside of the DMCA shelter.

Pandora spent the first half of its life chained to and defined by the DMCA’s statutory royalty rates. It then spent the next years not quite sure how to move forward. It saw the terrible financial deals that Spotify was making in order to gain on-demand streaming access to the major label’s music catalogs and didn’t want to be in that same boat. It tried getting into ticketing and events in order to control its own financial destiny, but it didn’t pay off.

“The reason we really did jump into on-demand was more about the porousness of publishing rights than anything else,” said Tim Westergren. “The industry had us in their crosshairs and after a while it's hard to be at war with your suppliers. There was too much potential for publishers to do monkey business and we had less and less confidence in the security of some of these statutory structures. We were vulnerable.”

“I think that we still squandered an enormous opportunity having survived all [those settlement negotiations] by not pivoting to on-demand fast enough,” said Westergren. “I feel incredibly proud and sort of marvel at what we got through, but I also have a lot of frustration about how we let it slip away after we established such a lead.”

The way Westergren describes it, Pandora should have become Spotify, before Spotify had the chance to.

“We should have done what Spotify did and ate a pound of flesh to get the industry on our side, then expanded the scope of the product and then really gone global and become an all-you-can-eat service,” said Westergren.

Today, in 2021, it’s nearly impossible to determine what Spotify pays in royalties per play. How much a song is worth varies among labels, artists, and other complex contractual details — including whether plays come from Premium subscribers or free listeners. The deals remain secret until frustrated artists eventually spill the beans on their own terms and provide a peek behind the curtain. In the end, musical artists continue to be the ones dealt the bad hand. Spotify pays major labels huge financial sums and upfront guarantees while it’s estimated that most artists will see payments of between $0.003 and $0.006 per song play.

Pandora still remains an active player in the music streaming space and counted 58.5 million monthly active listeners at the end of 2020. Depending on which music listener you ask, Pandora is a fond memory of digital music coming into its own, or its radio service may still be a vital part of their passive listening experience. Attention wise, however, Pandora is being left behind as Spotify and Apple Music push faster and further into on-demand streaming, sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle But Lost the War to Spotify syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/