#oh and if you made it this far i guess i should restate

[colorfulstage-en]

I’d rather be haunted by Nene. Mafuyu and Toya haunt me any gacha I pull for. Pulling 100 pulls on a gacha I really want, “sorry you can’t get the banner cards but have 2 four stars of Mafuyu and Toya each though. “

Oh, I'm afraid I worded it wrong- Nene never comes home. In fact I had to spark her from the CG/O gacha. The entire 200 pulls I pulled off-banner cards.

Trust me, as happy as I was to see Kanade, Rui, and Haruka. All pretty high favorites of mine- I was pretty sad to have to spark Nene.

In fact I got curious and checked, my most four stars is KAITO.

Although to be fair, only 2 of them (Leo/Need and Kamikou Fest KAITO) were pulled off-banner. Otherwise I would say I'm haunted by Honami, as much as I love her, I pulled 3 of her cards (2 different, but I pulled her New Years card twice) during new years and no fes. I was honestly surprised to see Kanade and Haruka show up in my pulls at all considering I only had 1 4☆ of either of them before this.

Although truly I can't complain because I have a four star for every character and I am always happy to see them come home (albeit usually at the cost of not getting someone else)

[silky-stories]

Hi!! Maybe headcanons or some kind of literature with either vampire garcello x reader or mermaid garcello x reader?? You could do both or one or the other. You're the one writing it after all. Thanks!

Oh. Ohohohohohohoho, now we’re talking >:)

Anon I am going to let you in on a little secret, so anyone who isn’t anon look away >:(

...okay now that it’s just you and me, one of your suggestions kind of predicted a oneshot I’ve been working on that I’m going to be posting soon. So because of that I’ll be going with the other option. Hope you enjoy ;3

———————————————————————

Parched. {Vampire Garcello/Reader}

Genre: Suggestive

Words: 2027

Related Song: Arctic Monkeys - Do I Wanna Know { slowed + reverb}

Summary: When your boyfriend gets home from a long day, it’s only polite to fix him a drink, don’t you think?

Disclaimer/s: Steamy content, swearing, blood

Notes: Garcello speaks in red this time, Reader speaks in blue ;) [Also, monster character x reader or character x monster reader is my absolute jam, feel free to send in requests like this more often-]

———————————————————————

Your boyfriend was, to put it lightly, a little bit on the odd side.

He work dark clothes on hot days, didn’t like the sun very much, had an uncanny sense of smell and hearing, and liked his meat pretty rare. To the outside world he was a weird shut-in that was probably goth, but you knew a hell of a lot more than that.

The two of you had met late at night in a rougher part of the city. You were on your way home from picking up a few essentials at the nearby 24-hour convenience store when you heard some rustling coming from an alleyway. Then some banging. Then some yelling. Then silence.

Well that was ominous as hell.

...

Time to investigate.

You made your way down the dreary alley, groceries in hand, preparing yourself to see a murder scene or something of the like and...

...you honestly weren’t that far off.

You found yourself watching as a man pinned a guy to a wall, his head lowered to his neck. At first you felt yourself getting embarrassed, figuring that you had walked over and unintentionally interrupted a passionate moment. You quickly realized that wasn’t the case when you watched the guy go limp in the arms of the larger man.

After a few moments of you being the quietest you’ve ever been in your life, standing and staring in shock, not knowing what would even be the right course of action for a situation like this, he pulled away. The guy that had previously gone limp slowly slid down the brick wall, deep red trickling down his neck and pooling in the crook of his shoulder. The aqua-haired man let out a sigh as he wiped his mouth with his gloved hands, still unaware of your presence.

Your mind was blank when you spoke up, it had to be for you to do something so bold yet stupid.

“Is he dead?”

The man flinched, hard, and whipped around to lock eyes with you. You were met with two bright red dots staring back at you, stunned, you began to unintentionally study his face.

The dark crimson that you had seen on the possibly-dead man’s neck was also identifiable as a smear on this guy’s face, starting at his lips and trailing off along his cheek where he had tried to wipe it off. His lips were slightly agape, revealing a set of sizeable fangs, as well as other teeth that seemed sharper than a regular human’s teeth should be. Looking down further you noticed that his gloves were fingerless, presumably to allow the sharp claws of nails that he had to stick out.

Other than all of that though he looked like a pretty normal guy. A pretty normal guy with very pale skin, but normal nonetheless.

“I... huh..?”

You were so busy taking in his clearly inhuman appearance that you actually forgot what you had initially asked for a moment, but restated your question when it came back to you.

I mean, what was there to lose at this point? It’s not like running seemed like a very smart option.

“Him. Is... is he dead?”

You pointed at the man that was currently almost falling over in his slump to emphasize your point. The man in front of you took a double take between you and what may have been a dead body before responding, clearly taking in the absurdity of the situation, similar to you.

“He’s... no he’s... passed out I...”

He paused, blinking a few times as he tried to process what was even happening. You took the moment to look at the body a little more critically and, surprise surprise, noticed that he was actually breathing.

“I didn’t... I didn’t take much so he’s just...”

Didn’t take much?

...

Oh.

Oh shit.

Suddenly the whole ordeal just clicked in your brain as you finally understood what it was that you were looking at.

“You’re a vampire!”

The words left your mouth before you could stop them, shocked and questioning, almost accusatory as your eyes went wide.

He didn’t seem to like that though. His brows pulling together tightly in sudden concern as he frantically looked around for any other possible witnessess. When he reinitiated eye contact he appeared quite a bit more panicked than before, more like someone that had been caught doing something arguably wrong. He looked threatening for the first time throughout the encounter.

“You... what do you plan on doing..?”

Plan on doing? Like what you were going to do after this? Knowing that vampires did in fact exist and at least one lived in your city?

“Do you... ever kill them?”

He shook his head warily.

“Then... I don’t... think I care?”

He was surprised to hear that, to be fair though, so were you. You figured you would care more about catching a literal vampire in the act but... he wasn’t killing anyone so was it really any of your business?

“You... you don’t care that I just drink some of his blood???”

“I guess not?”

You let out a chuckle of disbelief at your own statement, any ounce of a threatening or intimidating expression had left his face.

“He’s not gonna, like... turn into a vampire or die of disease or something later, right?”

“No that’s uh, not how it works...”

“Then just like... I don’t know, make sure he gets cleaned up and home safe and this stays between us I guess.”

He let you know that that’s what he did on a regular basis and after a few more awkward moments you were on your way.

That definitely wasn’t your last interaction though.

He didn’t trust you to keep your word, you honestly couldn’t really blame him, and you ended up catching glimpses of him watching you from alleyways or tops of buildings at night. It was kind of worrying at first but eventually it got to the point that you would just smile and wave if you saw him.

Eventually he would wave back.

Sometime down the road and you learned his name. Months later and you found an odd friendship forming, starting with you asking him to come in on a particularly rainy night.

Even later and you found yourself developing feelings, getting to know who he really was. His personality, his struggles, his fears. He really wasn’t a bad guy, he just had no other choice since regular food did nothing for him.

After half a year of your strange friendship you found yourselves together, he had happily moved into your apartment and you had started to acquire blood bags for him to use instead of people. That didn’t stop him from drinking straight from the source every now and then... although, the source he used had definitely changed.

“I’m home.”

You leaned out of the kitchen to smile at Garcello, he returned it with a warm grin, shucking off his coat and tossing it to the side to land on your shared couch.

“Welcome back! How was your day?”

You greeted him with open arms as soon as he meandered into the kitchen, he swiftly took up your non-verbal offer and swept you into his strong arms. He buried his face in the crook of your neck and inhaled, sighing deeply through his nose as he melted into the embrace.

“It went fine, certainly not my job of choice but I think the interview went alright.”

You hummed in acknowledgment and nuzzled your head against his, pleased to have him back in your arms after half a day without him.

“I made sure to get bread and milk like you asked.”

You chuckled as you spotted the brown paper bag he had set on the counter.

“Thank you.”

He continued to hold you like that, peppering your cheek and jawline with a few kisses as he told you more about his day. Although, there seemed to be a shift in his attitude somewhere along the way. He suddenly went from sweet and giddy to much quieter, giving shorter answers when you asked him a question as he let you lead the conversation.

You decided to bring it up, just in case there was something wrong.

“Hey, are you alright?”

“Hmm?”

“You just... you went kinda quiet so I just wanted to make sure.”

He was perfectly silent as he thought over his answer.

“Yes, but... are you... working on anything right now?”

His tone was anticipatory, eagerly awaiting your response. You found yourself suspicious of his intentions.

“Well, no, I was just putting away some dishes that I was washiNG-!”

You were caught off guard by his tongue dragging across your neck in a smooth motion, tightly taking hold of the back of his t-shirt as he did so. You felt him smirk against your neck afterwards.

“That’s good... you see, I have a bit of a problem.”

“Y...y-yeah...?”

“Yeah...”

You flinched as he brushed one of his fangs against the top of your shoulder.

“The thing is, I’ve had a bit of a... craving today.”

One of his claw-like nails came up to trace along your sternum...

“It’s been just... driving me mad.”

Your collarbone...

“Itching the back of my brain...”

Your sternocleidomastoid muscle...

“Funny, right?”

Stopping and hovering just above one of your carotid arteries.

“Yeah... f... funny...”

His smirk grew in response to your reactions, nuzzling your neck affectionately with a huff.

“I guess what I’m trying to ask is...”

He tilted his head up to whisper in your ear.

“...would you mind if I had a little taste?”

Your eyes fluttered shut as you leaned into him, not even having to speak for him to know what your answer was. He had waited for that cue though, just like usual he would never drink from you unless he was certain that you were fine with it. Even then, you both had a very clear safe word that you had used in the past if anything went wrong or you changed your mind.

You didn’t really have to worry about that though. You knew you were safe in his hands.

He purred in response to your willingness, slowly walking you back and gently pinning you to the wall.

“God you smell good right now...”

He lowered his head back down to your neck, finding the spot that he had traced up to and licking a small stripe along it, pinpointing the location of your pulse.

“...bet you’d... taste even better though...”

He was gentle as always when he bit down, it only felt like a pinch until the aphrodisiac kicked in, immediately erasing any sense of pain you had. Being guided by one of his hands that had tangled itself in your hair, your head lolled to the side as he drank from you. A gentle moan erupted from your lips as your grip on his shirt went slack, your arms falling limp beside you as bliss took hold of your thoughts.

“F... fuck...”

He purred louder as you gave clear indication of your enjoyment. The hand that he had propping himself up against the wall fell and came to rest on your hip, gripping tightly as the hand he had on the back of your head made soft contact with the wall instead.

He cut himself off a little bit sooner than usual, pulling away just enough for you to watch him lick his lips and fangs clean.

He chuckled as the hand that raked through your hair slid down to cup your cheek.

“...I was right, you taste amazing...”

His expression didn’t lose it’s smugness though, usually when he was done he would take a much softer turn and patch you up immediately.

“Although, I think I might have put a little too much aphrodisiac in your system sweetheart...”

He was right, you felt like a rag doll right now, nearly putty in his hands as the only thing keeping you standing at the moment was his grip on your torso. Your eyes had glazed over slightly and you were practically panting at this point.

“...let’s do something about that, hmm~?”

[nellie-elizabeth]

The Handmaid's Tale: Chicago (4x05)

Oh, for fuck's sake. If Janine's dead, I'm gonna rage quit watching this show. I mean, not really, but come on. She'd better be okay.

Cons:

This is a small thing but I thought I'd mention it: they've spent a lot of time in Canada this season, and yet didn't bother to set up why Moira would be in Chicago there at the end - I guess we'll find out later? That just seemed like an odd decision structure-wise.

I wish we understood why Janine changed her mind there at the end. See, this is part of why I'm really worried Janine is dead, because it seems like just the sort of thing this show would do. Make Janine come with June, just to die immediately so that June can feel super guilty for bringing her along. I think she's got the market cornered on survivor's guilt at this point. And it was really sweet when Janine showed up to go with her after all, but I don't get what changed her mind. Janine is her own person with her own motivations, and it would have made sense for her to stay somewhere she felt more or less secure. She made that choice, there was a sweet goodbye, and then an immediate reversal on her decision? I wanted a bit more to flesh that out.

Logistically, maybe I just missed something, but it seemed like June and Janine were running through a ghost town when those aerial bombs went off. And then there was a rescue team coming around, and people screaming for help all over the place? Were those people just in the buildings? I was a little confused about what we were meant to believe. The plan from the Commanders was to bomb them just before the cease-fire, right? So if the cease-fire hadn't been called, where were all the people, and how did they know about the bombing? Had they been tipped off? Maybe we'll get more info on this later.

Pros:

I find Aunt Lydia to be very interesting and compelling. Her desire for power over her "girls" is chilling because it comes from a real zealotry that I can't quite understand. She "cares about them" but it's so deeply on her own terms that it's warped beyond anything you would call actual care and affection. Seeing her use her soft power, the power of information collecting, to get back into a position of power and get what she wanted, was chilling, as is everything she does. This show has always been good at the stark imagery that pushes things maybe a bit too far, but is undeniably memorable. Seeing Lydia surrounded by Handmaid duos as they form a perfect circle from above, really emphasizes the way this whole system is designed to keep moving on, no matter what disruption comes its way. Creepy.

We've also got poor Nick, completely losing his mind about trying to be a Commander while also protecting June, and then Commander Lawrence, who I can't quite figure out, but in a good way. At this point, with his wife dead, it seems that Lawrence is just after self-preservation, but also after minimizing damage. Maybe? I mean, he pushes for a cease-fire, but he's willing to support a bombing. What is his actual game here? Is he trying to help June by dropping bombs on her head? It's intense, whatever it is he's doing, and I'm ready to find out more about his specific goals and motivations.

Nick's motivations are a lot clearer, and I think we're seeing him start to lose his cool in a serious way. So many close calls for June. All he wants to do is keep her safe. He can't keep his composure in Commander meetings, but I think he's still managing to avoid suspicion because most of the others know he's young and still new at this. It's impossible that he's the only Commander who has been rattled by the extremity of their situation. And yet there at the end, as June is lying in the rubble in the streets, and we the audience know that Nick is technically the one who ordered the attack... big yikes! Super intense!

So, despite my slight frustration with Janine changing her mind so quickly, I did find the Janine and June content in this episode to be incredibly moving. Last episode focused on Janine a bit more, and how she can chafe under June's assumption of authority. This week we get a bit more of that, as Janine starts a relationship with the guy in charge of this rebel outpost, and June disapproves. Janine is firm that she's making her own choices, that it's consensual, etc. But at the same time, there is this undeniable bond between Janine and June, and both women know it. Nobody could really come close to understanding everything that they've been through together. So when Janine gives June the hat she traded their Handmaid cloaks for, it's her way of saying that June will always be a priority for her. Beyond any man, beyond the desire to be a mother again.

Their goodbye exchange was so cute, with June saying to Janine: "that baby's going to be really lucky to have you" and Janine replying: "those rebels are so lucky to have you." It's awkward but heartfelt and I almost felt like Janine following her afterwards undercut how powerful that moment should have been. Again, I restate, if Janine is dead, I'm going to flip my shit.

I'll stop there for now. It's going to be so intense to see Moira and June onscreen together again. I'm beyond hyped for next week!

8/10

[blushie14]

Drawn To You [Skephalo]

Soulmate AU? …You know what? Heck yeah! Soulmate AU! This will be fun!  For this AU, whatever you write/draw on yourself appears on your soulmate. Let’s go!

Growing up, Zak has never communicated with his soulmate by writing on himself. In fact, he felt indifferent about the concept of soulmates for most of his life.

He’s seen a few people who got lucky and actually met up with their soulmate. It’s pretty rare to find your soulmate while you’re young. Most people however can’t find their soulmate that easily, or choose not to write to their soulmate for whatever personal reason.

Now this didn’t mean that he wasn’t interested in finding his soulmate. It’s not like he didn’t care. He never really had anything to say. Besides, whoever his soulmate was never contacted him either.

Zak simply has never felt the need to interact. Not until recently that is. He has been wondering what would happen if he actually tried to write to them.

Some of his friends have shared stories of how they got their soulmate’s number or how their soulmate reached out to them first. It has got him thinking about it a bit.

If he wanted to write on himself to contact his soulmate, what would he even do? Would his soulmate even write anything back? What were they even like? This person who is supposedly destined to have a deep connection with him is probably a complete stranger right now.

So Zak questioned himself, what should he do to capture his soulmate’s attention?

Then Zak had this… crazy idea one day when he was bored. He grabbed a couple of sharpies, went to the bathroom, looked into the mirror, and removed the sharpie cap.

-

It was a normal Tuesday afternoon. Darryl was going to do a late night stream, but he decided to stream a little early this time with face cam. It was a chill stream on the idiots smp, even if he was the only one online right now. It was pretty nice so far.

“Okay, VanessaTheMuffin! Fifty dollars is too much! Thank you for the dono, but no! Stap it!” He restates the donation out loud. “Do I know if Skeppy is going to get on the smp today? Well um..” He thinks for a moment while scratching the upper part of his lip.

“I am 95% sure that he’s going to join me later on? He might be doing something else at the moment… I wonder what he’s doing.” He hummed to himself before having an idea. “Ooh! Do you think I can build a little Skeppy statue right here?”

He was about to look at the chat before another donation appeared. When the donation was read out loud, he furrowed his eyebrows in confusion.

Lovemepls donated 5 dollars: Yo homie what is on your face lol

“What? What do you mean?” He looked at his chat which was moving surprisingly fast. Trying to read some of the comments, it seems everyone has been saying similar things.

SilverGalaxy: Uhhh you got a little.. somethin… Maddyisadork: A wild mustache appeared! DeezVibez: MUSTACHE LMAO

“Mustache?” He took a moment to open his stream on another tab and was bewildered at the sight. A mustache was messily drawn on him with sharpie above his upper lip. “The fudge?! What is this?!”

Darryl covered his mouth in confusion. “How in the world did- ..Where did this come from?!” Puzzled, Darryl couldn’t connect the dots on how this mustache suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

He felt this strange itching sensation around his left eye, similar to the sensation he glossed over earlier above his upper lip.

Rubbing his left eye, he looked at his facecam again. “AH! Oh my goodness!” Darryl freaked out when a drawing of a monocle around his eye faded in right before his very eyes. “What is going on?!”

Tumbling Croissant: OMG AHAHAHA ADoseOfLove: Wow your soulmate has great taste! Memesnotfound: Aww your soulmate is drawing on you lol

That’s when it clicked… His soulmate.

“My soulmate is.. oh my goodness.” Darryl didn’t even know what to say or think. He has never heard anything from his soulmate before. Then the one time they decided to reach out to him, they decided to draw on his face?!

“Is my own soulmate seriously pranking me!? They even had to do it while I was streaming out of all the muffiny times!” He sighed. “I’m so done.”

Darryl chuckled a bit after the shock and confusion faded. It’s true that he was a little annoyed, but he would be lying if he said he didn’t find this even a little funny.

AwesomePeter23 donated 10 dollars: Your soulmate is something special lol. I already love them and I wanna see them draw more.

“No they- Don’t say that! This is unacceptable!” Darryl crossed his arms and pouted. “I’ve never met my soulmate before, but whoever they are I hereby declare them a complete raggamuffin!” He shouted out and suddenly felt the tip of his nose itch.

“I swear if they added something new..” Once again he looked at his facecam and found a red dot drawn on his nose. “Oh come on! Are you flipping serious?!”

Pyro_Plays: CLOWNBOYHALO!!! OwOStawws: PFFFT ComradeinArms: WRITE THEM BACK PLEASE I BEG

“You know what? I’m grabbing a pen.”

-

Zak was staring at the mirror laughing at himself a little. “This is so stupid. I look so stupid! Why am I doing this?!” Despite questioning his life decisions, he thought about what he should draw next.

He reached for a marker in order to make himself look more clownlike until he felt his left hand itch. As he was scratching his palm he found writing on his hand.

“WHY!? >:0”

Zak couldn’t help but burst out laughing at this. The fact that they decided to draw a little emoticon just made this even funnier. “Oh my god what have I done?!” He grabbed the sharpie and giggled while writing out his response.

Meanwhile, Darryl was still streaming, looking at his left palm. A message appeared on his arm and he read it outloud.

“Because I wanna make you look pretty?! What kind of excuse is that?! I- This little rapscallion! I can’t believe them!”

King Kitty donated 5 dollars: You lookin fabulous there bad!

“You are all muffin heads..” Darryl grumbled. He wrote a little angry emoticon on himself in response to his soulmate. To his surprise he didn’t get a response back, but Zak suddenly texted him that he was going on teamspeak right now.

“Oh great. Guys, guess who decided to show up?” Darryl smiled and covered his face. “Is this even a good time or not? I don’t even know!” As soon as he moved Zak into his teamspeak, he could hear him giggling far from his mic. “Hey Skeppy. I’m streaming right now, and you aren’t going to believe what happened to me!”

“Bad I did something stupid.” Zak said quickly as his giggles died down.

“Oh wow, what else is new?” He laughed a bit. “Okay sorry Skeppy, I was just joking.”

“Wooow, okay. I was gonna ask you for help but now I’m-”

“Nonono Skeppy you know I’m just kidding please don’t leave.”

“I know! I know, but Baaaaad I think they’re mad at meeee.”

“Who’s mad at you? What did you do?” Laughter poured out from Zak before he responded. “What did you do Skeppy?!”

“Can you help me make them not mad? I actually don’t know what to say next all they did was send me a dumb emoticon thingy.”

“Yes. I can help Skeppy. Can you just tell me what happened?”

“Okay So- You know how I said that I’ve never written to my soulmate before?”

“Uhuh? Wait..” Darryl gasped. “Did you?”

“Yes and I did what was probably the stupidest thing I could’ve done.”

“Oh my goodness, what did you do? I mean, it can’t be as silly as what my soulmate did.”

Zak’s eyes widened in surprise. “You heard from your soulmate already?!”

“Uhh.” Darryl looked at his face again and just laughed a little. “Yeah, they recently did. What did you even say to them anyways?”

“Oh I didn’t really say anything to them at first. I kinda… I kinda drew on their face.” He nervously laughed.

…Wait a minute.

“You.. You what?” Darryl’s casual light hearted voice suddenly turned soft and serious as a look of disbelief was on his face.

“I drew some things on my face and then they got mad at me. I said something else afterwards but-”

“Waitwaitwait.” Darryl’s heart was starting to race, but he needed to confirm this before he got his hopes up even further. “What did you draw on them? I need to know.”

Zak got confused for a moment before answering. “Uhhh well I made them look like they had a mustache. And then I drew the monocle to go with it. After that I just drew a teeny little red dot on the nose… I was running out of ideas.”

Everything went silent as Darryl stared at his screen, red in the face. He was looking at the chat and surely enough it had exploded as everyone was losing their minds.

“Bad? …Are you there?”

Mashyapotatoes: OH MY GOD NO WAY! NO WAY!!!!! Disoriented Vine: Well shit this is actually happening?! Amber: WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!

There was almost too much for Darryl to process. His soulmate drew on his face live on stream. His soulmate unknowingly revealed himself to him AND thousands of fans. His soulmate has no idea why he’s suddenly so silent.

His soulmate… is Zak.

The situation was so unbelievably ridiculous. Darryl, being overwhelmed with shock and delight he just.. broke down into silent laughter, leaning forward as he covered his face with both hands.

Zak, still being confused and oblivious to the situation, got concerned. “The heck? Bad?…Are you okay?! What happened?! I actually can’t tell if you’re laughing or crying!”

Darryl couldn’t really tell either. He sat up for a moment and tried to speak, but to no avail as he started laughing again, facing down on his desk with a thud.

“Oh my god.” Zak laughed a little. “Seriously, what happened?! Are you okay?!”

Darryl eventually calmed down enough to barely speak. “Skeppy, look at my stream!”

“Okay? Why?”

“Take ONE good look at my face! ..And then you’ll see why!” He shouted out.

That was when the realization hit Zak as he felt his face warming up “No… There is no way that-..” He has never searched anything up so fast in his entire life.

When he saw Darryl’s facecam, Zak burst into hysterics when he saw the same thing drawn on Darryl’s face.

“Look at what you did to me Skeppy! Look at what you did!” Darryl shrieked, laughing and facing down on his desk with a thud once again.

“NO- DUDE- NO FUCKING WAY!”

Darryl, being in hysterics as well, barely muttered out a “language.”

“AND THE ENTIRE STREAM JUST- OH MY GOD NOHOHOOO!!”

“Skeppy whyyy!! …I look ridiculous Skeppyyyy!!”

It was complete hysteria for 2 minutes straight until both of them finally started to calm down, taking deep breaths.

“Oh my god, dude I-” Zak spoke out. “I don’t even know where to begin.. you’re my soulmate! What do you even think of it!?”

Darryl sheepishly smiled. “Actually I.. I’ve always kind of secretly hoped that it would be you.”

“..Really?” Zak asked in a soft tone, feeling his heart skip a beat.

“Yes! I-” Darryl looked at his stream. “Hang on a second. Sorry guys, I’m gonna to stop streaming right here. Maybe I’ll stream again later and if not, tomorrow. I hope you all understand.”

ImForeverScreeching: Awwwww nooooooo PenguinRaven: Awww! Yeah we understand! <3 Lemon_Lime49: I just got back, why does bad look like that?

“Byeeee!” Darryl ended the stream.

“Dude, everyone on every social media is going to explode. What have I done?!”

“Oh my goodness you muffin head. I’m already silencing my Twitter notifications temporarily.”

The both of them chuckled and stayed silent for a moment. Zak was letting it fully sink in that Darryl is his soulmate. “I’m.. finding it really hard to believe that it’s you..”

“Why? ..Are you not happy about it?”

“Wh- NO! Nononono, I’m happy I’m VERY happy about it.” Zak quickly made that clear. “I just never thought that it would be you! I’m really happy that it’s you though. I cannot think of anyone more perfect..”

“Awww Geppy!” Darryl smiled. “I’m really happy about it too. Like, you have no idea how happy I am. You may have been such a muffin head, but you’re always my muffin head..”

Zak giggled a bit. “I really really want to see you now..”

“Me too.. Wanna plan to meet up ASAP?”

-

Two weeks have passed since it’s been revealed that the two were soulmates, and it was pretty wild. As they predicted, the information spread like wildfire in the fandom. Skephalo shippers definitely had a field day with that too.

Zak and Darryl took a break from making content only for a few days, but were talking to each other even more often. They slowly went back to making content and started telling their fans they were finally meeting up.

After planning everything out, Zak got on a flight to meet up and stay with Bad for a week. As soon as he departed from the plane, he felt a little nervous but extremely excited.

He roamed around the airport looking for Darryl. A few minutes went by until Zak felt a familiar itch on his left palm and looked to find a message.

“Hi <3”

Zak quickly looked around him until he saw Darryl smiling and waving in front of him. He smiled wide and started to run excitingly towards him. Darryl was surprised for a moment before raising his arms, bracing for impact.

“Skeppy!” Zak almost tackled him as he wrapped his arms around him as Darryl laughed and hugged back.

Skeppy giggled. “Did you really bring a pen with you just so you can write hi as soon as you see me?!”

“Hey, I thought it was fitting okay? You muffin head…” Darryl pouted.

Zak didn’t move away from the hug. He melts into the embrace, hugging Darryl closer as he spoke out softly. “Well.. hi..”

Darryl smiled and stared at Zak as a warm and comforting feeling washed over them. He didn’t want to let go and just wanted to keep him in his arms forever. “Oh my goodness, you just got here and I already don’t want you to leave in seven days..”

“Nooo, don’t think about that right now! I’m just happy to be here now..”

“Yeah..” Darryl wrapped his arms around Zak even more. “Me too.”

[End]

[fireemblems24]

Hey! It's the anon who sent the ask about the imperialism thing.

I guess it's kinda ironic because uh, the country that did the whole imperialism shtick to my country is the US. The saddest part is that it's barely acknowledged and I'm pretty sure it's not even studied in your history either. If you're curious, look up Benevolent Assimilation. Yup. That's what they called it.

Anyway I had a realization when you mentioend about why not Edelgard try to enact the changes on her Empire first? And I realised... Yeah, why not???

A possible thing she could've done that's less bloody than a war is to change her Empire first. And then befriend the future leaders of the Kingdom and Alliance while they were in school. That would've made things fairly peaceful between them and also if the changes in the Empire are working out well, she could've promoted the same methods to Dimitri and Claude for them to establish in their own countries. She doesn't need to conquer them. I mean, yeah this is a very easier said than done situation (especially since there's still TWSITD) but again, less bloody alternatives.

To be fair, Edelgard handling this entire affair in a flawed manner such as a war is also fine by me. Seeing imperialism in media is fine especially if it highlights the flaws of it because yes, it and its long term effects need to be acknowledged. But the game just feels like it's condoning her... And there's also the ton of people who agree with her who just make me uncomfortable really because it feels so close to real life. Not only that seeing as this is a Japanese game and the Japanese have a... history with imperialism (in which they also occupied my country... we don't really get a break) it's just uncomfortable.

Again, I like Edelgard and the morally grey potential of her decisions. My problem really is in the execution. I would definitely tolerate CF much more if the BE had more prominent roles as critics? I think that's the only way they'd really fit in CF tbh. Criticise Edelgard, question her actions, make her question her own actions, make her realise the damage she caused. Stuff like that would've made CF into such a good route. Like, if AM is Dimitri's character study, why couldn't we have had Edelgard's character study in CF?

I guess in the end, the main reason why I'm really talkative about the whole Edelgard issue is because I really want to love her? I see the potential in her character — I love her design, her general personality, her voice actress, the fact that she's actually different from the usual female character in these games. But I just end up liking her and not really loving her because sometimes the games feels like it's forcing me to love her so much that I just eh. I still don't like her Byleth attachment.

But yeah I think I'm going to stop bothering you all about this since I think I'm just repeating restated points again.

I briefly looked up “Benevolent Imperialism.” Sounds exactly like the kind of phrase an Imperialist would label their conquest as. I’ll have to learn more about it because surprise, surprise, our history lessons do leave that out. 

As for your comments on Edelgard, I agree with everything you said. I cannot believe her actions are wholly benevolent and in the name of bettering society only because she never once attempts to work with other leaders. She’s either so far up her own ass she legitimately thinks killing every other major power in Fodlan except herself is really the best option for everyone or there’s more to her actions than her ideals - like killing all the dragons/forcing them into hiding forever or getting back what she thinks is rightly hers because the Empire ruled those territories hundreds of years ago. 

My issue, like yours, is that this game acts like she’s some kind of saint. She’s sacrificing her own soul by bloodying her own hands for the benefit of all. Whenever she talks about all the damage the war causes, it’s not about the victims, it’s about how sorry we should feel for her because she’s dirtying herself so everyone can live in her future utopia. 

It takes a grey, interesting perspective and makes it not only very uninteresting (and at times irritating as a player who doesn’t agree with her but it forced to act like she’s the biggest victim in all this), but problematic. To say nothing of how this glorifies war and skips over any and all negative side effects, it’s far more concerning in it’s presentation of Imperialism as a good thing, as a “liberation” of the countries who are getting violently taken over against their will. 

Like you, I don’t mind Imperialism in fiction. I don’t even mind seriously entertaining the question - but what if the conqueror really does improve things? What I do mind is this really black/white presentation where Imperialism is framed as liberation, like the Imperialist actually knows better than the countries she’s taking over. What’s super uncomfortable when analyzing things deeper is how unapologetic CF is at spinning the same propaganda used to devastate other countries, many still reeling from the effects. 

You could just write it off as fiction. It’s just a Fire Emblem video game no one should take too seriously. And I’m always torn about this argument because I don’t want to police fiction - at all - but I’m also aware of how fiction can change your worldview. You’d think people would be smart enough to separate fiction and reality but they often either don’t or use fiction to reinforce their own world views. 

I’m not surprised at all people agree with Edelgard. She’s presented as a liberator, her route presents war like its only victim is the perpetrator because she’s just oh so sad everyone else is forcing her to kill them. But I’m very alarmed if anyone wholly agrees with her and thinks she’s right to invade the Kingdom and the Alliance. You can love a character and not agree with their actions. I love a character who’s quite similar to Edelgard on the surface, Reinhard von Lohengramm, but I do not agree with his actions at all, even if I root for his victory at every turn in his own story anyways, because sometimes it’s fun to watch a magnificent bastard crush everyone under their heels. 

And yeah my main frustration with her is that I really want to like her. But her presentation is so bad that I’m struggling to enjoy her in her own route. 

[please-buckme]

Coffee (Part 1) Hayden x reader

Fluff

No warnings!

1602 words

You walked through the doors of a coffee shop not too far from your hotel, the enriching smell of fresh brewed coffee fills your sense. Since being in LA you'd been to this shop quite a few times but today is the busiest you'd ever seen it. It was packed all the way to the door, so much so that you still had one foot planted on the sidewalk outside. You could have gone somewhere else but you didn't know the area very well and you weren't doing anything today since your trip was coming to an end, so why not just wait it out.

You were still half way out the door when someone down the line caused everyone in front of you to shift backwards. The person directly in front of you took a step back right onto your foot almost falling on you. "Hey!" You exclaimed. The man removed his foot from yours and stood tall again, regaining his balance.

He puts his hand on your shoulder before asking, "Are you alright?" You looked up from your foot to meet his gaze. His icy blue eyes met with yours. You studied his face for what felt like hours, taking in every scar, freckle and crease that only added to his beauty.Your eyes moved down a ways to examine the rest of him when you noticed his very 'unique' ensemble. You smiled slightly to yourself as you traveled your gaze but to his face.  You'd been so focused on him that he gave you a concerning look.

"I'm sorry, what?" you asked, shaking your head to now look at the floor.

"I asked if you were alright." He restated.

"Oh, yeah, I-I guess." You uttered. He faintly smiled at you as he removed his hand, that you forgot was there, and turned back around. Then the line had now moved up a couple feet so you both walked up to catch up. You wanted to see his face again, if only for a second. You were now impatient waiting in the line. It wasn't about the coffee anymore, no, your new mission was to get him to look at you again.

You faked a yawn and stretched your arms over your head, swaying side to side, that didn't work. Your next attempt was waving as if you saw someone you knew on the other side of the shop to see if it'd peak his interest, it didn't. You tried and failed at many other attempts to get his attention. Your last resort was the one you wish you didn't have to do but you were desperate. So, you 'accidently' bumped into him. Now it was supposed to be a light tap but you had gotten yourself so worked up that you nearly knocked him over.

"Oh my god. I'm so unbelievably sorry. A-are you alright?" you asked him ironically this time.

"Yeah." He said bluntly. He looked at you over his shoulder which was better than nothing you thought. The amount of force you used on him made you feel terrible. He stretched his back out as if it hurt which wouldn't surprise you. You had to do something.

You peered off to his side. "Let me buy your drink." You stated. He gave you a generous smile.

"That's very kind but really I'm alright." He was next in line and if you asked again you would've felt as though you were pestering him, so you moved to stand behind him again. As the next person finished with their order you watched him walk up to the counter and to place his order. The way his voice sounded ordering his coffee was more delicious than any drink on that menu. You could listen to his raspy, deep voice for hours.

You watched as his hand reached for his wallet that was in his back pocket. When you looked back up from his 'back pocket' you saw him watching you.. watching him. You felt as all the residual pinkness of your cheeks ran flush. You thought he'd smirk or something, maybe be flattered but he didn't. His face was unreadable as he turned back around to finish his transaction.

It was your turn now as the Barista, Amy, called out next for you to walk up. You watched the man move to the end of the counter to wait for his drink. "Hi, what can I get for you today?" Amy asked.

"Something with him on the side." You say to her. She laughs and agrees that, yes, he was a tall glass of water and you were thirsty. You then give her your actual order and make your way to stand next to him. You were determined to make conversation whether he actually wanted to talk to you or not.

Once you got up next to him you blurted out the first thing that came to mind. "Busy today." Is all you could think of apparently. He gave you a 'sure' smile followed by an eyebrow raise.

"Um, Do you- do you come here often." You realize you're scrambling but he has you so flustered that your brain has totally given up on intelligent conversation.

"Um, yeah." he looks away from you trying to avoid conversation. You're not giving up though, not on this one.

"Are you from here?"

"No but I live around here." Okay an actual response.

"Have you lived here long?" He turns to you now.

"I'm sorry but is there a reason you're drilling me right now? Are you a report on coffee shop talk or something?" You give him a puzzled look. You hadn't thought you were being that pushy.

He turns back to the counter to see if his coffee has come out yet. You scoff at him and do the same. You honestly found what he said to be rude. Why was it so bad to make conversation with him?

At this point you are becoming visibly angry. You crossed your arms over your chest with your fists curled under them so tight you could feel your nails digging into your palm. Your foot was tapping on the cement floor as if to distract you from your inner rage and you were positive that your face was beet red. You were angry, yes, but at the same time embarrassed. Had everyone seen him dismiss you? Someone had to at least hear him. Just then your order came up, before his. You went up to the counter, thanked the Barista and walked back to be face to face with him now.

"You know what I was doing? I was trying to have a conversation, it's what people do. I'm sorry if my 'drilling' put a damper on the rest of your day." He opened his mouth as if he were going to say something but nothing came out. "I hope your coffee's cold." You added. You laughed to yourself at that last part realizing how ridiculous that sounded.

You rolled your eyes at him before walking through the crowd of people to get to the door. You turned right out of the store letting the door close behind you, but it didn't. You saw from behind you the man. "Wait." he said. You processed out the door trying to ignore him from behind you.

"Please, I'm sorry. It's just been awhile since someone has actually tried to talk to me just to talk. I'm really sorry." Your pace slowed as you listened to hear him out. "Can we start over?" He asked, making your cheeks turn to a light pinkish color. He had caught up with you now and stepped in front of you. "Hi, I'm Hayden." He reached his hand out towards you. You shook his hand in response. "What no name?" He asks you.

"Well knowing my name isn't important unless you're actually trying to get to know me." you smirk. He laughs, flashing you a beautiful glimpse at his perfect teeth, making you blush once again.

"What are you suggesting." He asks out of curiosity. You think for a second before responding.

"Well, seeing as though you don't have your coffee I guess I should buy you that drink now."  You have to be gushing at this point. No way someone this attractive is giving you the time of day.

He laughs under his breath while shaking his head. His laugh was infectious, making you laugh as well. "I guess you do." He moves in a little closer to you. "How about dinner too? I know a great place around the block, care to join me?" The smile had left his lips. The words were coming from his lips but he was now speaking with his eyes.

You looked down, clearing your throat, trying to compose yourself. "Maybe." You said before adding, "I wasn't planning on buying you a whole meal though." You look up now to see smiling down at you again.

"Okay then dinners on me, I guess." He says, continuing to laugh. You nod your head in agreement. "It's a date then." He grabs the hand hanging down by your side and gives it a light squeeze before leaving you to walk in the opposite direction. You so badly wanted to follow him, to see how he lived, where he lived, but you didn't. You just stood there and watched as he disappeared back into the coffee shop, most likely going back to claim his coffee. You start your trek back to your hotel with a smile on your face and a coffee in your hand.

Part 2 (Wine)

xMasterlist.x

[couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name]

What do you think they could have done better or differently with mcu spiderman?

- not ripped off Miles Morales for ideas

- made May??? Not a terrible parent??? I love Marissa Tomei but I genuinely cannot stand how they write her it literally pisses me off 

- highlighted Peter’s poverty more- they CUT scenes that highlight it?? And they just want you to infer he’s at Midtown on a scholarship?? It literally wouldn’t have been hard to just...build a smaller apartment set? Maybe they could’ve had a plot point in homecoming that he couldn’t afford to go on the D.C. trip (still keeping the he Needed to go on to find the bad guys plotline) and worked from there? I get not trying to hammer the idea into the audience’s head and letting them make assumptions but the way they handle the whole thing is just *too* subtle, like they just don’t wanna say the words He’s Poor out loud. it’s weird

- I personally loved the whole father/son relationship he had going with Tony, but it was too rushed. I would’ve had more of it in Homecoming or at the very least...referenced it before Infinity War idk. There’s a two year gap between Homecoming and Infinity War and the movie moves way to fast to let you play catch up with how their relationship developed. At the very least before the invasion starts in that movie you could’ve had one of them quip something about seeing the other later or something. idk if I’m making sense on this one lol

- Just Say The Name Ben Parker Out Loud Oh My God. We don’t need Peter vaguely mentioning having a bad year and we don’t need initials on luggage just Say The Man’s Name He’s Died So Many Times He Deserves More Respect Than This

- better fight scenes!! Far From Home delivered but Homecoming...I GET they were doing it because he was New At The Superhero Stuff but....’new’ meant he’d been at it for eight months already. Every other superhero gets to be badass in their origin story solo films and Spidey literally just got his ass kicked in every single scene. Realistically he should’ve held his ground in a fight better. He didn’t even win the final fight with Vulture!! He just ‘’’won’’’ by being a better person and like I Get That but also....don’t do him like this lmao 

- show some more of his brains- I loved how they used his webs to make the suit in FFH but that’s one thing and it wasn’t obvious enough to a lot of viewers. They needed to do more like...the tracker he used in homecoming. They could’ve put a scene in earlier in the film of him making them so you don’t assume they’re from Tony, or you could’ve seen them half built on his desk in civil war or something. Or like, in the Avenger’s films we’re used to him coming up with ingenious plans and crediting movies...but that never happens in his two solo films. Let us see him pull off some BATSHIT plans that shouldn’t work but he makes work because he thinks fast on his feet and is a capable hero please

- he needs...more personality lmao I’m sorry I love Tom Holland’s Peter to the ends of the earth but we see him 1) Stuttering and Panicking and 2) Crying and like lowkey nothing else??? We need some snark! We need some street smarts! I get that Peter is supposed to be shy but like...the way he talks to Ned and May, people he should not be shy around, is the same way he talks to like Flash and Fury and all of his other classmates, which means you don’t really get to see a different side to him when he’s comfortable? Like we don’t have a Who Peter Really Is/How Peter Acts Around Other People/How Peter Acts As Spider-Man situation going on, it’s just...all the same no matter the situation he’s in. Like...when Garfield was in the role, his Peter could barely make eye contact with anyone, and he’d stumble around sentences and barely get anything out, but then as Spider-Man he was confident and snarky, because it was an outlet for him. Tobey’s Peter was quiet and mumbled a lot and was overlooked as a civilian, but his voice was commanding as Spidey and even if the city was against him, everyone always knew he was in charge of the situation whenever he popped up. MCU Peter....it’s genuinely a mystery that no one in his life figured it out themselves. He literally acts exactly the same in and out of the suit. It’s just....less satisfying, I guess?

- why did I have to wait 3 years to see the spidey sense only referenced and wait a year and half after that to hear it talked about out loud. just wondering 

- I feel like J Jonah Jameson leaking Peter’s identity in FFH would’ve been more dramatic if we had actually gotten Peter working for him prior to that. We could’ve had like JJJ being torn whether to leak it or not and then another worker at the office doing it behind his back, or JJJ leaks it with no hesitance and Peter’s like ‘oh yay yet another betrayal in my life’ idk either could have been pretty compelling. 

- something they need to do different in the future: the venom movie NEEDS to be a buddy team up, I’m standing by that, sony and marvel CALL ME 

- this doesn’t actually effect the quality of the movies but the timeline they gave us for his age literally doesn’t add up and it drives me insane every single day. Homecoming and Infinity War are supposed to have a two year gap, but in one they establish he’s a 15 year old sophomore and in the next they’re saying he’s a 16 year old junior. Please for the love of God I need someone at Marvel to learn how to count PLEASE.

- this is all I have off the top of my head...I feel like I have to restate that I love Tom Holland’s Spider-Man to death, he’s literally my favorite character in the mcu, just...nothing is without complaints! And now that it looks like we get to keep him longer I hope they work on a few of these 

[istheresomebodywhocanimagine]

Say It Again (SMUT)

anonymous said: could write a smut that features joe mazzello where he has a HUGE impregnation kink plssss

(a/n: the impregnation kink scares me as a baby hater but also would let any of them ­take me raw so I am… conflicted. Anyways here u go heyooo i’m back for a moment - finishing up all the requests in my inbox and then i should have requests open sometime next week!!!!)

You found Joe’s fetish by pure accident, in a completely joking moment. Well, it was a completely joking moment at first. How quickly it would turn into more was something you never anticipated – even then, the situation it led to was a welcome surprise.

It was obvious he’d always wanted to be a dad. His nephews were his world, and he went into full dad mode every time he was around them. So, of course, kids were in the cards for you two – however, you were holding off because you wanted to make sure the time was right before you jumped into something so serious. But you never would have guessed that you getting pregnant was something that got Joe so wired. And in the heat of the moment, you realized that maybe it was something you were ready for.

“I just think that maybe the German team deserved better, sue me!” Joe threw his hands up in the air dramatically, shrugging and giving you a sour look as he sat across the couch from you, clearly upset that you thought the Bellas deserved the Worlds gold.

“I just think that blah blah meh,” you mocked teasingly, Joe narrowing his eyes playfully as he crossed his arms. “You’re just salty because the Bellas are clearly superior to Das Sound Machine.”

“You take that back!” he gasped, standing up quickly. When you didn’t, he took an annoyingly long inhale, then huffed at you and stomped off towards the bedroom, yelling about your opinion and how wrong it was. Rolling your eyes, you climbed up from the couch and followed him to the bedroom, listening as he ranted the whole way there.

When it finally got quiet and he sat down on the bed, sighing, you raised an eyebrow, leaning against the doorframe. “Are you going to be okay, drama queen?”

“I don’t even know who you are any more,” he groaned melodramatically, clearly joking, but still playing a very convincing upset part while he pressed his hands to his face, sighing. “You’re not the same woman I married 40 years ago.”

Okay. That part was less convincing. You snorted at Joe, deciding not to point out that he wasn’t even in existence 40 years ago, much less married, and you walked over to the bed, crawling on top of him and laying your head on his chest as you straddled him. “Don’t be such a baby back bitch.”

“I want a divorce!” he claimed loudly, despite the lack of rings on either of your fingers, and you laughed as you shook your head, deciding to play along after all. “I can’t believe we had all these kids together, and they grew up to be mindless Bellas fans like you.”

“You’re being so dramatic, it’s not like you’re the one who got knocked up,” you replied playfully, still keeping your head resting on his chest. One of his hands found your waist, resting there casually, and you giggled softly at the ticklish feeling it briefly gave you before you continued. “After all, you were the one who came in me.”

Joe was quiet, eerily quiet, and his grip on your waist tightened as a heavy tension settled over the room. Hearing his heart start to race a bit, you furrowed your eyebrows and sat up, looking down at your boyfriend, who was a bit red in the face and almost stoic in expression as you cupped his jaw.

“You alright?” you wondered aloud, running your thumb along his jaw as he shifted beneath you, looking somewhat uncomfortable. Had you taken it too far? Was this an uncomfortable topic for him?

“Say that again,” he murmured, almost too quiet to hear, and you raised an eyebrow as you wondered whether you’d heard him right. He nodded as if he read your mind, clearing his throat a bit. “Before what you last said. Say it, please.”

A bit of realization dawned on you as you recalled what you’d said moments ago, and you chewed on your lip as it became apparent to you that Joe might have a breeding kink. If you didn’t know better, you’d say he just liked sex without a condom, but the shallow breathing that just one sentence from you had induced said otherwise.

“You came in me,” you restated, Joe’s fingers digging into your side as he let out a shaky breath, groaning softly. His eyelids fluttered for a moment, but then shot right back open as he stared up at you, an intense burning in his hazel gaze that nearly made you shrivel from how unbelievably hot it was. So Joe was into that? You scooted back a bit as he sat up on one elbow, dropping his other hand from your waist and grazing his fingertips over your hip before he let it come to rest on your thigh, gripping it just tight enough to let you know he was there.

“C’mere, babe,” he muttered, and you couldn’t help but smash your lips to his, overwhelmed by how quickly the situation had shifted over into something so sensual, so real. But he met your lips with the exact same energy, moving in sync with you as your bodies pressed together, both of you sinking back down onto the bed as the kiss deepened. His tongue was soon delving into your mouth, tasting, exploring, and swirling around your own – meanwhile, his hand that was once on your thigh slid upwards. His fingertips snuck under the hem of your shorts, gliding over your skin just as easily as the moan of your name that tumbled forth from his mouth when you pulled away from the kiss and moved your lips to his neck. “You don’t know what you do to me sometimes, sweetheart,” he mumbled, his free hand moving to weave into your hair as he reveled in the feeling of your bites and kisses along his neck.

“Did you like that?” you asked, your voice slightly muffled by his skin as you continued to pepper love bites along his collarbone, not wanting him to see the slight blush that was overtaking your face as you prepared your next words. This was uncharted territory, and you had no idea how far Joe was wanting to take it, so you were slowly testing the boundaries, seeing where things went. “You wanna come in me? Take me raw?”

“Oh, Jesus,” he barely breathed out, his voice trembling as he heard your words. Making a note to yourself that you were on the right track, you waited to see what he did next as you pulled away, tugging your shirt off and tossing it to the side. But you didn’t even have to wait long, Joe being so excited about the situation he immediately launched into a sort of babble that made you wonder how long he’d been compartmentalizing it all. His lips were swollen from the previous kisses, holding back nothing as he practically whined. “Yes. So, so bad. Wanna fuck you raw, fill you up. Put a baby in you.”

Woah. The shock must have registered on your face because he was immediately sitting up, cupping your face and apologizing profusely, but you cut him off before he could feel too embarrassed. “Joe, Joe, Joe,” you crooned, cutting him off and taking his hands in yours as you pulled them away from your face. He silenced, still looking slightly regretful, but he waited patiently for you to speak, holding in his apologies for the moment. “It’s okay,” you reassured, moving his hands to your ass and resting them there before draping your arms over his shoulder as mild confusion flitted over his face. “Don’t just talk the talk,” you murmured, your lips brushing up against his for a moment before you gave him a brief, chaste kiss, giving him a moment to process what you were saying.

And it did take a moment, but then his eyes widened, and he could barely stop himself before he was stumbling over his words. Instead, he cleared his throat, then let out a shaky exhale and asked, “You mean it?”

One nod from you and he was on you like Velcro, flipping the both of you over and moving up so you were comfortably resting against the pillows. They were a gentle presence cushioning your shoulders and head, while Joe’s motions were the antithesis – his lips worked desperately against you, his hands tugging your shorts down eagerly in erratic, hurried motions. But you didn’t mind the contrast. The fact that he was this excited to fuck you was enough to make a shiver run down your spine, and the shallow, sharp breathing that punctuated his movements signaled to you that he couldn’t slow down if he tried.

To take the attention off of his shaky attempts to undress you, you kicked your shorts off before tugging at the string to his sweatpants, willing him to take them off himself while you rid yourself of your panties. He obliged, pushing his sweatpants off and tossing them to the side before also ridding himself of his shirt. Now, he hovered over you with just his boxers on, and you could tell he was already painfully hard by the way his cock strained against the fabric.

A small smile played at the corner of your lips as you tugged his boxers down, looking up at him, and the way he smiled back made your heart melt for just a second. Just a second, because then he was working on taking his boxers off, his eyes roaming down your body as he did so. When he finally sprung free of the restraint, you weren’t sure what you were expecting him to do next, so when he laid on his chest between your legs and started trailing slow, sweet kisses up your inner thigh, you were genuinely taken aback. For being in such a hurry moments ago, he seemed to really want to take his time with this part, and you weren’t sure you were ready for the change in pace. Joe being so desperate to get you undressed had gotten you riled up, so now you were a bit frustrated that he’d hit the brakes.

As his mouth neared your core, a small mumble from him distracted you from all of your curiosities and frustrations. “Have I ever told you I love you?” he asked, thought it was sort of a redundant question. Joe was always telling you how much he loved you – in fact, he kind of never shut up about it.

“Once or twice,” you murmured back, a playful edge to your voice, but it was quickly eradicated as Joe delved his tongue into your folds. Licking one long stripe upwards, he mumbled a response again, the vibrations stimulating your clit ever-so-slightly and making you shiver.

“Well, I fucking love you.” Then his tongue was on your clit, applying pressure to it just to play with you, and you let out a low moan as you used all of your remaining willpower not to grind on his tongue. “You’re so beautiful. And you’re gonna look so gorgeous when I-“

“Joe,” you whimpered, upset at the loss of his tongue already, and his hazel eyes met your gaze questioningly as you let out a soft huff, raising an eyebrow to imply something you didn’t really want to say out loud that bad. “Please.”

He hummed in amusement for a moment, then his eyes flicked back down to his original focus before his mouth was on you again, this time easily devouring you. Squirming in pleasure, you couldn’t help but let out filthy strings of curses as his tongue dipped in and out of you, exploring places that made your head spin. And his nose rubbing up against your clit as he shamelessly ate you out was just a bonus – by the time you were able to get a grasp on something, his hair, you were already halfway to your orgasm just from his mouth alone.

His tongue brushed up against your clit again before he placed an open-mouthed kiss on it and sucked it lazily. And finally, you managed to choke it out. “Joe, I-I need you inside me.”

“Yeah? My fingers?” he muttered, just a hint of a sultry gravel tone to his voice as he pulled away from your core for a moment, about to move his hand from where it had been resting on your hip. But you stopped him, grabbing his wrist, and his eyes flew up to meet yours curiously.

“No,” you almost whispered, shaking your head as you let go of his wrist. Spreading your legs out just a bit more, you moved your other hand from where it had been tangled in his hair. Taking his chin in between your forefinger and thumb, you ignored your own wetness that decorated the lower parts of his face as you gave him as serious of a look as you could manage when you were completely fucked out from his mouth. Admiring how wickedly good he looked like this for a moment, you smiled just a bit before regaining your composure. “Fuck me. No condom.”

“Oh, Christ,” he muttered, almost sounding like he was praising the holy one as much as he was cursing him. Crawling up so he was hovering over you, he rested his weight on one elbow while taking himself in the other hand, running the tip of his already-swollen cock up through your folds to position himself as you chewed on your lip. “You sure about this? You know what it means, right?”

“Damn right I do,” you replied quickly, still looking Joe straight in the eye, and he groaned obscenely loud before lining up at your entrance, short, quick breaths leaving his mouth. To silence himself from being any louder, he crashed his lips to yours one last time, muffling a soft groan that had been threatening to follow the first, but you coaxed it out of him anyways when you slipped your tongue into his mouth, swirling it around his own.

“That’s my fuckin’ girl,” he muttered as he reluctantly separated from the kiss, and before you could make a joke about his choice of words, he was pushing into you, the feeling of him without a condom not alien but definitely not very familiar – it had been a while, practically years. It was so much more real, for the both of you – you could tell by the way Joe’s mouth dropped open as he bottomed out that he was on cloud 9, and he hadn’t even gotten to the best part yet. “God, you feel so good. Holy shit, why didn’t we do this sooner?”

“Beats me,” you breathed out, your eyelids fluttering closed as you relaxed and adjusted to the feeling of him filling you, your head sinking back into the pillow and your lips staying slightly parted. Joe sat up, shamelessly ogling the sight of you in complete relaxation as he wrapped your legs around his waist, resting his hands on your thighs. And then he was moving, his hips canting forward against yours as he started out slow, just rocking in and out of you and making blissful sounds of satisfaction tumble out of your lips.

Joe was just as pleased, his breath catching in his throat as he marveled at how incredible he felt at the moment. So when you murmured for him to go faster, he obliged willingly, speeding up his thrusts and going deeper and deeper as one of his hands slid up to find purchase on your waist, gripping it tightly. The sound of skin on skin started to fill the room, Joe starting to pound into you as the realization of what was taking place washed over him once again. He couldn’t help himself as he realized he was really doing this, his hips snapping forward eagerly and slamming into you as you responded with a simple whimper, too overwhelmed by pleasure to form words.

“Jesus Christ-“ he muttered, mainly to himself, and his head fell back a bit as he sped up for a small spell, desperately fucking into you and making you whimper his name in pleasure. “Fuckkkk,” he groaned, finally slowing back down a bit and taking his time to thrust deep and hard. “So fucking good, baby girl, you feel so good.”

“God, you feel fucking amazing too,” you managed to breathe out, overwhelmed by how much more sensitive you were as Joe took you raw. You could feel how impossibly veiny and hard he was, every slight ridge on his cock stimulating you in all kinds of ways as you quickly felt yourself approaching your high. “Faster, bubs, I’m so close.”

“Faster?” Joe asked, nodding before starting to thrust faster again, grunting in pleasure as he did so. “Oh Christ, I- Babe, I won’t last much longer if I keep going this fast.”

“That’s okay, Joe, just fucking cum in me,” you breathed out, your hand reaching down to take the one of his that was resting on your hip. He laced your fingers together, then resumed the position on your waist.

“Baby, that’s so hot,” he almost growled, his hips suddenly slowing down as he gazed down at you with a dazed, lustful expression. He waited expectantly, still moving his hips, but only half as fast as he spoke again. “Say it again.”

“Cum in me, Joe!” you almost whined, frustrated at the slowing of the pace again. But your words sparked another excitement in Joe that sent him into an animalistic frenzy, his hips meeting yours flush as your heels dug into his lower back, pulling him in even closer, if that was possible. Desperately chasing both of your highs, your mouth kept rambling as he fucked into you, his hooded eyes nearly completely closed as his lips remained somewhat parted, small grunts of approval leaving them every once in a while. “Fill me up! Don’t stop until it’s leaking out of me. C’mon, babe.”

“Oh my god,” Joe muttered, squeezing his eyes shut tightly as he felt his high getting threateningly close from your words. His thrusts were hard and quick, but getting sloppier by the second. “M’gonna cum, baby girl. Gonna put my seed in you. Oh shit, oh f-“

Before he could finish his sentence, you were clenching around him, crying out his name brokenly as you hit your climax, your back arching up off the bed just a bit. And your orgasm triggered his, pulling him over the edge and eliciting a litany of swear words forth from his lips as he buried himself inside of you, releasing with a shattered groan.

When he finally pulled out after both of you had ridden out your highs, he quickly had to grab a few tissues from the bedside table as his cum actually did start to seep out of you, threatening to ruin the sheets you’d just washed a couple days ago. He cleaned you up, then himself, and proceeded to collapse on the bed next to you.

There were no words to be said after something like that. All that was supposed to be spoken had already been said in the heat of the moment, and now there was nothing left to do but snuggle back into your boyfriend’s embrace as he pulled you into a snuggling session, his toned arms pulling you back against him as he spooned you.

But after a while of enjoying the silent company, you had to say it. It was on your mind, and there was no more waiting.

“You know, I’m not exactly psyched that this just happened because of Pitch Perfect…. You’re kind of fucked up, Mazzello.”

A deliriously happy laugh bubbled up from Joe’s chest, tickling the back of your ear as he nuzzled your hair, one of his hands coming to rest on your stomach. His fingers splayed out and rested there, cradling a nonexistent baby bump that he was already ready for just minutes afterwards. And then, he replied. “Let’s name our kid after that guy from Das Sound Machine.”

“No! I’m officially removing you from the naming committee, that was a terrible suggestion. Ben is now in your place. Hope you’re happy!”

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[haberdashing]

Braving The Cold

Good Omens convenience store AU fic. Crowley fights his way through a cold while still doing his best to man his post at the convenience store; Mister Fell keeps him company and assists him the best he can.

Written for @badthingshappenbingo, for the trope “Working Through the Cold”; my current bingo card will be posted at the end of the fic, under the cut.

on AO3

Crowley’s head was pounding, and the bright fluorescent lights of the convenience store weren’t doing him any favors there. His nose was running, his face hurt, he kept sneezing at the most inconvenient moments, and all Crowley wanted to do was go home, crawl into bed, and go to sleep for a while. Maybe a few days, or a week, even, that ought to do the trick.

Unfortunately for Crowley, he still had almost five hours of his cashiering shift left to go.

The bell on the door rang, and Crowley slunk down a little at his station, trying to suppress a groan. It was a small noise, but one that turned his headache from bad to worse just the same. He didn’t see who was at the door, but he started off his usual greeting just the same, though even he could hear how hoarse and weak his voice was.

“Welcome to-”

And then before Crowley could get any farther, his speech was interrupted by a sneeze. It came fast enough that he didn’t have time to grab a tissue beforehand, instead sneezing into his elbow and getting snot all over it in the process. Lovely. That definitely looked professional right there.

“Oh, good heavens, you’re sick!”

Even before turning his gaze away from his dirtied elbow, Crowley could recognize the speaker by voice (and that characteristic manner of speaking) alone.

“Mister Fell?”

Crowley sniffled a little, which made him feel even more useless and pathetic than he had before, especially when he saw that Mister Fell looked exactly as put-together as he always did, without the slightest stain in sight.

“What are you doing here? You should be home in bed!”

Crowley laughed, though it hurt a little coming out. “I’ve got work to do, don’t I?”

“But you’re clearly in no condition to be working-”

“What’s the alternative, then? Take too much sick leave and I might not make rent, and then I’d be thrown out on the streets, and I’m not-” Crowley sniffled again, longer than before, sounding a bit disgusting in the process. “-letting that happen.”

Again, Crowley thought but didn’t dare say out loud.

Mister Fell looked positively stunned by what Crowley had thought was a rather straightforward restating of his living situation.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.” Crowley echoed.

“Well, that can’t be right-”

“Right or wrong, that’s how it goes when you aren’t-” Crowley sniffled again, trying and largely failing to keep it on the quiet side. “-aren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth.”

Or when you are, but you don’t get to stick around and keep it, Crowley thought. Not that his family had been quite silver spoon level of wealth to begin with. Bronze spoon at best, he figured. But from what little Crowley knew of Mister Fell, he had a fairly confident guess that the other man’s spoon hadn’t just been silver, it had been gold, or even bloody platinum.

Wait a minute, would those even make for good spoons in the first place? Wasn’t pure gold too soft for that sort of thing?

...the metaphor may have gotten away from Crowley a wee bit there.

Mister Fell stared at Crowley for a good long minute, and Crowley could practically see the gears turning in his head as he stood there in silence.

Eventually, the gears in Mister Fell’s head must have reached a conclusion, because he spoke up once again. “...won’t you make other people ill if you’re out working in this condition?”

“Possib-”

Crowley let out a loud sneeze in the middle of his response, and took it as a cue to adjust said response a wee bit.

“I mean, probably. But that’s not my problem, now, is it? And they’re not exactly going to pay all my bills for me if I don’t show up to work.”

If his glance in Mister Fell’s direction seemed a bit pointed at that last comment, well, so be it. He seemed like the kind of person for whom Crowley’s monthly rent money would be mere pocket change, spent on luxuries in an instant without giving it any thought whatsoever.

“...do you want my handkerchief?”

Crowly snorted, which made his headache a bit worse, but it was worth it. Of course Mister Fell had a handkerchief on him. It was probably monogrammed and commissioned especially to match his usual outfit too, for good measure.

“No, I’ve got tissues here, I’m-” Another sniffle. “-I’m good.”

“Are you sure? Your nose is awfully red-”

“That tends to happen when you’ve got a cold, yeah.” Crowley hadn’t meant for his response to sound quite as flippant as it did and winced a little internally as it came out, but Mister Fell didn’t seem to mind.

“No, not like that--I mean, there is that, yes, but--don’t you have any tissues with lotion you could be using?”

Another snort. “Those cost twice as much as the regular ones, so no, of course I don’t have any.”

“Well, that’s quite a shame.”

Mister Fell suddenly backed away and started exploring the far reaches of the shop, and Crowley shrugged it off; Mister Fell did have a way of breaking off conversations seemingly at random sometimes, often coming back to the counter with some odd item that must have suddenly sprung into his mind out of nowhere. It almost seemed like that was the case this time, too, as Mister Fell did indeed head back to the counter with an item in hand, but as he approached, Crowley could see that said item was a large box of tissues with lotion.

“No. No, no, no, no, no.”

“Yes.” Mister Fell rebutted, calmly but firmly.

“I absolutely will not allow this.”

“You won’t allow me to buy a box of tissues?” Mister Fell looked Crowley right in the eye as he continued, “You won’t allow me, a paying customer of this establishment, to purchase this item here?”

Crowley had seen the look in Mister Fell’s eyes before on other customers, ones who had thought (rightly or wrongly) that they had caught him up on some technicality, that if he didn’t do as they wanted immediately they were going to go cause a fuss with management and make sure to drop his name in the process, that his job might well be on the line and they knew it clear as day.

Of all the regular customers in the convenience store, Mister Fell was probably the one Crowley would have least expected to ever have that particular look in his eyes.

“Hang on, you know that’s not-”

“How much is it?”

Crowley sniffled and sighed and silently applied his employee discount because really, it was literally the least he could do in exchange. “Two quid.”

“Done.” Mister Fell handed over his usual note and added, “Keep the change, too, if it’ll do you any good.”

“We’ve got very strict rules against that, actually. No can do.” Crowley made change and, when Mister Fell didn’t hold his hand out for it, set it down on the counter, so close to the customer’s side of the counter that it was liable to fall off.

Mister Fell scooped up the change, hastily shoving it in his wallet before pushing the box of tissues towards Crowley. “Do you also have very strict rules against accepting gifts from customers?”

“I- now that I think of it, maybe, I can’t-” Crowley sneezed into his elbow. “-can’t recall-”

“Keep the tissues.” Mister Fell headed for the door, a thin smile on his face, as he added, “I hope they help.”

The bell on the door rang as Mister Fell left, before Crowley could think of a proper response.

Crowley looked over the tissue box closely, sniffling all the while, before one more sneeze onto his uniform made him decide to finally open it up. He was pretty sure there was a rule against taking gifts from customers, actually, but hell if he cared right now. Those tissues were soft. Too soft. So soft that he wasn’t sure if he trusted them.

...at least until it came time to actually use one, and okay, Mister Fell might have had a point, they really did make a difference.

But a lot of good that was going to do him in the long run, really. One box of tissues with lotion, that would just spoil him-

The bell on the door rang again.

“Wel-” was as far as Crowley managed to get this time before breaking out into a sneeze.

After the sneeze, though, Crowley stopped and blinked a few times. “Mister Fell? What are you doing back here?”

“I’ve got another gift for you.” As Mister Fell approached the counter again, Crowley saw that he was very carefully holding a steaming cup of hot cocoa studded with marshmallows, the cup’s label specifying that it had originated from the overpriced cafe next door.

“You know, I think there actually is a rule against taking-” A quick sniffle that Crowley didn’t let get in the way of his retort. “-gifts from customers-”

Mister Fell set the hot cocoa down on the counter, nudging it towards Crowley. “Just take it. You’re clearly having a bad time of it here, and I want to make it a little bit better. Is that so wrong?”

Crowley looked at the cup of hot cocoa, which looked and smelled absolutely delectable, and just the steam rising off of it was a pleasure right now. “Just don’t go thinking you’ll get any sort of- of special treatment for this-”

“Of course not!” Mister Fell looked positively offended by the suggestion. “I just wanted to be nice, that’s all.”

“Well, that’s all good then.” Crowley sniffled a little before saying, with as much of a smile as he could muster given the circumstances, “And thank you. I- I appreciate it.”

“Oh, you’re very welcome.”

As Mister Fell turned, ready to leave the store for good this time, Crowley could clearly see that he was grinning from ear to ear.

“It was the least I could do, really.”

One sip of that cocoa, and between its sheer deliciousness and the sweetness of Mister Fell’s gesture, a number of Crowley’s worries that had plagued him as of late had now miraculously disappeared.

[aingealcethlenn-archive]

Take A Drive

Characters - Reader, Sam, Dean

Pairing - None really

Summary/Request - When Y/N goes on a hunt alone and things go south, the Winchesters must not only save her from the monsters trying to kill her, but also make her realize what she’s doing, or else they could risk losing her for good.

Word Count - ~3313

Warnings - Angst, Language, Mentions of violence, Mentions of death/near death, Suicidal actions, Depression (If you spot any other warnings I should add, please let me know so I can edit this post to include them!)

A/N - Based on the Nick Alligood song “Take A Drive”

Tags (Want on or off? Send a message/ask or add yourself here) -  Redoing my Tag List...feel free to add yourself HERE

Story - 

It had been a rough few weeks lately... …Oh, who am I kidding. It had been a terrible few weeks.

Anything that could possibly go wrong, did. Any petty monster, demon, or creepy-crawly piece of shit that could rear its fugly head, did.

This last hunt, though? Was what finally did me in. I let the sleepless nights, the countless hours on the road, the pure, raw, emotion take me over - more like bash me over the head with a brick.

I was sick of these… these… things trying to take my family from me.  Sick of seeing my boys hurt.  Sick of having to mend bones, clean cuts, stitch up gashes. 

It wasn’t that these monsters were difficult in and of themselves, but for some unknown reason they were working together recently, and that just made it a sheer numbers advantage.

The hunt last week was different though; I was pissed off. This time? These freaks were messing with me. And I’d be damned if I let them take me without a fight.

Sure, I knew better than to take off alone - it was a suicide mission and I knew it -  but that wasn’t going to stop me this time. I walked into that nest with one thing on my mind. Take out the enemy before they took me out.

I wasn’t expecting a group of demons to be watching the nest though. Vampires are tough enough to catch off guard, let alone kill; especially an entire nest of them. Throwing in a twist like this was just going to make it that much tougher.

I got through though. Took out a few demons, and was able to cause enough of a distraction elsewhere to take the attention of the rest of them away from the nest.

Once inside - well that’s when things got difficult. I was only able to take out three of those bloodsuckers before I was ambushed.

I hadn’t been given any blood, so there was no worry there. They didn’t want to turn me, they wanted me dead. Drained of blood so there was no possibility of survival.

Lucky for me, Sam and Dean realized I was missing and figured out my plan quick enough. Nevertheless, by the time they arrived I was pretty far gone.

Now it was their turn to take care of me. Their turn to nurse me back to health.

With a little help from witchcraft - bless those bitches and their spells…sometimes it wasn’t such a bad thing to have Rowena around - I was back to myself in a matter of days.

Despite the ordeal that went down - the near-death experience and all - it didn’t stop Dean from speaking his mind once I was finally well enough to deal with it.

Seeing me sitting in the library when he returned from a liquor run, seemed like a good starting point for him. “What were you thinking Y/N?” Dean bellowed, throwing his jacket over a chair, directly over top my own.

Knowing exactly what he was talking about, I didn’t even bother looking up. “I was thinking, how I was tired of mending you two up. How those stupid creatures keep attacking in swarms. How, instead of laying low like they would normally do, things have been flipped on their head and they don’t give two shits about being caught anymore. I was thinking…”

“You weren’t thinking at all about the consequences though, were you?” he interrupted. “Didn’t stop to think what it might be like for Sam and me if we didn’t get there in time, huh?”

“Dean… I…” I let out a heavy sigh. “No. You know what?” I stood from the chair I’d been seated in, “I thought about all of that. And then I pushed it out of my head and did what I had set out to do. I killed things last week that had taken innocent lives. I pulled myself together and used all that damn pent up aggression I was harboring, and I killed those damn monsters!”

“Do you not understand that we could have lost you, Y/N?” His tone was still hard, but I could see the pain in his eyes. “If Sam & I hadn’t -”

“Did you ever stop to think, maybe I didn’t want you to save me?” Dean’s face dropped ever so slightly at my words. I could tell they stung, but they hurt me even worse. “No matter what I do, I seem to continue coming in last. I can’t drown the past anymore… it’s learned how to swim. I can’t… I can’t close my eyes at night, without my troubles seeping in and turning my dreams into nightmares.” I couldn’t hide the emptiness in my voice.

“So, what you’re saying, is you wanted to get caught. You wanted to go into that nest of vampires, and never come back out. Is that what I’m getting?” The voice I heard falling from his lips was one I had never heard from Dean before. He sounded… guilty.

“That’s not what I said Dean. Of course I didn’t want to get caught.” I was irritated by this conversation. I was scared. I was… I don’t know what I was anymore.

“Then I guess I don’t -” he started before I interrupted him abruptly.

“I just don’t want to feel anything anymore Dean. Okay? Is that clear enough for you to follow?” I snapped.

Turning on my heels, storming off to my room, roughly pushing past Sam as he made his way to check on what all the commotion was about, slamming the door once I was inside.

I leaned back against the door, sighing quietly as I slid down to the floor, listening to the muffled sounds of Sam and Dean discussing what just happened.

I didn’t mean to snap at Dean, it just happened. Sometimes I just couldn’t shut that switch off once it’s been flipped.

It wasn’t long before I heard Dean’s footsteps coming down the hall. Standing from my spot on the floor I changed into an oversized t-shirt and some shorts, hoping some rest will help improve my mood. As I crawl into bed, I hear Dean’s door close, and silence engulfs the bunker, and more specifically, my bedroom.

After lying in silence for what seemed like an eternity, unable to sleep, I leave my bed and put on a fresh pair of clothes. Knowing the brothers are fairly light sleepers, I’m careful to stay as quiet as possible. Clicking my door open, I step through the threshold into the hall before carefully clicking it closed once more and heading toward the main areas.

Dean had left his jacket draped over the chair in the library. When I picked it up in an attempt to get my own coat, figuring if I couldn’t sleep I might as well take a drive, it felt heavy. Seems Dean left the keys for the car - and the bunker - in his jacket pocket.

This wasn’t typical of him, he always kept his stuff in his room. It was just another thing that told me the events of last week had rattled him as much as they had me. We just each had very different ways of dealing with things.

It had been a long time since I had driven Baby. She used to be my escape when I needed to clear my head.

Smirking to myself as I recalled the times I would carefully fish the keys out of Dean’s discarded clothes, and tip-toe out of the different motel rooms to sit in the silence that Baby offered.

The times I would put the keys in the ignition, and start her up to hear that purr of her engine; sometimes taking her for a short drive, only to make it back minutes before the sun - and the brothers - would be up for the day.

Nonetheless, now that we had the bunker, and a garage full of cars, I had my pick of what to use. I didn’t see the sense in trying to sneak the keys to drive Dean’s car anymore when I could just as easily take another.

But, considering the circumstances, I felt the need to take the Chevy out for a drive. Call it sentimental, call it cheesy, call it whatever you want, but there was something about that car that could calm my rattled nerves and silence the monsters I carried with me in my own head better than anything else in this world.

Taking the keys from the pocket, I forgot all about my jacket and took off for the garage, as quietly as possible. 

With the roar of the engine, I was thankful the garage was far away from the rooms so there was no chance in them hearing me leave.

I threw the car in drive and took off for the open road. I had no destination in mind; I was headed nowhere, but I was headed there fast.

After a bit of mindless cruising - you know the type, when your mind goes blank and you zone out completely, only to come to and wonder how the hell you’re still alive and have no idea how you arrived at where you are - I finally engaged myself and started to focus, finding myself stopped on the side of a lonely road.

Dean rolled out of bed, unable to sleep after what happened between Y/N and himself earlier. Thinking, maybe trying to apologize was the best thing he could do to ease his mind.

Making his way to Y/N’s room, he felt a ping in the pit of his stomach. Something telling him to worry. Ignoring it, he opened Y/N’s door slowly.

“Y/N? You awake?” he offered in a whisper.

When he didn’t hear a response, he opened the door farther to at least check on her. Seeing her bed empty, he suddenly realized something may actually be wrong.

He made his way quickly to the main rooms of the bunker, checking everywhere he would expect her to be. Finding her nowhere, Dean made his way to Sam’s room to wake him.

Knocking on Sam’s door, he doesn’t wait for a response. Throwing the door open, he yells for his brother.

“Sammy! Wake up! Y/N is missing!”

“What?” Sam’s voice is full of worry and sleep, having been woken so abruptly.

“Y/N… is… missing!” He restated slowly. 

“She couldn’t have gone far Dean.” Sam tried to reassure. “Did you check the garage?” he offered, rubbing his eyes, still trying to wake up completely.

“The garage?” Dean questioned. Sam nodded in reply. “Why would I check the garage, Sam? She’s a person, not a car.”

“Because, Dean, Y/N tends to sit in one of the cars when she can’t sleep.”

I ran my hands over the steering wheel, feeling the smooth leather against my skin. The road in front of me was wide open, and in this small, map dot town, I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about cops, or even other drivers for that matter, out this late at night.

I may have been feeling lost, caught up in all the insanity that goes along with this life, but tonight? Tonight, I was going to find myself again. Forget the troubles, forget the insanity, forget the past; at least for a brief time.

I reached across the seat and lowered the passenger window. Once I was back in my spot, I lowered my window as well before pushing the gas pedal slowly to the floor, and listening to the engine purr as it moved increasingly faster down the road.

This was my therapy. This was my comfort zone. The open road. The engine roaring.

When the Chevy hits about 85, is when I truly feel alive again. The breeze rolling in, washing over me as if it were washing my sins away, being baptized by the open road.

Breathing in that sweet Kansas atmosphere, the speakers bumping to some upbeat country music - of course, I’d never tell Dean his baby played anything but his rock tapes - rolling on for miles at a time.

“SAAAAMMMM!!” Dean’s voice carried throughout the bunker. Within a couple minutes, Sam appeared in the doorway to the garage. “It’s gone Sam!”

“What’s gone Dean?” He made his way to where his brother stood.

“She took...my car!”

“I’m right here Dean, you really don’t need to yell anymore.” Sam rolled his eyes at his brother. “Look, why don’t I try to call her and see where she is?”

Dean didn’t respond. He appeared to be hyperventilating at the knowledge of someone else driving his beloved vehicle. 

“Go… Go sit down.” He clapped his hand on his brother’s shoulder, “I’ll get your car back.”

I don’t know how long I had been driving. Hell, I don’t even completely know where I am. All I really knew, was that I needed to top off the car if I had any intent on making it back to the bunker.

As I pull into the gas station, and up to the pump, I hear my phone vibrating on the seat. I didn’t care who it was, or what they wanted, so I ignored it.

Climbing out, I opened the door for the gas tank and removed the cover. I knew I couldn’t put the cheap gas in Baby’s tank, so I filled her up with the premium stuff. Once the gas cap was back on, I sat back in her seat and looked at my phone.

3 missed calls. All from Sam. Just as I was about to clear them all from my screen, his name appeared again. No sense ignoring it again.

“What is it, Sam?” I said abruptly, as soon as the screen had shown the call starting.

“Where are you Y/N? I’ve called you three times already. We’re worried about you.” 

“No, you’re not. Dean is worried about his precious car, that’s all.” I snidely replied.

“You know that’s not true.” I laughed a little at Sam’s attempt to make me feel significant. “I mean, sure he is worried about the car, but we’re more worried about you.” Sam’s voice was remorseful. “A car can be replaced Y/N, you can’t.”

“Sam, I appreciate the concern, but -”

“But nothing Y/N.” His tone had rapidly changed from concerned to frustration, “I don’t know what’s got your thoughts so warped right now, but whatever it is, we need to figure out how to make it stop. You know we care about you. You know we’d risk everything for you. So why are you so hell-bent on self-destructing?” 

“I’m not - “ I tried to start again.

“You are though,” he interrupted. “Drinking full bottles of whiskey in a night, thinking no one notices. Trying to take on an entire nest of vampires alone. Now you’re out, who knows where, alone, and couldn’t even be bothered to let one of us know you were taking off? How is any of that not being self-destructive?”

Sam had a point. Maybe he’s right. I was doing things that were dangerous, without so much as a second thought about the outcome. 

“Just… come home Y/N. Please? Let’s figure this out together.” I could hear the worry in his voice. “Before something worse happens…”

“Okay, Sam.”

“Thank you,” he let out a sigh, “I’ll calm Dean down while we wait for you.”

I hung up the phone, turned the key and headed back toward the bunker. There was no telling what would happen when I arrived, what may be said, or how anyone would react, but I had to at least give them a chance. 

After a long, quiet drive back, I pulled into the garage and shut off the engine. Sitting in the silence for a moment, I tried to gather my thoughts before making the walk inside.

Finding the brothers sitting in the library, I took a seat opposite of them and just waited. 

“What the hell were you thinking?!” Dean barked out. “No one drives that car but me! I don’t even let Sam drive her!” 

I toss the keys at him, “she’s fine Dean. Not a single scratch, and I even topped her off before getting here. The only thing she’s got is a few more miles on her, and I didn’t hear her complain at all.”

“That’s not the -” he cut himself off, running a hand down his face, “forget it.”

“What he means to say Y/N,” Sam glared at his brother before looking to me, “is are you okay?”

“I’m fine Sam,” I replied flatly.

“Why did you take off like that? You should have at least -”

“I needed a break, Sam. That’s it.” I leaned back in the chair, crossing my arms over my chest and just watching each of them.

“And that break required my car?” Dean growled again.

“Required it? No. I’m sure I could have accomplished the same thing taking any one of those other cars,” I smirked a little as I saw his eyes narrow, “but, I can’t say I would have come back as easily if I had taken any other one.”

“What do you mean Y/N? What’s going on? Let us help you…” Sam offered, his last word a soft whisper of a request, “please?” 

“There’s nothing to help Sam. I’m fine. I’m just…” my face dropped. I leaned forward, resting my arms on my knees, running my hands over my face slowly.

I didn’t see the shift in Dean. Seeing the hunched over state I was in, and hearing the defeat in my voice, something clicked for him. He questioned himself how he had missed it, beating himself up a little inside as he finally recognized the state I was in. One he had been in himself, and probably would have never escaped from had it not been for his brother.

“I’m just…” I tried again, “I’m tired of trying to look happy and act normal for you two because the truth is… I’m not. I haven’t been for a while now. But I just can’t… I don’t have the strength to tell anyone, you know?” I looked between the brothers, hoping they would understand what I was trying desperately to convey.

“Look, Y/N, you know it’s okay, right?” Dean questioned, his voice finally soft, forgetting about the car and focusing on me.

“Nothing about this is okay, Dean… That’s the problem.” I rested my arms on my legs, crossed on my lap as I continued to lean forward, taking interest in the speck of dirt I had found on the floor. Anything to avoid their eyes.

“You’re wrong,” he said flatly, “It’s okay to feel the way you do.” Dean stepped closer, kneeling down in front of me, lifting my head slightly to look into my eyes. “To feel like the whole world is about to collapse on top of you, and in some way, you want that more than anything. Because it means all the pain will finally be over. But at the same time, you’re terrified of what would happen if it did.” I could tell by the sincere tone of his voice that he was speaking from experience.

“Who-Who are you again?” I smirk, “The Dean I know has never been that profound with me before.”

“You’re not alone in this fight Y/N. The one here in the real world, or the one in that beautiful head of yours. Sam and I,” he looked back at his brother for a brief moment before returning his gaze to me, “we’re here for you sweetheart. In any way, you need us to be.”

I smiled, looking up at Sam before returning my gaze to Dean, “what would I do without you two?” I chuckled.

“Survive Y/N. Just like always.” Sam smiled in return.

[the-stark-bunch]

Rivals Finally /

Crush Part 1

Riri looked up from her workstation in the lab to the clock on the wall. It was already almost 2:00 a.m. and she knew Tony would throw a fit if they stayed up any later.

Peter was hard at work on new web shooters that would allow him to use less of his natural web fluid. Gifts from Wade Howlett and Harry Osborn were dotted around his portion of the lab, all chocolates and chimichanga bouquets eaten. Riri and Harley were actually the ones who ate most of the stuff, seeing as Riri was a sucker for fried food and Harley loved the expensive, fancy chocolates that Harry imported from various countries.

Harley was half asleep, hunched over his latest design of the Iron Lad suit. He was wearing a shirt Ned designed for him as a birthday present the year before that read “Not Iron Lad”. It was a personal joke among the OG friend group (which consisted of Peter, Harley, Ned, Shuri, Riri and Yukio), poking fun at Harley hating the name Iron Lad. His section of the lab was clean for the most part besides a few crushed cans of double shot Starbucks, an oil rag and a picture of his deceased mother and sister.

The last few days, Harley has gotten quieter than usual. He typically only opened his mouth to make smart remarks and work the room if needed, but these days all he seemed to bother talking for was debate team at school. He was starting to seem annoyed by the whole rivalry between Wade and Harry, but always shrugged it off when anyone asked why he was no longer interested. Peter had figured out about the small war of affection, and he found it flattering, but just like Riri he was much more worried about Harley.

“Pete, Harls,” Riri called to get her surrogate brothers’ attention. “We should head off to bed, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Peter agreed, shutting his area down.

When Harley didn’t move, Riri tried again, “Harley, come on. It’s late. Don’t you want to sleep in your bed?”

“Huh?” He finally heard her and looked up. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right.”

The older sister helped Harley up while Peter shut the rest of the lab down for them. Together, they made their way upstairs to the family residential floor of Stark Tower. Tony didn’t usually sleep on this floor unless one of the kids’ therapists suggested their mental state was declining, so it was no surprise that the master bedroom was empty.

“Want to have a sleepover tonight?” Riri asked once they got to the end of the hall.

“In Dad’s room?” Peter raised an eyebrow.

“It’s not like he’s using it right now,” she shrugged.

The three broke off to their own rooms to shower and change into pajamas. After grabbing a few things, they met back up in the now lit master bedroom and set up their pillow and blanket fort.

They all laid together cuddling, their positions subconsciously tactical in case of a late night attack. Being the youngest and weakest of the three, Harley was positioned in between his two siblings. Peter was the second oldest and physically strongest, so he was by the window, and Riri being the oldest was closest to the door to put herself between the most likely case of danger and her brothers.

“Are either of you awake?” Riri asked thirty minutes into trying to fall asleep. Both boys made small noises of acknowledgement, Peter turning to looked at her over Harley’s head.

“Howlett And Osborn seems to be calming down a bit lately,” she said.

Peter nodded, “I think they are running out of ideas.”

“Have you decided which one you like more?”

“It was never a competition.”

“I’m guessing that means you aren’t going to tell?”

Peter laughed at his sister, “No, I don’t plan on it. Not yet. Do you have a crush on anyone?”

“Pete, I’m eighteen,” she rolled her eyes. “I don’t get crushes. But... I think there is someone I like.”

“Who?”

“I’m not telling you,” Riri hit him with a pillow. “A secret for a secret.”

“You’re both so weird,” Harley laughed under his breath, not opening his eyes.

“Oh is that so?” Riri met eyes with Peter, then propped herself on her elbow. “And do tell, little brother, do you have a crush on anyone?”

Harley’s cheeks turned crimson. Without a word, he pulled the silk sheets over his head. That was answer enough.

“My baby brother has a crush,” Peter gasped.

“I’m not a baby, I’m two years younger than you!” Harley’s voice came muffled from under the sheets.

“Our little cynic is all grown up,” Riri faked to fan tears from her eyes.

“Who is it?” The older brother demanded, pulling the sheets down so they could see Harley again.

“No.”

“Harls, you have to tell us,” Riri begged.

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“Yes you do,” Peter said. “We are your older siblings. As baby brother, your secrets are our business.”

“That’s so unfair!” Harley said, glaring up at them.

A grin broke out across both the siblings’ faces, and Harley didn’t have time to react before they descended upon him with tickles.

“Stop!” Harley cries through fits of giggles and laughter. “Dad is going to- hear us- and get mad-“

“If you tell us who your crush is, we will stop,” Riri said singsong.

“Never!”

“Fine, just know you have dug your own grave,” Peter smirked, pinning his brother’s arms so that he couldn’t push them away.

After a little more struggling, Harley finally said, “It doesn’t matter who it is, he will never like me back!”

Peter and Riri stopped at that and frowned at each other.

“Harls, you can’t say that,” Peter said carefully. “He could love you back right now and you just don’t know it.”

“Even if he doesn’t like you, that doesn’t mean he never will,” Riri finished.

“I’m plain to him,” Harley looked away, trying to hide his red face. “I’m just some kid from the south with a heart disease. He doesn’t like me, I know he doesn’t. He never will. There’s no adventure in being with me, and that’s what he wants. That’s what he likes.”

The other two knew there was nothing they could say to make this better. Harley hasn’t had problems with his heart since the transplant, but they always knew there was a cliff hanging off ever breath. He was a cynic due to experience, and nothing could sway him once he made up his mind on a matter.

Both of them laid back down, cuddling their little brother close. It was right before she drifted of, that Riri connected the dots.

Harley being so quiet, having a crush on a boy who liked adventure and clearly didn’t have a crush on him back. It was all so obvious, she should have noticed sooner.

The last thing she saw was Peter’s sleepy, lidded eyes looking back at her, having made the same connection.

~~~

Riri and Peter called an emergency friend meeting the next day when Harley went to physical therapy with their uncle Rhodey. Not everyone was there, but the people who needed to be were. Yukio, Ned, Betty and Liz day on one side of the long conference table. On the other side was Eddie, Flash, Gwen, MJ and Shuri. At the head were the two siblings, of course, waiting for Wade and Harry to officially begin business.

Harry got there at 9:00 a.m. sharp, the exact time the meeting was supposed to start. Wade got there fifteen minutes late. Both sat at the other end of the table from Riri and Peter.

“I’m sure you are all very confused about why I called an emergency meeting while Harley is unable to attend,” Riri said, standing. “I will explain it all in a bit. For now, please listen to Peter present our dilemma. Peter, the floor is yours.”

Peter nodded and stood as she sat. “As you all have seen, and made bets upon, Wade and Harry both are pinning after me. Harley was the first to notice the growing dispute, and the first to get fully engaged in the outcome. The last few weeks though, he has been avoiding the situation. Can anyone tell me why?”

“He doesn’t want to see you getting hurt over having to chose the results,” Betty offered.

“He lost interest,” Liz suggested.

“Both of those are possibilities,” Peter agreed. “But it’s more complicated than that.”

“Is he sick?” Flash asked in a slight panic. “Did he get hurt?”

“No, no,” Riri tried to call their friend. “If he was sick, we would have told you all right away.

“Riri and I think we figured it out last night,” Peter continued. He looked far across the table to the boys who had been fighting for his heart. Harry looked extremely worried for his friend, while Wade looked about ready to run out of the room to hunt Harley down. He couldn’t help the twitch of a smile at his lips from their concern for his brother.

Riri took Peter’s hand to get his attention, guiding him to sit back down.

“Boys,” she carefully looked up at the conflicting love interests. “You both love Harley, correct?”

“Of course,” Harry said.

“Who couldn’t?” Wade added. “He’s so sassy, and small. I get overprotective around him all the time.”

“And you love me?” Peter asked.

“Yes,” both said.

“Well, then you need to keep open minds, and kind hearts, as to what I’m about to say,” Riri said, looking between them.

When she was sure both of them were listening, she took a deep breath, and prayed she was right.

“You both love Peter,” she restated, “but Harry, I don’t think you are in love with Peter.”

“What do you mean?” Harry looked taken aback.

“Harry, your brain tricked your heart into loving Peter, but I’m reality, you love someone else,” she said with great pity. Everyone was looking at Harry now. They had figured it out too.

“You’ve been projecting your feeling for that person onto me, because you know the risk of loving them,” Peter said.

“I still don’t understand,” Harry shook his head. Even Wade was now looking at him with a pitiful understanding.

“Harry,” Riri walked over to him, taking his hands in hers as she crouched in front of him. “You are in love with Harley.”

It took him a few moments. Many emotions crossed his face in those moments. Confusion, realization, terror, regret, fear and understanding.

He settled on saying the most graceful thing he could muster at the time.

“Oh shit.”

[waywardsons-imagines]

Take A Drive

Author - Aingeal

Characters - Reader, Sam, Dean

Pairing - None really

Summary/Request - When Y/N goes on a hunt alone and things go south, the Winchesters must not only save her from the monsters trying to kill her, but also make her realize what she’s doing, or else they could risk losing her for good.

Word Count - 3308

Warnings - Angst, Language, Mentions of violence, Slight mentions of death/near death, Suicidal actions, Depression (If you spot any other warnings I should add, please let me know so I can edit this post to include them!)

A/N - Based on the Nick Alligood song “Take A Drive”

It had been a rough few weeks lately... …Oh, who am I kidding. It had been a terrible few weeks.

Anything that could possibly go wrong, did. Any petty monster, demon, or creepy crawly piece of shit that could rear its fugly head, did.

This last hunt, though? Was what finally did me in. I let the sleepless nights, the countless hours on the road, the pure, raw, emotion take me over - more like bash me over the head with a brick.

I was sick of these… these… things trying to take my family from me. Sick of seeing my boys hurt. Sick of having to mend bones, clean cuts, stitch up gashes.

It wasn’t that these monsters were difficult in and of themselves, but for some unknown reason they were working together recently, and that just made it a sheer numbers advantage.

The hunt last week was different though; I was pissed off. This time? These freaks were messing with me. And I’d be damned if I let them take me without a fight.

Sure, I knew better than to take off alone - it was a suicide mission and I knew it -  but that wasn’t going to stop me this time. I walked into that nest with one thing on my mind. Take out the enemy before they took me out.

I wasn’t expecting a group of demons to be watching the nest though. Vampires are tough enough to catch off guard, let alone kill; especially an entire nest of them. Throwing in a twist like this was just going to make it that much tougher.

I got through though. Took out a few demons, and was able to cause enough of a distraction elsewhere to take the attention of the rest of them away from the nest.

Once inside - well that’s when things got difficult. I was only able to take out three of those blood suckers before I was ambushed.

I hadn’t been given any blood, so there was no worry there. They didn’t want to turn me, they wanted me dead. Drained of blood so there was no possibility of survival.

Lucky for me, Sam and Dean realized I was missing and figured out my plan quick enough. Nevertheless, by the time they arrived I was pretty far gone.

Now it was their turn to take care of me. Their turn to nurse me back to health.

With a little help from witchcraft - bless those bitches and their spells…sometimes it wasn’t such a bad thing to have Rowena around - I was back to myself in a matter of days.

Despite the ordeal that went down - the near death experience and all - it didn’t stop Dean from speaking his mind once I was finally well enough to deal with it.

Seeing me sitting in the library when he returned from a liquor run, seemed like a good starting point for him. “What were you thinking Y/N?” Dean bellowed, throwing his jacket over a chair, directly over top my own.

Knowing exactly what he was talking about, I didn’t even bother looking up. “I was thinking, how I was tired of mending you two up. How those stupid creatures keep attacking in swarms. How, instead of laying low like they would normally do, things have been flipped on their head and they don’t give two shits about being caught anymore. I was thinking…”

“You weren’t thinking at all about the consequences though, were you?” he interrupted. “Didn’t stop to think what it might be like for Sam and I if we didn’t get there in time, huh?”

“Dean… I…” I let out a heavy sigh. “No. You know what?” I stood from the chair I’d been seated in, “I thought about all of that. And then I pushed it out of my head, and did what I had set out to do. I killed things last week that had taken innocent lives. I pulled myself together, and used all that damn pent up aggression I was harboring, and I killed those damn monsters!”

“Do you not understand that we could have lost you, Y/N?” His tone was still hard, but I could see the pain in his eyes. “If Sam & I hadn’t -”

“Did you ever stop to think, maybe I didn’t want you to save me?” Dean’s face dropped ever so slightly at my words. I could tell they stung, but they hurt me even worse. “No matter what I do, I seem to continue coming in last. I can’t drown the past anymore… it’s learned how to swim. I can’t… I can’t close my eyes at night, without my troubles seeping in and turning my dreams into nightmares.” I couldn’t hide the emptiness in my voice.

“So, what you’re saying, is you wanted to get caught. You wanted to go into that nest of vampires, and never come back out. Is that what I’m getting?” The voice I heard falling from his lips was one I had never heard from Dean before. He sounded… guilty.

“That’s not what I said Dean. Of course I didn’t want to get caught.” I was irritated by this conversation. I was scared. I was… I don’t know what I was anymore.

“Then I guess I don’t -” he started before I interrupted him abruptly.

“I just don’t want to feel anything anymore Dean. Okay? Is that clear enough for you to follow?” I snapped.

Turning on my heels, storming off to my room, roughly pushing past Sam as he made his way to check on what all the commotion was about, slamming the door once I was inside.

I leaned back against the door, sighing quietly as I slid down to the floor, listening to the muffled sounds of Sam and Dean discussing what just happened.

I didn’t mean to snap at Dean, it just happened. Sometimes I just couldn’t shut that switch off once it’s been flipped.

It wasn’t long before I heard Dean’s footsteps coming down the hall. Standing from my spot on the floor I changed into an oversized t-shirt and some shorts, hoping some rest will help improve my mood. As I crawl into bed, I hear Dean’s door close, and silence engulfs the bunker, and more specifically, my bedroom.

After lying in silence for what seemed like eternity, unable to sleep, I leave my bed and put on a fresh pair of clothes. Knowing the brothers are fairly light sleepers, I’m careful to stay as quiet as possible. Clicking my door open, I step through the threshold into the hall before carefully clicking it closed once more and heading toward the main areas.

Dean had left his jacket draped over the chair in the library. When I picked it up in an attempt to get my own coat, figuring if I couldn’t sleep I might as well take a drive, it felt heavy. Seems Dean left the keys for the car - and the bunker - in his jacket pocket.

This wasn’t typical of him, he always kept his stuff in his room. It was just another thing that told me the events of last week had rattled him as much as they had me. We just each had very different ways of dealing with things.

It had been a long time since I had driven Baby. She used to be my escape when I needed to clear my head.

Smirking to myself as I recalled the times I would carefully fish the keys out of Dean’s discarded clothes, and tip-toe out of the different motel rooms to sit in the silence that Baby offered.

The times I would put the keys in the ignition, and start her up to hear that purr of her engine; sometimes taking her for a short drive, only to make it back minutes before the sun - and the brothers - would be up for the day.

Nonetheless, now that we had the bunker, and a garage full of cars, I had my pick of what to use. I didn’t see the sense in trying to sneak the keys to drive Dean’s car anymore when I could just as easily take another.

But, considering the circumstances, I felt the need to take the Chevy out for a drive. Call it sentimental, call it cheesy, call it whatever you want, but there was something about that car that could calm my rattled nerves and silence the monsters I carried with me in my own head better than anything else in this world.

Taking the keys from the pocket, I forgot all about my jacket and took off for the garage, as quietly as possible.

With the roar of the engine, I was thankful the garage was far away from the rooms so there was no chance in them hearing me leave.

I threw the car in drive, and took off for the open road. I had no destination in mind; I was headed nowhere, but I was headed there fast.

After a bit of mindless cruising - you know the type, when your mind goes blank and you zone out completely, only to come to and wonder how the hell you’re still alive and have no idea how you arrived to where you are - I finally engaged myself and started to focus, finding myself stopped on the side of a lonely road.

Dean rolled out of bed, unable to sleep after what happened between Y/N and himself earlier. Thinking, maybe trying to apologize was the best thing he could do to ease his mind.

Making his way to Y/N’s room, he felt a ping in the pit of his stomach. Something telling him to worry. Ignoring it, he opened Y/N’s door slowly.

“Y/N? You awake?” he offered in a whisper.

When he didn’t hear a response, he opened the door farther to at least check on her. Seeing her bed empty, he suddenly realized something may actually be wrong.

He made his way quickly to the main rooms of the bunker, checking everywhere he would expect her to be. Finding her nowhere, Dean made his way to Sam’s room to wake him.

Knocking on Sam’s door, he doesn’t wait for a response. Throwing the door open, he yells for his brother.

“Sammy! Wake up! Y/N is missing!”

“What?” Sam’s voice is full of worry and sleep, having been woken so abruptly.

“Y/N… is… missing!” He restated slowly.

“She couldn’t have gone far Dean.” Sam tried to reassure. “Did you check the garage?” he offered, rubbing his eyes, still trying to wake up completely.

“The garage?” Dean questioned. Sam nodded in reply. “Why would I check the garage, Sam? She’s a person, not a car.”

“Because, Dean, Y/N tends to sit in one of the cars when she can’t sleep.”

I ran my hands over the steering wheel, feeling the smooth leather against my skin. The road in front of me was wide open, and in this small, map dot town, I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about cops, or even other drivers for that matter, out this late at night.

I may have been feeling lost, caught up in all the insanity that goes along with this life, but tonight? Tonight, I was going to find myself again. Forget the troubles, forget the insanity, forget the past; at least for a brief time.

I reached across the seat, and lowered the passenger window. Once I was back in my spot, I lowered my window as well before pushing the gas pedal slowly to the floor, and listening to the engine purr as it moved increasingly faster down the road.

This was my therapy. This was my comfort zone. The open road. The engine roaring.

When the Chevy hits about 85, is when I truly feel alive again. The breeze rolling in, washing over me as if it were washing my sins away, being baptized by the open road.

Breathing in that sweet Kansas atmosphere, the speakers bumping to some upbeat country music - of course, I’d never tell Dean his baby played anything but his rock tapes - rolling on for miles at a time.

“SAAAAMMMM!!” Dean’s voice carried throughout the bunker. Within a couple minutes, Sam appeared in the doorway to the garage. “It’s gone Sam!”

“What’s gone Dean?” He made his way to where his brother stood.

“She took my car!”

“I’m right here Dean, you really don’t need to yell anymore.” Sam rolled his eyes at his brother. “Look, why don’t I try to call her and see where she is?”

Dean didn’t respond. He appeared to be hyperventilating at the knowledge of someone else driving his beloved vehicle.

“Go… Go sit down.” He clapped his hand on his brother’s shoulder, “I’ll get your car back.”

I don’t know how long I had been driving. Hell, I don’t even completely know where I am. All I really knew, was that I needed to top off the car if I had any intent on making it back to the bunker.

As I pull into the gas station, and up to the pump, I hear my phone vibrating on the seat. I didn’t care who it was, or what they wanted, so I ignored it.

Climbing out, I opened the door for the gas tank, and removed the cover. I knew I couldn’t put the cheap gas in Baby’s tank, so I filled her up with the premium stuff. Once the gas cap was back on, I sat back in her seat and looked at my phone.

3 missed calls. All from Sam. Just as I was about to clear them all from my screen, his name appeared again. No sense ignoring it again.

“What is it Sam?” I said abruptly, as soon as the screen had shown the call starting.

“Where are you Y/N? I’ve called you three times already. We’re worried about you.”

“No, you’re not. Dean is worried about his precious car, that’s all.” I snidely replied.

“You know that’s not true.” I laughed a little at Sam’s attempt to make me feel significant. “I mean, sure he is worried about the car, but we’re more worried about you.” Sam’s voice was remorseful. “A car can be replaced Y/N, you can’t.”

“Sam, I appreciate the concern, but -”

“But nothing Y/N.” His tone had rapidly changed from concerned to frustration, “I don’t know what’s got your thoughts so warped right now, but whatever it is, we need to figure out how to make it stop. You know we care about you. You know we’d risk everything for you. So why are you so hell bent on self destructing?”

“I’m not - “ I tried to start again.

“You are though,” he interrupted. “Drinking full bottles of whiskey in a night, thinking no one notices. Trying to take on an entire nest of vampires alone. Now you’re out, who knows where, alone, and couldn’t even be bothered to let one of us know you were taking off? How is any of that not being self destructive?”

Sam had a point. Maybe he’s right. I was doing things that were dangerous, without so much as a second thought about the outcome.

“Just… come home Y/N. Please? Let’s figure this out together.” I could hear the worry in his voice. “Before something worse happens…”

“Okay Sam.”

“Thank you,” he let out a sigh, “I’ll calm Dean down while we wait for you.”

I hung up the phone, turned the key and headed back toward the bunker. There was no telling what would happen when I arrived, what may be said, or how anyone would react, but I had to at least give them a chance.

After a long, quiet drive back, I pulled into the garage and shut off the engine. Sitting in the silence for a moment, I tried to gather my thoughts before making the walk inside.

Finding the brothers sitting in the library, I took a seat opposite of them and just waited.

“What the hell were you thinking?!” Dean barked out. “No one drives that car but me! I don’t even let Sam drive her!”

I toss the keys at him, “she’s fine Dean. Not a single scratch, and I even topped her off before getting here. The only thing she’s got is a few more miles on her, and I didn’t hear her complain at all.”

“That’s not the -” he cut himself off, running a hand down his face, “forget it.”

“What he means to say Y/N,” Sam glared at his brother before looking to me, “is are you okay?”

“I’m fine Sam.” I replied flatly.

“Why did you take off like that? You should have at least -”

“I needed a break Sam. That’s it.” I leaned back in the chair, crossing my arms over my chest and just watching each of them.

“And that break required my car?” Dean growled again.

“Required it? No. I’m sure I could have accomplished the same thing taking any one of those other cars,” I smirked a little as I saw his eyes narrow, “but, I can’t say I would have come back as easily if I had taken any other one.”

“What do you mean Y/N? What’s going on? Let us help you…” Sam offered, his last word a soft whisper of a request, “please?”

“There’s nothing to help Sam. I’m fine. I’m just…” my face dropped. I leaned forward, resting my arms on my knees, running my hands over my face slowly.

I didn’t see the shift in Dean. Seeing the hunched over state, and hearing the defeat in my voice, something clicked for him. He questioned himself how he had missed it, beating himself up a little inside as he finally recognized state I was in. One he had been in himself, and probably would have never escaped from had it not been for his brother.

“I’m just…” I tried again, “I’m tired of trying to look happy and act normal for you two, because the truth is… I’m not. I haven’t been for a while now. But I just can’t… I don’t have the strength to tell anyone, you know?” I looked between the brothers, hoping they would understand what I was trying desperately to convey.

“Look, Y/N, you know it’s okay, right?” Dean questioned, his voice finally soft, forgetting about the car and focusing on me.

“Nothing about this is okay, Dean… That’s the problem.” I rested my arms on my legs, crossed on my lap as I continued to lean forward, taking interest in the speck of dirt I had found on the floor. Anything to avoid their eyes.

“You’re wrong,” he said flatly, “It’s okay to feel the way you do.” Dean stepped closer, kneeling down in front of me, lifting my head slightly to look into my eyes. “To feel like the whole world is about to collapse on top of you, and in some way you want that more than anything. Because it means all the pain will finally be over. But at the same time, you’re terrified of what would happen if it did.” I could tell by the sincere tone of his voice that he was speaking from experience.

“Who-Who are you again?” I smirk, “The Dean I know has never been that profound with me before.”

“You’re not alone in this fight Y/N. The one here in the real world, or the one in that beautiful head of yours. Sam and I,” he looked back at his brother for a brief moment before returning his gaze to me, “we’re here for you sweetheart. In any way you need us to be.”

I smiled, looking up at Sam before returning my gaze to Dean, “what would I do without you two?” I chuckled.

“Survive Y/N. Just like always.” Sam smiled in return.

Tags: @thisismysecrethappyplace @gaybrieljax @assassinofmasyaf @xrogue-alicex

[dreamss-of-boston]

Rise - ch7

link on AO3! hello! for some reason this chapter was so hard to write hahah, but i like that i was able to do a little bit of character study in this one. i hope levi was as in character as possible (: thank you for reading love u bye! “...and you’re a fool if you think otherwise!” Hange sat back-- or rather she was pulled back by Moblit-- and before Nile Dok could respond, Darius Zackley slammed his gavel down in order to bring some kind of order to the courtroom.

“Order!” He thundered as the soldiers settled down.

They were going on hour three of the debate; Sonya had been awoken before the sun rose by Hange, who was obsessively reading over her arguments for the upcoming trial. Tensions were very obviously running high. While Nile Dok didn’t seem to be much of a hothead, he was certainly passionate about this particular topic. Everyone in the room was, and Sonya could understand why: the prospect of bringing a titan inside the walls was terrifying and, frankly, stupid.

“Nile Dok, your statement.” Zackley sighed, rubbing his temple.

“While I see your point,” Nile began with forced patience, “I still feel that the cons outweigh the pros. A titan is monumentally powerful, as we can see based on the Survey Corps mortality rates. Even one inside the walls would cause general unrest among the citizens, if not widespread panic.”

“How can we be sure you have the means to contain a titan properly?” One of the MPs, Hubert Vonnegut, spoke up with crossed arms.

“I’m so glad you asked,” Hange grinned, and gestured to the large double wooden doors, which opened to reveal Garrison soldiers wheeling in large equipment which Sonya had never seen before.

Hange stepped into the center of the room, walking towards the equipment confidently. “One of our new recruits,” she said grandly, “mentioned her anxieties about capturing a titan, for precisely the reasons you just mentioned.” Hange stepped up to the equipment: large barrels with calculated holes in them, and a pulley trigger behind them. “Keeping that in mind, I contacted the engineers and asked them to whip up this little prototype… If you’ll allow a demonstration, Zackley.” Hange bowed respectfully.

Zackley sighed. “Very well.”

Hange, grinning from ear to ear, motioned to the Garrison soldiers, who wheeled a large rectangle, supported to be standing upright as a sort of target, in front of Hange’s equipment. Upon closer inspection, Sonya recognized the material to be made of the same sort of stuff which was used in training as a substitute for titan flesh.

Once the target was in place, Hange explained: “This in front of me is what we require our soldiers to use when training to defeat titans. It is a specialized material which best resembles the tough flesh of a titan-- in other words, regular swords or guns have a hard time causing any real damage.” She held the pulley in her hand to show the court. “This piece of equipment has been specially designed to not only pierce titan flesh, but to anchor itself within titan flesh and into the earth, successfully pinning the titan to the ground, thus enabling us to perform experiments and the like on it. Observe,” She said, and gave a mighty pull. With a loud bang, multiple speared metal barbs shot out of the barrel at frightening speed, puncturing the material in front of it severely. Sonya jumped at the demonstration, but was nonetheless impressed. Just imagining those barbs piercing a titan, pinning it to the ground so that they could slice it open seemed like divine justice to her.

“Try not to look so excited,” Levi muttered, glancing at Sonya out of the corner of his eye. She sat back, forcing the little smile off of her face.

“Well, now I’m sort of excited to bag one of those bastards.” She murmured back.

“Oh?” Levi raised his eyebrows. “And here I thought you were shitting yourself at the thought of it.”

Sonya cast an irritated glance at Levi, but she couldn’t completely conceal her amusement.

Nile Dok seemed to be slightly swayed at the performance in front of him; he sat back, muttering with the other MPs alongside him as they discussed this new information.

Zackley pounded his gavel on the desk. “One hour recess.”

[-]

The debate continued well into the night; all three branches of the military were simply restating the same arguments at that point, neither one listening to the other. The Garrison regiment was particularly concerned with the damage a titan could do to the walls, if it were brought that close to them and antagonized by Hange’s experiments. The Survey Corps argued that titans had not destroyed the walls from the outside so far, and so it would be no different on the inside. Additionally, titans didn’t seem to display any signs of intelligence, but gee, it sure would be nice if they could somehow perform tests on them to find that out for sure.

And so it went.

Eventually, Zackley called the debate to a close; he said that he would let them know tomorrow morning if he required more debate from them, and Sonya prayed to whatever divine being there was up there that he wouldn’t request more debate.

By now, it was rather late at night, and Sonya couldn’t get to sleep despite how exhausted she was. Her mind was incredibly tired but her body was restless as all hell. She glanced at the snoring Hange across from her, and slowly accepted the fact that perhaps tonight sleep was just not meant for her.

With a sigh, Sonya quietly rose from her bed, slipping on her sweater, and tiptoed out of the room. The cold stone floors sent a chill through her body as her bare feet padded down the hallway, illuminated only by the light of the moon. She could hear voices at the end of the hallway, and silently approached the source of the noise: a brightly lit room, with the door cracked ever so slightly open. As she stared inside the room, a yellow sliver of light sliced across her face. It was just a group of MPs, sitting around a table with wine while playing cards. They seemed to be having a good time; laughing and teasing one another. What a shame that most of them were complete assholes.

Sonya quietly withdrew from her peering spot, and continued around the corner, which she thought at first was a dead end, but upon closer inspection, she found that there was a spiral staircase that went up, up, up. Curiously, and without much regard for her safety, she ascended the dark steps.

As she came to the top of the staircase, Sonya discovered that she had made her way to the roof. The stone turrets lining the edge of the building cast dark shadows over the moonlit stones, and every couple of feet there was a quietly burning torch which gave the whole atmosphere a sort of romantic hue. Well, almost everything was romantic to Sonya above ground.

As she scanned her surroundings, she noticed a figure sitting on top of one of the turrets, gazing out at the terrain before them. It wasn’t until she moved closer that she realized it was Levi. With a little smile, she gently cleared her throat to make her presence known; but as he turned to look at her over his shoulder, he didn’t seem surprised in the least to see her there.

“Can’t sleep?” Sonya said, sitting herself down next to him.

“Usually, no.” He said, turning to look out at the horizon again. Sonya nodded, and followed his gaze, enjoying the quiet stillness of the night. Her eyes trailed up into the sky, until she was leaning back to look at the stars.

“What did you think when you first saw the sky?” She asked.

Levi paused, glancing at her before looking up at the atmosphere. “I thought it wasn’t bad.”

Sonya laughed. “That’s beautiful.” She said sarcastically.

“What about you?”

“Hm?” She straightened her neck as she turned to look back at Levi.

“What did you think when you first saw it?” Levi brought his eyes away from the sky to land on her.

“I thought it was the most free thing in the world.” She smiled, remembering how the sun had nearly blinded her when she first surfaced. “At first, I hated the sun; training was a real bitch. I really couldn’t understand why you all didn’t just sleep during the day and then become active at night-- but then, I remember one day,” Sonya glanced at her hands, “Anna and I were getting water, just filling up the buckets from this well, nothing special. And I noticed Anna wasn’t doing anything to help, but when I looked at her, she was staring up at the sky even though it was the sunniest day of the year.” She pulled her legs up, crossing them in front of her as she propped her head up on the palm of her hand. “So then I turned to look at whatever she was looking at, and it turned out there was this flock of geese flying up there, in that pointed shape they have. Anna said to look at the sky, and look how beautiful it was.” Sonya bit her lip, feeling tears spring into her eyes at the memory. “That’s when I fell in love with the world, I guess. It sounds stupid and it probably is, but after being cooped up Underground… everything up here is the most beautiful thing.”

Levi didn’t say anything; he couldn’t help but gaze at Sonya as she spoke, feeling the slightest bit envious at her outlook. He knew that he couldn’t bring himself to look at the world that way-- it felt hollow and unrealistic to see his world as beautiful.

“It's not stupid.” He said.

Sonya glanced at him, waiting for him to elaborate-- but clearly he wasn't going to. So, she just turned back to the horizon, appreciative of the view and the company.

“Sometimes I kind of wish I was back down there.” She confessed quietly, lowering her eyes to gaze at the city below. Perhaps it was the late night making her particularly emotional; and she wasn’t quite sure why she felt so comfortable around Levi at this moment. He scoffed.

“Well, that’s stupid.” Levi said, and Sonya rolled her eyes. “Everyone down there was either a criminal, or in the service of criminals. You should know better than anyone what that’s like.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sonya tensed, turning to glare at him.

Levi raised an eyebrow, unimpressed by her defensive attitude. “Well, you were a whore, weren’t you?”

There was that word-- and that word associated directly with her. Sonya sucked in a breath and set her jaw, standing up to leave. She needed to remove herself from this situation before she did something she would regret. Her gut was on fire with anger and her chest was tight, and as Levi stood, grabbing her arm to stop her, she almost punched him in the face-- but as she whirled around to face him, he had placed his index finger over his lips, indicating her to be quiet. Sonya bit the inside of her cheek, and tilted her head ever so slightly to hear whatever Levi had heard.

To their left, she heard hushed voices-- obviously, something was not right. Levi and Sonya exchanged a glance: should they investigate? The voices got sharper, but still hushed. Sonya gave the tiniest shrug as if to say, “If you go, I’ll go.”

Levi nodded, and the two turned, stepping ever so quietly towards the voices, hugging the wall behind them. There was a small corner being illuminated by a few held torches, and as the two came closer, they saw that there were three Military Police soldiers, and two Garrison soldiers. Sonya and Levi ducked behind a large crate, successfully avoiding being seen, while they were close enough to eavesdrop.

“We paid you, and yet still, things didn’t go according to plan.” One man said in a low voice.

“They must have fixed it before it went in or something, I don’t know!” A girl’s voice; she was clearly terrified.

“Are you saying it’s not your fault?” An older woman said.

The girl must have nodded, because there was a palpable silence.

“So, what do you want us to do?” A familiar man’s voice drawled; Sonya was sure she could recognize that voice, but she couldn’t place where she had heard it. “Clearly, someone must have found out, otherwise the malfunction would’ve worked…” He laughed to himself. “Isn’t that a funny thing to say?”

“Not in the slightest.” The older woman hissed. “If someone found out, then we’d be behind bars already… maybe they caught the mistake and fixed it without another thought.”

“Hange did say it was a prototype-- maybe she checked it before it went in.” The girl said timidly.

Levi and Sonya exchanged a glance. Who the hell were they and why were they speaking about Hange?

“Well, we did our job.” The familiar voice said. He didn’t seem to have a care in the world. “Where’s the rest of our payment?”

Some shuffling of feet, and the sound of someone being shoved against the wall.

“You forget your place, Romanova.” The first man growled.

Sonya tensed up, and her gaze shot up to meet Levi’s. He clamped a hand on her shoulder, pinning her to the spot in case she tried anything stupid. That was… that was her name. The one her mother told her never to forget. The one thing her father gave her: her name.

Maria had kept the name Romanova-- stolen it-- from the man she most believed to be Sonya’s father. She would always lament about how she didn’t know who her father was, and how it didn’t matter because her only family was here Underground; but sometimes, she would be so sure of who her father was-- she would mutter “Romanova,” over and over again. Still, Maria would reveal nothing more about the man besides his name and complain about his absence. Sometimes Sonya thought that Maria had just made him up so that she could have an extra vessel to place blame onto when Sonya was full.

She had accepted long ago that the only semblance of her father that she would be able to have were her eyes-- bright yellow-green in contrast to her mother’s warm brown-- and her name. Her father’s name. And there it was, being spat in the face of whoever owned her father’s name, too.

“We’ll keep the second portion of payment, considering this was a failure.” The older woman sighed. “Let him go, Hubert.”

A moment-- and then some shuffling, and Sonya assumed that Romanova had been let go.

“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Romanova mused-- the familiarity in his voice coupled with the name he had just been baptized with was sending chills up Sonya’s spine. She was absolutely itching to peek over the crates they were hiding behind, but Levi’s grip was so fierce on her that she knew that was impossible. “Maybe having a titan in here will spice things up a bit-- Lord knows we could use some excitement around here.”

Footsteps receded; the three MPs must have left the two Garrison soldiers without another word. Sonya’s heart thundered in her ears, and she hooked Levi with her most pleading gaze: please let me look at whoever shares my name.

He narrowed his eyes: no.

She would have liked so much to have punched Levi in that moment-- but the Garrison soldiers began their own journey back to the sleeping quarters. They walked past Levi and Sonya, hidden in the shadows, without even realizing they were there.

And as the two soldiers passed, Sonya finally got to see who it was that shared her identity: Dimitri, the pianist.

[lookbackmachine]

Disney Afternoon Part 2

The Disney Afternoon Pt 2

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https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-machine/id1257301677?mt=2

0:00:00 Speaker 1: The Disney Afternoon hit an unexpected hiccup a few years earlier that was finally starting to rear its ugly head. Eisner and Katzenberg would try to strong-arm their former boss Barry Diller, which would lead to unexpected new competition. In 1988, Eisner bought a television station in Los Angeles that eventually became KCAL. With his new station, he obviously wanted to air Disney product. There was a problem. They were already airing the Disney Afternoon on Fox affiliates, Barry Diller's network.

0:00:32 S1: According to DisneyWar, Eisner had Katzenberg call Diller. In Diller's recounting of the discussion, Katzenberg said, "We want to renegotiate the Disney Afternoon, and we're taking away the LA market." Diller was shocked. They had a contract. "That's not fair," he protested. "I know you bought an LA station, but give us two or three years to replace this. Let's be reasonable." Diller called Eisner, who refused. "We were there for you when you needed us," Diller reminded him, pointing out that he'd bought the original programming for Disney Afternoon. Eisner still refused. "Okay then, we're out of business," Diller said. Fox promptly dropped the Disney Afternoon from all of its wholly owned stations and encouraged its affiliates to do the same. Still, that wasn't what put Diller over the edge. Even though he felt Eisner had betrayed him, it was when Disney sued Fox on antitrust grounds claiming Fox was trying to monopolize children's programming and then complained to the FCC that Fox was a morally unfit broadcaster with programming like the Simpsons.

0:01:35 S1: When Disney lawyers approached Diller about a possible settlement, Diller said the only settlement he'd consider was an apology. Disney ended up dropping the suit in 1992, but Diller told David Geffen, "I'm never going to speak to him, Eisner, again." Fox would launch its own kids programming in 1990, which would eventually cut into Disney's ratings with the cultural phenomenon Power Rangers, not to mention Batman, the animated series, and Animaniacs. Power Rangers was a show that no one wanted. It was turned down by everyone, and then became the show everyone wanted and wanted to replicate. Premiering in August of 1993, by December it was the biggest kid show by far. According to the Baltimore Sun, it was averaging a 12.5 on weekends with kids two to 11. Fox's X-Men was doing a 10.0. And it was first on weekdays. It was doing a 7.5 rating. Second was Fox's Animaniacs with a 5.6, and the highest rated non-Fox show on weekdays was Bonkers with a 4.5. Also in 1994, Power Ranger toy sales would reach nearly a billion dollars. At their highest height, Ninja Turtles had done only $450 million in sales.

0:02:50 S1: The butterfly effect was now spreading its wings, and the Disney Afternoon would take a hit, as did the future of syndication as networks realized they should be promoting their own IPs instead of other companies. It would even happen to Fox when Warner Brothers would take its popular hits, Batman and Animaniacs, and put it on their own WB network. And it wasn't just network competitors anymore, cable had entered the market as well. Nickelodeon had popped into the world of animation and their first three cartoons, Ren and Stimpy, Doug, and Rugrats had all been big successes. The syndication window was closing in the not too distant future, but for now Disney Television Animation was about to change with the times.

[music]

0:03:43 S1: Greg Weisman, creator Gargoyles.

0:03:46 Greg Weisman: The pitch for Aladdin, that I pitched to Eisner, it was just one poster shot of Aladdin and the Genie and three words, "Aladdin the series". He's like, "Sold." That was it. And I knew that. In other words, going in, it was like I could have given this whole pitch on Aladdin, but I thought anything I say would only give him a reason to say no. Aladdin's this huge movie. Let him imagine what the show is.

0:04:11 S1: Tad Stones, creator of Darkwing Duck.

0:04:14 Tad Stones: At the end of Darkwing, I said, "Okay, now Darkwing worked much closer." I think I can get even closer with my next show, which was going to be a science fiction show. Again, a comedy. The staff loved it, but the boss did not. I never got to pitch it to Michael and Jeffrey. You know, had a meeting, I said, "Oh, I'm gonna get a chance to do it." And it was like, "No." They wanted me to do Aladdin. Now, Aladdin was done by Ron Clements, John Musker. I said, "I used to room with... In the same office as Ron Clements." I mean I was literally four feet away from him. "Let me talk to those guys." With Aladdin there was the other thing that I did the first direct to home video, Return of Jafar. And all I was trying to do was keep our budgets up. And I thought, if there's one more source of revenue that comes in from our shows, this would be the excuse to not cut budgets or give us the money we need to pull off some of this stuff. I called up Home Video and said, "Technically, when I do this four part episode pilot to set up the show, technically it's the sequel to Aladdin. Are you interested?" And the guy took it to the higher ups and they were not.

0:05:25 TS: Then they put out Aladdin on video. Again, it broke records. They made a huge amount of money, and I called the guy back and again restated what I was doing. And this time he took it to the top and they were very interested. And we had a story meeting with my boss where he gave all sorts of notes. And I said, "Well, we got... That's a lot to pull off. We have to do that by March 14th or whatever the date was." He said, "Why?" I said, "Well, Home Video was willing to put this out on literally video at that time." And he said, "That's gravy. Do these notes and if you get them done in time, that's fine." And I had to be told this later by people who were in the room 'cause I had forgotten that I had said, "Okay we have to take those notes, but it also has to be done by this date so I can get it to Home Video."

0:06:11 TS: We did. And Return of Jafar was made for $3.5 million and it made something between $180 and $200 million domestic out on video. This may be apocryphal, but I was told that it was the first quarter where the company wouldn't have grown. Well, I don't know what, ten percent or whatever the number was, and I guess a bunch of executives had bonuses tied into profit growth. Evidently that was the first quarter that there wouldn't be bonuses, and then suddenly everybody got a bonus, and it was because of Return of Jafar, that out of nowhere this thing came in and making all this money. And that started the whole direct to video thing.

0:06:53 TS: All I was trying to do was to keep our budgets up. The stories involving the bonuses, they tried to do things like Lucas had with Star Wars had given everybody involved points or some sort of bonus, so they had X amount of money and they divided it up so everybody got something. And what that led to is whoever was last in line, some of the lower level people, got a bonus, a check of $50 or $100, whatever. People who basically were in the department who didn't work on the show, and all that did was piss them off 'cause they knew how much the movie had made. I got $14,000 and I told that to Ron and John. Now I was not an idiot. I knew that the only reason why the movie made that much money is because they had done an incredible Aladdin, and I remember telling that to them and their reaction was, "You got ripped off." And I realized, yeah, in live action terms, if you do a crappy spinoff of something that made a lot of money and your crappy spinoff makes a ton of money, you get a five picture deal and a new car in your driveway as a present from the studio. In animation, I was happy to get the bonus. But get a pat on the back and then you move on, do something else for us.

0:08:09 S1: Jymn Magon, writer.

0:08:11 Jymn Magon: Disney's had a definite style there for a while, of... I think we cornered the market in the comedy adventure genre. When Disney execs felt like they needed to branch out, I felt like the formula fell by the wayside. And it's like, "Hey, look what John Kricfalusi is doing on Ren and Stimpy. Let's do something like that. Hey, look what Warner Brothers is doing with superheroes. Let's do something like that." And I felt like, "Oh, this is interesting." Obviously, we're branching out, trying new things. But it felt weird to me that where we had before had been sort of chopping our way through the jungle, creating our own path. Now we were sort of following other people's paths, copying them. And that always seemed odd to me. But anyway, department does what the department does over the years, and the changes, and the new policy, and it gets worse or it gets better. And is it Disney? Yes, because it's Disney TV Animation. They're Disney and this is the show they're doing. It becomes part of the canon, you know.

0:09:15 S1: In 1994, Variety reported that Disney was spending $50 million to boost its afternoon, which resulted in two new series, Shnookums and Meat, and Gargoyles. Gargoyles, Aladdin, and Shnookums helped cut into the lead of Fox, but there was a larger problem that television animation was about to encounter. Disney's syndication contract with networks ran only through 1997, meaning that other networks could produce their own shows and make more money. This would leave Disney Animation without a home because Disney didn't own a network. In fact, earlier in the year, they had tried to buy NBC but failed. Total viewership was also in decline during this period, which had to do with VCRs, computers, and video games offering alternatives to television. And to add to the uncertainty of 1994, Jeffrey Katzenberg left the company and he left because he was fired by Michael Eisner.

0:10:12 S1: In a walk in Aspen together, according to Katzenberg, Eisner promised him that if anything happened to Frank Wells, Katzenberg would take over Wells's role as president. Eisner would later say that Katzenberg misunderstood this conversation. Unfortunately, something did happen to Wells. He was killed in a tragic helicopter crash on April 3, 1994. But business stops for no man, and Eisner went back on his word and did not put Katzenberg in Wells's position as president, nor did he name him as his successor. To make matters worse, in a white glove slap to the face to Katzenberg, Eisner took on the role of president himself. This led to a further deterioration of their relationship and Eisner gave Katzenberg his walking papers. Eventually Eisner also refused Katzenberg part of his contract, which stated Katzenberg would get two percent of all profits from any of the projects he had worked on at Disney.

0:11:08 S1: So, like all great Hollywood love stories, they went to court. At one point it came out that Eisner had said he hated that midget, referring to Katzenberg. The case could have been settled for $90 million at one point, but instead it was eventually settled for $280 million in Katzenberg's favor. And then to further complicate matters, Katzenberg went on to form DreamWorks with Spielberg and David Geffen. In the midst of all that, Shnookums and Meat, a funny cartoon show, was being made. Bill Kopp, animator.

0:11:40 Bill Kopp: And then I got a call from Disney Television, which I had never heard of. I didn't even know they had it. And Gary Krisel and Bruce Cranston made me an offer. They said, "Hey, we need some new funny stuff and we really think your eat show is funny, and can you come and do a funny show?" And I was like, "Well, like what?" And they were like, "Whatever you want." Seriously. I didn't have to pitch anything. They were just like, "Just come over and we'll do whatever comes out of your head." It was incredible. So I had a sketchbook full of stuff, and I just came in. And they said, "Well, how about a cat and a dog?" I said, "Okay." We started with that, and that must have been 1992 or 1993, something like that. I forget. Pitching at Disney now. I'm not saying [0:12:22] ____. I mean, it's legendarily hard. It's like running a gauntlet. There's all these people in these giant buildings and you just got to carve your way through. And then once you do get into development, you're gonna be there for a year or two just trying to get it through. My experience was, we had lunch and the next week I was there with a contract.

0:12:40 BK: There was no feeling of pressure or ever like, "Oh my God, the wheels are coming off." It never was like that. And we had a saying that Disney [0:12:49] ____. It's like, "Well, if something's... If something crashes, well, I'll just throw money at it." You know. Nobody bothered us. When they said, "You can do whatever you want," they never brought it up. I remember sitting in the editor room with Gary Krisel, who was a great guy, and he'd look at some of the rough animation coming back. He'd look at me and he'd go, "Is that funny?" And we're like, "Yeah, that's funny." He just trusted us, and it was awesome. Now, Jeffie came over one day, as he frequently did, while we were kicking it around. And I said, "The cat's kind of abrasive. So let's give him the opposite kind of name," you know, Shnookum, 'cause he was kind of a dick. And then we were just like, "What the fuck are we gonna call this dog?" We had no clue. Just nothing. And Jeffie came up with the name, and I think we were actually barbecuing something, which we also frequently did. And I think he just said, "Meat." And we had the design already. And I said, "Fuck, that's it."

0:13:40 BK: Shnookums and Meat. A little confusion came when they made the SpaghettiOs though. I had a can of them around here, they finally just deteriorated. I had to get rid of it, it was gonna explode. And it said, "Shnookums and Meat." It was like SpaghettiOs. The lawyers were like, "No, no, no, man. You gotta say that it's not meat. It's not a meat product."

0:13:58 Shnookums: Hey, what happened to your head?

0:14:00 Meat: Hey, what happened to your head?

[music]

0:14:07 Shnookums: Oh my gosh, my brain's gone.

0:14:10 Meat: Oh no, mine is to. What we gonna do Shnookums, what we gonna do? We don't have any brains.

0:14:21 Shnookums: Now, let's stay calm. I don't think you have too much to worry about, but I know I do. They couldn't have gone far.

0:14:27 BK: Right after the first two shorts went on to [0:14:29] ____ said, "Okay, let's make it a whole half hour. What else do you got?" And I just pulled out the Pith Possum, and the Tex Tinstar bit was gonna be a space serial called Guy Guy and the Space Vigilantes. We were all set to go, and then I got a call from John Kricfalusi, and I had Fontanelli there, you know, all of Kricfalusi's guys, [0:14:47] ____ was there. A couple... Eddie Fitzgerald. And John called me. He goes, "Hey man, I heard you're expanding your show, but can you maybe not do a space thing?" Actually, it was like getting a call from the Godfather. He was like, "Yeah, don't do a space thing." And I was like, I go, "Why?" And he goes, "Well, 'cause I'm working on one. I've been working on it for a while." Actually, Fontanelli brought that up to me too. So I just turned it into a western, which was easy because I was happy to accommodate. But I guess he never sold his space thing.

[music]

0:15:14 Speaker 8: Pith Possum. At one time an ordinary laboratory possum. He was changed forever by an experiment gone wrong, an experiment that endowed him with ultra possum-like abilities, turning him into Pith Possum, super dynamic possum of tomorrow. Maintaining his secret identity by cleverly disguising himself as Peter Possum, copy boy for a great metropolitan tabloid. He defends truth, justice, and the forest critter way for the good citizens of Possum City.

[music]

0:15:56 Speaker 9: Let me just grab what I have in store for you. The rope that holds you up Tinstar, will soon be burned through by that candle. When you fall, you'll land head first on this trampoline, which will send you flying into the pen full of rabid badgers. As you go down the ramp inside the pen, this torch will be knocked over, igniting the trail of gunpowder burning toward that cannon. Your barrel will roll toward that cannon and your head will become stuck. The gunpowder will burn the cannon's fuse and the cannon will fire. The blast will ignite the waterproof fuses on the dynamite surrounding your head. The cannon will shoot you through the roof of the barn, and then down into this giant tank full of man-eating sharks. The sharks will eat you. Then the dynamite will explode. The whole mess will be blown skyward and your remains will fall into this envelope, which I will place on a boat bound for Tunisia. So long, Tinstar.

0:16:48 BK: Anyway, and that was Shnookums and Meat, but again, that was so busy and I was the only writer. I wrote all 39 of those because I didn't know any better. After the show was on the air and we were done, Jeffie and I sat around. I went to Hawaii for six weeks to recuperate. I came back and they were just like, "Well, we don't know about the second season." And I mean, Shnookums and Meat was not... It was amazing that they let us do it 'cause it's not Disney, really. Well, it's not out of line, but it's weird. So we were just sitting there waiting to get the word, and I mean the writing was on the wall. I was like, "Yeah okay, there goes that. What are we gonna do next?" And I was there still getting paid. I developed other stuff. Jeffie and I were like, "This is gonna crack, man. What are we gonna fucking do now?"

0:17:34 BK: We didn't have a plan. And then, what happened was they said, "Oh, sorry boys. You're through." And we were like, "Ah fuck, okay well, at least we got that out." I mean that was three in one, dude. You got Pith and Tex, and Shnookum and Meat was actually our weakest link in the thing. And that was the only part that was foisted on us. But right after they canceled it, that was when Gary Krisel and Bruce Cranston left to go to Dreamworks, and we were like, "Ah." And it was like a sad goodbye and stuff.

0:18:06 BK: A new executive moved in, and we just weren't part of their plan. Because... And rightfully... They didn't know what to do with us. We were like a weird thing that, they were like, "Huh? Now what with these guys?" But we had a good time. I think we sort of knew in the back of our heads, it was like, "Wow, this will never last here." It isn't Disney material. The real story of that time was they were trying to keep up with Margaret and Fox Kids, and they were right to try crazy things. To their credit, they really, they stuck right by it. And then they... And Gary and Bruce did the same for us at DreamWorks when we went to do Toonsylvania.

0:18:42 S1: Greg Weisman, creator Gargoyles.

0:18:44 GW: We had the Disney Afternoon, which we viewed as sort of like the dragon that you had to feed a virgin to every six months. So every six months, we'd go up in front of Michael Eisner. In those days, Michael personally chose the shows. And we would pitch him six or seven shows. And he knew he always had to pick one to put into production. He could pick more than one, but he had to always pick at least one.

0:19:10 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:19:11 JM: Yeah, what we would do is every week, we would have this writer's meeting that I think it was Wednesday mornings, and it was like any new writers out there, any new talent, any new ideas, it was always looking for what are we gonna pitch? What's the next big thing? And of course, like everything in Hollywood, it was basically, what was the most recent hit film? With Star Wars, Indiana Jones, whatever. But people would come in and they'd pitch all kinds of things. And the things that were noteworthy would get... I'm not sure we did artwork on all of it, but at least we had a list of shows that we would take to the meetings with Eisner and Katzenberg and say, "Okay, this is called Wonder Weenie. It's about a guy in a hot dog suit that gets kidnapped and taken to another planet, where they think he's a hero 'cause of his television commercials." And it was like, Gong. [chuckle] "No, next." And we would just do that. We would come up with these sort of one, two sentence pitches and they would go, "Nah, or yeah."

0:20:13 S1: Greg Weisman.

0:20:14 GW: We were all sort of keeping an eye on Batman, and sort of seeing was this going to be a success or not? It was a serious drama on cartoon, and would that work? Because the conventional wisdom is it always has to be comedy, and often it's a pendulum and that conventional wisdom swings back into the forefront all the time. But Batman was working, it was working so well they tried it in prime time, and then it didn't work in prime time. And so the desire for us to do something along those lines sort of waxed and waned, often with Batman's ratings. And we didn't have superheroes in our camp so to speak, so we didn't wanna do Batman, we didn't wanna copy that, but we wanted to try and do something different. But that's not how Gargoyles came about at all. Those are almost two separate discussions that dovetailed later.

0:21:08 GW: Gargoyles was initially developed as a comedy adventure, very much inspired by and along the lines of Gummi Bears, Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, which was a show we were really proud of, created by a guy named Jymn Magon. We thought was great. It had this very rich backstory and we thought it didn't get enough respect, and we thought that the main reason for that was because there was brand confusion with Care Bears. Care Bears was a sort of sacchariney sweet, kinda awful show, from my point of anyway. But the brand confusion was understandable because both shows featured cute, cuddly, multi-colored bears. Gummi Bears wasn't that. It was an adventure show. It was funny. It was exciting. It had a great comedic villain in Duke Igthorn and great sidekick in [0:21:54] ____, and great characters, and just a lot of fun. So we set out very consciously to create a show in that vein with the same sort of rich backstory, but that would get more respect. So everything in the 90s, the sort of buzz word was everything had to be edgy. Instead of doing cute, cuddly, multi-colored bears, we did cute, cuddly, multi-colored gargoyles. Gargoyles having been something that fascinated me since I was in high school.

0:22:23 GW: And we thought that's edgier. And instead of setting it in medieval times, we'd have this rich medieval backstory, but we'd set it in the present. We'd have gargoyles have a spell cast on them and they'd wake up in the 20th century, and that seemed edgier too. And so we thought, we can do this kind of show and have this fun comedy adventure with Gargoyles. So we put together a pitch, and we pitched it to Michael Eisner, and he passed. But we really liked the show and my bosses, Bruce and Gary, both really liked it. And they were like, "Well, take another pass at it." So I showed it to a number of people, just the original comedy pitch, to try and get some feedback and see what else I might do with it. One of the people I showed it to was Tad Stones.

0:23:06 TS: Gargoyles had a long history of things that are in a direct line that ended up with Gargoyles. And some of them didn't involve Gargoyles at all. They were gremlins, or whatever. The last thing I'd been playing with I think was a Three Musketeers version of these gargoyles. I had just seen the rough cut of Beauty and the Beast. So again, I'm instrumental. I'm not a genius, at least not in that meeting. Greg had asked me in just to talk about things and be in the discussion with his assistants basically. Again, he was an executive. And I said, "What if he was the last of the gargoyles? This could be your Beauty and the Beast 'cause you've already got the female there." He is one of the fastest thinkers I've ever seen. While he's watching a movie, he is analyzing, dissecting it. And walking out of a movie he'll have all sorts of comments, where I'm going, "Well, I thought the colors were nice." Anyway, he was on to something, he kind of said to his assistant, "Okay, you follow up on the Three Musketeers angle. I wanna work on this."

0:24:07 GW: And that really clicked for me. And so I created the character of Goliath with the artist Greg Guler, and we took the whole show, the whole comedy development and put it through the prism of Goliath and came out the other side fundamentally with the show that made it on the air. And we were so enthusiastic about it, we came up with all these concepts for villains and adventures and stories and put together this huge long pitch and pitched it to Eisner six months after we'd pitched it the first time. And he passed, killed it. And so I thought it was done. We tried. It wasn't the first time I'd pitched a show and it had gotten killed. And the next day we had what we called a postmortem meeting. In those days, Jeffrey Katzenberg was... And Michael ran the whole company, but Jeffrey Katzenberg was head of the studio. And so Jeffrey had been in the meeting with Gary and Bruce and I, and we were having this postmortem meeting where we were discussing actually the shows that Michael had said yes to and what the next steps would be. And so after having this discussion about the yes shows, we all got up to go. And as I'm about to go, Jeffrey said to me, "Oh, and you're gonna work on Gargoyles some more, right?"

0:25:20 GW: And Bruce and I sort of looked at each other, and I was like, "Well no, Michael killed it. He killed it as a comedy. He killed it as a drama. I don't know what else we'd do with it." And Jeffrey said, "Oh, Michael didn't kill it, he just thought it needed more work." Now I had been there the day before, and I knew that he had killed it. But what this was telling me was that Michael may not have liked it, but Jeffrey liked it. And in those days Jeffrey wasn't gonna contradict what Michael had said, but he still felt it was worth pursuing. I also found out later that Gary had talked to Jeffrey about the need to diversify the Disney Afternoon from the standpoint of all we had in those days were very similar, funny animal comedy adventure cartoons, and that if we just kept doing that over and over again, eventually the audience would get bored with those kind of cartoons. No matter how good they were, they'd just get bored with them. And we had to bring other types of things in, which led to shows like Goof Troop, which was really more sitcom than comedy adventure. Shows like Shnookums and Meat, which was more sort of Tex Avery short cartoons, and Gargoyles.

0:26:36 GW: And so we went back to the drawing board for a third time to try and figure out how we were gonna pitch Gargoyles for a third time. And we looked at the show that we had, and we thought, "Nope, this is the show. We don't wanna change the show at all." So the problem isn't the show, the problem is the pitch. And what you realize is that we had just put way too much into the pitch. It had diffused it all and gotten confusing and we hadn't been crisp and clear. So we just pulled things out, things that we eventually did use in the show, but we pulled all these elements out and really narrowed it down to the key idea, which frankly, was the Beauty and the Beast idea.

0:27:16 GW: It was this relationship between Goliath, the lead gargoyle, and Elisa, the cop, who befriends him in the 20th century after he wakes up. And we very much played it like Beauty and the Beast, which actually was a movie that had done very well for Disney recently. So six months later, we pitched it to Michael a third time, and this time they bought it. We had added nothing to this pitch, we just subtracted. I'd reordered a few things. We may have redrawn a card or two just to clarify an idea, but there was nothing new, it was just shorter. Jeffrey turned to me and said, "You added a lot to that pitch didn't you?" And I said, "Yes, I did." And that was history. We went on and made the show.

0:28:03 Speaker 10: One thousand years ago superstition in the sword ruled. It was a time of darkness, it was a world of fear, it was the age of Gargoyles. Stone by day, warriors by night. We were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect, frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years. Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken and we live again. We are defenders of the night. We are Gargoyles!

0:29:01 GW: And so, yes, relative to Goof Troop it's dark, but I don't think of it as dark. There's tons of humor in that show. The color palette is rich, full of blues and purples and magentas and neon. It's not a dark show either visually or thematically. It's fundamentally a show about a guy, Goliath, who's an optimist, who believes that the world can be a better place, that bad things happen but they can be fixed, that the next generation can do better or that we can make it better. And so it's got a fundamentally optimistic tone to it. In terms of supervision, the advantage there was that I'd been the executive at Disney for five years when we went into production. I often compare it to a lunatic asylum, TV animation, in that there are inmates and then there are trustees, and the trustees are actually also inmates, but they're considered by management to be less crazy.

0:30:07 GW: So they give the trustee a stick, a baton to keep the other lunatics in line. And so that's how I sort of see my role on Gargoyles. I was the lunatic most trusted. So because of what was going on, both in the larger company and at TV Animation, there were a lot of shows in crisis for various reasons. And because of that and because I was in charge of Gargoyles, which I produced with Frank Paur, we were both producers, but from an executive standpoint it was still me. I was the lunatic most trusted at Disney TV Animation, so they kinda left us alone. And I remember at one point, Frank and I had lunch with Gary during season two and Gary said, "I wanna apologize to you guys. I have not been paying attention to Gargoyles at all. We've had other things going on. How is it going? What's going on? How's it going on the show?"

0:30:54 GW: And we said, "Well, it's going pretty good. Schedule's tough, but we're managing and we're happy with how things are turning out." He's like, "Great. What kind of stories are you doing?" So we started telling him about that and at one point we told him about Xanatos and Fox getting married and having a baby. And he goes, "Whoa, whoa. I wouldn't do that. You can't have the bad guy have a baby. You can't have the bad guy raising a kid. You gonna take the kid away from him? That'll be bad. And if you don't take the kid away from him then you got a villain raising a kid. Don't do that one."

0:31:23 GW: And we were like looking at each other and then I say to him, "Well, we already did it." So there was this long pause. And Frank and I are both sort of like what's gonna happen here? Is he gonna still reject it and force us to sort of tear the whole show apart and start over? And you could sort of tell he's thinking the same thing, like he doesn't like this idea at all. But on the other hand, this was the one show that was going smoothly, and if he rips it all apart, then he's gotta get another show in crisis. So after this long pause, he says to us, "Well, don't dwell on it." I said, "Okay, we won't dwell on it." Whatever the hell that meant, but so we didn't. I mean we didn't do it, we didn't change anything, but that was the kind of thing, we had very little supervision because of where I had come from. We pretty much made the show that Frank and I wanted to make and had almost no interference whatsoever.

0:32:25 GW: Gargoyles was sort of superheroes done without flagging that they're superheroes. No tights, no capes. For all intents and purposes that was the genre we were doing. A year or so later, I was in a meeting with Eisner where he announced his desire to buy Marvel, and I watched his corporate strategic guys talk him out of it and say, "Marvel's a disaster. They've got their rights sold all over the place. So you'd buy the company and then find out you can't make a movie about Spiderman because they've tripled sold the rights to three different companies. And Fantastic Four is being held by this company. And blah, blah, blah, blah."

0:33:05 GW: Now of course, years later Bob Iger just bought it anyway, and yeah, couldn't do X-Men, couldn't do Fantastic Four, couldn't do Spiderman, at least not at first, bought it anyway. Of course, it's been a huge success for Disney. But Eisner was talked out of it that day. So he turned to us, to Gary and Bruce and myself and says, "Can we use Gargoyles to start a Disney superhero universe?" And I said, "Yeah." And we began developing spinoffs, which we would do backdoor pilots for during season two of the show. But by the time those things got on the air, Jeffrey had left the company. Rich Frank had left the company. Frank Wells had died. Bruce had left the company. All the main supporters of Gargoyles had gone, and so that notion of using Gargoyles to launch Disney's own superhero universe sort of fell away.

0:34:01 GW: But for, I don't know, three or four months, it was like this is what we've got to do 'cause we can't buy Marvel, and Warner Brothers has DC. And on one level, and I don't think we even appreciated it at the time, but the great thing about Michael himself picking the shows was that everyone in every division got on board or got out of the way. In the years that followed, when Michael stopped picking the shows personally, those decisions began being made by committee. You found you had to get literally unanimous vote in order to sell a show. You needed not just one important person to say yes, or two or three, but literally you needed something like eight or nine people to say yes. And if even one said no, the others would jump off the show. And it became much harder to sell. So Michael was sort of the last of the moguls from my point of view, and we didn't appreciate it at the time 'cause there were so many shows he passed on that we thought were great, but what we didn't get was yeah, that may have been so but the shows he picked we got to just make. And that hasn't been the same in most places since then.

0:35:12 GW: I think what happened was, is that over time, there was this sort of sense within the corporation that Michael was micromanaging, not from us per se. I don't think it had anything to do with TV Animation, but just in general. And there was this sense that he had to start giving some things up. One of the things he gave up was choosing the animated series, but he didn't invest that power in another individual. Again, sort of became a decision by committee, a committee where any one person could derail something.

0:35:40 Speaker 11: Five-eights today to close at 42 and five-eights, one day after the company announced the resignation of Disney studio's chief Jeffrey Katzenberg. While rumors run rampant about where Katzenberg will end up, Disney chairman Michael Eisner said today, the company will likely produce fewer films.

0:35:57 GW: Jeffrey left. Rich Frank left. A lot of this was in the wake of Frank Wells's death, which was a tragedy in it's own right, but also destabilized the company. Roy Disney was not happy with Jeffrey. Ultimately, not happy with Michael either. So ultimately, both departed and Gary had at least a couple job offers that I know about, maybe more. I think Jeffrey wanted him at DreamWorks and had an offer out to him, and then when Bruce Cranston left to go to Dreamworks, Gary decided that DreamWorks would be a good place to sort of work with Bruce again and reform that team. So Gary also picked DreamWorks. So you had Jeffrey, Gary, and Bruce all at DreamWorks. Those were the three guys who I'd worked with. So at Disney, everyone sort of assumed that I'd be going to DreamWorks.

0:36:50 GW: When my deal was up at the end of the second season of Gargoyles, that I'd leave and go to DreamWorks. And I didn't actually want to. I wanted to stay and do a third season of Gargoyles. But it became this self-fulfilling prophesy. They were so sure I was gonna go to DreamWorks that they stopped inviting me to meetings, 'cause they thought of me as I was already spying for DreamWorks or something. It was kind of ridiculous. But they didn't make a job offer to me until a week before I was leaving, at which point, I did end up going to DreamWorks because I didn't have any other job offers. A week out they finally made an offer to me too late. So I went. And they really kind of made it clear that I wasn't welcome there anymore.

0:37:36 GW: In November of 1995, I wanna say, they came to me, and said they wanted me to do the third season of Gargoyles but they were offering me a demotion from producer to story editor. They said the show was going to be animated at Deak, but Deak had a very bad track record in those days in terms of the look of the thing, and that it would be pre-produced there as well. And they gave me a schedule in November of 1995, where the first script was due in October of 1995. And I looked at the schedule. I said, "Well, do you have a time machine? Because I don't know how I'm supposed to go back and deliver a script in October when it's already November and we haven't started." And they're like, "Well, we know that schedule's gotta be adjusted, but we wanted you to see where it had to end so you'd have to catch up. Not instantaneously, but by the end of the season you'd have to catch up." And so it felt to me like they were asking me to preside over the demise of the show. That they were reducing the budget, reducing the quality of the animation, reducing the quality of all the preproduction, giving us an impossible schedule, and then asking me on top of all that, to take it to motion.

0:38:57 GW: And we didn't even talk about money. That... We didn't even get to that. I just said, "Look, I need the weekend to think about this." And they said, "Great. Take the weekend." And then I came in Monday and they had hired my replacement already. And I said, "What the hell?" And they said, "Oh well, you can still say yes. You're a... We just figured we needed someone in case you said no." Which basically said they were trying to get me to say no. They were trying to make the deal so horrible that I'd say no. So I just said, "Fine, I'll walk away." And so I winded up going to DreamWorks, and they all sort of patted themselves on the back and said, "See, we knew he was gonna go to DreamWorks." But of course they're the reason I went to DreamWorks 'cause they basically kicked me out. Not literally, but basically.

0:39:44 GW: I ended up writing the first episode for them, which they gave to other people to add it into whatever. So the version that got on TV was, I thought, a mess, but still better than the other 12, which were done by good people, but good people who didn't know the show and didn't have time to familiarize themselves with the show. And so those last, that last season of Gargoyles, the fans and I just don't even count it as canon to the series. And we look at the comic book series that I did years later as the sort of true third season. I watched the third season. I watched every episode exactly once. That's not quite true, I watched the one that I wrote more than once, not a lot, but the other 12 I watched exactly once each and made myself do it. I don't know why, but I did. It was very painful for me on a lot of levels, not just again, not just because I didn't think they were very good, which I didn't, even though I know a lot of good people worked on them, but characters were just behaving out of character. And the stories just weren't up to our standards. And it was just a different show.

0:40:57 S1: The original Mighty Ducks movie was made because Eisner's kids liked hockey. So it got a green light. And based on the success of the movie, which the company termed market research, Eisner bought an expansion NHL team and promptly named them the Mighty Ducks. And with that purchase came an addition to the television line up. The Mighty Ducks, the Animated Series, premiered in September 1996, and Joe Barruso, and animation veteran, served as a director and supervising producer.

0:41:27 Joe Barruso: The reason I was able get a job at Disney, and went from Deak to Disney I think had more to do with the fact that the show that I had directed and produced, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego, had won an Emmy in '95 as the best children's animated program. And it was one of the first shows that they called edutainment because it had this emphasis on providing real information, whether it was historical or science, in combination with an entertaining story. It was a detective-type story where a couple of younger kids were pursuing Carmen Sandiego. It was based on a computer game that was very popular at that time. They were looking for someone specifically for Mighty Ducks at the time. They needed a producer and director. And so yeah, I went and interviewed specifically for that project.

0:42:20 JB: In the initial meetings they showed me what they had done to that point and it wasn't a lot. It's funny, thinking back on it, it had started because Friends was very popular at that time, hugely successful at that time, so they wanted something like Friends. I remember them pitching it to me that way, and I thought, "Oh well, that's interesting." In the development that I'd seen to that point, when it was the Friend's concept, it was like we had in the show ultimately, it was human characters with duck heads, so it was sort of breaking with Disney tradition in terms of DuckTales and things that were clearly Donald Duck type characters. This was a new twist on the ducks for them. And that wasn't tremendously interesting to me, but then I can't recall at what point it shifted and became more sci-fi based, you know heroes in the image of sort of Ninja Turtles. And that's when David Wise, the editor, came on board.

0:43:22 JB: It was clear it was gonna go that direction. He had had a great deal of experience with Ninja Turtles, editing those shows, so he brought all that thinking and that expertise in terms of that particular genre, in going in that direction. He bought all that. That's when I was excited about... Sci-fi had always been a big interest for me and then anime was just getting really a lot of attention at that time. It really caught my interest, so that when we started talking that way, I was like, "Oh well, this will be great. We can use anime influences on this." But yeah, I think the old school that was there, because it was ducks, was a little uncomfortable. But our character designer, Greg Guler, he had had a longstanding relationship with Disney TV, and so he had done it all. He really knew it inside out. At the same time he had a great interest in superheroes. His background, he had originally come from comic books, so his first love was superheroes. So here he had a chance to combine Disney ducks with superheroes, so it was really a perfect opportunity for him. He was just a fantastic artist. So it all sort of came together.

0:44:32 JB: I was relieved that it was moving away from sort of a Friends sitcom to something more sci-fi and hero based. All our influences in terms of doing the art were harder edged. We never really got to go as far in that sci-fi direction as we would have liked to, but the way it's done is in terms of the development and art direction, it's sort of a consensus. So you have to put it in front of a whole bunch of people. And that included at the time, that included Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz. We had meetings where they reviewed the artwork, and so they would have their input. I was kind of reaching for one end of the spectrum, and them pulling us back to something that was a little more comfortable. I was pleased that we were able to go as far as we did, given what they had done with ducks to that point.

0:45:24 Speaker 13: Six hockey playing ducks appear out of nowhere and suddenly six vigilantes in comic book get-up start showing up whenever there's trouble. Spill it. Where are they from? Another planet?

0:45:36 Speaker 14: Not another planet babe. A whole 'nother universe.

0:45:40 S1: And in this universe, there's a planet inhabited entirely by ducks.

0:45:45 Speaker 15: They called it Puckworld in honor of their greatest hero, the legendary hockey player, Drake DuCaine. He was the ultimate team captain. He saved Puckworld from a horde of conquering aliens, called the Saurian Overlords, hundreds of years ago.

0:46:00 JB: Michael Eisner, he was excited about it because he was excited about the hockey team. So here was just an opportunity to promote it.

0:46:07 Speaker 16: Well, this is sad news indeed for Duck fans. It looks like the Mighty Ducks season long winning streak may be coming to an end. They're tied with the Maine Quahogs with forty seconds remaining at Quahog Center. John Luke [0:46:20] ____ is aiming to score again. Oh, a spectacular save by the Mighty Ducks goalie, Wildwing. You know, not only are these ducks mighty, they're really ducks.

0:46:36 JB: Interesting thing that we did, which was sort of unconventional, was after the shows would come back animated, we would of course assemble them. It was decided that they were not funny enough. I would spend large amounts of time each day sitting with two comedy writers who would rewrite the shows. And rewrite jokes into the shows. And we would sit and we would have to make sure, because the shows were already animated, we would have to make sure that the new lines would work with the mouths that we already had. So, it was a grueling exercise of... They're trying to be funny, trying to... Coming up with jokes, but we had to make sure that they could work in the animation, as it was already completed. That was different, yeah, maybe one in ten were actually worth all the time and energy.

0:47:29 S1: So these hockey playing ducks were attacked by a dinosaur named Dragaunus. Am I hearing you right?

0:47:36 S1: You're bright, you got it babe.

0:47:38 S1: Beautiful. I could have stayed home watching sci-fi chiller theater, but this is much funnier. All right, what happened next?

0:47:48 JB: It was kind of disappointing that it went away just after 26 episodes 'cause there really was a big push behind it. The Disney marketing machine and merchandising machine was behind it entirely. And Mattel was on board entirely for the toy line. And I guess it was the second largest toy line in Canada, second only to Star Wars at that time, which makes sense 'cause it was hockey. And I know for a fact that Mattel was disappointed that it went away 'cause they had planned years of it. It never did horribly, but some weeks it would be just average, but other weeks it would be doing really well, so it was a surprise when we didn't get more episodes. I had worked my whole life towards the point of having the opportunity to do the traditional look, and a big thrill for me was to finally be at Disney, which was a personal goal. And so I was happy that I was able to do Mighty Ducks and sort of kick it up a notch in terms of duck properties.

0:48:47 S1: Jymn Magon. The last show the Disney Afternoon would produce was Quack Pack, a descendant of DuckTales, but with the nephews as teenagers and Donald as the parental figure instead of Uncle Scrooge. It should have been a perfect ending to Disney's run, but some things are not meant to be.

0:49:04 JM: I did move after the Goofy Movie into development on Duck Days, which eventually became Quack Pack. By that time, the whole mindset of the studio was changing. People that were valuable before were being sort of pushed aside and people that weren't valuable were being elevated and there was a lot more what I call baby suits showing up, middle management who were making decisions, creative decisions about things, people who had never made a single frame of film were making decisions. And it just got very strained, and it got so strained that I eventually said I need more money or I'm gonna go somewhere else, which was very, very difficult for me because I loved Disney. I thought I would retire from Disney, and it just didn't happen.

0:49:58 JM: From then on it was just like, I can't even follow what they're doing anymore. Well, it was part of the deal breaker. We were trying something new. We said, "How are we gonna do a series with Donald Duck when nobody can really understand Donald?" He's fine in a short where he goes, "Oh brother," or, "What's the big idea?" That kind of stuff. But to do dialogue is crazy. To try and hang a show on someone that you can't understand was gonna be very difficult. And we had some radical ideas and management looked down their noses at us. And I remember at one point our producer on the show, Larry Latham, was listening to management spouting about something or another. He looked over at me and he just, he did the throat cut, like cut, I'm out here.

0:50:51 JM: And shortly after that Carl Gears and I, who were the executive producers on the show, we just said, "We're happy to continue working on this, but we can't be running the show because management doesn't believe in it." And management said, "Okay fine." They never even called us and said, "What's wrong?" Accepted our statement and, which was basically a big, you know, forget you. And it was like, "Well, they don't care about us anymore." Like I said, that was sort of a turning point, for me anyway. I think it was a turning point for the department as well. But anyway, and I left shortly after that. We had a terrific run, and then just things felt... Started to get weird, that's all.

0:51:36 JM: And again, I can't put my finger on it, but to me, it had a lot to do with we stopped doing what we were good at and started following other people's leads. Every show we did was like number one in its slot, and so it wasn't like, "Oh ratings are slipping, let's do something different." To me, that genre, that style of Disney comedy adventure could still be going as far as I know. But it was like, "No, let's do Shnookums and Meat, and let's do Gargoyles. Let's do things that look like other studios." It just felt wrong to me. But again, I'm not in charge, I don't make those calls, I just, I'm a stupid ass show developer and story editor. I don't get to make the big decisions.

0:52:18 S1: Dean Stefan, writer.

0:52:20 Dean Stefan: And then of course Quack Pack was originally called Duck Days. The way I hear it, and I don't know, 'cause you know. It could be not exactly true, but I think it's true. Jymn Magon and, I think, Carl Gears were set to develop it, and much like Tad Stones was locked in his office for about six months or so when I first started, coming up with Darkwing Duck and all the artwork or whatever. Jymn and Carl were figuring out the show for Duck Days or Quack Pack. And at the time, Home Improvement was a big hit for Disney ABC, and they got the idea that Donald would be like the Tim Allen character. And he would have Huey, Louie, and Dewey, much like Tim Allen was the harried dad of the three kids. And the conceit was gonna be 'cause Donald couldn't really, he didn't have that many phrases he could say that... Disney actually had a list from the 30s they would hand to us, say, "These are the phrases that are recognizable, that Donald said." Because there just weren't that many words that you could make out, the way he talked.

0:53:26 DS: So their conceit was that he would have been a tailgunner in some kind of war and nobody could understand his instructions, so the military sent him to allocution school. And he would learn to speak clearer so that now he could do the sit-comy stuff with the kids and they can interact and stuff like that. So they had this whole thing worked out based upon the harried dad interacting with... And the way I hear it, they went to pitch to Katzenberg and the whole table of Disney suits. And they said, "Okay so, in this Donald, he went to allocution school because nobody could understand him in the military. Now he can speak a lot clearer." And that's about as far as they got.

0:54:07 DS: And Katzenberg says, "Wait, you wanna change the duck? You're gonna change the way Donald Duck talks?" And that was pretty much the end of the pitch, so that was it. So six months of work down the drain, 'cause without that they didn't really have a show. So then it became just really harried and it became Daisy Duck would be a roving reporter, and the kids would be tagalongs and Donald would almost be comic relief. You'd cut to him in the hammock doing gags and stuff like that. And it was a weird time at Disney 'cause we were between shows. And I think I wrote the Bible for Quack Pack, but I guess the show was okay. I'm not sure how it did in relation to the other ones. I don't think of it as one of the great ones.

0:54:49 S1: Jim Peterson, writer.

0:54:51 Jim Peterson: The origin of it is kind of muddled a little bit 'cause it kinda went through a whole bunch of different creative hands. So there was, I think it was originally Jymn Magon's project, and then he ended up leaving Disney. And Carl Gears took over. And then Carl got taken off the project and it was turned over to Kevin Hopps, who was our original story editor on Darkwing. And on the artistic side, Toby Shelton was running it, and they had kind of very different views of just between the two of them, how they wanted the series to run. And Toby really loved classic Donald Duck cartoons, and he kinda wanted to take it that way. And Kevin was more, it seemed, more on the sit-comy kind of stuff. We came in. There had already been a couple scripts written, but we ended up rewriting on what would become essentially the first episode, which was where Donald Duck gets drafted back into the Navy, of course, for some bizarre reason.

[music]

0:56:14 JP: The one that came out, kind of was still watchable was an episode called "The really Mighty Ducks". In it Huey, Dewey, and Louie become superheroes and Donald becomes a super villain called the Duck of Doom. And the whole battle is just about Donald trying to get the boys to clean their room, and they're doing everything humanly possible to, or duckly possible I suppose, to avoid cleaning their room.

0:56:41 Donald Duck: Clean this room or else.

0:56:47 Speaker 20: Clean our room? The nerve of some people.

0:56:50 Speaker 21: We're much too busy.

0:56:52 Speaker 22: We got a million things to do.

0:56:55 S?: We got nothing to do.

0:56:57 JP: And when Duck Days was winding up, it was an era where Disney was letting go of all of their staff writers. During the Bonkers run, they were also doing a couple other series at the time. So there were like 51 staff writers at that point, at Disney TV Animation. And when we finally left at the end of Duck Days, there were less than ten. So part of the reason was that Disney lost their market when Fox acquired the rights to the NFL. And a lot of stations that were independent and carrying the Disney Afternoon, signed up with Fox and had to drop the Disney Afternoon for the Fox cartoons. But at the time, that was our perception on the executive explanations for why the affiliates were dropping the Disney Afternoon. So that and also, at the same time, Turner acquiring Hanna-Barbara. Then he let go of all of the staff writers and decided to go freelance, and Disney kind of followed suit on that 'cause there were a bunch of writers available on the freelance market that didn't used to be available.

0:58:01 S1: In 1997 Disney purchased ABC, which was the final nail in the coffin for what had been known as the Disney Afternoon. Not only was that over, syndication was basically over as well. With their new network, Disney went full Nickelodeon, even bringing in Geraldine Laybourne who headed the Nickelodeon network. And Disney Television Animation changed quickly in response.

0:58:24 S1: In an attempt that the press called The Nickelodeonization of Disney, they bought Doug out from under Viacom and brought in Joe Ansolabehere who helped develop Hey Arnold! And Paul Germain who co-created Rugrats, to launch Recess, which became the flagship show of Disney's One Saturday Morning. With One Saturday Morning, Disney would retake the title of the number one kids block. The shows were far different than what had been done in the past, and the familiar faces that had transformed television animation like Gary Krisel, Greg Weisman, Mark Zaslove, and Jymn Magon, no longer wandered the halls. But a few were still there. Tad Stones.

0:59:02 TS: They had a luncheon at the rotunda restaurant where they invited the key people in the department, key creative people in the department were all there for the executives to introduce themselves. And Jerry Laborne, [0:59:17] ____ that she's talking about her direction. And she says, and obviously they had worked this out before. Says, "Dean, I hate ducks." And then that was Dean Valentine, and he replied. "I hate ducks too." Which was basically crapping on 80 percent of the people in the room, to say nothing of you would not have been offered a job because there would be no job to be had if it wasn't for those shows that you're currently crapping on. I was luckily on vacation during that luncheon. I don't know how I would have reacted. I wouldn't have said anything, but I might have walked out, which would've had the same effect. But it was totally disrespectful.

1:00:00 TS: You can certainly say, "You guys have done a fantastic job. And now the market's changing, we want to do something entirely different and we're looking for new ideas, and here's the ideas we're starting with." It's like, "Why do you have to piss on something to move forward?" So that was, again, this... They had a pitch, they had a strategy. Upper upper managment had signed off on it. So it's just basically, here's our show runners and some of you are gonna be working on these shows and some of you are not. So it's just a management thing. It's not like a slow evolution. It is just, "Hey, this is what we're doing now." And it's like, "Okay, are we doing any more of that?" "No, we're not gonna do any more of that, but we're still gonna do those feature spin-offs 'cause they're still doing well."

1:00:45 TS: That's that, you know.

[music]

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-machine/id1257301677?mt=2

[spicelupin-blog]

Marauders: Looks

Remus Lupin. Sirius Black. James Potter. Peter Pettigrew.

Summary: Short stories to do with the Marauders looks and development during their Hogwarts years.

Pairing: James x Lily. Other than that, only some irrelevant ones in passing.

Warnings: Some mentions of abuse (Sirius) and weight (Peter). 

Genre: Mainly cute friendship stories with some light angst.

Words: 2092

REMUS LUPIN

·         Remus was always a lanky kid. His arms were too long for his body, and his legs were even worse.

·         In his third year, he remembered being jeered at by a group of older Slytherins after he ran into the Herbology professor, causing the mandrakes they were levitating to fall to the ground. Luckily, only one student fainted from the incident and the professor let it go with a huff and a wave of their wand.

·         Yet, the Slytherins didn’t seem keen on letting him go without a lower self-esteem.

·         “Can you blame a Gryffindor for being useless?” Parkinson provoked.

·         “You’re right, especially one like that. He looks like a starved animal.” Laughed Crabbe.

·         “And that scar. I’m guessing he got into a fight with a hairbrush with the state of his hair.” Added Greengrass, gesturing to the bedhead Remus wore almost every day.

·         Once the scar comment was put out there, Remus took off. He didn’t want anyone to see the frustrated tears welling up in his eyes.

·         Everything began changing once fourth year ended. Remus was becoming more confident with the help of his fellow Marauders and his appearance began to reflect this.

·         His arms and legs were evened out by a good height boost of six or seven inches, and his shoulders started widening handsomely. He was no longer a ‘starved animal’, as he began developing muscle all over.

·         When he saw his fellow Marauders during the summer they seemed to have a lot to say about his new masculine build.

·         “Now girls will need a ladder to snog you.” James joked, biting the head off a chocolate frog.

·         Sirius, stealing the rest of the treat from James’s hand, restated, “Now girls might snog you.”

·         During his stay at Godric’s Hollow, he allowed Sirius to style his hair prior to an outing to Diagon Alley.

·         “You look like you’ve just rolled out of bed! How can I be seen with such a wreck?” The always dramatic Sirius exclaimed. Remus, finally peer pressure enough, allowed Sirius to work his magic.

·         Well, technically, it wasn’t magic. Sirius had discovered a few muggle hair products while looking for things to piss his parents off with, only to find he actually enjoyed them. He claimed they were even better than Sleekeazy, which James found great offense to. Remus, realizing there was nothing to lose when it came to his mop of hair, succumbed to anything Sirius threw at him.

·         Remus was genuinely surprised by the outcome. He had expected Sirius to make his hair look similar to his own, as in Sirius words, “My hair gets the birds squawking.” Which made even James roll his eyes.

·         Instead, Sirius let Remus’s hair be like Remus. He used the products to make Remus’s hair softer and his naturally wavy hair was like a fluffy sea of light brown. It wasn’t structured or greasy looking, instead, it was very Remus. It looked as soft as Remus’s personality was.

·         Shockingly, James and Sirius were right. He started receiving plenty of longing gazes from girls when the school year began again. 

·         When Gabriella Moore flirtatiously waved and greeted him at the beginning of term feast, Sirius pointed a drumstick at him and said, “It’s the hair. You’re welcome.”

SIRIUS BLACK

·         Sirius, though he hated to admit it, was a true Black.

·         He might not be a prejudiced, privileged wanker (Sirius’s exact words in fourth year), but he damn well knew he looked like a Black. Since he was a kid, relatives and family friends have doted on his looks.

·         “Oh, Walburga what a handsome set of boys you have. At least you won’t have to worry about the Black name dying out. I’m sure these two will be snatched up fresh out of Hogwarts.”

·         Sirius knew he looked like his brother, or his brother looked like him. The Blacks had a signature look to them, like most purebloods. According to his mother, a pureblood is too important to look like a common half-breed.

·         Sirius was well known for his mop of dark, well-groomed hair. He found that he felt good when it was nicely fixed. No one knew Sirius’s need for vanity was more deep-rooted than a love for materialism or an aesthetic. It was his security blanket. If everyone saw a good looking boy with a charismatic smile, there would be no need to dig further into his life. No need for them to uproot his unresolved problems.

·         Sirius Black was not vain, he was scared. Scared that his mother was right. Even though he knew she was wrong, her views and violence were morally corrupt, he was still riddled with anxiety.

·         He was well known for his lean figure among fellow students. He had a strong back that led into a trim waist down to a butt groups of girls would giggle about. He was never shy about taking off his shirt. That is until he ran away.

·         He left the House of Black with his once flawless skin covered with red lashes. He left the burning under his clothing as he approached the Potter’s home. When the door opened and he was welcomed with open arms, only then he showed his wounds. Mrs. Potter fixed him up, but the scars were forever. He was forever marked by his trauma.

·         But that didn’t stop Sirius.

·         He still took off his shirt. When someone asked what happened to him, he’d make something up.

·         “Fight with a dragon. You should see him, doll.” That got a few clueless girls.

·         “This one lass from Ravenclaw went a bit too hard.” This got even more clueless guys to whoop in response.

·         “Got attacked by a Hippogriff while trying to complete your summer essay, sir. I wanted to get a real life account. Unfortunately, it obviously did not like me very much.” This got him an O on his Care for Magical Creatures assignment.

·         Sirius felt clever coming up with all these myths for his scars, never letting the truth slip pass his lips to anyone except his closest friends.

·         Also, letting the truth be public would ruin the allusion of the mysterious Sirius Black.

JAMES POTTER

·         James Potter was the ultimate Gryffindor. Some people envied him for it, some really hated him for it. But at the end of the day, the only person’s opinion that mattered to James anyway was Lily’s. And just getting her to look his way was an accomplishment; regardless of the scowl present.

·         James, although he didn’t care about anyone else’s stares except a certain redhead, found he loved attention for his appearance. He got extra giddy at any compliments given but acting nonchalant on the outside.

·         “Looking good, Potter.” Smirked a Hufflepuff, leaving James to give a lopsided grin at her retreating back.

·         “Oh Merlin,” Grumbled Remus at that, knowing how James got with a compliment. Adding onto James Potter’s already huge ego was a dangerous choice.

·         “Padfoot, you got the map right?” James asked, ignoring Remus’s pointed look.

·         Sirius’s head bopped up and down, patting his robe pocket for confirmation.

·         “Perfect. I have an idea.” Those were never good words for anyone except a Marauder.

·         “What is it, James?” Peter raised a pale brow, looking a tad nervous already.

·         “It has to do with Snivellus. I think we’ve kept away from him for a long enough since the incident.” With few words, the others knew James was referring to Snape’s near death experience at a transformed Remus’s hands.

·         Remus shook his head, not wanting to get involved but knowing he had no choice. Sirius, on the other hand, just smirked and started spurting off prank ideas to James. Peter wordlessly listened to his best friends throw their ideas to each other, willing to do whatever James told him to do.

·         Merlin, they got Snivellus good that day. And Lily Evans stared at him. Sure, she was glaring, but you have to take what you can get.

·         One thing he knew Lily Evan did take notice of was his hair. He had created the signature dishevelment just for her.

·         The day before the start of third year, James was trying to sort his hair out. He had Sleekeazy at his disposal, but that wasn’t what he wanted. He was going to be fourteen soon, and he wanted Lily Evans to notice him. Or anyone really. Frankly, he was becoming a teenage boy and he just wanted a girlfriend. If Lily needed more time, then fine, but James was impatient.

·         He flipped it all around, brushing and combing pieces determinedly. Yet, he was without the result he wanted.

·         “James! Come get your broom out of the yard!” His mother yelled up the stairwell.

·         He groaned, setting his brush down with a huff. “Coming!”

·         His broom was still leaning on the gate, exactly where he left it yesterday night. He was determined to up his chaser ability. No more losing to Slytherin, as far as James would have it.

·         He eyed it, trying to decide if he needed more practice. The Gryffindor captain’s voice rang through his head, “Practice, practice, practice!”

·         Immediately, James hopped onto his broom, taking off. He did his drills until the sun had set and his mother was calling him for dinner.

·         When he went back inside, he passed a mirror, catching his reflection. His skin was darker from the sun, his eyes slightly teary from the whipping wind and his hair was just as he wanted.

·         All windswept and, to James, cool. He looked like he was always on a broomstick, experiencing new adventure and mischief every day. James gave his reflection his signature lopsided grin, as he found just how he was going to get Lily to notice him.

·         That, and a few cruel pranks at Snivellus. Just for good measure.

PETER PETTIGREW

·         Peter was not special. He knew that since before his Hogwarts days. It became more prominent to him when he became friends with Sirius, James, and Remus.

·         Sirius was dark and handsome. Girls tripped over themselves to just catch a whiff of his shampoo as he passed in the halls.

·         James was athletic and overall cool. He made students and teachers alike melt at his grin.

·         Remus was tall and bookish. Only Remus seemed to not notice girls’ longing stares as he sat reading in the library.

·         Peter had never seen himself as anything to notice. He was short, only about 5’5 with no lean muscle like the rest. He was a bit pudgy from the amount of sweets he ate.

·��        Once, James mocked his pouch of fat on his stomach, making Peter turn beet red and let out a forced laugh. He knew James meant it in a joking way, but it didn’t stop Peter’s twisting stomach.

·         He spent the whole month of July on a strict diet. Vegetables and fruit only. Even when his mother brought out his birthday cake on his birthday, he refused the treat with a solemn look. His mother looked a bit taken aback, but ultimately followed Peter’s request.

·         He made it a routine to walk around the muggle village nearby. He’d walk for hours in the summer heat. Sometimes, he’d run up and down the hill by his house with large rocks in his hands. He probably looked like a dip, but he didn’t care. He was going to prove himself as special. He was going to be worth noticing in seventh year.

·         When the Marauders regrouped on the train to school, Sirius was the first to note Peter’s trimmed appearance.

·         “Have you lost weight, Wormtail?” Asked Sirius, biting into a Liquorice Comfit.

·         Peter watched the candy, thinking about asking for one but stopping himself. He’d come so far, why take it all back now? “A bit.”

·         “I can tell,” James nodded, grabbing one of the candies. He pointed it at Peter as he said, “You have an actual jawline now, Wormtail.”

·         Peter felt smug with the compliment. He always had to savor compliments, as they rarely came his way. Before he could reply, their last member came into the compartment. Peter noticed with disdain that Remus had grown at least another inch, and his shoulders were even broader.

·         Remus told the rest of the boys with sparkling eyes of the girls he had a summer romance with while in Portugal. All attention was quickly pulled from Peter’s transformation and on Remus’s randevu.

·         Peter was silent, watching with a familiar envy as the others talked about their fun summers and girls while eating an assortment of treats.

·         “Want a Chocolate Frog, Wormtail?” Sirius inquired, holding out the sweet.

·         Peter looked at the packet for a moment before swiping it, “Yeah, why not.”

·         He would never be able to win the looks contest anyway.

Masterlist 

[themurphyzone]

All Time Travelers Go to Heaven Ch 13

Oh hey it’s the number 13! The unlucky number! Also, some religion. 

Uploading this so it’ll be Friday the Thirteenth on Eastern Standard Time (US). Everyone else can enjoy the chapter a few hours earlier or later depending on your time zone!!!

Ch 13- Sanctuary

“It would be less obvious to take you to the Murphys’ church rather than going directly to their home,” Brick explained as the limo pulled into the downtown area. “Savannah and I determined through careful observation that Brigette Murphy regularly visits the church by herself while her husband and daughter are at work and school. Luckily for you, today would be one of those times.” 

Milo’s eyes were fixed on the aquarium in the backseat. “I can’t believe I get to meet my mom,” he murmured. “You think she’ll look like me?” 

Vinnie ruffled his hair. “Maybe. Or you could take after your dad. Who knows?” 

Balthazar barely paid attention as Brick rattled off details of the Murphy family. Something about a safety inspector, an architect, and a comic book store. 

If this was indeed Milo’s biological family, they at least had a steady income. He could have a sister. He would be able to go to school like any other child. 

So why did he feel as though he was abandoning Milo? Due to circumstances beyond their control, the Murphys had missed out when Milo chose his name, his first time purchasing clothes he liked, or seen the laughter when Milo touched a horse for the first time. 

It hadn’t been a week, and he was already fond of Milo. No wonder emotional attachments were highly discouraged for agents. It made it hard to think properly. 

But it was for the best. 

And he wished he could convince himself that. 

The limo pulled up to the steps of the Danville Catholic Church, the steeple towering high over the other buildings. A stained glass window of a dove was set above the heavy wooden doors. 

He and Vinnie had passed by the church several times back when they were still lowly pistachio sellers. Now that he had to go inside, it was starting to look more ominous by the minute. Churches just didn’t agree with him. Not after the blackout he had in the Puritan era. 

“Before you leave, there’s one more thing I must ask you to do,” Brick said sternly as they exited the limo. “You will not reveal to Brigette Murphy that Milo is her son on the grounds of the church. That information is best reserved for a private conversation.”

The limo sped off, leaving a trail of dust in its wake. 

“We’d better get inside before anyone sees us,” Balthazar said. He placed his hands behind his back, his fingers twitching to clutch the watch. The habit was spiraling out of control. 

In a matter of minutes, the tub of holy water burst, a candle claimed a painting of the Last Supper, and four crosses had splintered. 

“Echo!” Milo shouted, his voice bouncing off the walls. “Hello! Salsa!”

Balthazar sat down in one of the front rows, ignoring the oily water that was covering the back area of the church. He rested his head on the pew in front of him, the watch trembling under his shirt. 

Vinnie rested a hand on his back. “Maybe you oughta lie down.”

You can never come back.

“Dakota,” Balthazar gasped. “I think...I think it’s happening again.” 

The ticking was the only thing he could think about. It filled his mind, the hands beating without end. 

“Try and fight it,” Vinnie urged quietly. His grip tightened on Balthazar’s hands. 

A swift end will come to those who reject heaven. You cannot fight it. 

He couldn’t.

He just couldn’t....

Balthazar’s vision darkened, and the collar of Vinnie’s shirt was the last thing he felt as the accusatory voices took hold, dragging him away to some unknown, lonely place. 

Heavy metal chains and locks bolted him to the chair, its monstrous four legs parading him through the flames while horrible, grotesque demons cackled and jeered. 

They prodded his face with sharp sticks. 

They grabbed the chains and forcefully yanked in every direction, forcing him to gasp for the heavy, stuffy air that made it almost impossible to breathe. 

They appeared out of nowhere, their faces melding with the brimstone walls, fangs bared in horrible toothy grins as they delighted and reveled in his humiliation. 

The chair ground to a halt at the end of the long hallway. 

“GUILTY,” a chorus of voices proclaimed. 

Balthazar couldn’t speak. Only a hoarse cry came out, his desperate plea falling on indifferent ears. 

“GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY!”

A wall crumbled away, and a clawed, red hand reached through to drag him to his punishment....

And a spray of cold water hit his face. 

Balthazar’s eyes flew open, and he groaned as another wave of mist hit them. “Was that necessary?” he complained. He tried to sit up, only for his chest to feel like it was on fire. He grimaced in pain. 

Vinnie set the spray bottle down, throwing a wad of slightly damp paper towels at him. “Your watch was burning you,” he said. “I tried taking it off, but you were thrashing around so much and screaming when I barely touched the strap so...yeah. And I needed to cool the watch down.” 

The watch had burned him? He gingerly unbuttoned his dress shirt, carefully peeling the rather warm watch away from his skin. Sure enough, there was a red circular imprint where the watch had been. 

He dabbed the area with a damp paper towel, wincing as the edge brushed the sensitive area. 

“It’s not too deep,” Vinnie sighed. “And don’t worry about Milo. I sent him out to get paper towels before your episode hit its high point.”

Balthazar looked away. “He’s seen me have one before.”

Milo had survived countless unethical experiments. Surely he would be able to handle a caretaker who occasionally hallucinated eternal damnation. 

However, he knew Vinnie would disagree if he said it out loud. 

“Not one as bad as this,” Vinnie murmured. “He handled it a lot better than me the first time. I had to make it up to you. I was so mad at you after the first time. I shouldn’t have gotten that mad. But no, past me just can’t seem to be there when you need it.” 

Balthazar sat up, ignoring the pain in his chest. He lifted Vinnie’s chin up so they could look each other in the eyes with no hesitation. “We had this conversation earlier,” he said sternly. “You’re not to blame and I will not allow you to leave this room until you see that. Understand?”  

“You mean it?” Vinnie asked. There was something odd about his hesitance now. It shifted to another place. 

But where? 

If he wanted Balthazar to answer, then he shouldn’t have been leaning in that closely.

He chose to ignore it, nodding. “Absolutely.” 

A door slammed against the wall, and Balthazar jumped, quickly buttoning his shirt up before Milo could see the burn on his chest. He would have to get some ointment for that later. 

“Sorry! Didn’t mean to bang it that hard!” Milo exclaimed, not noticing that he was covered head to toe in paper towels. He rushed over, dumping two rolls next to Balthazar. “I guess I kind of took a while, huh? You’re alright now?” 

Vinnie shook his head. “Nah, your timing’s fine.” 

“I’m fine, don’t worry about me,” Balthazar said, hoping to wave away his concern. 

Milo still didn’t look convinced. “You weren’t fine. You were clinging to Mr. Dakota and shouting,” he said. 

Why did his companions feel the need to restate previous conversations? He was getting tired of repeating himself. 

“You got paper towels all over you, kid. Did the dispenser vomit on you or something?” Vinnie chuckled as he discarded all the loose towels from Milo’s head. 

“No,” Milo said, still looking concerned. He was expecting an answer. 

Balthazar was glad Vinnie had switched to another topic so rapidly. It was wise to avoid another long, draining argument. 

Especially when the other party was a boy who was all smiles even when life handed him the short end of the stick. He couldn’t begin to imagine a Milo unwilling to speak with him. 

“-so then she said she’d put in a request at the church office to clean up the water before weekend service. She was really nice about it too. It was funny, she said the office was used to her requests anyway,” Milo explained, his concern replaced by excitement. “Oh, and she’s coming by the chapel, so if we stay long enough, you guys can meet her!” 

“We aren’t going anywhere,” Balthazar reminded him. “We’re on a lookout for Brigette Murphy, remember?”

“Brigette?” Milo gasped, jumping back in surprise. “You mean-”

“Wait, that woman you were describing, did you happen to get her name?” Balthazar asked. Brick and Savannah had left out any physical features, nor did they have a picture, so dumb luck was all they had in picking her out from all the other church patrons.  

Milo nodded, grinning. “I found Brigette! I found-oh my gosh, I found my mom! I dunno, I don’t think I look like her though. And she doesn’t seem like the abandoning type. She’s really nice.” 

“This is great, Milo! I love a good coincidence, isn’t that right, Balthy?” Vinnie grinned and elbowed him. 

“Right,” Balthazar said. “Milo, I know this is exciting for you, but we cannot reveal your biological relationship to her just yet. It should wait for a more opportune time.”

Not even that warning could deter Milo. He was sure the boy wouldn’t slip up, but he also wore his heart on his sleeve. 

And Balthazar wanted to meet Brigette and her family first before entrusting Milo to them. Based on Brick’s observations, they were likely good people.

As far as Milo knew, his family abandoned him. Yet he was still excited to meet them. 

He didn’t know how to be suspicious. 

“I never caught your name, you know,” someone said. They glanced over to a side door, and a woman with short, dark blonde hair waved at them. “Hello, you must be his guardians.” 

“My name’s Milo!” he exclaimed. “This is Mr. Dakota, and next to him is Mr. Cavendish!” 

Vinnie waved at her. “You don’t have to include the mister part for us, don’t worry.”

“Is your name Brigette by any chance?” Balthazar asked. “Apparently you and Milo had a fascinating conversation.” 

Brigette smiled, shaking hands with Balthazar and Vinnie. “Yes, I’m Brigette. Nice to meet you. And it was no problem, I was just helping out. The church office has a separate box for my husband. It was easy to stick in a cleanup note along with a half dozen other repair jobs.”

As she spoke, her gaze lingered on Milo. “Are you all right?” he asked. 

Brigette nodded. “I’m fine. Your cowlick just reminded me of someone, that’s all. Don’t mind me.” Her voice wavered slightly. “Would you three like to join my family for dinner? It’s been a while since we had guests.”

Vinnie nodded eagerly. “Yes! Thanks so much! Come on you two, it’ll be fun!”  

Balthazar rolled his eyes. “Of course you wouldn’t turn down a free meal.” 

“Where else are we supposed to get one?” Vinnie asked. 

But he was right. And Balthazar certainly wasn’t wasting this opportunity. 

“We’ll be happy to accept,” Balthazar said. 

Milo smiled. “Are you a good cook?”

“I think so. It’s not really one of my main talents though. That honor goes to being an architect,” Brigette admitted. “But someone’s gotta do it, right?” 

“Tell me about it,” Vinnie muttered. “Last time Balthy cooked, he wouldn’t leave me alone because he couldn’t tell when the noodles for spaghetti were ready.” 

Well, excuse him for not wanting to throw it at the refrigerator as Vinnie instructed. He didn’t want to clean carbohydrates and water off the surface, thank you. 

“Well, let me give you my address so you can come over later,” Brigette said, reaching into her purse. 

She didn’t realize they had no means of transportation other than walking. He supposed he could call a taxi, but he’d rather save the dwindling wad of cash they had for food or other emergencies. 

And it would be easy for an agent to pose as a driver. It was far too risky.

“Ma’am, while I appreciate the gesture, we don’t have a way of getting to your home,” Balthazar said. “You see, we became homeless recently and we can’t even afford gas.” 

It was technically true, even if he did oversimplify the situation. 

“Oh,” Brigette said, her gaze softening. “Then why don’t I give you a lift? There’s plenty of room in my car. It’s no trouble.”

“That sounds great,” Vinnie said. 

“I’m sure Martin and Sara would love to meet all of you,” Brigette smiled. But there was something...sad about it. At first Balthazar thought it was because he mentioned being homeless, but then she reached towards Milo, as if she wanted a closer look at his face. She thought better of it, pulling away. “Do you mind if I go pray for a few minutes? I’m sorry, it’s something I’ve done for years. Ever since one of...since one of my children died shortly after birth.” 

She rushed off to the opposite side, quickly kneeling on a bench in front of a statue of Mary, her head bowed in prayer. 

Milo gripped Balthazar’s arm. “Do you think I have another sibling?” he whispered, his eyes wide. 

“I’m not sure,” Balthazar admitted. “But you were certainly not abandoned.”

His theory was that someone from the Bureau had lied to Brigette and her family about her son dying after birth.

Savannah and Brick likely never realized that aspect of the story. It hadn’t been in the file they’d given him that contained all the background information on Milo. They only looked at facts and consequences, but never the hurricane of emotions that followed. 

Vinnie pulled Milo close to him, stroking his hair soothingly. “It’s complicated, huh?” 

Milo nodded silently, curling into a ball on the pew. His head rested on Vinnie’s leg. Balthazar inched closer so that his side touched Milo. He really wasn’t sure what he could say, so he hoped a tiny amount of physical contact was enough to reassure him. 

Brigette’s back was turned to them, but it didn’t escape Balthazar’s notice that she reached up and touched the baby in Mary’s arms.